Postwar

Tony Judt's comprehensive history of Europe from 1945 to 2005 — covering the reconstruction, division, Cold War, 1968, the fall of Communism, and European integration.

The definitive postwar European history: Judt integrates the political, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of both Eastern and Western Europe — unusual because most Western historians ignored the Eastern half. The book's organizing argument: postwar Europe was built on a deliberate forgetting of wartime atrocities (collaboration, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing) that enabled reconstruction but eventually required confrontation. The final section on memory politics (Holocaust memorialization, the 'sites of memory' movement) was prescient about the politics of historical memory that have since become central to European debate.