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61 " Thus when George Konrád wrote somewhat sententiously that ‘no thinking person should want to drive others from positions of political power in order to occupy them for himself’, he was acknowledging a simple truth—no ‘thinking person’ was in a position there and then to do any such thing. This same appreciation of the grim facts of life also forms a backdrop to the opposition’s insistence on non-violence: not only in Czechoslovakia, where passivity in the face of authority had a long history; or in the GDR, where the Lutheran Church was increasingly influential in opposition circles; but even in Poland, where it represented for Michnik and others both a pragmatic and an ethical bar to dangerous and pointless ‘adventures’. "
― Tony Judt , Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
62 " At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place.6 After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead. "
63 " The history and memory of the Second World War were typically confined to a familiar set of moral conventions: Good versus Evil, Anti-Fascists against Fascists, Resisters against Collaborators and so forth. "
64 " Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. Today - in the wake of painful public debates in almost every other European country - it seems somehow fitting (and in any case unavoidable) that Germans, too, should at last feel able openly to question the canons of well intentioned official memory. "
65 " But although the content of public writing and performance was spectacularly metamorphosed by the fall of Hitler, Mussolini and their followers, the tone stayed much the same. The apocalyptic urgency of the Fascists; their call for violent, ‘definitive’ solutions, as though genuine change necessarily led through root-and-branch destruction; the distaste for the compromise and ‘hypocrisy’ of liberal democracy and the enthusiasm for Manichean choices (all or nothing, revolution or decadence): these impulses could serve the far Left equally well and after 1945 they did so. "
66 " After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite [to that of WWI], boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead. "
67 " This leveling process, whereby the native population of central and Eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler's most enduring contribution to European social history. "
68 " For most Europeans World War Two was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything. "