Albert Jay Nock, "The Myth of a Guilty Nation" (1922)

Comments to follow soon.
Do note, in the interim, that Nock is writing about the First World War.

I used the digital edition produced and distributed by the (Ludwig von) Mises Institute of Alabama.


QUOTATIONS SELECTED, AND NOTES BY GREGORY KLAGES

Chapter I
"…the Governments of Europe are confronted with the inescapable…: they can either tear up the [Versailles] treaty and replace it by an understanding based on justice, or they can stick to the treaty and by so doing protract indefinitely the dismal succession of wars, revolutions, bankruptcies and commercial dislocations that the treaty inaugurated. That is the situation; and it is a situation in which the people of the United States have an interest to preserve—the primary interest of a creditor, and also the interest of a trader who needs a large and stable market. It is idle to suppose that American business can prosper so long as Europe remains in a condition of instability and insolvency."

Chapter II
"Germany, so the official story ran, not only plotted in secret, but she sprung her plot upon a Europe that was wholly unprepared and unsuspecting…"

Chapter III
"The fact is that Europe was as thoroughly organized for war as it could possibly be. The point to which that organization was carried by England, France and Russia, as compared with Germany and Austria, may to some extent be indicated by statistics. In 1913, Russia carried a military establishment (on a peace footing) of 1,284,000 men; France, by an addition of 183,000 men, proposed to raise her peace-establishment to a total of 741,572. Germany, by an addition of 174,373 men, proposed to raise her total to 821,964; and Austria, by additions of 58,505 already made, brought her total up to 473,643. These are the figures of the British War Office, as furnished to the House of Commons in 1913."

"England’s superiority in battleships alone was 112 per cent in 1901, and her superiority rose to nearly 200 per cent in 1904; in which year England spent £42,431,000 on her navy, and Germany £11,659,000. Taking the comparative statistics of naval expenditure from 1900, in which year England spent £32,055,000 on her navy, and Germany spent £7,472,000, down to 1914 it is absolutely impossible to make the figures show that Germany enforced upon the other nations of Europe an unwilling competition in naval armament."

"England’s army-expenditure for 1914 (pre-war figures) was £28 million; £4 million more than Austria’s. Nor was this a sudden emergency-outlay. Going back as far as 1905, we find that she laid out in that year the same amount, £28 million. In that year, Germany and Austria together spent £48 million on their armies; England, France and Russia together spent £94 million on theirs…"

Chapter IV
"France and Russia had been bound by a military convention ever since 17 August, 1892; England and France had been bound since January, 1906, by a similar pact; and this was subsequently extended to include Belgium."

Chapter VI
"Mr. Lloyd George, for example, is one of the cleverest of politicians. We have already considered his two statements; first, that of 4 August, 1917: What are we fighting for? To defeat the most dangerous conspiracy ever plotted against the liberty of nations; carefully, skilfully, insidiously, clandestinely planned in every detail with ruthless, cynical determination. —and then that of 3 March, 1921: For the Allies, German responsibility for the war is fundamental. It is the basis upon which the structure of the treaty of Versailles has been erected, and if that acknowledgment is repudiated or abandoned, the treaty is destroyed....German responsibility for the war must be treated by the Allies as a chose jugée. A little over two months before Mr. George made this latter utterance, on 23 December, 1920, he said this: The more one reads memoirs and books written in the various countries of what happened before the first of August, 1914, the more one realizes that no one at the head of affairs quite meant war at that stage. It was something into which they glided, or rather staggered and stumbled, perhaps through folly; and a discussion, I have no doubt, would have averted it."

"IF the theory upon which the treaty of Versailles is based, the theory of a single guilty nation, were true, there would be no trouble about saying what the war was fought for. The Allied belligerents would have a simple, straight story to tell; they could describe their aims and intentions clearly in a few words that any one could understand, and their story would be reasonably consistent and not vary greatly from year to year. It would be practically the same story in 1918 as in 1915 or at any time between. In America, indeed, the story did not greatly vary up to the spring of 1917, for the reason that this country was pretty much in the dark about European international relations."

"In Europe and in England, however, the case was different. International relations were better understood by those who were closer to them than we were; more questions were raised and more demands made."

"...the Allies, they were confronted with the politician’s traditional difficulty. They had to say something plausible and satisfactory, which yet must be something that effectively hid the truth of the situation."

"...the official and semi-official statements of the causes of the war and of the war-aims of the Allies are a most curious hotchpotch…"

Chapter VIII
"It was on the eastern frontier, we perceive, therefore—not on the western, where Belgium might have been invaded by France—that all the available Belgian military force was concentrated. Hence, to pretend any longer that the Belgian Government was surprised by the action of Germany, or unprepared to meet it; to picture Germany and Belgium as cat and mouse, to understand the position of Belgium otherwise than that she was one of four solid allies under definite agreement worked out in complete practical detail, is sheer absurdity."

Chapter XVII
"Lloyd George is right in saying that no one really wanted war. What every one wanted, and what every one was trying with might and main to do, was to cook the omelette of economic imperialism without breaking any eggs."

Chapter XVIII
"10 March of the following year [1914], Mr. Asquith, replying to a question in the Commons from Lord Hugh Cecil, denied that England was under an “obligation arising owing to an assurance given by the Ministry in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe.” On 24 March, he made similar denials in reply to questions from Sir W. Byles and Mr. King. On 14 April, Mr. Runciman, in a speech at Birkenhead, denied “in the most categorical way” the existence of a secret understanding with any foreign Power! On 3 May, the Secretary for the Colonies, Mr. Harcourt, declared publicly that he “could conceive no circumstances in which Continental operations would not be a crime against the people of this country.” On 28 June, the under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Acland, declared publicly that “in no European question were we concerned to interfere with a big army.” On 1 July, Lord Loreburn, Lord Chancellor from 1906 to 1912, said “that any British Government would be so guilty towards our country as to take up arms in a foreign quarrel is more than I can believe.” On 28 April, 1914, and again on 11 June, Sir E. Grey confirmed, in the House of Commons, Mr. Asquith's assertion, made 10 and 24 March, 1913, of British freedom from engagements with Continental Powers."

Peter Longerich, "Goebbels: A Biography" (2015)

Just finished. Comments to follow soon.

Two useful reviews:
- Nigel Jones, "Ménage-à-trois with Hitler: the Goebbels’ marriage was a bit crowded," Spectator (UK), 9 May 2015.
- James J. Sheehan, New York Times, 13 May 2015.

Some noteworthy excerpts:
Prologue
In this historical biography, first and foremost concerned with the question of the part played by Goebbels in the leadership of the Third Reich, insights gained into the deficiencies of his personality can help to develop wider perspectives. A particular purpose of this biography is to open the way to an analysis of the construction and modus operandi of the Nazi propaganda apparatus.

The connections, often quite subtle, among his various responsibilities become apparent only through a description of his life.

“Faith Moves Mountains”: Political Beginnings in Berlin
He developed a friendship with the graphic artist Hans Herbert Schweitzer, who designed National Socialist posters under the pseudonym Mjölnir.

“Dare to Live Dangerously!”: Goebbels’s Radicalism and Hitler’s Policy of “Legality”
December 1930
After consulting “Hitler and a large number of experts,” Goebbels came up with a definition of socialism that immediately met with Hitler’s “enthusiastic” approval: “placing the concept of the people above that of the individual.”

CHAPTER 7:
A few weeks later it emerged, either as a result of police inquiries or of a leak by former Party employees, that the assassination attempt had clearly been faked by Goebbels himself—and quite crudely at that. The “explosives” consisted of some jumping jacks and a little gunpowder. That Goebbels wrote up the “assassination attempt” in his diary as a genuine threat shows his relationship to the truth: Having acted out a charade for public consumption, he then recorded it as a fact in his diary.

“Dare to Live Dangerously!”: Goebbels’s Radicalism and Hitler’s Policy of “Legality”
1931.
On March 13, he records in the diary, “someone tried to kill me with a bomb.”

“Dare to Live Dangerously!”: Goebbels’s Radicalism and Hitler’s Policy of “Legality”
In all these disputes it became clear how small Goebbels’s power base within the Party actually was during this phase of the NSDAP’s rapid expansion into a mass movement. In Berlin he had to appear as a radical hothead in order to keep the SA on board, but this in turn created tensions around his attitude to the “legal” course chosen by the Party leader, upon whose support he was so highly dependent.

