Home Of The Gentry

Having now read Ivan Turgenev’s “Home Of The Gentry”, I can well understand why the novel was so greatly admired by Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

I can further declare, having now examined its source material, that Crispin Whittell’s stage adaptation, “The Primrose Path”, which we recently saw at The Guthrie, was shockingly inept, largely misrepresenting Turgenev’s themes, and was much more reliant upon current British soap opera practices than upon Turgenev.

Turgenev’s novel, at root, is a tale of Christian forgiveness, Christian charity—and Russian identity.

Lavretsky, the novel’s central character, is half serf and half nobility. He embodies the Russia of 1859, a land caught between feudalism and modernization. Beliefs are fracturing, passions are flaring, social tensions are rising—yet inaction on all fronts is the order of the day. (It was Tsar Alexander II himself who—courageously—took matters into his own hands two years later. Against the advice of all strata of Russian society, Alexander II abolished serfdom in 1861, in the process presenting more than 20 million Russian serfs with ownership of the land they worked.)

Lavretsky further embodies the unthinking worship of Western society typical of the Russian upper classes of 1859. Lavretsky has been taught to view Russia as backward and primitive—yet he finds that he fits into Paris society no better than he is suited for life in the Russian provinces. He is too Russian for the French, too French for the Russians.

It is Lavretsky’s return to his dilapidated Russian estate that propels the storyline into motion. He meets Liza, a young woman whose most pronounced quality is her essential goodness. Lavretsky contemplates marriage to the virtuous and spiritual Liza—until a shocking external event renders such marriage an impossibility.

“Home Of The Gentry” contains all the Turgenev virtues: masterful descriptions of Russian countryside and Russian family life; insightful characterizations of a wide range of persons; and incomparable depictions of the simultaneous stultification and anarchy endemic to life in the Russian provinces. The novel is passionate yet somber, idealistic yet true, painful yet suggestive of redemption. Above all, the novel is deeply reflective—yet totally non-judgmental.

“Home Of The Gentry” is a masterpiece.

I am surprised the novel is not more widely known.

Blanche And Alfred Knopf

Carl Van Vechten’s famous 1932 photographic portrait of Blanche and Alfred Knopf.

As my father has noted many times over the last ten or fifteen years, there has been a grievous deterioration in what has been coming out under the Knopf imprint since at least the mid-1990s.

The death of Knopf as a serious publishing house coincided exactly with the death of The New Yorker as a serious magazine, hardly a coincidence to anyone following the publishing field.

Publishing Then And Now

American authors are not very durable, and there are no giants in Europe now.

Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., from his intriguing book, Publishing Then And Now (1964)

Hilton Kramer On Joyce Carol Oates

It is a mercy, in a way, that she is so inept, for were she technically more adroit and even minimally readable, she would be more of a menace.

Hilton Kramer (1928-2012)

Rescuing Spain From Hemingway

I recently completed reading Antony Beevor’s “The Battle For Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939”, a magisterial history of the grim battle between The Nationalists and The Republicans for control of Spain.

In 1982, Beevor’s “The Spanish Civil War” was published, to great acclaim. It immediately became the standard English-language history of the war.

Post-1982 openings of archives in Germany, Russia and Spain inspired Beevor to reexamine the subject afresh; the result is “The Battle For Spain”, published in 2006, a complete rewriting of the earlier volume.

“The Battle For Spain” was immediately translated into several languages. The book was a bestseller throughout Western Europe, including and especially Spain, where “The Battle For Spain” became the best-selling book in the nation on the day of release (selling 10,000 copies a month—in hardback—for almost a year, a remarkable tally for a lengthy and densely-written history study).

In the U.S., “The Battle For Spain”, for whatever reasons, did not capture the public’s imagination. American sales were disappointing; the publication was not widely reviewed. This was so even though Beevor’s previous books—especially “Stalingrad” and “Berlin: The Downfall 1945”—had enjoyed robust American sales.

My conclusion is that The Spanish Civil War has never resonated with Americans as much as it has resonated with Europeans. The Spanish Civil War coincided with a period of American Isolationism—with the result, in American eyes, that The Great Depression became the single major event that occurred between World War I and World War II, to the exclusion of anything else.

Further, The Spanish Civil War has too often been treated as mere prelude to World War II, viewed as little more than provincial proxy battle in which The Nationalists fought with German weaponry and The Republicans fought with Russian weaponry. Americans have always enjoyed reading about the buildup to World War II in Britain and Germany—but the prewar years in France and Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, have never particularly captured the fancy of American readers.

Beevor does not see The Spanish Civil War as overture to World War II. Indeed, Beevor will have none of such nonsense—he firmly refuses to accept The Spanish Civil War as proxy conflict between Fascism and Communism fought on neutral ground prior to the main event getting underway. The Spanish Civil War was an independent, discrete event, bearing parallels with other ideological battles of the insane 1930s but nonetheless remaining a conflict sharply and uniquely focused on Spain and its unhappy history.

Not only does Beevor not view The Spanish Civil War as having anything to do with the ideological battle between Fascism and Communism, Beevor insists that The Spanish Civil War had very little to do even with a clash between Right and Left. Far deeper fissures were at the root of the conflict, he asserts, which is why The Spanish Civil War was so vicious if not outright barbarous (and left such long-lasting wounds).

The Spanish Civil War, in part, was a war about religion. An anti-Cleric wave swept Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century, but this wave only hit backward Spain in the 1920s. The wave festered—and grew—until it reached a boiling point in the early 1930s. The Catholic Church in Spain was viewed as authoritative, restrictive, unduly powerful—and unduly rich; it was viewed as indifferent to the needs of society, stuck in a mindset reminiscent of The Middle Ages. Many believed that the Church, as an institution, needed to be much more than reformed—it needed to be shuttered.

The Spanish Civil War was also, in part, a battle between those advocating centralization of power and those seeking regionalization of power. Spain had been falling apart ever since The Peninsular War—Spain’s overseas empire had already collapsed—and everyone understood that something needed to be done in order to halt Spain’s century-long deterioration. However, there was deep disagreement whether a stronger central government was the answer to the country’s woes or whether a dispersal of power to regional authorities was the necessary remedy to propel the country into modern times.

Tied to the centralization-versus-regionalization conflict was the question of ethnicity: some Spaniards viewed Spain as composed of one common people; other Spaniards viewed Spain as a nation composed of different ethnicities that happened to live in the same country. Those of the latter viewpoint quite naturally favored local autonomy.

Finally, 1930s Spain was in the grip of a major philosophical battle, a battle between those advocating 1930s-style authoritarianism of any stripe (akin to that then being practiced in Germany, Italy and Russia) and those advocating freedom of the individual (of which Britain was seen as the leading example). In this respect, the philosophical battle in Spain was not markedly different from the philosophical battle occurring in 1930s France, where authoritarianism-versus-freedom was the central—and most divisive—issue of the decade. Oddly, those seeking authoritarianism in both Spain and France came from both ends of the political spectrum; authoritarianism in 1930s Europe was a vision of many, of all political persuasions, advocated as a necessary evil to surmount the perceived inherent weaknesses of democratic governments.

The Spanish Civil War was not, in sum, a clean ideological battle. Different factions chose different sides for different reasons—and it became increasingly difficult, on both sides, for the joined forces to hold together. This was especially true for The Republicans: infighting between factions was often as brutal as the battle against The Nationalists.

The central theme of Beevor’s book is that The Nationalists won the war simply because The Nationalists were better at holding together than The Republicans—a conclusion in stark contrast to earlier histories, which had claimed that The Spanish Civil War had been won on the battlefield (and largely because imported German weapons had proved superior to imported Russian weapons).

Franco was an inept commander, and an inept military strategist; any Nationalist success on the battlefield was entirely coincidental, a point Beevor drives home with overwhelming force. The Republicans, however, were even more inept on the battlefield—and broke into numerous factions that fatally imperiled Republican attempts not only to win military battles but to capture the hearts and souls of Spain’s people.

As a practical matter, The Spanish Civil War began far earlier than 1936, the year in which fighting erupted.

Like much of Europe, Spain had been in a state of virtual civil war since the end of World War I. A military dictatorship had seized power in the early 1920s, and had managed to last eight years. The dictatorship dissembled only with the onset of worldwide Depression. Spain’s military realized that it had no solution for the economic problems caused by The Depression, and that it would be better for the military to step aside and allow a civilian government to handle the fallout from—and to assume the blame for—the severe economic contraction.

In 1931, the same year Spain’s military relinquished power, Spain’s royal family abdicated. A New Republic was declared—and a series of inconclusive elections was conducted, repeatedly, over the next five years. While the country attempted to arrive at a consensus for moving forward as a democratic nation, massive strikes, uprisings and outright anarchy prevailed. The nation was on the constant verge of collapse.

A new Leftist plurality narrowly prevailed in the 1936 elections and managed to form a minority government. As soon as installed, the government swiftly passed vehement anti-Cleric legislation and immediately embarked upon a wave of incendiary anti-Cleric rhetoric. Having seized all church property and closed all church schools, the new government announced that it welcomed the outright destruction and burning of churches and monasteries and convents—and, shockingly, that it would not prosecute persons who murdered priests, nuns and monks.

