In the opening pages of his memoirs, Felix Gilbert describes his return to Berlin in the autumn of 1945. Wearing an American army uniform and on orders from the Office of Strategic Services, Gilbert took time out from his official duties to look for the apartment in which he had spent much of his youth. Although he could discover no more than a few colored cobblestones amid the ruins, these were enough to bring back powerful memories of his childhood. In Gilbert's delicate vignette we can find many of the themes that will recur throughout this book: exile and return, America and Europe, loss and recovery. Gilbert calls his memoirs A European Past, a title that calls attention both to the forty years the book describes and to the new epoch in his life that began in 1945.

Since the beginnings of our culture, poets have sung about the exile's experience of loss and the struggle to return. Dante, who knew the pains of exile firsthand, wrote of the “salt taste of another man's bread, the steep climb of another man's stairs.” But while exile has always represented a special kind of loss, in the twentieth century its consequences have often been particularly serious. Because we live in a world where people's legal identity and status are defined and protected by their states, to be an exile is to suffer the terrible vulnerabilities of statelessness. Exiles now lose not only their homeland and livelihood; they also forfeit their most elementary rights as human beings. Never before has the bread of others been more bitter to the taste.