Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

I'm Christopher Clark, Cambridge historian.

I was born in Australia.

For Europeans, that's practically

the other end of the world.

But the European continent and its incredible diversity

always fascinated me.

Even in the far off country where I grew up,

I was always aware that so much of our world

has its roots in Europe.

And modern Europe is one of

the greatest achievements in human history.

I want to share the grand saga of this continent.

And, in the process,

I hope to rediscover its wonders for myself.

(dramatic music)

Today's leg of my journey begins in Paris

with a meeting that might surprise you.

Does this lady here look familiar to you?

Well, it's no wonder.

She's the little Paris sister of Lady Liberty in New York.

The French gave the Statue of Liberty to the Americans

as a gift in gratitude, it could be said,

for America's role in inspiring

the most important turning point in Europe's history.

America had broken away from England.

The American Declaration of Independence,

which the Statue of Liberty holds in her arm,

includes the lines "All men are created equal"

and "They are endowed by their creator

with certain inalienable rights,

including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

In the fledgling United States,

it seemed freedom, equality, and progress reigned.

Two years before the French Revolution,

self-determination and the liberty of humankind

were written into the American Constitution.

It was as if the utopias of enlightened political theory

had sprung to life.

Pennsylvania, 1777.

French nobleman Lafayette is fighting

on the side of the American colonists

for democracy and human rights

and against the English colonial rulers

whom the settlers see as their oppressors.

The old order begins to falter

in Europe and the rest of the world.

The Americans man the barricades

in what will become known as the Revolutionary War.

In the previous year, the United States of America,

as the colonists now call themselves,

had declared its independence from England.

(cheering)

The Statue of Liberty in New York

is still a symbol of freedom and democracy today.

It was a gift from the French

to the country that helped to spark a revolution

in their own country.

"L'Etat, ce moi."

"I am the state."

That's how the kings of France think.

The Palace of Versailles just outside Paris

is a manifestation of absolutism

and of the existing European order.

Many European monarchs model themselves on French royalty.

The monarch holds all executive power.

There's no formal separation of powers

into executive, judiciary, and legislature.

All chains of command converge

on one person in one place, Versailles.

This is a society of orders

with different rights and responsibilities.

The clergy, the nobility, and, of course,

the third estate encompassing the rest of society.

Those at the top of the pyramid wallow in luxury

while the poor often go hungry.

The days of absolutism were numbered.

Have the courage to make use of your own reason.

With these words, the Konigsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant

summed up the meaning of enlightenment.

Today, in what's sometimes called a post-factual era,

his words are more important than ever.

Profound discoveries in the field of the natural sciences

had already paved the way.

With their thinking and their precise reckoning,

Galilei, Kepler, and Newton

had already transformed human understanding

of the world and the universe.

When the French philosopher Rene Descartes declared,

"I think, therefore I am,"

he made the reflecting, questioning consciousness

of an individual human being

the fulcrum of our knowable existence.

In the European salons, often run by high society ladies,

the old order is increasingly called into question.

Especially in France.

Thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire

extol the principles of human equality, tolerance,

and the division of powers.

In his nature, man is free.

And all his actions must be based on reason.

I tell everybody, think for yourself.

We, ourselves, are responsible for what we do.

But also for what we don't do.

That's true, my dear Voltaire.

But it's also important to set the limit on power.

Experienced teachers have said,

"Any man with power tend to abuse it."

That is why the three powers of estate should be separated.

The legislative, the executive, and the judicial.

Freedom can only exist when

the powers of the state are separated.

Reason would mandate that, as well, don't you think?

During the Enlightenment,

knowledge is diligently collected and published

in the form of encyclopedias.

But these are not mere storehouses of knowledge.

They are critical and argumentative.

Ah, Monsieur Diderot, I am glad you could make it today.

Come with me.

Here, I bring you the author of the encylopedie

that you hold in your hands.

Oh, this here is a declaration of war against the king.

And why is that?

