reading

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at the verge of a new millennium.

The result is mesmerising: Mak’s rare double talent as a sharp-eyed journalist and a hugely imaginative historian makes In Europe a dazzling account of that journey, full of diaries, newspaper reports and memoirs, and the voices of prominent figures and unknown players; from the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Adriana Warno in Poland, with her holiday job at the gates of the camp at Birkenau.

But Mak is above all an observer. He describes what he sees at places that have become Europe’s well-springs of memory, where history is written into the landscape. At Ypres he hears the blast of munitions from the Great War that are still detonated twice a day. 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. 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.

Mak combines the larger story of twentieth-century Europe with details that suddenly give it a face, a taste and a smell. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to his own half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. In Europe is a masterpiece; it reads like the epic novel of the continent’s most extraordinary century.

About the Author

Geert Mak is a journalist and historian, and one of Holland’s bestselling writers; his prizewinning books include Amsterdam and Jorwerd.

In Europe

Travels Through the Twentieth Century

Geert Mak

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY
Sam Garrett

Prologue

No one in the village had ever seen the sea – except for the Dutch people, the mayor and Jósef Puszka, who had been there during the war. The houses were built along a little brook; a handful of yellowed, crumbling farms, green gardens, bright apple trees, two little churches, old willows and oaks, wooden fences, chickens, dogs, children, Hungarians, Swabians, Gypsies.

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. There was not a mechanical sound to be heard: only voices, a dog, a rooster, a gaggle of geese overhead, a wooden wagon creaking down the road, the mayor’s scythe. Later in the afternoon the ovens were lit; a thin blue veil of smoke floated across the rooftops. Now and then a pig squealed.

These were the final months of the millennium, and I was travelling back and forth through Europe for one year. The paper I worked for, the NRC Handelsblad, had commissioned me to do so, and my pieces appeared each day in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page. It was to be a sort of final inspection: what shape was the continent in, here at the conclusion of the twentieth century? At the same time, it was to be a historical journey: I would follow, as far as possible, the course of history, in search of the traces it had left behind. I did indeed find the silent witnesses, dozens of them: an overgrown crater on the Somme, a machine-gunned doorpost in Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse, a snowy forest outside Vilnius, a newspaper archive in Munich, a hillside near Barcelona, a small red and white sandal at Auschwitz. This journey also had something to do with me. I needed to get out, to cross borders, to find out what it meant, that misty term ‘Europe’.

Europe, as I saw in the course of that year, is a continent in which one can easily travel back and forth through time. All the different stages of the twentieth century are being lived, or relived, somewhere. Aboard Istanbul’s ferries it is always 1948. In Lisbon it is forever 1956. At the Gare de Lyon in Paris, the year is 2020. In Budapest, the young men wear our fathers’ faces.

In this southern Hungarian village of Vásárosbéc, time had stopped in 1925. Around two hundred people lived there in 1999. A quarter of them or more were Gypsies. They lived off their meagre unemployment benefits – about sixty euros a month – and the women went door to door selling baskets and nondescript wares. Their homes were falling apart, the doors were lengths of cloth, and sometimes even the frames had disappeared, stoked for warmth during a cold winter.

Even poorer were the Rumanian Gypsies, who showed up in the village occasionally in their wooden caravans. And poorer than poor were the wandering Albanian Gypsies. They were, in fact, the pariahs among the community of the poor, the absolute rock bottom of the European barrel.

I was staying with friends. They had moved into the house of the village barber, Jósef Puszka, after he died. In the attic they had found a little notebook full of pencil scratches from spring 1945, and the names of places like Ålborg, Lübeck, Stuttgart and Berlin. Someone had deciphered a few lines of it for my friends:

In the prisoner of war camp, Hagenau. Oh, my God, I have no one in this world. When I get back, there may not even be a girl left for me in the village. I’m like a little bird chirping far away. No dear mother to look after that little bird. Oh, my God, please help me get home, to my father and mother. So far from my country, such a long walk away from everyone.

In the middle of the village, along a muddy path, I stumbled upon a weathered block of concrete, a humble monument, decorated with the figure of something like a knight, and two dates – 1914 and 1918 – at the top. Below that, thirty-six names, thirty-six boys, enough to fill the village café.

1999 was the year of the euro, of the general proliferation of the mobile phone, of Internet for all and sundry, of bridges bombed at Novi Sad, of jubilant stock markets in Amsterdam and London, of the hottest September in living memory, of the fear that the millennium bug would drive all computers crazy on 1 January.

In Vásárosbéc, 1999 was the last year the ragman made his rounds with horse and cart. I had the good fortune of being there on that historic day: he had bought himself a truck. That same spring, four unemployed Gypsies had begun work paving yet another stretch of the sandy road, perhaps even with a layer of tarmac this time. And the bell-ringer was sacked; he had stolen a pension cheque that belonged to the mayor’s mother. That, too, was 1999.

