World War II

Bloodlands

| ruthpelletier

By Timothy Snyder

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It’s difficult to think of a topic more written about than World War II. It was the single largest and deadliest conflict humankind has ever fought, and, despite being over, it still looms over contemporary life. Thousands of books have been written about it, and that’s not counting fictional works in which it features. Even now, Barnes and Nobles awards WWII its own shelves, distinct from History (this from a store that considers Fiction and Literature equivalent).  Any author attempting to enlarge this body of work must be hard pressed to contribute something novel.

Most of the extant non-fiction about WWII focuses on nations or regimes, or on the conflict itself.  ‘Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin’ is Timothy Snyder’s attempt to examine the combined effect of the Nazis and the Soviets on the region where they did the most damage: Eastern Europe, occupied by both the Nazis and the Soviets during the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, from 1939 – 1941, then by the Nazis during Operation Barbossa and the German advance into Soviet Russia, and then by the Soviets as they pushed the Nazis back into Germany and built the greater USSR.  

There are advantages to taking a geographical perspective: because World War II was a struggle of nations, often dominated by personalities, it is usually related narratively, with emphasis on active protagonists. In popular imagination, WWII is a battle between Great Men and Evil Men, Churchill and Roosevelt against Hitler and Mussolini.  This focus de-emphasizes the local experience of a single place or people, what it must have been like for someone who occupied a single town, a single country for the entirety of the conflict.  We are used to following men and armies from place to place, not at watching them march past us.  By holding attention in the brutalized lands of Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and the rest of Eastern Europe, Snyder refuses to let our minds wander from the constant barrage of violence to which the occupants of these countries were subjected.

This constancy makes for extremely grim reading.  It was a horrifying ordeal which was experienced by the population, Jewish and otherwise, of Eastern Europe between 1933 and 1953.  Snyder lays before us the mass starvation in the Ukraine, the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war by the Germans, the Holocaust, the decapitation of the intellectual elite in the Eastern Bloc, the “relocations” of any number of Soviet, European, and German national minorities, and even the later (and somehow especially heart-rending) turning of the Soviet leadership on Soviet Jewry after the formation of Israel.  The sadness, loss, destruction, and horror is unrelenting.  Nevertheless, it is real, it did happen, and I would argue that everyone has an obligation to read this book, or a book very much like it, to trouble themselves to see, as best they are able, what happened.

Timothy Snyder

Snyder’s presentation is clear, well-researched, and extremely thorough.  He assumes almost no familiarity with the history of the war, or of the protagonists.  Those with little background will be able to pick up ‘Bloodlands’ and not be confused, as long as they are willing to wade through dense and, at times, dry historical prose.  I don’t fault Snyder for this, though: military history is almost always dry, and his intention is clearly to present an objective and balanced account.  There is some anecdote, but his emphasis is on the greater movements of troops and people.  The book will leave anyone who reads it with a strong and relatively complete understanding of the experience of the inhabitants of the Eastern Front.

But I’d like to be clear: that experience, the subject of ‘Bloodlands’, is brutal. At times, ‘Bloodlands’ becomes almost nightmarish for the reader, as massacre follows massacre, and the unending parade of human cruelty continues. It’s saturating; it begins to beggar belief. Synder adopts a scholarly, dispassionate tone though out – I got the distinct impression that he needed to, in order to continue. This tone, while dry, is never disrespectful, and the lack of embellishment helped me get through the material, which might otherwise have become overwhelming.

Despite the salve of Snyder’s tone, though, ‘Bloodlands’ isn’t for the squeamish, or for empaths.  Snyder isn’t prurient, and doesn’t revel in the gore, torture, and destruction that characterized the treatment of the people of Eastern Europe; nevertheless, their stories would not be complete without mention of the stomach-turning excesses of violence that took place there.  Readers with vivid imaginations, or well-developed senses of empathy, may have trouble reading accounts of the rapes and killings, of mothers having husbands and sons torn from them to be shot.  I have a strong stomach, blunted empathy, and long experience with emotionally brutal history, and I still found this book enormously difficult to read.  Put another way: if it were a novel, I would avoid it: it’s too much suffering, too hard. If it were fiction, it would be gratuitous.

But it’s not. It’s true, and truth should be witnessed, even it’s difficult. And, ultimately, the grinding sense of despair which ‘Bloodlands’ might elicit in the reader is an inevitable outcome of the very narrative perspective Snyder has chosen here. Because he has chosen a location rather than a protagonist, Snyder has denied readers any of the normal relief of protagonist-driven narrative. In wars, someone wins and someone loses. Strongmen rise and they fall. A place, though, endures, and because the suffering of the people of Eastern Europe didn’t end when WWII did, because they were caught behind the Iron Curtain and spent further decades under the yoke of totalitarianism, ‘Bloodlands’ is unable to offer its readers any of the comforts of narrative resolution. The book end with our sure knowledge that terrible things still await. True things, but terrible nonetheless.