When man starts listening to the voice of reason,

he will strangle the last king

with the guts of the last priest.

The writing is on the wall.

Peasants and commoners are financing

the extravagant lifestyle of the royal court.

The nobility and clergy are largely exempt from taxation.

The argument that this is a natural

and God-given state of affairs

comes to seem less persuasive.

This is a menu from the court at Versailles.

20 courses were served

from jellied lobster and scallops in oyster sauce

to morel souffle and leg of hare.

And, while the nobles of Versailles reveled and feasted,

the people in many parts of the country starved.

The world of the court and the world of everybody else

drifted apart.

This was just one of the reasons

why the French monarchy failed to make it through

to the end of the 18th century.

The fundamental problem was government debt.

France has become the most populous country in Europe.

25 million people live here.

Food is scarce and prices have spiked.

We want bread.

Down with the king.

We want bread.

Down with the king.

We want bread.

In 1788, bad harvests

and catastrophic weather events

only make the situation worse.

Bread, the main food of the poor,

is suddenly much more expensive.

The French decide to take things into their own hands.

Food riots break out across the country,

particularly in Paris.

Take what you can.

Take as much as you can carry.

Do not leave anything behind.

Keep your hands off.

You hear me?

Nothing.

Take what you can.

Take as much as you can carry.

Do not leave anything.

Take all the bread.

And the king's soldiers simply stand back and watch.

When order breaks down in the capital,

they refuse to intervene against the revolutionaries.

On the contrary, many side with the rebels,

because there is unrest in the army, as well.

By the late 1780s, there wasn't even enough money

to cover monthly payments to the troops.

A fully functional and strongly motivated army

could easily have put down

the small hunger riot at the Bastille.

But France no longer possessed

an army loyal enough to do that.

On the morning of the 14th of July, 1789,

an angry Parisian crowd storms

the notorious state prison in the Bastille fortress.

Their anger is directed at this symbol

of the tyranny inflicted on them by the king and nobility.

The revolutionaries demand

freedom, equality, and brotherhood.

But are these ideals really compatible with one another?

Contention over this question

will shape the force of the revolution.

In June 1789, the third estate breaks away

from the other two orders and convenes in assembly.

Its members see themselves

as representatives of the entire nation.

Open disagreement, debate now becomes

a central motor of political life.

Drawing on the legacy of the American Revolution,

General Lafayette and Honore Mirabeau

draft a bill of human rights.

Article one, men are born

and remain free and equal in rights.

Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.

(applause)

Article two, the goal of any political association

is the conservation of the natural

and imprescriptible rights of man.

These rights are liberty, property, safety,

and resistance against oppression.

(applause)

Fearing that the revolution

underway in France will threaten their security,

the rulers of Prussia and Austria

declare their military support for the French king.

The armies marching to Paris in 1792

are stopped by French revolutionary forces

in a battle at Valmy.

Historical events begin to unfold at a breathtaking pace.

France becomes a republic.

The king has been deposed and is a prisoner of the people.

He is put on trial.

Both Louis XVI and his queen are beheaded by guillotine.

France enters an era of profound

political polarization and radicalization.

The body count goes up.

Increasingly, the French revolutionaries

became armed missionaries.

Using violence to propagate their ideals.

And that, too, is a European invention.

The totalized application of a single political theory,

whatever the human cost.

Just across the river, in the Conciergerie Prison,

2,780 people were swiftly processed

by revolutionary tribunals and sentenced to death.

And, throughout the country,

executions during this period numbered

in the tens of thousands.

The revolutionaries wanted to liberate all of humanity.

That was one of the things that made them so radical.

And the French National Assembly

was the first organization in Europe, in the world,

to pose the question of whether and how

one state could use military force

to enforce the observation of human rights in another state.

The age of the humanitarian intervention was born.

The French National Assembly hopes to offer

strong resistance to Europe's monarchs

and mobilizes the population with revolutionary slogans.

Now let us show Europe that 10 million French citizens,

when challenged, will be fueled by the fire of freedom.