The reaction to the new government’s anti-Cleric pronouncements was swift and entirely predictable: the floodgates of zealotry opened—and over 7,000 Roman Catholic priests were promptly murdered throughout the country. (Protestant clergymen, too, were not immune from the slaughter: twenty Protestant ministers were murdered in a single day in Madrid alone.) After the first round of appalling bloodshed, the military decided that it had to step in and establish order.

The minority government, quite naturally, resisted the military’s move—and civil war was on.

Both sides made a grievous strategic error at the outset of war: both The Nationalists and The Republicans made no effort to attract the support of the middle classes. Had either side done so, it most certainly would have prevailed within months.

However, neither The Nationalists nor The Republicans had the foresight to seek solidarity with the very classes without whose support the war could not be won. Instead, both sides were determined to win the war purely on the battlefield—not, perhaps, the best strategy for prevailing in a civil war.

More than anything, The Nationalists did not so much win the war as The Republicans lost it. The Republicans alienated the middle classes in the areas controlled by The Republicans, while The Nationalists over time learned to court the support of the middle classes in the areas controlled by The Nationalists.

Within a year of the onset of civil war, it was apparent that The Nationalists were destined to prevail. Not only were The Nationalists winning on the various military fronts, but persons caught between sides learned that they could carry on with their lives much more readily in Nationalist territories than in Republican territories. For the last eighteen months of the war, it was apparent to all—including foreign governments—that the game was up for The Republicans. Nonetheless, The Republicans continued to fight—and with ever more recklessness. The final eighteen months of civil war were, if anything, the most barbarous months of all, with untoward numbers of persons losing their lives on both sides.

The Spanish Civil War was shockingly brutal. Both sides routinely executed captured soldiers after a battle was over. Both sides were merciless in destroying towns and villages standing in their paths. Both sides exhibited a degree of inhumanity toward each other—and sometimes toward civilians—that dismayed the outside world. No one, on either side, emerged from The Spanish Civil War with credit.

Beevor’s narrative is compelling, even artful, as he vividly examines a state and society in the process of total disintegration. Spain’s economy was a mess, Spain’s politics were a mess, Spain’s ideologies were a mess—and Spain’s civil war, too, was a mess. Beevor’s is a depressing and appalling tale.

Foreign intervention has been over-emphasized in past accounts of The Spanish Civil War, and Beevor offers a stern corrective. In no way did foreign intervention affect the outcome. This is one of the most important themes of Beevor’s book.

Germany and Italy supplied arms to The Nationalists while Russia (and, to a much lesser extent, France) supplied arms to The Republicans. Foreign arms, however, were not a determinative factor in the war’s outcome. They seldom are in civil wars. Civil wars ultimately become battles for the hearts and souls of a nation’s people—and The Republicans lost the battle for the hearts and souls of Spaniards.

There are few history books I have encountered in which literally all persons addressed in the chronicle are so soundly found to be wanting in judgment and character as the persons covered in “The Battle For Spain”. Literally no one—Nationalist or Republican, Spaniard or outsider—emerges from Beevor’s book unscathed. Even Andre Malraux is revealed as the unscrupulous, conniving, corrupt, preternaturally untruthful figure he most assuredly was.

Beevor is especially harsh on his countrymen, the British, for failing to support a democratically-elected government against insurgents. Britain withheld support for The Republicans for the duration of the war—and was the first nation to recognize the Franco regime, doing so even before the civil war had concluded.

America is not immune from censor. Beevor criticizes American corporations for selling automobiles, trucks and oil to The Nationalists—as well as for extending credit to The Nationalists.

Beevor, too, puts to bed the myth of America’s Lincoln Brigade nobly fighting on behalf of The Republicans. Noting that only 1,000 of the 3,000 American volunteers actually were involved on the fighting front, Beevor exposes the men and women of The Lincoln Brigade as spectacularly inept, not even arising to the level of “useful idiots”.

Although his sympathies are with The Republicans, Beevor is withering in describing how, early in the war, The Republicans wantonly shipped Spain’s gold reserves—the fourth largest gold reserves in the world—to Russia. Intended as prospective payment for armaments, the gold reserves proved to be nothing more than an outright gift to Stalin (Russia obtained the gold with the assistance of France). Most weapons ordered from Russia were never delivered to Spain, and those that were shipped were outdated and of inferior quality.

Stalin was happy to receive Spain’s gold reserves, but Stalin was never serious about getting involved in Spain’s war or providing significant aid—Stalin had far more critical matters at home with which to contend.

Significantly, Beevor retires permanently the longstanding fiction that Russia had a positive impact on The Republicans. In fact, Beevor argues the reverse: that Stalin’s agents in Spain substantially contributed to The Republicans losing the war. The Communists insisted upon the elimination of all Republican factions that did not share Communist ideology—on Moscow’s orders, The Republicans conducted Soviet-style purges within Republican ranks—and the Communists insisted upon the elimination of “the ideologically incompatible” in Republican-held territories (i.e., murder of the bourgeoisie). Such measures guaranteed that Spain’s middle classes, otherwise supportive of reform, would be scared off by The Republicans.

And this is precisely what happened: the Republicans lost all support among Spain’s middle classes, which were driven into the arms of The Nationalists. The overwhelming scale of this loss is best exemplified by Spain’s official government functionaries: halfway through the war, those administering the very mechanisms of state—Spain’s diplomatic corps, the central security agency, the police force, the central bank—were all nominally working for The Republicans but in fact had already switched allegiances to The Nationalists. The Republicans had lost all moral suasion over the people of Spain—with the result that the war had become de facto a lost cause.

Unlike other chroniclers of The Spanish Civil War, Beevor does not attempt to ennoble the various leaders of The Republicans. He reveals them to be as opportunistic and as ruthless and as inhumane as The Nationalists, if not more so. Unattractive as Franco and his cohorts were, the opponents, if anything, were worse.

Late in his volume, Beevor provides an extraordinary revelation, a revelation based upon his research in Russian archives: had The Republicans won the war, The Republicans planned to conduct post-war “purges” on an unimaginable scale, far exceeding anything Franco attempted. The revelation, from an author with innate Republican sympathies, is chilling.

In his conclusion, Beevor issues a bold, even striking, claim: previous English-language assessments of The Spanish Civil War offered little more than myth. They provided versions of events purely and exclusively Republican in outlook, and were of limited—if any—worth. More than merely outdated, those previous publications had been conspicuously untruthful.

It is a pity that “The Battle For Spain”, widely read throughout Europe, remains so little-known in the United States. It is a seminal book. Beevor has forever altered the ground upon which histories of 20th-Century Spain will be written.

In his book, Beevor accomplished one great feat: no longer is The Spanish Civil War that rare thing, a war in which the losers won the final word.

Seven Years Too Late, Fifteen Years Too Early

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) at his writing desk late in life.

I have recently been rereading “Beneath The Wheel”, Hesse’s first enduring book.

“Beneath The Wheel” is a very poetic work, with pages of great beauty—but it is also unmistakably the work of a 22-year-old.

Alas, Hesse was 29 years old when he wrote “Beneath The Wheel”—and therein lies the rub.

This semi-autobiographical portrait of a precocious young man forced to come to terms with the insensitivity of the world around him lacks the concentrated flame of the first rush of youthful genius. Hesse was seven years too late in writing the novel.

It also lacks the detached observation and probing psychological insight that mark the work of the mature novelist. Hesse was fifteen years away from refining his skills into mastery.

Neither fish nor fowl, “Beneath The Wheel” provides a frustrating reading experience—and yet it captures with great accuracy a particular moment in time in late-Wilhelmine Germany that was soon to be washed away forever.

Such a book could not have been written after 1914.

The Last Tsar

I recently completed reading Edvard Radzinsky’s “The Last Tsar: The Life And Death Of Nicholas II”.

“The Last Tsar” was published in the U.S. in 1992 and, insofar as I can ascertain, the book remains in print.

I cannot imagine why, because “The Last Tsar” is a very outdated—and very bad—book.

The book is outdated because Radzinsky suggests that Alexei and Anastasia survived the 1918 massacre of the Romanov family, and Radzinsky offers eyewitness testimony—second- and third-hand eyewitness testimony—in support of this possibility. The world now knows, through discovery of the Romanov grave and DNA tests that followed, that all members of the Romanov family indeed perished on the night of July 17, 1918.

Much of Radzinsky’s book, accordingly, needs to be rewritten—and this is so even though few reasonable persons believed or accepted, in 1992 (or earlier), that Alexei and Anastasia had somehow met a fate different from that of other family members.

At the very least, the publishers, Doubleday (hardback) and Anchor (paperback), should long ago have commissioned a new Forward for current editions in order to reflect post-1992 developments. Keeping the original text in print, without explication or update, is irresponsible on the part of the book’s publishers.