In the café I met them all: the mayor, Crazy Maria, the toothless man (also known as ‘the Spy’), the village lush, the Gypsies, the postman’s wife who lived with her cow. There was no getting around being introduced to the veteran, a big friendly man in a camouflage outfit who kept his nightmares at bay with alcohol and dubious toadstools. He spoke French, everyone said, but the only word of it I ever heard him utter was ‘Marseille’.

Later that same evening, the new bell-ringer and the man who collected the rubbish sang songs from long ago, and everyone beat out the rhythm on the tables:

We laboured in the forest,

High upon the crack of dawn

With the day still full of foggy dew

We worked among the fallen trunks,

High on the slopes, the horses strained

We worked on the railroad from Budapest to Pécs

The bright new blinking railroad

Blasted through rock, the tunnel at Pécs

Travelling across Europe, all those months, had been like peeling off layers of old paint. More than ever I realised how, generation upon generation, a shell of distance and alienation had developed between Eastern and Western Europeans.

Do we Europeans have a common history? Of course, everyone can rattle their way down the list: Roman Empire, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, 1914, 1945, 1989. But then one need only look at the enormous differences in the way that history has been experienced by individual Europeans: the older Polish truck driver I spoke to, who had been forced four times in his life to learn a new language; the German couple, bombed out of their home and then endlessly driven from place to place throughout Eastern Europe; the Basque family that fell apart one Christmas Eve arguing about the Spanish Civil War, and never spoke to each other again; the serene satisfaction of the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes, who have usually avoided catching the full brunt of History. Put a group of Russians, Germans, Britons, Czechs and Spaniards at one table and have them recite their family histories: they are worlds unto themselves. Yet, even so, it is all Europe.

The history of the twentieth century, after all, was not a play performed before their eyes, but a major or minor part of their – and our – own lives. ‘We are a part of this century. This century is a part of us,’ Eric Hobsbawm wrote at the outset of his magisterial history of the twentieth century. To him, for example, 30 January, 1933 was not only the day Hitler became chancellor, but also the wintry afternoon in Berlin when a fifteen-year-old boy walked home from school with his sister and, somewhere along the way, saw a newspaper billboard. ‘I still see it before me, as in a dream.’

For my own elderly Aunt Maart in Schiedam, who was seven at the time, 3 August, 1914 – the day the First World War broke out – was a warm Monday that suddenly took on something oppressive. Workers stood around in little groups in front of their houses, women wiped their eyes with a corner of their aprons, and a man shouted to a friend: ‘Hey, it’s war!’

For Winrich Behr, one of those whose story is included in this book, the fall of Stalingrad was the telegram he received as a German liaison officer: ‘31.01.07.45 Uhr Russe vor der Tür. Wir bereiten Zerstörung vor/ APL 6. Oa/ 31.1.07.45 Uhr Wir Zerstören. AOK6.’

For twelve-year-old Ira Klejner of St Petersburg (Leningrad then), 6 March, 1953, the day Stalin’s death was announced, meant a kitchen in a communal household, her fear that she would not be able to weep, and her relief when a tear at last rolled down her cheek, into the yolk of the fried egg she was eating.

For me, a nine-year-old, November 1956 smelled of red peppers, strange dishes brought to our sedate, canal-side home in Leeuwaarden by Hungarian refugees, quiet, shy people who learned Dutch by reading Donald Duck comics.

Now the twentieth century has itself become history, our personal history and that of the films, books and museums. As I write, the backdrops to the stage of international affairs are changing quickly. Seats of power shift, alliances break down, fresh coalitions arise, new priorities take pride of place.

Vásárosbéc is preparing for its country’s entry into the European Union. Within the space of three years, six more Dutch people have arrived and bought at least a dozen houses. Most of them are attracted by the low prices in Eastern Europe, several of them probably prompted in their exodus by a problem, the sort of people with a past one runs into everywhere at the continent’s edge: back taxes, a disastrous divorce, a bankrupt business, trouble with the law.

In one of the Dutch people’s gardens stands a huge German eagle made of plaster, on a wall at one side of the house the owner has had his portrait painted, on horseback, waving a cowboy hat, ready to tame the Wild East. Another Dutchman spent more than 100,000 euros to have his home transformed into a little mansion, where he spends three weeks each year. The rest of the time the house stands empty. He has made one minor miscalculation, though: his nearest neighbour is the village’s robber headman, who lives with his eight children in what is more or less a pigsty. This neighbour has carefully begun testing the locked shutters of the Dutchman’s El Dorado. His children already cavort in the man’s pool.

In the café they asked my friend what it means, this ‘new Europe’. After the Gypsy on the shrieking accordion had been silenced, he explained that, in the course of history, this part of Europe had become increasingly poor, that everyone looked up to wealthy and powerful Western Europe, and that it was only natural that they should now want to be a part of it.

