Kreisleriana

Posted: 15th December 2011

I had half considered dedicating this blog to the election of Tracey Emin to the chair of drawing at the Royal Academy, but I have changed my mind. During what is now - sadly - an inevitable nightly bout of insomnia, I thought of calling for the removal of my great-grandfather’s name from the annals of the Academy but by the morning my rage had abated, and I felt that having died nearly a hundred years ago John Henry Bacon had had the good fortune to miss the profanation of what was once a great institution not to mention the sight of that great bollocks that is the London art scene today.

And the news could have been worse after all: I recently predicted that Tracey, Damien Hirst or Rachel Whiteread would be given one or two of the vacant places in the Order of Merit in succession to Lucien Freud. Of course this could still happen, indeed it probably will. You can just imagine some dreadful, philistine, governmental marketing-wallah coming up with one of these charlatans, invoking the encouragement it would give to other charlatans who might want to make a blotchy scrawl of a woman wanking and call it art. It would be a gesture in keeping with the spirit of the age, just like choosing a woman who gives every impression of having no digital dexterity whatever for the post of the country’s most senior draughtsman.

In my mind Rachel Whiteread deserves a special place in hell as the woman who destroyed the Judenplatz in Vienna with that dreadful concrete ‘Klotz’ commemorating the fate of the city’s Jews. It is a sort of ersatz Third Reich bunker placed in the middle of one the city’s prettiest squares. When the city fathers finally come to their senses, they will find it as hard to remove as those genuine Third Reich air raid shelters, the elimination of which has robbed them of their sleep these past sixty-five years.

The erection of Rachel’s bunker is of course the result of a philistinism every bit as nauseating as that which counts for patronage here and it makes me wonder what the great Georg Kreisler must have made of it?

Kreisler died on 22 November. I am sorry to say I never met the man, although I had the luck to run into his former patron Gerhard Bronner a few times at the late and lamented Broadway Bar the last proper cabaret venue in the First Bezirk.

The Viennese philistine or ‘Spiesser’ was a natural target for the poet and caberettist Kreisler. In a song like Oper, Burg und Josefstadt he mocks the smug self-sufficiency of his fellow citizens, who felt that Vienna contained all the culture it needed in its two classic theatres and opera house.

Many of those who had made Vienna what it was were Jews like Kreisler and Bronner. Those two were among the few to return after the war, but unlike Bronner, Kreisler couldn’t forget, let alone forgive. He saw his former tormenters standing boldly on every corner, absolved from guilt by the Moscow Declaration of 1943, which had labelled the Austrians Hitler’s ‘first victims’ - something that he called ‘one of the biggest lies in the history of mankind.’

He had become an American during the war, and made no attempt to get his Austrian citizenship back any more than the Austrian government seemed ready to arrange it. They did, however, send him birthday cards - as did successive presidents (with the exception of Waldheim) - even after he took out an advertisement in Die Presse telling them where they could put them.

Austrians were afraid of him and what he might say. As he voiced it in the style of a self-deprecating Schmäh:

‘Don’t waste your time, but he’s good-ish,
There is a fascination.
He’s Viennese and he’s Jewish -
And that’s a lethal combination.’

‘This city has never lifted a finger for me.’ He wrote of Vienna, which makes me think that he would have quickly seen through the sop to international sensibilities on the Judenplatz. One of his most enduring lyrics was Wie schön wäre Wien ohne Wiener (How lovely Vienna would be without the Viennese). After a few years there it became too much to bear and he beetled off to Munich, Berlin, Basel and Salzburg; an ‘Ausgestossener’ or reject, permanently on the run.

But in spite of - possibly even because of - his travails, he was an artist who combined a stunning musical ability with a dazzling capacity to make the cumbersome German language dance to his tune. Had the Nazis not seized his hometown in March 1938, he might have continued his musical education; even become ‘Herr Professor Kreisler’, and a star in the academic firmament. Whatever had been his destiny, however, one thing is certain: he would not have needed to raise more than an eyebrow to eclipse this wanker at the Royal Academy.

The End of a Tyrant

Posted: 18th November 2011

I don’t imagine I was alone in finding the films revelling in Gaddafi’s death disgusting. It was not just the ‘snuff movie’ aspect, the sight of a lot of scruffy youths baying for his blood, or the ghoulish masses parading past his stinking corpse; but it was the thought of the months and millions NATO spent pinning back his arms to allow this cowardly rabble to kill him - you couldn’t call that shower an army. I suppose we can only be grateful that they stopped where they did: roughing him up, dragging him through the streets and shoving a metal pipe into his anus. We must count ourselves lucky we were not treated to a film of him being buggered or castrated or both.

And then we had the pathetic utterances of the head of the NTC assuring us he’d been killed by his own men in crossfire when we had all seen perfectly well what had happened. Surely if the West was sponsoring his downfall, they had a say in the manner of his passing: they should have made it clear he was to be brought to justice and not torn to shreds by a bunch of barbarians.

I am sure Gaddafi was a perfectly horrible man and his hands indelibly stained with blood. His end was reminiscent of some Roman emperor who had failed to please the mob. He was brutally murdered, but in this case his body was not thrown in the Tiber but transformed into some sort of macabre ‘installation’ set up in a butcher’s cold store. Which emperor he resembled most is hard to decide: certainly not an Augustan - one of the later ones, rather; an ostentatious and perverted easterner perhaps? Maybe he came closest to Heliogabalus? He was a far less impressive man than his friend Silvio Berlusconi: the nearest thing the modern world has seen to the Emperor Tiberius.

Gaddafi was washed up. Perhaps it was better that he die, but the person who cast the stone should have been without sin. What exactly had Gaddafi done to the boy who administered the coup de grâce? He made Libya a very prosperous place, even if it was not exactly free. I had my own experience of Gaddafi’s acolytes in Paris at the end of the seventies. A French engineering firm sent a group of about a dozen young to youngish Libyans to the language school in the Avenue Georges V where I was working. They wanted them to learn English. In my recollection the firm was called ‘Behemoth’ but I think now that must have been my nickname.

When the men arrived they were the staunchest supporters of Gaddafi and the revolution he had brought to the land of King Idris. They beat the desk with their Green Books and spouted the maxims of the great man. I was not just their teacher; to some extent I was their guide. One man wanted to buy a ‘brown goat’. I was slightly at a loss to know where I might get him such a thing in urban Paris. Then I learned he merely wanted a ‘coat’.

I went with them up the Eiffel Tower. The only time in my life I have ever done so.

The point about the men of ‘Behemoth’, however, was that when faced with the agréments of the French capital, their revolutionary virtue began to crumble.  They complained first about Gaddafi’s friend Abdessalam Jalloud, quietly at first, and then the clamour rose to a crescendo. Their attendance trailed off, and when they came in, they fell asleep. I was prepared to accept that my teaching was not scintillating, but it transpired their tiredness had another cause.

They were staying in one of the big modern hotels by the Porte Dauphine, and had fallen prey to the prostitutes who banged on their doors at night. Worse that that: these stout warriors for the Muslim cause had discovered drink, so when they were not given over to Morpheus they were suffering from hangovers. By the time their six weeks training was up they were as ferocious in their opposition to the regime as they had been in defending it at the outset.

Gaddafi’s fate begs the question of what would have happened had Hitler been caught alive by the Red Army. The Führer was in no doubt that death was preferable by far, and he was not going to let them take it out on his body either, or that of Frau Hitler or his favourite dogs. His servants had clear instructions to burn all the corpses.

Hitler himself thought he would be paraded through Soviet Russia in a cage. He would almost certainly have been subjected to long and gruelling interrogations before his final execution, possibly a big pompous occasion on Red Square with hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens bussed in to watch. How long he would have lived as a ‘prize’ is hard to say. They were reluctant to yield up the only field marshal they captured - Friedrich Paulus, and he was only freed (he had to agree to live in East Germany) after Stalin’s death in 1953; but he had had a dacha to himself near Moscow and was treated very civilly.

Paulus had atoned for his role in the attack on the Soviet Union. Hitler would not have been released. On the other hand, I am sure even he would have been allowed to die with more dignity than Gaddafi.

Mariandl in the Wachau

Posted: 17th October 2011

Last month I was invited to Austria by the Vinea Wachau organisation to attend the annual Smaragd tasting in Weissenkirchen. It was a gloriously warm weekend, and the combination of late summer sun and magnificent hospitality made it all the more memorable. Not only was I unstintingly entertained by the younger Leo Alzinger, Franz Hirtzberger, the younger Emmerich Knoll and Rudi Pichler, who showed me some truly sensational wines, I was able to see who was in and who was out and note the progress of certain younger, lesser-known growers - notably Bracher (very baroque wines), Galhofer, Josef ‘Graben’ Gritsch, Hick, Karthäuserhof, Lehensteiner, Machherndl, Ilse Mazza, Rixinger and Sigl.

The Wachau is a tourist trap; and for good reason - it is one the loveliest landscapes in Europe. It is certainly not new to me: I visited it for the first time in 1969, travelling with my mother, but how we made the journey from Vienna I could tell you now. I remember the blue-painted abbey church in Dürnstein and of course the castle, where the minstrel Blondel rumbled his master Richard the Lionheart. It has been a romantic ruin since it was slighted by the Swedes in 1645.

In 1990, I agreed to write a book about Austrian wine. As nothing happened until January 1991 it was already carnival before I made it up river. Indeed, I recall an unscheduled stop in Stein when the car broke down in the snow, and I wandered into he bowels of the mediaeval town to buy a carnival doughnut while my frustrated and angry driver tinkered about under his bonnet.

That driver was Martin Kelner, a talented musician who taught at the music Hochschule in Salzburg and did odd jobs for the ÖWM - the Austrian wine marketing organisation. I can’t think how much time I spent with Martin that year, but we were on the road for weeks and weeks, and I benefited hugely from his enthusiasm for wine and good restaurants.

To amuse Martin on the way, I made up a comic story about the Wachau and thereabouts. It brought together the porcine German cyclists who clutter up the roads in summer, the Bulgarian sailors in their river cruisers who ply the Danube between Passau and the Black Sea, the Loch Ness pub in Langenlois and Mariandl.

Mariandl was Martin’s contribution. She was the sugar-sweet Wachauer heroine of post-war Austria - love interest in a dirndl - a story that had been remade again and again, and quite possibly was about to be heated up in 1991. Martin sang me the film’s theme tune, made a tape of it for me and even - like a good teacher - bought me the sheet music. You can hear to Waltraut Haas singing it here.

I eventually wrote the novel but it never saw the light of day. Occasionally I tinker about with it, rather as Martin did with his car that day in Stein, although unlike him, I have never managed to get it moving. I even had another look at it the other day after I got back from the Wachau.

Although it must come up on Austrian television from time to time, I was swiftly reminded that was at a disadvantage, as I had never actually seen the film Martin was referring to. So I tried Youtube and bingo - Mariandl! If it wasn’t all there, there was about two thirds of it, and that was quite enough. It was a fairly lightweight film made in 1961 with Rudolf Prack as Hofrat Geiger, Walraut Haas playing Mariandl’s mother Marianne Mühlhuber, and Cornelia Froboess as Mariandl. The celebrated Hans Moser played the innkeeper.

Geiger discovers by chance that at the end of the war he sired a daughter called Mariandl. He hadn’t been able to marry the mother because he was a Wehrmacht lieutenant at the time and had a pressing appointment with an Allied tribunal. There were some nice colour shots of Dürnstein and a period feeling of Austria at the time when the economic miracle had begun to kick in. And just about everyone sang the Mariandl theme, composed by Geiger in his lovelorn youth.

The story was taken from a play called Der Hofrat Geiger written by Martin Costa, first performed in Prague during the war and made into a film in 1947. Here I able to locate the totality on Youtube. It was one of the first Heimatfilme and an important document in the Austrian attempt to redefine their national identity and distance themselves from their wartime association with Germany.

Hofrat (a sort of permanent undersecretary of state) Geiger is played by Paul Hörbiger, who will be best remembered by non-German speakers as the ill-fated porter in The Third Man. He has been ousted from his ministry by the Nazis, but, mandarin to the last, he misses the work, and his lackey Ferdinand Lechner has to borrow dossiers so that his master might work on them a while before Lechner quietly returns them to their rightful places in the ministerial archives. When Lechner is caught red-handed a civil servant suggests he just take them from a bombed-out building which is open to the skies. He also has to buy his master’s provisions with antiques: Austria had yet to receive a post-war currency and was stranded in limbo between the Reichsmark and the Schilling.