And, armed with swords and reason,

we'll single-handedly change the world

and make the tyrants tremble on their thrones.

The future of the revolution is at stake.

Ultimately, the advocates of war prevail.

Now let us vote.

Peace or war.

Who votes for peace?

And war?

(cheers and applause)

Napoleon Bonaparte starts out

as a general of the revolution.

But, once in power, he brings the domestic tumult to an end

and focuses on projecting French power outwards onto Europe.

His battles are legendary.

And his conquests numerous.

Napoleon plunges the continent

into a state of constant war.

And he leads his army from victory to victory.

And then Napoleon, a national hero at this point,

names himself emperor.

He is crowned in 1804.

Napoleon casts himself as a successor to the Roman emperors

and especially to Charlemagne.

Like his hero, he wants to create a European empire.

In 1806, Prussian troops encounter

the gendarme at Jena and Auerstedt in Thuringia.

The Prussians suffer a harrowing defeat.

Further annexations follow.

Napoleon now dominates almost the whole of Europe.

And he orchestrates his triumph accordingly.

In Berlin, as in many other places,

the response is ambivalent.

Napoleon may be a tyrant to some,

but, to others, he's the herald of a new era.

Napoleon and Europe,

some territories are simply annexed to France.

Outside the borders of an enlarged France,

Napoleon creates satellite states and confederations.

Even great powers like Prussia and Austria,

defeated by Napoleon, now pay tribute to him

and accept his dominance.

Napoleonic rule is a strange mix of military aggression,

fiscal extraction, and progressive institutions.

He hopes to bring progress wherever he rules.

His Napoleonic code promises civil rights,

equal protection under the law, and freedom for peasants.

But the mood darkens as Bonaparte wages war after war.

There's no exit strategy, no limit to his ambition.

Resistance grows.

In 1813, the Battle of the Nations rages in Leipzig.

A European alliance, including Austria, Prussia,

Russia, and Sweden, mobilizes more than 300,000 troops

against Napoleon.

More than 200,000 soldiers,

including Frenchmen, Italians Poles, and Germans,

fight on the side of France.

Bonaparte is defeated.

His dream of dominating the continent goes up in smoke.

He may only have been one meter 68 tall,

but, when it came to his sarcophagus,

there was no such thing as too big.

Here lie the mortal remains of Napoleon in five coffins.

Each nesting inside the other like a Russian doll.

As though the French wanted to preserve

their most important national myth for all eternity.

Napoleon was one of the sculptors of modern Europe.

His tools of preference were armies, legal codes,

and administrative innovation.

He was willing to use any means necessary

to bring the nations of the old continent together

as a family united around and serving

the motherland of human rights, France.

He believed in open borders for people and goods

and standardized weights and measures,

such as meters and kilos.

And, of course, the original standard meter

on which all the others are based resides here in Paris.

"France is the measure of all things.

The laws of France must extend to all the united countries

from the Pillars of Hercules to the Kamchatka Peninsula,"

Napoleon is reported to have said.

With Napoleon defeated and banished,

new negotiations begin in Vienna.

After 20 years of war,

Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England are the victors.

The objective is both to contain France

and to block hegemonic projects by the other powers.

France is invited to participate

in the system that will come to be known

as the Concert of Europe.

The settlement hammered out in Vienna,

amidst a flurry of extravagant social events,

will define the future of Europe.

Of course, the nations, the peoples as such,

aren't involved in this process.

They are objects to be acted upon.

Items on the negotiating agenda.

The dynastic rulers view themselves

as the guarantors of order in Europe.

And the result is a security architecture

that spans the continent.

This is the final act of the Congress of Vienna.

And, here, you can see the seals and the signatures

of the statesmen who took part

in the negotiations in Vienna.

Here, Prince Metternich for Austria.

Here, Talleyrand, French representative.

And, on this side, further significant figures.

Hardenberg, Humboldt, and many others.

The ultimate result of the Congress of Vienna,

laid out in this final act,

was, in a sense, the rebirth of Europe.

