“Germany: Memories of a Nation”, by Neil MacGregor

656 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-1101875667

In my head, when I was composing this review while still reading this book, I wanted to mention that the book read like a museum’s exhibition catalogue, with the whole of the nation of Germany as the exhibit; I have since discovered that Germany: Memories of a Nation by Neil MacGregor is, in fact, the companion book to the exhibition at the British Museum of the same name, as well as to the BBC Radio 4 (radio?) series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if I had shelled out $40 for this thing (rather than receiving it free from the History Book Club) I might have been a touch put out. But no matter: all-in-all this was an entertaining and informative read, filled with thousands of photographs and reproductions to add oomph the (rather pedestrian) text that, as mentioned, reads as if it were written by a Director of the British Museum…which it was. It’s not often that three formats have been produced to tell one story.

Irony, it seems to me, is key to MacGregor’s written approach. Back in 1970 travelers through Berlin’s Friedrichstraße Station – which was then the only permitted transit point from East to West – were subjected to intrusive scrutiny by a system of mirrors and observation cameras, so strategically situated that a model of the station’s labyrinth was used to train the Stasi (you know, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or the Ministry for State Security), which earned it the sobriquet of Tränenpalast, or Palace of Tears. Today, the Friedrichstraße Station operates without a single surveillance camera. Other ironies abound: it was Adolf Hitler who dreamed up the idea of a “people’s car” while Ferdinand Porsche obliged with the Volkswagen Beetle, only to decide that production was economically unviable for the 1,000 Reichsmark price tag insisted upon by his autocratic leader, whereupon the project was shelved until the Volkswagen the Beetle would go on production during the post-war years of British occupation (after the Brits had passed on the opportunity to build it themselves) with the car’s keenest buyers being the Americans who had flattened much of Germany’s industrial strength during the war.

Another of MacGregor’s ironic footpaths leads to Weimar, first home of a school of architecture that turned for its inspiration to the guild traditions of the Middle Ages. A photograph shows a beaming Hitler at ease in what appears to be a Bauhaus chair. The style appealed, but the ethos did not: the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, was closed down in 1933. But this irony has a hellish side. MacGregor displays a replica of the gate into the hell of Buchenwald, a former weekend haunt for the artists of nearby Weimar. Other Nazi camps presented their mottos (such as Arbeit macht frei, or “work sets you free”) to new arrivals. At Buchenwald, however, a Bauhaus-trained prisoner, a Communist called Ernst Erhlich, was ordered to create a gate that would speak exclusively to the inmates: Jedem das Seine, or “To each his just due”, was the statement that would daily greet the eyes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Leon Blum, Bruno Bettelheim and too many other during their servitude at Buchenwald. The words, crafted with deliberate art and set within the open and leafy panels of an ironwork gate, would be repainted blood red, year after year. That Cicero’s phrase might fit Buchenwald’s creators and guards better than their victims was a thought unlikely to have escaped the gate’s skilled designer (oh, and by the way: Ehrlich remained in the GDR after the war, as any dedicated Communist might have been expected to do, but when the immense Stasi archives were opened in 1990 it was discovered that the architect of Buchenwald’s boldly enigmatic gate had become a meticulous informant and spy).

Germany: Memories of a Nation the book is just what I said it was above: an exhibition book that displays a careful juxtaposition of singular objects with their surrounding history that conveys complexities of Germany’s continuing journey away from a shameful past – a past that the post-war nation continues to record in ever-more interesting and oh-so-modern monuments. While a few omissions surprise – might the swastika and its innocuous origins have earned a place? – MacGregor’s selection is largely admirable: an elaborate Torah bag stitched with the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, alongside a photograph of Jewish mountain climbers complete with Lederhosen, reminds us that Germany was not always anti-Semitic (indeed, Germany was considered one of the least anti-Semitic places in Europe, especially compared to Russia and even France). Prints of Durer’s valiant knight and his soul-searching companion, Melancholia, usefully sum up the conflicted psyche of Bismarck’s newly united Germany.

But it is in sculpture that modern-Germany has attempted to come to terms with the recent past and to try and work through it. In 1993, Helmut Kohl selected the sculpted image of a grieving mother as Berlin’s memorial for “The Victims of War and Dictatorship”. The sculptor, Kathe Kollwitz, had lost her only son in the First World War, a war into which she had urged the under-age boy. Her wooden Pieta shows the mother protecting a child of whom only the upturned face is visible, staring up into hers. “There is no longer pain”, Kollwitz wrote as she carved it in 1937, “Only reflection”. Back in the 1920s, commemorating that earlier war, the great Ernst Barlach chose Kathe Kollwitz’s face for his Hovering Angel, a mantled bronze that he suspended within the cathedral of his home town, Gustrow. The Nazis, preferring two naked youths with a sword, banished and later destroyed the Barlach Angel. Today, travelling outside Germany for the first time in 30 years, a second bronze angel, secretly cast from the original plaster, floats above the objects from this book that are currently displayed in London.

