Munich!

Our book today is Telford Taylor's monumental 1979 work of history, Munich: The Price of Peace, with its damningly familiar black-and-white cover photo of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain vigorously shaking hands with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Taylor provides deep background to the tumultuous summer of 1938, when the world tottered on the brink of war and the future seemed to depend entirely on the ability of these two men to come to some kind of agreement. That was an illusion, of course: the whole time Neville Chamberlain was scheming and feverishly losing sleep over how to accommodate Hitler's vociferous, belligerent nationalism with the treaty boundaries and stipulations that had been in place since the end of the First World War, Hitler was lying about his motivations and industriously planning for the invasion of Czechoslovakia and war. Everything he did and said with Chamberlain - all those diplomatic smiles and hours-long meetings - was only a cynical ploy to give his armed forces time to ready themselves. Early on in the series of meetings that culminated in Munich, Chamberlain infamously told his colleagues that Hitler was the sort of man who would keep his word if he looked you in the face and gave it solemnly. He held to this belief longer than anybody, longer even than his inestimable Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, but he was entirely wrong. Hitler was a faithless.

As has been argued elsewhere, Chamberlain couldn't have acted differently even if he'd known his actions were futile: the way he saw things, peace for the entire West was worth throwing Czechoslovakia into the maw of German expansion. There was a good deal of old-fashioned British imperial racism involved in this (there's likewise no evidence that Hitler's treatment of Germany's Jews weighed on Chamberlain at all), but it shouldn't be entirely dismissed even so. Among the many magisterial aspects of Taylor's account his willingness to draw conclusions from all his research - including conclusions that were as unpopular in 1979 as they are today:

The character and motives of Neville Chamberlain, I believe, have been much distorted in the mirror of historical literature, in which his image is that of a timorous, bumbling, and naive old gentleman, waving an umbrella as a signal of cringing subservience to a bully. Nothing could be further from the truth. Chamberlain did what he did at Munich not because he thought he had to, but because he thought it right. For him, appeasement was a policy not of fear but of common and moral sense. In public life he was a dominant and often domineering man, profoundly convinced of the rightness of his own judgments, and skilled in bending others to his will. Sadly mistaken he may have been; cowardly or indecisive he was not, and for him Munich was no surrender, but a passionate moral act.

The key to Chamberlain's failure was Hitler himself; here at last was a man Chamberlain simply, tragically, couldn't understand. Throughout this big book, Taylor is at his best assessing this dark central figure of the drama - his Hitler is never just a one-dimensional ranter, and that adds greatly to the complexity of the story Taylor's telling:

 But it is quite wrong to regard Hitler as the creation of the magnates and generals. They supported him not because they were in all respects pleased by his methods, but because his program, vague as it was, had ingredients of persuasive appeal to them and to Germans of every station; because of his demagogic skill and remarkable ability to lead and inspire; because, to use an expression borrowed from quite another time and place, he and he alone showed the ability to get the country moving again.

Chamberlain's political enemies were quick to disparage his efforts in September of 1938, Churchill foremost among them:

This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden times.

And his characterization of events - his invoking of the curse of the Danegeld - was certainly justified by later events. Churchill went on to write his own enormous history of those events, and many, many other enormous books have appeared in their turn. On used bookshop shelves, they begin to look like amassed armies, implacable, interchangeable. But readers shouldn't miss Taylor's book. Munich: The Price of Peace is not only absorbing (it's the fastest 1000 pages you'll read all week!), it's also, almost accidentally, an unsurpassed examination of character, good and bad. Highly recommended.

 

Guilt by Association in the Penny Press!

Guilt by an association, or maybe just guilt by an ass? Hard to say. In the 4 January New York Times Book Review, the normally-perceptive Jacob Heilbrunn turns in a review of Timothy Ryback's Hitler's Private Library that's meaty and thoughtful, like Heilbrunn's work usually is. He even gets at the central weakness of Ryback's book (one of them, anyway - another that bothered me and gets no mention in Heilbrunn's review is how namby-pamby Ryback is on the fact that Hitler was evil, but that's a nit we can pick another day!):

Hitler was tapped in 1919 by Capt. Karl Mayr to attend propaganda sessions at the University of Munich and to lecture to soldiers about the Bolshevik peril. As early as September of that year, in response to a soldier's written inquiry about the "Jewish Question," Hitler declared that rational anti-Semitism's "final aim must unshakably be the removal of the Jews altogether." As the historian Ian Kershaw has observed in his biography of Hitler, this response indicates that he adhered unswervingly, from the end of World War I until his final days in Berlin bunker, to nationalism and radical anti-Semitism. In short, Hitler's brooding over texts seems far more likely to have confirmed rather than created his virulent hatreds.

