The Passport Summary

Improved Essays
For Eastern Europe, the 20th century was nothing short of tumultuous; two world wars and stints with totalitarianism troubled the continent. Because of all that happened, it is hard to encompass the breath of the 20th century in a single work. Therefore, it seems that the question “What work best represents the turmoil in Eastern Europe during the 20th century?” does not have an answer. How can one work encompass the mess that was the 20th century? Is it possible to represent the varying struggles and the experiences of so many different people? To try to generalize a century’s worth of Eastern European history into a single volume does no justice to the experiences of the people of Eastern Europe. One Eastern European author, Herta Müller, does not try to generalize. Her novel, The Passport, focuses on the story of a very distinct group of Eastern Europeans—a German minority living in the Banat region of Romania following the Second World War. Instead of capturing every major historical event and figure in Eastern Europe during the 20th century, Müller does something more important; she shows that the complexity of 20th century Eastern Europe is difficult to …show more content…
“In the years following Stalin’s death—since 1989 in particular—the eight nations of Eastern Europe took very different paths, and it has become routine to observe that they never really had much in common in the first place. This is absolutely true: before 1945, they had never previously been unified in any way, and they have startingly little in common now, aside from a common historical memory of communism” (Applebaum, 2012, p. 54). It seems that as a matter of convenience and “simplicity, familiarity, and historical accuracy,” we like to group the countries of Eastern Europe together and generalize their histories and experiences (Applebaum, 2012, p.

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