Napoleon had a vision of a united Europe, of course.

But it was a Europe united under his control

and under French hegemony.

The new Europe allocated more power

to the peripheral empires of West and East.

Great powers Britain and Russia

were granted a stronger voice in determining

the fate of the continent.

A state of affairs that anticipated, in some ways,

the later standoff between

the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the future, problems would be solved

not by uncoordinated individual initiatives,

but harmoniously through the so called Concert of Powers.

This in some ways very intelligent and impressive solution

fell victim, like so many peace treaties,

to the egoism of the most powerful states.

One of Napoleon's unintended legacies

was a surge in national feeling.

Nothing galvanizes patriotic emotion

like the experience of invasion and foreign domination.

In May 1832, more than 20,000 people

from Germany, France, Poland, and other countries

gather at a palace in Pfalz Region of Western Germany.

They call for a united Germany

and a confederated republic of Europe,

as well as for freedom of the press, speech, and assembly

and equal rights for women.

Hambach is considered one of the cradles

of modern democracy in Germany.

And some see it as the birthplace of European unity.

But the European vision was still formless and incoherent.

And the old powers still dominated the continent.

The kings and princes simply ignored

the increasingly passionate demand for liberal reform.

In 1848, another revolution breaks out.

Once again, the French take to the streets.

Invoking the symbols and slogans

of the French Revolution of 1789.

But, unlike the French Revolution,

the Revolution of 1848 spreads like wildfire across Europe

at a breathtaking pace.

From all over the country, deep from every heart,

a strong united German fatherland.

The revolution.

The revolution has won in Paris.

With the exception of England and Russia,

nearly all the major European states are affected.

In the simultaneity of its tumult across the continent,

this revolution is unique.

The people want social reform and liberal constitutions.

And they're willing to use violence, if necessary,

to get what they want.

Full blown revolutions rage in many cities.

And revolutionary hotspots flare up across the continent.

The people rise up against the dynasties of Europe

under the banner of freedom and self-determination.

A wave of revolutions rolled across Europe

form Palermo to Paris to Rome, Milan,

Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin.

Hope, frustration, and anger formed a combustible mix.

The apparent unanimity of the revolutionary protests

concealed a plurality of conflicting aims.

Political liberty, social justice, the unity of nations.

In Central Europe, national identity,

the desire to be united in a common state,

was at the center of the revolutionary movement.

In Germany, for example,

the first freely elected German parliament

convenes at Saint Paul's Church in Frankfurt.

The focus is on uniting the nation.

The parliament is modeled on France's National Assembly.

Parliaments during this era

are still the domain of the elites.

But how is a revolution expected to succeed

without the support of an army?

In most European nations, the army remains loyal

to the rulers.

There's little that militias

or a network of revolutionaries can do

against an armed military force.

And yet the shockwaves of this revolution

would yield several important victories.

New constitutions and parliaments are created

and censorship is scaled back.

Many of the European states absorb and channel

the energy of the revolution.

Selectively implementing its demands.

And these political upheavals take place

against the background of

an even more profound transformation.

The Industrial Revolution.

Enormous factories spring up first in England

and then nearly everywhere in Europe.

With the invention of the steam engine,

manual labor is increasingly replaced by machines.

The process will take over a century.

Why did all of this begin in England of all places?

For centuries, using the experimental method

to probe the secrets of nature

had been part of the culture here.

So, there was a long run up.

And then there was the pleasure that

English scientists and inventors took

in the practical application of their knowledge.

They fueled the Industrial Revolution.

And among them was James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.

The water in this boiler is heated to steam

and the resulting pressure can be used

to drive other engines.

A loom, for example, or a locomotive.

During the middle decades of the 19th century,

the Industrial Revolution spread

in fits and starts across Europe.

It was a peaceful conquest.

But, for many, the consequences were grave.

Finally, people could free themselves

of the constraints of agricultural production.

Crop failures and famines that

impact entire populations are a thing of the past

in industrialized societies.

