Philosopher George Santayana\u2019s maxim, \u201cThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,\u201d is frequently quoted, but almost always in a way that contradicts his larger argument.<\/p>\n
On the very same page in Reason in Common Sense, Santayana goes on to distinguish between the intellectual capacity of human beings at various stages in life. \u201cIn the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted,\u201d he writes, \u201cthis is the condition of children and barbarians.\u201d Meanwhile, old age \u201cis as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible.\u201d One\u2019s golden years, Santayana continues, show \u201cthe same inattentiveness to conditions\u201d as youth. \u201cMemory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird\u2019s chirp,\u201d he concludes.<\/p>\n
In other words, come a certain age we perceive the world almost exclusively through the lens of past experience and by clinging too closely to memories one distorts contemporary events. Robert Kaplan\u2019s memoir In Europe\u2019s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond is the book of an old man.<\/p>\n
Kaplan begins by outlining his running fascination and personal relationship with Romania, a country that is often overlooked even within Europe. He first visited the country in 1973 before returning in 1981 after a stint in the Israeli army, and the book regularly juxtaposes recollections from\u00a0those visits with others in 1990, 1998, and 2013. As a format this has potential and at his best Kaplan compares and contrasts images from the various visits to create a sort of collage of Romania past and present.<\/p>\n
A description of 1980s buses fueled by dangerous roof-mounted methane tanks illustrates the absurdity of, and lack of concern for, human life under the communist regime. In 2013, Bucharest makes Kaplan feel \u201cas close to the dust-blown urban bleakness of Anatolia\u201d as Central Europe, as the city combines \u201cthe architectural legacies of Stalinism with capitalist decadence.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, too often Kaplan badly overplays his hand, and his memories can read a lot like clich\u00e9 composites concocted for illustrative purposes. \u201cAll I can remember,\u201d he writes of a hotel room he stayed in 36 years ago, before going on to describe the color, lighting, bathroom, hallway, television, the telephone, and the process he had to go through to make a phone call. How narratively convenient that this particular 1981 television is showing \u201cspeeches of the leader interspersed with folk dancing\u201d at the very moment he checks in to his room.<\/p>\n
One might be willing to excuse such passages as over-enthusiasm, but for the same hyperbole bleeding over into other parts of the book. At one point Kaplan declares the Romanian overthrow of Nicolae Ceau\u015fescu as \u201cthe singular event which terminated the Cold War in Europe\u201d \u2014 an absurd statement that would take a book-length essay to unravel. To start: No one event ended the Cold War. If any single thing symbolized its end, it was the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union persisted for two more years after Ceau\u015fescu\u2019s death. Soviet troops stayed in Czechoslovakia for 15 more months. Need we go on?<\/p>\n
Kaplan compares and contrasts images from the various visits to create a sort of collage of Romania past and present.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The biggest trouble seems to be that Kaplan cannot decide if he wrote this book because Romania is a unique place or because he wanted to use it as a platform for discussing grand historical themes. Unfortunately, he dabbles in a bit of both and the result is uneven.When Kaplan sticks to documenting the original features of Romania, In Europe\u2019s Shadow<\/em> is lucid – even\u00a0by turns beautiful, but when he drifts into using the country to espouse supposed eternal truths of geopolitics it borders on the schizophrenic.<\/p>\n
As Kaplan points out on occasion, the most interesting thing about Romania is that it is not representative at all of Central and Eastern Europe. Romanians are predominantly Orthodox while speaking a Romance language, Soviet troops ceased occupying Romania proper in 1958, and the country was the only former Warsaw Pact member to experience wide-spread violence during the 1989 revolution where some 1,100 people died as Ceau\u015fescu was torn limb from limb by an angry mob. Even Romania\u2019s experience during the Holocaust runs counter to regional patterns. While no doubt horrible in its own right, as historian Timothy Snyder has demonstrated, about two-thirds of Romanian Jews survived the war.<\/p>\n
Despite its many shortcomings, as a research project In Europe\u2019s Shadow is a formidable piece of work offering a primer on Romanian history, geography, intellectual currents, culture, and landscape. Kaplan visits small towns, big cities, and the places in between. There are also ample intriguing general factoids – Istanbul\u2019s name, for example, comes out of a distortion of Greek for \u201cto the city,\u201d [I-stin poli]. Mixed with Kaplan\u2019s own observations and a bit of color this travelogue-cum-memoir could be great. Too bad that Kaplan and his editors were not wise enough to make it about 30 percent shorter. Instead, faux-grandeur and amateur philosophizing are orders of the day.<\/p>\n