In this film Hans Moser plays Lechner. Moser had been mauled by Goebbels in 1938, because of his Jewish wife. As a result he agreed to live with her in Hungary. In this original version, Waltraut Haas plays the ingénue role: Mariandl, while Maria Andergast is her fierce mother.

In the 1947 film, Geiger is reading a borrowed file when he discovers by chance that he fathered a daughter in Spitz in the Wachau in 1929: Mariandl. He determines to put matters right, but both he and Mariandl’s mother - for whom he wrote the Mariandl theme - are both too proud to confess their love for each another and while she accepts his hand in marriage she refuses to live with him. Matters are complicated, however, by the news that she is domiciled in Znaim, now in communist Czechoslovakia and that she will have to go back there if she cannot obtain letters of naturalisation. The pursuit of these letters forms the funniest and most atmospheric part of the film, as Marianne is forced to spend all winter in Vienna going from civil service department to municipal office only to find the doors closed and marked ‘Don’t knock!’ or that as a result of that worst winter of in human memory, everyone has gone home.

Meanwhile Geiger has been restored to his job by the non-Nazi government and is aware of Marianne’s plight. While he uses his power to delay her application he quietly pumps money into Marianne’s inn in Spitz. When she finally returns home she finds that the Hofrat’s largesse has transformed it out of recognition. Mariandl has married in her absence and has a child. Needless to say they all live happily ever after and the final rendition of the Mariandl theme is sung by none other than Hans Moser.

Der Hofrat Geiger was shot in black and white in Spitz and there are enchanting views from the Blaue Gans inn back towards Dürnstein. It also shows how poor and primitive the Wachau was just after the war. Nothing much had changed since the Kaiser’s day and as the wine enjoyed no great reputation, the people lived simple lives, unvisited by any Bulgarian sailors or clumsy porpoises on bicycles.

Frederick the Great’s Erotic Poetry

Posted: 20th September 2011

A gentle breeze of excitement has blown in from Berlin: an erotic poem has been discovered, written by Frederick the Great and despatched to Voltaire from Königsberg on 20 July 1740, the very day the king received the homage of his East Prussian nobles. The BBC reported on it on 19 September. The poem deals with ‘jouissance’ or orgasm, and was inspired by his friend Francesco Algarotti’s contention that southern Europeans take more pleasure in sex than the frigid men of the north. The thought must have been provoked by the rather chilly city of Königsberg (or an even chillier monarch), where Frederick had arrived in the company of Algarotti and Dietrich von Keyserlingk. Here is the poem:

De Königsberg à Monsieur Algarotti, cygne de Padoue

Cette nuit, contentant ses vigoureux désirs
Algarotti nageait dans la mer des plaisirs.
Un corps plus accompli qu’en tailla Praxitèle,
Redoublait de ses sens la passion nouvelle.
Tout ce qui parle aux yeux et qui touche le cœur,
Se trouvait dans l’objet qui l’enflammait d’ardeur.
Transporté par l’amour, tremblant d’impatience,
Dans les bras de Cloris à l’instant il s’élance.
L’amour qui les unit, échauffait leurs baisers
Et resserrait plus fort leurs bras entrelacés.
Divine volupté! Souveraine du monde!
Mère de leurs plaisirs, source à jamais féconde,
Exprimez dans mes vers, par vos propres accents
Leur feu, leur action, l’extase de leurs sens!
Nos amants fortunés, dans leurs transports extrêmes,
Dans les fureurs d’amour ne connaissaient qu’eux-mêmes:
Baiser, jouir, sentir, soupirer et mourir,
Ressusciter, baiser, revoler au plaisir.
Et dans les champs de Gnide essoufflés sans haleine,
Etait de ces amants le fortuné destin.
Mais le bonheur finit; tout cesse le matin.
Heureux, de qui l’esprit ne fut jamais la proie
Du faste des grandeurs et qui connut la joie!
Un instant de plaisir pour celui qui jouit,
Vaut un siècle d’honneur dont l’éclat éblouit.

For those who stumble on the French, here is a rough and ready translation:

From Königsberg to Monsieur Algarotti, Swan of Padua

This night, vigorous desire in full measure,
Algarotti wallowed in a sea of pleasure.
A body not even a Praxitiles fashions
Redoubled his senses and imbued his passions
Everything that speaks to eyes and touches hearts,
Was found in the fond object that enflamed his parts.
Transported by love and trembling with excitement
In Cloris’ arms he yields himself to contentment
The love that unites them heated their embraces
And tied bodies and arms as tightly as laces.
Divine sensual pleasure! To the world a king!
Mother of their delights, an unstaunchable spring,
Speak through my verses, lend me your voice and tenses
Tell of their fire, acts, the ecstasy of their senses!
Our fortunate lovers, transported high above
Know only themselves in the fury of love:
Kissing, enjoying, feeling, sighing and dying
Reviving, kissing, then back to pleasure flying.
And in Knidos’ grove, breathless and worn out
Was these lovers’ happy destiny, without doubt.
But all joy is finite; in the morning ends the bout.
Fortunate the man whose mind was never the prey
To luxury, or grand airs, one who knows how to say
A moment of climax for a fortunate lover
Is worth so many aeons of star-spangled honour.

The poem was discovered by Vanessa de Senarclens of the Humboldt University in Berlin. It was originally sent to Voltaire but it is not to be found in the correspondence between the king and his philosopher, nor does it seem to have been known to Preuss, who published the totality of the king’s writings between 1846 and 1857. Preuss showed little reluctance to include other material that revealed the sexual inclinations of his hero, so he can’t have seen this. The text in question was that owned by Algarotti himself. In 1894, it was sent to Berlin, but rather than let it appear in the press, the prudish Emperor William II placed it in the archives where is has languished ever since.

It appeared in Die Zeit on 15 September. In her commentary, Vanessa de Senarclens says it was the first poem Frederick had written since ascending to the throne on 31 May. She also takes it as read that it is an erotic poem about Algarotti’s taste for women.

Like Keyserlingk, however, Algarotti was notoriously homosexual. Before coming to Prussia he had been the lover of Baron Hervey, who was characterised as the catamite ‘Sporus;’ in Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. Whether or not Algarotti performed similar services for the new King of Prussia is not known but his sexual antics clearly amused Frederick who wrote another poem soon after in which Algarotti has acquired a dose of venereal disease from a Berlin whore. As Hervey’s biographer David Halsband has pointed out, the genders of the prostitutes were ‘euphemistic’, probably much like the ‘Aphrodite’ of Madame de Senarclens’ discovery. Voltaire was less discreet and pointed out that Algarotti’s paramour was a Monsieur de Lugeac, secretary to the French ambassador Valori:

Mais quand, chez le gros Valori,
Je vois le tendre Algarotti
Dresser d’une vive embrassade
Le beau Lugeac, son jeune ami,
Je crois voir Socrate affermi
Sur la croupe d’Alcibiade…

Which I rendered thus in my biography of Frederick the Great:

Whenever, with fat Valori
I see tender Algarotti
Stiffen with an electric pass,
Lugeac, his young friend so pretty,
I seem to see Socrates at last,
Clasped to Alcibiades’ arse…

Frederick no doubt appreciated Algarotti’s companionship as well as having a genuine respect for his achievements - despite his behaviour in the bas fonds of Berlin. Later that year he invested him with the title of ‘count’ and packed him off on a diplomatic mission to Turin. The question raised by the poem is whether Frederick is describing a brief liaison he might have had with the Italian. If that was the case, it would very much conform to the stories printed about the king in Voltaire’s scurrilous memoirs. With time he became more discreet.

The History of an Abomination

Posted: 16th August 2011

Some day a brave or foolhardy man or woman will write a history of concentration camps in the twentieth century. There is certainly enough material for a big book. Leaving aside the famous Nazi camps for now, you could start with the British in the Boer War - as the Germans were wont to do when criticised. British camps form some of the more gruesome scenes in the German propaganda film Ohm Krüger (1941). They may have had a point: in one month 336 people died in one camp in the Transvaal, including 250 children. On the other hand the British may have got the idea from the Spanish, who isolated half a million peasants in this way during the Cuban War, just a few years before.

The next chapter would bring in the Turkish treatment of the Armenians, which resulted in the deaths of millions; then, you could dwell on all the lethal techniques used by the Soviet Russians in their gulags, which in their turn, inspired the Nazis, who were remarkably open to Bolshevik methods while abhorring their ideology. In passing you could mention the copycat camps set up by the Czechs, Jugoslavs and Poles after the Second World War to deal with captured Germans, or the Soviet ones in Germany itself. People died in their thousands, although the Russians, Czechs and Poles were certainly less efficient at killing than the Nazis had been, it was hardly for want of trying.

In Asia, the Japanese interned huge numbers resulting in great carnage as they deconstructed the Western empires in the Pacific. Scroll forward a generation and there were the Cambodian ‘killing fields’; and finally there could be an epilogue in which readers were reminded that Western countries still imprison people without trial. The British used ‘internment’ as a weapon to defeat the IRA. Was the famous ‘Maze’ at Long Kesh a concentration camp? And if so, has the concentration camp actually been phased out? Is Guantanamo Bay a concentration camp?

I mention this thorniest of subjects because I read a book last month written by a woman who had been in a Japanese camp in her childhood, and who has only recently been convinced to tell her story. The cruelty of the Japanese is legendary and the way they behaved towards their subject peoples - the Chinese in particular - was every bit as bad as the Germans. I have a friend who is in his nineties now and still hesitates to publish the diaries he wrote building the famous bridge over the River Kwai. He cannot bring himself to think of those times and many other former British servicemen have made the point that the Nazi treatment of Western prisoners of war at least was positively lenient compared to the Japanese. I stress Western: the Germans killed their Russian prisoners as the Russians killed them.

G Pauline Kok-Schurgers’The Remains of War (iUniverse inc, Bloomington Indiana) tells the story of the treatment of women and children by the Japanese in their camps in the former Dutch East Indies. It is predictably revolting and might have been all the more moving if an editor had been let loose on the text, to cut out the irksome repetitions and remove some of the toe-curling American idioms that make ‘Sofia’ (as Pauline becomes in the book) sound like bobby-sox-wearing sixth-grade high-school kid, rather than the little Dutch girl she surely was.

Sofia’s schoolmaster father was taken away by the Japanese and along with her mother, younger brother and sisters she was interned separately in a series of camps where the regimen went from bad to worse. They all survived, but there were moments when you thought they might not. Several women and children close to them died of disease while others were beaten to death by the Japanese.

Was the experience as bad as that meted out in Nazi camps? The comparison of suffering is a particularly murky field, but the author, or her publishers, have ended the book with a statement that the Japanese intended to slaughter all their prisoners after the war, which begs that question. On the cover of Pauline’s book, Japanese internment camps are described as ‘the other concentration camps of World War II.’  The European experience was slightly different, however. Had Pauline been a Jew and had her mother turned up at Auschwitz with her brood of little children, they would have all been taken straight to the gas chamber: Auschwitz had no use for mothers and children who could not be put to work. The death factories of the east - Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka and the rest - were just facades; not really camps at all, as those who entered were immediately put to death.

The way Pauline’s family was treated was indeed vile. There is not doubt that they suffered and probably suffer to this day. It would also be easy to argue that it is worse to live, and see others die around you than to be swiftly despatched by a bullet or a gas pellet?

Concentration camps came in all shapes and sizes. Nowadays they tend to be remembered exclusively for their use in the extermination of the Jews (although Timothy Snyder affirms that more Jews were killed outside camps than in them). Until 1938, however, the population of German ‘KZs’ was mostly composed of political prisoners and criminals. They were never nice places, but treatments varied. Some of them had special sections for privileged prisoners: the British spy Sigismund Payne Best used to dress for dinner at Sachsenhausen, and a similar luxury compound existed at Dachau. There was even a cosy ‘camp’ in Bayreuth where inmates were set to work making the more intricate ingredients for V2 rockets and Wagner’s grandson Wieland was involved with the administration.  Such moments provide some light relief in the history of an abomination.

