The Province of Chance

Andrew  Roberts: The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War

National Review, June 2, 2011 (June  20, 2011 issue) 

West Berlin, August 1977  © Andrew Stuttaford

The fall of Singapore is not news, the Rattenkrieg in Stalingrad’s ruins is not news, the grotesque theater of arrival at the Auschwitz railway siding is not news, but Andrew Roberts’s narrative gifts are such that it is almost impossible to read his retelling of these nightmares without some feeling of encountering the new. Almost: World War II is too familiar a saga for that. Still, Mr. Roberts, a distinguished British military historian, has produced a volume that serves as a comprehensive and clear (good maps too) introduction to this most sprawling of conflicts while adding fresh insights for those already well-versed in its twists, turns, and minutiae. Who knew that Hitler, ever the mystic, held the belief — ominous in the light of Russian winters to come — that “human barometers . . . gifted with a sixth sense” could predict the weather more accurately than mere meteorologists?

This is also, in the best meaning of the word, a balanced book, up to date (its author has made good use of recent research) without being faddish. That’s rarer than it should be. Clio is a restless, untrustworthy muse. History is malleable. Initial impressions count. That’s why Winston Churchill was so quick to write his account of the war: He wanted to set the mold. And he wasn’t the only leader to play this game. Their memoirs are valuable, but partial: Scores are settled, excuses are made, credit is claimed.

Later, when the professional historians moved in, they often seemed to do so in waves, all too frequently driven by fashion, opportunism, contrariness, and ideology. Magisterial in tone and spirit, The Storm of War rises above all that. No history book can ever truly be definitive, but this comes close.

There’s little that rewrites the past more than the release of once-hidden files. Roberts emphasizes the contribution made by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park; yet 40 years ago, their deeds were still classified. The opening of many archives in the former Soviet Union since 1991 ought to have eliminated any remaining traces of doubt about the nature of the Western democracies’ vile, essential, and dangerous ally: “The SS had been using gas vans to kill . . . since 1939: It was an idea borrowed from Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, during which people had been gassed in specially converted trucks.” “Uncle Joe”? Not so much.

Sometimes, the evidence was already available for all to see, even if not too many wished to look. The Holocaust was hardly a secret, yet it was decades before it assumed the central role it now does in our understanding of the European war. Roberts chronicles the darkness that descended in a chapter written with fewer rhetorical flourishes than its title — “The Everlasting Shame of Mankind” — might suggest. He lets the horrors speak for themselves: “Oswald ‘Papa’ Kaduk — his nickname came from his ‘love for children’ — gave Jewish children balloons just before they were squirted (abspritzen) in the heart with phenol injections at the rate of ten per minute.”

The conflict in Europe was, of course, about more than the Holocaust. The Allies did not go to war to rescue the Jews. Many Germans fought for reasons that owed little or nothing to Hitler’s anti-Semitic obsession. Nevertheless, Roberts doesn’t wall off the slaughter of the 6 million into one discrete chapter. As he rightly grasps, it infected everything. Roberts is an enthusiast and expert (as this book repeatedly demonstrates) of battle, campaign, tactics, and strategy, of tanks and planes and all the rest. That said, despite his appreciation of the fighting qualities of the German military — and the skills of its officer corps — he rejects the argument that the “decent” Wehrmacht was quite so different from the wicked SS as many have liked to maintain.

That myth may have helped build the peaceful postwar Bundesrepublik, but myth it was, and a highly successful one at that: An exhibition depicting some of the regular army’s fouler activities outraged a surprising number of Germans as late as the 1990s. But Roberts finds the Wehrmacht guilty as charged. He names the deeds, and he names the names: “After [the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at] Babi Yar, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau issued an order celebrating the ‘hard but just punishment for the Jewish sub-humans’ and [Field Marshal Gerd von] Rundstedt signed a directive to senior officers along much the same lines.”

More damning yet, if the experience of the “middle-aged, respectable working- and middle-class citizens of Hamburg” who made up Reserve Police Battalion 101 (the subjects of Christopher Browning’s devastating 1992 book Ordinary Men, and a force responsible for the killing or deportation of 83,000 people in German-occupied eastern Europe) is anything to go by, there would have been little risk of serious punishment for those who opted out of mass murder. It would have been a bad career decision, that’s all, but one that too few were willing to take. We can only wonder why. Ingrained prejudice? The effects of Nazi propaganda? Wartime brutalization?  Military discipline? Peer pressure (not all bands of brothers are benign)? Others simply enjoyed killing. Some were indifferent. Human nature is what it is. Our species had much to be ashamed about before Auschwitz. It has had even more to be ashamed about since.

And the disgrace was not confined to the Reich. Roberts devotes a good portion of his book to the war in the Far East and Pacific (with the Nationalist Chinese justly receiving more praise than usual, and Mao’s Communists, quite correctly, less), but, again, never lets his admiration for the martial get in the way of his grip on the moral. He describes Japanese cruelty in the Philippines in revolting detail, but, in a commendable display of respect, holds back on the even worse (“there were many other scenes . . . not denied by the perpetrators that are simply too disgusting to recount here”). The victims have already been degraded enough. In this war, however, there was plenty of savagery to go around: Roberts does not skate over the darker side of the Allies’ long march to victory. That he never falls into the platitudes of moral equivalence speaks volumes.

All this is typical of a book that is, at its core, deeply humane — and is so at several different levels. Roberts clearly relishes history’s wide sweep, which he relates in grand style; yet, no determinist, he is particularly fascinated by the missteps of those who shaped the war’s course. If you want to read a fascinating discussion of the sometimes idiotic decisions that led to the Axis defeat, The Storm of War is for you. Roberts is an author who never loses sight of the human side of this epic: His sketches of the extraordinary collection of bickering warlords who constituted the Anglo-American command, and of quite a few other senior officers besides (the Chindits’ inspirational, onion-munching Maj.-Gen. Orde Wingate — failed suicide, nudist, devout Christian, and ardent Zionist — for one), are worth the price of admission in themselves. But he doesn’t forget those in humbler roles, the millions of innocent dead, the millions left bereft, and, perhaps above all, the millions of soldiers whose feet filled those muddy, dusty, broken, bloody boots on the ground.

“Armchair strategists,” wrote George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the wonderful Flashman books and author of a fine memoir of the war in Burma, “can look at the last stages of a campaign and say there’s nothing left but mopping up, but if you’re holding the mop it’s different.”

Naturally, Mr. Roberts includes that quote.

A World Behind Barbed Wire

Anne Applebaum (ed) : Gulag Voices

Tamara  Petkevich: Memoir of a  Gulag Actress

Cathy Frierson & Semyon Vilensky: Children of the Gulag

Stephen Cohen: The Victims  Return - Survivors  of the Gulag after Stalin

Fyodor Mochulsky: Gulag Boss

Alexander  Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago

Kolyma Tales: Varlam Shalamov

Journey into the Whirlwind: Eugenia Ginzburg

My Testimony: Anatoly Marchenko

Faithful Ruslan: Georgi Vladimov

The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2011

Lubianka, Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

The most remarkable thing about "The Way Back," the 2010 film by Peter Weir, was neither its protagonists (escapees from the Soviet gulag system who trekked thousands of miles to their freedom) nor the curious tale of the almost certainly fictional 1956 "memoir" that inspired it (Slawomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk"). No, what distinguished "The Way Back" was its depiction of life in Stalin's camps. There have been a handful of films on this topic, but, as observed Anne Applebaum, author of a fine 2004 history of the gulag, this was the first time it had been given the full Hollywood treatment. Hitler's concentration camps are a Tinseltown staple, but Stalin's merit barely a mention.

Publishers have been more even-handed. There are many books on Soviet terror, and some have won huge readerships. Yet, as Hollywood's cynics understand, the swastika will almost always outsell the red star. That's due partly to the perverse aesthetics of the Third Reich but also to a disconcerting ambivalence—even now—about what was going on a little further to the east. The slaughter of millions by Moscow's communist regime remains shrouded in benevolent shadow. The Soviet experiment is given a benefit of a doubt that owes nothing to history and far too much to a lingering sympathy for a supposedly noble dream supposedly gone astray.

A flurry of recent books on Soviet oppression—surely encouraged by the interest generated by Ms. Applebaum's "Gulag"—is thus to be welcomed. One of the best is edited by Ms. Applebaum herself.

"Gulag Voices" (Yale, 195 pages, $25) is a deftly chosen anthology of writings by victims of Soviet rule. Some are published for the first time in English, most are by writers little known in the West and each is given a succinct, informative introduction. Above all, they help illustrate the duration, variety and range of Soviet despotism.

