Geert Mak, In Europe:
Travels Through the Twentieth Century

Harvill Secker, 876pp, £25

Review by Niccoló Milanese

In 1999, Dutch journalist Geert Mak's newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, sent him in a camper-van on a pilgrimage throughout Europe. His articles appeared on the front page each day throughout the year, the commission to write '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 to be an historical journey, to trace the contours of the twentieth century and how they affected the places in which they happened. The written up reports make an epic of over 800 pages, divided by month of the year 1999, city, and the period of the twentieth century Mak is concerned with.

Of course, the journey takes in all the obligatory events and locations of twentieth century history: Vienna before the 1st world war; Versailles; Lenin's route after the Russian Revolution to arrive in Petrograd; Munich; Guernica; Dunkirk; Auschwitz; Berlin; Gdansk … The historical narrative is familiar, and Mak's interest is always in how the history lives on in the consciousness of today's inhabitants, if not always in their willing memory: it is journalism written as history of the present. There are facts in the book about the ways the 20th century still punctuates 21st century European life which should be common knowledge, but which come (at least to me) as a surprise. Still today, for example, there are twice daily explosions of unspent ammunition from World War One at Ypres in Belgium, unremarkable and almost unnoticed amongst the locals.

In Europe has sold over 350,000 hardback copies in the Netherlands, and become a bestseller across Europe. For an 800 page tome about history, that seems an extraordinary achievement; but then widespread curiosity, of a certain kind, for the 20th century seems to be unflagging. Many critics have complained that the book tells us nothing new, that there are neither historical discoveries nor radical reconfigurations of the way the twentieth century is to be understood. This is unfair: Mak's mode of writing - and the original commission - would have been impossible working outside a commonly known historical narrative, but frequently he asks unusual questions about aspects of this, which would be unfamiliar to those who learnt their history only in school, such as what Basques at the turn of the Millennium think about the Civil War Guernica bombings. It is a brilliant blending of grand and small histories which awakens the traces of that history in each of us, and the occasional challenging of assumptions which gives those traces a pulse.

In the final chapters, Mak visits Sarajevo and Srebrenica, the gruesome last acts of a bloody and genocidal century. The Yugoslav conflict - about which Mak reads in the news throughout 1999 - hangs over the whole book. It might have come across as a fitting end to what could have been a kind of pilgrimage through millenarian End Times. Yet, as Mak says at the end of the book, the story of Europe cannot yet be told, since the ending has yet to be decided. Goethe said that Europe is the result of medieval pilgrimages: it is clear that with his own pilgrimage Mak sees himself as contributing towards the construction of a future Europe. There is a hopefulness which runs throughout the book and gives it its curiosity and verve. But it is at the same time an urgent hopefulness. The book is an appeal, based on Europe's past, for the urgent creation of a common European 'cultural, political and democratic space'.

Mak begins the book with a quotation from Borges (although it could have so easily been one of countless similar by Calvino), to the effect that in charting the world one only charts the contours of one's own face. There are so many histories in Europe that one cannot hope to create a single historical narrative that is any more than subjective. But, as many have pointed out, it is in the space between the multitudinous peoples and histories that Europe exists: Europe is the aspiration which drives the cultural exchange between these communities.

One of Mak's diversions throughout the book is to find the borders of Europe. The method he chooses for deciding this is to listen for people saying they are 'going to Europe', on holiday, on business … He finds people speaking in this way in Portugal, in the United Kingdom, in Russia. It seems to me this is one of his few faults. The important psychological border not one that becomes apparent in this vernacular. It is instead the difference between those who want to be European, in the sense of promoting cultural exchange and aspiration, and try to bring this about in a specifically European context, and those who do not. Of course, cultural exchange and aspiration are not exclusively European virtues (thank-goodness!) Rather, a particular way of doing cultural endeavour is given to Europeans by their history. Mak's pilgrimage is an instantiation of such European searching

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