But the glimmers of hope that the author does discern point, improbably, to success. Is the EU a ramshackle, secretive, undemocratic outfit that is destined to melt away like the Habsburg empire? Or will it cohere into a durable state-like polity, as Mr Mak’s Netherlands did? Perhaps sensibly, he does not attempt a definitive answer, punting the question to a mythical reader in 2069. The nature of the European Union is the central mystery that runs through the whole book. Digressive, itinerant and philosophical, Mr Mak’s style might not suit everyone and it certainly makes for a doorstopper, but it is mostly compelling and readable. The progression of disasters is familiar: the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the terrorist reactions it triggered in Europe the global financial crisis, followed by Europe’s own euro-zone crisis the migration crisis of 2014-15 the Brexit crisis the covid-19 crisis populism of right and left American isolationism. Mr Mak unfolds the debacle in a series of meditations, each pegged to a theme and a date but discursively wandering in time and space, introducing a cast of characters he frequently returns to (a Hungarian mayor, an Iranian refugee, a pair of Greek shop-owners, a Catalan journalist) as his rough chronology unfolds. In Europe is a masterpiece it reads like the epic novel of the continent's most extraordinary century.Yet how quickly it all turned. 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.īut Mak is above all an observer.
He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium. 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.
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