1. Deeply transgressive novel that's Dovstvyeoskian in length and intellectual depth. I feel assailed by the bNotes (since the book is unsummarizable)
1. Deeply transgressive novel that's Dovstvyeoskian in length and intellectual depth. I feel assailed by the book yet I keep on reading.
2. It reminds me a little of my emotional response while watching the World Trade Center collapse from my UWS rooftop. (In the days after, whenever a plane flew over, everyone would look up: "Oh, it's one of ours. . .")
3. The narrative often feels derived from post hoc historical considerations, but I suppose this is inevitable. For instance, the talk our Dr. Aue has with his friend Thomas about the possibility of the Wehrmacht failing to subdue Moscow before the winter. There’s a post-hoc feeling, too, when Sturmbannführer Blobel rants against the Wehrmacht’s efforts to distance themselves from the killing. Examples might be multiplied. So, I wonder, were these considerations undertaken by the Germans themselves during the war? But then isn’t this the problem with historical novels generally? Didn’t Tolstoy have to deal with it too?
4. Years ago I began reading widely on the Holocaust. So it's almost as if I can recognize the source material as I read. No doubt I am sometimes mistaken, but sometimes I think I've absolutely nailed it. Here are a few of my suspicions.
5. The Einsatzgruppen— death squads which entered Poland with the Wehrmacht in September 1939 — found the direct killing of Jews too traumatic. This repulsion was one of the reasons why an industrialized killing process requiring less human involvement had to be devised, resulting in the lethal adaptations of Auschwitz and other camps. These “factories” however were not up and running until late 1941 at the earliest, and most of the mass killing — gassing— began in 1942.
“As the weeks went by, the officers acquired experience, and the soldiers got used to the procedures; at the same time, one could see that everyone was searching for his place in all this, thinking about what was happening, each in his own way. At table, at night, the men discussed the actions, told anecdotes, and compared their experiences, some sadly, others cheerfully. Still others were silent; they were the ones who had to be watched. We had already had two suicides; and one night, a man woke up emptying his rifle into the ceiling, he had to be held down by force, and a noncom had almost been killed. Some reacted with brutality, sometimes sadism: they struck at the condemned, tormented them before making them die; the officers tried to control these outbursts, but it was difficult, there were excesses. Very often our men photographed the executions; in their quarters, they exchanged their photos for tobacco, or stuck them to the wall - anyone could order prints of them. We knew, through the military censors, that many of them sent these photos to their families in Germany; some even made little albums of them, with captions: this phenomenon worried the hierarchy but seemed impossible to control. Even the officers were losing their grip. Once, while the Jews were digging, I surprised [SS officer] Bohr singing: ‘The earth is cold, the earth is sweet, dig, little Jew, dig deep.’ The Dolmetscher was translating; it shocked me deeply. I had known Bohr for some time now, he was a normal man, he had no particular animosity against the Jews, he did his duty as he was told; but obviously, it was eating at him, he wasn't reacting well. Of course there were [also] some genuine anti-Semites in the Kommando.” (p. 88-89)
6. The author evinces a deep knowledge of the units and divisions and legions of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the place names, terrain, equipment, ranks (Hauptscharführer, Obersturmführer etc.), not to mention some of the many German euphemisms for killing. My favorites are Sonderbehandlung or special treatment (gassing), and Aktion or bloody massacre. Victor Klemperer wrote an entire book about such Nazi euphemisms; it’s called The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii.
7. The author was about 38 when the novel was published by Gallimard in French, though he’s American and a Yale grad. One wonders in what way his father’s many novels of espionage — The Amateur, Mother Russia, etc. — were influential. The father was publishing in the 1970s when the author was in short pants. How fortunate such a dad must have been for the author's development. I am reminded of other literary fathers & sons, — a relatively rare phenomenon — Kingsley Amis & Martin Amis; etc.
8. Dr. Aue’s speech about the ancient rituals of homosexuality is both preposterously long and clearly an evocation of Remembrance of Things Past. It cleverly seeks to provide his handsome young friend, whom he meets on leave in Crimea, with something like a National Socialist basis for homosexual behavior.
