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A review by sherwoodreads
In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond by Robert D. Kaplan
Copy provided by NetGalley.
One of the most interesting developments in journalism, or so it appears to me as a reader, is the reintroduction of “I.” Travel memoirs of old were presented up front as such, the better ones full of historical context and observation, with reference to how the ordinary person of a given area sees their world.
At least when I was young, there was this emphasis on being objective. I don’t believe anyone is truly objective. There are degrees of obviousness in the writer’s perception. And trying too hard for a robotic objectivity frequently leads to government-speak (“it was decided” convolutions) and just plain dullness.
Kaplan is very aware of that as he discusses at length his approach for this book—beginning with his own limitations. You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are. Bucharest, as I rode in from the airport and saw the ashen, moldy faces of the bus driver and other Romanian support, crushed in their overcoats and winter hats with earmuffs and their worries, made be instinctually aware of all the history I had been missing the last half decade.
The best travel writer since Herodotus to my mind is Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose superlative writing and profound insights and historical awareness are mentioned often enough in this book that I suspect that Kaplan was trying for a similar approach. And that’s no bad goal.
He has this to say about travel writing: For the real adventure of travel is mental. It is about total immersion in a place, because nobody from any other place can contact you. You are alone. Thus your life is narrowed to what is immediately before your eyes, making the experience of it that much more vivid and life transforming.
The dilemma, therefore, is how to generalize without going too far, and yet at the same time to describe honestly what one has experienced — and draw conclusions from it — without being intimidated by a moral reprimand. I have failed in this regard in the past, and have struggled for years trying to find the right balance. And I am more and more unsure of myself as I get older, even as I know that there is a vast distance between describing obvious cultural peculiarities and provoking the specter of both racism and essentialism.
He then segues to journalism, and its strengths and pitfalls.
By learning to be a journalist, I do not mean learning the commonplace but crucial mechanics of accurate note-taking, newswriting, or developing sources, which I had been taught in elementary form earlier in college and at a small newspaper. Instead, I refer to understanding the true character of objectivity.
For what is taught in journalism schools is an invaluable craft, whereas properly observing the world is a matter of deliberation and serious reading over decades in the fields of history, philosophy, and political science. Journalism actually is not necessarily, whatever the experts of the profession may claim, a traditional subject in its own right.
Rather, it is a means to explore and better communicate subjects that are, in fact, traditional areas of study: history and philosophy as I've said, but also government, politics, literature, architecture, art, and so on. I've never altogether trusted what journalists say about themselves. As Robert Musil, the great early twentieth century Austrian novelist, observes: "High-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideology."
The result is partly memoir, history, partly travelogue, partly journalistic reportage, and partly meditation, adding up to an absorbing, never boring, but seldom easy, read. Opinions are upfront: for example, twice Kaplan states that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to appreciate beauty.
The mention of writers such as Fermor, and Elias Canetti, and Mersea Eliade, with sharply observed examinations of the works of the two latter, made me reach for my pen to jot down names and titles of works of which I hadn’t heard.
The short summary is this: Kaplan returns to Romania and adjacent regions after visits in the eighties and nineties during tumultuous change. He does linger on some of the more stomach-turning aspects of history, very old ranging to not too long ago. But he veers from sensationalism for its own sake, trying to provide context, with such observations as this, after a tense visit, during which he occupied himself by reading Joseph Conrad: Because the future lies inside the silences — inside what people are afraid to discuss openly among themselves, or at the dinner table — it is in the guise of fiction that a writer can more easily and relentlessly tell the truth.
His premier point seems to be that Western indifference and ignorance of areas such as Moldova—tucked up against the Ukraine—could endanger the relative peace of Europe.
I then began acquiring the habit of separating myself from the journalistic horde, looking for news in obscure locations, that is. For example, on a later trip to Bucharest in 1984, Latham casually told me that Ceausescu was blasting a vast area of the capital into oblivion, with security forces plundering and then blowing up whole neighborhoods of historic Orthodox churches, monasteries, Jewish synagogues, and nineteenth century houses: 10,000 structures and all, many with their own sylvan courtyards. Residents were given hours to clear out with their life possessions before explosive charges were set.
