Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes Antony Beevor Mary Beard Richard J Evans Sameer Rahim Andrew ...

15 Pages·2016·1.17 MB·English

The past in
perspective
Catriona Kelly
Julian Barnes
Antony Beevor
Mary Beard
Richard J Evans
Sameer Rahim
Andrew Marr
Simon Schama
2 PROSPECT
Foreword by Sameer Rahim
At Prospect we believe that reflecting on the past glossed over in traditional works. Reviewing Beard’s new book,
can provide key insights into the present—and the SPQR, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King’s College, Lon-
future. In the following pages, you can read a selec- don, hails her “exceptional ability” to keep up with modern
tion of some our favourite historical and contem- scholarship as well as her talent for plunging the reader into the
porary essays we have published in the last year. thick of the action right from the start.
Julian Barnes’s new novel, The Noise of Time, is based on Nazi propaganda presented Hitler’s Germany as the inher-
the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In her itor of the Roman Empire. The man who shaped that image
lively and expert review, Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian at was Josef Goebbels. Richard J Evans, a leading historian of the
Oxford University, argues that Barnes has captured the spirit of Nazis, reviews a biography of Goebbels that draws extensively
the “technician of survival,” who was in continual fear of having for the first time on his private diaries. What Evans finds is a
his music—and his life—being eradicated by Stalin. man, for all his fanatical bombast, who had “a soul devoid of
Staying on Russia, Antony Beevor’s column “If I ruled the content.” Also included is my interview with Nikolaus Wachs-
world” describes how after the publication of his bestselling Ber- mann, whose acclaimed book KL is the first comprehensive his-
lin: the Downfall, which criticised the Red Army’s conduct dur- tory of the Nazi concentration camps.
ing the Second World War, the Russian ambassador accused Finally, we have Andrew Marr’s review of Simon Schama’s
him of “lies, slander and blasphemy.” Beevor says that histor- history of Britain through its portraits—“a terrific, fat book,
ical disputes should not be the subject of national laws—even classic Simon Schama.” Marr, the BBC presenter who last year
if that means allowing Holocaust deniers to put forward their wrote a history of the nation through its poetry, praises the book
case. Scholarship should be robust enough to challenge lies for its “zest and intelligence.” These are also qualities we believe
about the past. mark out Prospect’s writing, whether it is about the distant past
Mary Beard made her name with revisionist accounts of or the present day.
the Roman Empire, highlighting the women and slaves often Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Arts & Books editor

Contents
03 Technician of survival 07 What the Romans really did 12 Anatomy of a genocide
catriona kelly edith hall sameer rahim
06 If I ruled the world 09 Hitler’s shadow 14 An eye for a story
antony beevor richard j evans andrew marr
PROSPECT 3
Technician
of survival
Julian Barnes brings to life the troubled inner world of Dmitri Shostakovich
catriona kelly
The life of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich is at once and others have illuminated the circumstances in which the Soviet
well-documented and elusive. Famous from an early Union’s foremost composer lived and worked. Yet the surround-
age, the Russian composer was surrounded for his ings only make the man at the centre seem less substantial. Lau-
whole life by family, musicians, pupils, enemies and rel Fay’s scholarly biography, recording what is known for certain,
admirers; he attracted the attention of the formida- is at once scrupulous and dry.
ble Soviet surveillance machine at every level. Material traces, Myth-making annoys historians, but perhaps annoyed Shosta-
including an apartment museum in Moscow, abound. Yet he also kovich less. His Soviet biographer, Sofya Khentova, claimed that
skids away from definition. The latest Shostakovich had recalled raptly listen-
to re-interpret his life is Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time ing to Lenin’s speech at the Finland Sta-
whose new novel The Noise of Time is by Julian Barnes (Vintage, £14.99) tion on 3rd April 1917; Volkov recollects
structured round three crucial episodes Shostakovich saying he’d ended up in the
in Shostakovich’s struggle with state power. crowd by mistake and hadn’t known what the fuss was about; Fay,
In private photographs and in the recollections of those closest following Lossky, states that Shostakovich was never there at all—
to him in his later years, Shostakovich has the reserved intensity of by the time Lenin arrived, a nicely brought up 10-year-old would
his late chamber music. But in some moods, according to the dis- have been safely tucked up in bed. The third version is much the
puted but likely in some respects accurate memoirs of the musi- most convincing. But that doesn’t disprove that Shostakovich
cologist Solomon Volkov, he could be both hilarious and pungent. told the other stories, or even, to some extent, believed them. Like
Winding his way through a dangerous patronage culture, he has many who witnessed the Revolution (particularly the February
often been understood as a martyr to the totalitarian state. But he Revolution) as a child, he had a genuine enthusiasm for popular
is also psychologically comparable with figures such as Alexander upheaval and mass action all his life, if not necessarily for what
Pushkin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Interpreting such art- resulted from that great political turmoil. Sticking to the facts can
ists exclusively in terms of encoded self-revelation and concealed mean, at some level, missing the point.