"’After the thirteenth of June,’ I went on, ‘when it turned out that many of Röhm's accomplices, like Heine’s, were also his lovers, the Führer was afraid that the homosexuals might form a State within a State, a secret organization, like the Jews, which would pursue its own interests and not the interests of the Volk, an Order of the Third Sex, like our Black Order. That's what was behind the denunciations. [“The Night of Long Knives”] But it's a political problem, not an ideological one. From a truly National Socialist point of view, you could on the contrary regard brotherly love as the real cement of a warlike, creative Volksgemeinschaft. . .' — ‘Yes, but still! Homosexuals are effeminate, men-women as you said. How do you think a State could tolerate men that are unfit to be soldiers?’ — ‘You're wrong. It's a false notion that contrasts the virile soldier with the effeminate invert. That type of man does exist, of course, but he's a modern product of the corruption and degeneration of our cities, Jews or Jewified men still caught in the clutches of priests or ministers. Historically, the best soldiers, the elite soldiers, have always loved other men. They kept women, to watch over their household and give them children, but reserved all their emotions for their comrades. Look at Alexander! And Frederick the Great, even if no one wants to acknowledge it, was the same. The Greeks even drew a military principle from it: in Thebes, they created the Sacred Band, an army of three hundred men that was the most famous of its time. The men fought as couples, each man with his lover. . . .’” (p. 197)
9. In my view, the book doesn’t take off until page 291. It’s the winter of 1941-42 and the narrator and his fellow officers are 450 miles south of Stalingrad, in the Caucasus Mountains, distracting themselves with “Who’s the Jew?” Here’s a portion of the discussion:
"‘From the Abwehr's standpoint,’ von Gilsa explained, ‘it's a purely objective question of the security of the rear areas. If these Bergjuden cause disturbances, hide saboteurs, or help partisans, then we have to treat them like any enemy group. But if they keep quiet, there's no reason to provoke the other tribes by comprehensive repressive measures.’ — ‘For my part," Bräutigam said in his slightly nasal voice, ‘I think we have to consider the internal relations of the Caucasian peoples as a whole. Do the mountain tribes regard these Bergjuden as belonging to them, or do they reject them as Fremdkörper [foreigners]? The fact that Herr Shadov intervened so vigorously in itself pleads in their favor.’ — ‘Herr Shadov may have, let's say, political reasons that we don't understand,’ Bierkamp suggested. ‘I agree with Dr. Bräutigam's premises, even if I cannot accept the conclusion he draws from them.’ He read some extracts from my [narrator Aue’s] report, concentrating on the opinion of the Wannsee Institute. ‘This,’ he added, ‘seems confirmed by all the reports of our Kommandos in the theater of operations of Army Group A. These reports show us that dislike of the Jews is general. The Aktions against the Jews — such as dismissals from public offices, yellow star, forced labor — all meet with full understanding from the general population and are heartily welcomed. Significant voices within the population even find actions so far against the Jews insufficient and demand more determined actions.’ — ‘You are quite right when it comes to the recently settled Russian Jews,’ Bräutigam retorted. ‘But we don't have the impression that this attitude extends to the so-called Bergjuden, whose presence dates back several centuries at least." He turned to Köstring: ‘I have here a copy of a communication to the Auswärtiges Amt from Professor Eiler. According to him, the Bergjuden are of Caucasian, Iranian, and Afghan descent and are not Jews, even if they have adopted the Mosaic religion.’ — ‘Excuse me,’ said Noeth, the Abwehr officer from the OKHG, ‘but where did they receive the Jewish religion from, then?’ — ‘That's not clear,’ Bräutigam replied….’” (p.295-96)
The subject, historiography perverted for genocidal ends, has been explored elsewhere, but to my knowledge its treatment has not been equalled in fiction.
10. The virtues of narrative — continuity, catharsis, closure etc— are things that the Holocaust does not possess. The book abounds in the pleasures of storytelling; it’s masterly. There’s an account of famished soldiers dying in Stalingrad that’s terribly sad. Does it humanize the Einsatzgruppen, too? I’m afraid it does. No doubt this is what director Claude Lanzmann meant when he criticised the novel. Are the pleasures of narrative misplaced in such a story? Someone said, after Auschwitz to write a poem is barbaric. That’s a noble view. But, there is poetry, there is art.
11. In the Stalingrad kessel – a few days before General Paulus's surrender to the Red Army — Dr Aue, feverish and lice-ridden, begins to ramble; his narration soon turns phantasmagorical.