But industrial work is poorly paid,

dangerous, and exploitative.

Until late in the 18th century,

the only effective way of increasing

the production of goods was to increase

the number of humans employed to make them.

Then, the machines arrived.

They didn't just replace muscle power.

They also multiplied it.

In factories like this one,

huge machines performed the labor

of hundreds of human beings.

It was the most fundamental transformation

in human social existence since the beginning

of organized agriculture.

In other words, it was a true revolution.

An Industrial Revolution.

The inventor of the term was none other

than Karl Marx's close friend

and collaborator, Friedrich Engels,

who coined it in the 1830s

in an analogy with the French Revolution of the 1790s.

If the idea of Communism had a birthplace,

it would surely be Manchester.

The unrestrained form of production that developed here

came to be known as Manchester Capitalism.

In the mid-19th century, Friedrich Engels,

whose father owned a factory like this one,

could study, as if in a laboratory,

the social and economic consequences

of an unchecked capitalism.

And, in his writings, Karl Marx, Engels's friend,

explored the implications.

Workers of the world unite.

Yes, that sounds good.

But we need a strong message at the start.

The aim was to raise the workers

against a system that kept them poor and weak.

That's good.

That's good.

Yeah.

Not bad.

A specter is haunting Europe.

The specter of Communism.

Yeah.

What do you think?

Marx lives in exile in London.

In 1848, he and Friedrich Engels

published their Communist Manifesto,

which will one day become the bible

of the global workers' movement.

Marx and Engels call for a world

without exploitative social relations

in which the means of production

are owned not by capitalists, but by society itself.

Understood as a collective enterprise.

Both of them reflect at length on the idea of revolution.

But it's not until the early 20th century

that the explosive potential of their ideas

is fully realized.

Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor

continues to expand.

A workers' movement soon begins to take shape

and, with it, come political parties

championing the rights of waged labor.

And thus Karl Marx, who incidentally claimed

never to have been a Marxist,

influenced European history

in several ways at the same time.

The idea of the working class

as a structural feature of all modern capitalist systems

united people across borders

into a sort of community of fate.

The slogan "Workers of the world unite"

offered a counterweight to national egotism.

In the last decades of the 19th century,

left wing parties gained power

and pushed through social reforms

in dozens of European parliaments.

Only under the immense social and political stresses

of the First World War did the socialist left fracture.

A Communism emerged in whose hands

the teachings of Marx hardened into an unbending doctrine.

As the instrument of Soviet state power,

Communism became a force of global significance.

And, in Europe, the tension

between Communist and capitalist social orders

split the continent down the middle.

It's the high noon of the national idea

in every European country.

In the course of the 19th century,

the concept of nation becomes the pole star

in the firmament of European values.

But, in Europe, where so many cultures and languages

live in close proximity,

one nation's dream can become another's nightmare.

The leading monarchs of Europe

are nearly all connected in the same gigantic clan network.

And, in 1913, many of them come together

at the wedding of the German emperor's daughter,

Victoria Louisa, in Berlin.

No one realizes just how close Europe is to the brink.

This is the calm before the storm.

An assassination in the multinational Hapsburg state,

the murder of the Austrian heir to the throne,

captures the headlines.

But does this automatically mean war?

The great powers recognize the risk of escalation,

but none of them does anything to prevent it.

In 1914, the decision makers are like sleepwalkers.

They maneuver for advantage,

but, in placing their own goals

above the preservation of peace, they risk catastrophe.

When war breaks out, each country sees itself as the victim

and its opponent as the aggressor.

Modern military technology means that

this world war brings unparalleled carnage.

Nearly 17 million people lose their lives

on the battlefields and on the home front.

And the First World War is a breaking point.

The old European order collapses,

but no new order emerges to take its place.

The desire for compromise is there,

but the differences between the fronts are overpowering.

This is the dawn of an age of extremes

shaped by fascism and Bolshevism.

After the October Revolution in Russia,

the Bolsheviks seize power.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is the man of the hour.

