Year Zero: A History of 1945

By Ian Buruma

“Year Zero is a remarkable book, not because it breaks new ground, but in its combination of magnificence and modesty.” —Wall Street Journal

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781101638699

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma is currently Luce Professor at Bard College, New York. His previous books include Voltaire's Coconuts, The Missionary and the Libertine,The Wages of Guilt, Inventing Japan, God's Dust and Bad Elements,Occidentalism (Atlantic 2004) and Murder in Amsterdam (Atlantic 2006).

Reviews for Year Zero

[bezoar44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Year Zero is a history of 1945, but Ian Buruma approaches it not just as an historian, but also as a journalist and novelist - more broadly, as a intellectual. The result is a book that offers well-sourced details, but also thoughtful overarching judgments, and an artist's insights into how various nations' cultures changed in the wake of World War II. While the opening and closing of the book are somewhat chronological, for the most part the book is organized thematically: the experience of victory (or defeat), sexual expression, feeding populations, dealing with displaced persons, seeking reconciliation, rebuilding societies, and the slide into the Cold War. Buruma tells the story from an internationalist vantage, underscored by his starting with the personal experience of his Dutch father. Americans appear throughout, but this isn't an American-centric history - it explores 1945 as a global experience across Europe and Asia (Africa and Latin America are largely omitted). In that sense, if you've read biographies of major American figures of the time - Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall - this offers an illuminating parallax, in addition to being well-worth reading on its own.

[neurodrew · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Buruma starts with some reminiscences from his father, who was a forced laborer in Berlin during the war, having been drafted from the Netherlands. He says this led him to the topic of 1945, the year at the end of the war, and he explores the year in topics, such as the sexual license during liberation, the impulse to revenge, and the opportunism in the confusion of war. He relates poignant stories about the disgrace of "horizontal collaborators", the starvation, and the exultation of liberation. There are more details of the European experience, but the plight of Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Phillipines are discussed. The last section of the book, "Never Again" deals with the formation of the United Nations. The choice details are too many to rewrite, but the prose and pace were excellent.

[gshuk_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really like how he explores the conditions and difficult decisions that were made after the war.

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in honour of VE Day, rather expecting it to focus at least in part on the last few months of the war in Europe leading up to VE Day. Instead it started from the last few weeks of the war and focused thematically on the main trends from then until the end of the year: the exultation of release from concentration camps, combined with the dire state of the survivors; the cycles of revenge that the end of hostilities gave rise to in the occupied countries; the return, or attempted return, of huge numbers of displaced persons to their homes; attempts to drain the poison of fascism and militarism from Germany and Japan; and the beginnings of the rebuilding of society in all the devastated countries. The first steps towards rebuilding were combined with a limited but very real sense of optimism at the potential for a new start in individual countries and also, at least initially, internationally with the establishment of the United Nations, hence the title of the book. That said, the author concludes prosaically that:"the sense one gets from newspapers around the world on the last day of 1945 is that most people were too anxious to get on with their own lives to care much about the global news anymore. During a worldwide war, everywhere matters. In times of peace, people look to home." and"If there is anything to be gleaned from these glimpses of the global mood on New Year’s Eve, it is that a certain sense of normality was beginning to seep back into the daily lives of people who were lucky enough to be able to lift their heads from the direst misery of the immediate postwar period."My only criticism would probably be that the author tries to cover too much ground, in too many countries, and I might have preferred it if all the material on, say, Japan had been in one section, rather than scattered thematically throughout the chapters - though this may just be my personal preference.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

1945, the year World War II ended (or did it?). Buruma tells the story mostly of that year, with a bit of forward-looking to explain a little more about what was set in motion, in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. There’s plenty of trauma and starvation, and also grand hopes—mostly not to rebuild what was destroyed, but to build something better, whether in nations like Japan or internationally in a united Europe and the United Nations. Also a lot of sex (a lot of it with soldiers, for tangible benefits or for relief and fun or for association with winners) and a lot of rape (particularly in Germany).

