The Lost Continent. Geert Mak goes in search of Europe

In Europe

It is fashionable these days to speak of the death of Europe. And Dutch journalist Geert Mak's new history of Europe's 20th century begins with a scene from a picturesque European village in 1999. It's a place he finds filled with endings, loss and decay. "The storks had left by now. Their nests lay silent and empty atop the chimneys. The summer was in afterglow, the mayor sweated as he cut back the municipal grass." If that doesn't evoke expiration, consider that the mayor is cutting the grass with a scythe.

With a few exceptions, this sort of suggestive imagery is as close as In Europe comes to grand pronouncements or provocative arguments about the history or future of the Continent. The book is a subtle study, dealing in moods, not discourse. It is, after all, titled In Europe, not On Europe, and throughout, it is more interested in images and events than ideas. Mak spent 1999 criss-crossing the Continent in a rattling blue camper van, sending dispatches to the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad. These reports, collected here, create a journey through the last century, with Mak breaking up what is essentially traditional, narrative history with short, contemporary portraits of historical settings. So Mak settles down to write about World War I from a farm in Ypres. He tells us about Hitler's disastrous Russian invasion from a square in Volgograd. He recounts the splintering of Yugoslavia from a restaurant in Novi Sad. Think of it as history with a journalist's sensibility — and datelines.

As a traveling companion, Mak cuts a charming figure. But his portrait of the last century is almost unremittingly dark. The mayor's scythe sweeps through the book as Mak tours Verdun, Guernica, Auschwitz, Stalingrad, Dresden, Chernobyl, Sarajevo. With an itinerary like that, there are predictably few joyful moments to be had. The book is filled instead with a sort of dreadful comedy that drove Samuel Beckett and others to see Europe as a theater of the absurd: the jaunty optimism of soldiers setting off to World War I (home by Christmas!), the apocalyptic hope of the survivors (the war to end all wars!), and the heartbreaking irony of victims unaware (one letter from a Jewish transport car to Poland: "We've stopped at Auschwitz, we have to get out. It's a big factory town with lots of smokestacks everywhere").

Harrowing stuff. But what is it for, all this looking back? No doubt, Mak's obsession with recollection is enhanced by another war raging in the Balkans in the late 1990s — a sharp retort to anyone who contends that Europe had put brutality and tribalism behind it. It was Dutch peacekeepers, after all, on whom fell the shame of Srebrenica, when they failed to prevent the massacre of 8,000 Bosnians at a U.N. safe area in 1995.

Published in English in the run-up to the 50th anniversary in March of the Treaty of Rome, it would also appear that the book is an attempt to inject a sense of urgency into the E.U. debate. It includes an epilogue added for the English translation that describes the votes against the E.U. constitution in France and the Netherlands. Mak ends, uncharacteristically, with an injunction: "Europe has only one chance to succeed."

Really? What is that one chance? He offers no specific vision, only this general yet urgent endorsement of unification. But the reader should forgive Mak this halfhearted attempt to pull a foreign-affairs moral from his history lesson. The book is not a call for unity, but a call for peace. It is a testament to Mak's warmth and skill as a writer that even in a chronicle of unrelenting barbarity he has portrayed a humanity worth saving.