"I was walking on the Volga . . . . In front of me, a dark hole opened up in the ice, quite wide, probably pierced by a high-caliber shell that had fallen short. . . . I dove in. The water was clear and welcoming, a maternal kind of warmth. The swift current created whirlpools that soon carried me away under the ice. All kinds of things were passing by me, which I could clearly make out in this green water: horses whose feet the current was moving as if they were galloping, fat and almost flat fish, bottom-feeders, Russian corpses with swollen faces, entwined in their curious brown capes, pieces of clothing and uniforms, tattered flags floating on their poles, a wagon wheel that, probably soaked in oil, was still burning as it swirled beneath the water. . . Above me, the ice formed an opaque screen, but the air lasted in my lungs, I wasn't worried and kept swimming, passing sunken barges full of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current. Then slowly in front of me the water grew lighter, columns of green light plunged down from holes in the ice, became a forest, then melded into each other as the blocks of ice drifted farther apart. I finally rose back to the surface to regain my breath. . . . Upriver, to my left, a Russian ship was drifting in the current, lying on its side, gently burning. Despite the sun, a few large flakes of luminous snow were falling, which lay hidden as soon as they touched the water. Paddling with my hands, I turned around: the city, stretched all along the shore, lay hidden behind a thick curtain of black smoke. Above my head, seagulls were reeling and shrieking, looking at me curiously, or possibly calculatingly, then flying off to perch on a block of ice; the sea was still far away, though . . . ." (p. 415-416)
And then it corkscrews into something close to slapstick. Dr Aue comes out onto the far side of the Volga where he sees a dirigible aloft and walks toward it. Soon uniformed men without military insignia accompany him aloft in a kind of balloonist's basket to meet a mad doctor (foreshadowing Auschwitz) whom he interviews then has to escape by climbing a ladder, running across the dirigible's convex surface chased by thugs with guns, before parachuting to safety.
12. Many historical figures appear. Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höss (see Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz), Odilo Globocnik, Josef Mengele, Albert Speer (see Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth), and Hitler himself, batshit in the Führerbunker. When Aue travels to Occupied Paris in the center of the book he meets old pro-Nazi friends again like Robert Brasillach, Lucien Rebatet, Charles Maurras, and is newly introduced to another rabid antisemite, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (Celine). All the names but Celine's I had to look up. Moreover, Dr. Aue walks insouciantly around Paris. He's on convalescent leave and primarily concerned with his next posting. He's a careerist.
13. Meanwhile a hideous extermination is taking place in Poland. This is the background to Aue's days. While cracking jokes with his friend Thomas, dining out, "having my ass drilled by unknown boys," (p. 763) taking his twin sister to Potsdam, seeking a new post, while all this and more transpires — 6 million Jews are executed. Goldhagen called it "eliminationist anti-semitism." Eleven million if we include the Roma, "asocials," homosexuals, and 3 million Soviet POWs who were starved to death in open camps.
14. There's a twins motif. Dr. Aue and his sister, Una, are twins. When he goes to visit his mother in Italy, she is watching the children of friends, twins who can't be told apart. I think the image has popped up about five or six times. This might make it convenient for Aue when he visits Auschwitz, where Dr. Mengele performed infamous pseudo-scientific experiments on twins, causing enormous pain and death. See Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.
15. A great enigma is the tussle within the SS between those who want to exterminate the Jews, and those who wish to employ them as slaves. It's interesting to see dramatized a conflict that some scholars have blamed for Germany's loss of the war, since it diverted essential investment from a commitment to so called total war. They couldn't work the prisoners as slaves because they were too intent upon killing them. In this sense, they were shooting themselves in the foot. Here's the fundamental argument: Eichmann wants to kill the Jews, and Aue wants war production out of them.
