Geert Mak > Quotes

“careful reconstruction of the British war-cabinet meetings between Friday, 24 May and Tuesday, 28 May, five days that could have changed the world. Lukac’s conclusion is inescapable: never was Hitler as close to total control over Western Europe as he was during that last week of May 1940. Britain almost presented him with a peace agreement which he would probably have accepted, and only one man was finally able to stand in the way: Churchill. Besides Churchill, the British war cabinet in those days had four other members, at least two of whom could be counted among the ‘appeasers’: Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. The other two, Clement Atlee and Arthur Greenwood (representing Labour), had no experience in government at that time. On”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“machines again, and radios, and the latest Chevrolet. General Electric flooded the country with luxury gadgets: food processors, toasters, floor-polishing machines, FM radios, electric blankets, and so on. These were all products promoted by that epitome of the television salesman Ronald Reagan, a popular actor whose work in advertising eventually taught him to sell himself, too. Traditional ideals were put on hold and ‘selling out’ became a catchphrase – you accepted a job that gave you no satisfaction because the pay was good. These were the months and years when British singer Vera Lynn touched American hearts with ‘A kiss won’t mean “Goodbye” but “Hello to love”’. Yes, that’s when it started, with that kiss on Times Square.”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“Hitler, in fact, was not at all doomed to lose the war. In summer 1940, peace reigned in Europe. The greatest European conflict, that between Germany and France, had already been settled, and only the British were still fighting a rearguard action against German supremacy. What is more, in 1940 Hitler was still riding on an enormous groundswell of goodwill.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“relationship with an Aryan worker; a Jewish housepainter who made jokes about Hitler was informed on by his neighbour; a chauffeur sent a letter to the authorities saying his Jewish boss had smuggled illegal publications into the country from the Netherlands. Of all the Gestapo cases against Jews, Johnson’s research showed that no less than 41 per cent started with an informant or a complaint. Only 19 per cent were uncovered by the activities of the Gestapo itself, and 8 per cent came from other Nazi organisations. (Similar research into dossiers in Würzburg showed that no fewer than 57 per cent of the Jews arrested had been turned in by German citizens.)”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“there was always a table with a delegation of whispering Wehrmacht officers, industrialists, bank directors and military attachés, another German table was reserved for Nazis, Gestapo agents and boisterous women. Later a table was added for the German generals, all of them equally courteous. Rosie Waldeck: ‘Seeing them sit there you would never believe that they were here to plan a war. There was nothing tense or excited about them, nothing that would indicate they sat up all night poring over their maps.’ Even today, Waldeck’s observations are of great interest; despite her American diffidence, she was deeply involved with everything and everyone in the hotel. Night after night she sat talking to Germans in the flush of victory, to generals, diplomats and young officers, without”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“time for things like wedding rings”
― Geert Mak, Reizen zonder John: op zoek naar Amerika

“was possessed of clear judgement and great discernment. She committed her European experiences to paper in 1942 under the title Athene Palace, the name then of today’s Bucharest Hilton, where she lived and worked for seven months. For years Rumania had had its own violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard. From 1938 the country was ruled by strict anti-Semitic legislation. At the same time, King Carol II was trying to make himself Rumania’s dictator, as Miklós Horthy had done in Hungary in 1920 and Ioannis Metaxas in Greece in 1936. Since spring 1940, Bucharest had been run by a coalition of fascists and generals led by Marshal Ion Antonescu. In September, Germany more or less took over the country, which was crucially important for the Reich’s energy supplies.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“There’s no truth in the idea that the Germans had closed ranks, or that they were terrorised by the SS and the Gestapo. Not at all: 60 per cent of the people were Nazis themselves.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“the ground.’ In his war diaries he described the pandemonium that arose then among these experienced politicians from all parts of the political spectrum. ‘Quite a number seemed to jump up from the table and come running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office. I was sure that every minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“Zo beschrijft hij hoe wijlen burgemeester Bicket het voordelige ambt van vendumeester -- goed voor zesduizend gulden per jaar -- toeschoof aan zijn veertienjarige zoontje Hendrick. Het burgemeesterszoontje Jan Corver Trip was zelfs al op zijn vijfde jaar postmeester op Rotterdam, Delft en Den Haag. Toen hij acht was maakte zijn vader hem postmeester van het Hamburgse Postcomptoir. Toen hij achttien was, werd hij ook nog kerkmeester van de Nieuwe Walenkerk. Toen hij op zijn negentiende overleed -- hij had een leren riem te strak en te lang om zijn lijf geklemd om zijn overtollige vet te camoufleren, waardoor 'zijne edele's partijen, long en lever aan malkander waren gegroeid' -- liet hij een vermogen na van twee ton.”
― Geert Mak, Amsterdam