Evocative Descriptions and Pseudo-Philosophical Blather<\/h2>\n
Perhaps hoping some of their magic might rub off, Kaplan name-drops an array of formidable authors in an attempt to manufacture literary sensibility: Andr\u00e9 Gide, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Fernando Pessoa, Isaiah Berlin, Paul Celan, Seamus Heaney, Nikos Kazantzakis, along-side Romanians like Herta M\u00fcller, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco.<\/p>\n
While Kaplan seems more than capable of turning a phrase, he often tries way too hard to do so. Evocative descriptions like \u201ca few bent-over old women wearing black kerchiefs\u201d and subtle atmospherics that illicit a \u201csubtle rumor of Turkey\u201d are more than canceled out by pseudo-philosophical blather like: \u201cYou don\u2019t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts in pivotal moments.\u201d Or, elsewhere: \u201cWe travel in order to defeat oblivion.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHistory is never so real as in the candlelit faces of Romanians at Easter,\u201d Kaplan writes in another cringe-inducing passage as convolution like this infuses attempts to connect his wanderings with larger themes. Along with repeatedly reverting back to his deterministic view of geography as the decisive factor in history from his earlier book The Revenge of Geogra-phy\u2014still available in paperback one supposes\u2014he also diverts discussion to espouse the virtues of a realist view of global politics.<\/p>\n
This leads him to defending the very worldview\u2014predicated on concepts like spheres of influence as a means of maintaining stability\u2014that delivered Romania to the Soviet sphere after World War II. Such thinking would also concede places like Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, and much of the Balkans to the Russian sphere today \u2014 something Kaplan dedicates ample verbiage to opposing elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Little More Than a Caricature<\/h2>\n
In a bizarre passage about two-thirds of the way through the book Ka-plan sets about praising Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian statesman f\u00eated by realists for creating a stable European balance of power system in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars that more or less held until World War I. Not only does such thinking require a complete inversion of ends and means but it would also imply that what Kaplan calls \u201cPutin\u2019s revanchism\u201d equates to the natural order of things.<\/p>\n
For a realist, Romania would not be \u201cstruggling to maintain their equilibrium in the face of Russian aggression,\u201d as he puts it, but rather a legitimate part of a Russian (or Turkish) buffer zone. This is to say nothing of realism\u2019s stubborn insistence that nation states are the preeminent actor in global affairs, a curious contention in the 21st century that would view Ecuador as a real geopolitical player – but not Apple.<\/p>\n
The biggest trouble seems to be that Kaplan cannot decide if he wrote this book because Romania is a unique place or because he wanted to use it as a platform for discussing grand historical themes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In between nice passages about landscapes and descriptions of towns in parts of Romania most will never get to see, this kind of dissonance goes unreconciled and serves as a distraction. Such emphasis on ideologically-charged, sweeping historical claims means the picture that Kaplan paints of contemporary Romania is little more than a caricature.<\/p>\n
He finds the Transylvanian city of Sibiu \u201cdisappointingly globalized,\u201d before adding: \u201c[T]he locals were no doubt much happier, especially the children, but I treasured my original memory 24 years ago.\u201d Nostalgia like this is indicative of how Romania is portrayed throughout the book – more like a museum than an evolving 21st-century state. Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, among the most famous Romanians alive today along with ex-sports stars Nadia Com\u0103neci and Ilie N\u0103stase (none of whom are mentioned in this book), has both noticed and lamented similar approaches to his films. \u201cPeople always relate [my movies] to communism, because they don\u2019t know anything else,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Mixed with Kaplan\u2019s own observations and a bit of color this travelogue-cum-memoir could be great. Too bad that Kaplan and his editors were not wise enough to make it about 30 percent shorter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While Mungiu frequently captures both the universal and the particular in his work, Kaplan does not. It is fitting that at one point he cites the Arab proverb: \u201cPeople resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.\u201d Indeed, Kaplan\u2019s approach to Romania is that of somebody still trapped in the mid-80s, so much so that even Ronald Reagan makes a cameo as a \u201cgreat president\u201d who \u201cset history in motion in Eastern Europe\u201d with his \u201cproper compromise between realism and idealism.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so after following Kaplan on his \u201cThirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond\u201d we end up right back where he began. Chirp!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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