The Europe of the last century, dominated by the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain, is transformed.
At school in Brussels, we referred to Brussels as the "carrefour d'Europe" - it was not, of course, it was the carrefour [ crossroads] of a 12-member EU, of western Europe, but we were partitionists who thought Europe ended and the USSR began at the Berlin Wall. With the wall down, Berlin is once again, in Geert Mak's phrase about the city in 1918, "Europe's natural crossroads". In a year spent visiting 53 European cities, Mak got to a few - Paris, Munich, Moscow - twice, but Berlin he visited six times, and where some cities, such as Dublin, get only perfunctory treatment, Berlin, symbol of Europe's transience, never fails to rouse his enthusiasm:
In the 1950s, an elderly citizen of Berlin could have told you about the sleepy 19th-century provincial city of his childhood, the imperial Berlin of his youth, the starving Berlin of 1915, the wild and roaring Berlin of the mid-1920s, the Nazi Berlin of his children, the ravaged Berlin of 1945, and the reconstructed, divided Berlin of his grandchildren. All one and the same city, all within a lifetime.
By shifting the centre to Berlin, Mak joins that group of historians currently repositioning Europe. In his books, Norman Davies tilts maps 90 degrees so that the eye is drawn straight to Prague and Budapest, while Ireland and Spain dangle on the periphery.
Geert Mak has a trademark mop of white hair and is famous in his native Holland - when the crown prince married an Argentinian banker, Queen Beatrix asked Mak to give the new princess lessons in Dutch history. For 1999, his paper, NRC Handelsbad, commissioned him to go round Europe as "a sort of final inspection: what shape was the continent in, here at the conclusion of the 20th century?"
Starting in Amsterdam and finishing in Sarajevo, Mak made a historical tour, moving chronologically through the century from the optimism of the 1900 World Fair in Paris to the Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999. In each city he took a look at the "then" - eg Guernica in 1937 - and the "now" - Guernica in 1999.
As guides on his journey, he had writers, archives, old newspapers, and eye witnesses, including a Prussian prince who remembers growing up in Potsdam with his grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the daughter of an officer in Sebastopol: "[When Stalin died] I knew I was supposed to weep like everyone else, but all I could summon up was one tear. One tear. It fell on my egg."
In Europe is centripetal; everything tends towards the second World War. For Mak, it is the century's black hole, into which everything prior (the Dreyfus Affair, the Versailles treaties) leans, and from which everything subsequent (the Iron Curtain, the Common Market, Srebrenica) extends. This perception means he's at his best when dealing with the mainland, those countries, such as France, Germany and Poland, in the line of fire; and less good with the peripheries where conflicts were more isolated. His account of the Northern Irish conflict is perfunctory and unenlightening and the book doesn't need it, similarly with Eta and the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal.
MAK MAKES GOOD use of his eyewitnesses - on Keffalonia island in Greece, an 89-year-old recalls a taxi driver bringing a wounded Italian soldier to her door during the war. "What am I supposed to do with him?" she shouted. "Think of something," shouted back the taxi-driver, "he has a mother too!" An argument as unanswerable as any for tending the enemy.
Then there's the Bosnian journalist on the aid workers that swarmed into Sarajevo after 1995: "What kind of people are you sending us anyway? . . . Third-class adventurers who would probably have trouble finding a job in their own country. To them, we're some kind of aboriginals. They think they have to explain what a toilet is . . . They say Bosnians are lazy, but it takes them a week to do a day's work."
The archives also provide rich pickings - here is a civil servant in Berlin in 1912 justifying the scarcity of toilets in a slum: "The average bowel movement takes three to four minutes, included the time needed to arrange one's clothing . . . even if [ it] were to take 10 minutes, the 12 hours in the day leave sufficient time for 72 persons to make use of the toilet." An unfortunate instance of Teutonic efficiency and time-keeping!
Mak has a journalist's talent for pithy phrases. On the assassination of Franz Ferdinand: "True destiny is often as trivial as the plot in a disaster movie." On Vienna: "Modern-day Vienna is like a city of high officials with nothing more to be high about." On waking in a hotel in Riga: "Just as my mattress springs easily back into shape, so has this entire city sprung back in a moment to European life."
A few characters stalk the pages from event to event, providing novelistic continuity. We first meet Hitler as a painter in Vienna in 1911, sketching the Michaelerplatz, but replacing the radical Loos building with an 18th-century building; he loathed modernism.
Next he's in the trenches fulminating over British and German soldiers singing hymns together at Christmas: "This should not be allowed to happen during a war!" On Armistice Day, he's in hospital, half-blinded by mustard gas, sobbing into his pillow.
Then there's Jean Monnet. Our school debating theatre was called after this French strategist; we had a vague idea of him as architect of the EU, which sounded dull, but here he is Hitler's shadowy nemesis. An unknown merchant in 1914, he persuades the French and British governments to combine economic resources for the war; in 1938 he influences Roosevelt to start rolling planes and tanks off production lines; in 1940 he almost persuades Britain and France to merge politically until Phillipe Pétain sneers that union with the UK is "marriage to a corpse".
YET, DESPITE THIS leaven of characters, pithy phrases and eye witnesses, In Europe is mired by information. Mak took it on himself to span the continent from Belfast to Moscow to Istanbul, unloading cartloads of facts, and listing every nation's grievances - the effect can be relentless and depressing. Few of the century's achievements or even its brief gaieties are here - we don't visit bohemian Paris, or London in the Swinging Sixties, or Cambridge for the double helix.
More seriously, Mak trudges a well-worn path: it's 1937, you know he's off to Guernica; 1956, that will be Budapest; 1989, the Berlin Wall. Events are tackled head on, with few cunning feints or swerves - in Budapest, it's straight into the Russian tanks and a history lesson.
Compare this to Claudio Magris, who made a similar, shorter, journey to write his classic Danube (1986). When Magris gets to Budapest he gazes at the faces of school leavers in a photographer's window, then visits the tomb of a 16th-century imam; he turns to 1956 only to make a wry comparison between the toppled statue of Stalin and Atlas. You can't keep up with Magris - he keeps disappearing down odd lanes, to return with some ironic tale or forgotten object. Mak is more of a schoolteacher; enthusiastic, even inspiring, but diligent about covering the syllabus, careful of the facts, a touch of the Gradgrind.
In Europe is tied to a date, 1999, which turned out to be even more significant than Mak could have known. Two years later came 9/11 and a whole new preoccupation with religious extremism and terrorism. Because history writing reflects politics, we can expect a swathe of 9/11-influenced histories of the 20th century, focusing on terrorist movements, immigration, the Rushdie fatwa - new lines merging into a new story. Mak tells the old story - it is to his credit that, though he published after 9/11, he changed nothing - there is no retrospective highlighting of religion, immigrants or terrorism.
For Mak's generation, the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain were the decisive events and European union was a moral imperative. In speeches, Helmut Kohl could thunder emotionally that Europe was a question of krieg und frieden - war and peace; if Angela Merkel tried that, it would be rhetoric.
Commenting on how today's emotional events become tomorrow's statistics, Mak writes: "slowly the feeling shifts from one of solidarity to one of curiosity." Mak has solidarity for a period which is fading quicker than we thought; that perhaps is his book's chief value.
Bridget Hourican is a historian and journalist who has written extensively about eastern Europe
In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century By Geert Mak Harvill Secker, 875pp. £25