He keeps an iron grip on power

in hopes that this Red Revolution

will spread to the rest of Europe.

Versailles, 1919.

How can peace endure if Europe's two strongest powers

play no role in the peacemaking process?

Russia doesn't even send a representative

to the European conference at Versailles.

And the German delegation is barred

from participating in the negotiations.

With its reparations, disarmament clauses,

and territorial penalties, and, above all,

with its insistence on German-sold guilt

for the outbreak of war,

the Treaty of Versailles places

a lasting burden on the new Weimar Democracy.

The multinational Hapsburg Empire collapses.

New independent nations arise in its place.

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia.

The Baltic countries also gain their independence.

But the losers refuse to accept the new post-war order.

Voices of protest grow louder.

Particularly from the right wing.

Germany is being oppressed and robbed, they claim.

There are signs of rapprochement between Germany and France

at an international conference in Locarno in 1925.

It's a time of hope.

German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann

speaks of a Europe of cooperation, not confrontation.

And his French colleague Briand

makes an impassioned speech.

"Away with the cannons," he says.

"Make way for reconciliation."

Both statesmen are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

for their efforts.

But this vision of a peaceful Europe would soon evaporate.

The National Socialists promised to liberate Germany.

To restore the country to

its former strength and independence.

Hitler isn't interested in the balance of power.

He wants unconditional domination of the continent.

Attempts to appease the new German leadership fail.

The Nazis intend to secure their objectives by force.

Rearmament begins in earnest as soon as they take power.

September, 1939.

The war begins with the invasion of Poland.

The Nazis couple the technology of invasion and conquest

with the subjugation and extermination

of the peoples under their control.

The systematic slaughter of civilians

sets this war apart from past conflicts

right from the very beginning.

The Holocaust begins behind the front lines.

It will claim the lives of six million Jews.

May, 1940.

The German Wehrmacht attacks its neighbor to the west.

Hitler always adheres to the same binary principle.

All or nothing.

Germany will be a great power or it will cease to exist,

he declares in his book Mein Kampf

published years before he comes to power.

With his victory secure, Hitler visits Paris.

Among the sightseeing stops is Napoleon's tomb

at the Dome des Invalides.

He plans to surpass even the French emperor's prowess

as a military leader.

But his memory of Napoleon's achievements is selective.

He seems to have forgotten the fact that

Napoleon's invasion of Russia

proved the disaster that undid his empire.

The Nazi ideology leads further into ruin.

The Siegessaule or Victory Column of Berlin

was supposed to serve as an important element

on the great east-west axis

of the capital city of the Third Reich, Germania.

In Hitler's grotesque vision,

the megalopolis Germania,

bulging with oversized monuments,

was to be the focal point of a pan-germanic world empire.

The Nazis liked the mural at the base of the Victory Column.

We see an aroused German people

raising their swords against Napoleon

who's dressed like a Roman emperor in a red toga.

An historical event.

The early 19th century wars of liberation

against Napoleonic France is elevated

to the status of a world historical principle.

For the Nazis, the state was an obsolete concept.

They thought in ethnic racial

rather than political categories.

When Hitler imagined Europe,

it was not the Europe of states, but a continental platform.

A Petri dish inhabited by biological cultures.

One in which the Germans would simply expand

like a bacterial colony.

Lebensraum, the German word for habitat,

has nothing to do with politics.

It's a concept from biology.

In Europe, only the fittest were supposed to survive.

"Every being strives for expansion," Hitler wrote.

"And every nation strives for world dominion.

Only those who keep this goal in mind

will find the right path."

The war Hitler launched on Central and Eastern Europe

was a war of annihilation and enslavement.

A war against the diversity

of Europe's peoples and cultures.

It was a war against Europe's history.

The consequence was an unfathomable break

with culture and civilization.

And today's Europe is still deeply marked by this conflict.

In June, 1941 came the invasion of the Soviet Union.

A campaign of unexampled extermination

to expand Germany's territory to the east.

