Dictator Decades
Gersh, Gabriel
Dictator Decades Europe of the Dictators 19191945, by Elizabeth Wiskemann. Harpei & Row. 287 pp. $6.95 Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh nno compress the history of Europe from 1919 to 1945 into 70,000...
...One judgment with which it is impossible to agree is that on Austria...
...Some will also believe that Miss Wiskemann gives a false impression of Anthony Eden by overestimating his firmness, and others may question her judgment of the Corfu affair...
...This can easily be seen with the wisdom of hindsight, but many people saw it even at the time, and those leaders in France and Britain who did not must forever bear a terrible responsibility for their shortsightedness...
...The field is now far more academically respectable than it once was...
...Miss Wiskemann deals peripherally with the role of England in the 1930s—a welcome reversal of most studies of the period...
...Miss Wiskemann makes the reoccupation of the Rhineland by the Germans in 1936 the dividing line, after which war or the acceptance of German domination became inevitable...
...Nor is her treatment of the Soviet Union equal to the rest of the book...
...For the non-specialist her chapters on the Balkan nations and the complex diplomacy engaged in by both sides are excellent...
...It is difficult to think of anyone better qualified to undertake this task than Elizabeth Wiskemann...
...Yet the scope of events and of documentary evidence presents the specialist with a problem which is magnified rather than diminished when he must examine such a large tract of time and place...
...While Hitler was winning there does not seem to have been much opposition to his rule, and anybody who studies accounts of the fighting on the Eastern front will be aware that the Austrian troops were even more feared and hated by their enemies than those of the original Reich...
...Miss Wiskemann believes that the blame for the sequence of events of this disastrous period must be placed on the failure of the League of Nations, on the failure of the West to work in harmony with Russia before the war, on the failure of so many Western leaders to recognize the dimensions of the Nazi menace since its inception...
...These could be written only by someone with her combination of training and experience...
...Thanks to Hitler's oppression," writes Miss Wiskemann, "it seems that a new patriotism . . . has today become a reality...
...The prevalence of such attacks is a constant element in the moral decrepitude of the Twentieth Century, from Sarajevo to Dallas...
...Miss Wiskemann's book, free from emotionalism and set in a low key, does not moralize about these mistakes, but attempts to acquaint those who have forgotten, and those who never knew, with some indispensable facts...
...Was it not defeat, rather than Hitler's oppression, which caused this...
...As Miss Wiskemann shows, one of the nastiest threads running through the period is that of political assassination...
...Europe of the Dictators 1919-1945 is aimed at the general reader who wants a brief introduction to the whole subject in the form of a textbook...
...But such reservations are less important than the book's merits, the most stimulating of which is its ability to conjure up the hope, turmoil, and fear of the years between the wars...
...One also wishes that the author had added a chapter on the journalism of the period because, unlike the politicians, the journalists—the Vernon Bartletts, Pertinaxes, Edgar A. Mowrers, Dorothy Thompsons, and William Shirers—rallied public opinion against the dictators...
...For instance, younger readers need to understand why the Spanish Civil War, rather than Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 or the outbreak of the war in 1939, proved to be the real watershed of the 1930s...
...Neither the glittering impressionism of a Barbara Tuchman nor the ponderous, pioneering research of an important work like Ernest Nolte's Three Faces of Fascism will suffice...
...Her Czechs and Germans (1938) is still one of the best treatments of the subject in English, and her Rome-Berlin Axis (1948) made excellent use of the available records to disentangle the complex relations between Hitler and Mussolini...
...She was one of the most astute British journalists in the 1930s...
...The author's problem is to condense and simplify without committing any historical distortions...
...It is a recurrent event in all countries concerned but Britain and Switzerland and flourished under Hitler and Mussolini and among Balkan terrorists—culminating in the murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia...
...Her reports on Central Europe in the New Statesman contrasted sharply with its editorials in knowledge and judgment...
...Eye-witnesses are not always the best historians, but even before the war Miss Wiskemann demonstrated that she could shape observation into scholarship with facility...
...Horrified by Fascism and Communism, she shared with scholars like R. W. Seton-Watson and Lewis Namier an interest in the newly created Eastern European countries and the fear that Nazism would endanger their survival...
...Inevitably a book that does not try to give the reader many detailed explanations must contain noticeable gaps and questionable judgments...
...6.95 Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh nno compress the history of Europe from 1919 to 1945 into 70,000 words and to combine a high level of scholarship with a simplicity of style is a formidable undertaking...
Vol. 31 • January 1967 • No. 1
