Book Alert / In Europe -- Travels Through the Twentieth Century

In Europe -- Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Max, Pantheon '07, $35, 876 pages, ISBN #0375424954. Index, glossary, no bibliography, source notes or illustrations but features maps of the changing face of Europe over time.

It is rare that the sometimes conflicting approaches of a journalist and a historian merge towards one goal. So it is with Geert Mak, a popular Dutch writer, who in 1999 was assigned by the newspaper NRC Handelsblad to spend a year touring Europe stem to stern, to determine what the 20th century had done to it and to take its pulse at century's end. To do so, he visited the European places that had made history and interviewed scores of people whose fathers and grandfathers had built, destroyed, triumphed and suffered.

And, of course, he often came up against the reality that there is no one Europe, as much as the European Community now seeks to create one. Mak describes some of his subjects: "the older Polish truck driver I spoke to, who had been forced four times in his life to learn a new language; the German couple, bombed out of their home and then endlessly driven from place to place throughout Eastern Europe; the Basque family that fell apart one Christmas Eve arguing about the Spanish Civil War, and never spoke to each other again."

In the course of his meanderings, Mak gains some searing insights. In an Eastern European cafe, an old sage described the mixed blessing of being able to migrate to the prosperous West: "...you're going to lose some very precious things: friendship, the ability to get by without a lot of money, the skills to repair things that are broken, the freedom to raise your own pigs and slaughter them as you see fit, the freedom to burn as much timber as you like...." Mak's is an innovative approach that deepens historical understanding.