CHAPTER 7:
Kurt Tucholsky poem of 1928: “Due to bad weather, the revolution will be held indoors.”

“We’re Here to Stay!”: Taking Power
...the head office of the fascist leisure organization Dopolavoro, which impressed Goebbels very much: “We must do something like that. The people at leisure. Sport…"

CHAPTER 13:
The great majority of the public had grown used to manifesting their support for the regime—as was expected of them—in their everyday behavior. This happened, for example, through the officially encouraged “Heil Hitler!” greeting; the wearing of uniforms by a large part of the population, or at least the wearing of insignia to signal their support for the regime; the public display of flags at home; attendance at Party events and mass rallies; donations to street collectors; listening en masse to broadcasts in public squares; the gradual exclusion of Jews, labeled enemies of the state, from normal daily life; and many other ways.

“Taking Firm Control of the Inner Discipline of a People”: Propaganda and Manipulation of the Public Sphere
...let journalists know what areas were out of bounds for critical, or even just independent, reporting. There should never, for example (stated Point 1 on the list of guidelines), be any broad-brush description of “official ceremonial occasions”: This took Goebbels back to one of his favorite themes, the avoidance of “pomp” in the Third Reich. Another rule was that any controversial discussion of proposed legislation was incompatible with the idea of a “Führer state.” Likewise, to discuss the form of government was “intolerable.” When reporting political trials it was undesirable to “discuss in detail false assertions that are the subject of the trial.” One of Goebbels’s guidelines stated succinctly: “Today, the church question has been settled.” With regard to ecclesiastical affairs, in order to avoid confusion as well as adverse reactions from foreign propaganda, only reports from the German News Service should be used. And as far as the much-lamented monotony of the German press was concerned, Goebbels forbade any discussion of press uniformity outright.

...he characterized the attitude now taken by German journalists toward the Nazi regime as “neue Sachlichkeit.”

Goebbels: "We have removed the journalist from his humiliating and demeaning dependence on parties and business interests, thereby placing him in a position of honorable and loyal dependence on the state. For we see the freedom of Germans not in the opportunity to do or not do what one wants, but in the opportunity to integrate freely and responsibly into the higher laws and higher moral commandments of a state.”

...in his cultural address the dictator not only condemned the “vandals” of modern art but also spoke out against “backward-looking people” and their “old-world Teutonic art”—those of Rosenberg’s persuasion, in other words.

These examples show that in 1934–35 Goebbels was by no means the unconstrained sole master and expert helmsman of Germany’s culture and media he liked to claim he was: He had to share control and management
with others.

Goebbels called on the Gestapo to send six members of the cabaret casts who in the meantime had been arrested to a concentration camp for an initial stint of six weeks.

...the trial of five of the performers from the two theaters ended in October 1936 with an acquittal in all cases.

...directive prohibiting all authorities, organizations, and associations from giving the press any instructions or orders. Likewise, no one was entitled to exercise criticism of the press.

The law also introduced the classification of films by the state board of censors: The board was authorized to categorize films as “of political value to the state,” “artistic,” “educational,” or “culturally valuable,” thus exempting the films in question from the entertainment tax. Additionally, the Cinema Law provided for a “Reich film dramaturge” who—independently of the board of censors—was entitled to oversee all film projects at the planning and screenplay stages.

December 15, 1935, Goebbels gave another set-piece lecture at the Kroll Opera to “film creators.” Here he accepted in principle the justification for “entertainment films” but was critical of their “stupidity” and the “assembly- line production of those who followed the same formula.” Almost three years after the “seizure of power,” this was a fairly damning indictment of his own impact on filmmaking,

Among the amenities enjoyed there was a television set, installed in February 1935; the propaganda minister loved watching it with his family, although broadcasting was limited to a few hours and was still at the test stage.

“Never Tire!”: Foreign Policy Successes and Anti-Jewish Policies
In his capacity as head of propaganda for the Reich, Goebbels ordered that “between about 19 and 21 hours today, Tuesday, January 15, the population will spontaneously [sic] attend mass rallies to celebrate victory in the Saar.”

In his speech, broadcast to the nation, he described Christmas as a Christian festival but at the same time claimed it for National Socialism, which in the form of the “national community” had given the command to love your neighbor a “new and unexpected content” in the form of the national community.

“The Tougher the Better!”: The Olympic Year, 1936
It was not until the next day that Hitler and Göring informed him of the decision made the previous night, to which Goebbels pointedly attributed only minor significance in his diary entry: “So we’re getting a bit involved in Spain. Planes etc. Not obvious. Who knows what the point is.”

...placed a wreath on Horst Wessel’s grave

“The Most Important Factors in Our Modern Cultural Life”: Consolidating Nazi Cultural Policies
...lack of support for his “völkisch-Germanic” ambitions, Rosenberg’s mission to “spiritually educate” the whole Nazi movement carried little weight.

...on Goebbels’s initiative artists shown in the Munich “Decadence Exhibition” were branded as “degenerate” even though they were teaching at state art schools or were members of the Prussian Academy of Fine Art.

...in 1937 the Reich Chamber of Fine Art still had 156 Jewish members, mostly art dealers and art publicists.

Even by May 1943, he found himself stating with consternation that “the Reich Culture Chamber is not yet as de-jewified as I intended”; “a whole lot of quarter-Jews, even a few half-Jews, and numbers of Jewish-related are hanging around there.”

Hitler was “extremely” pleased with some photos showing Helga on the Obersalzberg: “Says that if Helga was 20 years older and he was 20 years younger, she would be the wife for him.”

“Don’t Look Around, Keep Marching On!”: The Firebrand as Peacemaker
...the appearance of the three million — a majority of Berlin’s population — was not exactly a display of spontaneous popular enthusiasm. On September 26, for example, there was an article in the Völkischer Beobachter peremptorily commanding “the working Berlin population” to attend the rally en masse. The guarantee of “en masse” participation was achieved—to mention only one detail of the nearly perfect planning for this event—by the German Labor Front. After work ended early, they made the staff fall in and marched them en masse to their allocated sector of the approach roads. It was not easy to escape: If you felt ill, for example, you had to request special permission to leave from the works organizer.

Goebbels: "If I don’t do everything myself, I’m pleased when things go wrong.”

Hitler’s interest in this conversation was far-reaching, as he confided to Goebbels: “We need a prince of the church if we want to break away from Rome. And we must do so. There must be no authority outside Germany
able to give orders to Germans.”

Goebbels: "What I’m doing is trying to incite you. Against any kind of sentimentality. The watchword is not the law but harassment. The Jews have got to get out of Berlin.”

“Maturity Is Only Achieved Through Suffering!”: Preparations for War—from the Munich Agreement to the Attack on Poland
Goebbels arranged with the War Ministry in 1937 that, should war break out, units from his ministry would be put in uniform and “embedded” with the Wehrmacht.

“Our Banners Lead Us On to Victory!”: Between the War in the West and the War in the East
...the dictator made it quite clear to his propaganda minister: “No invasion planned,” although propaganda should encourage fears of invasion by dropping hints “in order to confuse the enemy.”

Goebbels, who after his conversations with Hitler always conscientiously recorded all the Führer’s comments about his foreign policy and military plans, does not report anything in his 1940 diaries about concrete plans for an attack on the Soviet Union. Rather, Goebbels’s entries in his diary for August 1940 show that Hitler intentionally left him in the dark about his war plans.

“Our Banners Lead Us On to Victory!”: Between the War in the West and the War in the East
Some prominent films produced under the Nazis - The Rothschilds, Jud Süss, The Eternal Jew, Bismarck, Ohm Krüger (on which Goebbels himself worked), and Carl Peters, Goodbye, Franziska and Request Concert, I Accuse, Stukas, U-Boat Going Westwards, and The Lützow Squadron

“A Great, a Wonderful Time, in Which a New Reich Will Be Born”: The Attack on the Soviet Union
On August 14 an inter-ministerial conference took place in the Propaganda Ministry at which, among other things, this plan to visibly identify the Jews was discussed.