But first, my wise friend told them, you will have to go through a deep valley of even greater poverty, so that in the ten years that follow you may perhaps be able to climb up to the subsistence level of the West. ‘And what’s more, you’re going to lose some very precious things: friendship, the ability to get by without a lot of money, the skills to repair things that are broken, the freedom to raise your own pigs and slaughter them as you see fit, the freedom to burn as much timber as you like . . . any number of other things.’

‘What?’ they asked him. ‘No more slaughtering our own pigs? No more burning wood?’ They looked at him in disbelief. At that time they did not know that, before long, they wouldn’t be allowed to smoke in the café either. ‘The bell-ringer walked out during my story,’ my friend wrote to us. ‘I can hear him ringing the church bell right now, to mark the setting sun. There are some things that go on unchanged.’

The world order of the twentieth century – in so far as one can speak of ‘order’ at all – seems to be gone for good. Save that: Berlin can never be understood without Versailles, nor London without Munich, Vichy without Verdun, Moscow without Stalingrad, Bonn without Dresden, Vásárosbéc without Yalta, Amsterdam without Auschwitz.

The bell-ringer, Crazy Maria, Winrich Behr, Ira Klejner, the mayor, the toothless man, my old Aunt Maart, my wise friend – every one of us, whether we like it or not, carries with us the amazing twentieth century. The stories will continue to make the rounds in whispers, generation after generation, the countless experiences and dreams, the moments of courage and betrayal, the memories full of fear and pain, the images of joy.

I January 1900–14

Chapter One

Amsterdam

WHEN I LEFT Amsterdam on Monday morning, 4 January, 1999, a storm was rampaging through the town. The wind made ripples on the watery cobblestones, white horses on the River IJ, and whistled beneath the high iron roof of Central Station. For a moment I thought that God’s hand had momentarily tilted up all that iron, then set it back in place.

I was dragging my big, black suitcase. In it was a laptop, a mobile phone I could use to dispatch my daily columns, a few shirts, a sponge bag, a CD-ROM of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and at least fifteen books to soothe my nerves. My plan was to begin with the baroque cities of 1900, with the lightness of the Paris World’s Fair, with Queen Victoria’s reign over an empire of certainties, with the upsurge of Berlin.

The air was full of noises: the slapping of the waves, the crying of gulls on the wind, the roaring of the storm through the bare treetops, the trams, the traffic. There was very little light. The clouds chased across the sky from west to east, like dark-grey riders. For a moment they wafted a few notes along with them, the floating single strokes of a carillon. The newspapers reported that Morse code had now been phased out completely, and that the slipstreams of low-flying Ilyushins at Oostend airbase regularly sucked tiles off the neighbouring roofs. On the financial markets, the euro had made a brilliant debut. ‘Euro kicks off with challenge to dollar’s hegemony’ was Le Monde’s headline, and that morning the currency had briefly risen as high as $1.19. But Holland that day was ruled by the wind, the last, untamed force that left its mark in all directions, north-east, south-west, a persistent slamming that had shaped the lakes and polders, the course of canals, the dykes, the roads and even the railway track along which I rode south, into the wet polder landscape.

The boy with the blue tie and the pleasant face sitting beside me snapped open his computer right away, conjured up a whole series of spreadsheets and began phoning his colleagues. His name was Peter Smithuis. ‘The Germans want a hundred per cent solution, the other Europeans only need seventy-five,’ he spoke into the void. ‘What we can do now is look for something like a seventy-five-plus option, and neutralise the Germans by putting them back at a hundred per cent anyway . . . Oh, mmm. Off stream since July? Be careful, you know how it goes, if we let them decide too fast, everything will grind to a halt.’

The rain clattered against the windows of the compartment, under the Moerdijk Bridge the ships danced on the waves, at Zevenbergen a tree was in very early blossom, a thousand red dots in the water. Beyond Roosendaal the pylons became rusty, the only trace of a border between prim Holland and the rest of Europe.

Before I had left I had a long talk with the oldest Dutchman I knew. Of all the people I spoke to that year, he was the only one who had lived through the entire century (with the exception of Alexandra Vasilyeva, that is, who was born in 1897 and had actually seen the czar and made her glorious stage debut at the Mariinsky theatre).

His name was Marinus van der Goes van Naters, but people called him ‘the Red nobleman’. He was born in 1900 and had once played a prominent role in the Dutch Social Democratic Party.

He told me about Nijmegen, where, when he was growing up, a total of two cars cruised the streets: one De Dion-Bouton and one Spijker, both handcrafted down to the last detail. ‘My brother and I would run to the window whenever one of them came by.’ He had never been particularly fond of those first car owners. ‘They were the same people you see these days talking into portable telephones.’

On class relations: ‘At a certain point we became completely enraptured by the new social order that was on its way. We wanted to talk to a worker, but we didn’t know any. Through acquaintances of an acquaintance we finally met a worker’s wife, who read something aloud to us from a newspaper. I still wonder why, if we wanted to meet one so badly, we didn’t just go up to a worker on the street and talk to him!’