The Third Reich lasted for scarcely more than a decade. Most of those who died at its hands were slaughtered within the space of five years or so. The Soviet killing spree dragged on, however, from the revolutionary frenzy of 1917, through the terrible bloodbaths of the Stalin era, to the last violent spasms in 1991. The ultimate death toll may have been higher than that orchestrated by Hitler, but absolute annihilations like those envisaged by the Nazis were never on the agenda. Instead the nature of Soviet repression shifted back and forth over the years: sometimes more lethal, sometimes less, sometimes carefully targeted, sometimes arbitrary. The gulag itself was, as Ms. Applebaum notes, "an extraordinarily varied place." As the title of Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" reminds us, Stalin's hell, like Dante's, was layered. And how it endured: The most recent account in "Gulag Voices" is an excerpt from Anatoly Marchenko's "My Testimony," a memoir from 1969 that highlighted the way that Stalinist cruelty had successfully survived the dead, officially disgraced, dictator.

"Gulag Voices" begins in 1928. Dmitry Likhachev, an old-style St. Petersburg intellectual, was arrested when his literary discussion group was deemed to be a hotbed of counterrevolutionary plotting. He served four years in the Solovetsky Islands, the beautiful northern archipelago that from 1923 hosted the first organized camps, the tumor that metastasized into the hideous "archipelago" of Solzhenitsyn's great metaphor.

Mr. Likhachev's contribution is followed by a sampling of what could be found within that wider archipelago. Misery, gang rape and murder co-exist with Potemkin parodies of "normal life"—an excerpt from Gustav Herling's "A World Apart" (1951) describes the arrangements for conjugal visits. Occasionally, the prisoners might even carry on approximations of a career within the camp as an engineer, doctor or, as Tamara Petkevich recounts in "Memoir of a Gulag Actress" (Northern Illinois, 481 pages, $35), a performer for audiences of fellow convicts.

Such recollections come, as Ms. Applebaum acknowledges, with their own bias. With the exception of Mr. Marchenko, who died in the course of a later sentence, the authors all survived. Millions were not so fortunate. And some of those lives had hardly begun. In the devastating "Children of the Gulag" (Yale, 450 pages, $35), Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky chronicle the awful fate of those literally countless children whose parents had fallen foul of the rage of the Soviet state. Here, a gulag convict nurse recalls handing over a batch of prisoners' children for transfer to a "special home": "The worst happened: We'd given, according to the receipt, eleven healthy beautiful children, and not one of them was ever returned. Not a single one!" This was a story repeated again and again and again. And as for those who did survive, many were forced to accept a suspect, fragile existence in which, for decades, the knock on the door was never so far away.

That tension would have been familiar to many prisoners eventually freed from the gulag. "Gulag Voices" includes one account by the pseudonymous K. Petrus, describing his 1939 release into what Ms. Applebaum describes as "the strange ambiguity" of a life that was closer to limbo. The big cities were denied to most former inmates. Their families were broken. Many chose to remain near the camps that had once held them.

The fate of those who emerged is also a central concern of Stephen F. Cohen's "The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin" (Publishing Works, 224 pages, $22.95), a perceptive study of Khrushchev-era attempts to secure justice for Stalin's victims, the backsliding that followed and, finally, in the Glasnost years, the mass, too often posthumous "rehabilitations" of former prisoners—rehabilitations unaccompanied, however, by any realistic prospect that their tormentors would be brought to justice. Mr. Cohen was a frequent visitor to Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s and came to know some of those who had survived. His account is powerful and, often, very moving, marred only by traces of a belief in the impossible dream of a kinder, gentler Soviet Union, the will-o'-the-wisp that beguiled and destroyed Mikhail Gorbachev.

A very different (and highly unusual) perspective can be found in "Gulag Boss" (Oxford, 229 pages, $29.95) by Fyodor Mochulsky, the reminiscences of an engineer recruited by the NKVD (the Stalin-era secret police) to supervise forced labor in a Siberian camp. It was written during and after the U.S.S.R.'s implosion and ends with Mochulsky appearing to reject the methods, although not necessarily the ideology, of the system he served for so long. But he does so in the strained, awkward prose of a man unwilling to face up to what he had done. Mr. Mochulsky talks of disease, lack of food and other hardships, but the scale of the death toll that he must have witnessed is, at best, only there by implication. His overall tone is one of pained technocratic disappointment that the camp was so poorly run: He was a Speer, so to speak, not a Himmler. Yet Albert Speer served 20 years in jail. Mr. Mochulsky went on to enjoy a successful diplomatic and intelligence career and, in retirement, the luxury of modest regret.

And in those twilight years, he is unlikely to have been troubled by fears of prosecution. There has been no Bolshevik Nuremberg. Total defeat left Nazi horror open for all to see, but many Soviet archives remain closed, their tales of atrocity unpublished. The new books on the gulag cannot begin to redress the crimes they describe, but they can at least help history locate the facts with which it can pass the judgment that the victims and their jailers deserve.

Tales of the Gulag

The Gulag Archipelago By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

That "The Gulag Archipelago" had to be written says the worst about humanity. That it was written says the best. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) created an unanswerable indictment of the totalitarian regime under which he was still living and, no less critically, established that it had been poison from the start. As carefully researched as the difficult circumstances of its production would allow, "The Gulag Archipelago" is no dry roster of the dead but a work of passion and fury, underpinned by bleak humor and the hope (vain, it seems) that someday justice would be done.

Kolyma Tales By Varlam Shalamov

Far less well-known than they should be, these short stories by Varlam Shalamov (1907-82) are terse, lightly fictionalized, partly autobiographical glimpses into the gulag's abyss. "Kolyma Tales" derives its name from the region in Russia's far northeast that played host to a vast forced labor complex, in which hundreds of thousands (at least) perished. Written in a style of ironic, hard-edged detachment and so spare and so crystalline that they sometimes tip over into poetry, the tales rest at the summit of Russian literary achievement.

Journey into the Whirlwind By Eugenia Ginzburg

Rightly or wrongly, the Great Terror of 1937, an immense wave of violence that took down many who had either supported or benefited from the rise of the Soviet state, has come to be seen as the epitome of Stalinist despotism. Eugenia Ginzburg (1904-77) was among those expelled from a heaven under construction to a fully finished hell. "Journey Into the Whirlwind" remains a profoundly humane, wonderfully written first-hand account of arrest, imprisonment and exile into the gulag.

My Testimony By Anatoly Marchenko

Eugenia Ginzburg was a member of the Soviet elite; Anatoly Marchenko (1938-86) was the opposite, the son of illiterate railway workers. "My Testimony," his description of life in the 1960s gulag, is matter-of-fact, something that only makes its horrors seem worse. Marchenko's gulag experience transformed him from everyman into dissident. The last of his many re-arrests was in 1980. Still imprisoned, he died from the effects of a hunger strike in 1986. Perestroika had just begun: too late, far too late.

Faithful Ruslan By Georgi Vladimov

Moments of extraordinary beauty mark this haunting fable by Georgi Vladimov (1931-2003), told through the eyes of Ruslan, the most loyal of guard dogs. Abandoned by Master after their camp is closed down following Stalin's death, Ruslan patiently patrols the neighboring town waiting for the old order to return. It does, but only as a hallucination as Ruslan drifts into death after one final bloodletting. When Vladimov offered this novella for publication, though, it was rejected. Khrushchev had fallen and new masters were in charge. For real.

Naming the Crime

Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands - Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

National Review Online, March 18, 2011

Winter is bleak enough as it is. This year the gloom was deepened by the publication of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, by Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain’s most feted historians, and, oh yes, a man who stuck with the Communist party until 1991 despite a global killing spree that took perhaps one hundred million lives. Naturally Hobsbawm’s new book has triggered the usual hosannas from the usual congregation for, to quote the Guardian, this “grand old man.”

There had, of course, been that minor unpleasantness back in the 1990s when Hobsbawm had appeared to imply that the deaths of 15 or 20 million people might have been justified had the Communist utopia actually been achieved. This ancient ogre (he is 93) is now more discreet. Reviewing How to Change the World in the Financial Times, Francis Wheen, no rightist and the author of an erudite and entertaining biography of Karl Marx, noted how Hobsbawm could not “bring himself to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact, referring only to ‘temporary episodes such as 1939–41.’ The Soviet invasion of Hungary and the crushing of the Prague Spring were [also] skipped over.”

But who are we to quibble, when, as his admirers like to remind us, Hobsbawm’s life has been “shaped by the struggle against fascism,” an excuse understandable in the 1930s (Hobsbawm, who is Jewish, quit Germany as a teenager in 1933), but grotesque more than six decades after the fall of the Third Reich.

Just how grotesque was highlighted by two books that came out last year. In the first, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder describes the darkness that engulfed a stretch of Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century. He leaves only one convincing response to the question that dominates the second, Stalin’s Genocides, by Stanford’s Norman Naimark: For all the unique evils of the Holocaust, was Stalin, no less than Hitler, guilty of genocide?

