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.