On technology: ‘My friend and I were always fascinated by the phenomenon of electricity. We had read an adventure novel that talked about a machine you could use to talk to people without wires, no matter how far away they were. That seemed unbelievable to us. We installed lights, built telephones we could use to talk to each other two rooms away, we made sparks fly, we invented things, real inventions!’

My host took a book down from the shelf, its pages loose with age and use. Edward Bellamy, In het jaar 2000, Amsterdam 1890. ‘This is what we talked about, things like this.’ The story is a simple one: a nineteenth-century man falls into a deep sleep after being hypnotised and does not wake up until the year 2000. He finds himself in a city full of statues, fountains, covered walkways, gentlemen in top hats, ladies in evening dress. Thanks to electrical light, there is no more darkness. Night has been banished. Every home has a listening device, connected by an open telephone line to one of the municipal concert halls.

‘Here, read what one of those twentieth-century creatures says here: “At home we have comfort, but we seek the glory of life within society itself.” That was the kind of world we were looking for, in the year 2000. Money would no longer play any role. Every citizen would be safeguarded against “hunger, cold and nakedness”, products and services would be exchanged by means of an ingenious credit system, food prepared in huge, communal restaurants and delivered, if need be, by tube mail. The boys would be “sturdy”, the girls “fresh and strong”, the sexes would be free and informal in their dealings with each other, private shops would disappear, there would be no more advertising, publishing houses would be collectivised, newspaper editors would be elected by their readers, criminality and greed abolished, and – read for yourself – even the “crudest of individuals” would adopt “the comportment of the civilised classes”. Here, this passage: “Kneeling, my countenance bowed to the earth, I confessed in tears my unworthiness to breathe the air of this golden age. The long and sorrowful winter of mankind has come to an end. The heavens have opened to us.” What a book!’

The wintry light fell on the yellowed wallpaper of the study, the faded books on the shelf, the standing lamp with its cloth shade and tassels, my host’s strong hands, slightly spotted skin, his clear eyes.

‘What do I think about this century, now that it’s over? Ah, a century is only a mathematical construct, a human fantasy, isn’t it? Back then I thought in terms of months, a year at the most. Now I think in twenty-year spans, that seems like nothing to me any more. Growing so immoderately old spoils one. Time no longer fazes you . . .’

Chapter Two

Paris

THE NEW CENTURY was a woman, they were all in agreement on that back in 1900. Take, for example, the drawing on the cover of the piano music for the English song ‘Dawn of the Century’, a ‘march & two step’ by one E. M. Paul. Amid golden clouds a woman balances on a winged wheel, around her float a tram, a typewriter, a telephone, a sewing machine, a camera, a harvester, a railway engine and, at the bottom of the picture, there is even a car turning the corner.

The European metropolises were feminine as well, if only in the lavish shapes of the thousands of little palaces of the bourgeoisie along the new boulevards and residential streets, with their curlicues and garlands in every ‘neo’ style imaginable, a ruttish profusion still found from Berlin to Barcelona.

So too the cover of the catalogue for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair: a woman, of course, a rather hefty one this time, her hair blowing in the wind, a banner in her hand. Above the gate to the fairgrounds, a plaster woman six metres tall, in a wide cloak and evening dress by the couturier Paquin. At the official opening, Émile Loubet, the French president, spoke of the virtues of the new century: justice and human kindness. His minister of employment expected even more good things: gentleness and solidarity.

The fifty million visitors traipsed from one miracle to the next. There were X-ray machines with which you could look right through men and women, there was an automobile exhibition, there was equipment for wireless telegraphy, and from outside the gates one could catch the first underground line of Le Métro, built in less than eighteen months from Porte de Vincennes to Porte Maillot. Forty countries took part. California had dug an imitation gold mine, Egypt came with a temple and an antique tomb, Great Britain showed off all the colonies of its empire, Germany had a steam locomotive that could travel at 120 kph. France exhibited a model of Clément Ader’s motorised flying machine, a gigantic bat with a thirty-metre wingspan; humans, after all, were destined to leave the earth one day.

There was a Dance Palace where a wide variety of ballets were performed, a Grand Palais full of French paintings and sculpture, and a building where the visitor could ‘travel’ around the entire world on a special ceiling for two francs, from the blossoming orchards of Japan by way of the Acropolis to the coasts of Spain, all depicted with extreme skill by the painter Dumoulin and his team. There was a cineorama, a variation on the panorama, where one could revel in the view from an airship or a compartment aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. The military section displayed the newest technologies in warfare: the machine gun, the torpedo, the gun turret, wireless telegraphy equipment, the personnel carrier. And completely new were the shows at the phono-cinema theatre, with newsreels accompanied by a phonograph recording. Among other things, the shaky images filmed by the Pathé Brothers showed – extra! – the Rostand family in their box at the premiere of L’Aiglon, and other sensations of the day: the test flight of Graf Zeppelin’s first airship, the opening of a railway line through Africa, new cotton mills in Manchester, victorious Englishmen in the course of the Boer War, a speech by the kaiser, the launching of a battle cruiser.