irony—as Shostakovich often is—would certainly not do justice to Where historians subside into embarrassed silence, nov-
their intentions or intelligence. elists speak. In The Noise of Time, the different variants of the
Current academic study tends to avoid the hunt for “the real Lenin story are among many pointers to the fluidity of Shosta-
Shostakovich” (a kind of perpetuation of state surveillance) in kovich’s relations with his past: “These days, he no longer knew
favour of a historical understanding. The archives have not pre- what version to trust. He lies like an eyewitness, as the story goes.”
served the young boy’s school reports, but they confirm his near- In an anecdote that frames the novel and is also repeated within
contemporary Boris Lossky’s account. Shostakovich attended it, three men drink a vodka toast on a wartime station platform:
what was known officially as a commercial school, but the title was “one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink.” The Shos-
a flag of convenience: the syllabus was shaped by the strong con- takovich of Barnes’s imagining includes all three: the barely
temporary interest among educated Russians in “free education,” surviving crippled alcoholic, limbless on his trolley, practis-
and it even had its own Montessori kindergarten. The emphasis on ing “a technique for survival”; the bespectacled listener who
self-directed study, personal development and community spirit offers him vodka with egregious courtesy; and the anonymous
had its echoes later in his life. witness, who disappears even from recollection after the desul-
Shostakovich was certainly not purely a victim—he managed, tory encounter.
after all, to outlive no fewer than three Soviet leaders, while many Not that Barnes’s purpose is anything to do with allegory. But
of his artistic contemporaries preceded even Vladimir Lenin into The Noise of Time, largely based on memoirs (those collected by
the grave. As well as being moulded by his era, he helped to con- Elizabeth Wilson as well as Solomon Volkov’s) is a book about
struct it. Marina Frolova-Walker, Jonathan Walker, Kiril Tomoff Shostakovich’s memories, rather than a straightforward fic-
tional account of his life. Complaining that the Leningrad sym-
phony doesn’t figure, or that Barnes omits Shostakovich’s work
as a teacher of composition, or as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet

(and a conscientious one) would be obtuse. It would be equally

Catriona Kelly is a professor of Russian at Oxford University. otiose to point out that as well as agonising over his new version of
Her latest book is “St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past” (Yale) Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich negotiated hard over
4 PROSPECT
GES
MA
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N / B
O
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RY, L
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O
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MFIEL
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© F
Reserved intensity: a portrait of Shostakovich by Frances Broomfield (2003)
PROSPECT 5
in the dining room, with the clock’s door
open, holding back the pendulum with one
finger.” In turn, the book is structured less
round onward time than time repeated:
particularly, the three leap-year moments,
1936, 1948, and 1960, when Shostakovich
came closest to destruction and despair.
GES In Russia, despair is sometimes diffi-
N IMA cult to separate from black humour: as
MA the joke goes, “If you’re over 40 and you
GE
RID wake up, and nothing hurts, that means
N / B you’ve died.” Unlike some English chron-
O
OLLECTI itchliesr ms oofo Rdu: “sMsiauns ilcif ies, nBoatr lnikees Chahsin aens ee aerg fgosr;
RIVATE C it does not improve by being kept under-
URY) / P gwrhoautn hd.e” sWeehse ans Sthhoes tpaaksosvivicithy roeffl eAcmtse orin-
H CENT cans, he notes that “even the cows stand-
R (20T iandgv emrtoisteiomnelenstss fionr cthoen dfieenlsdesd lmooilkke.d” Olinkee
HE
RAP of Shostakovich’s wry comments even has
G
OTO a parallel life as an in-joke for people who
H
N P know Barnes’s previous work on Gustave
USSIA Flaubert: “Life was the cat that dragged
© R the parrot downstairs by the tail; his head
Shostakovich with fellow composers Sergei Prokofiev (left) and Aram Khachaturian (right) banged against every step.”