"'You know, Obersturmbannführer [Eichmann],' [Aue] replied evenly, 'in 1941 we had the most modern army in the world. Now we've gone almost half a century back. All our transports at the front are driven by horses. The Russians are advancing in American Studebakers. And in the United States, millions of men and women are building those trucks day and night. And they're also building ships to transport them. Our experts confirm that they're producing a cargo ship a day. That's many more than our submarines could sink, if our submarines still dared to go out. Now we're in a war of attrition. But our enemies aren't suffering from attrition. Everything we destroy is replaced, right away, the hundred aircraft we shot down this week are already being replaced. Whereas with us, our losses in materiel aren't made good, except maybe for the tanks, if that.' Eichmann puffed himself out: 'You're in a defeatist mood tonight!' . . . 'I'm not a defeatist,' I retorted. 'I'm a realist. You have to see where our interests lie.' But Eichmann, a little drunk, refused to be logical: 'You reason like a capitalist, a materialist ... This war isn't a question of interests. If it were just a question of interests, we'd never have attacked Russia.' I wasn't following him anymore, he seemed to be on a completely different tack, but he didn't stop, he pursued the leaps of his thinking. 'Were not waging war so that every German can have a refrigerator and a radio. Were waging war to unify Germany, to create a Germany in which you'd want to live. You think my brother Helmut was killed for a refrigerator? Did you fight at Stalingrad for a refrigerator?' I shrugged, smiling: in this state, there wasn't any point in talking to him." (p. 767)
16. Himmler, declaring the "Jewish Question" solved, orders Auschwitz shut in October 1944. Subsequently attempts were made to demolish it. Dr Aue's account of the Death Marches rings true, but not his involvement in them. Not his running about trying to secure food and clothing for the exhausted inmates or trying to stop the killing of those who can't walk....more
For me, this book was — like Why Nations Fail, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers— a keystone narrative that linked up many For me, this book was — like Why Nations Fail, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers— a keystone narrative that linked up many formerly disparate threads of my personal reading. Such books are rare pleasures. I had always known that Alexander von Humboldt’s story was a link missing from my general knowledge. The praises of Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould alone told me as much. But I didn't know this was generally due to anti-German sentiment so powerful in the U.S. and Europe after World War II.
During his Latin American explorations (1799-1804), Humboldt was front page news in the West. He and his team climbed volcanoes, pressed plants, murdered fascinating new animal species, reset the coordinates, often grossly incorrect, for scores of cartographic features (rivers, mountains, etc.), slept on the shores of the Orinoco River, dodged leopards, crocodiles and other predators, and were eaten alive by mosquitoes. This was a time when his name was a byword for adventure on the lips of every schoolboy, even in the U.S.
Afterward Humboldt returned to Europe, settling in Paris, where he wrote up his findings. What resulted was a series of paradigm-smashing publications for both scientists and general readers. He is the first true naturalist as we understand that term today. It helped that Humboldt was a writer of startling clarity and concision. Until then, it seems, writing for the masses was not considered a career-expanding opportunity by men of science. Author Andrea Wulf does not say why, but I think it probably had something to do with the presumed loss of reputation for so craven an act of moneymaking. Humboldt changed all that. Sacks and Gould and countless other writers would become beneficiaries of his breakthrough.
But his insight into the unplumbed market for science writing is secondary to his real achievement. Humboldt’s revolutionary act was to view nature as a unified force dependent upon myriad interactions and mutual reciprocities, not reduced to mind-numbing categories as taxonomists and other systematists were then doing. Humboldt saw the full ecological impact of forests; therefore, he was the first to warn about deforestation. He saw how greedy cash crops (monoculture), cleared needed forest, leeched the ground of minerals and emptied aquifers, thus touching the fates of countless animal species, including humans. Moreover, he saw the importance of expressing one’s personal emotional responses to nature and he wrote with a passion that repelled some cold men of science, but enlisted scores of readers from all walks of life.
He had as personal acquaintances Simón Bolívar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who had him arrested briefly as a German spy. They all read him. His works constituted an epiphany for Charles Darwin, who took Humboldt’s Personal Narrative on board H.M.S. Beagle with him and who later met his hero. Henry David Thoreau could not have written Walden without Humboldt's example. The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron all read and were influenced by him; as was Edgar Allan Poe, who dedicated his Eureka: A Prose Poem to him.
The major figures succeeding Humboldt and carrying his torch, if you will, include George Perkins Marsh, whose Man and Nature coalesced Humboldt’s environmental warnings, previously scattered throughout many volumes, into a clarion call for the conservation of the natural world; Ernst Haeckel, the prolific marine biologist, who virtually broadcast the Humboldtian sensibility to countless millions through his own popular books and articles; and John Muir, the almost comically ecstatic naturalist largely responsible for creating the U.S. federal parks system.
