Europe: A Second Renaissance

On both sides of the Atlantic last week, men paid homage to a renaissance.

“The nations of Western Europe,” said President Kennedy on the Fourth of July in Philadelphia, “long divided by feuds far more bitter than any which existed among the 13 colonies, are today joining together, seeking as our forefathers sought, to find freedom in diversity and unity from strength.” Echoing Europe’s own Jean Monnet, Kennedy called for a “concrete Atlantic partnership” that would help “achieve a world of law and free choice.” He looked forward to a “declaration of interdependence . . . between the new union now emerging in Europe and the old American union founded here 175 years ago.”

As Kennedy spoke, the two aged leaders of the “new union” held a meeting in Paris that symbolized Europe’s revival. Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle decided to press for resumption of talks on Western European unity before the matter of British admission to the Common Market can be settled, but they expressed the hope that Britain would be admitted. Still troubled by all too recent memories of the Boche, Parisians showed only muted enthusiasm for the visitor, but at a state dinner at the Elysée Palace, De Gaulle offered an emotional toast and a special history lesson: “However badly founded were the immediate motives of our wars, however inopportune their execution, however ruinous their results, it was a great cause which was fundamentally at the source of our quarrels. In seeking to impose their domination, Germany and France were in truth pursuing the old dream of unity which for some 20 centuries haunted the souls of our continent.”

New Façades. The force that Kennedy saluted and wooed, that De Gaulle contemplated with “joy,” and Khrushchev regards with fury is, in fact, a New Europe—proof of the Continent’s ability always to find in the ashes of its destruction the foundation for new triumph. After the moral and material devastation of World War II, perhaps the worst since the Black Death, Europe once again rose up with a new façade, new customs, a thriving culture, and a booming new prosperity that has made it the industrial rival of the two great powers. On the following twelve color pages, TIME presents a panorama of this extraordinary rebirth.

Its heart is the Common Market, but it reaches beyond the six countries that presently constitute it. Britain, while not yet a member, shares in the new affluence and in the ever-widening ways of life. A typical incident occurred a few years ago, when a Hollywood movie company went on location near Nottingham to film Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence’s somber novel about life in the sooty, poverty-ridden English Midlands. Before the scene could be made to look properly depressing for the camera, the film makers had to go from house to house, asking townspeople to take down their television antennas.

Such symptoms of prosperity are everywhere. Taste has become more cosmopolitan and leisure more adventurous. Some 1,500 Chinese restaurants have opened in Britain in the past six years; chartered aircraft flew Chinese waiters in from Hong Kong. Welsh miners now drink imported Danish beer instead of mild-and-bitter, while a leading Swiss candy firm is marketing chocolat au whisky. Toting cameras and wearing lederhosen, more than 1,000,000 Germans spread out over Europe from the Baltic to the Balkans every summer, reverting to their old passion for tourism. Other Europeans are keeping pace; French workers have a three-week vacation guaranteed every year. The European workingman, who used to be almost as firmly tied to his home town as the peasant to the soil, now is on the move in pursuit of both new-found leisure and of better jobs. Workers in the still-depressed Italian south, whose choice used to be between staying put or emigrating all the way across the Atlantic, have found their “America” at home by moving to Italy’s booming, industrial north; others go to Switzerland or England and return with their savings.

Class feeling is still far stronger in Europe than in the U.S., but one of the great facts in the new Europe is that the “proletariat” is being pushed toward middle-class status.

Widening Windows. The American influence is seen in supermarkets, motels, and rent-a-car agencies, now almost as omnipresent as Coca-Cola. Self-service is the rage—butcheterias and groceterias in Britain and lavo self (Laundromats) in France. Kellogg’s fiocchi (cornflakes) are the new staple of the Italian breakfast table. G.I.s stationed in Europe have introduced soapbox derbies, and bowling has become a new fad in Britain and France. German executives have taken to the absolutely clean, modern desk. For a middle-class woman in Munich or Cologne, it is “in” to have ice cream at the airport while the jets take off; for a smalltime Berlin reporter, it is in to wear button-down shirts and pointed Italian shoes—way out to speak Russian or waltz.

Color now splashes once-drab façades. New hotels, apartment houses and office buildings sport bright paint jobs. Even the ancient grime on the sacred Gothic spires of Oxford is being sandblasted away. Something in the German soul has long resisted big windows, but in Germany, and elsewhere, the small, heavily lidded apertures are giving way to huge walls of glass. Most of the new architecture clashes violently with Europe’s revered old monuments. Berliners sneeringly refer to the cylindrical new church at the gutted 19th century Gedächtnis-kirche as the “soul silo.”

Confident Youth. Only country in Western Europe without a housing shortage is Belgium. But the others are feverishly building. West Germany has put up 5,000,000 new homes, and housing starts in France have trebled over prewar days. With the increased urbanization, the governments of Europe have begun to decentralize industry and pump new economic life into the provinces with ambitious regional redevelopment programs. Belgium’s inefficient coal mines are gradually being closed down, and the mining regions, where Vincent van Gogh worked as a lay preacher among emaciated miners, are becoming light-industry centers.

In their formal communiqué last week, De Gaulle and Adenauer addressed a special appeal for the cooperation of young people, and Europe’s youth show signs of breaking down barriers that their fathers once thought insuperable; thousands of new schools are being built, and foreign languages are being seriously studied by a growing percentage of students. Economic progress as such always leaves more to be done and is always subject to setbacks. Western Europe’s spectacular boom reaches beyond economics by having given its people a new sense of self-confidence; instead of the old feeling of superiority to the U.S., based on past culture, there is now a sense of equality based on current achievement. Europe’s resurgence, which only yesterday seemed a miracle, today has become almost commonplace fact.