Publisher's Synopsis
World War II left Europe in chaos. Landscapes and crops destroyed, cities completely devastated and more than 35 million dead. In most of the continent, institutions such as the police, the media, transportation, local and national governments, had ceased to exist. Crime rates rose, economies collapsed, and European citizens were on the brink of exhaustion. In this gripping study of the post-war years, Keith Lowe describes a continent still wracked with violence, where a large part of the population had not yet accepted that the war was over. The book underscores the absence of morality and the insatiable thirst for revenge resulting from the conflict. He describes the ethnic clashes and civil strife that ravaged the lives of ordinary people from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and the establishment of a new order that ultimately brought uneasy stability to a devastated continent. Almost everything related to World War II has been studied and disseminated. However, very little is known of the five years after the war in which millions of Europeans also died and tens of millions suffered the horrors of the postwar period. Based on original documents, interviews, and academic studies in eight different languages, Wild Continent radically changes the vision of World War II that until today and helps to understand the Europe of our days, heir to those conflicts.
