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Letter to the editor

Author offers a fascinating survey of Europe past

Stellar journalism and a love of history inform this epic project.

By Vikram Johri, Special to the Times
Published August 12, 2007

In Europe
By Geert Mak
Translated by Sam Garrett
Pantheon Books, 896 pages, $35 

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Geert Mak, a distinguished Dutch writer, spent 1999 crisscrossing Europe and writing daily reports for NRC Handelsblad, which the newspaper dutifully carried on the front page. Mak's brief: to revisit the sites of the major events of the 20th century and file dispatches on what became of these places and whether the passage of time was as charitable to them as history. This book, a compilation of Mak's dispatches, along with additional material, is a fascinating study of the continent's captivating past.

In Europe is no tedious academic exercise; it's first-rate journalism combined with a love for history. Mak begins by dissecting three great scandals that rocked Europe as the 19th century drew to a close: Oscar Wilde's perversity trial, Philipp zu Eulenburg's intimacy with Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and, most notably, the Dreyfus affair.

From here to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mak's book broaches nearly all the major events of the last century, including the Dresden bombing, the Chernobyl mishap and the Srebrenica massacre. His journalistic approach offers the reader interviews and private observations that lend a personal touch to the ungraspable force of the past.

What makes the book interesting are Mak's sharp, coruscating statements that deflate the hype of grand ideologies with a studied lack of emotion. A case in point: When Mak visits Razliv, where Lenin hid after the failed rebellion of July 1917, he is amazed to see that a glass box had been erected around the communist leader's hiding place, "the kind one sees more often at sacred sites. Through it we can view the interior: a table, a bed, a samovar, a chair at the window, a teacup with four dead flies in it, a stable with space for one cow. Lenin's stable at Bethlehem."

In the acknowledgments, Mak regrets: All of Europe cannot fit in a single book. True, but with a writer this accomplished, most of it does.

Vikram Johri is a writer in New Delhi, India.

[Last modified August 9, 2007, 15:38:38]