Life After Life

| ruthpelletier

By Kate Atkinson

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Have you ever tried a new food and thought happily, ‘Wow, this is so easy to chew!’ It might just be me, but I doubt it somehow. Some foods are wondrously easy to chew: texturally satisfying while still working your jaws enough to justify their status as solid foods. Foods for which the ease of chewing is part of the pleasure of eating them.

That’s how I feel about ‘Life After Life’.

‘Life After Life’ is one of Kate Atkinson’s stand-alone novels (as opposed to her Jackson Brodie series, which I really like). Its protagonist, Ursula Todd, is the third child of Hugh and Sylvie Todd. She is born on February 11, 1910, with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She is strangled.

And then reborn. And reborn again.

Ursula Todd dies many times, and in many different ways. She will drown as a little girl, be killed by the Spanish Flu, bombed in the blitz, murdered by a husband. Each life will be a little different, some better, some worse. Ursula will learn and forget and learn again, carrying vague memories, suspicions, hunches, through her many lives.

And it’s so easy to chew! Er, read – it’s so easy to read!

First of all, the plot (reliving the same life, over and over, but tweaking it each time) is a lay-up of a plot. It would be difficult to write a book with this premise that wasn’t eminently readable, in my opinion. The interesting-ness is built-in: who doesn’t want to get a practice run at their own lives? The idea is irresistible to anyone who has ever regretted anything.

And the setting: World War II. Another slow pitch right over the plate. Maybe, one day, World War II will stop being an interesting fictional backdrop, but that day is nowhere in sight. World War II offers so many opportunities for novelists that it must be difficult to choose; Atkinson solves this problem by refusing to choose and writing all the plots. Ursula will pull bodies out of bombed out buildings, make friends with Eva Braun, marry a Nazi. She will even kill Hitler in one of her timelines (seriously).

All the elements are in place for an absolute tear-through of a book; all Atkinson needed to do was write well. And, luckily, Atkinson is a master of chewable prose.

Easy-to-read is a distinct quality that writing can have. In my opinion, it’s totally orthogonal to the goodness or badness of the prose itself: there is really good writing that is very easy to read, and really good writing that is very difficult to read. Some prose just works with you: it flows the way your brain flows; it doesn’t make you work. Sometimes, this is a lazy quality, but not in Atkinson’s case.

Kate Atkinson seems, from the two books I’ve read, an excellent writer of easy, vivid prose. She blends several qualities together into a well-balanced mixture. She is colorful, but she doesn’t over-burden her prose with description. She is funny, but she doesn’t tell jokes. She is casual without being too demotic (her language is realistic while remaining universal, no dialect for her). Her vocabulary is massive, but she almost never uses obscure or overly-difficult words. She’s a really good prose stylist, in my opinion (rather in the mode of J.K. Rowling).

Let me see if I can give you a sense of what I mean:

“Although, of course, neither Bridget nor Mrs. Glover had been invited to the Berkeley, and indeed Bridget had never been inside a London hotel, or a hotel anywhere come to that, apart from having gone into the Shelbourne to admire the foyer before catching the ferry at Dun Laoghire to come to England, “a lifetime ago.” Mrs. Glover, on the other hand, declared herself to be “quite familiar” with the Midland in Manchester where one of her nephews (of which, it seemed, she had an endless supply) had taken her and her sister “on more than one occasion.” (p. 175)

Or:

“He had asked her to meet him for a drink, a request conveyed on an Admiralty docket that had arrived mysteriously while she was briefly out of the office…’I think your department may be due an audit’, it read. Crighton liked code. Ursula hoped that the navy’s encryptions weren’t as rudimentary as Crighton’s.

Miss Fawcett, one of her clerical assistants, spotted the note lying in full view and gave her a panic-stricken look. “Crikey,”, she said. “Are we? Due an audit?”

“Someone’s idea of a joke,” Ursula said, dismayed to find herself blushing. There was something un-Crighton-like about these salacious (if not downright filthy) but seemingly innocent messages. ‘I believe there is a shortage of pencils.’ Or ‘Are your ink levels sufficiently topped up?’ Ursula wished he would learn Pitman’s, or more discretion. Or, better still, stop altogether.” (p. 295)

Kate Atkinson

Ignore the light-heartedness; this is really good prose. It is information-dense without in any way sacrificing clarity. Each sentence is instantly and totally comprehensible. There isn’t a word out of place. Usually, writing with this much complexity gets quickly bogged down in extra adjectives, too many phrases. There’s none of that here; Atkinson has put every word exactly where she needs it, and has nothing leftover. Lastly, notice the diversity in the vocabulary. Most writers are repetitive: they have favorite words and phrases which they repeat over and over. Atkinson does not – her working vocabulary (as well as her set of cultural touch points and allusions) is vast.

