Review: Ferdinand von Schirach, The Collini Case

I read this short and big-print novel at a single sitting, so that’s a recommendation. Yet the style is set at a sort of degree zero of plainness, slipping occasionally into pedantry. The structure is that of a murder mystery – the killer is known but not his motive. There is an (obstructed) quest for truth  by a youthful hero; there is a Helper; a court-room trial of strength; and a hint of a happy and romantic ending. As I write that summary, I realise I am  describing it as a Fairy Story or Folk Tale. You could probably bring Vladimir Propp to its structural analysis.

But it’s subject matter could not be more serious. It is a Roman à Thèse which culminates by demonstrating a weakness in the (real world) criminal code of the Federal Republic of Germany, a weakness due specifically to a seemingly innocuous amendment, inserted administratively in 1968 by a former prominent Nazi lawyer (Dr Eduard Dreher). The effect was to pull the rug from under a large number of ongoing investigations into Nazi war criminals by extending the scope of a statute of limitations.

Von Schirach happens to be a lawyer in real life and uses the novel to dramatise these consequences.

From a note annexed to von Schirach’s book (page 189 ), his novel has been added into an ongoing official review of  the 1968 amendment and related matters. In another book I reviewed here recently, Beorn’s Marching into Darkness, there is a discussion of  the same topic (in Chapter Nine, Endgame).

I haven’t looked at the German original. English readers will probably miss the clue to the murder mystery provided by the first occurrence of the word “Ludwigsburg” (p 110) – home to the Federal German centre for investigating Nazi war crimes – but apart from that, this book is probably as accessible to the English reader as it is to the German. 

It is a separate topic, but it is interesting to look at this novel as an example of the thoroughness with which younger Germans (von Schirach was born in 1964) are willing to think about the Nazi past. It is a way of thinking I don't think one sees in Russia, thinking about Stalinism, or France, thinking about its own Nazism.

Review: John Cornwell, The Dark Box

I find it quite easy to believe in Freedom of Conscience and quite hard to go on believing in Freedom of Religion. The latter now serves primarily to exempt from ordinary forms of accountability powerful and worldly organisations most of which are of a more-or-less criminal nature. The Roman Catholic Church is the Big Daddy of the type.

The appeal of the Roman Catholic Church baffles me, though not in the case of worldly and more-or-less criminal individuals drawn to it by the incense of power.

John Cornwell is a born-again Catholic who, while lapsed, nonetheless allowed  his own children to be brought up in the faith and he has written a book which promises a challenge but ends up being intellectually and morally flabby, a damp squib.

Cornwell picks a good topic –the role of Confession in securing the hold of the Church over its individual members – and in relation to the Church’s cruelty over the past hundred years, he makes an interesting and sometimes passionate case against Pope Pius X.

A nasty piece of work by name of Giuseppe Sarto, Pius X arrived at the core ideas of modern totalitarianism while Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin were still schoolboys. 

Confession has a role at the base of the totalitarian scheme; the wider totalitarian ambition was only realised in the Catholic fiefdoms – Ireland, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain. 

Of these proto - North Koreas, Slovakia was closed down by the victorious allied powers. The others are still emerging from the trauma of clerical fascism – in Ireland’s case, with no encouragement from the old Imperial power: shamefully, the United Kingdom rolled out the red carpet for Pope Benedict XVI at a time when the former Joseph Ratzinger could not have set foot in Ireland.

Cornwell sticks to the narrower context and at the core of his book is the argument that Pius X’s demand that Confession start at six or seven instead of fourteen or fifteen ruined the lives of many children, not only from sexual abuse in the Confessional, but from the universe of psychological Terror surrounding it.

Intellectually, there is just too much bland anecdotal material, padding out the text. So we learn, for example that Pius X:

Chose as his secretary of state the suave Anglo-Spanish prelate Rafael Merry del Val, although the latter was not yet forty years old. A consummate diplomat, and highly intelligent, Merry del Val spoke a number of languages and had an enormous capacity for administrative work” (page 81)

Morally, Cornwell assembles the case against the Church and then, it seems to me, seeks to persuade us that it could all be dealt with by feel-good internal reforms. He cannot see that the Church has only ever been responsive to external changes and force, never to internal moral argument or pressure. (You get excommunicated or exiled for that – Pope Benedict made his career out of silencing the internal opposition).