“almost fifty per cent and stayed high until the end of the 1950s. In 1957, at the peak of the boom, 123 in every 1,000 women gave birth – a figure unprecedented in American history – and all those children were brought up in far greater prosperity than their parents had known. ‘There never was a country more fabulous than America,’ wrote British historian Robert Payne after a visit in 1949. ‘She bestrides the world like a colossus: no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations . . . Half the wealth of the world, more than half the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world’s machines are concentrated in American hands; the rest of the world lies in the shadow of American industry.’ It was the American Century, and so it would remain.”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had already been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“end of the 1950s. The great story of post-war America revolves around the adjustment to this totally new way of living together. Within a period of less than ten years, the basic values of the dominant culture were turned on their head. Americans switched from a culture in which they had to deal with deprivation – with all the rigour and tenacity that required – to one in which the enjoyment of abundance, and the ever-increasing enjoyment of ever-greater abundance, was central. This quiet social revolution, this fundamental change of priorities, this evaporation of American values such as thrift, frugality and solidarity, made quite a few Americans feel insecure. They sensed that the festivities surrounding washing machines, pink”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“On the face of it, life was God-fearing and respectable. Almost sixty per cent of American families owned their own homes, an unprecedented figure. The divorce rate was remarkably low, at 8.9 couples per thousand all told in 1958. According to Gallup polls, in 1940 a third of American adults went to church every week; by 1955 the proportion had risen to around half. To the ‘happiness question’, more than half of all Americans answered ‘very happy’ in 1957. Never had there been so much quantifiable happiness, and never would there be so much again. Anyone wishing to be catapulted back into the America of those years should take a look on YouTube at the home movie Disneyland Dream, filmed in the summer of 1956 by enthusiastic amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow, who”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“These austere lifestyles were accompanied by an ideal of equality. In the first half of the twentieth century, most Americans liked to see themselves as members of a more or less uniform middle class. ‘The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio and TV set,’ Harper’s Magazine wrote with satisfaction in 1947. With this ideal came a sense of proportion; you didn’t always need to”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“nine-hour flight to California aboard a TWA Super Constellation, with room for no fewer than sixty-four passengers. Next we see the simple funfair of the original Disneyland. At the hotel, the Barstows are jubilant that the chic swimming pool is open to them. Yes, the days when such luxury was reserved for the stylish elite are over. The family deals with its budgetary constraints by not eating in restaurants but picnicking outdoors. There is no hint of any doubt or cynicism. Every minute of the movie is filled with sun, innocence and boundless enthusiasm. It’s true, Barstow says at the end, Walt Disney is right: Disneyland is ‘the happiest place on earth’. The entire family is ‘forever grateful to Scotch brand cellophane tape’ for the experience. The closing chorus of this charming cantata”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe:”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“breach between the old society of survival and the consumer society; getting into debt, always regarded as a burden and possibly a disgrace, was suddenly perfectly normal, even encouraged.”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“countries under the unyielding rule of Berlin and the discipline of the SS and the Gestapo. It was Churchill in particular who opposed all compromise, who talked to his fellow cabinet members for days on end and finally won over Chamberlain, who, after 1938, was also convinced of Hitler’s evil intentions. ‘Hitler’s terms, if accepted, would put us completely at his mercy,’ Churchill believed. And: ‘Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.’ In May 1940 it would have been blindly optimistic to think that Great Britain could defeat the Germans without massive support from the Soviet Union and the United States. But the British were persuaded that Germany would once again encounter difficulties due to”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“those manufacturing companies: America! With our pocket money we bought flat packets of chewing gum, beautifully wrapped, that included a picture of a movie star – we collected those – and it all smelled strange and rosy: America! On short-wave radio an army station crackled into the room, with an announcer who might start talking right over a swing band: America! Lionel Hampton came to the Netherlands in September 1953 and his saxophonist lay on his back onstage and carried on playing. Hampton abandoned his vibraphone to play drums for a while and to do an improvised dance to ‘Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop’. De Gelderlander, our provincial newspaper, wrote: ‘How vast must be the emptiness of those hearts that have lost any longing for values more exalted than those of Negro moaning.’ But”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“considered that a dishonourable death, that was something for traitors. During one of those air raids – we were sitting around in a little group – he told us that unimaginable atrocities were being carried out in the East. People there were being clubbed to death, hanged, tortured, burned alive, horrible things, for no good reason. “But,” that officer said, “those stories about the death factories, that’s nothing but English propaganda.” That’s what that officer said, with the deepest conviction, one week before he was executed.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“House of Commons: ‘You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’ Later this speech was generally cited as a classic example of determination and courage, but the reactions at the time were not all that enthusiastic. In his diary, Harold Nicolson noted: ‘When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, when Churchill comes in the applause is less.’ Many of the British, including King George VI and most of the Conservatives, considered Churchill in those days to be a warmonger and a dangerous adventurer. There was a strong undercurrent in favour of reaching an accord with Hitler.”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“the audience, unaccustomed to any of this, went wild: America! The high point of this whirring, pale-blue era was 1960. The average American earned more than 5,000 dollars a year; a newly built house cost 12,500 dollars, a car 2,600, a pair of shoes 13, a litre of gasoline 6.7 cents. The tail fins on the new Cadillac Eldorado were the largest and sharpest ever seen. In April, the world’s first weather satellite was launched. In the Philippines, the Japanese government tried in vain to coax the last two Japanese soldiers out of the jungle – they refused to believe the war was over. Xerox put the first commercial photocopier on the market. Chubby Checker started a new dance craze, the twist. Frank Sinatra, cigarette in hand, stood and sang in a short film called Music for”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“were suddenly up for discussion. In all sorts of ways, the American society of the 1950s was in a state of fermentation: black citizens wanted equal rights; students and artists were experimenting in a bid to find alternatives to the consumer society; conservatives were carrying out experiments of their own in an attempt to hold on to their religion and traditions; and women had begun to realise they were suffocating in the pretty-pretty life of the suburbs.”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“Mass television-viewing had some rather less desirable effects on Americans as well. Graphs for those years show a clear change of direction: Americans read fewer books, did less”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“One is struck again and again, in all the historical documents, by how small the Gestapo organisation really was, by how the Nazis repressed the entire German population with such a relatively small apparatus – particularly compared to, for example, the East German Stasi later in the same century. The Stasi employed more than 100,000 people to keep an eye on 17 million East Germans, while the Gestapo apparently needed no more than 40–60,000 for an empire of some 80 million”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“and approved for sale. Dr John Rock, champion of the pill, rejoiced that humanity’s rampant sex drive would finally be stripped of its consequences: ‘The greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.’ The Cold War resumed at full intensity after an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. War hero Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president; it was his last year in office. The election campaign was a neck-and-neck race between man of the people Richard Nixon and rich kid Jack Kennedy. Nineteen sixty is the year in which this story begins.”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck

