Summary of Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 My full name is Tony Robert Judt. I have two perspectives on my childhood. From one perspective, it was an utterly conventional, somewhat lonely, and very lower-middle-class London childhood of the 1950s. From another perspective, it was an exotic, distinctive, and therefore privileged, expression of mid-twentieth-century history as it happened to immigrant Jews from East Central Europe.
#2 My father’s father, Enoch Yudt, was a Jewish economic marginal in a state of permanent migration. He had no particular skill except selling, and not much of that. He got by on the black market between Belgium, Holland, and Germany in the 1920s. But things must have gotten a bit warm for him around 1930, because he had to move on.
#3 My father, who was from Belgium, had come to Ireland with his family in 1936. In 1936, his brother in London invited him to England. He left school at fourteen to work odd jobs. While my mother spent her late teens in London, she was far more English in her soul than my father, who had been born there.
#4 I was born in 1948 in East London. The first thing I remember is walking along Tottenham High Road. I have other memories of North London life, including looking at trucks and buses out of my parents’ bedroom window.

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Histoire
• United States
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669397069
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

My full name is Tony Robert Judt. I have two perspectives on my childhood. From one perspective, it was an utterly conventional, somewhat lonely, and very lower-middle-class London childhood of the 1950s. From another perspective, it was an exotic, distinctive, and therefore privileged, expression of mid-twentieth-century history as it happened to immigrant Jews from East Central Europe.

#2

My father’s father, Enoch Yudt, was a Jewish economic marginal in a state of permanent migration. He had no particular skill except selling, and not much of that. He got by on the black market between Belgium, Holland, and Germany in the 1920s. But things must have gotten a bit warm for him around 1930, because he had to move on.

#3

My father, who was from Belgium, had come to Ireland with his family in 1936. In 1936, his brother in London invited him to England. He left school at fourteen to work odd jobs. While my mother spent her late teens in London, she was far more English in her soul than my father, who had been born there.

#4

I was born in 1948 in East London. The first thing I remember is walking along Tottenham High Road. I have other memories of North London life, including looking at trucks and buses out of my parents’ bedroom window.

#5

I grew up knowing about the Holocaust, but I did not understand it. I knew who Toni was, and why I bore her name, only later. My parents were not interested in raising a Jew, even though there was never any question of complete assimilation.

#6

I was not brought up Jewish, except for the fact that I was. I would go to my grandfather’s house on Friday evenings, and every Friday evening I would meet some of the Auschwitz survivors who would come to visit him.

#7

My family experienced a brief period of prosperity from 1957 to 1964, when my father was able to afford some comforts, including foreign travel. In 1960, we went to Germany thanks to an invitation from a former Danish au pair.

#8

The world that was bequeathed to me by my parents was the world that was shaped by Hitler. The twentieth century was shaped by intellectuals of both right and left, but it is clear that the story of the European Jews is an important element in the history of twentieth-century thought.

#9

The Jewish question was never at the center of my own intellectual life, or indeed my historical work. But it intrudes, inevitably, and with ever greater force.

#10

The Habsburg monarchy, the old Austrian empire, was the first place where people were openly discriminated against on the basis of their differences. However, people and cultures were utterly intertwined and indissolubly blended in the identity of this place.

#11

The history of European Jews is complicated, and it is difficult to define what makes a Jew a Jew. The Jews who lived in Vienna and Budapest were brought up to think of themselves as German, despite being from Eastern European backgrounds.

#12

The author met Nick Kaldor, a prominent Hungarian economist, in the early 1970s. He had grown up in interwar Hungary and thought of himself first and foremost as an educated member of the upper middle class. He had never acquired either identity.

#13

The Pale of Settlement, which was the area where the Russian Empire allowed Jews to live, was an inhospitable place for multiple outsiders like Jews. Jews were confined to a single, alien culture.

#14

The interdependence of mutual ignorance explains the ease with which ethnic cleansing took place in central and Eastern Europe over the course of the twentieth century. Jews were typically from a minority within the community who knew about such things, and thus they were often targets for discrimination.

#15

Democracy was a disaster for Jews, who thrived under autocratic regimes. The only hope for European Jews was either perpetuation of the imperial status quo or else radical, transformative opposition to the nation-states that succeeded it.

