Europe, An Open Drama and a Space for Friendship by Victor Pérez-Diaz

Between 1939 and 1945, 6 million Jews were murdered, and 6 million German men, women, and children died from warring violence, as did 3 million young French and German men in the trenches from 1914 to 1918. In 1945, Germany’s gdp was what it had been in 1908. The French gnp in 1945 was what it had been in 1891. In 1944, Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, proposed, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agreement, that Germany should be stripped of its industries and cease to be an industrial power. Europe was exhausted by its immediate catastrophes, as well as by its history: In 1562, Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) wanted to “save” a Catholic Europe with his Invincible Armada of 1588; he even purchased Titian’s The Rape of Europa to drive the point home. Other nation-states with varying goals and at a horrid financial and human cost...