The book is bad because Radzinsky does not know how to write history or handle the presentation of factual material. Narrative flow is nonexistent. Radzinsky flits from subject to subject, theme to theme, year to year, character sketch to character sketch, to the point that the reader begs for the intervention of a competent editor (Jacqueline Onassis was editor of “The Last Tsar”). The book is more a loose fantasia on Tsar Nicholas’s life than a conventional biography or scholarly study.

Radzinsky’s writing is tortuous. He is by nature long-winded, and his tendency toward flowery, convoluted descriptions and Dostoevskian “analyses” only serves to magnify the ineptitude of prose already heavy and ponderous. His is some of the worst history writing I have ever encountered. (I assume the English translation is faithful to the Russian original). At least one-third of the book could have been cut without loss of a single important fact or idea.

Almost half the book is devoted to the last year of the Tsar’s life, yet Radzinsky has nothing new to offer about the Tsar and his family in captivity. Everything has been covered elsewhere—and everything has been covered better elsewhere.

Radzinsky’s twist is that he offers interviews with persons such as “X, who had a cousin who heard from a friend who had an old school chum that died thirty years ago who knew a church member who long ago talked with the son of an acquaintance whose former girlfriend once lived across the street from an elderly couple that once saw a Romanov carriage pass on the street”. Such interviews are worthless if not laughable.

Radzinsky also quotes extensively from the Tsar’s personal diaries, some of which had remained locked away in Soviet archives prior to the era of Perestroika, during which access to Soviet archives was somewhat loosened. Nicholas’s diaries offer very little insight into Nicholas the man or Nicholas the ruler—they establish that Nicholas was a devoted and faithful family man, and little more—and none of the diary entries included in “The Last Tsar” elucidates personalities or events. In fact, the diary entries contribute absolutely nothing to Radzinsky’s book unless one is interested in luncheon menus.

Radzinsky is not a professional historian. Prior to “The Last Tsar”, Radzinsky was a playwright, but the commercial success of “The Last Tsar” in Russia caused Radzinsky to abandon playwriting and to take up full-time the more lucrative field of popular biography. Radzinsky has since graced the world with new biographies of Napoleon, Tsar Alexander II, Grigori Rasputin, Joseph Stalin and many other figures. Only a small portion of Radzinsky’s vast output has been translated into English, as his books have not, in general, been well-received outside Russia. “The Last Tsar” is, I believe, the only one of Radzinsky’s books that made much headway in the U.S.—and any headway the book made here was unrelated to merit (Doubleday had engaged in an expensive public relations campaign at the time the book was released).

A satisfactory biography of Nicholas II remains to be written.

Thunder At Twilight

I recently completed reading Frederic Morton’s “Thunder At Twilight: Vienna 1913-1914”, a loosely-styled examination of the city of Vienna and its inhabitants—famous or otherwise—during the eighteen-month period prior to the great conflagration that was to begin in the late summer of 1914.

I lived and studied in Vienna for a year in 2001 and 2002, and I very much enjoyed my time there.

Vienna is a beautiful city, filled with historic buildings, imposing churches, stately palaces and excellent museums. It is a very clean city, with more overt charm than any other Central European city except Munich. Restaurants are excellent, culture is abundant, the eye is filled with beauty and interest in all directions at all times of year. Vienna is a tourist’s delight.

The Viennese are, on the whole, a very civilized people. Upper-class persons are unrelentingly civilized and gracious, although middle-class and lower-class persons often demonstrate a distinct roughness.

Austrians are among the best-educated persons in Europe.

The standard of living in Austria is among the highest in Europe.

And yet I was happy when my year in Vienna had come to its conclusion.

Outsiders often note something uncomfortable beneath the surface of Vienna, and the cause of this discomfort is difficult to identify and difficult to define.

Some ascribe the inherent pettiness of the Viennese themselves as the source of discomfort. Others claim that the city has not yet learned to adapt to loss of empire and that it continues, incongruously, to adopt imperial attitudes (although the loss of empire occurred almost a century ago). Yet others identify the vastly different bloodlines that run through the Viennese—a mixture of Nordic, Germanic and Magyar—and point out that the Viennese typically and genuinely see themselves as one part minor nobility, one part gypsy, and one part country yokel, a very irritating mixture.

Myself, I believe it was the innate Viennese preference for the importance of façade over substance that made me happy to leave the city. I have returned to Vienna only once over the last eight years, and that only for a very, very short visit (I had explored the city so exhaustively while I lived there, missing nothing of note, that return visits are not a priority for me).

The subtext of Morton’s “Thunder At Twilight”, too, was that the Vienna of 1913 and 1914 was a city bearing a glamorous surface beneath which was to be found rot and decay—and corruption.

Morton begins his tale of the great city by describing a typical Viennese social event held on the evening of January 13, 1913: a great Bankruptcy Ball, sponsored by the city’s bank employees. The Bankruptcy Ball paid tribute to the dire economic pressures then facing The Austro-Hungarian Empire—as well as provided the Viennese with an excuse for ignoring those pressures for at least one evening.

Using The Bankruptcy Ball as his embarkation point, Morton proceeds to describe how Vienna’s glittering façade was belied by foundations that were visibly crumbling. The latter stages of The Austro-Hungarian Empire saw massive numbers of immigrants move into the capital city, and those immigrants remained largely unassimilated (and a source of significant social and political disruption). The middle class was having trouble making ends meet. Government spending had grown to the point at which the private economy could no longer sustain itself—and could no longer sustain the heavy tax burden. A worried and disenfranchised merchant class watched with alarm as the economies of Germany, Russia and Italy, each in turn, began to surpass the stagnant if not dwindling economy of Austria and its client states.

The decay in Vienna was most prominently on display in the city’s buildings: new construction featured cheap materials and workmanship of haphazard if not shoddy quality—but street facades were invariably heavily decorated, and bore an undue portion of a building’s total cost. This phenomenon may be viewed today in the city’s office buildings, apartment buildings and townhouses that were built shortly before World War I and managed to survive World War II. In Vienna, one often encounters a turn-of-the-century building featuring an attractive, even elegant, exterior and entranceway, only to step across a threshold and enter an interior literally falling apart.

Governmental presence was everywhere in Vienna. The Habsburgs had always employed a giant state bureaucracy, but in the latter stages of The Austro-Hungarian Empire the scale of this bureaucracy became unthinkable. The state employed a vast network of secret police agents to spy on its citizens (and this secret police maintained detailed records on each inhabitant). A significant portion of the populace was directly employed—or pensioned—by the government, a maneuver seen as necessary to guarantee the loyalty of the citizens to the Habsburg monarchy.

The empire maintained one of the largest standing armies on the globe. Ill-equipped and ill-trained, the army devoted an extraordinary portion of its resources to elaborate (and preposterous) uniforms—as well as to equipage. It was the most out-of-date army among the great powers, no match for the armies of France or Germany (or even Russia, whose own army was also conspicuously out-of-date).

A land power, The Austro-Hungarian Empire nevertheless maintained a significant navy—and even built four dreadnoughts in order to attempt to keep up with Germany and Britain in the naval arms race of the early 20th Century.

Astride this decaying empire stood an aging Emperor, Franz Josef, sovereign since 1848. As a young monarch, Franc Josef had—unwisely—waged war against Italy and Prussia. Abandoning foreign adventures of necessity once the German states united in 1870, Franz Josef spent the final 46 years of his life affixing his signature to imperial decrees, a duty that—quite literally—occupied his entire workday.

An external event was sure to cause this house of cards to collapse, and that external event proved to be World War I.

Sitting upon the precipice of war, Austria was not prepared once the disastrous military conflict actually arrived in 1914. Its army proved no match for the army of Russia, which quickly routed the Austrians in the East (and the German Army had to be called in to bail out the troops of Franz Josef). For the remainder of the war, Austria and its armed forces served merely as a tool of The German High Command, which called all shots during the final four years of the conflict.

The twilight months of the great imperial city on the banks of The Danube are recalled as a golden period by many, but Morton, rightly, will have none of such nonsense. He portrays Vienna as an aging, decaying city in an empire in decline, with social tensions on the rise, political leadership lacking, and economic forces beginning to render the city irrelevant on the European stage. On the verge of anarchy, Vienna was nearing an implosion point—albeit it remained a city populated with some very interesting people.

Morton catalogs the many artists, musicians and writers practicing their skills in the Vienna of the immediate pre-war period, but his focus is on those persons who embodied—or came to embody—the political ideologies and political movements of the post-war decades. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky were only a few of such persons living in or passing through the Vienna of 1913 and 1914. Many were to assume political prominence after World War I, and Morton discusses them all, and in great detail. Indeed, Morton traces their time in Vienna with perhaps too much emphasis, in the process almost suggesting that it was the city of Vienna itself that was the cause of their revolutionary fervor.

The burden of the fall of The Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the descent of Vienna from imperial capital to charming but provincial backwater, rests largely on the shoulders of two men: Franz Josef; and General Conrad Von Hotzendorff, Chief Of Staff of The Austrian Army. Morton correctly identifies these two most powerful of Austrians—one the head of state and the other the head of the armed forces—as the figures most responsible for the collapse of the Habsburg dynasty.