FELIX ZIRNER

Posted: 18th July 2011

In idle moments I have been trying to piece together the last years of my maternal grandfather Felix Zirner. In my quest, I have found Leo Spitzer’s book Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism to be of help. Spitzer was born in Bolivia in 1940 - literally smuggled out of Austria in the womb - and his experiences, and more particularly the experiences of his parents and their friends - must have been similar to Felix’s.

Felix left Vienna sometime towards the end of September 1938 and travelled by ship to South America, arriving in La Paz on 3 November. I had always believed he went to Buenos Aires first, as his passport says he had permission to enter Argentina; but there is also a stamped transit visa for Chile, and reading Spitzer I realised that it is more likely that he docked there. The return trip - Genoa to Genoa - took approximately ten weeks: so half of that would have accounted for the lapse of time between his vaccination (25 September) and his appearance in Bolivia.

So Felix went directly to Chile and it seems he must have travelled on one of three ships belonging to the Italia Line, Virgilio, Augustus and Orazio that sailed from Genoa to Valparaiso. The ship stopped in some if not all of the following ports: Marseille, Barcelona, Las Palmas, Trinidad, La Guaira in Venezuela, Cristóbal on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal, Baranquilla or Buenaventura in Colombia and Callao in Peru before arriving at Arica: Chile’s northernmost port. Jews bound for Bolivia were lowered into boats here and taken ashore. The ship then continued to Valparaiso before turning round and making for home.

Arica was in the middle of a desert and effectively cut off from the rest of Chile. The only way to get there was by a twice-weekly transport from La Paz. The refugees waited in a bedbug-infested hotel for a train powered by two locomotives that took a full day to reach the Bolivian border at Charaña where it put up for the night. There was no hotel and some Jews preferred to sleep in the church because it was too cold on the train. By now the altitude had begun to take effect and the passengers felt very ill. They arrived in La Paz in the next evening.

Jews sought refuge in Bolivia because it had a comparatively liberal attitude to immigration. Felix, however, had had another reason to choose the Andean republic: his first cousin Otto Braun. He was travelling with Otto’s mother Gisela Braun: his father’s youngest sister and her other son Robert. Gisela had been a widow since her husband the lawyer Dr. Jonas Braun died in the mid-twenties. Jonas was the first cousin of the prominent socialists Heinrich Braun and Emma Adler, and Otto and Robert were therefore the second cousins of Friedrich Adler, the man who assassinated the Austrian Prime Minister Graf Karl Stürgkh as he ate lunch in the Hotel Meissl und Schadn in Vienna on 21 October 1916.

Otto Braun was already well established in Bolivia. He was an agronomist who had emigrated in the twenties, initially working for the immensely rich Patiño family. He was married outside the faith to a local girl called Mercedes Trujillo, and was notably unlike the Jews who came later, who had been scattered by Hitler’s policies at home.

The Patiños were the biggest mine owners in Bolivia, closely followed by the German-born Jew Mauricio Hochschild. Hochschild was the principal resource for the impoverished Jews who landed in Bolivia. In January 1939, using funds made available by the Joint Distribution Committee in New York, he founded ‘SOPRO’ (Sociedad de Protección a los Imigrantes Israelitas - The Society for the Protection of Jewish Immigrants) with branches in La Paz, Cochabamba and a handful of other Bolivian towns.

SOPRO created an agricultural training centre for Jews at Todos Santos, some two hundred kilometres north-east of Cochabamba. The plan was worked out by Otto Braun and it was hoped that as many as 5,000 Jews might settle in the sub-tropical region and turn it into something verging on the Garden of Eden. The project had full government backing and President Germán Busch offered them further concessions on the Chimoré river. The idea of turning the Jewish refugees into farmers was pursued further at another site - Buena Tierra - granting ten-hectare lots to settlers. Braun remained at the centre of it all, but the bottom fell out of the scheme after the unexpected death of the Bolivian president and Braun threw in the towel in June 1942.

There is no evidence that Felix considered joining Otto’s colony. I have a picture of him taken in La Paz. He is on the terrace of a restaurant with his aunt Gisi, his cousin Robert and Otto’s daughter Marianne. I assume either Otto or Mercedes took the photo as neither is in it. According to Otto’s granddaughter Gisela Alba Braun, Felix quit La Paz for Bolivia’s second city Cochabamba because he needed work, but the La Paz’s altitude might have had something to do with his decision. With an average elevation of 14,000 feet, Bolivia was way too high for Felix who had suffered from a weak heart from childhood. Even healthy men could not bear it: as the train moved up from Arica to La Paz ‘people’s noses and ears were bleeding. Some were haemorrhaging.’ As one Jewish refugee put it, Bolivia was ‘was only to be tolerated by persons with a very strong heart and healthy lungs…’

The centre of La Paz is situated at 11,975 feet with the suburban hills rising to 14,500 feet. Felix must have been in terrible pain. Cochabamba lay at a more tolerable 7,400 feet and Jews suffering from altitude sickness were sent there to recuperate. Somewhere along the line he decided to abandon his vocation as a jeweller and set himself up as a wood carver.

In the short time left to him, he explored the countryside around Cochabamba. He took his meals with the Tisch family he had met on the ship coming out and struck up a close friendship with Hochschild’s manager in Cochabamba, Ulli Marcus. A friend leaves us of a glimpse of those last days: Felix with a volume of Shakespeare in his hand, enjoying his leisure between commissions: ‘… In his spare time he was fond of making excursions into the surrounding country, studied the habits and customs of the Indians, sought to purchase old carvings and pictures, and was as pleased as a child when he found a beautiful article. We spent many Sundays in the beautiful little farm owned by Mr Marcus, bathing or sun-bathing, and conversing until evening…’

In November 1942, Felix’s health collapsed. He died aged thirty-eight on 10 May 1943.

John Graham and Laurence O’Connell

Posted: 15th June 2011

Two more deaths that have gone virtually unrecorded. In the case of John Graham there were a couple of snippets in the Evening Standard diary: londonersdiary.standard.co.uk/2011/05/farewell-to-the-mischievous-charming-john-graham.html, londonersdiary.standard.co.uk/2011/05/the-many-lives-of-a-multi-faceted-writer-.html. Laurence’s disappearance seems to have been almost wholly unrecorded bar four or five short films posted on YouTube by has last wife. They provide a bittersweet record of his last days. There are plans, however, to hold a memorial service at his old Oxford college, probably next term.

I didn’t know John well, I wonder now whether anyone did. I wouldn’t be able to say whether he had ever been married or whether he liked girls or boys. He lived alone, I believe he said somewhere near Lisson Grove.

He was a typical hard-headed Ulster Scot who could drink anyone under the table; I cannot recall ever seeing him drunk. He was brought up in Dublin, where his family operated a large commercial laundry that went by the name of ‘Swastika’ and customers received their starched and ironed shirts in boxes embossed with just that. When Hitler rose to power, there were questions raised about the Swastika Laundry in the City’s more intellectual pubs and bars, but it was pointed out that in this case the symbol referred to good fortune and had no racial connotations.

The laundry made enough money for the family to send John to Eton and from there he went up to Worcester College, Oxford. He was a journalist with the Observer and the FT in Washington, but somewhere along the way he blotted his copybook.

I got to know him in the mid-eighties when we both enjoyed the gravy train operated by the infamous PR-man Alan Crompton-Batt. Crompton-Batt demanded generous retainers from restaurants and drinks companies to ensure press coverage. He would then send out his harem of gorgeous, pouting ‘Batt-Girls’ to lure in journalists in the hope of getting positive copy.

Quite often, Crompton-Batt merely blanketed the target by inviting as many hacks as he could conjure up to attend a restaurant or hotel launch, and provided so much drink that the journalists would have been unlikely to remember the story the following morning. I think this was the case when I met John: we were bidden to a hotel somewhere in the Midlands. Two coaches were stuffed with hacks and topped up with Taittinger champagne. Corks popped before we had left London and we were mostly drunk on arrival. Weary from a long day we arrived back at the Batt offices in Covent Garden still baying for champagne and we clamoured so loudly we got it.

On another occasion I flew to Milan with John and others as a guest of the scriptwriter Allan Shiach, the then proprietor of the Macallan whisky. As our bus crossed the suburbs of the city John spotted a bar where people were playing backgammon. He vowed to return later. The next morning he told us in his deadpan way he had pocketed a tidy sum.

Despite the upsets of his earlier career, John found a niche at the Tatler at an age when most journalists have problems finding work. His brief expanded from booze and betting to wine and he used to ring occasionally to consult me on a piece he was writing. His experience and savoir-faire was considered indispensable to everyone around, from the editor, Geordie Greig downwards. When Geordie took over at the Standard and the Independent, John naturally came too. The last time I saw him his rugged features they were peering out of the pages of the Standard. He died from cancer on 18 May at the age of seventy-one.

Laurence was a generation younger, and my contemporary at Oxford. He had come up to Oriel as the history scholar a month short of his seventeenth birthday. In my first year I spent a good deal of time at Oriel, and got to know many of the freshmen. Most were public schoolboys and oarsmen. Laurence had come from a grammar school in Huddersfield and was occasionally gently teased about his Yorkshire accent. He took it in his stride: he knew he was cleverer than the whole lot of them put together.

Indeed, his tutor Jeremy Catto once told me that Laurence was the brightest man he had ever taught. He was no gnome for all that, burning the midnight oil in the library. He played his violin in the university orchestra and struck a firm friendship with the flamboyant marquess’s son Xan Rufus-Isaacs. One day they hit on the idea of inviting Oxford’s many tramps into Oriel to give them a bath. I think it was Catto who spoiled their fun, but only at the last moment.

That would have been in his third year, and the time when I got to know him better. I recall him taking me together with one of Xan’s jilts out for a row on the Cherwell: he seemed to enjoy playing Pandarus. He was admirably composed in the face of Schools. I met him in the High after one paper where he told me ‘I looked at the questions and I said to myself: the nerd in front of me and the nerd behind me will answer it like this, but I am going to turn the question on its head.’ Needless to say he got his first and they didn’t; and he was still only nineteen.

I went abroad after leaving Oxford, where I was disappointed to learn that Laurence had become an accountant. After that the trail ran cold for nearly thirty years, until I ran into Tony Sellors, another Oriel contemporary, at a house party in Norfolk. Tony was in contact with Laurence and soon enough I had an e.mail from the very man asking me to lunch at Man Financial in the City.

It was there that I heard Laurence’s story. He had worked in banking in the United States for several years, where he had also played violin for various east Coast orchestras. His pride and joy being his Guarneri, which he played at every opportunity. He had been married twice, had four children by his second wife, Jacqui and was now chief operating officer of the bank. His account was occasionally interrupted by the need to speak to a client about a deal involving many millions of pounds.

Over the next few months we saw Laurence often. He came here with his violin and we went to stay with his family in his lovely old house in Deal. He had built himself a wooden shed, lined it with the complete works of Calvin and was proposing to write a book on late mediaeval religion. Possibly under the influence of the notorious Catholic-baiter Hugh Trevor-Roper, Laurence had renounced the religion of his birth. He had foresworn alcohol in the eighties but he was a generous host and there was nothing he enjoyed more than performing a little piece on his violin with Tony Sellors at the piano.

Then Laurence announced that he was leaving Jacqui and going away. I think it was America first and then Singapore as CEO of MF Global. The last time I saw him was at a dinner in St James’s where he declared that he was about to take an Asian wife. Then the trail went cold again. The next thing I heard was that he had died on 12 April this year. 

A succession of odd and unsubstantiated rumours came out as well: that he had stopped working (confirmed by a letter of resignation on the Web from May 2010), that he had married twice since divorcing Jacqui, that his second wife was a Muslim, that he had converted to Islam and that - paradoxically - he had started drinking again. He had also sired a baby daughter called Sophia who appears in the videos. She must be about eighteen months old.

He reportedly died of a massive heart attack brought on by drink, cigarettes and lack of exercise. He was fifty-three.

George Hayim

Posted: 16th May 2011

Last month, I learned quite by chance that George had died. I had a sort of premonition, and looked on Google, where I found this short, but charming tribute. There wasn’t much more out there to mark his passing. He died on 2 January: too long ago for me to be able to organise a suitable obituary for him. His death should come as no great surprise, nor was it a great tragedy. He had celebrated his ninetieth birthday on 30 December.