All well and deserved commentary, since Ryback is a little blithe on the essential cause-and-effect at the heart of his subject. but then Heilbrunn takes an amazing left-hand turn:

While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for becoming a mass murderer, it's certainly no impediment. Stalin, too, was an avid reader, boasting a library of 20,000 volumes.

As the little twerp himself might have said, Vas is das? Reading primes the soil for genocidal psychopathy? Not on my watch! This is a quietly stunning stumble on Heilbrunn's part, this equating of having lots of books with being a bookworm. As all true bookworms (a class that certainly includes Heilbrunn) know, reading is all about being open to change. The books you read lay you open; they challenge everything you are; they move around your mental furniture. The description Ryback gives of Hitler's reading - and the description Heilbrunn echoes - is similar to real reading only in the raw physical mechanics. In both cases, books are bought and pages are turned, yes, what's going on in each case is radically different. What Hitler and Stalin did with books was what they did with politics and conquered countries: they ransacked, looking to pick up things on the cheap that they already knew they liked.

What true reading is - what true bookworms do - is churchgoing. With every new book begun, we audition a new god. We test the dogma, we try out the miracles on what ails us, sometimes we proselytize, but the end goal is the exact opposite of readers like Hitler do: we search not for outside confirmation of what we already think but for some wonderful, unlooked-for unknown to reach off the page and seize us. We pray for our faith the be rewarded with the finding of something we didn't know we lacked. That's what real reading is, every single time (is it any wonder it's so addictive, to those of us who understand its real nature?).

It might not make you a better person to read this way, but it does make you wary of ever closing your mind ... because you never know what's going to reach off the page, or in when, or in what way, and real readers crave that thrill too much to wall off any of its possible avenues. Hitler and Stalin and their homicidal ilk are, in addition to everything else, so pitifully close-minded in part because they never actually read books they way books hope to be read.

Hitler may have owned a copy of Tacitus, but he was never open to seeing that author's wry deflation of all pomposity; Hitler may have owned a copy of Clausewitz, but he was never open to that author's sotto voce mockery of arrogance. And how many more millions of people would have lived to comfortable old ages in the 20th century if Hitler had been a real reader and read Horace?

It's almost too painful to think about. I'm going to assume Heilbrunn was just having a bad day (although I'll be curious to see if his essay garners any comments in next week's letters).

Hitler, a Study in Tyranny

Our book today is Alan Bullock's big 1953 biography Hitler, A Study in Tyranny. It's been lauded from all and sundry since the moment of its publication, and although many Hitler books have been published since it appeared, we here at Stevereads still consider it much the best of the bunch.

The reason for this isn't Bullock's research, although his research is prodigious. Others, most notably Ian Kershaw, have equalled or surpassed the sheer amount of document-shifting Bullock did half a century ago. No, for our money the book's supremacy rests on the hard, clear prose Bullock turns out, page after insightful page. He's an old-fashioned literary stylist of a type rarer and rarer among the ranks of professional historians, most of whom nowadays either resort to slang and simplification or else retreat into academic jargon and specialization.

Although the book's subtitle is "A Study in Tyranny," this is a soup-to-nuts biography, starting with the day Hitler is born (when, presumably, he tyrannized nobody - except, as is the way with babies, his mother). The day, and the locale:

The Europe into which he was born, and which he was finally to destroy, gave an unusual impression of stability and permanence at the time of his birth.

It's neat little piston-strikes like that "which he was finally to destroy" that happen so consistently throughout the book. As in Gibbon or Macaulay or Churchill, they add an indispensable dimesion to mere research. We here at Stevereads are big fans of such writing.

Here's Bullock on Hitler's rise to power:

Nazi propaganda later built up a legend which represented Hitler's coming to power as the upsurge of a great national revival. The truth is more prosaic. Despite the mass support he had won, Hitler came to office in 1933 as the result, not of any irresistible revolutionary or national movement sweeping him into power, nor even of a popular victory at the polls, but as part of a shoddy political deal with the 'Old Gang' whom he'd been attacking for months past. Hitler did not seize power; he was jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue.

Reading such stern, unflappable prose, you can practically hear all the crypto-fascists out there (and you know who you are) sputtering and gnashing their teeth.