CHAPTER 23:
Rühmann film The Gasman
Meine Frau Theresa

March 6 Goebbels read a “detailed memorandum prepared by the SD and the police about the final solution of the Jewish question.

Der große König

“We Can See in Our Mind’s Eye a Happy People”: Offensives and Setbacks
Goebbels: "I have no desire to have a 22-year-old eastern Jew—the saboteurs of the anti-Soviet exhibition included types like that—putting a bullet in my guts. I prefer ten Jews in a concentration camp or under the earth than having one in freedom.”

His continuing attempts to eliminate any remnant of the German people’s admiration and respect for Russia and Soviet communism can also be seen as an obsessive attempt to kill off the last germ of this dangerous sickness in himself.

CHAPTER 25:
Hitler’s increasing physical frailty was a growing problem in terms of the deployment of the Führer for propaganda purposes. Thus Goebbels was obliged to note that Hitler “is very unwilling to appear in the weekly newsreels” and kept removing clips in which he was shown

In December 1942 a growing number of reports about the mass murder of Jews in German-occupied Europe began to appear in the international media. On December 17 the Allies published a statement about the systematic murder of the Jews by the Nazi regime;

For the Führer state to be maintained in the absence of the Führer was going to require extraordinary efforts.

Hitler’s public silence had created a vacuum, which the propaganda minister was now entering with a vengeance.

During the evening many people were saying that this meeting represented a sort of quiet coup. [...] Total war is now no longer a matter for a few perceptive men; it’s now supported by the whole nation.

...both were agreed on “what would threaten us all if we became weak in this war”; they had committed themselves so far in the “Jewish question” that “there is no possible chance of escape. And that’s a good thing.” For “experience shows that a movement and a nation which has burned its bridges fights with far fewer reservations than one that still has the possibility of withdrawal.”

“The Masses Have Become Somewhat Skeptical or...Are in the Grip of a Permanent State of Hopelessness”: Crisis as a Permanent State
When they devised the plan for the total destruction of the German people, they were signing their own death warrant.

Horthy’s soft attitude had strengthened Hitler in his view that “the junk of small states which still exists in Europe must be liquidated as quickly as possible.”

The deep depression among the population that Goebbels detected at the end of May had to a significant extent been caused by the excessive use of anti-Semitism.

“I Have No Idea What the Führer’s Going to Do in the End”: The Search for a Way Out
During 1944, apart from his addresses on January 30 and after the July 20 assassination attempt, Hitler made no speeches that were broadcast and did not speak at any major events.

Goebbels’s summary of Hitler’s comments. “Anyone who says A must say B, and now that the Hungarians have begun implementing our Jewish policy they can no longer back out of it. After a certain point the Jewis

While hitherto German propaganda had put forward the thesis that “the Jews,” either as plutocrats or as communists, were the “glue” holding the enemy coalition together (an assertion that Goebbels frequently made both in public and in private), now, in view of the threat of military defeat, it was necessary to emphasize the contradictions within the enemy camp.

...actual instances of vigilantism committed against pilots, he hoped to make an impact in the enemy countries.

“Virtually a Wartime Dictatorship on the Home Front”: Between an Apocalyptic Mood and Total War
There were further trials in the People’s Court lasting until April 1945 with more than 150 people accused of participating in the conspiracy, of whom over a hundred were sentenced to death and hanged.

“But When Will There Be Some Action?”: Downfall
He was also unsuccessful in gaining acceptance for his idea of a Military Auxiliaries Law subjecting all women under thirty to military conscription and thereby recruiting two hundred thousand women as “military auxiliaries.” It was blocked by Bormann and Himmler.

Conclusion
...while the propaganda that was now preparing the German population for a confrontation with Poland justified the use of military means, it also led to this war, which allegedly had been forced on Germany, being seen as an exceptional situation. The result was that after its rapid conclusion the vast majority of the population wanted to return to peacetime conditions.

Bettina Stangneth, "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" (2014)

Subtitle: "The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer."

Stangneth offers a close, meticulous, and exhaustive analysis of texts produced by Adolf Eichmann between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, when he was captured in Argentina and taken to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. Her book is not for the casual reader. For those with some knowledge of the period, of World War II, of the Holocaust, or of the post-war hunt for Nazis, Stangneth has produced a wealth of knowledge.

Eichmann before Jerusalem holds several critical aspects. Firstly, Stangneth unearths the murky history of documents produced by Eichmann and some of his acquaintances in Argentina. Often referred to as the Sassen papers, these transcripts of audio recordings shed light on Eichmann's post-war thinking, his perceptions of the Nazi era, world politics during the 1950s, and his own culpability in what most would view as horrific crimes. In itself, her explorations of these texts and their history could serve as a single book.

The second value of this text is its exposure of how little Eichmann and other (former?) Nazis did to try to hide themselves. Given the gravity of their crimes, the thin veneer of changed identity these men engaged in, and that many of their friends and family were aware of, is shocking.

Finally, with the abundance of textual resources Stangneth has marshalled, she offers a fascinating psychological profile of Eichmann, revealing how his ideas change over time, how he represented them differently depending on his audience, and particularly how his testimony at his war crimes trial did not correspond with testimony he had recorded previously from in hiding.

I had produced digital extensive notes from the book, and tragically the file was lost. I may someday try to revisit the book and recreate some of these notes. Until then, I can say that this book is very fine history writing, although it is likely a bit of a laborious read for even those interested in the topic. The closest comparison I can make is Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction, which I commented on in 2010.

The NY Times ran a fair review of the book, written by Steven Aschheim.

Christopher Nuttall, "The Invasion of 1950" (2013)

Just finished this self-published alt-history (allohistorical) work...

I heartily enjoyed it; worth the time, although it could use some editing. I did approach it, however, as pure escapist entertainment and not alternative history grounded in plausible variation of historical facts. More comments soon.

In the interim, travel over to the author's blog for more info.

Roy Porter, "Madness: A Brief History" (2002)

This short but pithy and informative book is an excellent read.

This similarly short and to-the-point review from Medical History will suffice to whet your appetite.

Comments and references that caught my attention:
- 32/33: “John Locke wrote to insist upon The Reasonableness of Christianity (1694): even religion now had to be rational. This pathologization of religious madness led Enlightenment free-thinkers to pathologize religiosity at large. In effect, this was also, much later, Freud’s position. God was an illusion, faith ‘wish-fulfilment’, and belief, though all too real, was a mental projection satisfying neurotic needs, to be explained in terms of the sublimation of suppressed sexuality or of the death wish. In reducing religion to psychopathology, Freud was echoing the more biting of the philosophes, like Voltaire and Diderot, who adjudged Christian beliefs the morbid secretion of sick brains. These days, while the Churches continue to accept, in principle, the reality of visions, spirit possession, and exorcism, they are profoundly suspicious of credulity and deception. The Roman Catholic or Anglican who claims to be assailed by the Devil has become an embarrassment. His priest may try to persuade him that such doctrines are merely metaphorical; and, if he persists, he may be urged to see a psychotherapist.”

- 89: “Foucault claimed that the great confinement essentially involved the sequestration of the mad poor by supporters of the bourgeois work ethic, and in his Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry (1981) Klaus Doerner followed suit. But there is little trace of organized labour in early asylums—indeed, critics accused them of being dens of idleness. And enterprising madhouse proprietors naturally sought rich and genteel patients, who would not be expected to work.”

- 93/94: “The decades around 1800 brought surging faith in the efficacy of personal treatment in sheltered asylum environments. In England, such doctors as Thomas Arnold, Joseph Mason Cox, and Francis Willis (called in to treat George III in 1788) followed Battie’s watchword that ‘management did more than medicine’ and pioneered a ‘moral management’ through which the experienced therapist would outwit the deluded psyche of his patient.”

- 94: “Shortly afterwards, the York Retreat developed ‘moral therapy’, with its emphasis upon community life in a domestic environment designed to recondition behaviour. The York Asylum, a charitable institution, had become bemired in scandal. By way of a counterinitiative, the local Quaker community, led by a tea merchant, William Tuke, established an alternative, the Retreat, opened in 1796. It was modelled on the ideal of bourgeois family life, and restraint was minimized. Patients and staff lived, worked, and dined together in an environment where recovery was encouraged through praise and blame, rewards and punishment, the goal being the restoration of self-control.”

