The author spent 1999 traveling around Europe looking to understand and tell its common history. In Europe is a masterpiece it reads like the epic novel of the continent's most extraordinary century. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. And in an abandoned crèche near Chernobyl, where tiny pairs of shoes still stand in neat rows, he is transported back to the moment time stood still in the dying days of the Soviet Union. In Warsaw he finds the point where the tram rails that led to the Jewish ghetto come to a dead end in a city park. At Ypres he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated twice a day. He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe's well-springs of memory, where history is written into the landscape. The result is mesmerising: Mak's rare double talent as a sharp-eyed journalist and a hugely imaginative historian makes In Europe a dazzling account of that journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports and memoirs, and the voices of prominent figures and unknown players from the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adriana Warno in Poland, with her holiday job at the gates of the camp at Birkenau.
He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium.
Like no other, Mak blends history, politics and culture with the stories and experiences of the many Europeans he meets on his travels.Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica.
He moves through the rocky expansion of the EU, the aftermath of 9/11 and terrorist attacks across Europe, the 2008 financial crash and the euro crisis, and on to the rise of right-wing populism and Brexit. In this illuminating book, Geert Mak - one of Europe's best-loved commentators - charts the seismic events that have shaped people's lives over the past twenty years.
How did the great European dream turn sour? And where do we go from here? 'Mak is the history teacher everyone should have had' Financial Timesįrom the author of the internationally acclaimed In Europe, a stunning history of our present, examining the first two decades of this most fragile and fraught new millennium.
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