The first half of Professor Snyder’s grim saga revolves around the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, a manufactured catastrophe in which zeal, malice and indifference conspired to create a horror in which, Snyder calculates, well over three million perished (there are other, much higher, estimates). It was, Snyder writes, “not food shortages but food distribution that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, and it was Stalin who decided who was entitled to what.”

The Ukrainian countryside had already been devastated by collectivization and the killing, imprisonment, or exile of millions of its most enterprising inhabitants. Now it was to be stripped of what little it had left. The peasants were given targets for the amount of grain and other foodstuffs they were expected to hand over to the state, targets that would leave them with barely anything to live on, and often not even that. Refusal was not an option. Starvation was not an excuse. Nothing was left behind. Nobody was allowed to leave. The peasants were trapped. And they were condemned. In the spring of 1933 they died at the rate of more than ten thousand a day. “The only meat was human.”

That fall the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.

Communism has brought mass starvation in its wake on a number of occasions (2010 also saw the appearance of Mao’s Great Famine,by Frank Dikötter, a harrowing account of the death of millions during the Chairman’s Great Leap Forward), but what distinguishes the Ukrainian Holodomor (a coinage that means murder by hunger) is that, as Snyder demonstrates, this particular famine was not just incidental to the business of fashioning utopia. It was deliberate, a weapon designed to break a class enemy, Ukraine’s embattled peasantry, and the battered nation of which it was the backbone.

It is this national element that some historians would like to deny. It unsettles the conventional narrative under which the ethnically based mass murders of mid-20th-century Europe are associated almost exclusively with Nazis, and, in so doing, it raises some awkward questions about those in the democratic world who looked so longingly to Moscow in the 1930s. The details of the Holodomor might have been obscure or obscured, but there was a fairly widespread awareness in the West that something had occurred. How else to explain all that talk of omelet and eggs? Those who claimed to have turned to Communism only because of the growing Nazi threat must have believed that those millions of dead Ukrainians counted for very little.

And it wasn’t just Ukrainians. As the Thirties curdled on, the list of peoples brutalized by Stalin grew ever longer. The “national operations” that were a murderous subset of the Great Terror of 1937–38 accounted for some 250,000 deaths, including those of at least 85,000 Soviet Poles. The hideous ethnic persecution developing in the Third Reich throughout the 1930s may have been more overt than its Soviet counterpart, but it was in the USSR that the cattle trucks were already rolling. At that stage Hitler’s haul of victims lagged far behind.

That was to change. The second part of Snyder’s book details how the Nazis brought their own flavor of hell to the territories he dubs the Bloodlands. With his feel for neglected history, Snyder restores focus to the terrible fate of the Soviet POWs who had fallen into German hands: “The Germans shot, on a conservative estimate, half a million Soviet prisoners of war. By way of starvation or mistreatment during transit, they killed about 2.6 million more.”

He correctly sees this not just as a matter of callousness and cruelty but as an adjunct to Hitler’s wider plans for a region that was to be emptied of most of its original inhabitants and re-peopled by the master race.

And then, of course, there were the Jews. In page after grueling page, Snyder depicts the pogrom that erupted across the Bloodlands. After all these years, after all the histories, there are still details that appall: “By spring 1943, fires burned at Treblinka day and night. . . . Women, with more fatty tissue, burned better than men; so the laborers learned to put them on the bottom of the pile.”

In an interesting twist, Snyder reveals how the usual Western understanding of the Holocaust, centered on the almost clinical danse macabre of deportation and eventual extermination in a camp far from Paris, Amsterdam, or Rome, fails to reflect the more typical experience to the east. The frenzied killings that swept the Bloodlands in the wake of the German invasion — within six months one million Soviet Jews had been butchered — are the clearest possible evidence of a primeval savagery unleashed.

To suggest, as some have, that, by twinning his chronicle of Nazi atrocity with a history of the Soviet slaughters of the previous decade, Snyder has in some way diminished the Holocaust is absurd. The Holocaust was underpinned by a dream of annihilation that was all its own, but it was also a product of its era. Like Communism, Nazism was a creed with a strong religious resonance (it’s no coincidence that this was a time when more conventional religions were losing their traditional hold over the human imagination), yet it aimed at creating a utopia for its elect here on earth, a dangerous enough delusion under the best of circumstances, let alone those developing in the early 20th century. For these utopias were, quite explicitly, to be built by bloodshed and sustained by force, a prospect made all the more menacing by technological advance, the growth of the modern state, and, critically, the shattering of so much of European civilization by the First World War. That conflict opened the door to the Bolshevik Revolution, which in turn helped pave the way for the Third Reich, a state that was both reaction against and imitation of the Soviet Union.

The Führer who, contemplating the Holocaust, once asked “who now remembers” the Armenian genocide. would certainly have noticed how quickly the Holodomor was allowed to vanish down the memory hole.

In some ways it is still there. That the Stalinist regime was guilty of what any reasonable person would describe as genocide has been beyond dispute for decades. Yet somehow there has been a hesitation about branding the Soviet state with the worst of the marks of Cain, a hesitation that still resonates — in politics, in diplomacy, and in high culture and low. Would there have been quite such an uproar if fashion designer John Galliano had said that he “loved” Stalin rather than Hitler?

In Stalin’s Genocides, Professor Naimark recounts how the definition of genocide was diluted before being enshrined in the 1948 United Nations convention. At the insistence of the Soviets — and others — the destruction of specific social and political groups was excluded. It was a distinction rooted neither in logic nor in morality, but it worked its sinister magic. Sparing Stalin, and by extension the state that he spawned, from the taint of genocide allowed the USSR to maintain some sort of hold over the radiant future that — against all the evidence — it still claimed to be building, that radiant future that has proved such a handy alibi for all the Hobsbawms and, even, for their successors today. It helped ensure that Mao’s famine too was largely passed over in silence. It still enables Russia to avoid the hard truths of its own history, an evasion that poisons its politics both at home and abroad. Sadly, it’s no surprise that the new pro-Moscow government in Ukraine has been playing down the genocidal nature of the Holodomor.

Since the Balkan wars, the jurisprudence of genocide has, as Professor Naimark shows, evolved to the point at which there could be no serious legal doubt that the architects of Soviet mass murder would, if hauled before a court today, receive the judgment they deserve. Prosecutions for the Soviet genocides have, however, been pitifully few and confined to the liberated Baltic states. Thus, in May 2008, one Arnold Meri was tried for his role in the deportation of 251 Estonians almost sixty years before. He died before a verdict could be reached. Not long later Dmitri Medvedev awarded Meri a posthumous medal for his wartime service.

And if you want just one reason why these books by Professors Snyder and Naimark are so important, that’s not a bad place to start. Hobsbawm you can junk.

Big Bruder Watching

Gary Bruce: The Firm - The Inside  story of the Stasi

The Weekly Standard, January 24, 2011

The Wall, Berlin, August 1978 © Andrew  Stuttaford

Stalin’s observation that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic helps explain why some of the finest portraits of 20th-century totalitarianism have been miniatures. Ivan Denisovich’s “day without a dark cloud” and the hunt for the Jewish schoolboys in Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants illuminate horrors that stretch far beyond one outpost of the Gulag or a stagnant Vichy town. The decision by the Canadian historian Gary Bruce to focus his new history of the East German secret police, the Stasi (Staatssicherheit), on Perleberg and Gransee, two out-of-the-way districts in communism’s distaff Germany, might have promised something of the same. But that’s not what his book delivers.

Instead, Bruce takes advantage of the fact that an unusually high proportion of the Stasi archives were left untouched in the backwaters that are his setting to produce a meticulous, grassroots examination of (to quote Timothy Garton Ash) “the quieter corruption of [East Germany’s] mature totalitarianism.” Supplemented by a series of interviews both with former secret policemen and those they watched over, The Firm is well done, even if Bruce’s approach has meant that the grand guignol of the Stasi’s formative years is passed over too lightly for his book to be viewed as a truly comprehensive analysis of that organization’s malignant DNA. The worst aspects of the later, more discreetly brutal, decades also escape the scrutiny they deserve. There’s little on the fates of those “the firm” (the Stasi’s smug nickname for itself) considered its most serious opponents. Their cases would have been handled by (and usually in) East Berlin.