- 98/99: “Criticism thus led not to the abolition of the madhouse, but to its rebirth, and institutionalization was transformed from a hand-to-mouth expedient into a positive ideal. In France the reforms of Pinel and the new legal requirements of the Napoleonic Code were further codified in the key statute of 1838. This formally required each departement either to establish public asylums, or to ensure the provision of adequate facilities. It guarded against improper confinement by establishing rules for the certification of lunatics by medical officers—though for paupers a prefect’s signature remained sufficient. Prefects were also given powers to inspect. Similar legislation was passed in Belgium twelve years later.
A comparable reform programme was put through in England, despite opposition from vested medical interests. Scandals revealing the improper confinement of the sane had already led to the Madhouses Act of 1774. Under its provisions, private madhouses had to be licensed annually by magistrates; a maximum size for each asylum was established; renewal of licences would depend upon satisfactory maintenance of admissions registers. Magistrates were empowered to carry out visitations (in London the inspecting body was a committee of the Royal College of Physicians). Most importantly, certification was instituted. Henceforth, although paupers could continue to be confined by magistrates, for all others a letter from a medical practitioner would be required to make confinement lawful. Further reforms followed. The 1774 legislation was strengthened in a series of Acts passed from 1828, above all establishing the Commissioners in Lunacy, first for the metropolis and then for the whole country. The Commissioners constituted a permanent body of inspectors (made up of doctors and lawyers) empowered to prosecute unlawful practices and to deny renewal of licences. They also took it upon themselves to improve and standardize care and treatment. The Commission ensured eradication of the worst abuses, for example, by requiring that all cases of the use of restraint should be documented. Safeguards against improper confinement were extended. Under an influential consolidating Act of 1890, two medical certificates were required for the detention of all patients.”

- 100: “Similar developments occurred in the United States, where the asylum arrived in the nineteenth century. The success of the York Retreat was the impulse behind the Frankford Asylum in Pennsylvania (1817), the Friends’ Asylum near Philadelphia (1817), the McClean Hospital in Boston (1818), the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York (1821), and the Hartford Retreat in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1824. Most early American asylums combined private (paying) and public (charity) patients. As in France, the early asylum era in America was spearheaded by physicians specializing in mental disorders, notably Samuel B. Woodward at the Worcester State Hospital and Pliny Earle of the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York, both of whom integrated medical and moral therapies in a climate of Pinelian therapeutic optimism. They were among the thirteen originators of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, established in 1844—it later became the American Psychiatric Association.”

- 101/102: “Throughout Europe, it was the nineteenth century which brought a skyrocketing in the number and scale of mental hospitals. In England, patient numbers climbed from perhaps 10,000 in 1800 to ten times that number in 1900. The jump in numbers was especially marked in new nation states. In Italy, no more than 8,000 had been confined as late as 1881; by 1907 that had soared to 40,000. Such increases are not hard to explain. Positivistic, bureaucratic, utilitarian, and professional mentalities vested great faith in institutional solutions in general— indeed quite literally in bricks and mortar. Schools, workhouses, prisons, hospitals, and asylums—would these not contain and solve the social problems spawned by demographic change, urbanization, and industrialization?”

- 103/104: “In England ‘non-restraint’ was introduced in the 1830s, by Robert Gardiner Hill at the Lincoln Asylum and independently John Conolly at the new Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum at Hanwell on London’s western outskirts. Taking moral therapy to its logical conclusion, Hill and Conolly renounced all forms of mechanical coercion whatsoever: not just irons and manacles but fabric cuffs and straitjackets too. These would be replaced by surveillance under ample trained attendants and a regime of labour, which would stimulate the mind and discipline the body.”

- 105: “…absolute non-restraint was seen by Continental reformers as a quixotically English idée fixe, a foible of doctrinaire liberalism, and it was little imitated. But French and German reformers made resourceful use of the asylum environment in their own ways. Work therapy was widely favoured. Planted in the countryside, the asylum typically became a self-sufficient colony, with its own farms, laundries, and workshops, partly for reasons of economy, partly to implement cures through labour. In France balneological treatments became a key feature of ‘asylum science’ (police intérieure). In Germany, C. F. W. Roller spelt out detailed directives for such matters as non-slip, smell-proof flooring, good drains, apparel, diet, and exercise at the influential Illenau asylum in Baden, where music and movement therapies were also pioneered. Everywhere, the care and cure of the mad became the subjects of the new ‘science’ of asylum management, spread by professional organs such as the significantly named Asylum Journal.”

- 139: “To some extent, psychiatrists were victims of their own propaganda. They had insisted that many of the aberrant and antisocial behaviours traditionally labelled vice, sin, and crime were actually mental disorders in need of the doctor and the asylum. As a result, magistrates deflected difficult cases from the workhouse or jail, but superintendents then discovered to their dismay and cost that rehabilitation posed more problems than anticipated. Furthermore, the senile and the demented, along with epileptics, paralytics, sufferers from tertiary syphilis (GPI), and other degenerative neurological disorders were increasingly shepherded through the asylum gates. For all such conditions, the prognosis was gloomy, and the asylum became a dustbin for hopeless cases.”

- 156: “Pinel’s favourite follower was Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840), whose Mental Maladies (1838) was the outstanding psychiatric text of his age. While asserting the ultimately organic nature of psychiatric disorders, Esquirol concentrated, like his mentor, on their psycho-social triggers. The diagnosis of ‘monomania’ was developed to describe a partial insanity identified with affective disorders, especially those involving paranoia, and he further delineated such conditions as kleptomania, nymphomania, and pyro-mania, detectable in advance only to the trained eye. A champion of the asylum as a therapeutic instrument, he became an authority on its design, and planned the National Asylum at Charenton, a suburb of Paris, of which he was appointed director. (It briefly housed the ageing Marquis de Sade.)”

- 156/7: “…the condition known as general paresis of the insane (one manifestation of tertiary syphilis) was elucidated in 1822 by Antoine Laurent Bayle. Although the micro-organism which causes syphilis had not yet been discovered—the bacteriological era lay ahead— the neurological and psychological features of GPI (notably euphoria and expansiveness), combined with the organic changes revealed by autopsy, supported Esquirol’s conviction that psychiatric disorders could be revealed using the techniques championed by such great French pathological anatomists as Laennec who had investigated tuberculosis and other internal conditions. Closely related to GPI, tabes dorsalis was another disorder, prevalent in the nineteenth century, which became the focus of neuro-pathological research. It was the subject of a masterly clinical study published in 1858 by Guillaume Duchenne, which established its syphilitic origin: so definitive was his account that it was soon named ‘Duchenne’s disease’. He was also at the forefront in describing many other neurological disorders involving personality degeneration, including progressive muscular atrophy and locomotor ataxia (lack of coordination in movement).”

- 177: “in the new world, where George M. Beard (1839-83) popularized the concept of ‘neurasthenia’, nervous breakdown produced by the frantic pressures of advanced civilization, which drained the individual’s reserves of ‘nerve force’. ‘American nervousness is the product of American civilization’ , he pronounced with mingled pride and regret. Neurasthenia’s prevalence in the modern era was no mystery, held Beard: the telegraph, railroad, press, and the market-driven rat race of Wall Street had rendered life insupportably hectic, intense, and stressful. Civilization made demands on nervous systems that nature had never anticipated. As with the eighteenth-century ‘English malady’, neurasthenia struck the elite and flagged up civilization and its discontents. Beard’s ideas were given a practical twist by Silas Weir Mitchell, who introduced the ‘Weir Mitchell treatment’—bed rest, strict isolation, fattening up with milk puddings, and passive massage—to counter such fatiguing tendencies amongst the neurasthenic.”

- 181: “The insanity plea became controversial in Britain when the trial in 1843 of Daniel M’Naghten for the murder of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s private secretary was stopped on the grounds of insanity. The resulting furore led to new guidelines being drawn up, by the House of Lords, to clarify the legal basis for criminal insanity. The M’Naghten Rules (1844) grounded the insanity defence in the defendant’s inability to distinguish right from wrong. This pre-empted the claim advanced by post-Esquirolian psychiatrists that the grounds should be ‘irresistible impulse’, that is, disorders of emotion and volition, independently of delusions of the understanding. In France by contrast, ‘irresistible impulse’ and partial and temporary insanity figured large in the plea of insanity and crime passionelle. Disputes over the insanity defence (who was bad? who was mad?) highlighted conflicts between legal and psychiatric models of the person, and left the public standing of psychiatry dubious.”