But it is above all the “hard, irreducible
the 1966 film version and insisted only the Kiev production was purity” of music that drives the narration, expressed not just in
used. The Noise of Time is a distillation of experience into insom- key sounds (“four factory sirens in F sharp”) or Shostakovich’s vis-
niac self-questioning, or the vertiginous doubt, otkhodnyak, that ceral reaction to conducting that he hates—“Toscanini chopped
succeeds the temporary confidence of a vodka high. The mode is up music like hash and smeared disgusting sauce over it”—but in
interior monologue, but in the third person sometimes used about the crafting of language itself. Shostakovich’s ageing shows not
themselves by particularly sensitive individuals alienated, lifelong, just in disillusion, or the shift of motion from “skitter” to “limp,”
from their own lives. but in a transformation of tempi. First comes a nervous scherzo of
“It had got to the point when he despised being the person he love entanglements: “And so he and Nina met, and they became
was, on an almost daily basis,” a Shostakovich in his fifties reflects. lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her hus-
This self-distancing permeates The Noise of Time, since the narra- band, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a
tive’s starting point is already the existential edge—the 1937 agony date for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so
of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady failed to turn up and ran away and hid…” Later, there is the slow-
Macbeth of Mtsensk in Pravda as “Muddle instead of Music.” Anna ing that Shostakovich himself liked to mark morendo, with the
Akhmatova, the poet with whom, as the novel reminds us, Shos- violist Fyodor Druzhinin told to play the slow movement of the Fif-
takovich once sat in mutually appreciative silence for 20 minutes, teenth Quartet “so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience
wrote in Northern Elegies: “I shall not lie in my own grave.” Shosta- start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.”
kovich had the same sense of self-distance. At once self-deprecating and precise, the joke captures
The composer’s early years are summed up by his painfully not just Shostakovich’s capacity for evasion, but the nature of
delirious love affair with Tanya, the “hard, demeaning work” of his own composition, its saturated emptiness. Fictional por-
playing cinema piano, or the open-air performance of his First trayals of music soften and sweeten the nature of the art (take
Symphony disrupted by a competitive concert from the neighbour- Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes),
hood dogs. Motifs repeat: a string of garlic threaded round a wrist reducing it to ethereal cliché; the result is not too far from
to ward off infections; a small case packed against possible arrest; novelettes such as Florence L Barclay’s The Rosary or Naomi
the cocktail sauce with bobbing shrimps in the plane Shostako- Royde-Smith’s Mildensee. But The Noise of Time shares with
vich gets to the United States, and where later the composer ima- Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata—another text which has at
gines himself afloat. its centre the tyranny of music and its physiologically devas-
At one level, this phenomenology of daily life echoes the tating potential—the capacity for evocation of music-making
shadow-double of Barnes’s novel, Osip Mandelstam’s memoir The that is worthy of the real thing. And, just as Shostakovich him-
Noise of Time. But where the hideous sideboard owned by a rela- self survived his encounters with power to transform dog barks
tion of Mandelstam’s, or the landscape of a Baltic beach, testify and factory sirens into some of the 20th century’s most explo-
to the age they came from, the objects here are pared to their sig- sive exercises in created sound, so this novel is, fortunately, much
nificance for Shostakovich. Two clocks, for instance, daily chime larger than the depiction of the composer in the familiar role of
together in perfect unison. “This was not chance. He would turn a “technician of survival,” a midnight meditator on life’s futility
on the wireless a minute or two before the hour. Galya would be and his own.