The reign of Franz Josef has always puzzled scholars. The first two decades of his monarchy were characterized by a series of disastrous foreign policy blunders; the last five decades of his monarchy were characterized by Austria continually ceding power and influence to a rising Germany, and to such an extent that Austria had become little more than a vassal state by the time war broke out in 1914.

And yet, unaccountably, Franz Josef was enormously popular within The Austro-Hungarian Empire throughout the latter half of his reign. The populace developed and tenaciously held a unique affection for him, which in part was probably due to his longevity (his rule was longer than that of Queen Victoria). Some historians assert that Franz Josef’s personal popularity was the only thread that held together the many nationalities of The Austro-Hungarian Empire in its final years, a claim equally hard to confirm or refute. And yet his reign was coincident with the steepest decline in power and prestige of the Habsburg dynasty in its 800-year history. The centuries-long dynasty, long a bulwark of European power and statesmanship, survived his 1916 death by only two years.

Hotzendorff is another figure difficult to peg. Considered by many (including his enemies) to be a military genius, Hotzendorff was a master at devising ingenious battle plans—and utterly incompetent when it came to executing those very same plans in the field. As a military leader, Hotzendorff was perhaps the biggest loser of World War I—he lost more battles, and was responsible for the deaths of more of his own soldiers, than any other World War I general.

Hotzendorff, of course, blamed his losses in the East on Alfred Redl, the former Austrian Chief Of Counter-Intelligence. While head of counter-intelligence, Redl had sold to Russia most of Austria’s state secrets, including its detailed battle plans in the event of military action in The Balkans. The treachery of Redl, a homosexual blackmailed into espionage by the Russians in 1901, was discovered in 1913—but Austria nevertheless failed to draft new battle plans, an incomprehensible blunder that was to have grave repercussions the following year, when Austria was thwarted again and again by a Russian army familiar with every detail of Austria’s campaign strategy.

Franz Josef, Hotzendorff, Redl: Morton hits them all, and hard—and all three are fully deserving of his dismissive treatment. It is especially welcome to see Franz Josef take some hard knocks, as Central European historians are too misty-eyed to write coldly and candidly about the shortcomings of this most misunderstood and most over-estimated of monarchs. To this very day, the Viennese retain an inexplicable affection for Franz Josef, an affection completely at odds with the reality of his record and legacy.

Morton is a native Viennese, born in the city in 1924. His family emigrated from Austria to the United States after the Anschluss. Morton has been an American citizen for almost 70 years, working first as a journalist and later as an author of books on various topics from Central European history.

Native Viennese tend to view their city through romantic, rose-colored glasses, but Morton does not share that common tendency. He sees the Vienna of the early 20th Century as a cauldron ready to boil over and scorch everyone in sight.

The cauldron of Vienna did not boil at the outbreak of war. Instead, the cauldron simmered during the war years. The populations of German-speaking lands were remarkably well-behaved from 1914 through 1918, suffering deprivations with stoicism and offering their governments broad-based loyalty and support.

That changed as soon as the war was over. Revolutions broke out immediately throughout Germany and Austria. The Houses Of Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Wittelsbach: all fell at war’s end. Germany lunged from crisis to crisis from 1918 until 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor and restored order by imposing totalitarianism. Austria remained in a state of virtual civil war from 1918 until 1938’s Anschluss, when Hitler did for Austria what he already had done for Germany.

Morton spent the first decade-and-a-half of his life living in a Vienna torn by civil strife and dissent. He and his family were forced to leave Austria once an anti-Semitic government was officially installed. It is no wonder that he takes such a dispassionate, arm’s-length view of his native city.

And yet Morton is not clear-eyed about everything in “Thunder At Twilight”.

One of the central characters in Morton’s book is The Archduke Ferdinand. Morton bears the same inexplicable fondness for The Archduke Ferdinand as most Viennese reserve for Franz Josef. Indeed, Morton sees The Archduke Ferdinand as the potential savior of the Habsburg dynasty, a savior that Franz Josef drove to ruin.

It is undisputed that Ferdinand agitated for modernization and reform throughout The Austro-Hungarian Empire—and it is undisputed that Franz Josef knocked him down at every turn.

Ferdinand wanted to modernize the army, and to reform Parliament, and to loosen ties with Serbia (where he met his end). Ferdinand’s recommendations, on the whole, were quite sensible—yet they hardly represented a fundamental change in the way the empire was ruled or administered. There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that The Austro-Hungarian Empire might have met a different fate had Ferdinand’s lobbying for incremental change met with approval from Franz Josef.

The magnitude of attempted change represented by Ferdinand was a small one, and unlikely to alter the sweeping forces of history already set into motion by previous decades of neglect and ineptitude within the empire.

In any case, Austria may have been fortunate to have been relieved of the possibility of Ferdinand succeeding Franz Josef.

During his lifetime, Ferdinand was known, within royal circles throughout the continent, as the most bloodthirsty hunter of animals in Europe. Ferdinand was known to kill up to a thousand animals a day in the forests of Central and Eastern Europe, calling upon the efforts of dozens of gamekeepers to assist him in his blood sport. Even by the standards of the day, people were appalled and sickened by his lust to kill animals on such a vast scale. On one level, Ferdinand was pure brute.

Morton concludes his volume with Ferdinand’s assassination at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Morton provides an undeniably dramatic, gripping, and even moving telling of the event that was shortly to cause an entire continent to lurch toward war.

However, more than one bullet may have been bitten that day.

A House In Marseille

I recently completed reading Rosemary Sullivan’s “Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape And A House In Marseille”. Sullivan is an English instructor at the University Of Toronto.

“Villa Air-Bel” tells the story of a chateau in Vichy France that, from August 1940 until September 1941, was a haven for refugees fleeing Nazism. The chateau served as a veritable way-station in World War II’s “underground railroad”, a loose network of people and organizations involved in a concerted effort to smuggle artists, intellectuals and others out of German-occupied war zones into the relative safety of neutral countries.

A large 19th-Century manor house outside Marseille, Villa Air-Bel was unofficial French headquarters for the Emergency Rescue Committee, an American organization that helped two thousand refugees obtain, legally, exit visas from France. The Emergency Rescue Committee, however, had another, more clandestine, purpose: to smuggle out of Vichy France persons—writers, artists, Leftists—whose names appeared on the Gestapo blacklist, a list that virtually guaranteed their extinctions (Vichy France had agreed to honor all German requests for extradition). Using forged identity papers and currency obtained on the black market, the Emergency Rescue Committee shepherded over 200 persons on the Gestapo blacklist through the Pyrenees to the safety of Spain or secreted them aboard freighters bound for Africa and South America.

Shortly after France fell in June 1940, the world learned of the detention camps that had been established throughout France and Vichy France, and the tens of thousands of persons detained in such camps, most awaiting certain extraditions to Germany. The Emergency Rescue Committee compiled a list of several hundred notable persons it wished to have released, and it resolved to free as many of these notables as possible—and by any means necessary.

The Emergency Rescue Committee’s efforts in Europe were headed by Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated Classics scholar, editor and journalist (Fry was married to Lincoln Kirstein’s sister, Eileen). Fry had utterly no background suggesting he was a man suitable for such an endeavor, yet the Committee, for reasons still unclear, accepted Fry’s request to lead its European venture—there may have been no one else available and willing to accept the assignment—and sent Fry to Marseille in August 1940 to see what he could do.

Contrary to any reasonable expectations, Fry proved amazingly resourceful at his work. Intending to remain in Marseille only for a month, he ended up staying for thirteen months, only returning to the U.S. after Vichy France declared him an “undesirable alien” and expelled him from the country. During his time in Marseille, Fry was instrumental in securing safe passage out of France for a long list of European luminaries: Hannah Arendt, Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lion Feuchtwanger, Siegfried Kracauer, Wanda Landowska, Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann, Jr., Max Ophuls, and Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel.

Fry was assisted in his efforts by two young American women, both as unlikely candidates for such dangerous work as Fry himself: Mary Jayne Gold, an heiress from Chicago who had settled in Paris; and Miriam Davenport, an art student from Boston studying in Paris when the Nazis invaded France. (From 1951 until her death, Davenport lived in the Midwest—and my father, through a mutual friend, met Davenport several times in the 1970’s.)

In June 1940, Gold and Davenport, independently, had fled south when it became clear that Paris would fall. Both ended up in Marseille, where they met by chance while attempting to arrange passage out of France.

Waiting for their exit papers to be issued, Gold and Davenport made contact with Fry. From Fry they learned of the desperate situation of persons on the Gestapo blacklist, and both women decided to remain in France in order to assist Fry in his rescue efforts. Gold and Davenport proved to be remarkably dedicated, working tirelessly with French and American authorities—as well as with the Marseille crime syndicate—to get as many persons out of France as possible. Their work was substantially aided by Gold’s inheritance, which proved to be invaluable—her vast fortune was used to grease many a palm among French officials and the French underground.

Gold and Davenport worked from Villa Air-Bel, which Gold had rented as temporary quarters. Shortly after moving in, Gold and Davenport realized that the large but ramshackle villa might become an ideal hiding place for persons at risk of extradition to Germany. Villa Air-Bel, consequently, was to become temporary shelter not only for Gold and Davenport, but also for an extraordinary array of displaced persons awaiting a means to leave France.

