Book Review By Jan Mieszkowski, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 21, 2013 Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine By Christian Ingrao London: Polity, 2013 Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands WHO'S AFRAID OF THE INTELLECTUALS? Perhaps it’s the same people who can’t get enough of them. Brad Pitt may have been the leading man in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), but it was Christoph Waltz as SS Colonel Hans Landa, “The Jew Hunter,” who stole the show. From the film’s opening scene, Landa is an ambiguous figure, an urbane dandy possessed of great cunning and a remarkable facility with languages yet prone to the exaggerated showmanship of a buffoon. While the pleasurably unnerving spectacle of the evil genius/jester is a venerable trope, Landa complements his campy behavior with the sober declaration that he is far too intelligent to be a true believer in the National Socialist cause and should simply be regarded as a careerist trying to excel at his job. “I’m a detective. A damn good detective,” he tells his American adversaries when they taunt him with his ominous nickname. “Finding people is my specialty. So naturally, I worked for the Nazis finding people. And yes, some of them were Jews.” Landa is a comic figure, of course, but it is not clear whether he is meant to lampoon the incoherence of our ideas about the Nazis or the vanity of intellect itself. The instability of his persona is a reminder that the study of Hitler’s Germany and the Holocaust is still haunted by questions about what kind of people could perpetrate such unspeakable crimes. One might presume Nazism and intellectualism to be incompatible. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Hannah Arendt notoriously declared that Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief organizational engineers of the Holocaust, was an obedient functionary rather than an evil monster and had “no insane hatred of Jews.” “Neither perverted nor sadistic,” Eichmann was rather, Arendt argued, “terribly terrifyingly normal.” For Arendt, the key to understanding Eichmann’s behavior lies in his “quite authentic inability to think.” Unable to grasp what anyone else’s viewpoint might be — having read, Arendt muses, no more than one or two serious books in his life — Eichmann was condemned to the oblivion of obtuseness. This supercilious judgment is often held up as proof of Arendt’s intellectual elitism. Would she, one wonders, have taken a cosmopolitan Nazi like Landa more seriously? In fact, Arendt was well aware that there was a place for the thinking man in the Third Reich. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she goes out of her way to observe that the heads of the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary death squads of the SS that conducted mass killings on the Eastern front, were members of an intellectual elite. How did these men, who did not, unlike Eichmann, suffer from a “lack of imagination,” become an integral part of a sustained genocidal operation of unparalleled scale? The Belgian historian Christian Ingrao’s Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine attempts to answer this question. In the 1990s, a high-profile debate took place between historians Christopher R. Browning and Daniel J. Goldhagen about the participation of “ordinary” Germans, people with no party affiliation and little or no ideological indoctrination, in the Holocaust. In Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992), Browning looked at a unit of middle-aged working-class men and concluded that their willingness to carry out orders to execute Jews was proof of their respect for authority and the power of peer pressure, and not evidence of deep-seated anti-Semitism. Four years later, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), Goldhagen vehemently contested this conclusion, arguing that an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” was a cornerstone of German culture and crucial for understanding the readiness of individuals such as Browning’s policemen to slaughter civilians. Interest in this dispute was heightened by an exhibition organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research entitled “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941–1944,” which toured German and Austria from 1995 to 1999. It made a strong case that the German army was actively involved in the planning and implementation of genocide and was not, as many had presumed, a passive bystander to the crimes of the SS. Book Review By William Scheuerman, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2013 Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. By Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer. Edited by Raffaele Laudani. Princeton University Press: 2013 War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- a precursor to the CIA -- and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis. Donovan was a decorated veteran of World War I and a Wall Street lawyer linked to the Republican Party. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt tapped him to create the United States’ first dedicated nonmilitary intelligence organization. At that time, many in the foreign policy establishment saw intelligence and espionage as somewhat undignified, even unimportant. So Donovan cast a wide net, recruiting not only diplomats and professional spies but also film directors, mobsters, scholars, athletes, and journalists. Even in that diverse group, Franz Neumann stood out. Neumann, a Marxist lawyer and political scientist, had fled Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He arrived in the United States a few years later, where he was hailed as an expert on Nazi Germany after the 1942 publication of his book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, which depicted Nazism as a combination of pathological, monopolistic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. Neumann’s work brought him to the attention of Donovan, who was eager to mobilize relevant expertise regardless of its bearer’s political views. Donovan put Neumann in charge of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, studying Nazi-ruled central Europe. Neumann was soon joined