Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

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People climb onto the Berlin Wall on Nov. 10, 1989, the morning after an announcement by the East German government that it would start granting exit visas to East Germans eager to go to the West. Robert Wallis/Corbis via Getty Images The sometimes bureaucratic and sluggish dynamics of EU processes rightly meet with the author’s disapproval. But things are very different today from when I was reporting for the Guardian in Brussels in the 1970s. The dynamic of ever closer EU integration continues, but not at the expense of the new European member states. Global population movements should be seen as a potential positive, not a threat This European kaleidotapestry became a source of special pleasures and personal enrichment for its author just when – after centuries of wars, poverty, and hunger that generated forced movements and mostly negative transnational encounters – it was suddenly becoming a much more pleasant direct experience for most other Europeans too. If the discovery of this alternative Europe of high culture and pleasurable ways of life was largely novel and often stunning half a century ago, it is little surprise that it also generated a great sense of curiosity and possibility for the fortunate youth of those days. We love Germany so much we are glad there are two of them.'… François Mauriac, 'J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je suis ravi qu’il y en ait deux', https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/mav/116/ Garton Ash has carved out a unique niche as a ‘historian of the present.’ Homelands combines his eye-witness account of Europe’s evolution with his keen historical insight to offer an innovative and compelling book.”—Charles A. Kupchan, author of Isolationism

Amalrik is dead and the KGB is still here!'… see 'press conference with Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for trade and industry,' Official Kremlin International News Broadcast, 29 January 1996.We know there are Germans, Italians, Spaniards and Poles—but are there Europeans? Yes, at least one: Timothy Garton Ash. Homelands is the brilliant, captivating story of how he became one.”—Mark Lilla, author of The Once and Future Liberal One does not say no to Plato'… Stephen Wall, Reluctant European. Britain and the European Union from 1945 to Brexit, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2020, fn. 4 on p.141. Wall confirms he had this directly from the source. an essay about the concept of Europe in the writings of Jakub of Paradyż,... now chapter five in Geremek, The Common Roots of Europe. the baby boomers, accustomed to never being resisted…'… Bernard Guetta, Dans l'ivresse de l'Histoire, J'Ai Lu/Flammarion, Paris 2017, pp.53-9. Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself, from his

Garton Ash’s personal experience of Europe over the past half a century or so has essentially revolved around how he came to be at home abroad and develop an elective affinity with Central Europe in particular. While (too) many west Europeans were essentially content with the Cold War division of Europe, he felt a strong – and markedly romantic – desire that people less fortunate than him should gain more of the freedom that he enjoyed. Poland would soon emerge as his Spain, with the Solidarity movement, and especially those parts of it he considered to be the liberal opposition to the regime, amounting to his Republican forces, and where, as he discreetly notes, “to political romanticism was added personal romance.” to 'get to know the enemy'.... Some more detail in the excessively lively article I wrote for The Spectator. 'Albania's theatre of the absurd', The Spectator, 30 September 1978, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/30th-september-1978/11/albanias-theatre-of-the-absurd. Of little interest or value to anyone else, it has sentimental value for me as my first published article. Der er bøger, som er gode; bøger, der er virkelig gode; bøger, som er fremragende – og så er der de helt sjældne, som sprænger skalaen. By 1988, the sociologist Jürgen Habermas,… could announce… see his article 'Der Marsch durch die Institutionen hat auch die CDU erreicht', Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 March 1988.Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father's memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents. a scientific and industrial base that matches that of the United States'… John M. Roberts, The Hutchinson History of the World, Hutchinson, London 1976, p.1063 and p.1081. Insightful. . . . Garton Ash’s often compelling homage to a liberated and prosperous Europe is tinged with disquiet and disappointment.”—Kim Bielenberg, The Independent xiii) 'he says Europe and means France'… As for so many famous attributed quotations, we have been unable to find a source for him saying exactly this. Hence ‘supposedly’.

In Estonia, the so-called 'forest brothers' went on fighting the Russian communist occupation from their camouflaged woodland hideouts well into the 1950s. The last surviving forest brother, August Sabbe, only died when the KGB tried to arrest him in 1978.… Lowe, Savage Continent, pp.340-58.The transition exacted a huge cost in social cohesion. Workers in Poland once chanted, “There’s no freedom without Solidarity”; by the early 2000s, the slogan had become, “There’s no solidarity in freedom.” The Gdansk shipyard, where the Solidarity movement had begun in 1980, went bankrupt in 1996. But freedom, understood as some basic control over one’s everyday life, also suffered: As Garton Ash puts it, “The locus of unfreedom moved from the state to the workplace.” The story of freedom in Europe did not proceed in a single straight line. the Palio, the inter-communal horse race that was first recorded in 1239... Maria A. Ceppari Ridolfi, Marco Ciampolini, Patrizia Turrini (eds.), The Palio and Its Image. History, Culture and Representation of Siena’s Festival, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Siena 2001, p.32.