The map in the catalogue provides a bird’s-eye view of the impressive fair grounds: from the Grand Palais, along the lanes of pavilions on both banks of the Seine, to the Eiffel Tower and the great exhibition halls on the Champ de Mars. The World’s Fair was a part of the city as a whole. Or, put differently, Paris with its boulevards laid out from 1853 under the prefecture of Georges Haussmann blended seamlessly with the fair, because Paris had become a permanent exhibition in itself, the grand display window of France, the city state of the new century. And both – as the photographs in the catalogue also show – were created for the new urbanite par excellence, the boulevardier, the actor/viewer of the theatre of the street, the young people on an allowance, the noble property owner, the wealthy officer, the youthful bourgeois relieved of all financial concerns.

‘The weather is so warm, so lovely, that I go outside again after dinner, even though I feel fatigue coming on,’ noted the young writer André Gide in the summer of 1905. ‘First along the Champs-Élysées, strutting past the cafés-concerts, I bustle through to the rotunda, then turn back along the Élysées again; the crowd is partying, in greater numbers and with greater cheer, all the way to the rue Royale.’

On other days he rides the roof rack of an omnibus, walks in the Bois de Boulogne, visits the opera, then heads back to a new exhibition featuring Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne, ‘impossible not to visit the Louvre these days’.

The boulevardier’s haven was the café, the marble table with kirsch and hot chocolate and friends all around, the democratic successor to the aristocratic salon. His prime trait was an infallible sense of timing: to be found in the best establishment at the best moment. The urban stroller moved between the old age and the new, plunging into the anonymity of the crowd, then falling back into the old security of one’s own class. It was a way of life that showed up everywhere in the literature of the day, a modern courtliness that conquered every major European city.

André Gide, 1 September, 1905: ‘I am swept off my feet, I let myself be carried along by this monotone flow, dragged along by the course of the days. A great lethargy overtakes me, from the moment I arise to the evening hour; the game saves me at times, but gradually I lose my normal life.’

I stroll from the Champ de Mars along the Seine and the roaring traffic on both banks to the boarded-up entrance of the Grand Palais, which is now being restored. Big neon letters on the Eiffel Tower read ‘347 days till the year 2000’. Of the old World’s Fair, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais are still standing, and of course the Pont Alexandre III, with its four pillars at the corners, gigantic golden horses atop those, and along the edges a lacework of bronze lanterns with glass like cut diamonds.

In that same April in which the Pont Alexandre III and the 1900 World’s Fair were opened, the anti-Semitic daily La Libre Parole took up a collection to present a pair of rapiers to the Jew-hater Raphaël Viau, to commemorate his twelfth duel ‘for the good cause’. Viau expressed his hope that the blades ‘would not long remain unsullied’.

Around the turn of the century, three major scandals rocked Europe’s capitals. They were cracks in the façade, the first fissures in that steadfast world of rank and class. In London, in 1895, there was the conviction of the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde for perversity. In Berlin, a similar scandal took place in the period 1907–9 concerning Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, former ambassador to Vienna and one of the German emperor’s intimate friends. But the scandal with the greatest impact was the Dreyfus affair.

No other issue occupied the French more intensely between 1897–9 than the possible rehabilitation of the unjustly accused Alfred Dreyfus. This Jewish army captain had been banished to Devil’s Island for allegedly having spied for the Germans. Gradually, however, it became increasingly clear that officers of the war council had tampered with his dossier and then, to refute the rising groundswell of suspicion, had continued to pile forgery upon forgery. The nation’s military command knew about it, but refused to budge. To admit to such fraud would be tantamount to blasphemy, and would cast a taint on the gloire militaire.

Before long the affair was being monitored breathlessly all over Europe. After Émile Zola forced a reopening of the case on 13 January, 1898 – his fiery ‘J’Accuse!’ in L’Aurore was intended primarily to provoke charges of libel – scores of other European writers and intellectuals became involved. What was more important? The rights of the individual, or the prestige of the army and the nation? The progressive principles of the Enlightenment, or the old values of the counter-revolution, of the days of glory from before 1789?

The Dreyfus affair, as historian Barbara Tuchman put it, was ‘the death-struggle of the old world’. ‘In those years, life seemed to have been temporarily suspended,’ wrote the future prime minister, Léon Blum. It was ‘a human crisis, not as far-reaching or long-lasting as the French Revolution, but no less violent for that . . . It was as though the whole world revolved around one affair, and in the most intimate feelings and personal relationships all was interrupted, all was disrupted, all was seen through different eyes.’

Friends stopped seeing each other: Dreyfus lay between them like a live grenade. Family members avoided each other. Famous salons fell asunder. A certain M. Pistoul, manufacturer of wooden crates, was taken to court by his mother-in-law after a family row over Dreyfus. He had called her an ‘intellectuelle’; she had accused him of being a ‘monster’ and a ‘traitor’; he had struck her; her daughter had filed for divorce. During Dreyfus’ retrial, Marcel Proust sat in the public gallery each day with coffee and sandwiches, so as not to miss a moment. He and his brother Robert helped to circulate a petition, ‘The Intellectuals’ Protest’, and collected 3,000 signatures, including those of that notable arbiter of good taste Anatole France, and of André Gide and Claude Monet. For Monet, the petition meant the end of his friendship with his colleague Edgar Degas, and an enraged M. Proust Sr refused to speak to either of his sons for a week.