by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the legal scholar Otto Kirchheimer, his colleagues at the left-wing Institute for Social Research, which had been founded in Frankfurt in 1923 but had moved to Columbia University after the Nazis came to power. What came to be known as the Frankfurt School combined an unorthodox brand of Marxism with an interdisciplinary approach to research that stressed the pivotal roles played by culture, law, politics, and psychology in buttressing injustice. Its members always disdained the more rigid leftist thinking that had claimed Marx’s mantle in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Despite the vast political and cultural gap separating Donovan from Neumann and his team, the spymaster trusted the radicals with the vital security task of providing advice about the Nazis. In the words of John Herz, another young refugee assigned to Neumann’s office (and later a major figure in postwar international relations theory), “It was as though the left-Hegelian World Spirit had briefly descended on the Central European Department of the OSS.” The result of this unusual collaboration was a series of fascinating reports prepared for U.S. policymakers on topics ranging from anti-Semitism and the Nazi political economy to the impact of air raids on civilian morale and the best way to prosecute war criminals. Despite their backgrounds in such abstract fields as jurisprudence, philosophy, and political theory, the Frankfurt School thinkers turned out to be shrewd and down-to-earth political analysts. Yet their reports also point to the limits of wartime policy advising, the difficulty of applying theory to practice, and the sobering reality that even astute prognosticators are likely to remain imprisoned in the political past. Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka By Kevin Jackson, Literary Review July 2013 Kafka: The Years of Insight By Reiner Stach. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press. Kafka: The Decisive Years By Reiner Stach. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton University Press. Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt By Saul Friedlander, Yale University Press Someone must have been telling lies about K., for the popular image of him as the great Gloomy Gus of 20th-century letters (close rivals: Beckett, Cioran, maybe Céline) does not bear very much scrutiny. Consider this incident, which took place as he was dying of tuberculosis, and knew it. One day, when he was walking in a Berlin park, Kafka saw a little girl crying. He asked her why she was sad and she told him that she had lost her doll. Oh no, Kafka said, her doll was not lost - the toy was simply off on an exciting adventure. Understandably sceptical, the girl asked for proof. So Kafka went home and wrote a long, detailed letter from the doll, and gave it to the little girl the following day. Then, every day for the next three weeks, he gave her an additional letter. It seems that the doll had met a boy doll, and become engaged, and then married. By the end of the three weeks, the doll was setting up her marital home and the little girl no longer missed her mute companion. This is hardly the sort of thing you would expect of the fellow who wrote The Trial or The Castle or 'In the Penal Settlement' (one of the most horrific short texts ever to have sneaked its way into the literary canon), and it is poignant as well as charming, not least because in our own climate of nervy erotic suspicion a middle-aged male writer who attempted such kindliness would have the social services or police on him like a shot. But the story of Kafka and the Lost Doll is instructive as well as surprising. It explains to the neophyte what an unusually kind and thoughtful man he could be, even when he was drawing his shallow breaths in sharp pain. Some of his fans think that - again like Beckett - he bordered on the saintly. But it also hints at Kafka's knowledge of the power that lies in stories, his own stories in particular. Stories can cure the sadness of small girls. They can also frighten, console, give courage. They can help even a sick and dying writer make some sense of what remains of his short life. Kafka seems often to have thought of writing as a curse or (to borrow a term from the literature of shamanism) a sickness vocation. And yet the thing that makes you ill may also, from time to time, make you powerful. Some of Kafka's greatness is due to the fact that his work belongs as much to the very long history of storytelling as to the relatively short history of Western literature. On the whole it is plain, simple, direct and tantalisingly cryptic. His stories worm their way under your skin and stay there until you itch. They make some people itch so badly that they have to start telling their own stories about K. In the years when his reputation first began to take off, after the Second World War, he was mainly revered as Kafka the prophet, the man who had read the entrails of his age and foreseen, first, the rise of totalitarianism, secondly the cancer-like proliferation of faceless officialdom, thirdly 'alienation' and finally, especially, the death camps in which most of his close family and lots of his friends were murdered. By Angus Trumble, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS), July 3, 2013 Book Review of James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore, The British as Art Collectors: From the Tudors to the Present, 352pp. Scala. £60. Protesting against Napoleon’s plot in 1796 to confiscate the greatest masterpieces of painting and sculpture in Italy and remove them to France, the connoisseur, antiquarian and theorist Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy warned: “England is the image of what Europe would become if the dismemberment which I fear were actually to occur. That nation has no centralized, dominant collection despite all the acquisitions made by its private citizens who have naturally retained them for their private enjoyment. What is the result? These riches are scattered through every country house; you have to travel in every county over hundreds of miles to see these fragmented collections: so that I can think of nothing less useful for Europe, or even for the arts of England itself, than what England already