This matters. East Germany’s past remains poorly known outside its former borders and, judging by the perverse phenomenon of Ostalgie, even within them. In making Au Revoir les Enfants, Malle could rely on his audience’s familiarity with the film’s backstory of war, occupation, and Holocaust. Bruce is in no position to make similar assumptions. Nonspecialists would thus do better to turn elsewhere, perhaps to Anne McElvoy’s The Saddled Cow (1992), a perceptive overview of East German history written by a journalist who witnessed its final years, or for a somewhat later examination of still raw memories, Anna Funder’s haunting Stasiland (2003):

Frau Paul started opening doors. First a compartment so small a person could only stand. It was designed to be filled with icy water up to the neck. There were sixty-eight of these, she told me. Then there were concrete cells with nothing in them where prisoners would be kept in the dark amid their own excrement. There was a cell lined entirely with padded rubber. Frau Paul was held nearby.

You won’t find much of that in The Firm. Also missing are the Stasi’s international activities, from espionage to the support of terrorism, dirty work that took place far from the dull towns in which Bruce’s narrative unfolds. Equally, there are few traces of the dangerous dance between regime and intelligentsia that forms the subtext of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning The Lives of Others (2006). The prominent playwright who is that movie’s principal protagonist bears scant resemblance to Bruce’s bullied provincials.

Where The Firm comes into its own, however, is as a demonstration of the remarkable reach of East Germany’s surveillance state. The Stasi employed 91,000 full-time officers at the time the regime fell. In the prewar Reich, a country with a population well over three times as large, the Gestapo made do with 7,000. To be sure, the Nazis enjoyed greater popular support than their Communist successors, but statistics from other Warsaw Pact countries suggest that this cannot be the sole explanation for the difference. As Bruce notes, “The secret services of .  .  . Czechoslovakia (1:867) or Poland (1:1,574) did not even come close to the ratio in East Germany of one full-time secret police officer for every 180 East German citizens.”

We are left to guess why. Fear of the vanquished fascist enemy? Maybe. Stereotypically Teutonic thoroughness? Probably. The dangerous, reproachful proximity of the free, increasingly prosperous, Germany next door? Almost certainly.

The snooping didn’t stop with the 91,000. In 1989, the Stasi had 173,000 informants on its books. They were given the generic, now reviled, name of unofficial coworker (I—Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter) but were then subclassified according to a distinctively totalitarian taxonomy. This included Secret Lead Informants (GHI), and below them, trusty Full-time Unofficial Coworkers (HIM), and below them, lowly Societal Coworkers for Security (GMS), and then, forming part of the base of this unlovely pyramid, Sporadic Contact Persons (KP) and Collaborative Operational Partners (POZW). In 1988, there was one informant for roughly every 76 preretirement adults in sleepy Perleberg District, a total that Bruce contrasts with one snitch for every 16,800 people in the Ukrainian regional hub of Kharkov at the depths of Stalinist terror.

The Gestapo, of course, benefited from the willingness (for varied reasons) of so many Germans to volunteer information on their neighbors to authorities for whom they had some sympathy. As “the sword and shield” (naturally the iconography was borrowed from the Soviet secret police) of a regime profoundly disliked for most of its existence, the Stasi had to be more proactive. Bruce shows how it recruited (predictably, a mixture of carrot and stick) and why. One Kurt Wollschläger was chosen because of the need to ferret out grumblers at the local river port. That Wollschläger was separated from his wife was, the Stasi (prudish when it came to behavior within its own ranks) reckoned, a plus: He had more time to hang around in bars. That he was a former Nazi was no problem.

Informants would report regularly to their handlers, a snippet here, an observation there, sometimes harmless, sometimes not, and sometimes, perhaps most characteristically, as a piece in a complex composite portrait being assembled of an individual that the regime was beginning to distrust. If it looked as if those suspicions might have been justifie—he bar was low: no laws needed to have been broke—he screws would tighten, relentlessly, remorselessly, but not necessarily attributably. There was not always a warning chat. A job would be suddenly lost; new employment would be hard to find. A child would not win that university place. Ugly gossip might be circulated. The phone would ring at night, with only silence at the other en— perfect expression of this shadowy, subtle, and devastating form of repression.

There was a word for this: Zersetzen (“to undermine” or “to break down”). For outright dissidents, for those “preparing to flee the Republic” or those whose mutters of discontent had tipped over into something more insistent, there was prison (and, on occasion, the bullet). The more fortunate won exile, or had exile forced upon them. For the law-abiding who never crossed such lines, there was always the reality or the risk of Zersetzen, a vital element in a system of understated control that Bruce describes as hovering “ominously in the distance, always threatening, always unsettling, a constant potential threat.” And it worked. The German Democratic Republic was, almost until the end, one of Moscow’s better-behaved satellites.

Coerced good behavior should not be confused with enthusiasm. An appropriately skeptical Bruce reports on reprehensible efforts by some historians to strip that ill-mannered adjective “totalitarian” from the regime that collapsed with the Wall: “Welfare dictatorship .  .  . post-totalitarian bureaucratic dictatorship .  .  . thoroughly ruled society .  .  . forced through society” and, thanks to its colossal number of informants, “participatory dictatorship” are amongst the euphemisms that have slithered into view. We can only speculate at what motivates such nonsense: Is it the persistent academic desire to minimize the crimes of the left, or is it an unwillingness to come to terms with the full implications of past horrors?

Such poisons have a way of seeping out from university campuses, but in the case of the former East Germany, their potency is reinforced by the natural tendency of its onetime citizens to allow past moments of personal happiness to cast a favorable glow over the republic in which they once endured: “Oh, it wasn’t all bad, you know.” Bruce handles this difficult topic with considerable subtlety before concluding that one can no more put a boundary between everyday life in the fallen republic and the ever-present awareness of the Stasi’s presence than “one can encircle a scent in a room.”

The Stasi’s stink not only lingers where it once did (and sometimes very strongly) but has also been allowed to waft into the former West Germany. The Left party, a grouping formed by the merger of western leftists with the “reformed” heirs to East Germany’s old governing party, took some 12 percent of the vote in the united Germany’s 2009 elections. Reformed? Well, when Joachim Gauck, a former dissident and for 10 years the first federal commissioner for the Stasi archives, addressed the parliament in Saxony, a territory that was once part of East Germany, the event was boycotted by all Left party parliamentarians.

A Flock of Black Swans

adam Fergusson: When Money Dies

The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2010

It says something about present anxieties that a 35-year-old account of Weimar hyperinflation has come into vogue. In early 2010, Adam Fergusson's long-out-of-print volume was trading online for four-figure sums. There were (false) reports of kind words about it from Warren Buffett. Now back in print, this once obscure book from 1975 has been selling briskly. Just another manifestation of the financial millenarianism now sweeping the land? Perhaps, but "When Money Dies" remains a fascinating and disturbing book.

The death of the German mark (it took 20 of them to buy a British pound in 1914 but 310 billion in late 1923) plays a key part in the dark iconography of the 20th century: Images of kindling currency and economic chaos are an essential element in our understanding of the rise of Hitler. Mr. Fergusson adds valuable nuance to a familiar story. His tale begins not, as would be popularly assumed, in the aftermath of Germany's political and military collapse in 1918 (by which point the mark had halved against the pound) but in the original decision to fund the war effort largely through debt—a decision with uncomfortable contemporary parallels (one of many in this book) tailor-made for today's end-timers.

Yet the parallels go only so far. The almost inevitably inflationary consequences of paying for a world war on credit were exacerbated by: Germany's relatively shallow capital markets, the creation of "loan banks" funded solely by a printing press that was also at the disposal of the central bank; and the muffling of warning signals in a way unimaginable in our information age. The rise in prices was obvious to all. That it was due to more than wartime shortages was not. The country's stock markets were closed for the duration of the fighting. Foreign-exchange rates were not published.

And then there were the black swans. Early 20th-century Germany was savaged by a flock, including defeat in what was then the world's most destructive war, revolution, civil unrest, territorial loss, the imposition of punitive reparations, a fresh occupation of its industrial heartland and, as if these woes were not enough, a Reichsbank presided over by Rudolf Havenstein. Even in the era of Zimbabwe's Gideon Gono, Havenstein must be considered a strong contender for the title of worst central banker of all time. There seemed to be no limit to the amount of currency he was willing to print. Yes, America has its problems today, but by comparison . . .

"When Money Dies" was written in the early 1970s for a British audience. Inflation was accelerating fast, and London's political class was at a loss about what to do. Mr. Fergusson's book (which began as a series of newspaper articles) reflected the growing national alarm over inflation and hinted that price stability would not be won back without more focus on the quantity of money in circulation. With monetarist ideas just beginning to enter mainstream British political discourse, the Havenstein of "When Money Dies"—a printing-press banker supposedly unaware of the connection between soaring inflation and roaring money supply—made a useful villain.

Yet in all probability his behavior owed as much to desperation as ignorance. Mass unemployment seemed more of a threat to Weimar's dangerously fragile social order than rising prices. Devaluation was the other side of Germany's debased coin. It kept the country's exports competitive and its factories (given an extra boost by generous subsidy regimes) humming.