‘Life After Life’ left me with the distinct impression that I had read something fun rather than something good. It was a romp of a read, engaging and easy to follow, sad sometimes and funny sometimes and suspenseful sometimes.

It’s not a bad thing, having a nice reading experience! Nevertheless, I am left with the feeling that I had just read a 500-page novel without having to strain even the tiniest bit. It’s the feeling that you have after phoning in a work-out: technically, you did the exercises, but you didn’t need to stretch a single muscle. Maybe you enjoyed it, but you didn’t improve.

And, OK, not all reading experiences need be opportunities for betterment, I understand that. Sometimes books are just fun and that’s great. In Atkinson’s case, though, it makes me a tad uneasy because she is such a good technical writer. And maybe that’s unfair – isn’t her lovely and enjoyable prose enough? But I have a feeling that, if she pushed, she could write something lovely and hard. Something really magnificent.

Explaining Hitler

| ruthpelletier

The Search for the Origins of His Evil

By Ron Rosenbaum

‘Explaining Hitler’ was one of those books that I knew I had to read as soon as I heard that it existed.  I thought that it would be right up my alley, and I was right.

Like so many historically-minded people, I’m a little obsessed with the fact of Nazis.

[I will allow myself a little self-serving quotation here: “When asked whether it was possible to think too much upon the Holocaust, [W.G.] Sebald said, ‘No serious person thinks of anything else.'” (p. 412)  I totally agree.]

Even if you take, as I do, a dark view of humankind, the Nazis are an outlier on the Evil Scale.  Anyone trying to get their arms around humanity’s capabilities must fit Nazis into their theory, must take account of the ability of an entire nation to rise up in a seizure of controlled, insane, determined violence.

Hitler himself must be part of that equation, whether you consider him the author of all the evil or a historical coincidence (‘if it had not been him, it would have been someone else’).  So people who are, as I am, interested in evil, or in the wickedness of human nature, end up reading a lot about Hitler.

But ‘Explaining Hitler‘ isn’t really about Hitler.

Rather, it is a history of Hitler theories.  It’s a long, ambivalent interrogation of our relationship with Hitler.  It’s about what Hitler represents, the various psychoanalytical and historical models that we have used to understand him, and about how those theories reflect back on us.

Explaining HitlerIt’s about why we need to explain Hitler.  It’s about why he, in particular, has obsessed us for so long, what it would mean to really understand him.  It’s about whether evil exists, and, if it does, what that means about the world.  It’s about what price we pay for thinking about Hitler too hard, and what price we might pay for not thinking about him enough.

It is exactly my kind of book.

To give you a sense of what I mean, let’s take a brief whirl through the table of contents:

‘Part 1: The Beginning of the Beginning’ is about the myths and origin stories about Hitler’s early life, the little that is known about his family, and about how the newspapers in Germany at the time of his rise understood him.

‘Part 2: Two Postwar Visions: Sincerity and Its Counterfeit’ features the work of two post-war Hitler scholars, H.R. Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock, and their debate about whether or not Hitler was ‘sincere’ in his anti-semitism, or whether he was merely a cynical and opportunistic politician playing on the anti-Semitism of the country he was hoping to rule.

‘Part 3: Geli Raubal and Hitler’s “Sexual Secret”‘ is about all the weird theories around Hitler’s sex life: whether he had one, whether it was abnormal, and whether those facts had anything to do with his political identity.

‘Part 4: Hatred: Complex and Primitive’ discusses whether Hitler was secretly Jewish, and whether or not that might be the source of his virulent anti-Semitism.

‘Part 5: The Art of Evil and the Future of It’ is about what happens when Hitler scholars try too hard to get into the Hitler headspace, and about the most famous Holocaust denier (or ‘Revisionist’), David Irving.

‘Part 6: The War Over the Question Why’ criticizes the position taken by some Holocaust chroniclers, most notably Claude Lanzmann, that to even seek to understand Hitler is “obscene”, because an explanation would inevitably, to some degree, exculpate him, and because to understand is, perhaps, to empathize.

‘Part 7: Blame and Origins’ covers the work of several scholars of Hitler and the Holocaust, namely Emil Fackenheim, Yehuda Bauer, George Steiner, Hyam Maccoby, Daniel Goldhagen, and Lucy Dawidowicz, on questions like: Would an omnipotent and just God allow the Holocaust to happen?  Why, of all the nations in Europe, did Germany fall prey to a Hitler?  When exactly did Hitler decide to exterminate the Jewish race in Europe?

