In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century
by Geert Mak, translated by Sam Garrett
876pp, Harvill Secker, £25
In the summer of 1998 the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad had a good idea. Why not have their distinguished writer Geert Mak travel around the continent throughout 1999, reporting on the history of the century just closing from the very places where that history was made? Verdun to Vichy, Amsterdam to Auschwitz, Guernica to Gdansk? "It was to be a sort of final inspection," Mak writes. They gave him a camper van, with bunk and cooking ring, from which he filed many of the reports which his paper carried on its front page every day for a year. He has reworked them, with additional material, into this fascinating book.
A "final inspection" was an ambitious aim, but Mak had unusual qualifications. He was the author of Amsterdam, a brilliant portrait of that city, and of Jorwerd, perhaps the best single book on the slow death of the European countryside. He was a journalist of a scholarly and even philosophical bent. And he was an intellectual from a country with wide international connections but rather parochial preoccupations. The Netherlands had only a few years before been shocked into a degree of self-examination, and of awareness of the outside world, by the disaster of Srebrenica, where hapless Dutch troops could not prevent a massacre. Self-examination and awareness, on the one hand, the refusal to know or care, on the other - these turned out to be the dominating themes of his reporting and his book.
Let the stones speak! That was the plan, but the stones did not give up their tale so easily. Partly, of course, this was the result of what Abraham Lincoln called "the slow artillery of time". Mak visited Couco, one of the many Portugese villages where peasants seized the land in 1975. They were filmed on their way to take over the local estates in their tractors and decorated carts. It was, he writes, "one huge rolling celebration". But in 1999 he found only two people left who had been there on that day. The peasant co-operatives had long since been dismantled, the people gone to the cities, the land returned to private use. The revolution which had turned Portugal upside down seemed very distant as Mak reluctantly joined in conversations about the profits to be made from growing tomatoes.
Mak found that the open book he had hoped to read while standing in a square, a church, or a concentration camp was often closed or half closed. Europe was like a school blackboard at the end of the day, with much that had once been clear erased. Deliberate suppression he expected. Mak stays in the hotel in the Bavarian Alps from which Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders were dragged in June 1934 to be executed. In a brochure he reads about the founders of the hotel, about colourful characters among its employees over the years, and about the "wonderful world on the Tegernsee", the lake it overlooks. The Röhm putsch is not mentioned.
He settles down in a room in which one of Röhm's men might well have slept. "The true sense of living history would not come ... the most industrious of chambermaids, after all, have been scrubbing here for the last sixty years, and scrubbing washes away the evil, snow covers everything, stillness and time do the rest." The Tegernsee inn was also an example of a special kind of forgetting which Mak not infrequently encountered: what is nationally admitted, analysed, and publicly regretted, is locally denied. The place where it happened may thus sometimes be the last place to grasp the reality of what happened.
Sometimes the past has been physically removed. Destroyed, like old Warsaw, like most of Dresden, like the buildings of the once gay little town of Vukovar in what was once Yugoslavia. Sometimes the buildings remain but people have disappeared, as in Pripyat, close to Chernobyl. There, the hammer and sickle still marks public buildings, the children's shoes are still in their racks at the daycare centre, and not a soul is to be seen in "the Pompei of the twentieth century". In other cases, all but the most immoveable items have even been carted off to another continent. American officers, Mak notes, took away as souvenirs every single picture, ornament and piece of furniture - save for a gigantic table they could not get out of the door - from the court house where the Nuremberg Trials were conducted.
Then there is what might be termed the shopping-mall effect. Commercial development may not only erase historic buildings, it may also erase the idea of history itself. How can real poverty be understood in a Brussels where the nuns who run the soup kitchen hand out leftover designer sandwiches from Eurostar? How can the struggles for independence against Russia and Germany be understood now on the main street of Vilnius where, Mak observes, "Western vacuity has descended with a vengeance" and "Adidas, Benetton and other familiar spirits smile down on you as you walk." There is no history here, unless it be the history of Western consumerism.
How eloquently Mak rails against the alliance of consumerism and bureaucracy! In Brussels he contemplates the glass and steel façade of the new European parliament, and concludes it is the kind of architecture which makes you feel like an ant. The parliament's shiny cliff overshadows Leopolds Wijk Station, a likeable 19th-century building flanked by small shops and cafes. He just knows that the station will be the next thing to go. "And roll on it will, there can be no doubt about that. In half a year, or in five years, the little station - like cheese made from unpasteurised milk, like French bread ... like real chocolate, untagged cow's ears, and thousands of other things that an ant-person values, will have been erased by Europe."
Mak has, in his descriptions of cities, something of the cinematic sweep of Joseph Roth, one of his favourite authors. He has a great eye for telling detail, whether it is a single mouldy rose on Salazar's grave, the last of the Goldene Hausnummern (the East German mark of distinction for model tenants) being unscrewed from doors on East Berlin housing estates, or the young Vladimir Putin trying to burn so many files in the KGB office in Dresden in 1989 that the stove exploded.
In Europe hardly breaks new ground historically. It has some longueurs, when Mak crams in so much that we get no more than a catalogue of events. And he tends, at least in the first two-thirds of the book, mainly to track the spoor of the Beast, the story of war and violent upheaval, to the exclusion of other aspects. But, in a work like this it is the sensibility of the writer that matters most. Only a powerful, humane and serious mind could give coherence to a mass of detail which, however arresting piece by piece, would otherwise soon become wearying. In Europe is, as he implies in the quotation from Borges which he places at the start of the book, as much a journey around Geert Mak's head as it is a journey around Europe.