Postwar

 

Tony Judt decided to write this book while changing trains at the Westbahnhof in Vienna in December 1989. He was returning from Prague where the Communist regime was being dislodged. All of East-Central Europe, it seemed, was at this juncture ‘changing trains’. The political timetables, which for decades had decreed how things should be run, were being torn up. Another ‘new Europe’ was being born and there was no better place to be than Vienna, city of imperial echoes, in which to sense seismic shifts. The history of postwar Europe would need to be rewritten.