This short popular history book, translated from Swedish, was longlisted for the second (2018) Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Whilst I'd been quite interested in the book anyway, it was the longlisting that prompted me to take it up at this time. I mostly listened to it as an audiobook, narrated in the UK version by Joan Walker, and I also read some bits of the text while listening. Åsbrink's thesis, as may be guessable from the title, is that 1947 is when the contemporary world 'began',because, during that year, a number of developments which continue to be pertinent today emerged in global politics and culture.
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A mostly enjoyable and interesting light popular history that feels like hearing or reading news from 71 years ago (if it were in the style of contemporary broadsheet news with a culture section).
I haven't read any others of the crop of popular histories named after individual years, but I understand that this one is different from the usual, because it concentrates not on a specific discovery or person, but on news and events from countries around the world during one year. It has month-by-month chapters, with one interlude in the middle about the author's family history. The book's underlying argument is that many aspects of later 20th-century and contemporary western life have their roots in the events and cultural products of 1947. It highlights these items in a news-magazine style, but Åsbrink does not give a counterargument to her thesis: this is history in the style of creative non-fiction rather than academia. There is an extensive bibliography and sources list, but there are no footnotes.
The countries most frequently discussed are Sweden (Åsbrink is Swedish), Britain, Palestine, India, France, the USA, Germany, Hungary (the author's father was Hungarian-Jewish), Poland and Egypt. Several cultural figures recur, and the narrative episodically follows George Orwell (writing 1984 on the isle of Jura) and Simone de Beauvoir (started The Second Sex) throughout the year, as well as making less frequent mentions of many others, such as Tolkien finishing The Lord of the Rings, computer scientist Grace Hopper who coined the term 'bug' (the first bug was a moth that had got into the computer) and was later involved in the development of COBOL, and Christian Dior and the waves made by his New Look. The quotes from Dior have a camp charm which contrasts with the serious topics making up the rest of the book, and give a flavour of the aesthetic relief from wartime austerity his designs brought to the fashion-conscious. I've never been a fan of it as a style, and prefer earlier 1940s looks, but these phrases and his personal frivolities made me grok it more than I ever had before. There is more about women here than one would probably find in an older popular history by a man, and fashion is treated with a cultural seriousness it wouldn't necessarily have been (the book also notes that Hennes, later H&M, was also founded this year), but 1947 remains a general history of predominantly political world events, at a time when the vast majority of politicians were men, rather than a history of women. Eleanor Roosevelt is the most politically powerful woman here, involved in drawing up the UN Declaration of Human Rights - that cornerstone of modern secular morality - with a working-group surveying and quoting philosophy texts from across the world, including Confucian philosopher Mencius and (unspecified) Hindu thinkers.
I'm not rating the book because I haven't checked most of the facts in it which I hadn't heard before, and with this being a translation as well as a popular history by a journalist, there are no English reviews by academics available. I didn't hear anything which I knew to be wrong, and in the one instance I did find online pointing out a mistake (an Amazon review mentioning Operation Black Tulip, in which the Dutch planned to expel German civilians from the Netherlands) it was simply the case that Åsbrink hadn't included the conclusion of the episode via events that happened after 1947, rather than being wrong per se.
The book was at its most engaging when it stuck to month-by-month events, newslike, rather than breaking the spell with accounts of later developments going into the 1950s as it did for a few topics.
Åsbrink devotes too much space to developments in European fascism in the early 1950s - this is the reason for that 'mostly' in the first sentence. It is depressing to hear about, but it is an important part of the post-war story that fascists were still active and internationally networking with one another after 1945 (a lot of people seem to assume that apart from Germany, and the Nazis hiding in South America, they disappeared in a puff of smoke, or were merely isolated figures of ridicule) but the amount of material about them in the book dwarfs the other topics predominantly because of the history of fascism in Europe extending beyond 1947. However, it will be a new idea to readers who've had little contact with history of the period, and who base their assumptions on more recent politics, that these postwar fascists were - at a time when internationalism was the prevailing trend across the political spectrum - in favour of a united Europe.