In Sullivan’s book, it is Villa Air-Bel itself that is the main character. The house and its inhabitants—as well as its parties, dinners, art salons, political discussions, and the many surreptitious comings and goings—provide Sullivan with her subject matter.

The chief pleasure of the book is taking note of the enormous cast of celebrities that populates its 544 pages. The list of famous scientists, artists, musicians, authors, poets and philosophers is an exhausting one, a veritable Who’s Who of notable persons displaced by Nazi Germany.

Alas, none of these remarkable figures comes to life in Sullivan’s telling. The author provides brief biographies of dozens of persons who make fleeting appearances in her book, but the effect is more that of a concise biographical dictionary than a genuine set of distinct character sketches. In fact, such entries appear to be entirely canned, borrowed from other sources.

Even Fry, Gold and Davenport emerge as cardboard figures in Sullivan’s hands. At the end of Sullivan’s lengthy book, the reader has no clue what motivated these admirable individuals to put their lives at risk, no idea what were the sources of strength they were able to summon daily in a period and place characterized by incessant danger.

More critically, “Villa Air-Bel” is fashioned in a haphazard manner. The volume moves back and forth from subject to subject, person to person, place to place, in search of an effective organizing principal. Its sixty short chapters more resemble an anthology of random ancient magazine articles than a serious and scholarly study.

Charges of plagiarism have dogged “Villa Air-Bel” since its publication in 2006. Experts of the period have contended that Sullivan relied excessively upon Fry’s 1945 account of his work in Marseille, “Surrender On Demand”, as well as Gold’s 1980 memoir, “Crossroads Marseille 1940”, lifting entire portions of her text directly from those old volumes. (The self-effacing Davenport was never to publish a book about her involvement in the rescue effort). Further, Sullivan relies far too heavily upon already-published letters that have rehashed this same territory, endlessly, for decades.

Indeed, much of what Sullivan offers is of no worth whatsoever. For instance, the first hundred pages of “Villa Air-Bel” provide a history of France in the 1930’s, and Sullivan’s handling of that history is neither deft nor penetrating—nor even particularly accurate.

Perhaps more seriously, Sullivan fails to acknowledge the selfless work of so many others who were instrumental in refugee work in 1940-1941 Marseille.

Fry, Gold and Davenport were vastly assisted in their efforts by a sympathetic diplomat at Marseille’s American Consulate, Hiram Bingham IV, who personally issued hundreds of transit, exit, entry and visitor visas to European nationals, all in direct contravention of official American policy. Bingham’s efforts were to cost him his career with the U.S. State Department.

A Massachusetts-based Unitarian mission operating in Marseille in 1940 and 1941 was equally important—and equally successful—as Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee in husbanding persons in danger out of France. In fact, the Unitarians, headed by Waitstill and Martha Sharp, little-known because they never engaged in self-promotion after returning to America, may have been responsible for directing an even larger number of endangered persons to safety than the Emergency Rescue Committee.

There was one very unpleasant and very unsettling aspect to the work of Fry and the Emergency Rescue Mission: the project was directed almost exclusively to the already-famous. Persons unknown in the United States who requested assistance were generally turned away. Fry justified such decisions on the grounds that financial backers in New York required a focus upon celebrities in order to maintain the necessary fund-raising back home.

Happily, Bingham at the American consulate and the workers of the Unitarian mission were not so sharply focused on helping the famous, and only the famous.

For Fry and Gold—and for Bingham, as well—their work in Marseille provided the central event of their lives.

By all accounts, Fry was an abject man when he returned to the United States in late 1941. In 1942, he wrote an article for The New Republic predicting the state-sponsored demise of European Jewry. It was the first such article to be published in the United States and was not well-received—no one in the West could yet grasp the concept of the monstrous death machine the Germans were about to put into place—and Fry, disappointed that no one in authority was prepared to heed his warnings, retired to private life. His 1945 “Surrender On Demand” attracted no interest whatsoever and quickly went out-of-print, not to be republished until after his death. Fry died in 1967. He was only 59 years old.

Gold was never to marry. She was to spend the rest of her life living off her considerable fortune, moving back and forth between luxury homes in New York and the South of France. She died of cancer in France in 1997, having reached the grand old age of 88.

Bingham retired from the diplomatic corps, a broken man, and lived in poverty at a farm in Connecticut for the rest of his life, enduring a succession of failed business ventures. He died in 1988 at age 85. His eleven children have been tireless in keeping his name alive.

Only Davenport was able to move on with her life after her work in Marseille. After the war, she enjoyed two long and happy marriages (her first husband died) and she experienced rewarding academic careers at universities in Iowa and Michigan. She was a much-respected and much-beloved woman by those who knew her.

Davenport was to outlive the entire cast of characters in “Villa Air-Bel”. Davenport, like her old friend Gold, was to die of cancer. Her death occurred in 1999, at age 84.

In 1997, two months before Gold’s death, Gold and Davenport were reunited for the first time in 56 years. Davenport, having learned of Gold’s mortal illness, had traveled to France in order to see the woman whose noble work she had shared more than half a century earlier.

The reunion, by all accounts, was a happy and touching one. It was amply documented by French journalists and filmmakers.

Of both women, who saved so many, it may be said: theirs were lives well-lived.

There Will Always Be An England

There will always be an England.

Or will there?

It is I think fair to say that for a while, before Margaret Thatcher, there wasn't that much left of England, in the glorious old sense. Mrs. Thatcher is utterly candid in acknowledging that before her eventful term as prime minister, England was a disheveled mess. A second-rate power, slipping into Third World status. This was so on the international front as well as domestically. The one significant foreign venture (the liquidation of the British Empire was a passive act, bowing under the winds of change) after the victory in the World War was the Suez invasion of 1956 under Anthony Eden, and that had turned into farce. Prime Minister Eden was booted out after President Eisenhower read the riot act to a country that had no alternative but to abide by American judgment over what was permissible in foreign policy in parts of the world where America was also involved.

William F. Buckley, Jr., writing in 1993 about Margaret Thatcher's "The Downing Street Years"

Margaret Thatcher's "The Path To Power"

I have now completed reading “The Path To Power”, Volume II of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs.

Thatcher’s memoirs are not chronological—“The Downing Street Years” constitutes Volume I and is intended to be read first—but I decided to read the memoirs out-of-sequence in order to follow in chronological terms Thatcher’s account of her own life.

My father told me I was making a mistake in beginning with “The Path To Power” instead of “The Downing Street Years”, but I am not yet prepared to admit error. Volume II, on its own terms, was a very happy beginning for me—but I admit it is possible that I may experience a change of heart after I read Volume I.

Much of the ground Thatcher covers in “The Path To Power” is exceedingly well-known, yet Thatcher’s own personal twist on people and events is essential if historians are to acquire a deep understanding of her years in power and her influence not only upon her own nation but upon international affairs.

In “The Path To Power”, Thatcher addresses practically everything of note that happened to her between 1925, the year of her birth, and 1979, the year she became Prime Minister.

Much of what she writes about her life is not inherently interesting. Thatcher lived a largely unremarkable existence until 1970, the year in which the Edward Heath government assumed power and she was given a Cabinet post. Thatcher’s discussion of the years 1925 to 1970 provides anything but gripping reading. Simply put, Thatcher was not cut out for domestic life, and her account of her first forty-five years is dutiful and no more, as if the author could not wait to move on to more important matters.

From 1970 through 1979, however, Thatcher’s life was one great drama, a prelude of sorts to the even greater dramas to come during her years in 10 Downing Street. Thatcher covers those nine eventful years with great skill—she was an excellent assessor of the people around her (both those for and those against her), a theoretician of some talent, a master tactician in the realm of party and parliamentary politics, and a woman whose talents all moved into high gear during the 1970’s, the decade in which she advanced from Member Of Parliament to Cabinet Minister to Party Leader to Prime Minister. It was during the decade of the 1970’s that Thatcher became “formidable”—as well as acquired the “Iron Lady” moniker that was to carry her around the world (an intended insult that first appeared in the Soviet press, “Iron Lady” became not a term of disparagement, as the Soviets had hoped, but an instant badge of honor).

The Heath years were not happy ones for Thatcher. The Heath government’s policies, in as much disarray as Britain itself, were a mishmash of Conservative and Labour positions, often espousing conservative principles in theory while advocating statist policies in practice. This was no solid foundation for a long-lasting government—it was a recipe for disaster (as well as bitter internal strife among Tories). The Heath government did about-face after about-face (“U-turns” in the parlance of the day) until no one had a clue what the Heath government stood for. In 1974, the Heath government was turned out in favor of Labour, even though the British public at the time had no more confidence in Labour than in the Tories.

Eight months after forming a government, Labour called a surprise election in order to solidify its power. The gambit worked: Labour achieved a majority.

The surprise election spelled the end of Heath’s political career. He had lost three of four national elections while head of the Conservative Party, and dissatisfaction with his performance had reached critical mass within the backbench of his own party.