Ron_Rosenbaum
Ron Rosenbaum (looking, I think, unnecessarily ferocious for a journalist)

‘Explaining Hitler‘ is, essentially, a long existential query, and it reads like one.  I found it mesmerizing, but then, I would.  Rosenbaum interviews scholars, visits historic sites, pores over archives.  He asks complicated, devastating questions, and he records the answers of the men and women he’s interviewing, even when they are belligerent, or rude, or contradictory, or unconvincing.  He does not shy away from the global, or the grandiose.  It is clear, by the end, that most questions about Hitler are, ultimately, unanswerable, that the best we can do is be honest with ourselves about the dark potential of mankind.

“In declaring so offhandedly “the fact” that Hitler was a “person like you and me,” Bullock places himself squarely on the side of a great schism among Hitler explainers: those who speak of Hitler as “one of us,”, of a “Hitler within” all of us, of a potential for Hitlerian evil in all human nature, in our nature – and those who maintain one of several varieties of Hitlerian exceptionalism.  Exceptionalist arguments range from the belief that the magnitude of Hitler’s evil (however that magnitude is measured) surpasses that of previous malefactors of history to the most sophisticated theses of those like the philosopher Berel Lang who argue that it is the quality of Hitler’s intentionality, not the quantity of bodies, that makes the Nazi genocide a new chapter in a “history of evil”.  Beyond that are the more metaphysical and theological arguments of Emil Fackenheim, who rejects the idea of a Hitler “within us,” who argues instead that Hitler is beyond the continuum, off the grid, not explicable by reference to any previous version of human nature.  Rather, he represents some kind of “radical evil”, even an “eruption of demonism” into history, one so unprecedented it must cause us to reconsider our conception of God’s relationship to man.” (p. 85)

“Fackenheim’s notion of “posthumous victory” suggests that, much as we would like to understand Hitler, it is important to realize that we should in some sense also still be at war with him.  And there might be some value to continuing to resist, even to hate, the enemy.  Is hatred of Hitler still a legitimate response, or is it the kind of crude, debased emotional reaction that explanation and understanding should ideally lead us upwards from?  Is it bizarre, out-of-bounds, a sign of an unevolved sensibility, for a civilized, educated citizen of the post-Holocaust world to hate Adolf Hitler?  Put another way: Would it be a bizarre moral failure not to hate Hitler?” (p. 390)

If these are not the sorts of questions that get you going, if you don’t like moral dilemmas strung out over hundreds of pages, dense, insoluble ethical and historical riddles which force you to choose between a rock and a hard place, then ‘Explaining Hitler‘ is not the book for you.

But these are exactly the sorts of questions that get me going.  I love thinking about stuff like this, I do so voluntarily, in my free time, and so ‘Explaining Hitler‘ is like four hundred pages of exactly the kind of conversation I use to alienate people at parties!

What is evil?  Are people evil, or just actions?  Can we use a term like ‘evil’ when we’re talking about something merely human, and not actually Satanic?  Was Hitler evil?  Does it matter?  Was the entire Nazi leadership evil?  At what level does the evil stop: Nazi leadership, the S.S., the army, complacent civilians?  Can a whole nation be evil?  How about a species?

Who bears responsibility for the Holocaust?  What if you found out that Hitler had a brain tumor from 1918 on – would that make him less evil?  It certainly wouldn’t make the Holocaust less terrible, so how could it make him less evil?

Is it wrong to even ask these questions?  By seeking to understand Hitler, do we risk empathizing with him?  Or, on the other hand, do we have a responsibility to understand him, in order to make sure we spot the next Hitler before he kills millions of people?

I will also say this: I’ve read a lot of W.W. II history, and several Hitler biographies, and I encountered a bunch of stuff in ‘Explaining Hitler‘ that I hadn’t seen before.  Some of the theories of Hitler get very granular, and I learned things I hadn’t known about his rise, his life, and the post-Holocaust scholarship about him.

But, mostly, to me, ‘Explaining Hitler‘ was a long series of compelling questions, premises and thought-experiments about what is, for my money, one of the most interesting relationships of the 20th century: our relationship with Hitler.  There is no use pretending that we don’t have one – he is our go-to example of Badness, on the tip of our tongues even now, omnipresent in Godwin’s Law and political punditry and meme culture.  Hitler is important to us, not simply because of the enormities that he orchestrated, but because he represents the farthest-out version of ourselves, the most extreme human potential in Category: Evil.  We need to see the worst that we might be, and I think that we need to understand that worst.