In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century (review)

Every twentieth-century historian must have at least one favorite journalist. Mine is contemporary Dutch journalist and historian Geert Mak, winner of the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2008. Mak first gained my attention with Jorwerd: The Death of a Twentieth Century Village. Based on a long residence in the small Friesland village of Jorwerd, Mak's book fuses journalism and history around the theme of the rapid and irreversible transformation of a traditional Dutch village, covering its loss of autonomy, old rural way of life and, to borrow from the book's subtitle, "how God vanished" from the town.

In In Europe we have Jorwerd, Mak's "Brief History of Amsterdam," and his own bio-historical portrait of the twentieth century (De eeuw van mijn vader, "The Age of My Father") writ large. Based on a vast mingling of lives, times, places, and historical works, In Europe displays a mastery of journalism and contemporary history. With a poignant pointillism, whose skill and sensibility rests on academic training in sociology, long-time socialist and pacifist leanings, and a liberal disposition to side with the outsider and victim, Mak weaves individual lives into a compelling chronology of a century's tragic events. Constant in his testimony to the personal, collective, and spiritual destructiveness of the century past, he explores Europe's prospects for the future.

Mak centers his work around a single year of travel, 1999, during which he crisscrossed Europe. Stopping at sixty-six places big and small, his travels covered the continent from Madrid to Moscow and from Gdansk to Sarajevo. In interviews of the famous and the ordinary, he creates a polyphony of human voices that sing in deep keys of memory, loss, bitterness, suspicion, and yet achievement and hope. Eastern European voices sing the commanding bass conscience of what Europe suffered during the past century and what is still to be tested in the century ahead. Mingling the testimonies of the living and the dead, Mak's shifting spatio-chronological frame moves from large towns, cafes, apartments, and villages to cemeteries, battlefields, abandoned buildings, and out of the way places where plots were hatched and events transpired.

Mak fleshes out his work with secondary texts, documents, diaries, reports, newspaper articles, old travel guides, statistical reports, films, songs, paintings, and other iconographic materials. Though his work is not without strong opinions, it does not constitute an ideological expedition into the past nor an exercise in applying social science theories of demography, democracy, or social class formation. His primary power, defiant of generalization, lies in his evocation of the singular person, moment, event, and consequence. Much more a matter of juxtaposition than argument, his work at its best reads like prose poem. His deepest truths—the points at which his meaning is most intense—come in the form of facts, stories, and anecdotes.

On the pages of In Europe different generations, classes, places, beliefs, and, alas, destinies mingle. At the start of his book, at the 1900 Paris World Fair, along the streets of the city of the Grand Illumination, we meet not just prophets of the new century but ordinarily forgotten grandpères and grandmères, who in different guises intrude their way into Mak's narrative of epoch change. While not a religious text, In Europe is a serious meditation—a memorial of the cruel, meanspirited, heartbroken, dead, sacrificed, and slaughtered. Along a short stretch of highway, with "only a tap of the accelerator along the autoroute from Lille to Paris," Mak delivers us to the battle of the Somme. A few pages later, after we've been told of the deadly "sum of the Somme"—1.2 million were killed in the late summer of 1916—we learn of a popular anti-war German song. Based on a poem by Bertold Brecht, it recounts the tale of a dead hero who, having died before the war, is re-animated, drafted, and sent marching forward to the front for a second hero's death...