6 PROSPECT
If I ruled the world
Antony Beevor
States must stop trying to rewrite history
As world ruler, I would prevent countries from attempting to it of the status of a victorious nation.” 
control history. One saw the way the historian David Irving, who It didn’t occur to me until after writing Berlin that the rea-
in 2005 was sent to prison by an Austrian court for denying the son Russians found it so painful to acknowledge the mass rapes—
Holocaust, could make himself out to be a victim and a martyr. including those who suffered in the Gulag and hated Stalin—was
Then there was former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who that for them the victory over Nazi Germany was a moment of
tried to outlaw the denial of the Armenian genocide in 2012. It which they could all feel proud and which unified the country. In
was opportunistic and designed to get the Armenian vote. This fact Karasin warned me—before he knew exactly what was in the
is a state attempt to control history, which is something I oppose book—that “what you have to realise is that the victory is sacred.”
on principle.  It is seen almost as the defining moment of the Soviet Union and
The issue has also come up in Russia. In 2013, Sergei Shoigu, therefore cannot be tampered with. 
the country’s Minister for Defence, passed a law that he had been That any state has to rely on legislation to defend this idea is
trying to get on the statute books since 2009. It would imprison deeply depressing. They have even set up the Russian Military
anyone, in theory for up to five years, who criticised the Red Historical Society, whose aim is to foster patriotism and resist
Army’s conduct during the Second World War. (I have to declare attempts to distort military history. There have been some very
an interest: I am a target of this law because my 2002 book Ber- brave Russian historians, some of whom have lost their posi-
lin: the Downfall also covered the mass rapes commit- tions, simply by questioning the party line of today, which is
ted by Russian soldiers in 1945.) Shoigu described that there were only a few cases of rape and of course all of
the “crime” of criticising the Red Army as tan- those were prosecuted. We know this is absolute rubbish:
tamount to Holocaust denial. It’s interesting, the numbers were far greater. Trying to foster patriotism
considering that Joseph Stalin himself was, in through history is something that many regimes have
a way, the first Holocaust denier. He refused done in the past, and they tend to be undemocratic in
to allow that the Jews should have any spe- one form or another. During the Russian victory cele-
cial category of suffering.  brations on 9th May the orange and black St George’s
After the publication of my book, the ribbon was being used everywhere. This symbol from
Russian Ambassador to Britain, Grigory the past is being used in eastern Ukraine to represent
Karasin, accused me of lies, slander and blas- Russian heroism today.
phemy against the Red Army. Karasin is now History needs to be debated openly. You can ban cer-
Deputy Foreign Minister. I don’t know to tain symbols—as Germany has done with the
what degree I am still in the firing line swastika—and you can even ban certain
because I still get invitations to the political parties. But it is quite wrong
Russian Embassy. Vladimir Putin to suppress a counter-argument in
does like to come up with totally history. For example, the great
contradictory positions to con- Jewish historian of the Holocaust
fuse his opponents. Rather like Raul Hilberg put the number
the way he accuses Ukraine of of deaths at a bit over five mil-
fascism and then proceeds to sup- lion, rather than six million.
port fascist or neo-fascist parties Did that make him a Hol-
in western Europe. His real goal ocaust denier? It’s a grey
is the attempt to control Russian area. If you want to do
history. In March, while planning something about real
celebrations for Russia’s victory in Holocaust deniers you
the Second World War, Putin said: could prosecute them
“Today we unfortunately see not under hate laws—but
only attempts to misrepresent and not on the grounds of
K
OCdistort events of the war, but cyni- falsifying history.
