In europe by geert mak6/5/2023 In Europe helps Europeans discover the past that truly unites them. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. And in an abandoned crèche 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. 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. At Ypres he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated there twice a day. He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe’s well-springs of memory, where history is written into the landscape. His extraordinary book, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth. He reads about the International Exhibition in Paris in 1900 in newspaper reports that promise their readers a new century of light, and the memoirs of soldiers who served in the trenches of Flanders Fields less than fifteen years later.īut Mak is above all an observer. Geert Mak is a wide-awake Dutchman who deserves to be just as famous as his fictional forebear. As he travels, Mak reads the evidence of history in diaries, including the dramatic account of Victor Klemperer’s life and Count Harry Kessler’s worldly entries.
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