But in the end the music stopped. Without a reliable pricing mechanism, much of the German economy eventually ceased to function, even at the most basic level. Rent was payable in butter, a ticket to the movies with a lump of coal. Farmers stopped sending food to the cities. Under such circumstances the harsh medicine of monetary reform (the return to a fixed parity against gold and the dollar, the imposition of strict budgetary discipline) found the political support it needed despite the pain it was bound to bring to German industry and its work force.

And so, in November 1923, a new quasi-currency, the Rentenmark, was launched. Its asset backing was little more than a conjuring trick, but with the population desperate to believe (and with the Reichsbank no longer financing the government) the magic worked. Despite the rickety nature of the recovery that eventually ensued, Germany might have arrived at a lasting turning point had not black swans—the Great Crash and a global depression—returned to bedevil its future once again.

Readers of Mr. Fergusson's melancholy chronicle can comfort themselves with the thought: That was then, and this is now. "When Money Dies" cannot be used to prove that the combination of rising deficits and the modern money manufacture euphemized as "Quantitative Easing" can only end up in near-apocalyptic disaster. (In a note to this new edition, Mr. Fergusson, who subsequently became a Conservative member of the European Parliament in the early Thatcher years, stresses that no "advanced economy is threatened with inflation approaching such severity as in post-Imperial Germany.") Nevertheless, to borrow his adjective, the book is a "sobering" warning of what could go wrong.

His examination of both the seductions of inflation and its devastatingly corrosive effect is merciless and horrifying. Most haunting are the depictions of those broken on inflation's wheel, the workers without a union to protect them, the retired trying to live on pensions that had lost all meaning, the once-proud bourgeois after the annihilation of their savings. A nation can recover from hyperinflation, but for these people time had run out. Everybody ought to read this book. But baby boomers must.

Tinker, Tailor, Pilot, Spy

Giles Whittell: Bridge Of Spies - A True Story Of The Cold War

The Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2010

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, August 1977 © Andrew Stuttaford

You can pick and choose from any number of disasters, but it is clear that long years immersed in the heavy-metal simplicities of the later Cold War left U.S. intelligence agencies ill-prepared for the complexities of the global struggle with Islamism—a contest in which ideology, ethnicity and national interest collide and an overwhelming technological advantage is not, by itself, enough to deliver victory. The porous borders and shifting contours of this slippery new world require something subtler, something new. Yet they would have seemed strangely familiar to Otto Katz (1895-1952), a Soviet agent of the interwar era and now the subject of an engrossing, endearingly gossipy biography.

Born into German-speaking Jewish prosperity in Habsburg Bohemia, Katz was a member of a doubly despised minority, stranded in the ancestral lands of yet another people with no country to call their own and under the sway of an enfeebled ancient authority that was alien to both. It's no great surprise that the young Katz was drawn to the certainties and promises of socialism, an attraction only deepened by the time he spent as a reluctant soldier on the battlefields of World War I.

Brief forays into business after demobilization failed to reconnect Katz to his bourgeois heritage. Family money did, however, help fund his involvement in the artistic scene (first in Prague, then Berlin), which was creatively stimulating, deliciously hedonistic (Marlene Dietrich!) and saturated with a radicalism that was much more than chic. Katz was energetic, charming, a committed leftist and a better journalist than the playwright he also had pretensions to be. It was probably inevitable that he would fall in with Willi Münzenberg, an old acquaintance of Lenin's based in Berlin and running a pro-Soviet propaganda network. Despite criticism by some comrades of Katz's questionable class background, Münzenberg sent him to Moscow in 1931 for further work within the propaganda apparat and, more important, for training as an "illegal."

When Katz finally rejoined his mentor a couple of years later, it was as one of the pur et dur—ready to do whatever it took to bring capitalism down—a transformation that his biographer, Jonathan Miles, never quite manages to explain. Intelligent and with a well-honed taste for life's pleasures, Katz witnessed the poverty and paranoia of the Soviet experiment at first-hand ("a hard, but promising reality" was his carefully euphemistic description) yet apparently emerged not deterred, but reinforced, in his faith.

Mr. Miles talks of Katz's belief in "the magnitude of the socialist vision" and, less loftily, suggests that he was hooked on intrigue and the thrill of pretense. Maybe. We should not overlook the accidents of time and geography that left him with scant affiliation to any nation or established social order—a vacuum that communism filled. More practically, its internationalism also offered a route for an ambitious, doubly—or was it triply—deracinated wanderer to rise to the top. Then came the Nazis, a phenomenon of disturbing resonance for a Jew brought up in lands stained by centuries of anti-Semitism. Hitler provided Katz with an enemy— always a good motivation—and yet another reason to stick with the Soviets.

The struggle against fascism defined Katz's career. In a darkening Europe (fans of thriller writer Alan Furst will relish this book), he worked as journalist, spy, agent of influence and propagandist, adding executioner to his résumé in Civil War Spain. Across the Atlantic, as "Rudolph Breda," he charmed the Hollywood elite with elaborate yarns of bogus derring-do. Katz's Red Pimpernel was the inspiration for Kurt Muller in "Watch on the Rhine" and, more or less, Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca."

The war years—largely spent in Mexico—were an anticlimax, but the divided world they created left little room for men like Otto Katz. He returned to Czechoslovakia in 1946 as foreign editor of the Communist-controlled Rudé Právo, Prague's best-selling daily, but time was running out. He was arrested in 1952, tortured, tried and hanged as one of the 14 defendants (11 of Jewish origin) in the Slánský show trial, one of Stalin's final encores, striking mainly for the bluntness of its anti-Semitism.

By then the internationalist veneer had been scraped off the Red Star. The venerable ethnic muddle of Katz's Mitteleuropa was gone. Utopia was off the agenda. The struggle between the Soviet Union and its enemies had degenerated into a traditional great-power rivalry: home team versus away, white hat against black. The era of the "cosmopolitans" was over, a fact nicely illustrated by the undistinguished postwar career of the distinctly cosmopolitan William Fisher.

Fisher was born in England in 1903 to ethnic German communists who had quit their Russian homeland at the end of the 19th century, only to return with their offspring after the revolution. As "Colonel Abel," he became the best-known Soviet spy of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, not for the little he did but for the even less he said. As Giles Whittell shows in "Bridge of Spies," Fisher's reputation rests on the tantalizing reticence he showed after his arrest in 1957 and on the fact that he was swapped for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in Berlin in early 1962.

Fisher is a member of the supporting cast even in a book that recounts his story. The true stars of Mr. Whittell's narrative are an extraordinary airplane and the men who flew it. The game had changed. Propaganda continued to be peddled; agents of influence still whispered sweet somethings; spies still spied; secrets were still stolen. But with the descent of the Iron Curtain, borders were back: Loyalties were no longer so fluid. Even John Le Carré, a man capable of finding ambiguity where there is none, dated the recruitment that festers at the heart of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1974) to an earlier time, the 1930s. Le Carré is fiction's supreme chronicler of the Cold War, but his depiction of that long standoff favors nostalgic prewar shadow over the bright electronic glare of the new great game. As a former intelligence officer of a declining power (Britain) forced to live off its wits, it was natural for Le Carré to put the spy at center stage—it certainly made literary sense—but the real-life drama had moved on to cruel sideshow wars, relentless military build-ups and the unending pursuit of that crucial scientific edge.

By the late 1950s, the key question was not if the Soviet Union could inflict terrible destruction upon the U.S. but how. After Sputnik, panic over a "missile gap" was piled on top of suddenly old-fashioned anxieties about H-bomb-laden bombers. These fears were fed by domestic opportunists and buttressed by Ike's unwillingness to demonstrate the lack of that gap. To do so would have been to admit what the Kremlin already knew—that the Americans were peering down into the Soviet heartland from the vantage point of the U-2, a revolutionary "jet-powered glider" able to fly long distances at 70,000 feet, an elevation beyond (fingers crossed) the range of Soviet defenses.

In many respects the massed armies and fixed European frontlines of this stage of the Cold War were a reversion to conflicts of the past. Some of the most critical spy work of this period was the time-honored stuff of military reconnaissance—listening, watching, prob ing, snooping—updated for a technological age. Cloak-and-dagger counted for less than the straight arrows of the "Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Number Two" and the frighteningly fragile, terrifyingly cumbersome eyes-in-the-sky—the U-2—that they flew.

Mr. Whittell, the Times of London's Washington bureau chief, is no Tom Wolfe, but the tale he tells is effectively another installment of "The Right Stuff," with a peculiarly lethal twist: People were trying to shoot these high-fliers down. "When [Powers] saw his first MiG contrails . . . while sailing over Baku on the morning of November 20, 1957, he trusted that the MiGs wouldn't be able to reach him and flew on. (He counted fifty-six Soviet fighters in the sky below him that day.) When his electrics malfunctioned over Yerevan he calmly rerouted himself via Mount Ararat. . . . He reached Adana in one piece and had his long martini."