The dictator wants to create a German Europe

from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains.

The Second World War would cost

60 to 70 million human lives.

The majority civilians.

The Holocaust, millions of slaughtered Slavs,

bombing campaigns, prisoner of war camps,

refugees, and displaced persons.

The war left a traumatized generation in its wake.

I'm in Kiev.

Where an enormous statue commemorates

the Great Patriotic War,

as the struggle against Hitler's Germany is known in Russia.

The fighting here was particularly violent.

In a place like this, you can still feel the horror.

The iron hand of war.

These are the bloodlands.

Areas where two totalitarian powers

fought over the same space

in a life and death struggle for supremacy.

Millions died.

Millions more were murdered.

And, even before the Second World War,

millions had perished in a manmade famine

engineered by Joseph Stalin

to break the national will of the Ukraine.

Hitler's war of annihilation

claimed further millions of lives.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers

died in battles of encirclement or in POW camps.

The country was plundered.

People starved in a new wave of famines.

There have been phases in the history of Europe

where the violence was so devastating that

the thread of memory was severed.

The intimacy with the past was disrupted.

Only trauma remained.

These are the killing fields of Europe.

In 1945, it seemed unimaginable that

Europe would ever reemerge from the abyss

it had created for itself.

Everyone suffered in this terrible war.

Tens of thousands of soldiers

and civilians lost their lives.

German invaders and Russians alike.

There is a story, a grieving family, behind every headstone.

The military cemeteries in the Ukraine

bear witness to the countless dead on both sides.

(dramatic music)

But the most terrible, the cruelest fate,

was suffered by the Jews.

There was a campaign of extermination

against the entire Jewish population of Kiev.

And, on this precise spot,

the bloodiest mass shooting of Jews took place.

If the name Auschwitz stands

for industrial mass murder by the Nazis in gas chambers,

Babi Yar near Kiev stands for the murder by shooting

of tens of thousands of defenseless

men, women, and children.

Holocaust by bullet.

On the 29th and 30th of September, 1941,

in this ravine near Kiev,

33,000 Jewish men, women, and children were shot.

The Jewish population,

whose roots here extended back for centuries,

was annihilated by Hitler's henchmen.

Babi Yar and Auschwitz, the nadir of the history of Europe,

which it had such a high view of its own civilization.

June the 6th, 1944, D-Day.

The tides of war begin to turn.

With the Allied attack on Normandy,

the assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe begins.

The victorious powers want to put an end

to the Nazi dictatorship once and for all.

Never again should war originate from German soil.

Nor should one European power subjugate the others.

Above all, the humanitarian catastrophe of the war

should never be repeated.

(dramatic music)

I'm standing in the old Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

This is one of those places that

reminds you of what was lost to Europe

through the Holocaust.

The industrialized killing centers of the Nazi genocide

were unique in history.

But so were their victims.

Since the Middle Ages,

Jewish culture, know how, and scholarship

have left a deep imprint on Europe.

Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust,

Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt,

Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler,

Marc Chagall, Albert Einstein.

You could add countless further names.

The Holocaust put a brutal end

to this remarkable history of cultural symbiosis.

Europe has never quite recovered

from this act of self-mutilation.

Zero hour.

The war is over.

The Nazi's attempt to dominate the continent

ends in catastrophe.

Huge swaths of Europe lie in ruins.

Buildings will be rebuilt, but the trauma will remain.

At a conference in Potsdam near Berlin,

the victorious Allies negotiate the post-war order.

The future of Europe.

The heads of state of the three allied powers

come together here.

US President Truman, Soviet dictator Stalin,

and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

When Churchill arrived on a hot July day,

the first thing he did was to order a whiskey and a cigar.

He spent a long time looking out

over the peaceful Griebnitz Lake.

A Soviet sentry could be seen

patrolling along the opposite shore.

And perhaps Churchill reflected

on how Europe would in future be divided

into East and West.

The Allies have won the war together.

And together they want to work towards peace

and to shape the future of Europe.

