This Further Subject is intended to provide a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to the social, cultural and political history of post-Second World War Europe, both east and west. By crossing the fixed frontier between western and Eastern Europe, it encourages students to regard the history of post-war Europe as a unity. Similarly, it deliberately transgresses the boundaries between political, social and cultural history. By using cultural sources, it seeks to illuminate political and social trends; and by placing those cultural texts in a political context, it challenges students to see those texts as emphatically historical sources. At the heart of the paper is the examination of the broad social and cultural shape of Europe after its traumatic exit from the personal and political horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. What Richard Bessel has recently termed the era of ‘Life after Death’ was one of rapid political change, notably the emergence of two dominant forces, Communism and Christian Democracy, which had hitherto been minority currents in European political life. At the same time, social processes of ‘modernization’ were accelerated by state policies and by the rapid levels of economic growth experienced in almost all areas of Europe. The consequence was a European society of unprecedented social and geographical mobility, in which the gaps and tensions between regions, classes, the sexes and generations were widened by cultural, technological and economic changes. Central to these overlapping and often tumultuous processes was the quest for identity, both collective and individual. National and political identities had been transformed and quite literally uprooted by the events of the previous decade. New regimes were installed in almost all of the major European states, new frontiers drawn and new social and political contracts established. Amidst these wider processes, families and individuals sought to recover a sense of ‘normality’ and personal identity. By exploring the culture of the era, this paper will seek to recover the personal experience of Europeans during the twenty-five years which followed the Second World War.

This is not therefore another Cold War History paper. It is an attempt to get under the skin of post-war Europe by approaching it from a range of cultural sources. The set texts include a number of major novels by Böll, Calvino and Kundera, films such as Fellini’s La dolce vita, political writing by de Beauvoir, Sartre, Marcuse, Fanon and Orwell and a number of memoirs written by ‘ordinary’ Europeans who lived through the extraordinary upheavals of these years. The topics which will be covered in the classes and tutorials will include the legacies of war, the impact of consumerism, generational conflicts and the origins of the social and cultural carnival of 1968. The course requires no prior knowledge of the period and all texts are in English translation.