The Church’s conversion to the cause of Democracy dates only from the moment when American tanks showed up in Rome. I don’t think there is any way it can be converted to decency. It's never been in that business. It just has to be closed down.

So why do Catholics like Cornwell stick with - and even return to - a Church which they know is vicious at its heart? For the same reasons that if we closed down North Korea there would still be those for whom the guilt of betrayal would be assuaged by longing for the Kim dynasty. For the same reasons that in Russia there are still those who long for the Romanovs or Stalin. Erich Fromm called it the Fear of Freedom. It’s the fear which prevents you seeing that the way out is through the door.

Review: Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or a Life of Montaigne

I read this book after giving up on Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, which I found intolerable. Heilbroner’s leading idea seems to be that you spin out a noisy yarn about your subject of the moment (I got no farther than Adam Smith – absent minded, he was, did I already tell you that? Well, he was absent minded. D’you know what he did one day? No? Well, I’ll tell you   …) and then, when the reader is open-mouthed with amazement, you shove a spoonful of disgusting Economic Theory down their throat. Not painful at all, you see, give it a Human Interest and, see, you’re away.

So Sarah Bakewell’s book was something of a welcome contrast. It is not technical or difficult and it provides a Life of Montaigne. At the same time it seeks to engage us with his writings in an organised and developed manner. I think it works very well. You get a strong sense of how writings celebrated for their digressiveness are held together by a fairly coherent body of thought.

I’ve never read Montaigne’s Essais, but I now know that I owe to Montaigne an idea I have liked and deployed on several occasions – but drawing on a version of Montaigne’s thought found in Malebranche. It’s the idea that paying attention – being able to pay attention, being in the habit of doing so, valuing the time it takes – expresses a natural piety of the soul. It’s a way of acknowledging the importance of the world and our own unimportance in face of it. It may be a phenomenon of nature or a work of art or simply another person – but if we can’t or don’t stop, look, listen - then we are not only letting down the object which invites our attention but ourselves. Maybe you could say: we don’t live our lives unless we pay attention to our situation at this or that moment in time.

I always think of very young children, capable of extraordinary absorption in tasks they have set themselves and at which they persist until disturbed, usually by some adult in a hurry.

Then I am reminded of something in my life which provided me pleasure but which now, in retrospect, makes me feel a bit proud. I once had a lover who after showering in the mornings, plumped herself down on the bed  to dry her hair. She had lots of hair and drying it was a serious business. I always sat and watched, at a distance and without speaking. I never tidied away the breakfast things, read the newspaper or otherwise distracted myself. It was such a pleasure just to sit and watch, her and all the intricate work involved in drying that hair. I was very happy.

I digress from Sarah Bakewell’s book. It runs to over 300 pages, has a fine Apparatus of Notes and References but isn’t written by an academic – the outside funding to assist the work’s completion came from literary Funds. You may take that as a recommendation.

Review: Caroline Walton and Ivan Petrov, Smashed in the USSR

This book is a testimony to the strength of the human body. Ivan Petrov lived to the age of 67 (1934 - 2001) despite a brutal upbringing in a polluted Soviet industrial town, the hunger and cruelty of Soviet labour camps, police beatings, the hazards of life as a tramp, and above all alcohol - not just vodka but home-made varieties: eau de cologne, paint stripper and furniture polish. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he ended up in London as an asylum seeker (though what he was seeking asylum from is not indicated) who, though continuing his career as an alcoholic, made contact with Caroline Walton and entrusted to her his tape-recorded life story. It is published a dozen years after his death, with no indication of the cause of the delay - except perhaps Caroline Walton's identification of herself as also an alcoholic.

It would be foolish to take Ivan Petrov as a reliable narrator and we do not know how much Caroline Walton has had to edit his words to make it the fascinating read that it has become. But the fascination is not in the "truth to self" of the book but in the details of the underbelly of Soviet life out in the Urals, Central Asia and the Caucasus. It's the details about domestic violence, vodka shops, casual labour, riding the trains, run-ins with the police, improvised alcohol, sleeping rough, Soviet rehab centres, and much more - including the fact that in the Soviet Union even tramps read books - that makes this book thoroughly worthwhile - and more informative than Oliver Bullough's Last Man in Russia reviewed previously on this Blog. 