It's a marvelous saga of dangerous missions, helter-skelter innovation and clandestine activity, punc tuated by succulent reminders that this was the era of the Mad Men's paradise lost: the steaks, the martinis, a fight over a wife in a bar, the Buick with whitewall tires roaring past an old crusader castle. It all came to an end in 1960 with the downing and incriminating—impossible, Ike had been assured—survival of Powers and way too much identifiable wreckage (still on view today in Moscow). This shattered plans for an Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit that some believe (I'm more skeptical than Mr. Whittell) might have defused the most dangerous Cold War tensions.

The path was now open for the arms race that was to dominate the next three decades. That there never was a missile gap was ignored or denied. The intelligence pointed one way, the politics another. (Mr. Whittell draws somewhat heavy-handed parallels with the run-up to the Iraq conflict.) That the consequences—the development of towering levels of Mutually Assured Destruction—preserved peace in Europe and, ultimately, bankrupted the Soviet Union would have been an irony too far even for the serpentine Otto Katz. On the other hand, the practical, patriotic and straightforward Francis Gary Powers would have been delighted.

Young Lisbeth

Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

National Review, October 14, 2010 (November 1, 2010 issue)

Stockholm, December, 2009  © Andrew Stuttaford

I got Dan Brown, I really did. The history was bunk, the prose was Lego, and yet there was something there — that maddening, tantalizing what’s-going-to-happen-next — that kept me turning, turning, turning the pages deep into the night. By contrast, the success of Stieg Larsson, the Swedish thriller writer, who would — had he not died tragically young (only 50) in 2004, leaving just three (completed) novels behind — now be seen as a challenger to the impious Mr. Brown, leaves me more than a little amazed.

Collectively known as the Millennium trilogy, those three books have together sold over 30 million copies worldwide and quite a few bytes beside: Larsson is the first author to be downloaded over a million times on Kindle. Each installment has been made into a movie in Sweden. The first two films (I haven’t seen the third) were characterized by fine acting, land-of-Bergman pacing, and, of course, land-of-Bergman language, a tough sell anywhere much south of Malmo. Sure enough, a Hollywood remake is on the way, complete with James Bond, well, Daniel Craig, as Mikael “Kalle” Blomkvist, Larsson’s journalist-hero, and, for that matter, Larsson’s fantasy Larsson.

Craig was a smart choice: Borrowed glamour is better than none. Blomkvist may, in his painstakingly proper, pragmatically Scandinavian way, be something of a Lothario, but he’s also a middle-aged, excruciatingly priggish leftist, steeped in the shopworn pieties and bottomless paranoia of a certain strain of northern European political correctness. A bracing suggestion of 007 will be just what this tatty scribbler needs.

Mercifully, Hollywood’s filmmakers will probably follow the lead of their Swedish predecessors and dilute the “progressive” preaching that drones on throughout the Millennium saga, most loudly in the shape of a septic feminism fueled more by an apparent dislike of men than anything else. As a teenager, Larsson is said to have witnessed the gang-rape of a girl by some of his friends, a horror that he failed both to stop and to report. The form his feminism takes is thus a very public atonement. It’s not subtle — the Swedish title of the first novel is Man som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), and its narrative is festooned with factoids designed to show just how hateful men can be. In all three novels his (almost invariably male) villains are brutish, sexist pigs, include abusers of prostitutes amongst their sleazy ranks, and, all too often, are in pursuit of underage entertainment.

Intriguingly, Larsson’s heroine and Blomkvist’s sometime lover, Lisbeth Salander, a busily bisexual 25-year-old hacker, is less than five feet tall, “doll-like,” and, until some breast-augmentation surgery in the second book comes to the rescue, “flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty.” Make of that, Dr. Freud, what you will.

The more conventionally left-wing opinions that flavor the book are less bothersome and more predictable. The precincts of Schwedenkrimi (a subset of literature extensive enough to boast its own German compound noun) are a thoroughly Social Democratic (or worse) place. The genre’s pioneers (Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, co-authors of an enjoyable series of books between 1965 and 1975) were Stockholm-style soixante-huitards. Their most prominent successor, Henning Mankell (best known internationally for his marvelous Inspector Wallander), is another red-flag man, and a veteran of the embattled Gaza flotilla earlier this year. Under the circumstances, Larsson, an erstwhile Trotskyite who, like the fictional Blomkvist, spent much of his career working for a small leftist periodical, fits right in.

If Larsson’s politics are an irritant, his prose is a catastrophe. Nordic crime fiction tends to be written in a matter-of-fact way, but at his worst, Larsson is just a matter of lists:

She was back in Soder by 5.00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner. At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.

No, the translator is not to blame.

For all that, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo passed the Dan Brown test. Easily. There was something about the mystery that forms its dark core — a classic locked (more or less) room whodunit complete with truly hideous family secrets — that pulled me in. Even so, by themselves neither the dreadful doings of the decadent Vanger clan nor the occasional glimpses of hauntingly wintry landscape would have been quite enough to do the trick. Throw in a brilliant investigator compared with whom old cocaine-and-Stradivarius Sherlock is Andy Griffith, however, and airport bookstores’ Stieg-crammed shelves begin to make sense.

Heavily pierced and tattooed, Larsson’s surly, taciturn, and thoroughly antisocial Salander is a pattern-finding genius with a preternatural gift for hacking more typical of those modem-heavy movies that littered the dawn of the Internet age. She is also, Blomkvist realizes, someone who almost certainly plays for Dr. Asperger’s team. Oh yes, did I mention that Lisbeth is handy with a gun and good in a brawl? Absence of empathy, a surfeit of strangeness, and a comic-book collection of skills make her an ideal subject for Larsson’s surface-dwelling talents, yet somehow this plodding Swede also manages the remarkable achievement of persuading his readers to care about someone who would not, could not, give a damn about them. 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a decent, self-contained story. If Larsson had stopped there, all would have been well. Unfortunately, he didn’t. The remaining two books are in fact one (they are separated by an abrupt break of Dickensian shamelessness) and they should have been none. Despite a MacGuffin involving sex trafficking (a suitably modish variety of XY villainy, and much in the Swedish headlines when Larsson was writing), The Girl Who Played with Fire is really all about Salander, the eponymous Girl. She shifts from being puzzle-master to puzzle, a transition that Larsson fumbles and, in the course of the final part of the trilogy, drops.

Part of what made Salander so interesting in the first place was the depth of her detachment, an idea that cannot survive her transformation in the second and third books into tough-grrl cliche, a lethal and seemingly indestructible combination of avenging angel, Modesty Blaise (an endearingly enduring heroine throughout Scandinavia), and, as underlined by a few sly hints in the text, Pippi Longstocking. Larsson had become so infatuated with his own creation (he had plans for ten books about her) that he came to believe that Salander, and the baroque background he dreamt up for her, would be enough to bring his readers along for the balance of the trilogy. Millions of the misguided have proved Larsson right, but your reviewer sticks to his opinion: Salander’s legend was allowed to overwhelm the story — and it wrecked it.

Mind you, as baroque backgrounds go, Salander’s is a doozy. It ranges far from the obligatory wretched childhood, venturing into territory that the borrowed 007 could easily call his own, all the while retaining an aura of suspicion and resentment that has a lot to do with the author, and not much with the plot. To read Larsson is to be given the impression of a Sweden where a handful of dedicated comrades struggle for their vision of justice against the overwhelming power of the Man. Given how much of Sweden’s ancient Social Democratic consensus still lingers on (notwithstanding any impression left by the recent election results), that is still, unfortunately, something of a stretch.

Nevertheless, Larsson sometimes allows a glimpse of a more authentic Sweden to slip through, something that will add to the interest in his writing to those living outside that remote Nordic bastion. Some of it — the leniency of the criminal justice system when compared with the American model — ought to take nobody aback, but other aspects will be more surprising. Henrik Vanger, an aged and ailing industrial titan, is allowed to come across as a sympathetic figure, a reminder that in Sweden — home, after all, of the powerful Wallenberg dynasty — social democracy has traditionally come with a notably corporatist tinge. It is the “yuppies” (itself a tellingly dated term), assertive, individualistic, and disruptive of time-honored Swedish ways, to whom both Larsson and Blomkvist object. The grandees who had run the companies that actually made things were fine: The “twenty-point stags of the old school” knew their place in the old consensual nation — even if it was close to the top of the tree.