Among the other biggest international stories here are the partition of India - its borders shockingly delineated by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, considered by the Lord Chancellor a good man for the job due to "his brilliance as a lawyer and his ignorance of India". Gandhi is later quoted decrying violence against women during the aftermath of partition, without reference to his dubious personal behaviour which has become better known in recent years.
Also ongoing throughout 1947 were efforts to address the Holocaust, its survivors and perpetrators. The Nuremberg Trials were initially halted, but restarted as new documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities was uncovered. Public boredom with news of the trials is commonly mentioned, as many people wanted to be able to move on from the war. Raphael Lemkin is here too, a figure who seemed to be rarely mentioned in the past (and a lonely, impoverished crusader at the time, for official recognition of the crime of genocide) but one who seems increasingly well-known recently, perhaps since British barrister and law professor Philippe Sands' award-winning East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity".
The most complex issue of all, and one I'd, rather appalings, barely heard about in reference to this period in history, was Palestine - its difficulties also, in part, a legacy of the Holocaust. Åsbrink implicitly indicates similarities to the current decade's refugee crises, with accounts of the illegal immigration of Jewish survivors from all over Europe, heading to Palestine: waiting in camps for visas or boarding clandestine ships, such as one the the British (in their last days of colonial power in the area) sent back to France, despite disagreement by the US. There is a widespread sense that Jews no longer want to live in the countries where mass crimes against them had been committed, and many wanted to go to Palestine or the US. A UN delegation with members from neutral countries - some of whose levels of competence may have been questionable - was set up to find a solution. It was clear that Britain could no longer hang on to Palestine, so the question was how to find a plan that met the needs of both Zionist Jews and Arab powers in the region.
The background to the tension in Palestine in 1947 is a politically sensitive topic that really needs comment from someone who's studied the history in depth: it is the type of issue where selection of facts may be as significant as the accuracy of what is stated. I will try to delineate what Åsbrink says, or what I picked up from it, although I know it won't be the full story. There had once been a anti-colonial, anti-British, pan-Arab tendency that was inclusive of Jews, but in the 1930s, following the foundation of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 - a revival of the idea of jihad after hundreds of years - this shifted. A key figure in the Palestine Region was the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, who had links to Hitler's regime and who appears to have supported the Holocaust; he later opposed Zionism and Jewish immigration. There were also moderate Arabs who considered that their people should not have to lose land as a knock-on effect of the actions of Hitler, who was nothing to do with them. There was active terrorism from both sides, including an incident in 1947, in which Zionist paramilitaries killed two British soldiers; this was followed by a week of anti-Semitic riots across British cities, with smashing-up of shops that echo East European pogroms. Åsbrink notes, with foreshadowing, that various sources in 1947 predicted a bloodbath in the Palestine region, if a suboptimal plan (was there an optimal one?) were chosen for the area's borders. Åsbrink heavily implies that the roots of ongoing problems in Israel and Palestine lie in the decision-making of 1947. (This has to be a factor, although other causes such as British colonialism itself, or hundreds or thousands of years of religious history, are not thoroughly explored here.)
Although I can't say how exact all of this history is, overall 1947, carrying the perspective of a writer from another European country, seems like an instructive book for the British reader or listener, who is probably unused to hearing about their country's history as just one among several, discussed without any hint of specialness. It does not go out of its way to make Britain seem bad, but it does not try to gloss over negatives as a lot of UK popular historians (even the less conservative ones) seem to do by reflex.
The book has short subchapters, making it an ideal read/listen for commuting, waiting, cooking and so forth. I hadn't really noticed before that Metro - the free newspaper commonly found on buses and in city centres - had 'Books of the Year' but it seems fitting that this would be one of them, as highlighted in one edition's blurb.
This was a lovely audiobook reading - the narrator had a light, airy timbre which worked perfectly for the more literary and descriptive sections as well as for the more news-like episodes; some of the descriptions would not have worked as well read out in a matter-of-fact radio-announcer tone.
I found the first two episodes of this short Radio 4 series, The Death of the Postwar Settlement a great follow-up to 1947: When Now Begins. The first episode discusses the UN and the foundational assumptions, and the programmes then go on to explain how things changed from the fall of Eastern Bloc Communism onwards.
(listened and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)
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