Bombing beyond Democracy: Remembering the Ruins of Europe

Abstract

The Second World War is often seen as a victory for democracy, but at the same time represents the final bankruptcy of those humanistic ideas that seemed so deeply rooted in European tradition. The idea of a European community of democratic civil institutions is based on the fact that the Second World War was the peak — or rather the ‘point zero’ — in the history of mutual destruction. Never in the history of Europe had so many Europeans been killed, never had so many civilians become the victims of war and totalitarian regimes. And by 1945, a very large part of Europe, from London to the Ural, from Northern Germany to Athens and Naples, was literally in ruins, leaving the smell of death hanging over the former cities, their inhabitants being thrown back to a kind of pre-historic existence. One can get a pretty good impression of this situation by reading Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s anthology Europa in Trümmern (1990), which gathers accounts of the state of Europe from 1944 to 1948, written by journalists and authors most of whom had not themselves been affected by the destructions, and who therefore looked upon the ruins from the perspective of an outsider. Whether reporting from a small Dutch Town like Nijmengen or from the city of Warsaw, they tried to imagine the life and appearance of these cities with their historic centres and proud inhabitants before they had been turned into rubble and lunar landscapes.