Hitler Revisited

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Adolf? Not again. My first reaction on learning that not one, but two, substantial new Hitler biographies were up for review was not one of unreserved joy. How much more is there to say? After all, Ian Kershaw’s two volumes from the turn of the century have stood the test of time very well. Nevertheless, as Brendan Simms, a professor in the history of international relations at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, demonstrates in the introduction to his Hitler: A Global Biography, the research grinds on. In his case, he has used a basic cradle-to-ashes format (Simms does not pretend to depict “the ‘whole’ Hitler”) as a frame on which to hang an intriguing — if not always convincing — reexamination of Hitler’s thinking.

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“Horizon” Horizontales

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A book’s index can entertain as well as inform, and in D. J. Taylor’s Lost Girls, a lively, perceptive, and gossip-strewn inquiry into an overlooked aspect of an influential corner of London’s literary life in, mainly, the 1940s, the index does not disappoint. Turning from “Horizon, ‘bugger incident,’ ” to the entries for that storied magazine’s creator and presiding genius, “Connolly, Cyril,” we find, among other accolades, “capriciousness,” “dilettante quality,” “double standards and hypocrisy,” “mother-fixation,” “self-absorption,” “self-destructiveness,” “self-propagating mystique,” “sulkiness,” “tactlessness,” and, in a final jab of the indexer’s finger, “vacillation and procrastination.”

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Feeding The Enemy

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The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.

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The importance of being Ernst

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The more you study history, the less you know. Straight paths turn into labyrinths. So it is that, in the Paris journals of Ernst Jünger (now translated into English by Thomas and Abby Hansen as A German Officer in Occupied Paris), we learn that in July 1942 Jünger, who had previously swapped books with a fellow author by the name of Hitler, dropped in on a future Stalin Prize winner, one Pablo Picasso. The artist was an exile, Jünger a captain in the Wehrmacht, an occupier. The meeting passed off agreeably. Picasso declared that the two of them “would be able to negotiate peace over the course of [that] afternoon.”

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First Persons Singular

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It is both satisfying and subversive that Herman Koch, the author of The Ditch, was, if not exactly expelled, at least “encouraged to leave” his Montessori school in Amsterdam. While any failed attempt at “child-centered” education will warm a chilly reactionary heart, young Koch’s inability to summon up enough self-discipline to survive indiscipline must be regarded as a disappointing rejection of the conscientiousness the Dutch have traditionally, if not always correctly, been thought to possess.

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Gray's Anatomy

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The British philosopher John Gray has been on the Left, and he has been on the Right. More recently, he has settled into the role of a brilliant, provocative, and contrarian curmudgeon, known for an aphoristic style rare in a discipline where opacity is often confused with erudition.

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Confessions of a Revolutionary

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Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.

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Crass Capital

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In an age when cultural appropriation is “problematic,” the EU is a repeat offender. Not content with stealing a continent’s name and rewriting its history, the engineers of “ever closer union” have spent years squeezing centuries of art into a “European” (as they abuse that term) straitjacket, a maneuver anticipated by General de Gaulle during a press conference over half a century ago. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand, he agreed, “belonged to Europe” insofar as they were Italian, German, and French. But they would not have done much for Europe had they lacked a nationality and written in some sort of “harmonized Esperanto or” — and here de Gaulle reinforced mockery with erudition — “Volapük.” 

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In 2020, Trump has everything to lose

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November 2020 is still a long way away, but it already looks as if the next presidential election will be lost not won.
It is not a given that America’s economy will hold up, but if it does, Donald Trump, as the incumbent, would normally have a good chance of hanging onto his job. However, “normally” is not a word that applies to a president forever a tweet, a fiasco or a past, present or future scandal away from disaster. Then there are the polls. Trump has had the lowest average approval ratings of any president since Gallup started measuring them in the 1930s, and he has yet to hit 50 per cent even once. He prevailed in 2016 with the smallest share of the popular vote (46.1 per cent) since a complicated four-way tussle in 1824.

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Agencies of disruption

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Heidi Tworek’s shrewd, erudite and timely News from Germany is a work of historical analysis that can also be read as a corrective to the dangerous hysteria over the information games—fake news and all the rest—currently being played over the internet. The tale she tells is, in no small part, an account of how a nation that understood more clearly than most how the dissemination of news could be used as a device to project power beyond its borders tried to break its rivals’ (accidental) dominance in this area. For more than half a century, this was, argues Tworek, an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia, an obsession for “an astonishing array of German politicians, industrialists, military leaders and journalists”.

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