possesses . . . . Let us hope that these collections will be happily reunited and restored to the world of learning.” This perception from Paris was partly right and partly wrong. Referring in 1844 to great English country houses with notable collections of Old Master paintings, Anna Jameson wrote: “I know not for my own part, more than one or two isolated instances in which admission was refused to an artist or stranger who came properly introduced, or whose name was known”. On his epic tours of inspection in the 1830s, however, Dr Gustav Waagen was often tormented by key-jangling housekeepers hovering at his elbow, poor light, and out-of-date lists, inventories and wall diagrams. Accessibility was a problem, and information often scarce. The British as Art Collectors, liberally and beautifully illustrated, sets out the history of the art-collecting impulse in Britain from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Shaping it into four densely packed, chronological sections, James Stourton and Charles Sebag-Montefiore deal, first, with “Royalty” (in other words, collecting at Court, above all the assembly and dispersal of the superb collection of King Charles I at Whitehall); “Aristocracy” (the principally eighteenth-century Whig Grand Tour and country-house phenomena which Quatremère de Quincy had in mind); “Plutocracy” (the transitional period brought about by the displacement effects of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars); and, finally, “Democracy” (which concerns the arrival of the public art museum in the early nineteenth century, its proliferation, and the gradual institutionalization, professionalization and broadening of the collecting impulse into our time). By David Nirenberg, The Chronicle Review, January 28, 2013 Does the past affect how we perceive the present? Do our concerns in the present affect the ways in which we see the past? Does what we have thought in the past—the history of our ideas—affect what and how we think in the present and future? Those dauntingly large questions once animated the discipline of history. But in the second half of the 20th century, many—historians, philosophers, psychologists—became increasingly (and rightly) suspicious of the available answers, and more or less stopped asking such questions. "History," Foucault put it in the 1960s, "is for cutting." Today intellectual historians largely focus their efforts on reconstructing the context within which a given idea was expressed, rather than exploring the movement and transformation of ideas across time and space. This emphasis on ever-more-particular historical contexts can help us to sever some of the fantastic continuities that cultures construct between past and present, but it cannot help us to perceive those continuities, or to reconstruct or understand them. In the words of Montaigne, himself quoting Seneca, "Cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion." If the present is not independent of the past, if the cognitive possibilities at any given moment—even our own—are conditioned by habits of thought acquired over time, then we need a way to become aware of those habits, lest we find ourselves acting in their grip. The problem could not be more general, but the history of ideas about Judaism poses a particularly acute example, because it is both a highly charged concept in the present and one with a long history. Ancient Egyptians spent a good deal of papyrus on the Hebrews; early (and not so early) Christians filled pages attempting to distinguish between the New Israel and the Old; Muhammad's followers were intensely worried about the Prophet's relation to Jews and "Sons of Israel"; medieval Europeans invoked Jews to explain topics as diverse as famine, plague, and the tax policies of their princes. And in the vast archives of material that survive from early-modern and modern Europe and its cultural colonies, it is easy enough to demonstrate that words like "Jew," "Hebrew," "Semite," "Israelite," and "Israel" appear with a frequency stunningly disproportionate to the actual number of Jews living in those societies. Alexander Pushkin By Mikhail Shishkin, New Republic, July 1, 2013 It was only a century ago that Russia was the center of world literature. Writers streamed from all over the world to Yasnaya Polyana to bow before Tolstoy, like pilgrims to Jerusalem. And in Russia the authority of this writer was so great that, should he, the great writer, have decided, say, to be elected czar, it is doubtful that Nicholas II could have held on to his throne. The snag is that Tolstoy didn’t consider power to be worth a brass farthing—and that it is impossible to be elected czar: in Russia, legitimate power is derived only from God. It is also impossible, I should add, to be elected a great writer. But where did this power of literature come from in Russia?At the time that Shakespeare was penning Hamlet’s monologue in the West, in Russia there were no poets or writers to speak of. There were only czars and holy fools. God gave the Russian people the king-emperor and the fool-in-Christ. The former held sway over the lives and deaths of his subjects, the latter was the only one who could speak truth to the tyrant. Recall the famous scene in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, when the holy fool exclaims: “It is forbidden to pray for Czar Herod, the Holy Mother forbids it!” The counterweight to the sanctity of power was the sanctity of Christian conscience. Back then, the Russian atlas of the world looked something like this: the holy Fatherland in the center of the world, the only truly Christian country, surrounded on all sides by an ocean of enemies. Centuries-old servitude to the czar meant a confiscation of body and will and mind, but in exchange it elevated the soul and conferred a righteous purpose on existence. What looked to ambassadors from the banks of the Rhine like Russian despotism and slavery seemed on the banks of the Moscow River a committed participation in a common fight, in which the czar was the general and everyone else was his child and soldier. The absence of a private life was compensated for by the sweetness of dying for the homeland. The stretch of the Fatherland across geography and time was the down payment for personal salvation; the