The Dreyfus scandal, like those surrounding Oscar Wilde and Philipp zu Eulenburg, had been drawn to the public’s attention by a newspaper. And it was, above all, a clash of the papers. The affair’s unprecedented vitality was due to the phenomenon of the ‘high-circulation daily’ appearing all over Europe, sensation-hungry papers with hundreds of thousands of readers and a distribution network that stretched to the remotest corners of the country. Around the turn of the century, Paris alone had between twenty-five and thirty-five dailies reporting and creating a wide variety of news. Berlin had sixty papers, twelve of which appeared twice a day. In London, the Daily Mail cost twopence, and had a circulation of 500,000: eleven times that of the staid and respectable Times. There arose in this way a new force, the force of ‘public opinion’, and it did not take the newspaper magnates long to learn to play on popular sentiment like a church organ. They inflated rumours and glossed over facts, everything was allowable for the purposes of higher sales, political gain or the pure adrenaline of making the news.

Yet the question remains: why was French public opinion so susceptible to this particular affair? Anti-Semitism definitely played a part. The anti-Dreyfus papers ran columns every day about the perfidious role of the ‘syndicate’, a burgeoning conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, socialists and foreigners who were out to tear France apart with their deception, lies, bribery and forgeries. When Dreyfus was first court-martialled, the crowd at the courthouse gates shouted ‘À mort! À mort les juifs!’ The Viennese Neue Freie Presse’s Jewish correspondent in Paris was so shocked that he went home and penned the first sentences of his tract Der Judenstaat: the Jews had to be given a country of their own. The correspondent’s name was Theodor Herzl. And so the first seed of what was to become the state of Israel sprouted here, at the Dreyfus trial.

But that was not all. What was really taking place, in fact, was a collision between two Frances: the old, static France of the status quo, and the modern, dynamic France of the press, public debate, justice and truth. Between the France of the palaces, in other words, and the France of the boulevards.

Strangely enough, the affair also blew over almost as quickly as it had arisen. On 9 September, 1899 Dreyfus was convicted once more, despite obvious tampering with the evidence. Europe was stunned to discover that such things were possible in an enlightened France. ‘Scandalous, cynical, disgusting and barbaric,’ the correspondent for The Times wrote. The French began to realise that the affair was damaging their country in the eyes of international opinion – and on the eve of a world’s fair that was to be the biggest ever held. Dreyfus was offered a pardon and accepted it, too tired to fight on.

In 1906 the army rehabilitated him. He was promoted to the rank of major and received the Légion d’honneur. Zola died in 1902; in 1908 his ashes were interred at the Panthéon. Once free, Dreyfus himself proved less idealistic than those who had fought for him. ‘We were prepared to die for Dreyfus,’ one of his most avid supporters later said. ‘But Dreyfus himself was not.’ Years later, when a group of intellectuals asked him to sign a petition to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti – two American victims of a political process – he flew into a rage: he wanted nothing more to do with such affairs.

During my first few days in Paris, I take as my guide a copy of the 1896 Baedeker. In it, the avenue Jean-Jaurès is still the rue d’Allemagne, the Sacré-Coeur is still under construction, the most important painter of the day is Louis Meissonier, and the vanes of the Moulin de Galette have only recently stopped turning. I hail one of the 13,000 fiacres, or hop aboard one of the forty omnibus lines crossing the city. Everything works and moves by horsepower, tens of thousands of horses for the cabs, omnibuses, carts and coaches, my entire city guide smells of horse. And all those horses must be stabled and fed – hence the hay and oats markets – and watered – there are 2,000 city fountains – to say nothing of disposing of all that manure.

The days have been sunny and mild. From my hotel window I look out over the roofs of Montmartre, the ruins of an old windmill, the misty hills in the distance. Beneath my window are a few old gardens with tall trees, a house with a sun porch, the early spring sounds of the blackbirds, sparrows and starlings. Darkness falls gradually. Between the roofs and the grey of the evening sky, more and more yellow lights appear. The city hums quietly.

The waters are blue and the plants are pink; the evening is sweet to behold;

People go walking.

The big ladies go walking; behind them, the little ladies.

It was with this ode to Paris, written by the Vietnamese Nguyen Trong Hiep in 1897, that the wandering European writer Walter Benjamin begins his essay ‘The Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. Why did he – and so many with him – choose to grant the title to Paris? Why was the name Paris still on everyone’s lips around 1900, when global power had long been focused in London, industry in Berlin, the future of good and evil in Vienna? Why was nineteenth-century Paris seen so widely as the springboard to the modern age?