[fist_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

We like to think of history as a long salami: rectilinear and to be cut up in easily digested slices. Ian Buruma's "Year Zero" shows that reality is messier and more complex. The first year after the end of WWII, far from being a tranquil oasis of peace, was turbulent and difficult. The author has a global view, and takes the reader from the independence struggle in Indonesia to the leaders of the Polish resistance trying to create a new Polish state from the ashes (and being killed by the Soviets for that same reason). Particular attention is giving to Germany and Japan, where denazification was often at odds with the need to create a functioning society or the strategic imperatives of the incipient Cold War. It may be shocking for some readers to realise just how many war criminals managed to hang on to their influential positions (some of them even making it to Prime Minister of their country). Buruma has the broad view of a big-picture historian, but brings it to life with his empathy for the people living the specific circumstances. The book begins and closes beautifully with a story about his father, who, as a former POW in Germany had to make his way back home in that remarkable year.

[queencersei · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Year Zero offers up an interesting, though not much discussed treatment on the aftermath of World War 2. Only minimal attention is paid to the United States. Instead the main focus is on the aftermath in Europe and Asia. How did the survivors of the most brutal war in history cope in the immediate aftermath of the most terrible war in history? Especially the people of Europe, China and Japan, many of whom had no homes or family to return to. What did people do about the food shortages, changing social mores and social structures that had been totally upended? Year Zero is a fascinating read about what happens after the war has been won, but how life must go on. For the victors and the losers. For the aggressors and the victims.

[jcbrunner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ian Buruma's Year Zero covers an often neglected topic: The aftermath of a war, of the Second World War. The dramatic history of survival of his father returning from Berlin to the Netherlands opens a huge panorama of acts and events large and small around the globe. From the Netherlands, Germany, France, Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan, the breadth of Buruma's examples is awesome and presented with clear judgment. The wide-ranging narrative can become a bit overwhelming, though. The episodic approach in the thematic chapters makes it harder to remember and place the facts in an overall picture.The thematic chapters are titled as follows: exultation (about the liberation), hunger (the Dutch hunger winter), revenge (and retribution), going home, draining the poison (denazification), rule of law (accountability), bright confident morning (never again, Nuremberg trials), civilizing the brutes (denazification, reconstruction), one world (United Nations). A common theme of the book is how too many bad guys escape punishment out of the victors' hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis. The Japanese war criminals are especially leniently treated in the early days of the Cold War, while in many countries the actual resistance (often fringe leftists) are pushed aside to install safe corporate leadership.The power politics are often difficult to stomach, such as Soviet foreign minister Molotov's casual reveal to his US and British allies during a social event that the Soviets had eliminated the Polish delegation (first tortured, then murdered) the Allies had encouraged to negotiate with Stalin. The Year Zero was a new start but the world was not necessarily friendlier.

[dougcornelius_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had high expectations for this book based a review I read. It was good, but I had set my expectations too high.The book covers a huge spectrum of topics, from the revenge on Germans to the re-education of Japanese students under General MacArthur. 1945, was start of a new world. Germany had been defeated. Japan had been defeated. The colonies in Africa and especially Asia saw that their European overlords were capable of defeat.The problem was that the book tackled too much. That leaves vignettes of the problems faced in 1945 and what happened as a result. It lacks a narrative because the book stays focused on 1945 and does not trace the problems forward.

[nbmars · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

World War II was the biggest, most cataclysmic war of all time, involving tens of millions of soldiers spread across the globe. As such, it was not so easy to conclude. In Year Zero, A History of 1945, Ian Buruma tells the story of what happened in both Europe and Asia in the months following the ostensible end of the war with the surrender of Germany and Japan. Buruma is not an historian; rather, he is a professor of journalism. His book is anecdotal, does not employ original scholarship, and is interspersed with reflections about how the war impacted his own family. He even relies on his father’s musings about what constitutes normality to serve as his touchstone for observations about a large selection of egregious behaviors by people after the war.Evaluation: While attention on the immediate aftermath of the war is valuable, a historian’s perspective and methodology would have been preferable. The reporting is not comprehensive, and for Buruma to begin the book by focusing strictly on the father’s experiences was just not that interesting, especially because his father’s memories were incomplete. The book does contain a number of interesting anecdotes once the author broadens his lens of inquiry, but one is left always wondering about the integrity of data that comes exclusively from secondary sources.