unconscious slavery was bitter for the body but life-sustaining for the spirit. Russia, like Noah’s ark in the flood, fulfilled the mission of saving sacred life on Earth. But everything changed with Peter the Great. He wanted to “cut a window to Europe,” but instead he cut a hole in the Russian ark. Russia’s regular historical paradox is that its rulers want one thing but the result is often something entirely different. Peter the Great wanted to strengthen the empire, but instead he placed a bomb beneath it, which destroyed it. In our time, Gorbachev wanted to save communism and instead he buried it. By Marc Mulholland, Dublin Review of Books, June 17, 2013 Book Review of Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber, Liveright Publishing, 648 pp, £25 Karl Marx, writes Jonathan Sperber in this splendid new biography, was “a true and loyal friend, but a vehement and hateful enemy”. To be in his small circle was to feel part of something historic, but also to be exposed to constant critical scrutiny. Once he feared for his political reputation, Marx let no politesse hold him back. One close colleague, Wilhelm Liebknecht, remembered him as “the most accessible of men … cheerful and amiable in personal relations”. It was as well, perhaps, that Liebknecht remained unaware of his sniping remarks about him in private letters. Marx’s closest friendship was with Friedrich Engels, a man many found to be extremely off-putting in person: strongheaded, rather vain and arrogant. It may be that his buddy relationship with Engels licensed Marx to ditch responsible leadership and blow off steam, and their mutual correspondence is certainly full of unedifying abuse of almost everyone they knew. But it is Marx’s ability to inspire loyalty and awed respect that comes through most clearly from the recollections of those who knew him. Sperber’s Marx is very much “a nineteenth-century Anglo-German bourgeois”, and as such he was a fairly typical father and husband. Sperber rather approves of Marx’s “middle way” between bohemianism and Victorian patriarchy. That may be justified, though the suicide of one daughter (Eleanor, who feared the emergence of some obscure scandal blackening her dead father’s name) and the suicide pact of another daughter and son-in-law (Laura and Paul Lafargue) rather suggests an intense family atmosphere crippling of psychological well-being. Marx sacrificed the welfare of himself and his family, as he was guiltily aware, on the altar of revolution. He gave up easy income, quiet study, respectable recognition, his own health and many friendships to the imperious demands of unremitting struggle. His family and circle were dragooned into exhausting work for the cause. Their solidarity was not always sufficient to protect him from the tragedies of life ‑ “All of you cannot give me my boy back” he brokenly cried after the death in 1855 of his eight-year-old son, Edgar – but they were indispensable to Marx’s work and as such never free agents. He was, in life and from the grave, their heroic exemplar and demanding tyrant for the cause. It was a crushing burden, but it had its rewards. Marx’s wife, Jenny Westphalen, in 1881 died contented knowing that her husband’s great work, Capital, was finally reaching public notice in Britain, years after its first publication in 1867, and cheered by the impressive electoral results for Marx-inspired socialists in Germany. These were ambitions for which a lifetime’s energies could rightly be spent. By Daniel Johnson, Standpoint, July 2013 Are we living through the end of history? Not in the Hegelian sense that Francis Fukuyama used the phrase in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, meaning that with the triumph of liberal democracy, world history had reached its ultimate goal. As subsequent events have shown, this was a case of wishful thinking by a political scientist, not a historian. No, I mean the end of history as the central pillar of high culture and national identity. History in this sense is not the same as historiography or historical scholarship, of which there is more than ever before. Nor is it the same as the popularisation of history, history as pure entertainment, which is also flourishing. What has become problematic is the assumption that general historical knowledge, an informed consciousness of our past, is the essential framework for Western civilisation. It is the decline of history in this sense that lies behind the heated debates about the teaching of history at school and university. The loss of such a temporal dimension has brought about a profound change in the outlook of the West: a loss of organic connection, not only with those who came before us, but with our place in the world. Clive James memorably described this phenomenon as "cultural amnesia", and Eric Voegelin adopted the theological concept of "anamnesis" to describe our attempts to preserve transcendent memories. Yet such remembrances of time past, whether they express rage against the dying of the light of history as a force in intellectual life, or acquiescence in its oblivion, are at best rearguard actions. That an educated person could lack such historical awareness would not have occurred to the 19th-century apostles of high culture, the Mills and Arnolds, père et fils, or the brothers Humboldt and James. The 18th-century philosophes had tried to create a "philosophical" or "conjectural" history of mankind, as Anthony Pagden writes in his encyclopaedic new book The Enlightenment (OUP, £20). "The purpose of these histories was . . . not only descriptive — it was emancipatory. In providing a proper scientific understanding of the origin and evolution of the human condition, they would, it was hoped, release man from his servitude to . . . prejudice." In the 19th century, however, this emancipatory impetus was allied to the romantic cult of genius, which gave weight to what Max Weber would later call "charisma". History was the story of liberty, but also of the liberator. To be human was to be an actor on the stage of history; the human sciences were those governed by the historical method. To have a place in the history books was not only the definition of fame, but the very purpose and meaning of life. |
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