What we owe to the generation that rebuilt after the war

My grandfather rebuilt a house with his hands. Not metaphorically: he laid the bricks himself, mixed the mortar himself, set the window frames himself. The house still stands. He has been dead for twenty years. I think about him more than I used to.

What I think about is not the house, exactly — though I have walked past it on every visit to the town where he lived, and I feel something specific each time, something that is not quite pride and not quite grief. What I think about is the act of rebuilding itself, and what it required of the people who did it.

Europe in 1945 was a ruin. Not a metaphorical ruin but a literal one: cities in rubble, infrastructure destroyed, populations displaced, institutions gutted or corrupted beyond recognition. The people who rebuilt it — physically, politically, culturally — did so in conditions of hardship that most people alive today cannot fully imagine, not because we are incapable of imagination but because the gap between then and now is simply too large.

They rebuilt without knowing whether the reconstruction would last. They built institutions — the early European communities, the new constitutions, the welfare states — on the assumption that they would be maintained, developed and, where necessary, reformed by those who came after. That assumption has been only partially honoured.

I am not interested in nostalgia as a political programme. I am interested in gratitude as a political disposition — the disposition that recognises what was given to us, acknowledges the conditions under which it was given, and takes seriously the obligation to pass something equivalent on.