Dreamland
Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
By the end of World War I, in November 1918, Europe’s old authoritarian empires had fallen, and new and seemingly democratic governments were rising from the debris. As successor states found their place on the map, many hoped that a more liberal Europe would emerge. But this post-war idealism all too quickly collapsed under the political and economic pressures of the 1920s and '30s. Howard M. Sachar chronicles this visionary and tempestuous era by examining the fortunes of Europe’s Jewish minority, a group whose precarious status made them particularly sensitive to changes in the social order. Writing with characteristic lucidity and verve, Sachar spotlights an array of charismatic leaders–from Hungarian Communist Bela Kun to Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg, France’s Socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum and Austria’s Sigmund Freud–whose collective experience foretold significant democratic failures long before the Nazi rise to power. In the richness of its human tapestry and the acuity of its social insights, Dreamland masterfully expands our understanding of a watershed era in modern history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the political and social chaos that followed WWI, Jewish communities throughout Europe found themselves in new, often contradictory positions that seemed to suggest fresh possibilities for integration, explains Sachar (author of the highly regarded The History of Jews in America) in this accessible overview of the interwar Jewish experience. In Hungary, for instance, despite a violent outbreak of postwar anti-Semitism, a new coalition government was headed by the Jewish army officer Bela Kun. Sachar, a history professor at George Washington University, weaves a broad tapestry of social, economic and political conditions that is at times dizzying in its complexity and breadth. He looks at this hopeful era primarily through the stories of influential individuals like composer Arnold Schoenberg and socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, as well as less well-known figures such as Walther Rathenau, a Jewish businessman who became a diplomat in post-WWI Germany. Sachar has a keen eye for historical detail, and a fine sense of narrative. Yet the book feels uneven at times, offering a great deal of detail on some subjects (like the byzantine politics of interwar Czechoslovakia) that seems at odds with the more general sketches of figures like Freud and Proust. Nonetheless, it gives general readers a sense of the enormous diversity of experience among Jews during this time whether peasants, intellectuals, businessmen, atheists or believers and a concise explanation of how anti-Semitic stereotypes responded to this variety, eventually giving way to the devastations of the Holocaust.
