History,Tony Judt will tell you, is "grotesquely complicated." But the way it gets enshrined in collective memory is another matter. Memory favors simpler stories—and even outright omissions. It is precisely this concern—not only that history will be forgotten but that it will be misremembered (indeed dismembered and put back together more palatably)—that drove Judt to write his sweeping Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. It's not something he had planned from the start of his distinguished academic career—the London-born author is currently director of the Remarque Institute—but in a way he's been stewing about it for a long time.
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