In Europe: Travels Through The Twentieth Century

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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 set off in search of evidence & witnesses looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium The result is mesmerising Mak's rare double talent as a sharp-eyed journalist & a hugely imaginative historian makes In Europe a dazzling account of that journey full of diaries newspaper reports & memoirs & the voices of prominent figures & 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 But Mak is above all an observer He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe's well-springs of memory where history is written into the landscape At Ypres he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated twice a day 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 & in an abandoned creche 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 Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face a taste & a smell His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past full of unknown peculiarities sudden insights & touching encounters In Europe is a masterpiece; it reads like the epic novel of the continent's most extraordinary century