USA vs Europe, or Ilya Ehrenburg’s “D. E. Trust”

Abstract

The author refers to the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg “D. E. Trust. History of the death of Europe”, written in 1923. It was published by the Berlin publishing house “Helikon” and then went through several dozen reprints. This year we can celebrate the centenary of this text. As the author believes, this strange novel is not even a novel at all, but something like a romanized apocalypse. Ehrenburg himself wrote in his memoirs that he did not bury Europe, that his novel is the story of the death of Europe as a result of the activities of the American trust, that it is satire; the writer could write it now with the subtitle — “Episodes of the Third World War”. Escapees from Western Europe, having got to another continent, to North America, among the natives, not very happy with the invasion of strangers, began to exterminate them until they turned the continent into a territory free of indigenous inhabitants. The relevance of the novel is clear today, looking at how the strangulation of Europe unfolds with the help of the proxy war in Ukraine, when it clearly emerges what role the United States plays in this strangulation.