Along the way Kaplan offers vivid word pictures of places and people he met, many of them leaders (it was apparently surprisingly easy for journalists to gain access to powerful people thirty years ago), but there are at least a few some snaps of ordinary folk.
This is where my interest caught the most. When I was young, the map of Europe was dominated by the vast pink swathe of the USSR. Names like Romania and Moldavia belonged only to ancient histories. When I traveled as a student in 1971-2, I couldn’t get past the Iron Curtain: everyone said it took money, and in those days I got around by hitchhiking, eating once a day, or less. Ever since then, I’ve read whatever I could about those mysterious areas so closed off.
And Kaplan takes me there, beginning about the time I was in Europe, for he was a year younger, his reach much farther than mine.
Worked in among the chapters on his travels are historical meditations, ranging from the fourteenth and fifteenth century voivodes up to the crucial work Metternich did at the Congress of Vienna in laying down a pattern for relative balance of power that more or less lasted for the following century.
Metternich, that farsighted reactionary, was a man of peace — contra Napoleon, that endemic progressive, who was a man of war. Metternich believed in legal states, not in ethnic nations. States are sanctioned by bureaucratic systems governed by the rule of law; ethnic nations are ruled by blood and soil passion, the very enemy of moderation and analysis.
Toward the end of the work he brings us to the present, with an essay about the importance of the region, and of Western awareness of what is going on there. Group consciousness is all very well and good as long as it defends the rights of the individual — regardless of origin or political tendency. Only with that in mind does nationalism have legitimacy. Though people from time to time still fought vaguely and wistfully, with their eyes half closed, about Greater This or Greater That, their immediate concerns were for the safety and predictability in their own lives.
There’s a lot of food for thought here, as well as a fascinating excursion into an area few of us English-speakers have reached.
One of the most interesting developments in journalism, or so it appears to me as a reader, is the reintroduction of “I.” Travel memoirs of old were presented up front as such, the better ones full of historical context and observation, with reference to how the ordinary person of a given area sees their world.
At least when I was young, there was this emphasis on being objective. I don’t believe anyone is truly objective. There are degrees of obviousness in the writer’s perception. And trying too hard for a robotic objectivity frequently leads to government-speak (“it was decided” convolutions) and just plain dullness.
Kaplan is very aware of that as he discusses at length his approach for this book—beginning with his own limitations. You don't grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are. Bucharest, as I rode in from the airport and saw the ashen, moldy faces of the bus driver and other Romanian support, crushed in their overcoats and winter hats with earmuffs and their worries, made be instinctually aware of all the history I had been missing the last half decade.
The best travel writer since Herodotus to my mind is Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose superlative writing and profound insights and historical awareness are mentioned often enough in this book that I suspect that Kaplan was trying for a similar approach. And that’s no bad goal.
He has this to say about travel writing: For the real adventure of travel is mental. It is about total immersion in a place, because nobody from any other place can contact you. You are alone. Thus your life is narrowed to what is immediately before your eyes, making the experience of it that much more vivid and life transforming.
The dilemma, therefore, is how to generalize without going too far, and yet at the same time to describe honestly what one has experienced — and draw conclusions from it — without being intimidated by a moral reprimand. I have failed in this regard in the past, and have struggled for years trying to find the right balance. And I am more and more unsure of myself as I get older, even as I know that there is a vast distance between describing obvious cultural peculiarities and provoking the specter of both racism and essentialism.
He then segues to journalism, and its strengths and pitfalls.
By learning to be a journalist, I do not mean learning the commonplace but crucial mechanics of accurate note-taking, newswriting, or developing sources, which I had been taught in elementary form earlier in college and at a small newspaper. Instead, I refer to understanding the true character of objectivity.