- 182: “Mental illness, Hunter and Macalpine believed, was not psychogenic. Hence the utterances of the insane were but cries of distress—and not necessarily even good clues to its nature. You don’t crack mental illness by decoding what the mad say: for, they held, mental disease had a biological base. Powerful psychiatric currents have furthered such tendencies to silence the insane, especially in institutional environments.”

- 183: “…did not the methods of the natural sciences prescribe observation and objectivity, not interaction and interpretation? The noisiest patients were shunted off into the back wards, and all too often those who were shut up were, indeed, ‘shut up’—or at least nobody attended to what they were uttering, there being less communication than excommunication.”

- 215: “The course of psychiatric illness, he insisted, offered the best clue to its nature, rather than, as in common practice, the raft of symptoms the patient showed at a particular moment. On this basis, Kraepelin wrought a great innovation in disease concepts and classification. Amalgamating Morel’s demence precoce with the notion of hebephrenia (psychosis in the young, marked by regressive behaviour) developed by Karl Kahlbaum and his pupil Ewald Hecker, he launched the model of a degenerative condition which he named dementia praecox, to be decisively distinguished from manic-depressive psychoses (Falret’s ‘circular insanity’). The archetypal dementia praecox sufferer as pictured by Kraepelin on the basis of meticulous clinical experience might be astute and clever, but he seemed to have forsaken his humanity, abandoned all desire to participate in society, and withdrawn into a solipsistic world of his own, perhaps mute, violent, and paranoid. Kraepelin routinely used phrases like ‘atrophy of the emotions’ and ‘vitiation of the will’ to convey the sense that they were moral perverts, psychopaths, almost a species apart. As the precursor to schizophrenia, Kraepelin’s dementia praecox has left an indelible mark on modern psychiatry.”

- 242: “Invasive treatments equally reflect the powerlessness of patients in the face of arrogant and reckless doctors, and the ease with which they became experimental fodder. In a now notorious experiment, hundreds of black mental patients at the Tuskeegee Asylum in Alabama were guinea pigs without their knowledge or consent in an experiment to test longterm responses to syphilis, a minor echo of the atrocities committed by Nazi psychiatrists.”

- 272: “The growing centrality of women to psychiatry over the last couple of centuries is superbly handled in Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986)…”

- 272: “Andrew Scull, Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1979)—this has appeared in revised form as The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700—1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993)”

- 276: “Leonard D. Smith, Cure, Comfort and Safe Custody: Public Lunatic Asylums in Early Nineteenth-Century England (London: Cassell, 1999)”

- 279: “Extracts from nineteenth-century English psychiatric texts may be found in Vieda Skultans, Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).”

- 279: “Autobiographical writings of ‘mad’ people have been anthologized and surveyed in Dale Peterson (ed.), A Mad People’s History of Madness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); Michael Glenn (ed.), Voices from the Asylum (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Allan Ingram, Voices of Madness: Four Pamphlets, 16831796 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997) and Roy Porter (ed.), The Faber Book of Madness (London: Faber, 1991; paperback 1993). Some attempt at reproducing their ‘view’ is offered in Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).”

Timur Vermes, "Look Who's Back" (2012)

This is likely one of the most clever, amusing, intriguing and generally enjoyable fiction books I have read in a long time.

Essentially, the premise is that Adolf Hitler awakens with a pounding headache in a Berlin vacant lot in 2011. He has no memory of what has transpired since April 1945, with his last memory of that time being the act of showing Eva Braun his antique pistol. The rest of the story is simply too good to spoil. Vermes combines a singular wit, trenchant political commentary, and thought-provoking representation of how Hitler might understand the contemporary political world (both within Germany, as well as beyond).

Some snippets that I found particularly enjoyable (pagination is from my digital version):
37: “…in the last sixty-six years the number of Soviet soldiers on the territory of the German Reich had fallen substantially, particularly in the Greater Berlin area. The current figure was between thirty and fifty men; in a flash I could see that this afforded the Wehrmacht a far better prospect of victory compared to the last estimate from my general staff of around 2.5 million enemy soldiers on the Eastern Front alone.”

41: “We all know, of course, what to make of our newspapers. The deaf man writes down what the blind man has told him, the village idiot edits it, and their colleagues in the other press houses copy it. Each story is doused afresh with the same stagnant infusion of lies, so that the “splendid” brew can then be served up to a clueless Volk. In this instance, however, I was prepared to be somewhat lenient. So rarely does Fate intervene this strikingly in its own workings that even the smartest minds must find it difficult to comprehend, let alone the mediocre intellects serving our so-called opinion sheets. My brain required the stomach of an ox to digest the other information I managed to unearth.”

48: “What irony: yesterday I was repositioning the 12th Army; today it was magazine racks.”

194: “the so-called reunification of Germany into his expansive lap. I have to concede that this supposed “reunification” was one of the few first-rate lies propagated by the republic. For how could they call it a proper reunification when essential components – such as the aforementioned Silesia granted to Poland, as well as Alsace-Lorraine or Austria – were missing?”

378: “That’s pure gold!” Madame Bellini said when, heavy-hearted, I showed her the report on the “National Democrats” alongside others we had filmed.”

540: “the telephone has to be a telephone, a calendar, a camera and everything else besides. This is dangerous nonsense, the only possible consequence of which is that thousands of our young people will be mown down on the roads because they cannot stop staring into their screens. One of my first undertakings will be to outlaw such telephone devices or allow them only for those inferior racial elements remaining in our society – for the latter I may even make them compulsory. Then they will litter the main thoroughfares of Berlin like squashed hedgehogs.”

541: “Christmas decorations have become more tasteful with the passing of the years. A most disagreeable industrialisation has taken hold. I am not concerned about whether something is kitsch or not, for every example of kitsch harbours a residue of the feelings of the simple man, and since that is the case there will always be the possibility of a development towards real art. No, what really bothers me is that the importance of Father Christmas has grown disproportionally, doubtlessly as a result of Anglo-American cultural infiltration.”

547: “He has also devised a new electoral slogan. It will be plastered at the bottom of all the placards, giving them a common thread. The slogan addresses old virtues, old doubts, and for good measure has a humorous, conciliatory element to win over those pirate voters and other young people. The slogan reads: “It wasn’t all bad.”

Peter Tsouras, "Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History" (2013)

Comments coming....

Deborah Lipstadt, "History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier" (2005)

This book details Lipstadt's court battle to prove that her assertion that author David Irving had engaged in a long-standing effort to falsify history: selectively using and misrepresenting documents to cast Adolf Hitler in a favourable light, as well as denying the very existence of an intentional, widespread, systematic, and state-sanctioned effort to slaughter Europe's Jewish population.

The case stemmed from claims Lipstadt made in her 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, wherein she discussed Irving's work as well as the efforts of other 'deniers'. (See my discussion of the book here). Three years later, Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin, for libel (stemming from the statements in her book). According to British law, the onus was placed on the defendants to prove that their assertions could be supported by evidence.

Working with an impressive team of scholars and legal minds, arrayed against Irving's rather lacklustre and self-managed representation, Lipstadt and Penguin without a doubt brought Irving low. He was publicly shown to work less as a historian than an ideologue, calling into question the integrity of the entirety of his oeuvre. The revelation of his sloppy, highly biased, and clearly flawed use of documentary sources and other archival materials effectively ended his career as a historian. Banned from entering multiple countries, considered persona non grata by respectable publishers, and saddled with a significant financial burden after losing the case, Irving is unlikely to ever widely enter public consciousness other than as a sad, deluded figure.

As a result of the trial, and her unwillingness to compromise or back down from defending her observations, Lipstadt has become a far more widely known scholar and commentator on 20th-century Jewish history, particularly as it relates to the Nazi regime.

