To Hell and Back

August 17, 2015
Kershaw (The End), an acclaimed British historian and biographer of Hitler, looks at a 36-year stretch of the 20th
century when Europe was dominated by Germany, from the outbreak of World War I to the nation’s division in the
aftermath of World War II. Kershaw’s strength is political and economic history—he devotes less attention to military, social, and intellectual matters—and he uncovers a number of largely forgotten events, including the 1919–1921 conflict between Germans and Poles in the Baltics and Upper Silesia that claimed 100,000 lives. Unfortunately, Kershaw’s book suffers from three significant shortcomings. His prose is dull, in part because there are insufficient telling anecdotes, and he is prone to capturing history via tangential statistics. He also stretches himself thin in writing about peripheral states, as when he addresses the nature of authoritarian rule in Estonia in the 1930s, which takes up more space than his attention to the surrender of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940. Finally, while Kershaw possesses superb knowledge of Britain and Germany and is adequate on the U.S.S.R., he repeatedly glosses over developments in France during the period. These deficiencies make Kershaw’s fact-laden and well-organized history less than satisfying. Maps & illus. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.