#16

I have never detected in German, Hungarian, or Austrian Jews the same complex mix of familiarity, attraction, and ressentiment that you get among Polish-Jewish intellectuals.

#17

Poles and Jews have a tendency to overstate their centrality, which can be difficult for non-members of either group to recognize. The Holocaust was not a central concern for most Europeans during World War II, and the fact that it is now considered such a matter is something that only emerged in the decades after the war.

#18

The modern narrative of Jewish geographical emancipation is to escape the wrong places and find better ones, which in this case could be Western Europe, Canada, or even Israel. But never Eastern Europe.

#19

The fin-de-siècle wonderland of post-impressionist Paris was a society that had lost something unique. France was a profoundly divided society, riven by competing political memories and abrasive disagreements over religion and social policy. But within just a few years, the French had come to understand and explain these decades as a glorious dawn.

#20

The first great age of globalization was the twenty years following the end of the nineteenth century economic depression. The world economy was becoming integrated in just the ways Keynes suggested. But the conditions of uncertainty that Keynes was trying to address were still the norm rather than the exception in capitalist economies.

#21

The interwar period in Austria was a Duel between Keynes and Hayek. Keynes believed that under conditions of economic uncertainty, we should intervene in order to bring about stable outcomes. Hayek believed that intervention would end badly, and that society would be destroyed if it were handed over to the state.

#22

The Austrian experience, which was always and above all a political encounter between the urban Marxist left and provincial Christian rightists, has been elevated to the status of economic theory.

#23

Psychology, like Marxism, offered a way of demystifying the world and understanding behavior and decisions according to a universal template. It also proposed a narrative of self-delusion, necessary suffering, decline and fall, followed by the onset of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-overcoming.

#24

In the Freudian narrative, as in the Marxian narrative, the crucial consideration is unstinting faith in the inevitable success of the outcome if the process itself is correct.

#25

I was unusually well-informed about the history of the Holocaust as a child, but I was uninterested in Jewish history as a student at Cambridge University in the 1960s. I began to study the Holocaust in the 1990s, and it became my main interest.

#26

Arendt’s biographical study of Rahel Varnhagen and her report on the Eichmann trial reflect her understanding of the Jewish condition in modern society. She gets one thing absolutely right: the banality of evil.

#27

Sartre was a man who had no political engagement or response during the 1930s, despite being in France during that time. He later made a deliberate decision not to think of those crimes in ethical terms, or at least in a language that would engage his own ethical commitment.

#28

The rise of German philosophical thought from the 1930s through the 1960s had a profound impact on European intellectuals. It was the only way to think intelligently about the century and the age.

#29

The ethics of republicanism, as articulated by Arendt, are not based on an account of history, but rather on what we understand as the risks of getting it wrong.

#30

The German question was how to deal with the country’s past, and in the 1950s, the Americans, British, and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer redrew the lines between East and West Germany. The Cold War suppressed discussions of the Holocaust in the West, but it was not as though the Soviets were eager to promote such discussions.

#31

The Soviet Union promoted the idea that the Great Patriotic War was an anti-fascist struggle, rather than presenting the conflict with Stalin’s recent ally as an anti-German endeavor. Because the destruction of Jewish Romanians and Poles was not typically a matter of local regret, their deaths were easy to forget.

#32

The problem with historical events that are intricately interwoven is that to understand them, you must pull them apart. But in order to see the story in its entirety, you must interweave those elements back together again.

#33

The German reunification in 1990, the disappearance of the GDR, and the country’s subsequent unification, normalization, has led to a recasting of their history and that of Europe as a whole.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I grew up in an England where Jews were still among the rare conspicuous outsiders. I was not overachieving in school, and I was not considered commercially predisposed or overly successful, but I was still alien because I did not believe in Jesus.

#2

I was and remain a solitary child. I preferred reading to playing with my sister. I felt completely at home in the world of an English rural church and its surrounding community, even though I didn’t share the beliefs nor the symbols of the ceremony.

#3

The characteristic voice of the 1920s is Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which combines a post-World War I attitude of insouciant carelessness about the looming shadow of social change.