A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a
new world emerged from the ruins of World War
II
Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with
the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in
1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was
beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across
Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the
Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental
Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued
emerged the modern world as we know it.
In human
terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to
imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their
populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge
was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for
much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of
unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was
extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar
years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United
Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European
Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was
imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no
historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised,
but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were
in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and
effective.
A poignant grace note throughout this
history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis
during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war
in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally
hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely
managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and
Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and
attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his
generation’s experience.
A work of enormous range and
stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European
theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that
Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is
surely his masterpiece.
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