P.S. Humboldt was almost certainly homosexual. He usually had some slender young man with him in the guise of assistant. He avoided women like the plague, except those who could talk science, and he was said, if we are to believe Wulf (I do), to have disappointed entire cities of women who thought he'd make a fine match. His life was, in part, another bullet to the gizzard of that ridiculous fiction, the celibate bachelor....more
Read the Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Robert Walser essays. which are vintage Sebald. Waiting to read the works of Mörike, Keller and Hebel, which I don'Read the Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Robert Walser essays. which are vintage Sebald. Waiting to read the works of Mörike, Keller and Hebel, which I don't know, before finishing remaining essays....more
Author Tina Rosenberg never simplifies the immense complexity of the issues which inform her story. If anything, she dives right in, fully immersing hAuthor Tina Rosenberg never simplifies the immense complexity of the issues which inform her story. If anything, she dives right in, fully immersing her reader in the formidable challenges the three states— Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany—faced in their rocky transition from communism to democracy just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The question the book raises is who is to blame for the crimes of the communist era and who should be punished? Scenes of great political or legal or social complexity are described until the reader begins to feel the earth shifting underfoot, the tale is so dense, but then comes a gradually dawning clarity. In this sense the book reminds me—not in its diction or style so much as in its relentless intellectual rigor—of V.S. Naipaul at his best. This is the highest praise I can offer any writer. I particularly want to cite Naipaul's two Islam books and the three books on India. The Haunted Land is solid throughout but the penultimate chapter, "The Conversation," in which Stasi personnel and collaborators try to justify their spying on friends and associates, will set your hair on fire. These are absolutely astounding flights of Trumpian thinking. Good grief. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1995 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1996....more
I have often lamented the lack of German World War I perspectives. Erich Maria Remarque aside, I usually read works by British and French scholars, meI have often lamented the lack of German World War I perspectives. Erich Maria Remarque aside, I usually read works by British and French scholars, memoirists, diarists, and novelists. Fortunately here is a fine memoir translated from the German by the esteemed Michael Hofmann. I like its very flat spare prose. Everything is simply allowed to stand for itself: bravery, death, corpses, blood, shrapnel, friendship, dreams. Plainly declarative, there is no unnecessary coloration, no prolixity, no subtext, little in the way of moral judgement.
After reading Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That about the efficiency of the German trenches, I found it fascinating to get a sense of how those fortifications were built and how they functioned. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War goes on at some length about the greater efficiency of German soldiers than their opponents. Jünger has here provided at least one example: the Germans simply didn't have the resources--munitions, for example--that the Entente Powers had. They had to do more with less, and did so:
Hundreds of British soldiers were running forward through a flat communications trench, little troubled by the weak gunfire we were able to direct at them. The scene was indicative of the inequality of resources with which we had to fight. Had we essayed the same thing, our units would have been shot to pieces in a matter of minutes.
Author Ernst Jünger was nineteen, the proverbial ephebe, when he went to the front. He was at first an enlisted man in the infantry who after a brief convalescence was commissioned an ensign and given responsibility for a platoon. He was frequently on the frontlines during the early years, responsible for his short stretch of the line, his poor comrades dropping all around him like flies. I suppose the oddest moments are when the tone becomes madcap, devil may care, despite the storm of steel..
Jünger was wounded with varying degrees of severity fourteen times by his count, except for the last time he was afterward always sent back to the front. Such travails you would think might sour a man, yet the attitude he evinced toward the British, which his soldiers shared, was anything but ungentlemanly:
The [British] sargeant practically had both legs sheered off by hand-grenade splinters; even so, with stoical calm, he kept his pipe clenched between his teeth to the end. This incident, like all our other encounters with the Britishers, left us pleasantly impressed by their bravery and manliness.