UTTERSTcmaal,t ioopne nof l iae sw ahnodle t hgee nberraazteionn d wefhao- bAensttsoenlyli nBge eavnodr aisw aa rd-
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© MIauthority of modern Russia and deprive Press
PROSPECT 7
What the Romans
really did
Mary Beard’s colourful chronicle of Ancient Rome debunks familiar myths
edith hall
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome A ncient Roman literary critics admired writing Beginners will then spend the next five chapters struggling to
by Mary Beard (Profile, £25) that plunged readers into the thick of the action— understand the successive waves of data about the preceding cen-
in medias res—rather than boring them with pre- turies—the kings of Rome, the consolidation of the Republican
ambles. Mary Beard plunges her reader, from the regime, the widening of Rome’s horizons in the fourth and third
first page, into one of the most exciting episodes in centuries BC, the expansion of the empire, the violent upheavals
Roman history. of the “new politics” at the time of the Gracchi in the late 2nd cen-
In 63BC, the orator and statesman Cicero exposed what he tury down to the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73BC. We do not
claimed was a revolutionary conspiracy. rejoin Cicero until nearly halfway through
It was led by the disaffected aristocrat SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Beard’s narrative, in chapter seven, where
Catiline, whom Cicero accused of plot- by Mary Beard (Profile, £25) he is now taking on Verres, the governor of
ting to assassinate all the elected mag- Sicily accused of corruption. But that con-
istrates of Rome, set fire to the city’s buildings and cancel all frontation preceded Cicero’s denunciations of Catiline, with which
debts indiscriminately. Beard writes with her customary energy, “we” had begun “our” history. As a Classics graduate I know some
charm and intensity, resurrecting the titanic personalities who Roman history, but must admit to intermittent bewilderment. I
struggled to control Rome while its republican constitution was would recommend any new Roman history enthusiasts to begin
hurled into its final death throes. She uses contemporary terms on page 78 with Beard’s enthralling account of the archaeological
like “homeland security” to make the unfamiliar accessible. Her evidence for early habitations in the Roman area. These include
ambivalence towards Cicero—brilliant, prolific, brave, eloquent, the remains of a two-year-old girl found in a coffin beneath the
but vain and obnoxiously self-pitying—is palpable. By the end of forum in a dress decorated with beads; in the 1980s archaeologists
the chapter we are primed to take the story forward to the next unearthed the sort of house she might have lived in north of the
phase: the assassination of Julius Caesar and the climactic con- city, a small timber edifice with a primitive portico. It contained
flict between Mark Antony and Octavian, soon to become Augus- the remains of the earliest known domestic cat in Italy.
tus. But Beard chooses instead to disorient us completely. Beard is always at her dazzling best breathing life into the
In chapter two she abruptly transfers us back many centuries material remnants left by the ancient inhabitants of the Roman
to the very beginnings of Rome, or rather its mythical origins in world, as she did in her prizewinning 2008 book Pompeii: The Life
the stories of Romulus and Remus and of the rape of the Sabine of a Roman Town. One of her hallmarks is an exceptional ability to
women. All except the final two chapters then take a broad histori- remain up-to-date with the most recent archaeological discover-
cal sweep, structured in conventional chronological order stretch- ies, and communicate their contents and significance in a lively
ing from archaeological finds dating to as early as 1000BC all the and user-friendly manner. The public has been waiting eagerly for
way to 212AD. The sense of chronological disorientation is, I think, SPQR since her engaging 2012 BBC series Meet the Romans. The
deliberate. The version of the early history of Rome which has greatest virtue of SPQR is her ability to choose individual objects
come down to us was mostly filtered by later Roman writers, both or texts and tease out from them insights into Roman life and
Cicero and authors working under Augustus—Livy, Propertius, experience. These range from the enigmatic “black stone” found
Virgil and Ovid. Beard is laudably keen that we see the early his- in the forum inscribed with words including “KING,” to a relief
tory as not only gappy and inconsistent but artfully manipulated sculpture depicting a poultry shop, complete with suspended
to suit the political agenda of later writers. But the effect is con- chicken and caged rabbits. The book contains 21 colour plates and
fusing, right from her opening sentence: “Our history of ancient more than a hundred others embedded in the text, every one add-
Rome begins in the middle of the 1st century BC.” By “Our history ing an exciting dimension to her colourful chronicle.