I spent the next day or so thinking about him. I well remembered our first meeting. It was in Paris in 1980. George had picked up my late, ebullient friend, Willie ‘Priapus’ Purcell in the boulevard de Montparnasse. Willie subsequently arrived at my sister’s flat in a state of high excitement and told us we all had to meet ‘an extraordinary old queen’. As it was, George lived in the neighbouring block, across the flat roof of the Théâtre de Poche on the other side of the drab courtyard that formed the view from my sister’s window.

After some short introduction, during which he admitted he had just been bound and beaten up by a plumber, George pointed to a small puddle of semen on the floor: ‘Not bad for sixty!’ He exulted.

We were a group of hungry young men who had recently come down from Oxford: there was Priapus, Tim Hunt and myself, and more tangentially Hubert Gibbs. Hubert wasn’t really hungry because his father was consul-general, and he could always go back to a vast HMG flat in the seizième when he wanted a warm bed and a hot meal. George was literally manna from heaven, in that he presided over a large battery of cooking pots and a well-stocked larder, and was always ready to rustle up a meal. He was terrifically generous. If he thought we had no money he would find a way of insinuating it into our pockets. We were quite safe from his advances, however: apart from Priapus, that is, whom he adored, and because he wanted to know why he called himself Priapus. George stooped to conquer: he was aroused by muscle-bound plumbers, brickies and pastry chefs, not stuck up Oxford graduates.

George was born in Shanghai in 1920. His father, the businessman Ellis Hayim was the head of the Jewish community in the city, and as such came into his own in 1938, when Shanghai was the only place in the world Jews could go to without a visa. Ellis Hayim organised aid and relief for tens of thousands of bedraggled German and Austrian Jews. I mentioned this to George after our reconciliation in 2002. He appeared oblivious of the facts, but I suspected he knew more than he was letting on.

George was sent to school in England, to Harrow, from which he was expelled. He then went to St. Pauls (which he didn’t care to mention much as it had less cachet than Harrow), and from there to Trinity College Cambridge. He must have been the oddest undergraduate: it would be hard to imagine a less academic or indeed educated man. I never saw him read a serious book. He said he had read modern languages - French and German. He spoke French perfectly, but his efforts at German involved putting on a guttural accent and stringing together a lot of unrelated words. It was very funny, but it wasn’t German.

He was saved by the War: he was able to slip away and join the navy as a simple sailor. After 1945, he began his life in earnest, living on air, entertaining the boys (and girls) moving in grand circles while he resided in the maids’ rooms of hotels. That way he got to know people like Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Noel Coward. He was a great snob, and this world meant a good deal to him and he could naturally witter on about it for hours.

His father starved him of money because he disapproved of his wayward life (he had another son who was no better), so George would do outrageous things such as working in a men’s lavatory until his father agreed to bail him out. He achieved security only at his father’s death when the old man left him the interest on a charity. There was no formal award of cash for either brother.

In his digs at the top of grand hotels he would install a two-ring cooker and a few pots and brew up amazing meals. He used to joke about the mother of the girl I knew then, who was divorced and bored and who bought every imaginable kitchen gadget with the aim of preparing perfect feasts; but her cooking was not half as good as George’s.

I remember the food best: marvellous home-made jams, pumpkin soup, risottos, veal chops cooked ‘à la crème’ and chickens with ‘old’ basmati rice: he had a way with chickens. The kitchen was also part of the seduction routine: he’d invite brawny yobboes in and offer them food. After they had punctuated the meal with an appreciatory belch he would say ‘I bet you couldn’t tie me up and beat me black and blue?’ When they had done just that and George had had his fun, he’d make them a cup of tea or a pancake and while dipping into he sugar or the flour or wherever he’d hidden it, he’d filch out a few hundred francs and they’d have their little reward.

I used to go to the street-market in the rue de Buci with George. He was an exhibitionist, and the most important thing for him was that people should look at him. His favourite device was to wear extraordinary hats with the labels hanging off them or weird coats that made him look like the Michelin Man. He avoided homosexuals, whom he hated: ‘ban the buggers!’ He’d say, far too loudly, whenever he saw them, but he was not averse to buggery. He told me he had once been arrested in Brazil and sodomized by every policeman in the police station. He’d been in seventh heaven.

He preferred the company of women to men. He liked them to tell their stories - all the gory details - about husbands and lovers, because he thought himself one of them. He cultivated one particular rugged, beaten-up looking woman because he liked to imagine she had been subjected to some sort of violence, and that was how he got his kicks.

He could be tremendously witty. There was an untranslatable story I heard (and not from him) that he had sent a postcard to Max Théret, the founder of the FNAC in Paris, scrawled with the pun ‘à mon PDG, ton Pédé, G.’ He loved the telephone and would play all sorts of games with it, often ringing up a bemused secretary at the Académie française when he wanted to know the meaning of a word.

That I fell out with George - who had been telling nasty tales behind my back - is hardly surprising. He fell out with everybody, particularly men. There were a few charities, like Tony Heckstall Smith (‘Old Toe’) - who never dropped through the net. Heckstall Smith was already ancient and gaga when I met him. Three of his closest muckers were Garith Windsor, John Lindsay Opie and Richard Mason. Garith was a hugely handsome ladies’ man, a sometime journalist who had been living in Paris since the thirties. George refused to speak to him after he suggested George should pay taxes.  John Lindsay Opie was an urbane expert on Russian icons who lived in Rome, as did Mason, the creator of Suzie Wong. I recall an evening with the chef Franco Taruschio in Richard Mason’s lovely flat overlooking the Pantheon, and Mason telling me how impossible George had been.

I made my peace with George after a twenty-year frost when I had to go to the Iranian Embassy one day to get a visa. His London flat was nearby and I saw him through the window as I passed by. After my interview with the Iranians I dropped in for breakfast. He was surrounded by devotees as usual. He hated to be alone. I immediately remembered how soporific the atmosphere was with George twittering away in an overheated room, telling stories that were largely hot air.

He had three homes by then: in Paris and London they consisted of a ground floor flat where the walls were painted with elaborate, gaudy scenes. This was done to make people look in. Then, if he fancied them, George would lean out of the window and indicate the way to the door. In Paris the flat looked out on the ramp that issued from a cinema complex, meaning that literally thousands of people could peer in on George in the course of a day. In London it was in a pedestrian street by the Ark restaurant and it was said he broke the telephones in the boxes outside so that any frustrated but fetching oik who was unable to make a call could be invited in: ‘I’ve got a telephone!’ He’d scream from the window.

In the eighties he rescued a displaced Lebanese boy and acquired a bungalow in Sydney. He went to Australia when it was winter in the northern hemisphere. I never visited the house, but from the pictures I see it was decorated in a similarly garish style.

George penned two books in his long and picaresque life. I never read the one he wrote about the Obsession he bore for a man called Edmond. The other - Thou Shalt not Uncover thy Mother’s Nakedness - was published by Quartet in 1988. Although he had plenty of tales to tell, he was not a natural writer: such things required a mental discipline that he didn’t possess. He expected other people to write his books for him. He generally found someone, and then fell out with him afterwards.

Finis Austriae

Posted: 18th April 2011

I was performing my annual role at the Decanter World Wine Awards all last week. We work in an old factory building in London’s Parson’s Green which contains enough space to house the 250 odd judges needed to evaluate the more than 12,000 wines sent in by producers all round the globe. This year, for the first time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a room all to itself: there I was presiding over Cisleithania (Austria), while Transleithania (Hungary) was deliberating under another chairman along side. There were separate tables for the Croatians and Slovenians while the Czechs and Slovaks have yet to achieve independence and are represented by a few flights of wine on a mixed table that might present anything from Moldova to Cyprus. The Romanians have a table of their own, however and the present state of Romania contains a large area that was in Transleithania before 1918, and reflected in its indigenous cultivars. We were therefore happy to have them in our room.

Of course this was mere accident and not design, but it made sense, as there were obvious stylistic affinities between the wines. Just as when you travel in these regions you can’t fail to notice the presence of the baroque Schloss, the inevitable onion dome on the church and the pukka railway station and post office, their façades still revealing, here and there, traces of the original ‘Schönbrunner Gelb’. They may be talking Czech, Ukrainian or Croatian these days, but this was all once part of the Habsburg Empire.

The Habsburgs are belittled now, but much like the British Empire it was a remarkable achievement to placate so many races and administer such diverse regions. The army and the administration together with the German language were about the only mortar Vienna could provide to hold it together, and yet it worked pretty well until those centrifugal forces of nationalism rent it asunder during the closing months of the First World War. From one corner, President Woodrow Wilson, pulled up the carpet with his principle of self-determination, while Bolshevik Russia rallied the Slavs from the other. The punitive clauses of the Treaty of Saint Germain furnished the coup de grâce: the empire succumbed; but it would be hard to argue that this was inevitable and in many ways the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire has much to teach us today.

These thoughts occur to me often, but I had been reminded of the situation as I worked on an article on the premiership of Graf Heinrich Clam-Martinic in the second half of the First World War. Clam’s political career allegedly foundered on his inability to make the right sort of offers to the subject peoples at the time when Czech soldiers were deserting en masse to the Russians and the Ukrainians were seeking to set up an independent state in the vacuum left after the successful advance of the German army. The ‘South Slavs’ too were clamouring for autonomy, albeit still under the authority of the Habsburg Emperor.

It is a fascinating field of study, but my work is dogged by a paucity of historiography: the Habsburg Empire disappeared so quickly and so totally that no one seems to have had time to assemble the source material for later historians. The papers were left where they were: in the scattered former constituent parts of the empire. Yes, just as in Germany there are the recriminatory memoirs written by major military and political figures who sought to offload the blame on a prince or colleague, but whereas with a few adjustments, the German Empire remained intact after 1918 (it was only really scaled down after 1945), Austria slipped from being the hub of a major empire to one of the least significant nations in Europe. The issues, wrangles - gossip even - of those last days of greatness is now exceedingly difficult to lay your hands on.

Here in London, the British Library has only about half of the important published material. Thank God then for certain improvements that have come about as a result of the Web: namely the presence online of a number of easily consultable newspapers from the period.

One thing that is clear from these newspapers is that, much like British India, the world of high finance was one of the last elements to go. The businesses of the Empire continued their fragmented existence throughout the former Empire with their boards of directors composed perhaps of a mixture of Czechs, Austrians, Jugoslavs and Hungarians, just as they had been before 1918. Ten years later they were wiped out by the Wall Street Crash. When that happened, all these former Habsburg lands had to remind them of their past was the yellow-painted railway station and perhaps a few rows of vines: Grüner Veltliner or Blaufränkisch.

Speaking in Tongues

Posted: 14th March 2011

I realise I am becoming a typical old fogy whose ire is easily provoked. In my case it often comes in the morning, on the way to my son’s school, when a one-time schoolmistress, formed in the academy of jolly hockey sticks - to the degree that she might have understudied for Joyce Grenfell in the St. Trinians films - greets me with a raucous ‘Hi!’ I keep promising I shall respond with an equally sonorous ‘howdee!’ but all I actually do is utter a firm and embittered ‘good morning’.

I read an article recently by an educated British historian and MP who used the past participle ‘gotten’, which is surely nothing more than American dialect. This man was young, I suppose, and one forgives youth, but this is not the case of the Anglican clergyman from Norfolk whose hand I shake twice a year and who, when I ask him how he is, tells me that he’s ‘good’. I suppose he might mean morally good but I find it insulting a man of his cloth might imagine I think him bad.

For some time I have been wondering whether there was anyone out there who cared what happened to the English language or literature (how long before we start censoring books? I am prepared to bet that the Americans will take a knife to Hemingway in a year or two). Should the British Academy, for example, form a committee composed of a dozen leading linguists to study the problem? Rather than concern, however, I hear nothing but encomiums: what a wonderful language, beautifully adapted to change and twice as good as that horrible French language, which needs to have some sort of a dour matron in charge in the form of the dreaded Académie française, to stop it from misbehaving. English is elastic, English is vibrant, English is fun.

It occurred to me that the people who said these preposterous things could not possibly have any knowledge of other languages, and that there must be plenty who are just as alarmed as I was. I decided to write to a prominent journalist who has carved out a name for himself recently by extolling the virtues of grammar. He eventually wrote back to say that policing language was a nasty foreign habit: good English was taught by example and a few fine writers were worth any number of academies.

I looked on Google to see if there had been any call for a body to protect the language, and stumbled across something that might have made that putative grammarian nervous. The summer of 2010 saw the launch of a body calling itself the ‘Academy of Contemporary English’ under the chairmanship of a linguist and translator called Martin Estinel.