In the Introduction to the book translator Michael Hofmann quotes Gide who wrote in his diary: "Ernst Jünger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith." I would agree. It is the finest book on World War I from the German perspective that I know. It also represents an utterly obsolete means of statecraft. ...more
Set on the Gangetic Plain some 2,600 years ago, Siddhartha is about one man's search for enlightenment. Siddhartha, son of a Brahmin, even in the presSet on the Gangetic Plain some 2,600 years ago, Siddhartha is about one man's search for enlightenment. Siddhartha, son of a Brahmin, even in the presence of Gautama Buddha himself, is unable to find a way if it depends on the teachings of others. There is, Siddhartha comes to believe, no single illuminated path for all men and women to follow. We must each of us make our own mistakes. We must all suffer, and no warning against it will ever help us. For to live some kind of bizarre life of comfort that prevents suffering also prevents our finding peace. The novel's especially illuminating if you have some understanding of Vedic Religion and how it fed developments in Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. The writing style is very honed, lean, without abstruse digressions. It fulfills for me the fundamental requirement of all good fiction: that it reveal a fully imagined world. And isn't that what we really require from narrative: that it take us out of ourselves; that, to paraphrase John Gardner (The Art of Fiction, Grendel, Mickelsson's Ghosts, Nickel Mountain, October Light, etc.), it perpetuate the dream? Highly recommended. I much prefer it to Steppenwolf. Up next Journey to the East and The Glass Bead Game....more
The novel starts well with a preface by the young man of the house where the Steppenwolf (Harry Haller) is lodging, but then bogs down in a long disquThe novel starts well with a preface by the young man of the house where the Steppenwolf (Harry Haller) is lodging, but then bogs down in a long disquisition on Harry's suffering called "The Treatise on the Steppenwolf." I found these pages turgid and thought they might easily be skipped. It's not until Harry enters a dance hall around page 95 that we meet Hermine, who becomes a matriarchal-figure for him; Maria, who becomes his lover; and Pablo, the impresario who leads the band and become's Harry's drug supplier. Hermine and Harry are soul mates with a death wish. They do not see the possibility of peace in this world, but only after death, which is supposed to bring them release and fulfillment. The culmination of the book is a great ball where Harry dances until dawn and goes to the subsequent psychedelic drug fest known as The Magic Theater--For Madmen Only. I can see why the novel was so popular during the 1960s. There is liberal guiltless consumption of street drugs, mind-blowing sex (straight), cross dressing, and passages in the so-called Magic Theater where Harry is clearly tripping. The book is a novel of ideas and it is a strange freestyle combination of Buddhism and Christianity that informs its spiritual quest. Read this roman philosophique, at least its first hundred pages, as a period piece. The material of the first half to my mind does not transcend its time of its composition, the mid-1920s, i.e. decadent Weimar Germany. In these early pages author Hesse is taken up with a number of ideas: Freudian psychoanalysis; Decartesian mind-body "dualism"; Jungian archetypes and the collective unconcious; Einstein's theory of relativity; everything Nietszche; and a lot of literature in which the double or doppleganger runs amok. (Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson are some English-language examples). But then we get to page 95. Thank God....more
This severe, judgemental little book is solely about the politics -- internal and external -- of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary in the years This severe, judgemental little book is solely about the politics -- internal and external -- of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary in the years stated. There is nothing in it about wars fought, just passing references to their having occurred. There's virtually nothing in it about cultural life. The biographies of those involved are kept slender. The focus is exclusively on the Emperors' courts at Vienna and the many permutations that the monarchy went through -- who its ministers were and what their mistakes and successes were and who they dealt with abroad -- to manage a vast, polyglot state which eventually collapsed along nationalist and cultural lines. Lacking descriptive color, it can be very dry. On the other hand, I know of no more condensed survey of all the socio-historic trends and economic pressures the state was subject to in that period. Especially recommended for those with an interest in how Austria handled the Revolution of 1848 and it's run-up to the first world war....more
This is about a European walking tour begun by the author in 1933. He was 18 at the time and his budget was £4 a month, sent poste restant to him alonThis is about a European walking tour begun by the author in 1933. He was 18 at the time and his budget was £4 a month, sent poste restant to him along his route. The book’s unusual intellectual depth derives from the fact that he did not write the memoir until much later in life. This first volume, of three, appeared in his 62nd year.
Leigh Fermor’s departure from London takes the form of a lengthy description of his steamer, the Stadthouder, pulling away from Irongate Wharf under Tower Bridge on a rainy night. His literary technique here is to slow the moment down through excess description as if to savor it. This is just the first spate of very rich description that one gets throughout.
He naps in the pilot house and is in snowy Holland in a blink. Here everything reminds him of Dutch painting. On the third or fourth night he sleeps above a blacksmith's shop. Promptly at six he’s awakened by the clanging hammer, the hiss of hot metal in water, the smell of singeing horn as a horse is shoed. Heading for the German border, he comes across a belfry and, almost reflexively, climbs it:
The whole kingdom was revealed. The two great rivers loitered across [the landscape] with their scattering of ships and their barge processions and their tributaries. There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods. (p.34)
His trek across Germany comes at the very start of the Thousand Year Reich. Hitler has been Chancellor just nine months. The people he meets are wonderful. He picks up two fräuleins in Stuttgart--he was strikingly handsome--who don't let him go for days. The parents happen to be away at the time.