of Rome” she means “My history of Rome,” but any Roman his- The leading dramatis personae are evoked in stunning pen-
tory novice will assume her meaning is that “The history of Rome” portraits. Some ask us to reassess figures we thought we already
commences at that date. understood well. She is impressed by Pompey, who “has a good
claim to be called the first Roman emperor.” She is sceptical about
Brutus’s commitment to Republican ideals. She sensibly refrains

from trying to penetrate the assiduously crafted public image of

Augustus to the “real” man behind the propaganda, although she
Edith Hall is a Professor in the Department of Classics
and at King’s College London. Her latest book is admires some of his achievements. There are finely-tuned cameos
“Introducing the Ancient Greeks” (Vintage) in the whistle-stop tour of the 14 emperors who ruled between
8 PROSPECT
antness of life in ancient urban centres was
suffered by rich and poor alike: traffic jams,
uncollected refuse, disease, gangrene-
infected water. She has a pitch-perfect ear
for class snobbery and the insults poured
on the allegedly vulgar newly rich by the
educated or aristocratic. She writes mov-
ingly about the gravestones of ordinary
Romans, artisans and semi-skilled labour-
ers, informing posterity about their exper-
tise and achievements as bakers, butchers,
midwives and fabric dyers. She evokes well
the squalid cafes and taverns where the
poorer urban classes caroused. Yet she
makes us face the reality that the major-
ity of the empire’s 50 million inhabitants
would have lived on small peasant farms,
struggling to extract more than a subsist-
NS
MO ence livelihood. There were few changes
M
MEDIA CO itna l aligfreisctuyllteu frraolm te tchhen Iorloong yA goer tfou mndeadmieevna-l
WIKI times. The letters of Pliny the Younger are
DU/ a rich source of evidence for the relation-
RG.E ship between Roman governors and such
U
B
RT “ordinary” people of the provinces, in his
WA
© case in Bithynia and Pontus; Beard leads
Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784) portrays the Roman ideal of loyalty us from these into a revealing discussion
and self-sacrifice of the problems Roman governors faced in
policing the boundaries of empire (includ-
the death of Augustus in 14AD and the assassination in 192AD ing Hadrian’s Wall) and how they largely tolerated local religious
of Commodus (the son of Marcus Aurelius who plays the villain practices and cultural diversity, although Christianity became an
in Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator). Although there are mercifully exception.
few signs of the controversialism which used to be her sole irri- The turbulent showdown between the Illyrian Emperor Dio-
tating characteristic, Beard rightly challenges the tradition of cletian and the martyrdom-hungry Christians in the early fourth
dividing the rulers of the Imperium Romanum into heroes and century is one of many fascinating episodes in the history of the
felons. The tradition, extending back to Tacitus and Suetonius, Romans which Beard excludes from her account by ending it in
was inherited by Edward Gibbon. Beard pleads, instead, for a less 212AD. Her logic for ending here is impeccable: this was when
judgemental and more nuanced appraisal of the way that the sen- the Emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the Roman
sational ancient accounts of the emperors reveal the anxieties and Empire a Roman citizen, thus causing 30m individuals to “become
socio-political values of the imperial era. She also emphasises that legally Roman overnight.” Beard stresses the significance of the
for many inhabitants of the empire, especially those living in the erasure of the millennium-long boundary between the rulers and
more far-flung territories, the personality of the emperor made lit- the ruled—the completion of what she calls the Romans’ “citizen-
tle difference. This is a wonderful, lucid and thoughtful section of ship project,” from which we can still learn, even though it subse-
the book and should be required reading for anyone setting out to quently failed and had always been fundamentally blemished by
study Roman emperors. slavery.
There is an attempt at a thematic rather than linear approach Besides the history of Rome as it continued in the third and
in one central chapter, “The Home Front,” where the discussion fourth centuries CE, the element I most miss is an attempt to
of family life and women is compromised by being focused, yet get inside the minds of the remarkable ancient Italians in terms
again, on Cicero—or rather Cicero’s relationships with his wives of their philosophy and ethics. Beard writes well on priesthoods
and daughter. But the two other thematic chapters—the last in and public religion, but is not much interested in philosophy.
