'In Europe' was recommended to me by Tony Judt's [b:Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945|29658|Postwar A History of Europe Since 1945|Tony Judt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388276992l/29658._SY75_.jpg|1979891], which it is an excellent complement to. I borrowed it a while before lockdown, but it has taken this long for my brain to stop skittering just about sufficiently for 800-page non-fiction to become manageable. I definitely would not describe this as a pleasant distraction from lockdown and the pandemic, however. The opposite, if anything, as it led me to consider how the history of the 21st century in Europe will be told. Books will doubtless be written examining how the pandemic played out across Europe, including analysis of how the UK ended up with such an appalling death toll. (I already have tentative theories. If you've ever read my non-fiction reviews, it will not surprise you to learn that they centre upon neoliberalism and austerity. The evisceration of social care and the NHS, worsening inequality, cascading failures of political accountability, and loss of public trust in politicians and institutions, coupled with the more immediate and appalling irresponsibility of our hideously incompetent current government. Don't fucking get me started.) There is perhaps some cold comfort in the knowledge that by 1920 the 20th century had already proved more cataclysmic than the 21st has been thus far, comparing the First World War and Spanish Flu pandemic with the War on Terror and COVID-19. This is just the beginning of our 21st century pandemic, though.

The format of 'In Europe' combines travelogue, narrative history, and personal testimony. The author travelled across cities from Moscow to Lisbon and Sarajevo to Keffalonia during 1999, locating major events of the 20th century and observing their legacy at its end. Understandably, the book is thus dominated by the two world wars, particularly the second. Mak is a fluid, eloquent writer who stitches together a remarkable amount of material into an extremely involving and wide-ranging continental narrative. The only notable flaw is frequent, low level sexism that proved somewhat tiresome. All women mentioned were either beautiful or he could tell they had been when younger. I've read a lot of books written by men, though, so am fairly inured to that sort of thing. The only occasion it really bothered me was this on the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising: 'An impressive number of women took part: approximately a third of the membership of the resistance groups consisted of girls and young women. Almost all of them were in love.'

Such patronising comments aside, I found Mak's accounts of the atrocities and disasters that wracked Europe humane, thoughtful, and moving. He also manages to clearly explain complex political situations without losing nuance, no mean feat. The chapters covering the Spanish Civil War are an excellent example of this, as they summarise the complicated myriad of groups fighting in the civil war as well as the wider international consequences. The vividness of events are also brought to life by literary quotes and first person accounts, some from famous sources like Orwell and others gathered by Mak himself. When he was travelling Europe in 1999, even the First World War was still within living memory. Mak's interview material intermittently reminded me of [a:Svetlana Alexievich|7728207|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1473846978p2/7728207.jpg]'s magnificent collections of personal testimonies, as he presents quite a few recollections without context as they speak powerfully for themselves. In 2020, the Second World War is passing from living memory, accelerated by a plague that is especially deadly to the elderly. I no longer have any living relatives from the Greatest Generation. The voices Mak recorded in 1999 are all the more important now.

There are many highlights in this book, I just didn't make a note of their page numbers. Many of the most memorable parts were horrifying, for example how the Catholic church failed to protest against the pre- war Nazi genocide of disabled people, Latvia's ethusiastic pre-emption of the Holocaust, and the British decision to bomb German civilians rather than industry in the final years of WWII. The comparisons between different manifestations of fascism across Europe were fascinating, as I previously knew nothing about Portugal's Salazar and little about Spain's Franco. I also appreciated the commentary on how De Gaulle essentially invented a new and glorious narrative of resistance for France, to replace the shame of surrender and moral failures of Vichy. Like Judt, Mak gives the East of Europe equal weight to the West and shows the USSR's patchwork legacy across Germany, Poland, Russia, and beyond. I hadn't thought of the mid-70s as a time of change before, but now see that it was: the Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese dictatorships all collapsed within a couple of years of each other. Also notable were Mak's observations of Europe's boundaries, the cities where people say, "I'm going to Europe."