Review: Shereen El Feki, Sex and the Citadel

This is a book of many surprises. Not the least the fact that someone exists to write it. Towards the end of the book, El Feki defines herself as a "liberal Muslim woman" (page 292). She has an Egyptian Muslim father, who she identifies as her "research associate" ( p 334), and a Welsh mother, a convert from Christianity to Islam. Shereen El Feki grew up in Canada.

She writes as an experienced journalist and and her approach in this book is that of a serious journalist - there is an impressive Bibliography. Her stance is firmly sex-positive: "sexual rights can be realized, and exercised, in an Islamic framework ....Religion is not black and white, as conservatives would have us believe; on sex, as with so many matters in life, Islam offers at least fifty shades of grey" (p 293).

That kind of cheeky humour runs through the book as she narrates her travels around the Arab world, but focussing on Egypt, engaging with people, talking with them about their sexual practices, satisfactions and frustrations and then setting the interviews into a broader historical and social context. No one seems unwilling to talk to her - women, men, Imams, doctors, lawyers, police officers, taxi drivers. And she writes about everything you could think to put on a list: heterosexual relations, same sex relations, prostitution, female genital mutilation (though she uses the word "cutting"), sex toys, porn, rape and harassment, HIV, marriage and its alternatives ...

I found one section particularly interesting, where she talks critically about "identity politics" (chapter 6). Some of her interviewees see "Identity Politics" as a Western ideology which has the potential to be divisive and to get in the way of creating a tolerant (liberal) environment in which everyone can get on with their own lives without harassment. It doesn't help, so the line of criticism goes, if groups seem to be arguing for special treatment or privileges or a kind of recognition which goes beyond that involved in giving mutual respect. I felt sympathetic to this position - but simply as someone who is irritated by the endless supply of English newspaper columnists who make their living banging the drum for their favourite group rather than for everyone who is oppressed. 

Interesting, intelligent, funny - a really good book!

Essay: Holocaust Education

Fifty years ago, around the time of my 17th birthday, I travelled to Sweden for a long summer holiday job in the Hotel Siljansborg, Rättvik. I travelled by train and on the way back through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium sat opposite two midddle-aged women, one dressed as a Nun. The woman who wasn't a Nun started a conversation with me, in English, explaining that her sister spoke only Polish. They were going - or had been - to collect an Award, a Medal conferred on the Nun. Even the Polish  communist government has to recognise that she is a brave woman, said her sister. She was in Auschwitz, she continued and - taking her sister's arm - rolled up her sleeve to show me a number tattooed on her forearm.

My Holocaust education did not  begin in school - we did Tudors and Stuarts [but see Footnote] -  though my private reading as a teenageer included a book of Yevtushenko's poems, published by Penguin, and including his Babi Yar. As a young child, even in primary school, I knew the word "Belsen". (Adults might say that a very thin and ill-looking person was "like someone out of Belsen")

Fast forward thirty years and in the mid 1990s I took my two daughters to Amsterdam and - I think at the instigation of my then partner - we visited the Anne Frank house. It was more interesting than I had imagined likely and quite moving. A couple of years previously I had visited Yad Vashem, about which I had mixed feelings: I disliked the American sponsorship-cum-memorial plaques which I felt out of place - tacky, if you like. I was moved by the black basalt columns which show the death toll of Jews for each European country.

Until now, I had never read Anne Franks' book. It runs to over 300 pages in the expanded 1990s edition but held my interest all the way through. Even though you open the book knowing how things end in August 1944 when the Frank family's hiding place was betrayed, it has a "What Happens Next?" page turning readability. It's well written, the candour is astonishing, and the topics discussed range widely over family relations, life in the Secret Annexe, teenage anguish, world politics, history and literature, Jewishness and religion - though very little, actually, of those last two. Anne Frank's religion is of the most simple and humane kind and commands immediate respect.

If you were a Minister of Education, it would be very tempting to say that this is a book which all teenagers should read. Not because it tells you much about the Holocaust (though there is some of that via radio broadcasts heard and word of mouth picked up) but because it shows you someone who could be your friend in school, socially advantaged though with pretty much the same preoccupations as anyone of your age - but to whose extermination a vast pan-European organisation was dedicated.