the book—are outstanding. Here she abandons the chronologi- Despite her fixation on Cicero, who wrote philosophical trea-
cal structure and looks at the rich-poor divide and the experience tises, she offers less on the complex thought-world and extraordi-
of people living under the Romans outside Rome. The luxurious nary psychological strengths—self-control, resilience, acceptance
lifestyle of the wealthy across the empire was astounding: some of uncompromising discipline, fearlessness in the face of death,
owned dozens of sumptuous villas with central heating and lav- moral fortitude, high ideals and principles—which many mem-
ish murals, swimming pools and shady grottoes, all serviced by bers of this tough and soldierly people drew from their Stoic, Neo-
armies of slaves. Some rich people paraded their wealth by indulg- platonic and Epicurean convictions. She is good on Virgil’s Aeneid
ing in ostentatious feasting and pastimes; others subsidised public as a political poem, but has little to say about the earliest surviv-
amenities—libraries, theatres, gladiator shows—in order to ward ing Roman epic, Lucretius’s inspirational work On the Nature of
off the dangers posed by the inevitable envy of the poor. Things. I finished SPQR hoping that we will one day be treated to a
Beard points out, however, that much of the physical unpleas- Beard book on the inward contours of the Roman psyche.
PROSPECT 9
Hitler’s shadow
The first study of Joseph Goebbels based on his recently-published diaries yields important
insights into his sense of inferiority, his affairs, the Holocaust and the downfall of the Reich
richard j evans
In April 1983, the Sunday Times, together with the Ger- archive was opened up after the fall of communism.
man magazine Stern, revealed to an astonished world the Since then, a team from the Institute of Contemporary His-
diaries of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Running to a tory in Munich, led by Elke Fröhlich, has been transcribing the
total of 60 volumes, the diaries had been authenticated often difficult handwriting and publishing it in 29 volumes, the
by two leading historians of the period, Gerhard Wein- last of which appeared in 2008. A few extracts have appeared in
berg and Hugh Trevor-Roper. “I am now satisfied,” declared English, but the vast majority of the diaries are only accessible
Trevor-Roper after examining the documents in a Swiss bank in this German edition. The historian Peter Longerich, author
vault, “that the documents are authen- of a major study of the Holocaust and a
tic; that the history of their wanderings Goebbels: A Biography biography of Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader
since 1945 is true; and that the standard by Peter Longerich (The Bodley Head, £30) Heinrich Himmler, has now delivered the
accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his first study of Goebbels to be based on an
personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in exhaustive and critical evaluation of the whole run of the diaries,
consequence have to be revised.” augmented where appropriate by the use of other sources ranging
This was certainly true, or would have been had the diaries from official documents to Goebbels’s own propaganda produc-
been genuine. Hitler was well known for his irregular lifestyle, tions. It is an impressive achievement.
staying up into the small hours watching movies, getting up late, And it’s an achievement that has immediately got Longerich
and preferring to make decisions on the hoof rather than plough- into legal difficulties. Extracts from the diaries appear on almost
ing through the mountains of documents that usually confront every page. But the diaries were still legally in copyright at the
heads of state. Was he, then, confounding everyone’s view of his time Longerich’s book was published, since European law states
character by writing down an account of his thoughts and deeds that copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death, which in
day after day for years on end? After the German Federal Archives Goebbels’s case means 1st May 2015. Who exactly are the copy-
had finally obtained samples of the diaries, they discovered that right owners? Longerich and his publishers, Random House, had
the ink and paper had been manufactured long after Hitler’s assumed that Nazi documents were free for anyone to quote, as
death, and that most of the diaries’ content was copied from his indeed should be the case. But there were people who disagreed.
speeches. As the forger Konrad Kujau was sent to prison, it seemed Last year, a successful lawsuit was brought in a Munich court
the standard account of Hitler’s writing habits and personality against Random House for breach of copyright. The lawyer bring-
would not have to be revised after all. ing the case was Cordula Schacht, daughter of Goebbels’s col-
Even before the decisive intervention of the archivists, however, league in the Hitler Cabinet, Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar
there was good reason to doubt that the Hitler diaries were authen- Schacht; it seemed as if the old Nazi regime was rearing its head
tic. There had been no mention of them before. Nobody, neither again from beyond the grave to lay claim to ownership of these
his friends and acquaintances nor his secretaries and assistants, crucial documents.