Estinel had succeeded in gaining the attention of the press, but his pedantry proved too much for them. One or two journalists reacted by agonising over the difference between the subjunctive and the conditional, but worse came when Estinel revealed that he still used the adjective ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘jolly’ or ‘merry.’ This was too much for The Times, which promptly issued a thunderbolt in the form of a dismissive leader: Estinel and his chums were ‘fuddy-duddies’ and pedants; but that leader was a mere grunt compared to the reaction of the Godlike Stephen Fry, England’s greatest son, who awoke from his slumbers to bellow ‘outrage!’ Fry’s comment left Estinel’s campaign a lifeless corpse: there was nothing more to do but swiftly confine it to its grave.

Despite the bullish attitude of so many journalists, it is hard to escape the impression that the English language has actually left its orbit, and is in danger of becoming a sort of pidgin used essentially for when one foreigner needs to speak to another one who can’t communicate in his native Urdu or Japanese. It might be that English English is effectively dead as a creative idiom and that it died with its motherland some time in the ’sixties, although most of us didn’t notice the end for another twenty years. It was the language of the last phase of empire and its speakers were the imperial administrators who must have quietly thrown themselves on the funeral pyre, for there is no sign of them now. What passes for English is a celebration of the freedom to disassociate from an evil past, to ‘hang out, ‘do your own thing’, ‘chill out’. An attempt to impose order would be tantamount to ‘fascism’ or at the very least, an evocation of unwelcome ‘traditional’ values such as insisting that men wear jackets and ties, refrain from breaking wind in public or close their mouths when they are eating.

It is possible that the masters of modern English advocate the use of American idioms because that is the only part of the language that is just about alive. To be with it, you speak American. The schoolmarm, the historian and the vicar are therefore all under some sort of self-imposed pressure to Americanize their English. They are simply trying to be with it, believing that in ‘hi’, ‘gotten’, ‘you guys’ or ‘I’m good’ they have discovered a form of rejuvenation. Or is it that they understand that unless they bow to this hidden academy that has its headquarters in the press, they will be passed over, ostracised like those ancient Athenians who failed to toe the line?

As regards the French language, it appears that those who revile it are no more than a bunch of charlatans, who were beaten by it at school else they would not say such idiotic things. It is wonderfully precise and expressive all at once. I recently translated a book on testicles and was struck by how much richer the French vocabulary was than English - both in its British and American forms. One reason for this is the strict Académie, which forces so much of the creative side to reappear as slang, and French slang is a language all of its own.

Of course there is a real English academy that is far more powerful and a good deal more sinister than any other and which is impossible to ignore. Indeed, I am writing these words on a Microsoft Word file, while ‘spellcheck’ reminds me that I may not use the passive voice or reflexives, and that I have just done something monstrous by using a term that was ‘gender specific’. Let’s face it: the English Academy is Microsoft and its president is none other than the American Croesus, Bill Gates.

Vital Statistics

Posted: 16th February 2011

The following review of my book After the Reich appeared in the Basler Zeitung in Switzerland on 18 January. It was prompted by the reviewer’s interest in the runaway success of the Spanish translation. The newspaper did not choose to publish it in their online edition, so for German-speaking readers I have put it here in answer to the question I so often receive: why is there no German translation?

Deutsche als Opfer - ein Tabu

Christof Wamister

Ein englisches Buch über die Behandlung der Verlierer nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg stösst in Spanien auf Interesse. In Deutschland ist das alles längst bekannt - aber man lässt lieber die Finger von dem Thema.

«In Prag wurden Deutsche an Laternenmasten aufgehängt und als menschliche Fackeln verbrannt.» Das schrieb entsetzt die spanische Autorin Rosa Montero in ihrer Kolumne im Magazin «El País Semanal». Entnommen hat sie die schrecklichen Vorkommnisse den Besprechungen eines Buches, das in spanischer Übersetzung vergangenen Oktober erschienen ist. Verfasst hat es der englische Historiker Giles MacDonogh. Es heisst im Original: «After the Reich». «The brutal history of allied occupation» lautete der Untertitel der Erstausgabe von 2007.

Das lebhafte Interesse für sein Buch erstaunte den englischen Historiker bei der Präsentation in Spanien zuerst. Doch dann machte man ihn auf die Gräber mit den Skeletten von Erschossenen aufmerksam, die zurzeit in Spanien an verschiedenen Orten ausgegraben werden. Der Umgang der Sieger mit den Besiegten ist ein Thema, das die Spanier stärker denn je beschäftigt. Nach dem Ende des Spanischen Bürgerkriegs nahm das Franco-Regime Rache an den Verlierern.

In Deutschland gräbt man zwar kaum noch Skelette aus, aber man tut sich mit dem Problem auf eine andere Art schwer. Zwar wurden viele Einzelaspekte der deutschen Kriegs- und Nachkriegsleiden in den letzten Jahren wieder thematisiert: die Zerstörung der deutschen Städte durch die Luftangriffe, die Vertreibungen aus Mittel- und Osteuropa.

in deutschland unmöglich. Im Zusammenhang mit dem Fernsehfilm «Die Flucht» (2007) und anderen Publikationen entwickelte sich eine Debatte über die Frage, ob sich die Täter und Verlierer als Opfer darstellen dürfen. Doch kein deutscher Historiker könnte ein Buch über die brutalen Auswirkungen der alliierten Besetzung schreiben, ohne nicht in die rechte Ecke gestellt zu werden. Der Bann gilt auch jetzt: MacDonoghs Buch wurde in Deutschland nicht übersetzt.

Im englischsprachigen Raum waren die Reaktionen, wie in Spanien, überwiegend positiv. Nur eine Autorin deutscher Herkunft schrieb im «Times Literary Supplement» eine vernichtende Besprechung. Das sei ein Rückfall in die Zeit der frühen Fünfzigerjahre. Damals waren die Vertriebenenverbände noch stärker und die Erinnerungen an das Erlittene noch lebendiger.

MacDonogh stützt sich bei «After the Reich» auf Gespräche mit Zeitzeugen und auf Schilderungen, Memoiren und Quellenwerke, die in Deutschland schon lange bekannt sind. Aber bis jetzt hat es in deutscher Sprache noch niemand gewagt, ein gut lesbares Gesamtbild der Ereignisse zu liefern.

Der 55-Jährige verfolgt mit seinem Buch keine unlauteren politischen Absichten. Das ethische Problem umreisst er folgendermassen: Es sei auch in England gängige Meinung, dass die Deutschen verdient hätten, was sie am Kriegsende zu erdulden hatten. Und er habe keinesfalls die Absicht, mit seinem Buch die Deutschen zu entschuldigen. Aber es müsse deutlich gesagt werden, dass die Besiegten durch die Allierten oft schändlich behandelt wurden. «Und es waren in den meisten Fällen nicht die Politkriminellen, die vergewaltigt, ausgehungert, gefoltert oder zu Tode geschlagen wurden, sondern Frauen, Kinder und Alte.»

Das Leiden der Zivilbevölkerung und der Kriegsgefangenen war laut MacDonogh nicht nur die Folge eines bei einem Einmarsch in ein besiegtes Land herrschenden Chaos. Gemäss Auffassung der Alliierten, unter denen die USA die stärkste Stimme waren, mussten die Deutschen für den Angriffskrieg und die Vernichtungsstrategien kollektiv bestraft werden. Man liess sie zwei Jahre lang hungern; eine Massnahme, die vor allem die Schwächsten traf.

Die sowjetische Führung liess bekanntlich ihren Truppen bei der Eroberung des Landes und der Städte freien Lauf. Sie plünderten und vergewaltigten in grossem Umfang. Ausschreitungen in kleinerem Umfang gab es auch aufseiten der Westalliierten. Die Behandlung der Kriegsgefangenen verstiess oft gegen das humanitäre Völkerrecht. Sie wurden teilweise unter katastrophalen Bedingungen - unter freiem Himmel und bei Minimalernährung - untergebracht und zu jahrelangen Arbeiten abkommandiert. Die Zustände in vielen Gefangenenlagern beschäftigten das IKRK, dann aber auch die Medien und die Regierung.

Die vertraglich besiegelte Vertreibung von zwölf Millionen Deutschen aus ihren angestammten Gebieten in Mittel- und Osteuropa würde heute als ethnische Säuberung und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit taxiert. Ein Beispiel dafür sind die Vertreibungen aus der Tschechoslowakei. Im Mai 1945 kam es in ganz Böhmen zu barbarischen Gewaltexzessen, von denen nicht nur die Träger einer Wehrmachts- oder SS-Uniform, sondern auch viele Unschuldige betroffen waren. Die Deutschen wurden von dem Gewaltausbruch überrascht, denn nach einer Repressionswelle in der Folge des Attentats auf «Reichsprotektor» Heydrich (1942) gab es kaum bewaffneten Widerstand gegen die Unterdrücker.

Vertrieben wurden rund drei Millionen Menschen, 240 000 kamen dabei um, schreibt MacDonogh unter Berufung auf deutsche Publikationen in den frühen Fünfzigerjahren. Andere gehen von rund 130 000 Toten aus; eine deutsch-tschechische Historikerkommission kam 1997 zu einem Befund von 15 000 bis 30 000 Todesopfern. Die Mordorgien wurden strafrechtlich nie verfolgt. Unabhängige Historiker haben sich aber mit den Ereignissen befasst, und sie werden nicht mehr ernsthaft bestritten.

Folter. Laut MacDonogh wird das Bild der Okkupationszeit auch dadurch getrübt, dass bei Verhören mutmasslicher Kriegsverbrecher oft Folter angewendet wurde, besonders von den Amerikanern. Das lässt die Methoden gegen heutige Terrorverdächtige in einem neuen Licht erscheinen. Die Westalliierten lockerten ihre harte Hand dann gerade noch rechtzeitig, um bei den Deutschen keinen neuen Nazi-Widerstandsgeist zu züchten, schreibt MacDonogh.

US-General Patton, ursprünglich auch ein Deutschenhasser, war einer der Ersten, die entdeckten, dass man die Deutschen noch brauchen würde. Von 1947 an herrschte der Kalte Krieg und der Wiederaufbau Deutschlands begann.

Die geschätzte Bilanz des Nachkriegsdesasters: zwei Millionen tote Zivilpersonen; eine weitere Million starb in Kriegsgefangenschaft.

Giles MacDonogh: After the Reich. From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. John Murray, London 2007/08.

One point made by Wamister is that the numbers of Germans killed in Czechoslovakia are much disputed. When I wrote the book, I found a variety of figures quoted ranging down from half a million to none. There were ingenious ways of dismissing the figures too: the people who died were Reich Germans and not Bohemian Germans so they didn’t count; or, they were soldiers and  - I suppose - meant to die. The fact that they had clearly died in captivity did not change anything. Others pointed out that some of them were members of the SS (and therefore not even human), etc, etc. It is true that Field Marshal Schörner left the wounded men from his massive army behind when he retreated, and they may have made up a sizable number of the deaths incurred, either by desire or neglect. In the end I plumped for the official ‘Bonn’ figures, published the German government in the fifties, that assessed the number of deaths at around 240,000.

Recent books have questioned the Bonn figures both for Czechoslovakia as well as for the Germans who died as they were driven from their homes in Hungary and from old Prussian provinces such as Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia when they were awarded to Poland and Russia. These include Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (see January’s Blog), and Mary Heimann’s indictment of the Czechoslovak state in Czechoslovakia: the State that Failed (Yale 2009). As far as the Czech massacres are concerned, they rely on the findings of a Czech-German Joint Commission published in 1996, which assessed deaths at between 19,000 and 30,000.

The great disparity between these figures does not necessarily surprise me; even that the Commission’s tallies are under ten percent of those cited by Bonn in the old days. The fact that it was a ‘Czech-German’ commission (ie that German experts sanctioned the findings) should not lead us to believe that it is the last word on the subject either. As Wamister says in the Basler Zeitung,the notion of ‘victimhood’ is still not respectable in Germany, and there is a conscious desire among all right-thinking Germans to play down the idea that the Germans might have suffered too. The descendants of surviving Bohemian Germans in Germany are considered troublemakers, allied to the far right, and people who will not knuckle under and accept the post-war settlement with good grace.