There's a funny evening when one of the girls must attend a party held by a business associate of her father. The German host is a Nazi and a man of high, conspicuous style. His ghastly modern villa is deprecated at length. Leigh Fermor watches as the host hits on each young woman in turn, cornering them in his study, and is rejected by both. This does nothing for his standing among other guests. (He styles himself the young woman's cousin, named Brown.) His host introduces him around as the "English globetrotter," which PLF resents. Most amusing is their departure. To protect the girls' reputation he must tell the host he's staying at a nearby hotel, when of course he's sleeping on their sofa:
We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the door of the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff on the ogre [his host's] cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance. (p. 80)
Then he's in Bavaria wrestling strapping peasants on beer hall floors for fun, losing his precious notebook, his walking stick, and waking "catatonic" with hangover, or, as it's called in Germany, katzenjammer. The holidays pass and on 11 February 1934 he turns 19.
He undertakes a recapitulation of his reading at the time, much of it Latin and Greek, which left me envious of his failed classical education. Though he was a terrible student — a scrapper and practical joker it seems — he ended up a formidable linguist, who, only a few years later during the war, along with his unit--he was in uniform by then--successfully kidnapped a German general in Crete. This would make him a national war hero, but I rush ahead.
In Austria, as in Germany, he has occasion, between his nights in peasants’ stables and hutches, to find himself lodged amid extraordinary grandeur. He had the foresight to arrange a number of introductions on the continent. In Austria he fetches up at the schloss of K.u.K. Kämmerer u. Rittmeister i.R., Count Gräfin of the late dual monarchy.
The count was old and frail. He resembled, a little, Max Beerbohm in later life, with a touch of Franz Joseph minus the white side-whiskers. I admired his attire, the soft buckskin knee-breeches and gleaming brogues and a gray and green loden jacket with horn buttons and green lapels. These were accompanied out-of-doors by the green felt hat with its curling blackcock's tail-feather which I had seen among a score of walking sticks in the hall. (p. 137)
We move on to an assessment of the quintessential Austrian schloss. Its myriad details are considered, as well as certain regional variations. The disquisition on German painting (Cranach, Bruegel, Altsdorfer, Dürer, etc.) has the righteous authoritative tone of Robert Hughes. Especially interesting is the author’s point about the lush technique of the Italian Renaissance hardening into a grotesque and visceral style in the north due to the brutal wars of the period. (See C.V. Wedgwood's fine The Thirty Years War which he extols in a note.).
We also get details of the Danube's history, its flora and fauna (including a predacious 15-foot catfish known as the Wels). The author's not infrequent late nights at the various inns along the way are colorful. The one five miles from Ybbs "was made of wood, leather or horn and the chandelier was an interlock of antlers."
A tireless accordionist accompanied the singing and through the thickening haze of wine, even the soppiest songs sounded charming: 'Sag beim Abschied leise "Servus,"' 'Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier,' and 'In einer kleinen Konditorei.' . . . The one I liked most was the Andreas-Hofer-Lied, a moving lament for the great mountain leader of the Tyrolese against Napoleon's armies, executed in Mantua and mourned ever since. (p. 170)
The section on the migrations of peoples I found particularly dense. One thing you have to say for PLF, he does not write down to his reader. He assumes you have much the same knowledge or educational grounding as he does, and for those of his generation this was by and large true.
Always hovering is the horror of the Holocaust to come. It's 1934 after all. But it's not until he enters Köbölkut in the marches of Hungary, and finds himself among the roughhewn peasantry in a local church on Maunday Thursday, listening to the Tenebrae, then, in search of a bed for the night, when he finds himself talking to the local Jewish baker, that the weight of the inevitable hits the reader and the effect is is one of deep dread.
The church had lost its tenebrous mystery. But, by the end of the service a compelling aura of extinction, emptiness and shrouded symbols pervaded the building. It spread through the village and over the surrounding fields. I could feel it even after Köbölkut had fallen below the horizon. The atmosphere of desolation carries far beyond the range of a tolling bell. (p. 299)
I gave the book four stars because the style is very dense and I never quite acclimated to it. I find PLF here at times too humorless and didactic. There's a smell of the lamp, true, but there’s also much that’s wonderful. He's clearly drunk on the history of the Danube basin and he has a gift for making languages interesting on the page even for those who do not speak them. That cannot have been an easy task, but he does it. Particularly interesting was how one almost watches him pick up German, writing about the change of dialects along the way.