The evolution of the European Union is bittersweet to read about now the UK has rudely and ignominiously flounced out:

No-one foresaw the current EU. Who would have dared to predict in 1953 - the year in which Stalin died, in which George Marshall and Albert Schweitzer received the Nobel Prize for Peace, in which Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, the year in which the East Germans rebelled and the Dutch-Belgian border was the scene of a fierce manhunt for butter smugglers - who would have dared to predict that half a century later there would be an EU of twenty-seven members, with its own currency and its own parliament, a free space with largely open internal borders, that would stretch from Ireland by way of a united Germany to the very borders of chaotic Russia?

[...]

The tragic thing about Europe, as other observers have noted, has to do with the fact that those very measures needed to survive in the long term - the influx of young immigrants to reverse the demographic trend towards ageing, reorganisation of the welfare states to strengthen Europe's competitive position with regard to the other continents, open dealings with the Muslim world, good stewardship with regard to raw materials and the environment, the further strengthening and de-nationalisation of Europe's military forces - are, at the same time, often grist to the mill of paranoid populist movements.

The overwhelming impression is of Europe's wide expanse and diversity:

There is no European people. There is no single, all-embracing community of culture of tradition that binds together Jorwerd, Vásárosbéc, and Kefallonia; there are at least four of them: the Northern-Protestant, the Latin-Catholic, the Greek-Orthodox, and the Muslim-Ottoman. There is not a single language, but dozens of them. The Italians feel very differently about the word 'state' than do the Swedes. There are still no truly European political parties, and pan-European newspapers and television stations still lead a marginal existence. And, above all: in Europe there is very little in the way of shared historical experience.

Almost every country I travelled through myself, for example, had come up with its own account of the unimaginable explosion of violence between 1939 - 1945, its own myth to explain all that unbelievable madness, to justify wrongdoings, to bury humiliation and create new heroes.

[...]

I have often had the feeling that, despite our common heritage and our present-day contacts, Europe as it was in spring 1914 exhibited a greater cultural unity than it does today, more than ninety years later. Then, a worker in Warsaw led more or less the same life as a worker in Brussels, and the same went for a teacher in Berlin or in Prague, a shopkeeper in Budapest or in Amsterdam.

Although I find that somewhat reductive, it echoes Stefan Zweig in [b:The World of Yesterday|629429|The World of Yesterday|Stefan Zweig|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347696322l/629429._SY75_.jpg|615762], which Mak references in early chapters. The quotes above are from the epilogue, which draws together the myriad of threads in the book together into a comment on Europe's future. It foresees disagreement and comments on rising neo-nationalism, while also marvelling at how peaceful the continent has been since 1945 in comparison to the previous millennium of war. At the very end, Mak sensibly caveats his conclusions thus:

(It remains entirely possible, of course, that factors such as climate change or major epidemics will once again overturn all these economic prognoses.)

We're definitely within the parentheses now.

My intrusive reflections on what Europe's 20th century can suggest about 2020 kept coming back to the many moments of crisis and catastrophe when established political realities suddenly collapsed into something new. Sometimes for worse, but sometimes for the better. Seeing the spread of the anti-racism movement at the moment gives me hope for positive change. In the UK, however, it's hard to avoid seeing in the last two decades a narrative of ongoing political, social, and economic collapse. I find it difficult to see how the UK can continue to exist as a single country under the combined strains of pandemic, Brexit, and each Conservative government proving less capable than the one before. It bothers me that I'm unlikely to remember very much of this book in the long term, as my mind is too scattered by immediate fears. 'In Europe' is full of thought-provoking and significant material, so deserves greater focus and consideration than I could manage. ( )

Wow. Essential reading that you can't put down. Definitely going to seek out more of Mak's work. ( )

author travels to places significant to 20th cent. In Europe wars and revolutions and evolution of idea of Europe

Mak travels around Europe on the cusp of the twenty-first century, reporting a century's worth of history. A fine piece of travel writing matched to an even better set of historical essays. ( )

The personal anecdotes were beautiful. If individual lives are not what history truly is about, then I don't know what history is. ( )