To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949

Written by Ian Kershaw

Narrated by John Curless

The European catastrophe, the long continuous period from 1914 to 1949, was unprecedented in human history—an extraordinarily dramatic, often traumatic, and endlessly fascinating period of upheaval and transformation. This new volume in the Penguin History of Europe series offers comprehensive coverage of this tumultuous era. Beginning with the outbreak of World War I through the rise of Hitler and the aftermath of the Second World War, award-winning British historian Ian Kershaw combines his characteristic original scholarship and gripping prose as he profiles the key decision makers and the violent shocks of war as they affected the entire European continent and radically altered the course of European history. Kershaw identifies four major causes for this catastrophe: an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism, bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism, acute class conflict given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution, and a protracted crisis of capitalism.

Incisive, brilliantly written, and filled with penetrating insights, To Hell and Back offers an indispensable study of a period in European history whose effects are still being felt today.

“Chilling … To Hell and Back should be required reading in every chancellery, every editorial cockpit and every place where peevish Euroskeptics do their thinking. … Kershaw documents each and every ‘ism’ of his analysis with extraordinary detail and passionate humanism.”—The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781501904592

Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw is a highly acclaimed historian and professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield. He is well known for his writings on Nazi Germany, especially his definitive two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis. He lives in Manchester, GB.

Reviews for To Hell and Back

[stillatim · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Penguin History of Europe is an uneven series, but Kershaw does an excellent job here. There's no reason not to read this book. He covers the major developments of the period, whether they be military, economic, social or cultural. His book is well organized, the sentences are crisp, and the interpretation sane. The best compliment a history book deserves on goodreads is a short review, because what can one say about a good history book? It's good. It's worth noting that he has a comparatively easy job, though. This volume covers 35 years. Those writing on earlier time periods generally get the same number of pages for, say, 350.

Anyway, there's even a little bit of argumentation, which I didn't expect (how does he fit so much in? I'm wracked with envy). Kershaw suggests that the second world war might have been averted if it had been possible for more European countries to remain/become democratic in the inter-war period. In this book, at least, that claim is entirely unsupported, and I don't find it terribly convincing. But so good is the book that I value the argument anyway. It's good to know where a historian stands, and Kershaw tells us. Now we, his readers, can read him with more understanding.

Wait, though, I do have one complaint! The bibliography is not divided up in any way. Hopefully for the next volume, Kershaw or Penguin will spring for some graduate student to spend a few hours separating the economic histories of Latvia from the military histories of Spain. Kershaw makes me want to read more about the period; it's easier to do that if I have some guidance at least.

[dimplesrao · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Found this masterpiece in a bookstore at Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site, near Munich, Germany. The author, IAN KERSHAW, is an expert historian of that part of the world and his volume (Europe 1914-1949) is a gripping bird's eye view on the era. We ain't able to understand state of human progress (we're part of) until we look back and reflect on humanity's formative forces, esp those that led to our scarcely imaginable self destruction. When we forget that damaged national prestige (resulting from losing wars, political imbalances etc) or ethnic-racist-hatred are merely acute forms of human ego/illusions, we forget gods in us. We kill 'us'. We kill peace. We kill our roles of human progress. We kill progress! Ever fascinating to absorb we killed it for almost a century (1914-1989). Just soaking in the heat of what happened and why. Thanking also our passionate guide Gordon Hogan at Dachau, for letting me know that Dachau means a beautiful medieval upper Bavarian town bustling with joyful human spirit, beyond realms of nazi hell and dark valleys. #ArbeitMachtFrei.

[dlmorrese · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this an excellent account of a pivotal moment of history. It relates not only the events but the underlying economic and ideological factors that influenced them. So why only 4 stars? Well, it's the prose. Long, compound sentences, paragraphs that start with one subject and end in another, and some (I thought) dodgy punctuation made this a more difficult read at times than it needed to be. The content of the book is great, but the prose sometimes required that I reread a sentence or a paragraph to catch its meaning. Still, a great follow on to The Pursuit of Power by Richard J. Evans.

[schmerguls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a masterful work, telling of Europe from 1914 to 1949. There are no footnotes, though there is a 28 page bibliography. Much attention is paid to the time between the world wars, and the events after World War One, when the U.S. stupidly decided we need pay little attention to what was going on in Europe, are lucidly accounted and one sees how unwise the decision of the U.S. to ignore what was going on in Europe was. The contrast after World War Two is striking and the fact that we remained fully engaged in Europe is shown to be the correct course. One can be glad that the short-sighted policy people like Senator Taft urged did not prevail. Most of what the author indicates his opinionis are seems to have been correct.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful book. Kershaw spends many pages at the end of the book in discussing the political shifts in postwar Europe. For the first time ever, I know that a Christian Democrat is a conservative, and I also know why astute historians like Eric Hobsbawm were Communists. The only country capable of rooting out the Nazis was Soviet Russia, and Hobsbawm was attracted to the party early on. He comments on the differences between the first and second world wars brilliantly, saying that at the end of WWi there was a set up for a new war already, because thestab in the back theory was adopted by the Nazis and they rode it to victory. Hitler's immediate crushing of opposition despite his narrow victory in the polls was of key importance.