Bullock hates his subject, of course (due in part to good taste but also in large part to shameful legal decisions in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere; we are unlikely ever to read a published Hitler biography by somebody who DOESN'T hate him ... ominous underscoring of something a very wise man once said, namely that a society which makes laws to forbid its citizens from saying wicked things is one dark day away from being a society which makes laws forbidding its citizens from saying anything), but like William Shirer in his magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he uses that hatred, paradoxically, to keep him objective. From first to last, he sifts the evidence, does the research, and then actually takes the time to labor over his prose.

The result is unflaggingly interesting, even in a book of some 700 pages. Indeed, the wonderful clear, strong tone follows its subject to the grave, and a little beyond:

The question [of the disposal of Hitler's remains] would scarcely be of interest had the failure to discover the remains not been used to through doubt on the fact of Hitler's death. It is, of course, true that no final incontrovertible evidence in the form of Hitler's dead body has been produced. But the weight of circumstantial evidence set out in Mr. Trevor-Roper's book [The Last Days of Hitler, 1947], when added to the state of Hitler's health at the time and the psychological probability that this was the end he would choose, make a sufficiently strong case to convince all but the constitutionally incredulous - or those who have not bothered to study the evidence.

Reading Hitler biographies, even ones as well-written as this one, is straining, staining, and exhausting business. Necessary, but arduous for the sheer amount of evil that such books thread through your mind. We here at Stevereads recommend severe rationing for the rest of you - maybe even just one such biography in your whole lifetime. If so, make it this one.

The Penny Press! Boots on the ground, and Germans!

The latest London Review of Books offers a few interesting items, most of them good and rant-worthy (and be honest! If you weren't enamored of my rants, would you really still BE here?)

Our first item is a positive review by James Wood of Edward St. Aubyn's new book "Mother's Milk."

The review is positive, but that need not detain us here: we at stevereads haven't yet read the book in question, and therefore none of YOU know whether or not it's any good. Once I read it, I'll tell you all what to think about it.

In the meantime, this review gives me the perfect opportunity to whole-heartedly recommend St. Aubyn's previous book, "Some Hope," which is indeed available in this country (I know, I know - thanks to the Interweb, everything's available everywhere ... nevertheless!).

"Some Hope" is marvellous, and its middle chapter, a truly harrowing fictional account of what it's like to be a drug addict, is outstanding. "Some Hope" is a strong, subtle, totally knowing book, not exactly the kind of thing you'd recommend to your Aunt Bertha, but still - it's well worth hunting up yourself, for a fictive experience you'll remember a long time (unless of course you're stoned when you read it)

Elsewhere, there's an omnibus review of entirely online sources, a first in my reading of proper literary journals. All the sources deal with the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the pig's breakfast it's become, or was from the start.

A typical paragraph:

'Iraq has a Commission on Public Integrity, along with the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit and inspector generals in the ministries, which is supposed to investigate corruption. Arrest warrants were issued last year for several former cabinet ministers. The defence minister Hazem Shaalan, accused of being party to corruption involving more than $1.3 billion, fled to London. He is now said to be in Iraqi Kurdistan. The transport minister Louay Hatim Sultan al-Aris disappeared. The electricity minister Abdul Muhsin Shalash is reportedly living in Jordan. There are signs that the efforts to prosecute these people are finally being stepped up. The labour minister Laila Abdul Latif at least went to court, though she was only convicted of a minor offence and given a suspended sentence. Another electricity minister, Aiham al-Sammarai, has now been convicted of corruption and embezzlement and sentenced to two years in prison. But he's also an American citizen so he isn't in an Iraqi jail."

Reading such accounts makes me sigh a heavy sigh for the days when military occupations - and let's be clear, that's exactly what the United States is conducting in Iraq, no matter what it tells itself - were conducted with a maximum of effeciency and a minimum of garden-variety futzing around.

Let's have a little clarity about what a military occupation is, shall we? I'll give you a small hint: it has nothing whatsoever to do with electricity ministers getting two-year jail sentences..

In a true military occupation, there are no grey areas, no confusion, and, after a very brief initial settling-in period, no chaos. Most ordinary Iraqis hate the American military people in their midst not on idealogical grounds but on practical grounds - those armed men and women are the face of the vast, unthinkable chaos now at loose in their land. Chaos only happens in poorly-run occupations.