The Franks were arrested in August 1944 and in September shipped on the last transport to leave the Netherlands for Auschwitz. None of them were gassed. Anne's mother died in Auschwitz in January 1945 but Anne's father survived there until the camp was liberated by the Russians, after which he was repatriated to the Netherlands.

Anne and her sister Margot were shipped from Auschwitz back to Germany in October 1944, to Bergen-Belsen. Hannah Arendt's book categorises Belsen as a camp for "high value" Jews, who might be traded for goods or money, one step down from Theresienstadt - the show camp (and only camp) which was open to inspections by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But though at the end of 1944, Himmler called a halt to the Final Solution - reckoning that more could be made from using those Jews still alive as hostages - the break-down of the Reich as the war drew to a close meant that Belsen degenerated into a hell of starvation and disease. Both Anne and her sister Margot died of typhus, at the end of February or beginning of March 1945. British troops liberated the camp in April and in my childhood "Belsen" was shorthand in England for all that was inhuman about the Nazis. (I vaguely recall seeing the photographs). I don't think I even knew the names of the death camps in the East - Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka.

Hannah Arendt at one point in her forceful and wide-ranging book estimates that those Jews who went into hiding in Nazi Europe had a 50 - 50 chance of survival. Those who didn't had a less than ten percent chance.

Fifty years after its original publication, it reads well as a stimulus to thinking about many of the complex threads which have to be woven together in any programme of Holocaust education - motivation, levels and degrees of responsibility, appropriate punishment and reparation and much more.

The well-off and relatively well-connected family of Otto Frank nearly made it through the War. The deaths of Edith Frank and her daughters were no longer even policy when they happened, other than insofar as they were part of Hitler's last wish that everyone die together.  

Note: Proofing this Blog before posting it, I did have a flashback to seeing a Holocaust educational film (it must have been Resnais Night and Fog (1955)) but I don't know if this is something I saw as a sixth former at Bromley Grammar School for Boys or watched much later as a school teacher alongside a class of my pupils.

Review: Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life

Stephen Grosz begins this book by telling us that for twenty five years he has worked as a psychoanalyst, spending more than 50,000 hours with patients. I calculated:  that's 2000 hours a year which implies 40 hours a week, 50 weeks of the year. He's working too hard.

He has lots of stories to tell and each of the thirty plus short chapters is a well-crafted vignette of encounters with patients, mostly in private practice in London and making use of the traditional Freudian couch. The text is double spaced which means you turn pages quickly and finish in a few hours.

All the stories are readable and some - especially those which deal with serious illness and dying - are moving.

I think that broadly Freudian psychoanalytic theory is the best of the bunch, despite attempts by some of its adherents to make of it a cult (their own) rather than the theoretical basis of a regime of treatment. Many of the criticisms are misguided. In particular, critics fail to realise that all theories are undetermined by data - another theory will always fit the same data - which does not mean that theories are useless or that none are better than others. The weak point in Freudianism is not the theory but whether a curative therapeutic practice can be founded on it - on that, there is reason to doubt.

One of the most challenging stories in the book (pp 158 - 165) concerns a young boy (seen in a public health service context) who eventually puts it to the analyst that his brain doesn't work - not like other people's - and says that it's sad. And all the analyst can do is agree, "Yes, it is really, really sad" (page 165)

For me, the strong point in Freudianism has always been the theory of dreams and the possibility which arises from that of using them diagnostically and therapeutically. So illiterate have we become that some people think that Freud's dream theory is a theory of dream symbols when it starts out, quite explicitly,  to demolish the dream symbol approach and replace it with one which argues that meaning is created in a context - and that the key context for a dream is the events of the recent past (in the strictest theory, the previous day). So you do not look up a Symbol in a Dream Book which tells you what it Stands For - no, you lead your patient back to the recent past and link the Unicorn in the dream to some event,some conversation, some book recently read and work from that link.

As you read Grosz's vignettes, you see him constantly probing for a context not only for dreams but for all symptoms and odd behaviours. Only when you find their context do they begin to yield up their meaning. In particular, he looks for a context where something otherwise bizarre makes sense as a way of achieving satisfaction or avoiding a feared outcome or as indirect acknowledgment of something known but not acknowledged.