After Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, Winston Churchill had no qualms about entering into an alliance with Stalin, whose regime he understood all too well: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Similar thinking does much to explain the enlistment of former (and not so former) Nazis by the Western allies in intelligence work against the Soviets after 1945…
Read MoreIt was hard to read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s original and intriguing “Oceans of Grain” without thinking of Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”: “The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.” Karl Marx looked at history and found class. Mr. Nelson tends to find wheat. Thus, in the 19th century, he writes, “the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire all [had] more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.”
Read More“Eight Days in May,” a gripping, immaculately researched retelling of the Nazi Götterdämmerung, is the story of an intermission, a phase, as the German author Erich Kästner wrote in his diary, between the “no longer” and “not yet.” But during this intermission the action rarely paused. Written by Volker Ullrich, a German journalist and historian perhaps best known for his impressive two-volume biography of Hitler, this book is structured as the day-by-day chronicle implied by its title. That said, Mr. Ullrich also looks further backward and forward in time to add the context that a study confined to eight days alone could not provide.
Read MoreIt never occurred to me that one day, I would review Bambi (the novel). If it had, I would not have expected that its story and backstory would, among other surprises, include the Nazis, a communist, pornography and talking leaves. In fact, I didn’t even know that the film had been preceded by a novel. Felix Salten wrote Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde in Vienna, where it appeared as a newspaper serial in 1922 before being published in book form in Germany the following year.
It debuted in America in 1928 as Bambi, a Life in the Woods, translated by none other than Whittaker Chambers, already a communist, but not yet in the Soviet agent phase of his astoundingly protean career. The translation sold well but was eclipsed by Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942), an eclipse probably prolonged by a questionable interpretation of US copyright law. The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest is a new, more precise translation of Salten’s original by Jack Zipes, professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Zipes has also written an informative introduction, albeit one that is unmistakably the work of someone on the left side of the political woods:
Read MoreTo label Kati Marton’s biography of Angela Merkel a hagiography would not be fair—not entirely. That said, when she writes of the chancellor being “too busy saving the world” to have much time for strolling in the woods, the expression may be less of a rhetorical flourish than it should. “The Chancellor” is an impressively researched but, in many respects, devotional work—the reflection of a worshipful establishment consensus that will eventually seem absurd.
Read MoreShutdown, historian Adam Tooze’s new book—which carries the somewhat premature subtitle How Covid Shook the World’s Economy—is billed by its publishers as “a deft synthesis of global finance, politics and business . . . a tour-de-force account of the year that changed everything.” Whether the coronavirus will, when all’s done, have “changed everything” remains to be seen, but Shutdown is well worth reading as an intriguing, thought-provoking study of a period made unique not by a disease—our species has weathered many—but by how we dealt with it.
“Never before,” writes Tooze, “had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down.” He could have taken a more rigorously questioning look at the rights and wrongs of that decision, one of several missteps in the book that range from his cursory examination of the different course adopted by Sweden to his failure to consider whether prolonged shutdowns would have been justifiable had vaccines not been developed so quickly. The vaccine breakthrough casts the draconian measures taken by authorities in a more favorable light than they may deserve. For how much longer would we have had to shelter at home? Years?
But then Shutdown’s author makes no secret of his preference for strong state action…
Read MoreThe Viking Heart, the latest work by the historian Arthur Herman, is engaging, informative, and highly readable. As Herman deals with four separate topics each of which deserves a book of its own, it is also an extremely ambitious undertaking. His reach may sometimes exceed his grasp, but even when that is the case the results are likely to leave readers wanting more — in a good way.
The first topic, taking up a third or so of The Viking Heart’s text, is a history of the “classic” Viking era. The second is a discussion of what happened next — the Vikings did not just vanish into nothingness when the longships ceased setting sail. The third touches on the Scandinavian experience in America. The fourth, which is more of a thread running through the book, is an examination of what Herman dubs “the Viking heart,” character traits (mercifully somewhat evolved since that heart began beating) that, in his view, contributed so much to the development of these northern peoples and the impact they have had far beyond the fjords, forests, and lakes of their homelands.
Read MoreThe Middle Ages,” wrote Carl Jung in a 1958 book about UFOs, “have not died out. . . . Mythology and magic flourish as ever in our midst.” I doubt if Monica Black, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of A Demon-Haunted Land,an intriguing, subtle, and occasionally startling examination of a wave of superstitious belief that swept across Germany in the immediate post-war years, would disagree. Certainly, Black recognizes the fascination that supernatural ideas and practices, from astrology to the occult, held for millions of Germans “across the modern period” as well as the persistence of a long-standing tradition of folk and magical healing.
Read MoreWriting a few years after the armistice that, at 11 o’clock on November 11, 1918, brought a halt to the fighting on the Western Front, John Buchan related how:
“At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South African Brigade, which represented the easternmost point reached by the British armies, a German machine gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.
After that, peace descended on the long battlefield. A new era had come and the old world had passed away.”
But cataclysms rarely end so elegantly. More of the old world lingers on into the new than is often presumed.
Read MoreReaders of Stephen Walker’s fine new account of how Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet air-force major (he was promoted from lieutenant while circling the Earth), became the first man in space will discover quite a bit about Gagarin the man, but a great deal more about the program that put him into orbit 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961.
Vasco da Gama, Gagarin was not. For all his skill, toughness, unflappability and courage, he was no explorer. In a way, he was merely the most important of all the fauna that the Soviets shot into space. The first astronauts had relatively little control over their capsules; the first cosmonauts had far less.
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