Episode 5

Our Book of the Week, In Europe, chronicles the Dutch journalist Geert Mak’s travels through Europe at the close of the twentieth century.  His year long journey was the result of a commission from the newspaper he worked for to write a series of articles assessing the condition Europe was in on the eve of the new millennium, and to reflect on the legacy left behind by the turbulent twentieth century. Mak travelled back and forth all over the continent, painting a lively and engaging portrait of the places he visited and the people he encountered along the way who shared their personal stories with him. 

In Book of the Week we’ve heard how Mak left his home town of Amsterdam for Paris where he finds the remnants of the spectacular World's Fair held there in 1900. We’ve accompanied him as he retraced Lenin’s revolutionary footsteps from Zurich to Petrograd, via Stockholm and Helsinki where he contrasted the Bolshevik leader's fiery politics with the more measured route taken by the Scandinavians. Then off to Odessa and Istanbul where traces of acceptance and tolerance are found amid the worst excesses of tyranny.  His journey takes him to Moscow where he meets the Russian cosmonaut, Anatoli Artsybarski who recalls orbiting the Earth as the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991. To round off the week, Geert Mak wrote a new piece where he updated his reflections and opinions on the shape of the continent almost two decades after setting out on his year long journey around Europe.