Max Egremont, author of Some Desperate Glory, tells stories from the "Glass Wall" between Europe and Asia; he takes us to Estonia and Lithuania, conquered and contested for centuries, and among their current citizens, searching for an identity in the wake of the German and Russian occupations of the twentieth century
Few countries have suffered more from the convulsions and bloodshed of twentieth-century Europe than those in the eastern Baltic. Small nations such as the Baltic States of Latvia and Estonia found themselves caught between the giants of Germany and Russia, on a route across which armies surged or retreated. Subjected to foreign domination and conquest since the Northern crusades in the twelfth century, these lands faced frequent devastation as Germans, Russians, and Swedish colonisers asserted control of the territory, religion, government, culture, and inhabitants.
The Glass Wall features an extraordinary cast of characters—contemporary and historical, foreign and indigenous—who have lived and fought in the Baltic and made the atmosphere of what was often thought to be western Europe’s furthest redoubt. Too often it has seemed to be the destiny of this region to be the front line of other people’s wars. By telling the stories of warriors and victims, of philosophers and Baltic barons, of poets and artists, of rebels and emperors, and of others who lived through years of turmoil and violence, Max Egremont reveals a fascinating part of Europe, on a frontier whose limits may still be in doubt.
