It was a shame that Geoghegan does not start his journey from the Rhineland, covered towards the end of the book, as there we learn of his summer experience in Hochdahl, near Düsseldorf on a school exchange with a German boy “that sowed the seeds of (his) love of Germany”. This would have made a
meaningful base from which to launch his story and put me in a better frame of mind to overlook the…mehrIt was a shame that Geoghegan does not start his journey from the Rhineland, covered towards the end of the book, as there we learn of his summer experience in Hochdahl, near Düsseldorf on a school exchange with a German boy “that sowed the seeds of (his) love of Germany”. This would have made a meaningful base from which to launch his story and put me in a better frame of mind to overlook the otherwise deprecatory approach which dominates the descriptions of the other regions he visits.
His text is often spoiled by the use of obscure expressions and monotonous descriptions, and florid and contemptuous prose. The author has a working knowledge of German as he likes to show off with expressions in German – some of which are wrong. His crudities, such as telling his gay English acquaintance to get his dick out when he drools at the ubiquitous rent boys – devalues the tone of the book. His apparent antipathy to Germany and the Germans in the early chapters wrongly caused me to assume that he wanted to produce a book targeted to please British Kraut-bashers and patrons of the gutter press. It seems strange to claim that “every German restaurant…” is decorated with “clutter” comprising “…dried or fabric flowers, wrought iron candle holder, wooden stand for menus…” a “beer mug containing cutlery and serviettes…” and that all German restaurant toilets smell bad?
He does not limit his derogatory tone to descriptions of Germany in the earlier chapters. His description of Brno – a town I know well both before and after the fall of communism – is unrealistically unremittingly ghastly. This and other major towns in central and eastern Europe have largely had good as well as bad aspects, but Geoghegan glibly focuses his blarney on the bad. His view of central and eastern Europe seems to have been immutably formed prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the way he tells it, nothing has changed. Why does the author of a travel book order mass produced, mass-marketed Polish Żywiec when he should be seeking out the excellent small brewery beers available everywhere in Poland? Some passages make me wonder if Geoghegan really visited these places in the 21st century, let alone – as we learn halfway through the book – in 2006 (while he jumps around in time so much, the reader is often confused as to which era he is describing). One wonders that Geoghegan shows little pleasure in his travel experiences, least of all in the prostitutes and rent boys who he encounters wherever he goes in the former Soviet Empire and even in a number of German cities. Even the British he encounters on his receive no preferential treatment. They are also almost exclusively sex-obsessed drunkards and his girlfriend is a superficial good-time girl, who abandons him on one of his visits to the gloomy East. He despises the Czechs and insults the Poles, but Geoghegan reserves his primary contempt for his Germans. No book on the Third Reich can fail to mention the concentration camps but one feels they ere there to dramatize rather than inform. His these concessions to a better side in the Germans do not adequately compensate for the predominantly anti-German tone of the book.