Her book is more narrative of the experiences of the trial, and exploration of some of the choices made in her legal team's efforts. In this regard, it is compelling and informative reading. For readers seeking a closer analysis of Irving's work, however, better sources are available, such as the expert analysis of Irving's work carried out for the trial by Richard Evans, Hajo Funke, and Robert Jan van Pelt. (Electronic editions of these can all be found at the Holocaust Denial on Trial website). Trial transcripts can be found at the same site.

I discuss Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, here.
I also discuss her 2011 book, The Eichmann Trial, here.
I discuss Irving's 1996 biography of Josef Goebbels here.

Norman Finkelstein, "The Holocaust Industry" (2000, rev. 2003)

Subtitle: "Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering".

The book is essentially three essays ('Capitalizing The Holocaust', 'Hoaxers, Hucksters and History', and 'The Double Shakedown'), each arguing - with significant reference to media articles, legal activity, and some archival research - how a cadre of Zionists have co-opted the tragedy of the genocide carried out by Nazis during World War II to privilege Israeli political and economic interests, as well as Zionist advocacy groups outside of Israel.

Given the topic, and more so Finkelstein's position, the book is very, very controversial, and I expect it would prove challenging to pretty well any reader. I know that I am hesitant to even write a summary regarding the book, for fear sloppy language or thinking might make me appear to have some kind of hatred that I do not. The book has been characterized as an anti-Semitic attack (by someone whose mother died in the Nazi genocide, as Finkelstein informs his readers).

I will note a few (related) aspects that I found intriguing:

1) Finkelstein notes the tension, and in some respects competition, that has taken place over the definition (historicizing and politicizing) of the genocide carried out by the Nazis as a set of events. He notes that a cadre of Jews has worked to marginalize the importance of non-Jewish victims, or at the least to point to the necessity of understand Jews' experience of the genocide as the lens through which all other victims' experiences must be viewed.

2) He proposes that this cadre of Jews undertook a re-historicization and political/economic functionalization of the Nazi genocide in large part as a response to the period of military conflicts involving Israel that lasted from the late 1960s through the early 1970s.

3) Finkelstein spends much of the third chapter examining various claims for compensation, as well as 'repatriation' or return of funds and other goods held in several nations' banking systems (particularly Dutch and Swiss banks). He notes US support for investigation of Swiss banks (and the US calls for quick and willing restitution to be made to victims). He raises the disquieting point that if this is the US position, why has it quashed efforts to compensate descendants of slaves, and flattened demands to seek repatriation and return of money and other goods to victims of the Nazi genocide who had deposited their wealth in US banks? As Finkelstein notes, the US was one of the top three recipient countries of financial resources being exported by Jews from the Third Reich.

4) In his revised edition (I'm not sure about the original), Finkelstein occasionally indulges in some unhelpful, annoying and provocative personal attacks and less than professional use of language. In these portions, the book crosses from polemic to screed. Perhaps his indulgence is a product of the deep hostility that Finkelstein's work generated, but it does nothing to reinforce the sense of objective and informed scholarship. This is unfortunate, and helps to lend support to the idea that there might be more to Finkelstein's attacks than a pure desire to correct our understanding of how the world works.

5) Finkelstein is a graduate of Princeton, was being considered for tenure at DePaul University in 2007, and has published widely on the Israel/Palestine conflict (nine books).

Heike B. Görtemaker, "Life With Hitler" (2011)

This is a fascinating biography of Eva Braun, the woman who for over a decade was Hitler's closest female confidante, if not his mistress.

Görtemaker takes on an aspect of the Nazi regime that has rarely been investigated: given Hitler's (and the majority of the Nazi hierarchy's) stance on the proper comportment and role of women in the regime, how was it that Hitler (and his entourage) maintained his relationship with a single young woman who never bore children, who smoked and drank, and who seems in many respects, the exact opposite of the ideal Aryan woman?

Görtemaker is treading on territory where she has few peers. There have been only three biographies written about Braun. This one is exceptional. The author's investigations being vexed by the glaring holes in archival resources. Many letters and other documents produced by Braun and Hitler have disappeared or been intentionally destroyed. Nonetheless, she is careful to assess shortcomings in the existing evidence (primarily testimony provided by members of Hitler's entourage and Braun's family members), which usually leaves her pointing out that more questions than answers exist about Braun and Hitler's life together.

The book features an exceptional array of rarely seen photographs, both of Braun within her own circle, as well as within Hitler's. A quite different vision of the 'Fuhrer' emerges here, less iconographic and more casual: Hitler and friends at the opera, lounging over lunch, etc.

More to follow...

Anne Applebaum, "Iron Curtain" (2013)

The subtitle for this book is: "The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956."

Applebaum is the author of the critically-acclaimed Gulag, and the spouse of Poland's Foreign Minister.

Applebaum's scholarship is impressive. She has mined a voluminous and multi-language body of archival material that has only become available in the last few decades. She has also, apparently, conducted interviews with an abundance of former Communist Party workers, members of the Communist youth associations, etc. She manages to tell a compelling story clearly, making the relationships between the Central/East European countries and their overseers in the Soviet Union clear.

Essentially, Applebaum divides the Soviet era into two periods, that running from 1944 through to 1949 (the consolidation of Soviet power), and the period of 1949 to 1956 (the period she describes as "High Stalinism", as well as the immediate aftermath of Stalin's reign).

Notes of relevance to possibly no one but me (page numbers correspond to my digital edition):
p. 193 – “In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke wrote admiringly of the ‘little platoons,’ the small social organizations from which, he believed, public spirit arose (and which he thought were threatened by the French Revolution). In the nineteenth century, Alexander de Tocqueville wrote equally enthusiastically of the ‘associations’ that ‘Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form.’ He concluded that they helped ward off dictatorship: ‘If men are to be remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve.’

p. 406 - Jakub Berman was both culture minister, as well as head of secret police. Noted from Toranska, Oni: Stalin’s Polish Puppets. 1988.

p. 516 – Noting that some Poles actually sought to bring their factories closer to Marxist-oriented worker-management, Applebaum quotes Hungarian intellectual Eörsi: “That is the common trap of all quasi-revolutionary systems: the people begin to take seriously the real message of the officially declared ideology and the nationalized heroes of the system.” (From: page 110. Hegedus, “The Petofi Circle…” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 113,2, pp. 108-122.

Deborah Lipstadt, "The Eichmann Trial" (2011)

In progress.

The New Republic offers an excellent assessment of the book.

You can also watch/listen to Lipstadt discuss the book, in a half-hour talk at University of South Florida, delivered in February 2012.

Additionally, see my discussion of Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993).

Stephen McGinty, "Camp Z: The Secret Life of Rudolf Hess" (2011)

McGinty's record of Hess' time imprisoned in the United Kingdom, primarily at Mychett House outside London, records a sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical dance between a mysterious Nazi leader and his British guards, doctors, and interrogators.

More to come...

The Daily Mail provided a pretty solid summary, without much critical commentary.

Patrick Coffey, "American Arsenal: A Century of Waging War" (2013)

The Los Angeles Review of Books offers an excellent review of Coffey's text.

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Case of Wagner" (1888). Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici (1911).

Nietzsche essentially recognizes Wagner's skill at evocative, indulgent histrionics. This is, however, a skill that Nietzsche sees as indicative of a weak and unmanly approach to art.

Notes of interest to possibly no one else but me (page numbers correspond to my digital edition):
- “And let it be said en passant that if Wagner’s theory was ‘drama is the object, music is only a means’ – his practice was from beginning to end ‘the attitude is the end, drama and even music can never be anything else than means.” p. 47
- “In the theatre, no one brings the finest senses of his art with him, and least of all the artist who works for the theatre, - for here loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not suffer a witness… In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron, idiot – Wagnerite: there, the most personal conscience is bound to submit to the leveling charm of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules, there one becomes a neighbour.” P. 47/48
- “In the solemn, or fiery, swinging movement, first slow and then quick, of old music – one had to do something quite different; one had to dance. The measure which was required for this and the control of certain balanced degrees of time and energy, forced the soul of the listener to continual sobriety of thought. – Upon the counterplay of the cooler currents of air which came from this sobriety, and from the warmer breath of enthusiasm, the charm of all good music rested – Richard Wagner wanted another kind of movement, - he overthrew the physiological first principle of all music before his time. It was no longer a matter of walking or dancing, - we must swim, we must hover…” p. 48
- “…there are two kinds of sufferers: - those that suffer from overflowing vitality, who need Dionysian art and require a tragic insight into, and a tragic outlook upon, the phenomenon life, - and there are those who suffer from reduced vitality, and who crave for repose, quietness, calm seas, or else the intoxication, the spasm, the bewilderment which art and philosophy provide.” p. 51
- “I began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek, and also the Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean, and who, with his belief that ‘faith saves,’ carries the principle of Hedonism as far as possible – far beyond all intellectural honesty…” p. 51

Anna Bramwell, "Blood and Soil: Walther Darre & Hitler's 'Green Party'" (1985)

This book is certainly challenging, in that it presents both a significant 'rewriting' of the history of Nazi Germany, an intensive analysis of ideological clashes within German National Socialism, and a troubling apparent sympathy for some aspects of that movement.