That overwhelming unanimity had to do, first of all, with the new building materials and construction techniques, the iron and glass used here so much more freely and artfully than anywhere else. Take, for example, the palaces, the Eiffel Tower, the metro tunnels under the Seine with their immense iron stairways and lifts half the size of a railway car. And everywhere the famous galleries, the ‘indoor boulevards’ that formed the motif for Benjamin’s most important work.

The lush interiors of the bourgeoisie – ‘the purses of the private man’, as Benjamin called them – became safe havens for the arts. The rise of photography – Paris led the way in that as well – forced painters to find totally new forms. It was now the splendour of a movement that made its way onto canvas, or the impression of a late afternoon. In this way the Impressionists blazed trails for painters like Pablo Picasso, who later pulled scenes and objects apart in search of structure.

The ties between the artists were intense, the market eager. Claude Monet immediately sold his first paintings for 300 francs, twice the monthly salary of a teacher. Week after week in his diary, André Gide speaks of new exhibitions. Those were the places to which ‘the whole world’ went, the things ‘the whole world’ talked about.

Paris overwhelmed the senses as well with its boulevards, with that stunning order imposed on the city by prefect Haussmann. In that order, Benjamin said, ‘the institutions of the worldly and spiritual dominion of the citizenry found their apotheosis’. Of course, Haussmann’s grands travaux were based on the necessities of law and order – from that point on, military units could operate much more easily in the event of a rebellion – but that was not their most important objective. The boulevards were primarily designed to be modern transport corridors between the various terminals; nineteenth-century Paris, like London and Brussels, was a complete chaos of horses, carts, carriages, coaches and omnibuses. They also served as visual corridors between monuments and major government buildings, national symbols to be viewed in awe by Parisians and visitors alike and therefore requiring a great deal of space. The boulevards served as dividing lines between the city’s bourgeoisie and the common workfolk, between the wealthy arrondissements and dirty, smoky suburbs. But at the same time Haussmann’s plan generated unprecedented dynamism, because it was based, for the first time, on an all-inclusive view of the phenomenon of the ‘city’.

‘Modern Paris could not exist within the boundaries of the Paris of the past,’ enthused the poet and journalist Théophile Gautier. ‘Civilisation blazes broad trails through the old town’s dark maze of little streets, crossings and dead-end alleys: she brings down houses the way the pioneers in America bring down trees.’ In this way Paris was to become the outpost of the modern age, a beacon for the modern spirit, a light in the provincial darkness, France’s song of glory, the city state of the new Europe.

No other metropolis is so much a city and, at the same time, so infused with the countryside as Paris. In the three-minute walk from my hotel to the nearest boulevard I pass six greengrocers, five bakeries, five butchers, three fishmongers. Shop after shop, the crates are displayed on the pavement: apples, oranges, lettuce, cabbage, leeks, radiant in the winter sun. The butcher shops are hung with sausages and hams, the fish lie in trays along the pavement, from the bakeries wafts the scent of hundreds of varieties of crisp and gleaming bread.

It has always been a complicated relationship, that of the Parisians with their mysterious rural roots, ‘la France profonde’, and an intense one as well. Many Parisians, or their parents, or otherwise their grandparents, originally come from the countryside. These days the French are not ashamed of that, they actually cultivate and flaunt it with holiday houses and products from ‘home’ on the table. It’s all a part of ‘l’exception Française’, even though one third of France’s urban population today consists of foreigners.

Around the turn of the century, however, they seemingly wanted to shake off the dust of the countryside as soon as they arrived in Paris. In that sense, too, one could speak of two French nations. The more the big cities grew to be machines full of light and movement, the darker and sleepier the provinces seemed.

Generally speaking, the Parisians saw farm folk as savages or barbarians. One could pick them out in a crowd by the sound of their clumping, clattering clogs, and even when they wore shoes in the city, their strange, waddling gait immediately gave them away. This social rift was found everywhere in Europe, but nowhere as emphatically as in France.

Around 1880, there were still many people in the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Massif Central, in all those villages and river valleys where Europe today spends its holidays, who had never seen a cart or a wagon. Everything went by horse or mule. Local dialects predominated; according to official figures from 1863, one quarter of all French citizens barely spoke a word of French. Many regions were still using units of measure and weight, and some of them even currencies, that had been officially done away with a hundred years earlier. Anyone who had visited Paris, even if only for a day, bore the honorary title ‘Parisian’ for the rest of their lives.

There was nothing very romantic about ‘pure’ French country life. The provincial court records bear constant witness to inhuman poverty and harshness. A daughter-in-law murdered ‘because she was sickly and no good to us’; a mother-in-law thrown down a well to avoid paying a yearly annuity of twenty francs and three sacks of grain. One old man’s wife and daughter beat him severely with a pestle, a hammer and a rake, because they had grown tired of feeding him. Little Rémi from Malot’s Sans Famille could be found everywhere: in 1905, there were some 400,000 beggars wandering the French countryside.

