Thinking the Twentieth Century lets us listen in on conversations between distinguished colleagues, the intellectual historian Tony Judt and the Eastern Europeanist Timothy Snyder. It conveys the sort of conversation that two scholars may have when they share the same knowledge, references, and opinions.
I can think of older historians possessing a greater range of scholarship and biographies of more significance—among writers on modern Europe, Eric Hobsbawm or Peter Gay—whom one might want to hear from before Judt in this unusual format. But this book was motivated by tragic circumstances. Judt suffered from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. Snyder began his interviews after the point at which his senior colleague had lost the use of his hands and had begun to dictate rather than write.
Judt’s courage and clarity of mind were celebrated, as he continued to deliver important public addresses in the early stages of the disease and produced two more short books. One was an impassioned defense of the welfare state titled Ill Fares the Land (2010). The final book was a moving, short memoir in vignettes, The Memory Chalet (2010), which spoke with a historian’s mind of warmly personal things (the school system Judt was raised in, the public-transit system that charmed him as a child). It also hinted at the work Judt intended to pursue if he had lived: a history of trains and modernity, to be called Locomotion, along with a long-planned history of 20th-century social thought.
Thinking the Twentieth Century is something of a substitute for those books that could not be composed. It uses its interview format to review Judt’s earlier books chronologically and in biographical context, from his early specialist histories of socialism in France to his engagement in the 1970s and 1980s with the freedom movements of Eastern Europe to his major synthesizing achievement, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). With the best intentions, however, it perhaps inevitably cannot live up to the work Judt accomplished himself, both before these interviews and—so admirably—after. Judt does not rethink his positions here, Snyder does not challenge him, and the two men defer on points of difference. These conversations also occurred before the introspection that began to emerge when Judt composed The Memory Chalet in the last phase of his illness.
The beginning of each chapter in Thinking the Twentieth Century supplies an installment of autobiography made up of pages of continuous first-person narrative run together, with Snyder’s interview questions removed. Judt was born in 1948, in London’s East End, to Jewish parents of Eastern European descent. His father was a socialist, of the dissenting cast of mind that hated Stalin early and sided with Trotsky. Judt outlines the facts of his London childhood and his sojourns on kibbutzim in 1960s Israel, culminating in a disillusioning spell as a volunteer translator for the Israeli army after the Six-Day War. Teenage Judt, after absorbing the literature of Marxist sectarianism, turned to ardent Zionism, until his experiences opened his eyes to an Israel that was also, in his estimation, “not the fantasy world of socialist Israel that so many Europeans loved (and love) to imagine—a wishful projection of all the qualities of Jewish Central Europe with none of the drawbacks. This was a Middle Eastern country that despised its neighbors and was about to open a catastrophic, generation--long rift with them by seizing and occupying their land.” Though he was 20 in 1968 and joined protests against the Vietnam War, he did not sympathize with the New Left and remained preoccupied with the Old Left and the conflicts that had agitated his father.
Judt retained a power, however, to upend expectations and turn his genuine individual knowledge to account in an interruption of some fixed and stagnant debate. His kibbutznik background led him, in the midst of stale talk about an Israeli two-state solution, to write his famous 2003 account of a one-state solution in The New York Review of Books. Late in his life, he used his social and economic erudition as a postwar historian to offer, with the seemingly out-of-the-blue Ill Fares the Land, an un-ideological and pragmatic defense of forgotten principles of social democracy. An excellent chapter at the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century, worth reading on its own, reprises the history told in that book, tracing the Western welfare states from their roots in the turn of the last century’s “social question” through their robust rise after World War II, and contemplating how we might argue once again for them now. When Judt begins to speak about contemporary American politics near the end of the book, though, one is grateful for the presence of Snyder, whose origins Judt characterizes as “deepest Ohio” and who emerges from the shadows to prove himself an acute observer. Elsewhere, too often, the un-self-conscious satisfaction in limitedness of this book undermines the whole.
Mark Greif is a founding editor of n+1 and an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School.