The greatest excitement of my Christmas was not any of the gifts I received, but the pleasure of finally having someone I love ask me to gift them a book. I am the only truly rabid reader in the family and always long to share favourite books with others but lack a receptive audience. But not only did my mother ask for a book, she asked for one of the best ones I’ve read this year: Homelands by Timothy Garton Ash.
Garton Ash is a British journalist, historian, and academic, and, above all, fervent European. He studied and lived in Germany before the Wall fell and my first introduction to him was his excellent memoir, The File, in which he accesses his Stasi file and then sets out to speak to the informants and Stasi officers who compiled it. He has spent much of his life being passionately engaged with Central Europe and in Homelands he gives a very personal and always fascinating take on European history in his lifetime (he was born in 1955).
He does not attempt to be exhaustive – no one could be on this topic – but he still wants to be comprehensive. Frustrated by how the British choose to distance themselves from and deride their nearest neighbours, he rejoices in the complexities of the continent and the multitudes it contains:
Europe, the real Europe, not the two-dimensional, black-and-white ‘Europe’ of British political debate, is a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing work of art, to borrow a term from Richard Wagner. This artwork has been created not by one megalomaniac composer but by millions of hands over thousands of years, and is constantly being remade. It comprises not just the familiar elements of traditional high culture but also fashion, food, drink, sport, popular music and local customs; the characteristic smells of a Mediterranean island, a Scandinavian fjord, a windswept Atlantic coast and crowded Italian restaurant; fifty subtly different ways of being a man or a woman, or of embracing some other sexual or gender identity; intricate, polychromatic local histories, all the way down to that of individual buildings. Ten thousand pages would scarcely begin this book of the real Europe.
Languages are certainly key to feeling more at home in Europe, but Britian has a history of indifference to if not downright suspicion of polyglots. While English is now fairly widely spoken, that’s a far more recent change (where it has indeed changed – German proved the most helpful language for most of my travels this year) and during Garton Ash’s youth and for the level of immersion he wanted, more languages were needed – and with each one he drew a little closer to being a European:
As was traditional for British schoolchildren, the first foreign language I learned was French. I still find it the most beautiful spoken language in the world. Then, thanks to my fascination with recent German history and Thomas Mann, it was on to German, learnt very systematically at the Goethe Institute in Prien am Chiemsee […] Unlike French or Italian, German does not have a worldwide reputation for elegance, but it can be both beautiful and profound. I have loved the language ever since. In my twenties, inspired by the dissident movement in Poland, I added Polish. With every language I learned, I became a bit more European, a bit more capable of seeing myself as another – to use a fine formulation of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur – and more detached from the solid monolingual certainties of my father’s England.
I particularly enjoyed Garton Ash’s thoughts on Central Europe. He became very engaged with the Polish dissidents under communism (indeed, he picked up his Polish wife during this period) and is clearly the most informed writer I’ve come across in talking about what life was like under communism:
…someone who gets their ideas from the film The Lives of Others could come away with the impression that life behind the Wall was all about secret police oppression and that people were somehow just waiting and yearning for the moment of liberation. It was not like that. Most people could not imagine how liberation could ever happen. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which extinguished the hopes of the Prague Spring, was still fresh in everyone’s mind. How on earth could you get rid of a nuclear-armed superpower that was ready to send in tanks to crush you?
He is equally good when talking about what life was like in those countries after the fall of communism, when security was traded for freedom and many people found themselves scared by their new circumstances. He recounts conversations with working Poles about their anxieties in this brave new world, but also with Pope John Paul II, who told him “the trouble with capitalism and communism is that I dislike the one almost as much as the other” during a conversation, in Polish naturally, at the Pope’s summer residence in 1987 – a feeling the Pope would continue to express through the 1990s as his countrymen became ever more enthralled by the shallow pleasures of materialism.
Europe has changed dramatically over Garton Ash’s lifetime. It has emerged from the devastation of the Second World War, it has suffered through oppression under Soviet rule but also home-grown dictators in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, it has miraculously come together to create an era of peace, democracy and prosperity, and now – with Britain abandoning the EU, a war raging on its Eastern edge, and right-wing populism on the rise across the continent – seems on the cusp of yet more change. But change is a constant and, as Garton Ash hopefully notes, “the gamble of civilisation is that we can learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves.”
[…] Homelands (2023) – Timothy Garton Ash A wonderfully personal, passionate, and articulate history of […]