Thursday, March 30, 2017

“Hitler”, by Joachim C. Fest


844 pages, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN-13: 978-0156409469

Joachim C. Fest, the son of a Catholic anti-Nazi who grew up in Nazi Germany (but he never alludes to his own life), has written perhaps the most engaging and insightful biography of the madman of the century in Hitler. This is not the first Hitler biography I have read: I am a veteran reader of past works on the sonovabitch as Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock, Adolf Hitler by John Toland, and the two-volume study by Ian Kershaw: Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis. Yet none of these books, while informative, have the depth of understanding of the horrible phenomenon of Hitler that Fest brings to his biography (perhaps, as a German, Fest is closer to his subject?) Yes, the style is dry, but within the covers of this book you will find insights and observations that are lacking in all other biographies on the Führer. Sadly, Hitler is probably less well-known to English-speaking readers than the afore-mentioned works, but for anyone who wants to understand the Nazi phenomenon and its role in history should turn to the far more trenchant and searching Fest, as he is much more focused on the man than the cataclysmic events he set in motion. Fest’s book is, to a degree, psychoanalysis, both of a leader and of the society that he led, as he delves into how we react, intellectually and emotionally, to history-moving leaders and their movements when we are but passive observers.

I cannot praise enough the author’s picture of the ambitious young Adolf, then later the Adolf of the charity men’s home in Vienna, and the Adolf serving exemplarily on the Western Front. Fest provides a real understanding of Hitler before he found his destiny as a public speaker and a leader of men. In most biographies of Adolf Hitler the portrait of the Monster or Madman have loomed so large that the man himself has been obscured, if not completely submerged. This is one point among many where Fest’s book parts company with most that have come both before and after. This is not just the best Adolf Hitler biography I've ever read – it’s possibly the best biography of anyone I’ve ever read. I never would have believed such a long book could be such an enjoyable read and yet be so totally informative, well-researched and well-documented. The will to power was always latent in Hitler’s nature, but like a volcano it needed to find its way to the surface. Many soul-searing influences were needed, most importantly being the lost war and the humiliating demands of the Treaty of Versailles. Those were the years of grinding hardship that drove the populace toward the freedom and dignity offered by Communism. This was fertile ground for Hitler, whose hatred of Marxism dated from his youth in Vienna: more even than Jews it was international Communism that he wanted to destroy, and amongst his first victims, both Jewish and Christian, were dedicated Marxists (indeed, the first Nazi concentration camps were built for them, as well as for other political opponents of the regime).

Fest makes no apologies or excuses for the monstrous crimes Germany committed at Hitler’s behest, but there is more to any man than just whatever evil he has done. The skill needed to transform events into a good read while also maintaining perspective and providing a balanced judgement from the evidence now available to scholars is clearly one of Joachim C. Fest’s strengths. This is an excellent biographical history to read in conjunction with social, economic and military histories of Germany in the grim, dark 20th Century. I am a general reader and found this more than a worthy work, unfolding as it does, like some great Wagnerian Opera, yet full of telling detail to make the events vivid and memorable.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

“Napoleon: The Immortal Emperor”, by Gerard Gengembre, David Chanteranne and Pierre-Jean Chalencon


256 pages, Vendome Press, ISBN-13: 978-0865652330

Napoleon: The Immortal Emperor by Gerard Gengembre, David Chanteranne and Pierre-Jean Chalencon is a sumptuous exploration of the life and legacy of the first Emperor of the French. This is not a conventional biography (of which there are many) but rather a thematic exploration of Napoleon through images with explanatory text. While I lost whatever boyhood infatuation I had with Napoleon and learned to view him in the context of the terrible costs inflicted on Europe and the French nation in his long wars of conquest, an epoch was named for him and the arts reflected the glory he achieved. Even the decorative arts were inspired by his conquest and “Empire Style” with echoes of the Near East he conquered was born. Napoleon lived at a time when France was the artistic capital of the world and artists like Jacques Louis David, Baron Gros and Anne-Louise Girodet immortalized him. After his death, in a nation that never again stood astride Europe in the same way, the cult of Bonaparte lived on. Later over the course of the 19th Century, the great military artists of France – Ernst Messionier and Edouard Detaille – continued to paint Napoleon and his soldiers. When his nephew, Napoleon III, was the French autocrat, the Empire style was revived and paintings of Napoleon’s days of glory were purchased for the state. Finally, in the 20th Century he became the subject for countless films and this legacy is given the same visual exploration in the volume.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