Some may be taken aback by how ethnically diverse Larsson’s Stockholm turns out to be. In part, this is simply a reflection of the facts on the ground (nearly a fifth of the Swedish population is either foreign-born or a child of two foreign-born parents), but in part this glorious northern mosaic was also clearly an attempt by Larsson, much of whose journalistic career was spent in the anti-racist trenches, to remind his Swedish readers that their Folkhem had changed (in this case, the implication is that it’s for the better), a theme frequently echoed by other Nordic detective writers: A muttered racial slur is a good sign that a murderer has arrived on the scene.

But for a more evocative sense of Scandinavian locations alongside Scandinavian mayhem, there are better places to go. Wallander’s atmospheric Ystad is one obvious starting point, as is Jo Nesbø's sharply drawn Oslo, but I’d rather start with The Darkest Room, the sophomore novel by Johan Theorin: a spooky, beautifully written tale of a manor house on a half-deserted Baltic island that is the setting for the most exciting snowstorm I have read in years.

And Trotsky is nowhere to be seen.

So You Want To Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star

Keith Richards: Life

The Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2010

Right at the beginning of "Life," there's a hint of the glorious Spinal Tapestry that Keith Richards's autobiography might have been. Using words that are rather less decorous than a family newspaper can permit, Mr. Richards recalls how: "[1975] was the tour of the giant inflatable [phallus]. It came rising up from the stage as Mick sang 'Starf—er.' It was great was the [phallus], though we paid for it later in Mick's wanting props at every tour after that, to cover his insecurities. There was a huge business of getting elephants on stage in Memphis until they ended up crashing through ramps and [defecating] all over the stage in rehearsals and were abandoned." With such grandiloquent kitsch (and the author's implicit acceptance of its absurdity) and a cleverly freighted jeer thrown at a bandmate, we have the ingredients of a definitive rock star memoir. A child of the 1960s and 1970s, I read on expectantly.

 I should have known better. Judging by the hype and circumstance that has surrounded its release, "Life" is a tome meant to be taken very seriously: less a deliciously barbed and baroque romp than an attempt to amplify—up to 11 perhaps—the legend of the world's "most elegantly wasted man."

It will succeed. Apparently shocked, shocked by the guitarist's calm, if obsessive, depiction of his drug use (too much detail, Mr. Richards, way too much) and the suggestion that such pastimes can be managed (if not always, the author admits, by him), Walt Disney is reportedly considering writing our hero out of the next "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. By contrast, the most outrageous substance abuse described in the book—a recipe for bangers and mash involving HP sauce—has attracted none of the condemnation it deserves.

Drugs have been a big part of Mr. Richards's life, but they are part of his shtick too, and the emphasis upon them in this book will buttress the Rolling Stoner as an icon of dilapidated cool. But cool is not what it was. For all the laconic detachment of Mr. Richards's frequently amusing prose, there is something sweaty about the way this former choirboy (yes, really) is so determined to establish his machismo. It's not the girls (though there are plenty—and why not) that give the game away but the hard-man anecdotes—"so, boom, I fired a shot through the floor"—the (possibly helpful) tips on knife-fighting, the brandished Jack Daniel's, the references to himself as an alpha male, the disparagement of Mick Jagger's "todger," even a competitive approach to narcotics:

"I don't think John [Lennon] ever left my house except horizontally." Mr. Richards claims to feel imprisoned by his image ("like a ball and chain"), but, ever the professional, he's willing to play along: "Folks out there created this folk hero. Bless their hearts. And I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs."

That's good of you, mate. But preserving the illusions that feed the Rolling Stones franchise has made "Life" so much less interesting than it could have been. That said, if you're after a first-person impression of the band, especially one in which Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman have been brutally cut down, this is the book for you. Ronnie Wood's "Ronnie" (2007) is a cheery enough collection of postcards, but he only formally joined the band in 1976. Bill Wyman's "Stone Alone" (1990) ends with the storied 1969 concert/wake for Brian Jones in Hyde Park. It's OK, and the author tries to settle a few scores ("the crucial riff for 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' was mine"), but it is ultimately dragged down by historical minutiae: "Finally we ended up in the Bali restaurant in Park Street, where we had a nice lunch of curried prawns and Cokes. It was the first real meal we'd had for twenty-four hours!"

Mr. Richards disdains (or perhaps has just forgotten) such details. "Life" is impressionistic, something reinforced by its being structured as an extended monologue—Dionysus reminiscing in the pub—a process helped along by a friendly collaborator, the accomplished journalist and writer James Fox. At least one of the two of them is capable of startlingly evocative language: Brian Jones's contributions to "Let It Bleed" were the "last flare from the shipwreck."

And "Life" covers a lot of ground. After opening his story with a smug account of a potentially disastrous arrest by Dixie's finest (it turns out more "Dukes of Hazzard" than "Cool Hand Luke"), Mr. Richards takes us back to a shockingly normal working-class childhood distinguished mainly by a musical fascination that turns into an obsession. Then comes art college saving him "from the dung heap," music, more music, Jagger, the coming together of the band, and a brief period of struggle followed, astoundingly quickly, by distaff Beatlemania. After that, we're in more familiar territory: Anita Pallenberg, Altamont, the pharmaceutical adventure tour that drags on for decades, and the usual tales of studios, tours, tax avoidance and excess. This culminates—let the moralists weep—not in a junkie's death but in a successful second marriage, creative contentment and an old man's bibliophile pleasures in a Connecticut library full of George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O'Brian.

Naturally, there's plenty for gossips (the Mars bar was on the table), armchair psychiatrists, rock archaeologists and—to borrow one marvelous phrase—"lyric-watchers" to savor, as well as revealing glimpses of the inexhaustible self-regard of this new royalty: "A jury of my peers would be Jimmy Page, a conglomeration of musicians, guys that have been on the road and know what's what. My peers are not some lady doctor and a couple of plumbers."

For the musically inclined, there's a master class in the "simple secrets" needed to make a guitar sing the Richards way, even if the source for all those "crucial, wonderful riffs that just came" remains elusive. (Bill Wyman is probably not the explanation.)

A more reliable clue can be found in the way that Mr. Richards caresses the memory of the siren songs of his youth: Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Elvis and the others, soaring across the Atlantic to an island still not quite emerged from the drabness of a war concluded more than a decade before, and, of course, this: "The early days of the magic art of guitar weaving started then. You realize what you can do playing guitar with another guy, and what the two of you can do is to the power of ten."

And so it was. And so it still is, but, after this book, Mr. Richards may have to look for a new lead singer.

Irrepressible

Leslie Brody: Irrepressible - The life and Times of Jessica Mitford

The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2010

Toffs remain big box office in Britain as, less classily, does Adolf Hitler. Combine both in one glamorous, self-mythologizing family, and it's easy to see why the six Mitford sisters have helped feed generations of English journalists and historians. The daughters of a wildly eccentric peer, they made a splash in Britain's interwar high society. Two of them then immersed themselves in the more questionable pleasures of fascism—Unity ornamented the Führer's inner circle, and Diana married Oswald Mosley, Britain's would-be Duce.

Meanwhile, Jessica (1917-96), the fifth sister, known as Decca, took a different course, to civil-war Spain (against Franco). What followed—as Leslie Brody outlines in "Irrepressible," the first biography of this particular Mitford—was an existence filled with the clichés of an Internationale-set life. Boho revolt in London and America, marriage to a left-wing Jewish lawyer (take that, Diana!), and Communist Party membership. She stuck up for spies (the Rosenbergs, naturally); she was harassed by the U.S. government (subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, of course); and, on occasion, she did brave, marvelous things. These were usually in connection with the struggle for civil rights: 1950 found her in Jackson, Miss., campaigning to save a prisoner lost in the state's lethal legal labyrinth. A decade later Mitford was a Freedom Rider.

But some freedoms were more equal than others. Jessica quit the Communist Party, tellingly late, in 1957. That was a year after the popular uprising in Hungary, a country that she had managed to visit in 1955 without finding much amiss, an example of a blindness all too typical of her life-long attitude toward the left—unforgivable, given the clarity with which she could see when she chose.

Her "The American Way of Death" (1963) was a brutally clever examination of the scams and sharp practices of the funeral business. It established her as a muckraking journalist, and it paved the way for her role as a droll, rickety, radical grande dame—a performance that only ended in 1996 with her funeral (costing $475, Ms. Brody informs us).

"Irrepressible" is a brisk, engaging and mainly admiring work, but the author—best known for "Red Star Sister," a memoir of her own years as an activist in the 1960s counterculture—seems neither worried nor terribly interested that Jessica hung on in a largely Stalinist party long past the usual wartime excuse, something that a more critical biographer might have used to suggest that the red sheep of the Mitford family was not so different from Diana and Unity after all.

