Walking Since Daybreak

Grant Dawson is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in military history at
Carleton University.

Eksteins is the author of the acclaimed Rites of Spring (1989), a study
of the Great War and the emergence of modernity in the West. His latest
book is about World War II and “Hour Zero,” the time of
unconditional surrender and total devastation in Germany, and about his
family’s experiences in the war and their eventual flight to Canada.

The author’s personal narrative begins from two points in
time—present-day Toronto and mid–19th-century Latvia, when his
great-grandmother was born—and converges at Hour Zero, a time of
desperate scurrying for survival and numbed, stupefied silence.

The book is not so much about World War II as about the civilization
that was profoundly altered by it. The concentration camps, the
rapacious policies of Stalin, and the heavy bomber raids, Eksteins
convincingly argues, were so destructive and cruel that they remain an
incomprehensible, unbridgeable gap in Western civilization. Intellectual
and cultural bridges have been rebuilt, but “despite the bridges, the
chasm remains.” Walking Since Daybreak is about disintegration of
lives, centuries-old communities, states, and the “gravely wounded ...
Enlightenment tradition.”

Eksteins does an excellent job of illustrating how Hour Zero was the
final nail in the coffin of the tradition that believed in
understanding, connectedness, and continuity. As he observes midway
through his powerful book, “[his own] experience contradicted this
tradition fundamentally.”