From Keith Lowe, author of the criticall acclaimed Inferno comes an 'extraordinary, disturbing and powerful' (Daily Mail) new history, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.
The Second World War left Europe in chaos. Landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than 35 million people killed. Across most of the continent, the institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport,local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates soared, economies collapsed, and the European population hovered on the brink of starvation.
In this groundbreaking study of the years that followed the war, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. He outlines the warped morality and the insatiable urge for vengeance that were the legacy of the conflict.
Based on original documents, interviews and scholarly literature in eight different languages, Savage Continent is a window on the brief, chaotic period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
'Deeply harrowing, distinctly troubling. Moving, measured and provocative. A compelling and plausible picture of a continent physically and morally brutalized by slaughter' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
'Excellent', Independent
'Unbearable but essential. A serious account of things we never knew and our fathers would rather forget. Lowe's transparent prose makes it difficult to look away from a whole catalogue of horrors...you won't sleep afterwards. Such good history it keeps all the questions boiling in your mind', Scotsman
Keith Lowe is widely recognized as an authority on the Second World War, and has often spoken on TV and radio, both in Britain and the United States. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943 (Penguin). He lives in north London with his wife and two children.