Bramwell offers two core theses:
1) Walther Darre was found guilty of war crimes that he should not have been.
2) Echoes of Darre’s philosophies can be found in contemporary Europe, if not globally, thus suggesting that they cannot be regarded as intrinsic to fascistic/national socialist ideology.

Bramwell explores the evolution of Darre’s thought through his pre-Nazi era writings, the policies and pronouncements of the Nazi era, as well as his post-Nazi writing. She notes that Darre’s anti-semitism, given the absence of this position in his pre-Nazi writing, may have been adopted merely as a pragmatic attempt to curry favour with powerful anti-semitic Nazis such as Hitler. She spends a significant amount of effort exploring Darre’s interests in the peasantry, and how his aims for preserving and strengthening Germany’s peasant class did not include the claiming of substantial new lebensraum in the East, nor the use of a vast number of non-German forced labourers for the purposes of maintaining or increasing agricultural output.


You can read it for yourself, if you go to:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/155137318/Bramwell-Anna-Blood-and-Soil-Richard-Walther-Darre-and-Hitler’s-‘Green-Party’

David Irving, "Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich" (1996)

Irving is, and this is a generous assessment, one of the most controversial aspirants to the title of 'historian' to address the Second World War era. He has been described as a 'revisionist', and a 'denier'. His work appears, at first glance, as impressive; full of lengthy citations of archival and interview sources, criticism of scholarly work, and distinctions that to a casual reader seem to suggest an encyclopedic knowledge of relevant material. As Irving's increasingly erratic and extreme pronouncements indicate a wilder and ever-more problematic approach to history, politics, and professionalism, however, most of his writing has come under criticism. Despite the appearance of meeting scholarly standards, many of his books have been revealed as poorly-founded revisions of commonly accepted and better researched work. Having found Irving's Hitler's War an entertaining read as a teenager, and discovering that Irving had made 'author-approved' versions of many of his works available freely online, I decided that they might merit a new assessment from a more critical perspective.

Irving finished his draft of Goebbels in September of 1994, and duly submitted it to St. Martin's Press for review. While the Press made revisions, and did not offer the book for sale in North America, Irving offered the original to readers for free via his website.

There is a short assessment in the Kirkus Review that rings pretty true. If you can't be bothered to follow the link, the review can be summarized as calling the book, "ponderous, tedious, and scurrilously misleading."

The same year that Goebbels was published, Irving lodged a libel suit in the United Kingdom against Deborah Lipstadt, a United States university professor and author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (1993). As part of the evidence in the Irving v Lipstadt case, Richard Evans offered an assessment of Irving's manipulation of historical records.


All of this being said, a few themes emerged from my reading of Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (that at over 900 pages - could easily be argued is too long for its own good). I list them below:

1) Irving's sometimes subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) anti-semitism.
For instance, on pg. 195, Irving offers the rather florid sentence: "The government’s Shylocks were determined to eviscerate him now… The hundred pound Dr. Goebbels was equally determined to keep his flesh intact.” Of course, this allusion to the 'vengeful Jew' in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice plays on a common anti-semitic stereotype while symbolically equating the level of risk Goebbel faced to physical death.

2) Goebbels was a virulent anti-semite who pushed Hitler further than Hitler would have gone on his own
Several times during the book, Irving notes that Goebbels was either pleading with Hitler to take a stronger anti-semitic stance, or that Goebbels was - through independent decisions - compelling stronger actions against Jews from Hitler. This is not a position that Irving attempts to hide. Describing the situation in 1934, on pg. 376, Irving bluntly states, "For the next nine years, Goebbels was the motor, goading his reluctant Fuhrer into ever more radical actions against the Jews.” Similarly, on pg. 656, Irving opines, "For Goebbels there were two problems. Neither the broad German public nor their Fuhrer shared his satanic antisemitism.” Additionally, on pg. 693, Irving suggests, "Hitler told Hans Lammers categorically that he wanted the solution of the Jewish problem postponed until after the war was over—a ruling that re-markably few historians now seem disposed to quote." Ironically, Irving includes the following in the footnote appended to the preceding sentence: "At about the same time [Goebbels] noted [in his diary] that Hitler was relentless on the Jewish question: ‘The Jews must get out of Europe, if necessary by applying the most brutal means.'"

In somewhat more subtle terms, on pg. 369, Irving writes, "[Hitler listens to]… Goebbel’s litanies against their turbulent priests and their arrogant Jews. Hitler finds it hard to get worked up about the Jews, now that he is in power.” With regard to the pogroms of Kristallnacht, Irving suggests Goebbels acted independently of Hitler's directions in bringing about violent anti-semitic actions, "It is plain that [JG] had consulted neither the party’s gauleiters nor the S.A. chief of staff before issuing these instructions.”

Irving has difficulty incorporating some historical realities into his version of history, however. He includes, but seems to miss the obvious contradiction to his claims that statements such as the following pose: "…the Reichstag that September 1936 passed a set of laws circumscribing the rights of Jews and half-Jews in Germany. Goebbels took no part in their drafting…” (pg. 376). If in fall 1936 the Reichstag was passing laws limiting the rights of Jews and those the Nazi regime identified as 'half-Jews', it would suggest that these laws were passed with Hitler's implicit support or at least lack of objection, and that Goebbels could not be identified as a solitary, driven, or exceptional anti-semitic leader within the regime.

3) Practical need dictated ant-semitic actions
While discussion of the early struggles of the Nazi Party is filled with fulminations against what Irving characterizes as the 'dirty tricks' of the Communist and Social Democratic opposition parties, he suggests that the Party's anti-semitism was grounded in the reality of a German society dominated for the worse by Jews (in terms of dominant ownership of key industries, wealth-holding, and occupation of government offices and the judiciary). Once the Party's anti-semitic policies had eliminated the possibility of Jews being able to meaningfully participate in German society, of course, a new threat could be rationalized, that of rebellion by the marginalized, disenfranchised, and victimized. As Irving indicates on pg. 706, "...Goebbels dictated that he saw a major danger in having forty thousand Jews ‘with nothing more to lose’ running loose in the Reich capital.”

4) Offering subtle counter-narratives to cremation as evidence of mass executions
Likely recognizing that his work would be under scrutiny, and yet widely read by less-than-critical readers with a casual interest in Nazi history, Irving inserts some subtle references that suggest attempts to destabilize, if not rewrite dominant historical interpretations based on overwhelming evidence. As indicated in a quotation above, his criticism for 'institutional/professional historians' who are too afraid to be objective about the history of the Nazi era is well-known.

For instance, on pg. 722, Irving states “...Himmler wrote to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller that... given the high mortality rate in the camps; he ordered all the cadavers ‘of these deceased Jews’ cremated or interred.” On its face, the ambiguity of the quoted phrase ('of those deceased Jews') might be missed, but the implication that the deaths were somehow natural, caused by misfortune or disease, and certainly not part of a process of state-conducted slaughter, is an important re-interpretation of history that Irving is known for. That the Nazi state's laws created this situation in the first place is overlooked.