Why all three women succumbed to the totalitarian temptation is to be found in their times, in their genes and in the brilliant mess of an upbringing that muddled the aesthetics of Blandings with the ethics of Berchtesgarten. But not, alas, in Ms. Brody's book.

Through A Glass, Darkly

John Carey: William Golding, The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies - A Life

National Review, July 28, 2010 (August 16, 2010 issue) 

We’ll never know for sure what the English writer William Golding (1911–93), a publicly private man, would have thought about the publication of this book. Thanks partly to Golding’s failure to cooperate, no biographies of him were published during his lifetime, but the assumption that follows from that would probably be wrong. Feast has followed famine: To help him in his work on this book, the Golding family granted John Carey, a prominent Oxford academic, distinguished literary critic, and acquaintance of Golding, access to the author’s previously closed archive. It was a hoard too extensive not to have been designed as an invitation, one day, to biographers, and this appears to have been exactly what Golding intended. He just had to die first. Safe in his grave, Golding couldn’t be pestered; but he could be remembered.

The Golding papers contain (amongst much else) early drafts of what was published, and copies of what was not — including novels or their fragments, two autobiographical works, and a 5,000-page warts-and-all journal maintained more or less daily for 22 years. As a resource for Carey, this trove was essential — and it was not wasted. This book must be one of the most closely observed portraits of an author ever written. If you are looking for a perceptive, marvelously written close-up of a body of work being shaped and reshaped, this is the book for you. And if you want to know when Golding upgraded chess computers — and to what model — this is also the book for you.

As a picture of both the man and his oeuvre, this makes for an engrossing (if sometimes overly pointillist) read, but I finished it unconvinced that Golding was worth all the effort. As Carey’s title reminds us, his subject’s reputation has dwindled. Golding no longer needs no further introduction, and so he has been given that implicitly condescending identifier, “The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.”

Carey explains that this was meant both ironically and as bait to lure new readers in, but I doubt that Golding himself would have been greatly amused. The book may have made his fortune (since its publication in 1954 Lord of the Flies has sold 20 million copies in the U.K. alone) and his reputation (there would have been no Nobel Prize without it), but Golding himself later described it as “boring and crude.” False modesty? In part, but as with so much else about Golding, the truth was more complex than the performance. The disdain Golding came to feel for his first published novel was genuine, and very revealing. And it’s no less revealing that Carey, a biographer convinced of his subject’s genius, makes so little of it.

Could the reason for this be that Golding’s most brilliant book was, in some crucial ways, among his least representative? To be sure, its big theme — man’s fallen nature — became the leitmotif of much of Golding’s writing, and, yes, like so many of his novels, Lord of the Flies is characterized by passages of astounding power and almost hallucinatory beauty. Nevertheless, by Golding’s standards it is a remarkably spare and uncluttered work. Its message may be profound, but its language and its storyline are stark, straightforward, and unburdened by the rococo rambling that bedevils so much of his later writing.

Much of this was thanks to the efforts of Faber and Faber’s Charles Monteith, the novice editor who was the first to see what Golding’s much-rejected typescript could become. The fruitful relationship between the clever, long-suffering, and benignly manipulative Monteith and his histrionic, pathologically self-absorbed discovery is wonderfully described by Carey — and is essential for a proper understanding of Golding’s career. The two men were to work together for four decades, but it is reasonable to assume that Monteith’s creative influence was at its peak right at the beginning of their relationship. Golding wanted to be published, and Monteith appeared to be the only person who could make it happen. So Lord of the Flies was slimmed down, losing both back-story and, more significantly, a messiah. Golding had originally envisaged the character Simon as a Jesus figure. His death was to have been an act of self-sacrifice: noble, mystical. After Monteith’s intervention, it is reduced to a cruel accident, the result of hysterical misunderstanding. The only god on this island was the devil that the children had dreamt up for themselves. They are — we are — alone.

Monteith was right. Horror is amplified by hopelessness. But the change, I suspect, may have left Golding thinking that the book that made his name was not quite his. He was deeply (if unconventionally) religious. He had, he disclosed, seen spirits and apparitions. Psychiatrists can make of that what they will (while Carey generally has plenty to say about what made Golding Golding, he shies away from medical commentary, which is a mistake), but to Golding such fancies were fact. Taking the Jesus out of Simon must have seemed to him an unnatural and arbitrary act. Years after Lord of the Flies was published, he was, as Carey notes, still talking up the sanctity of Simon — and still failing to reverse the effects of Monteith’s shrewd editorial pen, a failure he finally tried to remedy with Matty, the enigmatic central character in the largely incoherent Darkness Visible (1979), a figure who may be an angel, a holy fool, or both, but either way remains overshadowed, like all Golding’s later characters, by a handful of feral schoolboys.

Golding found himself on firmer ground when he returned in book after book to the wickedness of you and me. “Man produces evil,” he wrote, “as a bee produces honey”: a typically melodramatic overstatement redeemed by the subtler suggestion that we have no real choice in the matter, it’s just who we are. When the last dumb but decent Neanderthals of The Inheritors (1955), the novel with which Golding followed Lord of the Flies, are wiped out by the New People (your ancestors and mine), their annihilation is merely the inevitable consequence of the arrival of smarter, more assertive Homo sapiens. It’s just what we do.

The sources of Golding’s misanthropy were complex and (I’ll take psychological speculation a little further than Carey is prepared to go) rooted in a disordered, depressive psyche, lunatic spirituality, and the need for an alibi to assuage the overwhelming sense of guilt that descended upon him during his (distinguished) service in Britain’s wartime navy and never went away. The war, explained Golding, generated “a sort of religious convulsion” within him, giving him for the first time “a kind of framework of principles.” Once they were in place, however, he realized that he had not lived up to them. “I have,” he claimed, “always understood the Nazis because I am that sort by nature” — a characteristically absurd, characteristically self-important exaggeration. The similarities that Golding saw between himself and the Hitler crowd lay in what he now — eyes freshly opened — believed to have been the “viciousness” and “cruelty” of his younger self. To be sure, there was that clumsily attempted (and mercifully unsuccessful) date rape, and the smashed heart and mind of an abandoned fiancee (her traces can be detected in 1959’s Free Fall), as well as some more persistent suggestions of sadism, but, for all that, he was a long, long way from the Third Reich.

This overwrought sense of his sin would only have been exacerbated by — he was a child of his era — a mix of curiosity and unease about his obvious homosexual leanings. But after fantasies of sodomy and hints of the lash came the reality of rum. As Carey records in sometimes spectacular detail, Golding was for decades a guzzle-yourself-prone drinker, and obnoxious with it: not an unknown phenomenon in literary circles, but in his case it could come with a distinctive twist. We may laugh (well, I did) at the tale of a drunken Golding attacking another author’s Bob Dylan puppet, but that’s before discovering that Golding had mistaken the marionette-troubadour for Satan. That sense of his sin may have helped drive Golding to drink, but it also followed him there. How much better if Golding could soothe himself with the idea that he was not really as bad as he thought. In the absence of a sense of proportion, the next best thing would be the conviction that everyone else was just as bad. It’s not a case that Carey makes, but some of Golding’s onslaught on the Old Adam must have been an attempt to conscript his fellow man into sharing the burden of the wickedness that he could not bear to shoulder alone.

But perhaps he drank to deal with something else too. Lord of the Flies is an extraordinary creation, a ghastly glimpse of a very dark place, but much of the rest of Golding’s work (with the exception of 1956’s remarkable Pincher Martin) is dreary, pretentious, and sometimes just nuts. Carey would certainly not agree, but for all his canny, well-crafted explanations of some of Golding’s more puzzling writing, and despite his deployment of a series of enthusiastic mid-century critics to hosanna his hero, the suspicion must remain that Golding’s talents were more second-division than first. After Lord of the Flies, Golding had shot his bolt and, I reckon, he knew it. He was, after all, smart enough and insecure enough to be his own fiercest critic. If that obsessive guilt of his was not already reason to turn to the bottle, the growing realization that he would never repeat the success of his debut would surely have done the trick, particularly if, like so many high achievers, he already felt like a fraud. And he often did.

All this may also help explain Golding’s prickliness, rumored plagiarism (a topic too quickly passed over by Carey), money worries that lingered even as his bank balance fattened, and — he was British after all — undignified scramble for a knighthood and, presumably, the validation that some might believe a “K” could bring.

But, still: One masterpiece ought to be enough for a reputation. The island transformed by this bleakest of Prosperos into mirror and hell will endure long after the booze and the bluster have passed into trivia:

Toward the end of the afternoon, the mirages were settling a little. They found the end of the island, quite distinct, and not magicked out of shape or sense. There was a jumble of the usual squareness, with one great block sitting out in the lagoon. Sea birds were nesting there. “Like icing,” said Ralph, “on a pink cake.”

What could go wrong?