When the Commission published its findings in 1996, the evidence had been largely swept away, nor can there have been there any desire to revive memories that might have been an embarrassment to the people living in the areas concerned - Czechs who had taken up residence in villages and towns that had been pretty well completely German before 1945. One interesting series of revelations that has taken place since then (see Blog for 16 June 2010) has shown that in the case of the massacre at Postelberg at least, everything took place more or less exactly as they said it had in the official report of 1951 - when memories were fresher than they are now.

It may be that the German expellees cooked the books back then, but the truth is that anyone wanting to pour cold water on massacres in this way starts of by questioning the statistics. We are all used to the so-called ‘Holocaust-deniers’ who say that the number of Jews who perished during the Third Reich was considerably less than six million, and there are some who maintain that none died at all. Twice now, I have received outwardly very scholarly letters from a certain William A. Kunberger of Levittown, Pennsylvania in the United States, who seems to be suggesting that the numbers of Jews who died in Auschwitz has been wildly exaggerated. In truth, it doesn’t matter very much whether they died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz or a ditch in the Ukraine (or indeed of typhus in a camp bunk), the moral point is surely that not one of them should ever have died intentionally or otherwise for the ‘crime’ of being a Jew, any more than they should have perished for being Ukrainian, Czech or Polish; or indeed, for being German.

Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes

Posted: 17th January 2011

Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (Chatto & Windus £16.99. Paperback edition released on 27th January).

Inasmuch as I understand it, The Hare with Amber Eyes is a travel book, albeit of a special sort: a voyage of self-discovery provoked by a rare inheritance that takes two forms: a collection of Japanese bibelots and the author’s growing awareness of his remarkable ancestry.

De Waal’s grandmother was an Ephrussi. Originally from Poland, the Ephrussis’ fortunes began to prosper in the port of Odessa when they became wholesale grain merchants. From grain they graduated to money. Ephrussi banks were created in Odessa, Vienna and Paris. In Vienna they were ennobled, and acquired such wealth that the only Jews that could raise an eyebrow to them were the Rothschilds, who had made their own fortunes a couple of generations before.

They sound a nice family for all their wealth. In Paris, Charles Ephrussi was a notable patron of the arts and the probable model for Proust’s Swann. It was he who amassed the collection of netsuke that is the thread that pulls the book together. These exquisite little carvings were given to his cousin Victor in Vienna as a wedding present. They are now owned by the author.

The Ephrussis were assimilated Jews, as only Vienna knew them: conspicuous by their absence from the synagogue, they nonetheless contracted marriages with their most powerful Jewish peers. After the First World War, many of them dropped their Judaism altogether, married Gentiles or converted, like de Waal’s grandmother Elisabeth, a lawyer who swapped poems with Rilke in her twenties and ended up producing a son who became an Anglican clergyman: de Waal’s father, Victor.

I was drawn to the book by the thought that it might tell me something about my own family. Like de Waal, I am a quarter Viennese Jew. My ancestors were not Ephrussis, of course; they were rich, but not fabulously so. When my great-great grandfather Ludwig Zwieback died in 1906, he left his daughters a fortune of 2.3 million crowns. The Ephrussis had ten times as much. De Waal translates this 25 million as $400 million. So my great-grandmother and her sisters carved up a fortune of $40 million in today’s money.

They were not half as ostentatious. Where the Ephrussis had their vast pink ‘palais’ on the Ring (which seems to make the author cringe), my family lived here and there on the same majestic boulevard, but in palaces sporting other people’s names. They were not on the piano nobile, but another floor up. The exception was ‘uncle’ Josef Kranz, who was quite as rich as an Ephrussi, but he was only an uncle by marriage.

It is, on the other hand, certain the two families were acquainted. De Waal’s great-grandparents’ best friends were the Barons Guttmann, who were also known to my great-grandfather. A Guttmann boy served in the same regiment (King of Saxony’s Dragoons) as my great-uncle Josef, and was killed in action against the Russians not long before he was, in the summer of 1915.  The Ephrussis must have gone to my great-grandfather’s jewellery shop on the Graben (indeed, a photograph of de Waal’s great grandmother shows her standing outside it talking to an archduke), or to the Modehaus Zwieback, the fashion house and department store on the Kärntnerstrasse that was founded by Ludwig and run by his youngest daughter Ella until 1938.

It is inevitable the book should reach its dramatic zenith with the Anschluss, when Vienna’s Jews were systematically robbed by the Nazis. He has learned the pseudo-legal methods of reducing Jews to penury and pilfering their collections from the expert on the subject, Sophie Lillie, whom he acknowledges. You see his ancestors cowering in their palace, not knowing how to react as all but one servant betrays them. How does an old man flee his home and abandon all the things he loves: a lifetime of careful collecting? A few days in a Nazi prison made them see the path north to safety in Slovakia, and eventually Britain. Viktor von Ephrussi left his palace in Vienna to die in straightened circumstances in Tunbridge Wells.

The Ephrussi story intrigued me, but I was less impressed by the author’s insistence on placing his personal voyage of discovery at the centre of it. Despite all my efforts, by the end of the book, his presence and his linguistic tics had started to irritate me and I heaved a sigh of relief when his story came to an end.  

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Posted: 16th December 2010

For some weeks, friends have been urging me to look at Professor Snyder’s new book (Bodley Head £25), one of them going so far as to tell me that it was the best he had read all year.

It concerns the ‘Bloodlands’, a country apparently invented by Snyder, that throws together the populations of Poland, Ruthenia and the Ukraine: western Slavs ground between the two millstones of Russia and Germany. It was also the traditional homeland of most of the world’s Ashkenazi Jews, who formed large minorities in cities such as Kiev, Minsk or Lvov as well as tilling the soil in their countless settlements or shtetls.

In modern times it was Tsarist Russia that began the persecution of the shtetl Jews, during the pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century.  The action led to large-scale emigration, as the so-called ‘Ostjuden’ (‘eastern Jews’) moved west, some drifting into the cities of central Europe, others docking in London or New York.

Stalin was less opposed to Jews at this stage (indeed, forty percent of his secret police were Jews). His bugbear was the kulak: the wealthy peasant of the Ukraine who resisted his plans to collectivise agriculture. In the early thirties Stalin allowed millions of Ukrainian peasants to perish of starvation in a desire both to reform agriculture and rid himself of a class that had long been anathema to him.

When Stalin forged his alliance with Hitler in the summer of 1939, it was the turn of the Poles who lived in the eastern part of the country who had been assigned to Russia under the terms of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Stalin had them executed in their thousands, a pendant to the activities of the Germans in their half of the conquered country, who set to work slaughtering the elite and large numbers of Jews. Snyder shows that the massacre of the Polish officer corps by the Russians at Katyn was just one of a handful of similar bloodbaths.

As Snyder reiterates (repetition seems to part of his apocalyptic style), the Germans had been mere pussycats in the killing game until war broke out. With time, however, they would outstrip their Soviet prototypes, taking the lion’s share of the fourteen million civilian lives lost in east central Europe during the Second World War.

For me, this Soviet model was one of the more interesting sides of the book, or rather just how much Hitler and his ministers imitated their communist enemies. Take the machinery of terror: the Gestapo adopted the form of the Soviet Cheka; the Soviets provided the model for German concentration camps. With time 18 million Soviet citizens would toil in these camps and between a twelfth and a sixth of the inmates died. In the late thirties, Germany had only about 200,000 people in ‘protective custody’. Soviet citizens were ‘deported’ to the camps, providing the euphemism that the Nazis would later use for the Jews.

It was not just the institutions he admired, he approved the methods: the starvation of the kulaks was eagerly observed by Hitler, who was not slow to see possible uses for such a weapon when he snatched his empire in the east: his victims were Soviet POWs, killed by the million. Even the ghastly ‘Genicksschuss’ - a bullet in the base of the skull - as a means of execution seems to have travelled to Nazi Germany from Russia. Snyder calls the depopulation of the region ‘a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.’

Why was Hitler so reticent about showing his murderous hand? Despite their tough anti-democratic rhetoric, the Nazis were an elected government who were keenly aware of their image abroad. They took care to hold plebiscites to reassure the world of their popularity.  Snyder calls Nazi Germany a one-party state, but that was not so: the communists and socialists were banned, but the right wing parties formed part of the governing coalition. There were plenty of traditional Germans who would have been horrified by seeing Bolshevik methods used in Germany. Once war came, gun smoke obscured the activities of the Einsatzgruppen in the east.

Even German terror bombing (which writers have pointed out was a British invention) was perfected away from home in Spain, where Hitler was gaining experience supporting Franco’s revolt.

At the Nuremberg trials doubts were cast about the ability of small groups of men to execute such large numbers with just rifles and pistols, but Snyder shows how first the Russians then the Germans were quite happy to expend quite phenomenal amounts of ammunition in this process, before the Germans dreamed up the idea of gas. You need a strong stomach to deal with the pages dedicated to the Soviet massacres, and the cannibalism that occurred in the Ukrainian famine, but that is nothing compared to Snyder’s description of death at the hands of the Germans. Perhaps for that reason you can expect no sympathy for the latter at the end of the war. Snyder pours cold water on their sufferings, and suggests that it was partly their folly anyway: they should have run faster - leaving their homes before the Red Army got the chance to rape and murder them.

In truth, no one comes out of his account well: the Nazi butcher Heydrich had been popular with the Czech workers; Jews and Russians collaborated with the Nazis to save their skins (but lost them in the end). He is good at exploding some well-worn myths: ‘The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.’ His total of 5.4 million Jewish deaths will surprise some by being lower than the normal figure, but he tops it up with Romanian massacres. The Romanians needed no urging from the Germans.

Was it my book of the year? I would have to say no, but it is an important book for all that. At least a decade ago I wrote an outline proposal on how the Red Army behaved when they arrived in East Prussia in January 1945 (a book on this theme has been written by Max Egremont and comes out in March). My then agent poured cold water on the idea. ‘You expect the Russians to behave like that.’ He said. The point is that you don’t expect it of the Germans. And yet they did behave like that, and Snyder does not adequately explain why. 

A Game of Consequences

Posted: 16th November 2010

On 25 November, my book The Great Battles is published by Quercus here in London. I can’t pretend that it is my usual beat, but it looks smart and there are plenty of pictures and maps, and it is a great joy to see my not quite eight-year old son carry it up to his bedroom at night.

Joseph is not exactly the target audience; rather the book is aimed at the increasing numbers of grown-up men (and I presume women) who are fascinated by the history of warfare. While I was writing it I was often amazed by how little space mainstream historians dedicated to the events on the battlefield in their books. There are whole monographs on the English Civil War, for example, which gave no account of the minutiae of the campaigns.

As a non-military man, I naturally feel a good battle should have serious political consequences. The battle that military planners and instructors allegedly like best is Cannae, but despite the brilliance of Hannibal’s tactics, Cannae is flawed by the fact that the Carthaginian general failed to follow up his victory by seizing Rome. Warfare’s most famous theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, saw the battle as an extension of politics, but the most political battles, and the most consequential ones, are sometimes the least impressive militarily.

Take, for example, Garibaldi’s victory over the King of the Two Sicilies’ army at Calatafimi on 15 May 1860. It didn’t take long for the Redshirts to disperse King Francis’ forces: a lot of noise and bravado and the 3,000 or so soldiers took to their heels, but it was the first nail in the coffin of the Bourbon kings and their fate was sealed when Garibaldi entered Naples in September. Italy was as good as unified.

Plassey is another case in point. Robert Clive had 3,200 troops (and only a third of them Europeans) when he faced Siraj-ud-Daula in June 1757. The battle rapidly turned into a rout due to the behaviour of the Nawab’s elephants, which, incensed by the British barrage, broke ranks and fled, rapidly followed by the oxen that had drawn the guns. The Indian gunners then set fire to their powder and very soon they were all running away with the Nawab at their head, seated on his camel. Clive lost 23 Europeans and 500 Sepoys in this comic-opera combat. The results, however, were no joke: in 1765, Clive became governor of Bengal. Plassey was the first step toward the creation of British India.

Frederick the Great’s dazzling victory at Leuthen in 1757, did little to alleviate his misery, which was to continue for anther five years. It was not his prowess as a general that saved Prussia, but the death of the Tsarina.

Some battles, on the other hand, are utterly political: the Battle of Hastings changed England for good; Agincourt brought Henry V the crown of France; Waterloo saw off Napoleon and introduced a European settlement that lasted a century.