Heath was too obtuse to realize that he had lost the support of the rank-and-file. He was taken by surprise when a challenge arose to contest his party leadership—and he was equally surprised to learn that his challenger, through a series of backroom maneuvers mostly involving other prospective candidates dropping out of the race, was none other than Margaret Thatcher.

Heath expected to defeat his challenger with ease, but the joke was on him: Thatcher emerged from the contest with an easy victory on the first ballot. Heath was forced to step down from the Conservative leadership the following day.

Thatcher’s support had come not from the aristocratic wing of the Conservative Party but from the middle-class wing of the Tories. The old-line aristocrats had lined up behind Heath, but they had been outnumbered—and outmaneuvered—by dozens upon dozens of backbenchers who believed that the Party’s denizens were no longer serving the nation’s interests and needed to be replaced. Thus was set into motion not only the modern Conservative Party but also an anti-Thatcher faction within her own party, a group of old-line traditionalists that could never accommodate itself to the notion that a woman, let alone “a grocer’s daughter”, had ended its monopoly on power. The aristocratic wing of the Tories was never to grant Thatcher its full support—and, years later, would prove to possess one of the seeds of her demise and subsequent fall from power.

By such events had Thatcher become, in February 1975, the first woman to lead one of Britain’s major parties. Having won the position as an outsider, Thatcher had no choice but to appoint Heath’s closest associates to her Shadow Cabinet. In consequence, during her early years as Party Leader, Thatcher was exceedingly cautious while she moved her party inch-by-inch to the Right.

Fundamental to her success in convincing her fellow Conservatives that they must represent something other than “Labour Lite” was a plethora of position papers supplied to the Conservative Party by various think tanks in Britain and the U.S., such papers advocating an abandonment of Keynesian economics as the key to Britain rising from its decades-long economic quagmire.

The Conservative Party had four years in opposition to study these papers and to become convinced that such a course of action needed to be installed. Had not Conservatives enjoyed that four-year window out of power—four years in which to create and solidify an intra-party consensus about the need for economic and monetary reform—there would never have been a Thatcher Revolution.

As leader of the Opposition, Thatcher bided her time in public while working behind-the-scenes to gather support within her own party for the advancement of free-market reforms. While Thatcher shored up support for a radical rethinking of her nation’s policies, Labour dithered. The country went from crisis to crisis while Labour, holding a razor-thin majority in The House Of Commons, was content to serve as caretaker government. In a state of hubris, Labour watched Britain continue to deteriorate, seeing its role as nothing more than manager of national decline.

The winter of 1978-1979 saw a critical turn in the nation’s fortunes. That winter was marked by coal shortages, electricity outages, wildcat strikes and garbage piled high on the streets of London. That winter became known as the “Winter Of Discontent”.

Public dissatisfaction with Labour reached a peak in February 1979. Thatcher seized the moment: she introduced a Motion Of No Confidence in The House.

By a vote of 311-310, the Motion passed. Labour had to dissolve Parliament and call elections. Thatcher’s had been the first successful “No Confidence” Motion since 1924.

In an election campaign defined by the Conservative slogan, “Labour Isn’t Working”, the Tories amassed a majority of 44, the first Conservative absolute majority in The House Of Commons since the early 1960’s.

“The Path To Power” ends, suitably, with Thatcher’s great 1979 electoral victory.

Thatcher tells this story well, but she airbrushes a few items along the way. Of greatest significance, she fails to offer worthy accounts of her associations with Keith Joseph and former Prime Minister Heath.

Keith Joseph was one of the most important figures in the Conservative Party. He might have challenged Heath himself in 1975, but Joseph was under mounting criticism for a speech he gave in Birmingham, a speech that had called for a thorough review of government policies that provided public support for unmarried lower-class mothers. (Joseph’s speech was little different than Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s contemporaneous writings in the United States advocating a policy of “benign neglect”.) Effectively shoved out of the race, Joseph threw his support behind Thatcher. He was to serve as a key advisor to Thatcher for the next several years, first in the Opposition and later in the Government.

Thatcher mentions Joseph many times, but she fails to accord him the key role in the Thatcher Revolution to which he is entitled. He was the most analytical and most brilliant of the Tory leaders, instrumental in obtaining grass-root support for free-market reforms in and out of The House Of Commons. Thatcher nonetheless fails to acknowledge fully the vital importance of his work and dedication over the course of many years. Aside from Thatcher herself, Joseph may have been the most important figure in British politics during the latter half of the seventies and first half of the eighties.

Heath is an altogether different matter. Thatcher does not attempt to ignore Heath, which would have been impossible, but she entirely sugar-coats him, failing to point out—unlike so many others, who have provided truer accounts of Heath’s fall from power and the resultant bitterness he carried within himself until his dying day—that Heath acted badly after he lost his party leadership and did everything possible to undercut Thatcher for the rest of his life. Thatcher takes an unaccountably high road in her discussions of Heath, and this excessive nobility rings false—anyone willing to plow through the Thatcher memoirs already knows legions of stories about Heath’s public and private attempts to bring down the Thatcher government. Thatcher should, I believe, have swung her purse at Heath, and offered a truer account of Heath’s shenanigans.

At volume’s end, the reader is left with the impression that the private Thatcher is very much like the public Thatcher. A woman of no nonsense, firm in her principles and firm in her opinions, Thatcher was the woman to be called upon when a difficult job was at hand—and, when her country called for her, Thatcher was ready. She told the public what Britain needed, she did what she said she would do, and she told the public what she had done: THAT’S leadership, and she supplied it in massive doses.

History’s final judgment of Thatcher will come from the U.S.

Germans and Frenchmen cannot judge Thatcher soundly because Germans and Frenchmen do not understand the Anglosphere and because Germans and Frenchmen carry pro-statist instincts entirely at odds with the English-speaking world and its tradition of skepticism toward government dating back to the Magna Carta.

The British themselves cannot judge Thatcher soundly because the British Left is still caught up in virulent anti-Thatcher hatred while the British Right still has not decided what to make of the great lady, afraid to embrace the legacy but also afraid to cut the cords.

As a result, American historians will be called upon to render the final verdict. That verdict appears to be an easy one to make.

One of the guides in judging great leaders is first the realization and later the acknowledgement that their successors, for several generations, are always unable to measure up.

The task of judging Thatcher will be made considerably easier by the circumstance that she indeed has been followed, in comparison to herself, by a succession of nonentities.

Like Ronald Reagan, Thatcher stands astride the pygmies that followed in her wake.

I look forward to “The Downing Street Years”.

Books Must Have Jokes

Books must have jokes. People have to be amused because life is so sad.

British Historian Paul Johnson

Plagiarism

My blog has been plagiarized several times by college students, and I learned of yet another incident of plagiarism today—in fact, a double incident.

A college student in a Rocky Mountain state recently “borrowed” my August 11, 2009, entry on Barry Strauss’s “The Trojan War: A New History” and submitted it as a term paper.

The student’s professor, knowing the term paper was not the product of the student’s own effort, conducted an online search in an attempt to locate the true source of the student’s paper. The professor’s search led him to my blog, and he submitted a comment, now deleted, asking me whether I wrote the blog entry in question and providing me with an email address to contact him.

In an email response to the professor, I assured him that I, and I alone, had written my blog entry on the Strauss book.

The professor’s response back to me included the following: “Then you should take a look at this: http://enlarykw.lovelyish.com”.

I did so—and there, right before my eyes, was my blog entry on the Strauss book. It had been copied—word for word, start to finish—on the blog of some person claiming to be a Ph.D. candidate currently in the midst of writing his dissertation about Ancient Greece. The Ph.D. candidate’s blog entry copying mine was dated August 17, 2009, six days after my own blog entry. The post even bore the same title as mine.

Amazingly, the person who had copied my blog entry even copied my personal remarks, such as my references to my father as well as my references to our summer vacation.

I guess if one is going to plagiarize, one might as well go whole hog!

I sent an email back to the professor, informing him that the person at http://enlarykw.lovelyish.com had plagiarized me, too.

“Yes, I know, and I thought you should know, too” was his response back to me.

The person blogging at http://enlarykw.lovelyish.com does not accept comments.

I know, because I tried to submit one.

Update Of 15 November 2009: I noticed today that the offending weblog had been closed down for "violations of the website's terms of use".

Embarking Upon The Thatcher Memoirs

“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.”—The Baroness Thatcher


I have embarked upon reading Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs, which shall take several months, as the memoirs involve thousands upon thousands of pages, in three volumes.

I decided to read the volumes in chronological order. Consequently, I have begun with “The Path To Power”, although most persons choose to begin with “The Downing Street Years”.

It should be a luxurious reading experience, a welcome antidote to living in a period of pygmy politicians and leadership more suited to banana republics than world powers.

Thatcher’s memoirs are much the most important since Churchill’s. Everyone that has studied them has raved.

They are also the best-selling memoirs since Churchill’s, worldwide, in numerous languages, and have enjoyed a very durable shelf life (it is seldom that politician memoirs remain in print for any period).