5) Irving offers subtle rehabilitation of Hitler's and Nazism's reputation
Near the closing of the book, on pg. 916, Irving includes one of Goebbels' last assessments of the efforts to which he had given his life's work. “‘If worse comes to worst,’ he mused, ‘and the Führer dies an honourable death in Berlin, and Europe goes bolshevik, then in five years at most the Führer will have come a legendary figure and national socialism a mythus sanctified by a last grand finale—and all of its mortal errors that are criticized today will have been expunged at one fell swoop.’“ That this statement would be offered without critical commentary or counter narrative implies a dangerously ambiguous re-statement of Goebbels ideas, and given Irving's history, suggests either a stiff middle-finger in the face of his critics and/or an affirmation that much of their criticism may be correct.

6) Irving occasionally lapses into petty, sometimes ridiculous nastiness
Describing one of Goebbel's children, Irving states, "Hellmut Goebbels grows to a solemn, slow-witted mutt of nine, 136 centimetres (four feet six inches) tall, with no greater recorded ambition than to become a Berlin subway driver.” Such an assessment of a boy who spent most of his short life (between the ages of 3 and 9 years old), living in Berlin during World War II seems rather unnecessarily harsh.

7) Irving's use of footnotes sometimes ignores the responsibilities of an historian
On pg. 299, Irving states that in 1933, "The world’s press greeted Goebbels’ crude but effective boycott with uproar (while ignoring the Jewish boycott which had triggered it.).” Such a statement, which Irving had to know would be controversial, and which given criticism that he was prone to play loose with the rules of historical evidence, would greatly benefit from citation to some kind of documentary proof, such as references to a few articles from the 'world's press' to support his claim. None are provided.

Similarly, on pg. 527, Irving states, "“In Rhodes [Goebbels] read that Mr Chamberlain had guaranteed Poland against any aggression.*” The asterisk leads the reader to the following note: "Except, it turned out, aggression by the Soviet Union; a secret addendum made this clear.—It was Ian Colvin of the News Chronicle, whom Goebbels expelled a few days later, who tilted the balance to war by telling Chamberlain, untruthfully, on March 29 that Hitler had already drawn up plans to destroy Poland. However the contingency plan (Hitler’s Case White) was now activated as a result of the British guarantee.”

This addendum is footnoted. The footnote, however, does not seem to relate to the claim regarding Chamberlain, the British guarantee, a secret addendum to said guarantee, Colvin, or Colvin’s conversation with Chamberlain. Instead, the footnotes states, “See the diaries of Bormann; Eberhard (IfZ, Irving collection); and Major Wilhelm Deyhle, Jodl’s staff officer (ND: 1796-PS); also a letter from Col Eduard Wagner to his wife, Mar 30 and Apr 1 (in which latter he wrote ‘gestern bei der Führerentscheidung...’—‘yesterday, when the Führer reached his decision...’). How Bormann, Eberhard, or Deyhle would know about secret addendums to British guarantees with Poland, or what a British journalist discussed with the British Prime Minister is incomprehensible. It is also difficult to understand why Irving would not direct his readers to particular entries in the diaries rather than to the entirety of the books is suspicious.

8) The book is desperately in need of an editor.
Like many self-published books, this text suffers from a multitude of egregious writing flaws and typographical errors that a critical, objective eye would have caught immediately. A few examples of the various types that are found in the book:

OVERWROUGHT LANGUAGE:
Pg. 206 - "With the political wind in Germany now beginning to blow Brown…”. Irving was referring to the colour of the Nazi uniform. Aside from the mixed metaphor, the scatological reading of this phrase gave me a surprised chuckle.

AWKWARD STATEMENTS OF TIME:
Pg. 253 - "Two years later [Goebbels] published a popular edition of his diaries for the coming months…”. Why Irving phrased his sentence this way, instead of something much simpler and clearer, such as "Two years later, Goebbels would publish a popular edition of the diaries he wrote over the next few months," is baffling.

FORMATTING ERRORS:
On pg. 672, clearly there has been a layout error that a fresh eye would have caught. The book states, "“The film pirated And apartments—supposedly for bombed-out Berliners, but the cream of these vacant buildings went to their closest cronies.” The portion following 'pirated' appears again lower on the same page.

SILLY AND SLOPPY ERRORS:
Pg. 743: "“As Hitler reminded Goebbels before this speech, it was proper even now to compare Germany’s situation now with 1933.”
Pg. 860: "“Goebbels sent Hitler a telegram reporting the three hundred thousand new troops. ‘I intend,’ he dictated on the train, ‘to plead with the Führer not to let Speer pick the currents out of my cake.’”

Sönke Neitzel, Harald Weitzer, "Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying" (2012)

Neitzel and Weitzer have written a fascinating analysis of two significant bodies of long-overlooked edited transcripts of conversations between German prisoners-of-war secretly recorded in the UK and US during the Second World War. The authors conduct a qualitative content analysis of the discussions, arriving at fascinating insights into how German soldiers, airman, and sailors understood their role in the war. Topics assessed range through obvious concerns such as the soldiers' sense-making regarding fighting and killing (as indicated in the book title), but also addresses their perspectives on less-often or indirectly explored issues such as soldiers' perspective on sexual violence, anti-semitism and racially-motivated violence, and the degree of soldiers' support for the Nazi regime.

The book offers a clear and important discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of content analysis, as well of these records. Any discussion of the records cannot be engaged in without the disclaimer that they are transcriptions of select portions of conversations, sometimes between German soldiers who did not know they were being recorded and sometimes between a German soldier and a British or American 'plant' who was seeking information. On the other hand, as the authors point out, the records does provide very unique perspectives from the point of view of 'regular' German soldiers recorded in informal conversations during the war; before the outcome of the war was obvious, and outside of the fear that any dissent or criticism might result in punishment from the regime.

The book offers intriguing insights that challenges some increasingly popular - although contentious - understandings of German society, such as advanced in Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners.

More later...

Sir Stephen King-Hall, "Diary of a U-Boat Commander" (1918)

This is a short book dating from the end of the First World War. While an entertaining read, the work is deceptive. It is written in the voice of a German naval officer, as a diary of his reflections. As a social elite, he expects - but at first must only aspire - to command his own Unterseeboot. With experience and attrition in the submarine officer-classes, his desire is eventually successful.

The 'diary' balances between gritty descriptions of life at/under the sea, and provides a convincing narrative of tense battles, fear of attack, and cramped, tense boredom between actions while at sea. While on land, the sailor pines for a distant, but teasingly interested female who is attached to an older, corpulent army officer.

It is the end of the story where the tension begins to fall apart - when it is revealed that the love interest is a Polish spy working for the British, and killed by the Germans for her activities. The 'diary' format begins to become suspect when the officer describes how his life radically changes upon the suspicions that he was complicit in her activities.

Certainly, as can be seen on sites such as Amazon, there are still some who believe that this book is actually a diary written by a German officer. It was, however, written by a British naval officer in 1918. In this respect, the book provides an intriguing view into a British man's view of German society, relationships between the officer class and others within the German navy, and the challenges war faced all men and women with. Of course, these views are all offered based on speculation, by an outsider, and placed within a narrative that is as much about the frustration of love as it is about life as a submariner during wartime.

You can read the entire work for free via the Internet Archive.

Fritz Kreisler, "Four Weeks in the Trenches" (1915)

Kreisler, a famous violinist, served for a short time on Austria-Hungary's Eastern front at the beginning of the First World War. This very short memoir of that experience does not describe a fundamentally unique perspective on war, or offer a soldier's perspective in a particularly novel fashion. The text, however, is intriguingly compelling in that it retains - although tempered by clear description of some of the early horrors of the war - some of the optimism, sense of élan, and bravado that so marked the entry of so many men into the fighting.

For instance, Kreisler writes:

"The very massing together of so many individuals, with every will merged into one that strives with gigantic effort toward a common end, and the consequent simplicity and directness of all purpose, seem to release and unhinge all the primitive, aboriginal forces stored in the human soul, and tend to create the indescribable atmosphere of exultation which envelopes everything and everybody as with a magic cloak."

While I know little about why this book was published, it strikes me that it would have found an eager audience in any country involved in the war in 1915. That it was published in the United States is more than a little curious. That it was acceptable to publish may in part be Kreisler's complete avoidance of talking about politics or attempting to justify, or even explain, the reasons for the war. In this book the war merely happens, and soldiers are expected to fight. Kreisler does, and never once seems to question why, challenge the sacrifices he sees, or is required to make.

The full text of this book is available through Project Gutenberg.