Bismarck’s handing of the aftermath of the Battle of Königgrätz allowed for the creation of a unified Germany and for Austria to bury the hatchet. The greatest battle of all time, however, was probably Stalingrad. Before it Nazi Germany could still hope for victory, after the defeat, however, it was sauve qui peut. The biggest menace of our time was on the run.

Legacies

Posted: 20th October 2010

I was in Barcelona on 1st October to launch the Spanish translation of my book After the Reich (Después del Reich: Crimen y castigo en la posguerra alemana). In a single day, I gave six interviews and a press conference at the Circulo de Lectores bookshop in the centre of the city. When I got up for breakfast in my hotel the next morning, I was amazed to see the story splashed all over the quality dailies, not to mention the principal regional papers from the Balearics to Cordoba. A week later ripples had reached Argentina. Even more gratifying was the report that it had climbed to the upper branches of the Spanish bestseller list, though it seems to have tumbled a bit since.

I had to admire the efficiency of the Spanish press. The Spanish not only read newspapers, they appear to like books too, even books nearly a thousand pages long and costing €30. Here in Britain, even an interview with a literary giant with the stature of an Anthony Beevor or a Julian Barnes would be unlikely to run the next day. More likely it would pass in and out of the pages for three weeks before being relegated to some dusty corner of the Web site. Books are not news in Britain.

After the Reich had clearly struck a chord as a result of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The atrocities committed by the nationalists were swept under the carpet until Franco’s demise in 1975 and the surviving perpetrators were amnestied in 1977. More recently there has been an attempt to establish a ‘truth commission’ to investigate the deaths of the half a million people killed on both sides. Nineteen mass graves have been identified and there is a strong desire to finger the men who murdered the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

It should come as no surprise that the ubiquitous Judge Baltasar Garzon has been involved in this attempt to dig up the past, but earlier this year the judge was muzzled then sacked for exceeding his authority.

Meanwhile in Berlin an exhibition has opened at the Museum of German History dedicated to Adolf Hitler. The prospect of exhibiting pictures of the dead tyrant has led to much soul-searching in Germany, where the swastika continues to be an illegal symbol and Mein Kampf is a banned book. Sixty-five years after the end of the war, it seems the Germans cannot to be trusted to make up their own minds. The exhibition has been laid out to make it as didactic as possible as a warning against racialism, in the light of certain recent comments made about Islam. Any reference to Hitler’s apparently seductive personality has been expunged and all images have been carefully contrasted with representations of atrocities.

The curator, Hans-Ulrich Thamer, has put it on record that Hitler was an ‘ordinary man’ and the fear is that ‘ordinary men’ might once again see him as a role model.

Goebbels might have done his best to present him as a man of the people, but Hitler was anything but an ordinary man. He was an extraordinary man, and an extraordinarily evil man. If he had been just an ordinary man we would all have forgotten him by now. The honest truth is that we still don’t know what made Hitler tick, which is why people are fascinated by him, and why there are so many books and documentaries made about him, and why there will be so many more for years and years to come.

More Bones

Posted: 13th September 2010

A fresh cache of bones was uncovered in northern Slovenia on 7 September but seems to have excited very little interest in the British press at least. In all likelihood, the bodies represent another immediate post-war atrocity, committed by Josip Broz Tito who was seeking to eliminate his political enemies after a two-year long struggle for supremacy in Yugoslavia. For the time being, however, the identity of the 700 or so skeletons remains a mystery, with the BBC reporting that they were found in a twenty-metre long pit near the town of Prevalje. The victims were mostly men and some women. Their hands were tied. Some had been shot, while others had been hacked to death. Their shoes revealed that a few of them at least had been civilians.

Prevalje is just across the River Drau or Drava from the Austrian town of Bleiburg in southern Carinthia. The river forms the national border.  One solution is that the dead were part of the so-called Bleiburg Massacre which occurred after the British refused to accept the surrender of several thousand pro-German Croatian Ustashe, Serbian Chetniks and Slovenian Domobranci (home guard) troops who tried to pass into Austria between 15 and 17 May 1945. They were the last Axis force to surrender in World War II. The British had backed Tito’s partisans all along and agreed at Yalta to repatriate his enemies. 

Given the relatively small number of dead in this grave, however, it would seem more likely that the victims were some of the 11,850 Domobranci and their families who were forcibly repatriated from British camps in Austrian Carinthia. The fiercely Catholic Domobranci had collaborated first with the Italians and then with the Germans, finding both preferable to Tito’s brand of communism. Tito had been insistent at first and then had gone cold about their repatriation. The British order to go ahead seems to have proceeded from some misplaced zeal.

The British ousted some of these by the trainload via Bleiburg on 29 May. Most of them were disembarked at Slovenj Gradec, just a little further down the line into Yugoslavia before being marched to secluded spots in the forest where they could be secretly killed and buried in mass graves. Some were driven towards Misleja to the west. Others were taken south along the valley to the concentration camp at Teharje, where about 5,000 died.

The Prevalje site was revealed by a local who had witnessed the massacre hidden behind a tree as a boy. Prevalje is not mentioned in John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar’s moving account of the slaughter: Slovenia 1945 (I B Tauris 2005). The story makes you wonder how many more sites have yet to come to light.

Roger Moorhouse, Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-1945

Publisher: Bodley Head
Price: Amazon £16.25

Posted: 28th July 2010

Books about Berlin so often miss the point. All too frequently the city of Berlin becomes a simple metaphor for Germany. After 1871 at least, the mistake is more comprehensible: Berlin was the capital after all, but the city did not control Germany in the way that London or Paris ruled Great Britain or France. It was the seat of the German Emperor and the foreign office was there, but for the rest it played host to a relatively small number of centralised agencies whose brief extended throughout the new German Reich, such as the navy and the post office.

Berlin certainly possessed the ministries that ruled Prussia, and Prussia made up two-thirds of Germany, but as the saying went ‘Berlin is not in Prussia’, and the people had their own character and an image quite distinct from the stock Prussian.

Even when the Empire fell in 1918, Weimar Germany remained federal in structure. Regional power was devolved to the old Residenzen - the former court capitals. They showed disdain for that untidy, modern city in the east. Many Germany cities like Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt and Hamburg looked down on what the Jewish politician Walther Rathenau called ‘Parvenupolis… the parvenu among capital cities and the capital of parvenus’.

The Nazis hated the loose structure of Bismarck’s and Weimar Germany. The state lacked an effective capital and thereby defied the ‘Führerprinzip’ which demanded a proper chain of authority to replace the interconnecting pyramids that had been there before. With Hitler as chancellor, regional administrations were subsumed into a network of Gaue under the control of Party bosses or Gauleiters, and where possible power was shifted to Berlin.The Rheinlander Joseph Goebbels had been Berlin’s Gauleiter since 1926. From February 1933 he was effectively the city’s governor. When Hitler arrived at the Reichs chancellery a lot of Bavarians migrated north to join his team. Hitler wanted a magnificent capital, and set about demolishing the shabby city. He failed, however, to dent the character of Berliner in the six years between coming to power and the outbreak of war.

Roger Moorhouse does not fall into the trap in his excellent new book. He is anxious to look at the daily lives of Berliners and how they coped with the Third Reich.  He shows how little enthusiasm there was for the war and just how much joy was spread by a simple rumour that Hitler was about to conclude peace. Much of the story has a familiar ring to it: it could be wartime Britain, with its blackouts (with their inadvertent encouragement of sexual depravity - remember the excitement of George Formby’s ‘Mr Wu’ when he donned his ‘siren-suit’ and became an air-warden), rationing, bombing raids and evacuation. Propaganda played a big role, and children were encouraged to worship heroic fliers like Werner Mölders and Adolf Galland, but did we not look up to the Douglas Baders and Guy Gibsons? Gibson’s book on the Dambusters’ Raid was published within months of the event.

Only it was not Britain but Nazi Germany. Berliners witnessed not only the conscription of hundreds of thousands of foreign slave labourers who were bludgeoned in sinister camps on the city’s periphery, but also the deportation of the Jews. Moorhouse tackles the thorny question of how much Berliners knew about where the Jews were going, and what would happen to them. It is surely true that rumours circulated about mass-shootings before more clinical forms of extermination were introduced at the end of 1941, but most Berliners would have been uncertain of the Jews’ fate and living in a police state in wartime, they were few likely to risk their lives to interfere. They were, after all, more concerned with the fate of their own loved ones whose deaths on the Eastern Front were hushed up on Goebbels’ orders.

When the going was good, the war was not such a hardship. Anxious not to repeat the morale-sapping famine of 1917, Gauleiter Goebbels laid in adequate stocks of food. For a whole year from Fall of France in June 1940 to the start of the Barbarossa campaign against the Soviet Union, there was ‘Siegfriede’ - the peace of victory. When the tide turned against Germany after the Battle of Stalingrad, however, the grumbling became increasingly audible. The Nazis responded with ever-greater brutality. After February 1943, the Third Reich was sustained by terror alone: terror of the Gestapo and terror of what the Red Army would do when it reached Berlin.

Goebbels made full use of Soviet atrocities to bend his city to his will, but even he failed to adequately describe what would happen to the Berliners once the Russians penetrated the city walls in April 1945. Moorhouse’s brief ends here, but he nonetheless describes the first few days of horror with his customary flair.

The Postelberg Massacre

Posted: 16th June 2010

Last month, the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran a two-part story by Hans-Ulrich Stoldt on a massacre of ethnic Germans that took place in Postelberg (Postoloprty) on 6 June 1945, a month after the end of the Second World War. Encouraged by their leader, Edvard Beneč, the Czechs were eliminating the Germans in their midst: the people who had caused them so much grief since the foundation of the state in 1918, and particularly after Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in October 1938.

It is in almost all particulars the same story that I told in my book After the Reich except that my report was based on the deposition of the expellee Dr Franz Freyer logged by the appropriate federal ministry in March 1951, and Stoldt based his findings on contemporary interviews.

The Postelberg massacre took in the male members of the small ethnic German community from the hop town of Saaz or Zatec (incidentally, the hop trade had formerly been in the hands of Jewish merchants) who were marched the fifteen kilometres to Postelberg on 3 June. The local militia then assembled the Germans on the town square and amused themselves for the time being by packing them off on work details.

The massacre was unleashed when five boys aged between twelve and fifteen were discovered to have set out with the older men, possibly in the hope of escaping. One of the Czechs in command, Bohuslav Marek, decided that they should be flogged for their impudence, while Captain Vojtech Cerny deemed they should be shot. In the end a compromise was struck and the boys were flogged and shot. One of them was later found to be still alive and pleaded to be allowed to see his mother. They carried on shooting. Over the next few days another 2,000 grown up Germans were killed in this way. Their bodies were then concealed in a number of mass graves.

In 1947, the Czech authorities investigated and decided to destroy some of the evidence by cremating the dead they found in one of the pits. Evidently they hoped the story would go away. A number of people had an interest in keeping it alive, however. Among these was Walter Urban, who still lives in the area. He was three when the massacre took place and his father was a victim. Others keen to see the dead remembered are the eyewitnesses Peter Klepsch and Heinrich Giebitz, who now live in Germany. Their desire to see a monument erected to the dead is supported by Czechs like the historian Tomas Stanek, and the local journalist David Hertl. Other Czechs are not so enthusiastic: Hertl has received death-threats since he began airing the story.

Wherever the Germans were chased away after 1945, a general cover-up was imposed. The elimination of the graves and graveyards was common practice after the war in both Czechoslovakia and Poland as a means of removing the evidence of the existence of German communities. In 1991, I recall wandering into the evangelical church in Olsztyn (the former Prussian Allenstein) in north-eastern Poland and watching the cautious approach of the pastor as he ventured out of his sacristy. He addressed me in Polish. When I said I couldn’t speak Polish he switched to German. I was aware there were still a few dozen families of ethnic Germans living in the area and asked him where they were buried. He patted the altar: the German dead had no right to tombstones, as officially they did not exist and never had. They were buried in the church by night.

Things have now begun to change. After the discovery of another mass grave containing 2,000 skeletons dating from 1945 in Malbork (Marienburg) last year, the Polish authorities permitted the remains of the dead Germans to be re-interred on Polish soil. In November 2008, the Czech government allowed some 4,500 German bodies that had been rotting in a disused factory to be buried in Cheb, the formerly Eger in the Sudetenland. There is still opposition to the idea of a monument in Postoloprty, but there is a chance that a compromise may be struck. Some of the Czechs who now inhabit the homes of the banished Germans would like to see the stone honour all the victims of the war: Czechs, Jews and Germans alike.