“in any way concealing her own Jewish background. What struck her most of all during those months was the enormous élan of almost all the Germans she met, ‘the dynamism of the National Socialist revolution, the dynamism which went through the entire military and bureaucratic machine of Hitler’s Germany.’ It was like an intoxication, she wrote. ‘All said that they never felt as free in their work as they did now.’ At the same time, their diplomacy was less than brilliant. ‘The Nazis were good at conquering, but deplorable at exploiting their conquests, even for their own good, not to speak of the good of the conquered.’ She also knew full well that this young, intellectual generation of Germans would, sooner or later, end up in conflict with the limitations of party”
― Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

“going on. Models had always been different each year, but consistently solid and square, usually black or dark green. Suddenly a completely new generation was on gleaming display – wider and softer than ever. I’ve looked at the advertisements for that year. The earthy colours of previous decades were replaced by pastels, pinks and pale blues. The Chevrolet Bel Air and the Pontiac Star Chief, with their Strato-Streak V8 engines, were available in ‘Avalon Yellow’ as well as ‘Raven Black’. The new models had rounded, panoramic windscreens and, in the case of the new Cadillac, a strange rear end with tail fins like a fighter plane. Sales soared, rising by thirty-seven per cent between 1954 and 1955 alone. People were no longer so concerned about technology and durability; it was more”
― Geert Mak, In America: Travels with John Steinbeck