Post-War Europe Quotes

I was born in Allied-controlled Pola. At the end of World War II, the victorious wartime Allied powers negotiated the details of peace treaties and borders with Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. The Paris Treaty was signed on February 10, 1947. I was born a few days later.

I was born in Munich, and my father was stationed in Salzburg. For the first three years of my life, I lived in Austria back when the American Army was still in Austria. I grew up subsequently in posts around the country around veterans.

We have to make the argument that the only economically sound place to be is within Europe - we have to remember, it's history again, that there are reasons we bound ourselves together as a set of European nations and it all came out of the second world war.

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of politicaldiscourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.... These were therequirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

The Treaty includes no provision for the economic rehabilitation of Europe -- nothing to make the defeated Central Powers into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.

As a post-Holocaust kid, growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish refugees, I had got the idea there were no Jews left in Europe. But I found in my European wanderings that many of them had gone back and rebuilt their lives.

After the liberation of France, I went to the movies all ihe time.

Well, as a general remark, I would say that I was discouraged by the physical and economic conditions in continental Europe after the war.

Europe has been at peace since 1945. But it is a restless peace thats shadowed by the threat of violence. Europe is partitioned. An unnatural line runs through the heart of a very great and a very proud nation [Germany]. History warns us that until this harsh division has been resolved, peace in Europe will never be secure. We must turn to one of the great unfinished tasks of our generationand that unfinished task is making Europe whole again.

Starting from the ruins of the Second World War, we - all Europeans said, after centuries of fighting each other, we're going to build permanent arrangements in which peace between European countries is secured, freedom is secured, and growing prosperity. And that's what we have done over the last 70 years.

My father was a black, working-class man who arrived here with no money in his pocket from Nigeria; my mum came from more of a middle-class background, whose father had prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg.

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.

And the Marshall Plan, to us, meant a general who had turned into a secretary of state, and that the secretary of state saw the necessity of the reconstruction of these European countries that had suffered so heavily.

Broadly speaking, the bitterness, confusion and economic uncertainty which have cursed Europe in the last four years have grown out of the controversies over these stupendous unsettled matters. The agencies created for liquidating the peace settlement have unfortunately operated instead to solidify national hatreds and conflicts.

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.

Well, in 1947... in Europe and in Italy especially, we thought of America as all-powerful.

After the turmoil of the Second World War, my family ended up in Russian-occupied East Germany. When I attended fourth grade, I had to learn Russian as my first foreign language in school. I found this quite difficult because of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as time went on, I seemed to do all right.

Germany's fate is decided first and foremost in Europe. Reconciliation and cooperation in Europe have brought us freedom, peace and prosperity. Who would have dared to believe so much 50 years ago?

The Franco-German tandem at the core of post-war European integration has become lopsided. Relations between Berlin and Paris are unusually poor, with some French politicians decrying the 'selfish intransigence' in the euro crisis of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Following the war in Europe a large increase of European immigration to the United States is to be expected, of which the largest part is and always has been made up of men skilled in farming.