My father read the volumes as they were first published. He said at the time that the memoirs were fifty times better than he had expected, the first memoirs since Churchill’s written at the most exalted level—and written not to settle scores.

Thatcher’s memoirs are considered to represent a template of the leader’s art, and will be read for the next thousand years, in admiration and awe. According to a highly-regarded history professor I know, they are destined, over time, to supplant Machiavelli as primary source of the politician’s craft.

It is apparent, from the first few chapters, that the memoirs have been painstakingly assembled. Thatcher is a fine, even elegant writer, and she possesses more than a little eloquence.

It is also apparent, from the first few chapters, that Thatcher possesses a mind of startling clarity.

While Thatcher’s eloquence does not quite match Churchill’s, Thatcher’s clarity of thought exceeds that of the great lion that preceded her.

Upon reflection, this should not be surprising. Thatcher accomplished at least as much as her great predecessor.

Churchill is remembered today as a wartime leader. He was instrumental in winning a great conflagration, but he did so by reacting to international events, not by shaping them according to his own initiative. Churchill’s domestic accomplishments were mostly non-existent.

Thatcher is remembered as a peacetime leader who completely transformed her nation’s economy and ethos—and who did so NOT in response to external events but entirely upon her own initiative. Further, Thatcher is remembered as a leader of vast foreign policy accomplishment, including a seminal role in winning a lengthy Cold War.

As such, Thatcher enjoys two trumps over Churchill.

There is another quality Thatcher shared with Churchill: both leaders were wont to drive their fellow politicians mad.

In a career lasting four decades, Thatcher was renowned for driving her opposition into a tizzy.

Her opponents in the Labour Party were always in a tizzy. Her opponents in the Liberal Party were always in a tizzy. Even opponents within her own Conservative Party were always in a tizzy.

Leaders on the continent were generally in a tizzy, too—and, amazingly, they were in a tizzy from the time of her first cabinet post, years before she became leader first of her party and then of her nation. Europeans must have foreseen, earlier than the British themselves, that Thatcher would one day become Prime Minister—and cause them all sorts of grief.

She was a formidable woman.

No one ever took on Thatcher face-to-face and emerged the winner. She could only be attacked from behind, under cover of darkness.

“Margaret Thatcher always gave me headaches.”—Helmut Kohl in his “Memoirs: 1982-1990”

“What does she want, this housewife? My [****] on a tray?”—Jacques Chirac, during the February 1988 Brussels Summit

Thatcher was an extraordinary woman. She was sui generis.

Not surprisingly, Thatcher was a great political and personal friend of the other great leader of her era, Ronald Reagan.


In less than a decade, the two leaders shaped a comprehensive reorientation of the world’s politics and economies. A revolution in all but name, it was an achievement on the most extravagant scale, the magnitude of which is generally accomplished only through warfare.

Thatcher and Reagan were to remain close until Reagan’s mind was lost to dementia a full decade before his body gave out and he was called home at last.

I remember vividly Thatcher’s appearance at Reagan’s 2004 funeral.

Her eulogy, the best of the eulogies that day, began: “We have lost a great President, a great American, and a great man—and I have lost a dear friend.”

I recall how fragile Thatcher looked at the end of what, for her, surely had been a very long and very tiring day. After The State Funeral at The National Cathedral, Thatcher, along with Reagan family members and a handful of Reagan intimates, made the long journey from Washington to California in order to lay Reagan to rest, at sunset, on a spot overlooking The Pacific Ocean.


Though visibly frail, The Iron Lady still displayed the dignity and composure for which she had been greatly admired during her prime.

That day, as always, she wore a great hat.

Endkampf

The literature produced about World War II continues without end.

Occasionally a new study will reveal new information, fresh insights, or the detailed examination of some aspect of the war and its aftermath previously not addressed by scholars.

Such is the case with “Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians And The Death Of The Third Reich”, Stephen G. Fritz’s study of the last days of the war in Franconia, a stronghold of the National Socialism movement.

Although The Allied Army had crossed the Rhine in early 1945 and the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, General Eisenhower took very seriously intelligence reports detailing Germany’s last-ditch “Werwulf” strategy: concentrating resistance to the Allies in Franconia, where remnants of The German Army, aided by local and imported guerilla groups, were to establish an Alpine stronghold, a stronghold difficult if not impossible for an occupying army to conquer.

Eisenhower’s fears of an “Alpine Redoubt” proved to be well-founded. Having dispatched an army to intercept the German retreat toward Franconia, Eisenhower began receiving reports that the Allies were encountering ferocious fighting from a variety of German defenders: Wehrmacht, SS, Hitler Youth and Volkssturm forces, all offering such tenacious resistance that Eisenhower feared that Germany’s last-ditch effort would hamper the successful post-war occupation of Germany itself.

In the early months of 1945, Eisenhower was worried about post-war considerations in places besides Franconia.

The German occupation of Holland had turned Holland into a virtual fortress, impregnable to attack. Once on European soil, The Allied Army had deliberately sidestepped Holland, not expecting Holland to fall until Germany itself surrendered. One Eisenhower concern was that a defeated Germany would not give up Holland without a fight, or at least without concessions.

Another Eisenhower concern was Norway. Germany’s occupation of Norway was expected to be difficult to bring to a conclusion. The Allies believed that German forces would continue to occupy and control vast portions of the country long after war’s end, and do so by establishing an impenetrable German stronghold in Norway’s mountains.

With growing alarm, Eisenhower feared that his occupying forces, at great cost, would be required to deal with resistance on three separate fronts—and he decided to nip Franconian resistance in the bud even before the war ended. Accordingly, more than two months before cessation of hostilities, Eisenhower sent troops to occupy Franconia, an area otherwise without strategic or military significance.

For civilians living in Franconia in the last weeks of the war, March, April and May of 1945 brought living hell.

Civilians, by and large, were eager for the war to end. Their chief concerns were preserving their property, preserving their way of life—and, most of all, preserving their lives and the lives of their families.

Local officials, however, often had a different view. Many officials wanted to defend the towns and cities to the point of total destruction rather than surrender them to the Allies. Toward this end, they were often joined by hardened, battle-tested soldiers of the Wehrmacht, transferred to Franconia from The Eastern Front in order to create havoc for the Allies.

The situation was highly volatile, and varied significantly village-by-village, town-by-town, city-by-city.

Throughout Franconia, local officials fought with Nazi officials who fought with military officials who fought with the local militia who fought with the civilian populace over what course of action to take as the war wound down.

Each of these constituencies had a different outlook. Each had a different motive. Each had a different plan of action.

The result was that each jurisdiction became unique, largely controlling its own fate. Such fates were dependent upon the vagaries of local politicians, local party officials and local citizens of prominence—as well as upon the actions of whatever Wehrmacht personnel happened to be passing through town, some of which were resolved to fight unto death and others of which wanted nothing more than to lay down arms.

A hodgepodge of different methods for dealing with the advancing Allies was adopted, a scattershot approach that the Allies had trouble predicting (and controlling).

Some towns willingly surrendered to the Allies. Others did not.

Some towns were virtually undefended. Others were virtual fortresses.

Some towns welcomed the Americans with relief and open arms. Others became death traps for American combatants.

In the changing circumstances of battle, some towns that had surrendered to the Allies found themselves once again under German control, and the leaderships of those towns were regarded as traitors (and were treated as such).

The womenfolk in many towns insisted upon raising white flags of surrender. In some towns, their efforts were successful. In other towns, their efforts were not, and the women were hung like common criminals.

One of the causes of fierce German resistance in Franconia was the fear—probably justified at the time—of an Anglo-American sell-out to vengeful Soviets. The people of Franconia had heard reports of the inhuman actions of The Russian Army in the East, and many were prepared to die rather than subject themselves to similar horrors.

Another cause of resistance, held by committed Nazi ideologues, was the belief that The German Reich would rise again. This faction wanted to see a spirited resistance that would result in the total destruction of Germany, followed by a foreign occupation so brutal and so miserable that the population would look back on the period of National Socialism as a golden age and seek its return.

American forces were lucky in that they enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in firepower at this late stage of the war. Franconian towns and cities that offered resistance instantly became the targets of artillery shells and air strikes. The Americans intended to show that they meant business, and German resistance was quickly pummeled into submission by American superiority in armaments.

Resistance, however, did not end with Germany’s final defeat. Well into the late 1940’s, American soldiers were attacked, maimed and murdered by small but organized factions of resisters, most of which were believed to have been formed by Nazi loyalists and sympathizers.

Many top officials in the American occupying force were of the opinion that, were it not for the fact that the Germans had been so utterly worn down by war, a successful insurgency might have developed and threatened the success of the occupation.

The years 1946 and 1947 proved to be particularly hazardous for Americans. Germany had not yet begun to recover economically from the war’s devastation, and local populaces were unhappy with the American policy of permitting economic development only in the agricultural sector (a policy not to be abandoned until late 1947).

Tensions between Germans and occupying forces became acute that year, when attacks against American soldiers became frequent and sabotage became widespread. Such actions were attributed to a small band of diehard zealots as well as frustration over a deteriorating economy and unhappiness with growing fraternization between German women and American GIs. The frequency of attacks was to wither the following year, coincident with changes in economic policy and the goodwill engendered by announcement of The Marshall Plan.