Fittingly, MacGregor’s final image is Gerhard Richter’s portrait of his daughter Betty. The girl’s face is turned away from the artist and from us. We are not shown what she sees. We can only guess what she thinks of her father, or his generation. All we know, as MacGregor quietly observes at the end of this timely and profoundly affecting work, is that, in a moment, “this young woman will turn to face us, and the future”.

“Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State”, by George P. Shultz

1184 pages, Charles Scribner’s Sons, ISBN-13: 978-0684193250

During the Reagan Revolution, that sadly incomplete counter-revolution of the 80s against the excesses of the 60s and malaise of the 70s, two kinds of conservatives competed for influence in The Gipper’s Washington: there were the “movement conservatives” – hot-eyed, ideological and conservatively radical; and then there were the “true conservatives” – men and women who believed in changing only what needed to be changed in order to conserve the fabric of a world they felt comfortable with, like Edmund Burke…and like George Shultz. The main theme of Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, Shultz’s memoirs of his time in Reagan’s Cabinet, is a success story. When he succeeded Alexander Haig as Secretary of State the world was in a tense, angry mess, but by the time he left at the end of the Reagan Administration the Cold War had been won by the West, relations with the Soviet Union were almost miraculously friendly, and Schultz’s own personal relationship with Eduard Shevardnadze had contributed significantly to that improvement. Everywhere one looked Soviet influence in the world was fading while American influence was filling the spaces left by the receding red tide.

The struggles within the Reagan Administration, though, loom at least as large in Shultz’s narrative as the conflicts in the world outside the Beltway. There was, first of all, the bitter personal feud with Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense. Weinberger (the lawyer from northern California) and Shultz (the economist from New York City) had bumped into one another all through their respective rises, first in the Nixon Administration and then again at the Bechtel Corporation. In Reagan’s Cabinet they found themselves sharing responsibility for that amorphous concept called National Security, and ended up feuding constantly, with these quarrels punctuating Shultz’s memoirs like an out-of-tune leitmotiv (there are exactly one-hundred references to Weinberger in the index, some of them lengthy, none of them complimentary; almost the only unedifying thing in this long, careful and fair-minded book is this obsessional carping). Shultz’s more serious problems, however, were with Reagan’s national security advisers and their staff, and with the CIA: Bill Casey, Bill Clark, Bud McFarlane, Admiral Poindexter, Oliver North and the whole cast of intriguers and desperadoes, Middle Eastern and native-born, to whom they were incessantly trying to hand over American foreign policy. Instinctively, President Reagan shared the Manichean worldview of these bravoes and ideologues and squirmed when Shultz distanced the United States from General Pinochet in Chile or consented to the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines (desperate, shady sonsovbitches, to be sure, but the world is full of desperate, shady sonsovbitches – and besides, they were our desperate, shady sonsovbitches). Yet nothing is more impressive in this book than Reagan’s instinct never to allow his moderate Secretary of State to be totally cut out of the loop.

At 1100+ pages this is a very long book and not a light one in any sense of the word. Shultz’s manner is ponderous, his self-esteem is unshakeable, his intellectual complacency infuriating…yet this is an important book and one which deserves to raise his already solid reputation. His account of the Iran Contra affair contains new material (though it is more wholehearted in its condemnation of the Iranian arms deals than of the Contra aid, as it should be), while diplomatic historians will find his lengthy accounts of the Reagan Administration’s dealings with Gorbachev and of the part of the Middle East peace process that happened on his watch very useful. Through it all George P. Shultz emerges from his own account (and I do not think this can be entirely faked) as a man with firm principles governing the way the United States ought to behave and a firm set of lines which he was not prepared to compromise in his personal conduct. His book will not perhaps be much read for entertainment, but his reputation, I suspect, will rise with the passing of time. More importantly, this long, honest and serious account of the way American foreign policy worked in a period of exceptional opportunity confirms an unfashionable but, I think now unavoidable, impression: that the United States has been fortunate indeed in the quality of its diplomats at Foggy Bottom.

“How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It”, by Arthur Herman

472 pages, MJF Books, ISBN-13: 978-1606710494

Arthur Herman’s (get ready for it) How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It (whew!) is a bit overstated, but, if at the end you’re not convinced that if only the Scots had been more hooked on whiskey then it just might have prevented them from conquering the world…which they did, according to Herman, first with their ideas generated during the Scottish Enlightenment, and latter through the medium of the British Empire, which they all but ran. Not to mention all of those Americans, Canadians, Australians and so on of Scottish decent who likewise ran their relative countries. That’s a mighty big claim to make, but Herman buy and large makes it believable (with a hefty sprinkling of salt, to be sure).

