The fall of the Berlin Wall promised Europe a bright future – so what went wrong?

Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir. 

Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled the author is and how extensive his contacts are, among its great strengths are the personal encounters, experiences and anecdotes it relates. We learn, for example, of the Romanian pastor who, on hearing that Garton Ash is from Oxford, asks in all seriousness whether he has met John Henry Newman. A jailed Erich Honecker reaches into the pocket of his prison pyjamas to give Garton Ash a card ‘on which his secretary had typed a telephone number’. When he dials it, it goes straight through to the chancellor’s office.

Helmut Kohl asks him in an interview whether he realises he is sitting opposite the direct successor of Adolf Hitler – the last chancellor of a united Germany. The Hungarian prime minister Arpad Gonz says he could cope with 40 years of communism but wonders how he’s going to manage one year of capitalism. Meanwhile, Bronislaw Geremek, insists that Garton Ash takes away with him ‘a bottle of Czech vodka called Stalin’s Tears’, as ‘a Polish foreign minister can’t keep Stalin in his office’. A Russian-speaking Ukrainian refugee from Mariupol laments: ‘We saw the Russians as our brothers – and then they came to murder our children.’

Also outstanding are the vivid turns of phrase. Railway lines are ‘varicose veins of Nazi evil’; and the author notes how changes to European borders resulted in whole countries being ‘shunted around against their will like cattle’. Two expressions keep recurring: ‘the memory engine’ and ‘post wall’.