For what is taught in journalism schools is an invaluable craft, whereas properly observing the world is a matter of deliberation and serious reading over decades in the fields of history, philosophy, and political science. Journalism actually is not necessarily, whatever the experts of the profession may claim, a traditional subject in its own right.
Rather, it is a means to explore and better communicate subjects that are, in fact, traditional areas of study: history and philosophy as I've said, but also government, politics, literature, architecture, art, and so on. I've never altogether trusted what journalists say about themselves. As Robert Musil, the great early twentieth century Austrian novelist, observes: "High-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideology."
The result is partly memoir, history, partly travelogue, partly journalistic reportage, and partly meditation, adding up to an absorbing, never boring, but seldom easy, read. Opinions are upfront: for example, twice Kaplan states that the ultimate purpose of human existence is to appreciate beauty.
The mention of writers such as Fermor, and Elias Canetti, and Mersea Eliade, with sharply observed examinations of the works of the two latter, made me reach for my pen to jot down names and titles of works of which I hadn’t heard.
The short summary is this: Kaplan returns to Romania and adjacent regions after visits in the eighties and nineties during tumultuous change. He does linger on some of the more stomach-turning aspects of history, very old ranging to not too long ago. But he veers from sensationalism for its own sake, trying to provide context, with such observations as this, after a tense visit, during which he occupied himself by reading Joseph Conrad: Because the future lies inside the silences — inside what people are afraid to discuss openly among themselves, or at the dinner table — it is in the guise of fiction that a writer can more easily and relentlessly tell the truth.
His premier point seems to be that Western indifference and ignorance of areas such as Moldova—tucked up against the Ukraine—could endanger the relative peace of Europe.
I then began acquiring the habit of separating myself from the journalistic horde, looking for news in obscure locations, that is. For example, on a later trip to Bucharest in 1984, Latham casually told me that Ceausescu was blasting a vast area of the capital into oblivion, with security forces plundering and then blowing up whole neighborhoods of historic Orthodox churches, monasteries, Jewish synagogues, and nineteenth century houses: 10,000 structures and all, many with their own sylvan courtyards. Residents were given hours to clear out with their life possessions before explosive charges were set.
Along the way Kaplan offers vivid word pictures of places and people he met, many of them leaders (it was apparently surprisingly easy for journalists to gain access to powerful people thirty years ago), but there are at least a few some snaps of ordinary folk.
This is where my interest caught the most. When I was young, the map of Europe was dominated by the vast pink swathe of the USSR. Names like Romania and Moldavia belonged only to ancient histories. When I traveled as a student in 1971-2, I couldn’t get past the Iron Curtain: everyone said it took money, and in those days I got around by hitchhiking, eating once a day, or less. Ever since then, I’ve read whatever I could about those mysterious areas so closed off.
And Kaplan takes me there, beginning about the time I was in Europe, for he was a year younger, his reach much farther than mine.
Worked in among the chapters on his travels are historical meditations, ranging from the fourteenth and fifteenth century voivodes up to the crucial work Metternich did at the Congress of Vienna in laying down a pattern for relative balance of power that more or less lasted for the following century.
Metternich, that farsighted reactionary, was a man of peace — contra Napoleon, that endemic progressive, who was a man of war. Metternich believed in legal states, not in ethnic nations. States are sanctioned by bureaucratic systems governed by the rule of law; ethnic nations are ruled by blood and soil passion, the very enemy of moderation and analysis.
Toward the end of the work he brings us to the present, with an essay about the importance of the region, and of Western awareness of what is going on there. Group consciousness is all very well and good as long as it defends the rights of the individual — regardless of origin or political tendency. Only with that in mind does nationalism have legitimacy. Though people from time to time still fought vaguely and wistfully, with their eyes half closed, about Greater This or Greater That, their immediate concerns were for the safety and predictability in their own lives.
There’s a lot of food for thought here, as well as a fascinating excursion into an area few of us English-speakers have reached.