Reckoning With the 20th Century

NOTE: Laura Axelrod and I discovered that we were both reading In Europe, so we both decided to post our book reviews of it on the same day.  Hers is here. While you're there, might I recommend that you check out this other post which is totally awesome?

In Europe by Geert Mak, Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett. Pantheon Books, August 2007. 876pp.

The 20^th Century was, amongst other things, extremely well documented.  Amidst the blood and the chaos, the rise and fall of both fascism and communism, the ascendancy of America, the assassinations of people good and bad and two different historical Moon Walks, lay vast improvements in technologies to document and record everything as it happened.  Now, less than a decade after its close, we are already reckoning with the century that gave birth to the one we live in now. 

 In 1999, a Dutch newspaper sent one of its favorite writers on a voyage. Geert Mak’s assignment was to write a daily front-page column detailing his travels through Europe, tracing the history of the twentieth century through interviews, historical research and shoe leather.  Those columns form the basis of In Europe: Travels Through the 20^th Century, a combination of travel literature, people’s history and accounting of the state of European affairs at the dawn of the new millennium. Writing a history book of this scope and detail is a monstrous undertaking. The historian must decide what events warrant his or her full attention, when to officially begin “The 20^th Century” and how to provide thematic and narrative cohesion to an arbitrary period of time within a highly fractured continent.  For the most part, Geert Mak is up to the task, writing an accessible, informative frequently beautiful book that is almost (but not quite) Great.

Mak begins his story with two key events that presage most of what is to come: The Dreyfus Affair and the death of Queen Victoria.  The first, in which a Jewish Army Captain was framed and convicted of treason in France, was famously dubbed  a “Dress rehearsal” of the 20^th Century by Hannah Arendt.  In the Dreyfus Affair lay many of the thematic elements that would come to a head with two World Wars and the Holocaust, from European Anti-Semitism to the suicidal militarism of European society to the birth of modern day Zionism in the mind of Theodore Herzl, who covered the Dreyfus Affair as a journalist.  The death of Queen Victoria was the beginning of the end of a system of rule that had governed European affairs for some time. During her lifetime a ruling class, largely made up of a giant extended family, decided the details of European and Colonial lives at a series of fetes and conferences far from the day-to-day lives or consciousnesses of their subjects. After her death, that extended family would enact a horrible and bloody divorce that would claim the lives of millions and set the stage for Hitler’s rise to power. 

Flowing from these two events, the 20^th Century that Mak traces over eight hundred pages breaks up rather neatly into two sections.  In the first, he investigates a continent that began as a series of Nation States that eventually fought two catastrophic wars with each other.  In this section, Mak traces in detail the life of everyday people, the culture they lived in, and the various actors at the top of the ladder making decisions that would change the world, and it is safe to say that even those with a familiarity with the first half of the 20^th Century will find depth and richness in Mak’s penetrating historical analysis.

In Europe begins to run aground as soon as World War II wraps up.  Having displayed a mastery of synthesizing detail and primary sources in laying out the narrative of the first half of the 20^th Century, it begins to feel like Mak just isn’t all that interested in the Cold War and the divide between East and West that dominates the second half of the book.  Beyond quick dips into Hungary in 1956 and Paris in 1968, the portion spanning from the end of the Second World War until the outbreak of the wars in Yugoslavia feels perfunctory and rushed. The history of the Berlin Wall and its fall, for example, is barely delved into, and while the section of the book detailing World War II is roughly two hundred pages long, the section dealing from 1958-1980 is less than half that.  As we get to the Balkan wars and his righteous dissection of the EU and its discontents in the Afterward to the book, the spark that animates the first two thirds of the book returns briefly to remind the reader of why he or she has stuck around for so long.

This points to the vital strength and the Achilles heel of In Europe: Mak himself.  Geert Mak is not content with a dry retelling of European history; this is a creative writer telling a very personal and personable version of history through his own eyes. It is this personable nature that allows Mak to deftly switch styles from third person history to Studs Terkel-style monologue.  His personality allows him to imagine the worlds of years gone by with a specificity and poetic grace that conjures up clear images in the mind of the reader. His lengthy takedown of France’s mythology about itself during WWII is remarkable, as is his ongoing chronicling of European anti-Semitism leading up to the Holocaust and his explanations of the ideological underpinnings of Hitler’s brand of malicious nationalism.  The tragic recounting of the Soviet incursion into Germany, built around the diary entries of an anonymous Berlin woman who becomes the consort of a Russian officer to keep herself from being raped and murdered only to be abandoned by her husband when he returns from the war is harrowing and horrifying stuff. At the same time, it is very easy to tell when he is not particularly invested in what he is talking about but feels that he should cover the story anyway. The section on the Spanish Civil War, for example, is extremely confusing and the plight of the Gypsies is barely mentioned in the entire book, despite the horrors inflicted upon them by both the Nazis and the Soviets (for more on this, see Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey).

Oddly enough, it seems that Mak is also completely uninterested in the events that he was alive for.  Ultimately his greatest joy as a writer-- and thus the most enthralling experience for the reader-- is the process of discovery.  He loves finding the obscure headline, the unknown farmer who witnessed a battle, the diary left out in the snow and rescued from the tides of time.  There is not much more to be discovered, however, about the second half of the 20^th Century; we watched it all on television and recorded it all for posterity.  An archeologist would find little fulfilling about discovering unburied, unhidden treasures, and Mak as a historian is no different.

It is only in the Epilogue when he must sum up the century and the birth of the European Union that Mak’s flair and incisiveness return, and it is a cautionary tale he wants to leave us with.  The European Union has been built by elites without regard to the will or interests of local peoples.  In the second half of the 20^th Century, Western Europe flourished while Eastern Europe stagnated, and Europe is now culturally and economically more fractured today that it was a century ago. As Mak points out “in spring 1914… a worker in Warsaw led more or less the same life as a worker in Brussels”. After wars, Communism, economic booms and free market “shock therapy” the day-to-day existence of Europeans is no longer monolithic.  What this will mean for Europe in the 21^st Century remains to be seen but with any luck, in a hundred years a new Geert Mak will emerge, equipped with a newly minted endless fascination to try and tell the collective story of a continent struggling towards an elusive and perhaps futile unity.