How Hitler’s dreams came true in 1946

I should begin this review, in the spirit of full disclosure, by admitting that I know the author very slightly. Something close to 14 years ago, we were on the same press freebie: a slap-up lunch in Paris courtesy of — was it? — LBC radio. Who knows? The ignominious occasion of our acquaintance isn’t the reason I mention it: rather that, somewhere on the Eurostar under the Channel, he and I fell into a conversation about the European Union. As I trotted out the usual boilerplate grumbles about sovereignty and bureaucratic opacity and the iniquities of the Common Fisheries Policy, he exclaimed so passionately in its favour that the conversation stayed with me. After all these years I of course paraphrase, but what he said was: ‘Yes, yes, but it is such a beautiful idea.’

You may — I imagine most Spectator readers will — think this intellectually nugatory, or indictably hippy-sounding, or both. But the combination of impatience with detail and deep feeling (this was an outbound conversation at about 10 a.m. so we were nearly sober) struck me. And reading this book — a snapshot of what was going on in four continents, but especially in Europe, in the year after the end of the second world war, by a man whose family fled Hungary as refugees when he was a child — I better understand where it came from.

There aren’t all that many laughs in 1946, and such as there are tend to be dark black. If anyone had the notion that the war coming to an end would cause a general improvement, they had it (at least in the short to medium term) quite wrong. Indeed, there was even a term minted for that particular stripe of disappointment. A 1946 study by British psychologists discovered that those freed from forced labour in the camps still seemed a bit grumpy about the state of the world.