Mak’s book is a fascinating mosaic of stories and historical accounts: later, at a greater distance, it may also be one in which we detect entirely new patterns. That is part of the paradox of history: the further a period retreats from our field of vision, the clearer its image seems to become. And, as the story draws closer to the present, the chaos seems only to increase.

In this powerful monograph we experience it all over again, often by means of firsthand, eyewitness accounts. Wars raged, the Wall fell, a European currency was created. The twentieth century is over and done with, it is history now. For how could it have been? This, after all, is a continent containing widely divergent cultures within its boundaries, a place where the seemingly contemporary can be so badly out of synch - as illustrated painfully not so very long ago when civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, only two hours by plane from calm, diligent Holland. All those conversations, all those documents, all those books resulted in an impressive story about a century in Europe, a continent that may long have borne a single name but was never truly a single entity. Everywhere he went, Mak visited auspicious locations, nosed through archives and spoke to writers and historians, philosophers and politicians, former resistance fighters and enlisted men - but also to common, everyday people who told him about their lives. His objective? “It was to be a sort of final inspection: what shape was the continent in, here at the conclusion of the twentieth century?” At the same time, it was a “historical journey”: “I would follow, as far as possible, the course of history, in search of the traces it had left behind.” The book’s table of contents consists of an impressive list of historical places: Verdun, Ypres, Berlin, Predappio, Leningrad, Vichy, Nuremberg, Lourdes, Chernobyl and Novi Sad, to mention only a few. In 1999, as another chapter in a European century was drawing to a close, Geert Mak set out on a journey through that Old World. Within the boundaries of that continent, various layers of time seem to slide across each other like ice floes in a river: one place may give you the feeling that time has stood still, while in other places the innovations take place at breakneck speed. What does a penniless, toothless octogenarian in a remote Rumanian village have in common with the inhabitant of a Dutch housing tract, with his hybrid car parked at the curb and his golf clubs waiting in the hallway? Not a great deal – yet they both live in a country that is part of Europe.

First published in 2004 - Following a tangle of routes that led him to London, Volgograd and Madrid, past the bunkers of Berlin, the perfumed closets of Helena Ceausescu in Bucharest and the toy automobiles in an abandoned day-care center in Chernobyl, Geert Mak traveled in the footsteps of the 20th century.

In Europe by Geert Mak