“Catherine the Great”, by Henri Troyat, translated by Joan Pinkham


395 pages, E.P. Dutton Books, ISBN-13: 978-0525078135

Like most biographies of the ever-fascinating Catherine, Catherine the Great by Henri Troyat is a bouncy-but-sloppy retelling with a cracking first half but a formless second – and, like most such biographies, it stresses the infinite variety of Catherine-the-woman while failing to provide much in the way of historical grounding. Troyat writes well of a woman who had a natural appetite for absolutism: she subjugated serfs, jailed dissidents, lost her head over younger lovers who were hired to service her lust, encouraged obscene consumption in imitation of Versailles (although she detested the French), deplored the ineluctable rise of republicanism and the concept of human rights, stole her son’s children and raised them as she saw fit, frustrated native Russian talents in preference to ill-fitting European transplants, neglected her country’s infrastructure (except for establishing some institutions of learning), and generally ruled in such a way that her death began the undoing of all she had worked for 34 years – that is to say, she did little to strengthen its non-parasitic systems or institutions; she merely enforced her will.

As always, the raw, unlikely story of the making-of-an-Empress is irresistible: minor German Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg, unattractive but very bright, was promoted by her pushy mama (and by the King of Prussia) as a fiancée for Grand Duke Peter, nephew and heir of decadent Empress Elizabeth of Russia – and though Peter was an impotent half-wit (fixated on toy soldiers, dirty jokes, and Prussia), little outsider Sophie grabbed the main chance with a will, transforming herself into the most virtuously Russian Orthodox of princesses and enduring eight years of virgin marriage before taking lovers (LOTS of lovers), so that, by the time her unpredictable mentor/enemy Elizabeth finally died, cagey Grand Duchess Catherine was ready to parlay her popularity into an overthrow of loathsome, now-dangerous Peter III. Troyat tells this tale vigorously enough, with the usual reliance on Catherine’s own wry, juicy memoirs, but also with a dismayingly large doses of sloppy prose and pure clichés: “beside herself with joy”; “green with envy”; “she melted on the spot”; “method in her madness”; and so on in like fashion.

Reforms, Crimean conquests, shrewd diplomacy, suppression of rebellions…Troyat covers it all, but haphazardly, with constant resort to over-simplifications (such as Catherine’s switch from Voltaire-inspired liberalism to old-fashioned Russian repression), dubious generalizations (about “Russian irrationality”, for instance; I mean, just what is that, anyway?), and ungainly gush (“She was mad for reform. She had a passionate desire to knead the thick dough of Russia”. Blech). Typically, when the complex Polish annexation comes up, we get minimal historical background while the passions of Catherine’s Polish puppet-king/lover are paperback-pulped ad infinitum: “He wanted to come back to the woman whom he had never stopped loving, back to the taste of her lips, the sweetness of her voice, the movement of her hips”. And Troyat is ever eager to get back to the boudoir, as infatuation-prone Catherine (a healthy creature with “nothing of the hysteric or nymphomaniac about her”) goes through “fresh young bodies”, some of them procured for her by lover/adviser Potemkin, the only bedmate who also had “a strong mind that could send the ball back to her”. I mean, is this a biography or the treatment for a soap opera?

Ultimately, Catherine was a woman of her times and indisputably proved to be a most able successor to Peter the Great inasmuch as she made Russia a major player on the European stage and greatly expanded the territory under her control. The personalities involved herein make for a highly entertaining read. But, after all of that, one is not entirely sure just what made her “Great”, unless it was the military conquests ordered by her (and which are given rather hasty treatment by Troyat). Maybe other hereditary monarchs were as bad as Peter III and she merely shone by comparison. Maybe all hereditary monarch had to do in those days to be considered “Great” was not let the country go to hell in a handbasket. It must be said that, in comparison with other rulers of Russia, both past and present, she was not the worst, so I guess she’s got that going for her?