had betrayed even the slightest suspicion that they existed. By con- Cordula Schacht has form in this area, as legal advisor of the
trast, the fact that his chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was late François Genoud, a Swiss banker who had met Hitler in the
writing a diary had been well known for many years. Goebbels 1930s and become financial advisor to the Grand Mufti of Jeru-
published edited extracts in a chronicle of the rise and triumph salem, a fanatical anti-Semite who wanted to exterminate Jew-
of Nazism and the party’s coming to power in 1933. Then at the ish emigrants to Palestine. Genoud was close to the international
end of the war, some of the pages were found amid the ruins of the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and advised the Popular Front for
Reich Chancellery, and subsequently published by an American the Liberation of Palestine in an airplane hijacking in 1972. An
journalist. Towards the end of the war, as he became concerned active Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler, Genoud once told
about the fate of the (by now voluminous) diaries, Goebbels had the journalist Gitta Sereny: “The truth is, I loved Hitler.” He gave
them filmed on to glass microfiche plates, taken to Potsdam, just financial support to old Nazis trying to evade capture, and con-
outside the German capital, and buried. Here, however, the Red tributed money to the defence of Adolf Eichmann in his trial in
Army discovered them and shipped them off to the KGB Spe- Jerusalem in 1961. Genoud bought some of the papers of Hitler’s
cial Archive in Moscow, where they remained, unread, until the factotum Martin Bormann, although some of the documents he
published from them are widely thought to be forgeries.
In 1955, he purchased the rights to the diaries from the Goeb-

bels family. Goebbels, he said, was a “great man.” Shortly before

his suicide in 1996, Genoud made over his share to Cordula
Richard J Evans is President of Wolfson College
Cambridge and the author of “The Third Reich in Schacht, who since then has claimed to be the copyright holder.
History and Memory” (Little, Brown) The case was complicated by the fact that the Bavarian State
10 PROSPECT
GES
MA
D VIA GETTY I
N BIL
ULLSTEI
©
Joseph Goebbels (centre) watches the filming of Patriots in 1937 with the French ambassador, André François-Poncet (left)
also claimed to own the copyright, since it had taken ownership of Dostoevsky, as his early diaries show, was a particular passion. But
the Nazi publishing house which Goebbels had intended should he did not embark on an academic career or find success as an
publish the diaries after his death. True, no written contract has author. His two verse plays were never performed, and he could
ever been found. But a 1936 entry in the diary suggests there was not find a publisher for his semi-autobiographical novel Michael
an oral agreement. On this basis, Random House has refused to for several years. Plagued by feelings of inferiority, generated not
pay Schacht for the right to quote from the diary. It is the first least by the club foot that left him with a heavy limp, he earned a
publisher to take this stand; previously, for decades, publishers meagre living as a journalist and for a while as a bank clerk, and
had to crawl to Genoud for permissions, on occasion being forced found a sense of self-worth in numerous affairs with women, a kind
to allow him to write a preface or introduction expressing his of self-validation that continued throughout his life.
own obnoxious views. On 23rd April this year, a higher Munich Whether or not Goebbels was, as Longerich claims, a narcis-
court accepted Random House’s appeal against last year’s ruling. sist, he certainly sought to compensate for his low self-esteem
Schacht has appealed against this, demanding payment of just by passionately attaching himself to Hitler. Already by 1923, he
over €6,500 (the publisher offered to pay if the money went to a had formed his deeply anti-Semitic and anti-democratic political
Holocaust-related charity, but Schacht refused). On 9th July the views, which he found expressed by the early Nazi party. Lack-
case will come before the courts for a final decision. ing any real power base, Goebbels profiled himself as a radical
Random House is taking its admirable stand on the principle when he became politically active in the Nazi party in April 1924,
that the writings of a Nazi criminal should not be made the sub- using violent and inflammatory language to make a name for
ject of commercial exploitation. As the diaries show, there can be himself. Although he found Hitler’s views on some issues “reac-
no doubt about Goebbels’s responsibility for murders, expropria- tionary,” he was won over by the Nazi leader on a visit to Munich,
tions and much more besides. He began his career as a poet and and his ascent up the Nazi hierarchy began. Soon Hitler put him
novelist. His PhD in German literature earned him the title “Dr in charge of the Nazi party in Berlin, difficult territory in view of
Goebbels,” by which he was invariably known in the Nazi years— the fact that the communists and socialists were extremely strong
few leading Nazis were as well educated or as well read: Fyodor in the capital. Goebbels’s diaries, however, lay bare the feuding