But alliances rarely survive the wars

they are created to fight.

And now that their mutual enemy is defeated,

the victorious Allies begin to discover their differences

as they sit talking at this table.

After this war, the preeminent position

of the old European continent was a thing of the past.

Moscow and Washington now called the shots in Europe

and would do so in the decades to come.

Europe, like the world, would be divided.

Embedded in two opposing blocks.

And this, too, was Hitler's work.

The aim of defeating Nazi Germany

had united the world's two greatest powers

in a struggle that brought them together

in the heart of the continent.

But, when it came to shaping the peace,

the tensions between two radically opposed systems

proved impossible to contain.

The so called Iron Curtain separated

the capitalist from the Communist world.

And did so in the very center of Europe.

The western power zones of occupation

become the Federal Republic of Germany.

In the east, the Soviet Union creates a bloc

of socialist satellite states, which includes East Germany.

The continent splits into

a mainly capitalist and liberal democratic region

and a Communist region.

And the two alliance blocs keep each other in check.

The term balance of terror is often used

in this era of nuclear arms buildup.

Meanwhile, in the Hague,

European leaders take up an idea

that failed to acquire traction between the two world wars.

The vision of a Europe united in peace and freedom.

We cannot ordain that anything less

than the union of Europe as a whole.

Winston Churchill even floats

the idea of a United States of Europe.

This goes too far for many Europeans,

but the heads of state manage to agree

on the creation of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

It's the precursor to the future European Community

and to the EU.

In May, 1949, 10 founding fathers

sign this institution into existence.

A Western European forum

for freedom, peace, and social justice is born.

The hope is that a spirit of solidarity

will blossom from the conflict of the past.

Shared values and symbols are at the heart of this project.

Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor

of the Federal Republic of Germany,

sees an opportunity in this bond with Europe.

By collaborating with the Western allies,

he hopes to lead Germany

back into the family of free peoples.

Or at least West Germany.

Even if doing so intensifies the division

between eastern and western halves of his country.

The Wets German government's goal

is to peacefully overcome

the division of Germany and Europe.

But what's the first step?

Building bridges with France.

France's Foreign Minister Shuman already has a plan.

"If we want to prevent war in the future," he argues,

"the coal and steel industries

in various European countries, vital to any war effort,

were to be consolidated under one roof."

In 1952, the European Coal and Steel Union is born.

Now, iron and steel shall forge

the peoples of Europe together

in a community of actions and ideals.

Just seven years after the war,

national sovereignty over a crucial military resource

is handed over to an international body.

A world historical step.

As the economy recovers, Europeans grow more mobile.

Their horizons broaden.

They drive their own cars or motorbikes or hitchhike

to new destinations.

Traveling through a Europe that

was opening up to the world.

Today, we take it for granted.

As early as the 1950s, some young Europeans

are already calling for open borders.

That's still a long way off at this point.

Particularly since a few early attempts

at expanding the community failed.

But the campaigners refuse to be deterred.

And, once again, all roads lead to Rome.

The Roman Empire was one of the largest in history

and the EU would later become

the world's largest trading power.

In 1957, representatives of West Germany,

France, Italy, and the Benelux Countries

come together in Rome to establish

the European Economic Community.

The EEC also results in closer political ties

between the countries.

It's open to new members.

And plans to expand its powers step by step.

Building the foundation for a shared future.

Ancient Rome eventually fell, of course,

thanks to financial crises, political conflict,

and barbarian invasions.

And Europe has its own share of tensions today.

The divide between north and south,

the Euro crisis, immigration policies.

These are all challenges that

the continent will continue to face.

But the European political order is robust.

It's underpinned by longstanding common values,

civil and political freedom, equality before the law,

democracy, human dignity, and a rational view of the world.

This order is now in danger.

If Europeans really want to inhabit a common house,

they will have to make it so strong that

it can withstand storms and earthquakes,

even those that come from within.

This can be learned.

And wasn't Europe always a continent that learned?

(inspirational music)