This is not a mystery - at least a dozen army commanders on the ground in the Green Zone know exactly what to do, what changes to make. They're hampered only by an ignorant chain of command and absolutely ridiculous set of restrictions.

Step One, an important trifle: banish all forms of reportage. Revoke all press privileges, criminalize the production of all video footage of any kind, and evict all reporters from the country.

Step Two, far more important: impose uniform martial law and an ironclad sunset curfew. This means exactly what it says - martial law means you can't do anything, not any little thing at all of any kind whatsoever, without obtaining written permission from your occupiers, and sunset curfew means if you're seen outside after sunset for any reason, any little reason whatsoever, you get shot and dumped in a ditch. No reporters to cry your outrage to: you'll simply be gone.

Step Three grows out of Step Two: once you've declared an honest-to-gosh martial law, anyone - anyone at all - operating outside its boundaries is your openly declared enemy. Once the rules are clearly, non-politically declared - and once the press is absent from distorting them - things become very simple. Unpleasant, yes, but simple. You have a gun, a bomb, a knife, a rock? You're dead. You're demonstrably connected to such? You, too, are dead. You're approaching an armed picket, talking a bluestreak in a language he doesn't understand? You're dead, because it's after dark. No reporters - and hence no idiotic court of world opinion - to litigate or mitigate for you.

It's obvious immediately, the benefits of such an arrangement, such a true military occupation. For starters, the nascent civil authorities would have a great deal of weight taken from their shoulders - they wouldn't need to look around every corner whenever they go to meetings, nor would they need to take time out of their busy schedules to LEGISLATE over matters more properly left to the military occupation force.
This would leave them free to create a working government - which is a good thing since no military occupation should last too long... there being, after all, other places to occupy.

But the benefits most certainly extend to the average citizen, whose water supply, road infrastructure, and basic utilities (including electricity, as we've seen) will no longer be mishandled by corrupt or incompetent civil officials - the Army Corps of Engineers will be in charge, since in a true military occupation, no vital system (and certainly no system that could possibly be used against the occupiers) is left in civilian control.

Two things need to be pointed out about such a genuine military occupation, however: first, it would be more expensive, in the first few months, than the current patchwork non-method in place (there'd need to be more troops, and they'd need additional training), and second, it shouldn't be done. The United States shouldn't be occupying Iraq. The United States should certainly be occupying Mexico, and perhaps North Korea, but not Iraq.

But such a genuine military occupation WOULD work. When it's done properly, military occupations almost always work. If you swapped out their swords for guns, the Roman 10th Legion could have Baghdad blood-free and peaceful in about three months. What's needed is the stomach for it.

Speaking of stomachs, there's something else in this issue that TURNED ours, here at stevereads. It crops up in the long and very sympathetic review Neal Ascherson gives of Gunter Grass' new memoir:

"In the postwar decades, foreigners were upset by the apparent inability of many Germans to grasp the suffering that their nation had inflicted on others. But somebody - perhaps it was Grass - wrote recently that this silence was really the continuation of another, earlier silence: their reluctance to be open about what they themselves had suffered."

To which we here at stevereads respond: Nein!

If your country tries to take over Europe once, wellllll MAYBE the rest of the world can let it slide. Chalk it up to youthful hijinks, that sort of thing.

But if your country tries to take over Europe TWICE in twenty friggin years, you don't get to talk about YOUR suffering, and you don't get to feel self-pity when nobody else talks about it either.

For ten years, Hitler preached a doctrine combining unapologetic militarism and jubilant anti-Semitism. Then for ten years he ACTED on exactly that. Say what you want about the man, but he was no hypocrite.

Granted, a technical majority didn't vote for him - which raises two points: 1) how did he get even what votes he got, and 2) why didn't the technical majority FIGHT?

The German people acquiesced to a virulent dictator because he offered them a way out of the crushing economic and psychological depression they'd been in since the end of the last war. He told them exactly what the INGREDIENTS of that way out were, and they swallowed it anyway. None of this 'we didn't know' business - they knew perfectly well and they did it anyway.
Which renders me slightly disinclined to credit their suffering, unless it's the remorse of having made a mistake.

And it isn't! Every German I've ever met, I search their eyes, their minds, their voices for it, and it's never there. Germans - and especially Germans of the war years - aren't sorry they tried Hitler. They're sorry Hitler didn't WORK.

So let's wrap things up, Larry King-style (Cantabridgians: he's a television commentator):

Rants - great, aren't they?

Iraq - should US stay or go, and why?

Germans - genetically evil, or what?