There’s so much more I’m not touching on. Bratislava and his friend there, Hans, the banker; the last-minute train trip with Hans to Prague in the snow, a backtrack to the only city on his 2000-plus mile route he does not enter on foot; his discussion the following morning with the Jewish baker's Hasidic heritage; the time he's held at gunpoint on the Austria-Czech border when he's thought to be a smuggler; his contemplative loitering on the bridge between Slovakia and Hungary, the Basilica of Esztergom looming overhead, the Danube rushing below.
But for all it’s verbal richness A Time of Gifts can be at times a bit of a slog. One never careers happily through it. One is always aware of the great erudition, the trumping vocabulary, etc. It is in the end like a cloying, too rich desert. If you’re inclined to indulge, as many will be, (for the book is very highly regarded), so much the better for you....more
Notes on a few points of interest to me. This is not a review or summary. The content is too broad and unwieldy for that.
1. Count Harry Kessler was a Notes on a few points of interest to me. This is not a review or summary. The content is too broad and unwieldy for that.
1. Count Harry Kessler was a Prussian aristocrat, army officer, diplomat, littérateur and homosexual. The biggest surprise for me so far is Kessler's prescience. He senses the national grievance astutely and its likely resolution in further war.
His entries begin after Germany's WW1 defeat. He leaves the Spartacist riots in Berlin behind and goes to Warsaw as Germany's the revolution's ambassador. This is a tenuous time. Kessler's legation is attacked and he must appeal to Polish General Pilsudsky for protection.
30 Nov. 1918 — Moreover, there are "...reports of atrocities by our [German] soldiers in the Bug area, the exclusion of Polish officials from the Suwalki region which is indubitable Polish territory, [and the] fear of Russian Bolsheviks following on the heels of our retreating forces in Lithuania and White Russia."
At first, none of Kessler's dispatches to Berlin are answered, such is the disarray of the home government. Just anarchy, pre-Weimar. Poland breaks with the German legation and Kessler returns to a crumbling nation. Virtually no rule of law, returning soldiers, and Reds marching in the streets.
6 Jan. 1919 — "Now Spartacus approaches in serried ranks. . . . A strong detachment of Government troops moves across Potsdamer Platz at the double. There is shouting all the time. Berlin has become a witches' cauldron wherein opposing forces and ideas are being brewed together. Today history is in the making and the issue is not only whether Germany shall continue to exist in the shape of the Reich or the democratic republic, but whether East or West, war or peace, an exhilarating vision of Utopia or the humdrum everyday world shall have the upper hand. Not since the great days of the French Revolution has humanity depended so much on the outcome of street-fighting in a single city."
Kessler's description of the violence of the Spartacus revolution in Berlin in 1919 reminds me of the Goncourt Brothers' view of the 1848 revolution in Paris. See Pages from the Goncourt Journals.
2. Interestingly, Kessler comes up with an idea for a worker-based League of Nations to counter President Wilson's abomination. In Kessler's League power would be ceded to a consortium of international labor groups. It strikes this reader as unfettered cumbaya. As if the Allies are going to give up any leverage over conquered Germany.
16 Feb. 1919 — "A mistake that leaps to the eye is that the plan has originated with states, political entities which are by nature rivals, rather than with those major economic and humanitarian interests and associations which inherently incline to inter-nationalism. Those are the bodies (international labour organizations, international trading and raw materials federations, major religious com-munities, the Zionists, international banking consortiums, and so on) which should be furnished with power and sanctions against these political entities and become invested with ever more legal independence of any individual states. A framework and set of rules for that purpose is what is needed, and not one which will, just the other way round, provide the ridiculous old elite of Great Powers with even more ascendancy than before."
Nevertheless, in post World War I Europe, Kessler's socialist ideas inexplicably get traction. He is, to be sure, preaching to the choir.
3. The hubbub surrounding German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau's signing of the Treaty of Rapallo with his Soviet counterpart, Georgy Chicherin, is fascinating. This takes place during the Genoa Conference of 1922.
4. One of many ominous entries. "30 October 1922 — Mussolini has been appointed Prime Minister by the King of Italy. This may turn out to be a black day for Italy and Europe."
5. Kessler's diplomatic back-channeling while in London during France's unilateral occupation of the German Ruhr is fascinating.
6. Now on page 231 where Kessler first mentions Hitler. The Beer Hall Putsch has passed with little notice. It’s 1925 and General Paul von Hindenburg has been named President of the Weimar Republic. The author will die in 1937; he saw only a portion of the Third Reich. (Lucky man.) For me though these will be the most interesting pages.
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