Geert Mak
IN EUROPE
Travels through the twentieth century
752pp. Harvill Secker. £25.
9781843432265

Lenin was in the delicate position of finding his wife and his mistress on the same train, but that was not what worried him most. It was the smokers. As the carriages creaked out of Zurich in the spring of 1917, a blue haze filled the second-class corridors. Since the train was supposedly sealed, it was difficult for the smokers to step on to the platform, during stops at stations. Lenin, disgusted by the smell of cigarettes, found it equally difficult to catch a breath of fresh air.

In what may have been his first official decree, Lenin ordered that smoking was to be restricted to the toilets, where the fumes would be sucked down the floor hole as the train chugged along. Lavatory access was thus at a premium, and to meet the growing demand, he devised a system of written passes. Non-smokers, he announced, would be given priority use of the facilities. That was how the journey to the Finland Station began: with a band of about thirty carousing Russian intellectuals, fuelled by beer and Swiss bread, occasionally singing the “Marseillaise” and telling bawdy jokes, all led by an allergic, ill-tempered martinet, clicking and jerking their way eastward towards the Revolutionary crowds of Petrograd.

Europe spent a good part of the last century on the road. Franz Ferdinand’s touring car, thrust into reverse by the errant driver, backed warily up a side street as Gavrilo Princip stepped on to the running board. Mussolini took the direttissimo to Rome, while 20,000 Fascists came on foot. A thousand train carriages pulled into Majdanek and Treblinka. The cortège of Imre Nagy, the shaky symbol of Hungary’s resistance to Soviet rule, inched its way across Budapest in the summer of 1989, where a new era had already begun.

Geert Mak follows many of these old routes – including that of Lenin’s famous journey home – in his book In Europe, a splendid and hefty volume that originated as a series of essays for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Mak spent the year 1999 on trains, ferries and bicycles, and in one rattletrap van. Like travellers from a century earlier, he took along a full set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a guide (albeit on CD-ROM). He spoke with politicians and intellectuals, as well as ordinary Europeans, both young and old, who had stories to tell about their own journeys through the fading century.

Each leg of Mak’s trip involved moving across Europe’s changing landscape and deep into its multiple time zones. “Aboard Istanbul’s ferries it is always 1948”, he writes. “At the Gare de Lyon in Paris, the year is 2020. In Budapest, the young men wear our fathers’ faces.” His itineraries were all tied to a particular period, and his account weaves geography and chronology into a narrative that slides through space as easily as it slices up time. The First World War takes him from Vienna via Verdun to Versailles. He spends the 1920s and 30s in Barcelona and Munich. He passes the Second World War in Dunkirk, London and Moscow, and explores the fissures of a divided Europe in Brussels, Gdansk and Chernobyl. The unmaking of the post-war order, from 1989 through the 1990s, sends him to Bucharest and Srebrenica.

Mak has a journalist’s eye for detail and a historian’s sense of narrative sweep. Like his earlier Amsterdam, an intimate biography of the city and its people, and Jorwerd, about the decay and renewal of village life in the Netherlands, In Europe combines rich, at times thrilling, storytelling with arresting insights, even when Mak takes off down the most well-worn paths. The prose, in a fine translation by Sam Garrett, sparkles. In Europe is a stunning pointillist history of the continent’s twentieth century. But at its core, it is a work of history that is sceptical about the possibility of writing history at all.

Consider the fastidious Lenin aboard the sealed train, with his Bolshevik comrades pounding impatiently on the toilet door. How does history of this sort – the particular and quotidian, the obsessions of antiquarians and genealogists – become History of the kind displayed in museums, taught to schoolchildren, and debated by professional historians? And does the history that Mak finds littering the byways of Europe today add up to a History in this second sense?

History-writing involves making choices, not only about causality and context, but also about relevance. Even an effort to write “total history”, encompassing everything from the price of beer to the machinations of a prime minister, must fashion out of the mess of human existence a narrative that links minute actions to grand outcomes. The historian’s conceit is that distance makes the picture clearer, revealing forests where there were before only trees. Yet, as Mak shows time and again, the past is incorrigible. Historical meaning is made, and often in ways that would probably seem odd to the participants themselves.

Calculated forgetting is usually a more powerful tool than the wisdom of hindsight. At Verdun, Mak finds the memory of the war all but gone, even though farmers continue to find munitions and buttons each ploughing season. In Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace, he finds the village filled with Nazi and Fascist paraphernalia for sale, “one huge souvenir shop for all things from the wrong side of the fence”. Even in Srebrenica, now sanctified as a symbol of resistance to Serbian aggression, the ground zero of the Bosnian genocide, few people are aware of how genuinely unimportant the city was during the war itself. It was precisely the city’s lack of strategic value, and its abandonment by the Bosnian army, that paved the way for the Serb onslaught.

History-writing is also, to a degree, the process of sorting out self-reflective action. Most people live at least a part of their lives between the passive future and the future perfect, wondering not only how they will be remembered but also what they will have done. For some, it is the way the family fortune will be divided, or whether they will produce children who turn out to be more successful than them. For others, it is how historians will judge their statesmanship or artistic originality. People are conscious of their status as historical beings, suspended between past and future, and the temptation is always to look through the fourth wall, staring out beyond the proscenium and forgetting to pretend the audience is not there.

The irony at the centre of Mak’s book is that Europe today is the product of precisely this form of self-reflective history-making, a “unique peace process”, as he calls it, whose chief object in the second half of the twentieth century was to build a bulwark against the mania for self-destruction that had characterized the first. The twentieth century ended with a uniting Europe that had learned how to misremember its origins. “The community is not a goal in itself”, wrote Jean Monnet in his memoirs. “The community is merely a step towards the organized world of tomorrow.” That, of course, is an inadequate pole around which to build popular allegiance and a common identity, but after the 1950s, it became a serviceable one. It allowed Europeans to conceive of their past in a radically new way: as linked by a sense of common destiny that was all the more remarkable for its long absence.

Geert Mak elegantly demonstrates the ways in which Europeans have gone from glorifying their fissiparous past, to trying to escape from it, to reimagining it as an inexorable march towards peace and good governance – and now with its own half-century milestone: the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, celebrated in March of this year. From the carriage bench and the bicycle seat, Mak has shown that other histories are there to behold as well, in urban neighbourhoods and dying villages, from Dublin to St Petersburg, where the cacophonous voices of Europe’s multiple pasts can still be heard.

A certain way of being European has triumphed, and the continent is the better for it; the alternatives are both horrible and still easily available. But history as grand narrative is a sealed train. The real life of cities, peoples and continents resists being captured in a single storyline, no matter how moral its conclusion. In the end, the real Europe may be no more than the routes marked out on Mak’s maps: the connections, both hopeful and tragic, that make understanding one place impossible without reference to another. There is no Moscow, Mak suggests, without Stalingrad, no Bonn without Dresden, no Amsterdam without Auschwitz.

Charles King is the author of The Black Sea: A history, 2004. His new book, The Ghost of Freedom: A history of the Caucasus, will be published next year.