Nevertheless, throughout the late 1940’s, occupation authorities (and American politicians) despaired of success, always calling for more troops and more personnel trained in civic affairs. The U.S. Army and President Truman were repeatedly accused of poor planning for the occupation phase of the war.

The press and public alike became convinced that eventual success was highly unlikely. Predictions of ultimate disaster became commonplace. A widespread perception was that the occupation had been botched from the beginning, that the devastation of Germany was too great ever to be repaired, and that the German people were obstinately resistant to a democratic form of government. These perceptions were not to begin to change until the successful Berlin Airlift of 1948.

Despite resistance efforts, relations between the German people and the American occupying forces were, on the whole, reasonably good. Germans realized—with profound thanks—that the Americans were more civilized occupiers than the Russians, British or French. Americans recognized that the Germans, alone among Western Europeans, were as orderly, industrious and advanced as themselves.

By 1949, resistance had largely come to an end—and, of greater importance, the German populace no longer supported small bands of resisters. Like thieves and murderers, the resisters had become outcasts.

The resistance had come to an end—and so, before much longer, would the occupation.

Fritz tells this story well. His sources are deep and widespread, and include personal interviews as well as police reports, intelligence reports, U.S. Army records, and German newspapers and periodicals from the period. Indeed, almost one-third of the book is devoted to documenting primary and secondary sources, probably a good thing (other than for the general reader) since Fritz is treading unbroken ground.

“Endkampf” was widely (and positively) reviewed in American and European historical journals at the time of its publication in 2004. The book, however, was totally ignored by the mainstream press, a very odd state of affairs given the book’s unique timeliness. The publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post presumably did not want to alert their readers to the existence of a new, scholarly publication addressing the perils involved in a post-war occupation, especially a publication that would allow readers to draw parallels between the post-war occupation of Germany—ultimately successful—and the post-war occupation of Iraq.

Despite the mainstream press ignoring “Endkampf”, someone was paying attention: the book remains in print, and is widely known to scholars of the period.

All wars end in a post-war period of insurgency. Such circumstance is entirely unremarkable, known to all but the obtuse. Fritz’s book on the history of the American occupation of Franconia is an invaluable study, full of lessons applicable to our own time.

It is my understanding that “Endkampf” has been read and studied—and admired—by key U.S. military personnel, in Washington and in Baghdad.

As for those who ignored the book on its initial publication: Whoever could have imagined that a study of Germany in the aftermath of World War II might shed light on the current situation in Iraq?

The War Effort

But the fact was that the fall of Singapore had left [Churchill] angry and depressed. A force of 100,000 British soldiers had lain down their arms, despite outnumbering the Japanese invasion force four to one. “They should have done better,” he lamented.

What use was it, that he himself displayed a warrior's spirit before the world, if those who fought in Britain's name showed themselves incapable of matching his rhetoric?

He was not alone in his poor opinion of Britain's fighting men. The chief of the general staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, wrote in his diary: “If the Army cannot fight better than it is doing at the present, we shall deserve to lose our Empire.”

Nor was the judgment a new one. Back in 1941, following defeats in Greece, Crete and North Africa, Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office wrote: “Our soldiers are the most pathetic amateurs, pitted against professionals. The Germans are magnificent fighters, veritable masters of warfare. We shall learn, but it will be a long and bloody business.”

A year had gone by since then and, with the fall of Singapore, Cadogan added: “Our Army is the mockery of the world!”

It was the absence of any scintilla of heroic endeavour at Singapore, any evidence of last-ditch sacrifice of the kind with which British armies through the centuries had so often redeemed the pain of defeats, that shocked Churchill.

There was no legend to match that of Rorke's Drift in Zululand or the defence of Mafeking in the Boer War, only abject defeat—surrender to a numerically inferior enemy who had proved themselves better and braver soldiers.

He was confident that America's recent entry into the war would enable Britain to survive. But how could the nation hold up its head in the world, be seen to have made a worthy contribution to victory, if the British Army covered itself with shame whenever exposed to a battle?

The bigger problem for Churchill was in the United States—the ally who had only just joined the war against Hitler but was crucial if victory was to be won. There, a perception was growing that Britain was too yellow to fight. This worried Churchill because he suspected it might be true.

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There were similar concerns voiced about the workings of the Home Front. If his fighting men were letting him down, then Churchill had reason to believe he was not getting the best out of the country's civilians either.

The majority of the British people remained staunch and united in their war effort. Yet class tensions ran deep. Few workers broke ranks during the Dunkirk and Battle of Britain periods, but as those crises receded, there was less urgency about the struggle for national survival.

In 1942, amid the continuing military defeats, a weariness and cynicism pervaded the country. Industrial unrest and strikes revealed fissures in the fabric of national unity which are seldom acknowledged.

To be fair, many wartime industries achieved remarkable results. The Labour politician and War Cabinet member, Ernest Bevin, mobilised the population, and especially the women, more effectively than any other belligerent nation, save possibly Russia. At the same time, some factories suffered from poor management, outdated production methods, lack of quality control and a recalcitrant work-force.

These were shortcomings that had hampered the nation's economic progress through the previous half-century, but they were not resolved by the war.

Strikes were officially outlawed, but the legislation failed to prevent wildcat stoppages in coal pits, shipyards and aircraft plants, often in support of absurd or avaricious demands. Some trades unionists adopted a shameless view that there was no better time to secure higher pay than during a national emergency, when the need for continuous production was compelling.

Nine thousand men at Vickers-Armstrong walked out in Barrow in a dispute over piecework rates. When a tribunal found against them, the strikers still refused to resume work and the dispute dragged on for weeks.

Lesser stoppages were over the use of women riveters, and refusal by management to allow collections for the Red Army during working hours.

In the engineering and shipbuilding industries in 1942, 526,000 working days were lost to strikes, rising to a million in 1944. In the aircraft industry, 1.8 million days were lost in 1943, rising to 3.7 million in 1944. All of this suggests a less than wholehearted commitment to the war effort in some factories.

Nor was it confined to labour relations. In dockyards, workers were guilty of systematic pilferage, including lifeboat rations. U.S. seamen arriving in Britain were shocked by the attitudes they encountered as trucks and tanks were damaged by reckless handling during offloading.


Max Hastings
The Finest Years: Churchill As Warlord 1940-1945

To Be Published In The United Kingdom On September 3, 2009
To Be Published In Canada On October 15, 2009
To Be Published In Australia On November 1, 2009
Publication In The United States Not Yet Arranged

"We Must Keep Him Fresh . . ."

By the end of April [1940], it was plain that the allies faced defeat in Norway. Churchill himself [as First Lord Of The Admiralty] bore much of the responsibility. He had asked of Britain's armed forces far more than they were capable of delivering.

But Neville Chamberlain was prime minister. It was he who, in the eyes of the British people, had presided over a disaster. On May 7, 1940, the House of Commons met to debate the Norway debacle. Chamberlain sounded bitter, petulant, beaten.

When a vote was called the following night, 33 Tories voted against their own party, and a further 60 abstained. Though Chamberlain retained a parliamentary majority, it was plain that his Conservative government had lost the nation's confidence. This was not merely the consequence of the Norway fiasco, but because through eight fumbling months most of its ministers had exposed their lack of stomach for war.

An all-party coalition was indispensable. Labour would not serve under Chamberlain. Winston Churchill became Britain's prime minister following a meeting between himself, Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and Tory Chief Whip David Margesson on the afternoon of May 9, at which Halifax declared his own unsuitability for the post, as a member of the House of Lords who would be obliged to delegate direction of the war to Churchill in the Commons.

In truth, some expedient might have been adopted to allow the Foreign Secretary to return to the Commons. But Halifax possessed sufficient self-knowledge to recognize that no more than Neville Chamberlain did he possess the stuff of a war leader.

The historian David Reynolds has observed that when the Gallipoli campaign failed in 1915, many people wished to blame Churchill. After Norway nobody did.

“It was a marvel,” Churchill wrote in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs. “I really do not know how I survived and maintained my position in public esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr. Chamberlain.”

The British people showed themselves much wiser than the old ruling class, by applauding the change as most of the grandees did not. They understood that Winston Churchill, alone among their politicians, was the man for the hour.

He himself may have perceived his good fortune that he had not acceded to the premiership in earlier years, or even earlier months of the war. Had he done so, it is likely that by May 1940 his country would have tired of the excesses which he would surely have committed, while being no more capable than Chamberlain of stemming the tide of fate on the Continent.

Back in 1935, Stanley Baldwin explained his unwillingness to appoint Churchill to his own Cabinet: “If there is going to be a war—and who can say there is not?—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.”

Max Hastings
The Finest Years: Churchill As Warlord 1940-1945

To Be Published In The United Kingdom On September 3, 2009
To Be Published In Canada On October 15, 2009
To Be Published In Australia On November 1, 2009
Publication In The United States Not Yet Arranged

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Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson, for your kind and thoughtful gift.