While enormous facilities for the supply and drainage of water were being built in Paris – small underground lakes can still be found there today – the gutters of provincial French towns like Rouen and Bordeaux were still open sewers. Rennes, a city of 70,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century, could claim precisely thirty bathtubs and two houses with a bathroom. In the literature of the day one finds an increasing number of complaints about the stench of domestic staff, for example, or of fellow passengers.

But here, too, began a period of rapid and radical change. Starting in the 1880s, the French state allocated tens of millions of francs to the development plan advanced by the ambitious Charles de Saulces de Freycinet. By building roads and schools, this minister of public works hoped quickly to narrow the gap between Paris and the provinces, while at the same time giving the stagnating French economy a badly needed boost.

The measures soon bore fruit. By 1900, the infamous black bread, symbol of grinding poverty and backwardness, was almost nowhere to be found. Within two decades, stiff traditional costume was replaced by supple, ready-made clothing; around 1909, a farm girl at the fair was almost indistinguishable from a dressed-up factory maid from the city. The market stands run by public scribes also began to disappear: from 1880, every farm child learned to read and write, effectively putting an end to a brand of dependency we can scarcely fathom today.

The regionalist writer Émile Guillaumin described the lives of five hired men hoeing a field of beets near Moulins on a hot summer’s day in 1902. Eight years later, in 1910, the first of these farm workers had become a hotel doorman, the second lived in the city of Vichy, the third worked in a furniture factory, the fourth was a domestic servant. Only the fifth man still worked the land. Today, in 1999, I dare assert, no more than two of their one hundred great-grandchildren still work the soil. At least thirty of them will have ended up in Paris, and the Parisians – more than the residents of any other metropolis – seemed to realise that they are all the great-grandchildren of beet-weeders, and that they must grant due respect to both beets and their hoers.

At Opéra metro station I start a conversation with Pierre Maillot. With his grey beard and plain spectacles, he is standing in one of the corridors holding a tin can and a cardboard sign: ‘I beg your forgiveness. But I am hungry.’ This is how he earns about a hundred francs (roughly fifteen euros) a day, enough for a bed and a lonely meal with a quarter-litre of wine. The older people are generous, but the young ones tease him. ‘I have my only friend right here with me,’ he says, reaching into his inside pocket and pulling out a bible with a red plastic cover. Then he tells me a complicated story about prisons, a divorce, problems inside his head, vanished unemployment benefits and the other vagaries of a man’s life.

Up at street level, there’s a demonstration going on. To my knowledge there is no other city in Europe where the papers each day print maps, as nonchalantly as they do the weather report, showing the anticipated routes of popular assemblies: illegal aliens, dentistry students, royalists, telecommunications workers, it goes on day after day. I come across a group of students. They are angry because their teachers have been laid off in mid-term. Philippine Didier explains to me that she will not now be able to complete her Greek exams. Like her fellow students, she plans to attend the École Nationale d’Administration, the ENA, the breeding ground for France’s top politicians and administrators. ‘The minister hates us,’ Philippine says with great conviction. ‘It seems he once failed his exams himself.’ I begin seeing all these sloppy pea jackets, bent spectacles, velour caps and backpacks through different eyes: standing here before me, I realise, is the French elite of the year 2030, the cabinet ministers, the top officials, the iron rails on which France rolls along, the Establishment of the future.

In Paris, even the ordinary is often impressive. That applies particularly to the city’s public transport system. Paris and its environs have a network the likes of which cities such as London, Amsterdam and Berlin will only be implementing thirty or forty years from now. Every detail speaks of an unparalleled feeling for quality: the automatic ticket system, the uniform prices, the clear signposting, the high frequency of departures, the seeming effortlessness with which the trains rocket all these thousands of people through the city.

You rarely see anyone running for a train: the next one will be coming in two to four minutes. One seldom feels unsafe: there are always people around, every corner is put to good use. And only very rarely is one ever tempted to go by car: nothing can equal the speed, for example, of the RER connection between the Eiffel Tower and Versailles. And most amazing of all is that the system has been running exactly this way for many years, as though it is the most normal thing in the world. If you want to catch a glimpse of the future, you need only travel around Paris for an afternoon.

Meanwhile, my antiquated Baedeker has started baulking. The outskirts of Paris today comprise a jungle of factories, warehouses and tower blocks, but the foldable map at the guide’s centre shows light-green fields and woods, with villages such as Neuilly, Pantin and Montreuil. Le Bourget is a market town along a tributary of the Seine. Later it housed the most famous airport in Paris; today that airport is a museum.

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

In Europe

Travels Through the Twentieth Century

Geert Mak

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY
Sam Garrett

Prologue

I January 1900–14

Chapter One

Amsterdam

Chapter Two

Paris

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

In Europe

Travels Through the Twentieth Century

Geert Mak

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BYSam Garrett

Prologue

I January 1900–14

Chapter One

Amsterdam

Chapter Two

Paris

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY
Sam Garrett