4 ideas
The former ruler of an empire spent his days chopping and sawing thousands of trees. When German troops took Paris in 1940, he sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram. Mak uses the estate to show the old imperial order surviving as a sealed-off, self-deceiving remnant while the catastrophe it helped start moved on without it.
History can be recovered by going to the physical sites where events happened, such as a battlefield, a palace, a camp or a town square, and interviewing the last people who remember them. Pairing the landscape as it looks now with living testimony shows how the past persists in present-day places and people, which archives alone flatten. In 1999 this had to happen urgently, because the generation that witnessed both world wars was dying.
Western Europeans remember 1945 as liberation, followed by democracy and prosperity. For much of Central and Eastern Europe, 1945 began another occupation and dictatorship that lasted until 1989. Because of this split, there is no single European story of the century, and any attempt to unify the continent has to deal with memories and grievances that do not match.
Postwar European cooperation was driven by people who had personally seen what nationalism and war produced, so their memory acted as the continent's safeguard. As that generation disappears, the emotional reason for the project weakens. The 1990s Balkan wars show that ethnic slaughter could return to Europe within living memory of the camps.