“Homelands” is a trip down memory lane on a continental scale
Personal memories matter in Europe, where the remembrance of recent horrors has shaped modern politics—notably the continent-wide push towards ever-closer union in the aftermath of the second world war. A prolific essayist who teaches European studies at Oxford, Mr Garton Ash has over five decades’ worth of other people’s recollections to add to his own. “Homelands” is a trip downThe period he describes starts, roughly, with his first solo visit to the continent in 1969 .
Unusually, Mr Garton Ash grasps the mood not just in France or Germany, but in bits of Europe farther east . He is most insightful in recounting travels in the 1980s to the then-communist bloc to meet striking Polish dockers or Czech revolutionaries. His book can be downright chilling, too. In 1994 he came across a little-known aide to the mayor of St Petersburg.
The book’s tone shifts as it describes more recent times. Mr Garton Ash notes how, in the wake of the cold war, and particularly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, his homelands gradually disappeared from the front pages of newspapers, often in favour of rising Asia. “Europe led only in the Style pages,” he bemoans. Historians like big-ticket events, and Europe for many years became in large part a story of the dull grind of building a single market, and expanding theeastwards.
“Homelands” is not an organised chronicle of modern Europe. Led by anecdote, there is no sweeping narrative that explains why the continent is the way it is. That is occasionally frustrating. Stories of protests, revolutions and chance encounters are gripping, but often the reader is assumed to know the wider context in which they happen. The manner in which once-poor parts of the continent have converged with the world’s richest countries in record time features too little.
There have been other personal histories of Europe. During a more extreme bout of continental turmoil, the Austrian writerfused memoir and history in “The World of Yesterday”. The day after he submitted the manuscript in 1942, he and his wife committed suicide in Brazil. Despite the tragedy of Ukraine, Mr Garton Ash remains more hopeful about the place he still calls home.
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