Bring Back the Editor!

Online Reviews

Posted: 18th May 2010

For many of us writers, the story that the historian Orlando Figes had been using assumed names to trash his rivals’ books (guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/23/historian-orlando-figes-amazon-reviews-rivals) has merely confirmed our worst fears that internet reviews are just so many accounts settled. It is none the less worrying news because it would seem that the future lies with the Web. Book reviewing has been in crisis for some years now and with every book I publish the number of conventional outlets for comment gets smaller and smaller. Reviews generate recognition, and recognition results in sales: fewer reviews would mean fewer sales and even less money.

In America the three great papers - the New York and Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post - soldier on - as does the New York Review of Books, but the rest have either perished or gone online. Here in Britain the pressure on space in the broadsheets is so intense that you are lucky to get one full-length review where you might have had half a dozen in the past.

On the other hand there is a thin silver lining that one proper review will be copied to the Internet and read by vastly more people than, say, those who used to read the reviews in the Daily Telegraph or the Sunday Times in the old days. The old tribalism that said ‘I bought this because it was recommended in my favourite paper,’ has largely disappeared.

And there will be plenty of commentary on your book on the Web too, even if it is hard to determine as yet how or whether this influences sales. This comment ranges from well-informed and well-written articles in online journals and specialised blogs, to illiterate or semi-literate abuse elsewhere. At its worst, online reviewing is no better than the tyrannical opinions of some loud-mouthed tub-thumper in a pub or bar. A very large number of these ladies and gentlemen conceal their identities behind pseudonyms (if they have the courage of their convictions, in Heaven’s name why?). One I have encountered actually calls himself Damocles! Nomen est omen; but then, I think Damocles actually gave me a good review so he wasn’t my nemesis after all.

In the light of the Figes story, most people will now assume that all pseudonyms are either noms de plume belonging the unsympathetic writers, their friends or enemies.

By far the greatest gathering-place for these tub-thumpers is Amazon, which encourages people to write reviews to the degree that I now get a weekly sales-pitch from Amazon coupled with the chance to review my own books. Not only do you have the means to conceal your identity, but there are lots of tricks whereby you can help a mate out. I was slow in the uptake here and wondered why so many unpromising books had a single row of five stars. Then I learned the reason: not so long ago, a friend bounced up to me at another friend’s book launch to say that she was getting a free copy of the novel.

‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because I gave her five stars.’

The scales fell from my eyes. I had been hopelessly naïve. There are other ruses: I am now told you can make a list, and include the friend together with all the acknowledged giants in the field; or you simply buy a bestseller plus the friend’s book so that some item produced by a vanity publisher sits cheek by jowl with Julian Barnes or Agatha Christie: ‘customers who bought X, also bought Y’.

I must have read some of these Amazon reviews at first, but I quickly became apoplectic when I saw that they were publishing comments that started with lines like ‘I have seen this book in a bookshop….’ Book reviewers were hardly the salt of the earth, but at least they pretended to read the works assigned to them. There needs to be a proper line drawn between gut-reaction and informed criticism.

Nor can you entirely dismiss these amateur reviews by saying no one will read them. Amazon now sells about one in ten of my books, and some buyers will be guided by the ratings if not by the reviews themselves. Even the professional reviews Amazon prints are often suspect. On US Amazon, my book After the Reich is prefaced by a very un-representative and extremely vindictive review by a Polish-American journalist called Andrew Nagorski. It has been slinging unfounded abuse at me for two years now, and there is no sign of it ever going away.

It is fair to assume that Amazon has been a great success and has made its owners plenty of money. In the light of the Figes business I would therefore like to make a humble suggestion: that the company appoint someone to oversee the review pages on each of their sites around the world. This person would try to determine if the comment were fair, and whether it constituted a review in the accepted sense of the term. Comment could be limited to reactions to reviews. The overseer would also elicit the real name of the person submitting a review and an undertaking that the article was written impartially, not by an ex-wife or a sacked employee and not from reasons of revenge.

Over and over again the Internet makes us writers cry out in despair: ‘bring back the editor! All is forgiven!’

GOODNIGHT VIENNA

Posted: 16th April 2010

When I was in Vienna in January, my friend Christopher Wentworth-Stanley pressed a historical novel on me with all too evident disdain. It was called Goodnight Vienna and was written by someone called J.H. Schryer. He had picked it up in the airport, and since ascertained that ‘Schryer’ was a pseudonym. The real authors were a Dr Helen Fry, who teaches theology in Exeter, and a quondam tailor called James Hamilton. 

Had it not been for the subject matter I doubt the book would have caught his attention or mine. It is a collection of howlers with a bit of gratuitous, toe-curling sex thrown in. Christopher grabbed it because it was set in Vienna, and concerned 1938, a Nazi mole working for MI6 and the Rev. Hugh Grimes. So the plot derives from the true story of Captain Thomas Kendrick of the Passport Control Office (and MI6), the mole Karl Tucek and the Anglican baptisms carried out by Grimes and his locum, Rev. Fred Collard at Christ Church Vienna.

It is indeed a dismal book. As there is a historical mistake on every page (and two or three on some of them) I shall confine myself to the most pungent: the authors maintain the anti-Jewish laws had all been enacted by the time Hitler reached Vienna on 14 March and Cardinal Innitzer appears with Hitler when he stands on the balcony in the Hofburg to address the crowds on the 15th (I am surprised they didn’t have him molesting a small boy at the same time); the forcing of the Jews to scrub the pavements seems to carry on for weeks, rather than being the short-lived retribution of Austria’s home-grown Nazis for the fact they had been forced to wash their own slogans off the walls by the previous regime; Viennese Jews immediately apply for visas to the United Kingdom, when visas weren’t reintroduced until 21 May; Eichmann has become one of the most important figures in the Reich (a sort of Hermann Göring with strings of medals), when he was then only a lowly apparatchik at the time, specialising in Jewish emigration; we have a Berlin-style book-burning in Vienna (there was one is Salzburg) and a resistance movement (that came much later); the Jews are already wearing yellow stars in the streets; they eat chanterelles in November (presumably deep-frozen); transports of Jews trundle off to Dachau long before the first transport of 1 April; ‘Napoleon’ is apparently a brand of cognac; Seyss-Inquart was the Austrian ‘chancellor’ (the office was scrapped on 13 March before Hitler reached Vienna), Vienna has ‘ambassadors’ (they went with the Anschluss: Berlin was the capital of the Reich); Jews are massacred (this started in September 1939); Churchill was hiring and firing the head of the secret service (he was still a backbencher); Italy was allowing Jews across the border in November (they closed it in September).

The SS has ‘gauleiters’ (a Nazi Party rank), Hitler was born in Linz… Strewth! All that and much more, expressed in the ghastly, anachronistic language of an airport novel: characters ‘keep their cool’, go to toilets and say ‘that bastard cheated on me;’ an idiom more suited to a modern celebrity golfer’s wife than a 1930s virtuoso. Who ever heard of a raunchy violinist anyway?

Almost all the German is misspelled.

In the sex-scenes, Hamilton’s former metier seems to have helped him out, for there seems to be a lot of wardrobe detail. There’s a bit of buggery and some fashionable lesbianism to cater for all tastes, but it’s rather coy and it has been a long time since I heard the word ‘manhood’ used to denote a penis (as in ‘her hand moved down to his manhood, caressing the end in pleasure’: a line that is delightfully - but perhaps unintentionally - ambiguous). Had I been shown it sooner I might have recommended the book for a Bad Sex Award.

The puzzling question is where did the authors got the detail about Hugh Grimes and his political baptisms from? The only people who have looked at the papers at the Anglican church in Vienna are the incumbent, Patrick Curran, Christopher, Professor Munro Price of Bradford University and myself. I can only assume that Dr Fry (who is apparently an expert on ‘Anglo-Jewry’) read the article I published in the Jewish Quarterly in 2004 about Kendrick, Grimes and his verger Richter. The piece was written to support a synopsis we were showing to publishers in Britain and Austria at the time. Sadly, no one showed an interest. ‘J H Schryer’ had better luck. For what it is worth, the title of our proposal was Goodnight Vienna.

And you will be pleased to hear J.H. Schryer’s book has been a runaway success and that we can expect a sequel this very year.

VALKYRIE

Posted: 12th March 2010

It has happened: over Christmas I finally saw Bryan Singer’s film Valkyrie about the 20 July 1944 Plot to kill Hitler. It wasn’t exactly that I had been straining at the leash. I had had many reports, people told me that Tom Cruise was a simply awful Stauffenberg and that the film was redeemed by its stock of British character actors.

My reaction was quite the opposite: I thought Cruise decent enough, and the British for the most part dreadful. At least Cruise was stiff in a way you would expect from an old-fashioned German colonel, whereas most of the cast could be dismissed as a ‘shower’ who might have benefited from a month or two’s hard drill round a Prussian parade ground.

Bill Nighy resembled a cowardly bank clerk. Kevin McNally completely misinterpreted the stuffy ‘Oberbürgermeister’ in Carl Goerdeler (no one succeeded in wrapping Cruise’s tongue round either name, Goerdeler or Goebbels). A craggy looking man (David Schofield) turned out to be the retired Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who had the reputation of being a proper Prussian general with a great sense of right and wrong and it was impossible to imagine either him or Colonel-General Ludwig Beck (Terence Stamp) in uniform.

There were some decent performances too: Tom Wilkinson was an accomplished General Fromm, and I liked the slightly common Field-Marshal Keitel portrayed by Kenneth Cranham. He wasn’t called ‘Lakeitel’ (‘Keitel the Lackey’) for nothing. And the shambling Hitler portrayed by David Bamber was very good indeed.

In all fairness, it was not just the British actors who struck the wrong note. The German Christian Becker playing Merz von Quirnheim had had his head shaven in a trendy way and peering out from his designer specs he reminded me irresistibly of the telly techno-chef Heston Blumenthal, so that I could picture him pulling out a test-tube filled with essence of steak and kidney pudding from the pocket of his carmine-striped trousers.

The wooden spoon, however, goes to Kenneth Branagh as Henning von Tresckow. He had the military bearing of a wet Labrador, but worse, much worse, was the scrambling of so many of the moving statements Tresckow made at the time which were recorded by his friend Fabian von Schlabrendorff. This was the scriptwriter’s fault, but it was a crime to omit such lines: ‘remember this hour. If we do not succeed in persuading the field marshal to do everything, even to get these orders countermanded, Germany will have finally lost her honour, and that will be felt for hundreds of years to come. Not only Hitler will be blamed, but you and I, your wife and my wife, your children and my children.’

In a note to Stauffenberg (a version of these lines is awarded to Tom Cruise in the film) he made it abundantly clear, even failure would be preferable to inaction: ‘The attempt must succeed, coûte que coûte. If it fails, we must act in Berlin. It is now no longer a question of practical results, but of showing the world and history that the Resistance movement risked the last throw. Nothing else matters now.’

And then there are his last words to Schlabrendorff before he blew himself to bits with a grenade: ‘Now everyone in the world will turn upon us and sully us with abuse. But my conviction remains adamant - we took the right course. Hitler is not only the arch-enemy of Germany, he is the arch-enemy of mankind. In a few hours time I shall stand before God to answer for my actions and omissions. I believe that I will be able to vouch for everything I have done in the fight against Hitler with a clear conscience.

‘God once promised Abraham that he would spare Sodom if ten just men could be found in the city. He will, I trust, spare Germany and not destroy her because of what we have done. None of us can complain of his lot. Whoever joined our movement donned the shirt of Nessus. The moral worth of a man is certain only if he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.’

The garbling of these lines completely sapped the film of the emotional pull it should have exerted. Yes, we do see gallant men in the dock holding their heads high before the hanging-judge Roland Freisler, but where was Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, an inveterate plotter who had bearded Churchill in Britain before the war? Asked by Freisler if he had committed high treason, Schmenzin replied ‘Jawohl, I have been committing high treason consistently and with all the means at my disposal since 30 January 1933. I have never made any bones about my fight against Hitler and National Socialism. I hold this fight as ordained by God, and God alone shall be my judge.’