Hungry for history
Noel Malcolm
BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: ACROSS THE BORDERLANDS OF EUROPE by Anne Applebaum Macmillan, £10, pp. 314 Aperiod of .transition, as every histori- an knows, is the period which comes between one period of transition and another period of transition. I suspect that a borderland must be the geographical equivalent.
Looking at European history from a peculiarly British perspective, we think first of all of a handful of long-lived and clear- cut historic states — Britain, France, Spain — and wonder why the rest of Europe failed to come up to these normal stan- dards. But these 'normal' states are extraordinarily untypical: the wobbliness of the rest of Europe is the norm. Populations ebbed and flowed, borders shifted, empires swallowed countries and regurgitated them again, cultures and religions overlapped and coexisted.
`National' languages usually consisted of rainbows of local dialects: borderland dialects often blended imperceptibly into the neighbouring language, which the borderers would find easier to understand than the speech of their metropolitan compatriots. (Readers of Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen will know how recent linguistic unification was, even in one of the most historic nation-states: in the last decades of the 19th century, standard French was a foreign language to more than half the population of France.) Having said that, I have to admit that the lands which Anne Applebaum has written about in Between East and West — a broad swathe of territory running from East Prussia and Lithuania down through Byelorussia and the western and southern Ukraine to the Black Sea port of Odessa have had a more than usually chequered and contested history. Great powers have come and gone here, from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Austro- Hungarian, overlapped with the Baltic and the Germanic, the East Slav with the West Slav, the orthodox with the Catholic, and the Jews with all of the above.
Two things in particular are responsible for making this the region par excellence where boundaries feel provisional and identities uncertain. The first is sheer physical geography: a sad lack of natural obstacles to invading armies, apart from the odd forest or swamp. The second was Joseph Stalin, who shunted Poland 100 miles to the west, emptied East Prussia of its Germans and turned it into a sovietised wasteland, deported hundreds of thousands of people from the Baltic states to Siberia, and generally fiddled with every frontier his blood-stained fingers could touch. The result is a string of territories where, even more than in other parts of eastern Europe, the desire for historic identities is experienced almost like hunger.
Anne Applebaum too is hungry for histo-
P. J. Kavanagh
ITMA
`We'll follow the man with the big cigar!' Unembarrassed they sing on the Victory tape of Itma, Clarrie, Sid, Jack Train, little Jean Capra, All the classless troupers of my childhood, Concert-party soubrettes, tenors from ends of piers, Brought together by Handley, the war, and my father.
Some of the jokes he wrote will do, but others strain And break — 'I went home by Underground. Fell down a manhole and caught the last drain' Its awfulness nearly pricking filial tears Because of a lost, genial rhythm in there, Unpretentious dactylics, a signalling thump at the end Which the audience knew on its pulse. Maybe not good Immortal work, not art, but I'll not hear, However hard I try, the noise he heard, Withdrawn, unjaunty man; the grateful sound Those predictable rhythms provoked: frank gratitude, An audience shrived, that stands and cheers, and cheers.
ry. She travelled through these lands in search of continuities, traces of the past, signs that the human spirit can survive the most violent uprootings — and even, in one small Byelorussian town, memories of her own great-grandfather's family.
Readers will indeed learn a lot about the history of these regions from her deft summaries of military campaigns, political deals and dynastic complications. From looking at towns and villages through her eyes, they will learn how to see and inter- pret the most fragmentary signs and point- ers: the rain-worn gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions, the German manufacturers' names on the manhole-covers in Lvov, the Polish inscriptions on letter-boxes. in Vilnius, the heavy village houses of Saxon settlers in the Carpathians, the tall Italian windows of a castle built by Genoese architects for the Turks on a hillside in the southern Ukraine. Atmosphere and detail are beautifully conveyed, in a prose which is frequently poetic but never purple, characterised as it is by visual alertness, understatement, psychological empathy and emotional reserve.
And yet the real subject of this book is not the history of these regions, but the mentality of the people who are trying to recover (or re-invent) their historical identities there today. Anne Applebaum listens to scholars and enthusiasts quarrelling over whether Adam Mick- iewicz, Poland's national poet, was really a Pole, a Byelorussian or a Lithuanian. She meets Byelorussians and Ukrainians for whom national identity is a new religion, and in cities such as Czernowitz and Odessa she encounters products of the Soviet melting-pot — Russian-speaking offspring of mixed marriages, transplanted Russians and Russified Germans — for whom, with the ending of the Soviet state, no homeland now exists.
Although Anne Applebaum is, as Specta- tor readers know, an incisive commentator on political change in Eastern Europe, this book is not a work of political reportage. Here and there she senses a more sinister manipulation of national feelings at work, and says so; but her focus is always on local realities (or the lack of them), not high politics. My only complaint is that her detachment from the controversies she describes is almost too perfect. Having seen the rival claims of Lithuanians and Poles, for example, presented in her pages, one begins to long for an adjudication even for a prejudice or two.
Had she entered these debates as a combatant, however, the book she would have written might have become dated before very long. Instead, she has done an extraordinary thing. Writing about shifting borderlands, in an unusually transitional period of transition, she has composed a work which will surely last for decades — the best guide to understanding a whole skein of territories where no single guide has ever taken us before.
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