The first part of the book, Epiphany, consists of eight chapters and focuses on the roots, development and impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on Scotland in particular and on Great Britain as a whole. The roots come from an appreciation for democracy and literacy that developed from the Scottish Reformation when John Knox brought Calvinist Presbyterianism to Scotland and preached that God had ordained true power into the people and that, therefore, it was for the people to administer and enforce God’s laws, not the monarchy. For common people to understand God’s laws they had to be able to read the Bible, so schools were built in every parish and literacy rates grew rapidly, creating a Scottish-oriented market for books and writers. Though they each resented one another, the English and Scots joined in 1707 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain (and Ireland); the English wanted the Scots controlled and the Scots realized they could never match English power (much less English birth rates). The Scots immediately benefited from a centralized government that paid little attention to it, as for example when inexpensive imports reduced the impacts of famines and allowed a Scottish culture to, at last, flourish. Herman calls the Scottish Enlightenment “more robust and original” than the French Enlightenment and that the principle product of the “Scottish School” was the idea that humans are creatures of their environment, constantly evolving and trying to understand itself via social sciences. The defeat of the 1745 Jacobite rising – while certainly romantic – was ultimately a blessing for the Scots in that it decimated the feudal social structure based around clans lorded over by chieftains. This liberalized the Scottish way of life by allowing citizens to own land and keep the profits instead of giving all profits to the chieftains who owned all the land. Their literate foundation allowed the Scots to become economically literate and take advantage of trade, with Edinburgh and Glasgow becoming epicenters of intellectual thought and industrial might. There existed in Scotland a clergy who believed that a moral and religious foundation was required for, and compatible with, a free and open sophisticated culture that moderated hardline conservatives. Herman presents biographies of Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Robert Adam, Adam Smith, and others to illustrate this at-one time unthought-of Scottish development.

The second part of the book, Diaspora, focuses on the impact the Scots had on wider events all over the world. While most Scottish immigrants to the American colonies sympathized with the British during the American Revolutionary War, those who did fight in the militias were the most capable because many were the same refugee families from the 1745 Jacobite rising. Herman claims that the Scottish School of Common Sense influenced much of the American declaration of independence and constitution. After Great Britain lost the American colonies, a second generation of Scottish intellectuals saved Britain from stagnation and reinforced a self-confidence that allowed the country to manage a world empire during the Victorian era. Scots in India, like James Mill, led the British idea of “liberal” imperialism that they had to take over indigenous cultures and run their society for their own good, the white-nationalist euphemism “white man’s burden”. And as if all of this wasn’t enough, Herman claims that Sir Walter Scott invented the historical novel, giving modernity a “self-conscious antidote” and gave literature a “place as part of modern life”. In science and industry Herman states that James Watt’s steam engine “gave capitalism its modern face, which has persisted down to today” by permitting business to choose its location – like in cities close to inexpensive labor – and it was the Scots who rectified negative impacts industry had, i.e. the public health movement. Scottish contribution to modern society is further illustrated with biographies of Scots like Dugald Stewart, John Witherspoon, John McAdam, Thomas Telford, and John Pringle, among others.

What to make of all this? How the Scots Invented the Modern World is lively, well-written and even scholarly (notwithstanding the complete lack of notes), but with a rather over-reaching thesis. However, the use of the word “invented” – perhaps provocative and hyperbolic, maybe even absurd and prejudicial – should be understood as trying to understand certain traditions and institutions that had spontaneously arisen in the course of man’s work but that were still misunderstood even by many intelligent observers, not, like a number of their French counterparts, an attempt to construct a new world. With the rise of German universities and their way of doing things, the Scottish model has waned and fallen into disuse – a pity, as all of the riotous snowflakes now occupying our hallowed halls of learning could use a bracing dose of Scottish common sense right about now.

“Instrument of War: The German Army 1914–18”, by Dennis Showalter

328 pages, Osprey Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1472813008

Instrument of War: The German Army 1914–18 by Dennis Showalter draws on his more than half a century of research and teaching in order to present a fresh perspective on the German Army during World War I; an army that was at the heart of German pride and national identity that was driven (yet also defeated by) warfare in the modern age, and which struggled to capitalize on its victories and ultimately forgot the lessons of its defeat. Exploring the internal dynamics of the German Army and detailing how the soldiers coped with the many new forms of warfare, Showalter shows how the army’s institutions responded to and how Germany itself was changed by war. The overall theme of this book is that the inward-looking nature of the officer corps: concentrating as it did on tactics, weaponry and operations, to the detriment of broader strategic and diplomatic/political policy. Detailing the major campaigns on the Western and Eastern fronts and the forgotten war fought in the Middle East and Africa, this comprehensive new volume reveals operational strategy, the complexities of campaigns of movement versus static trench warfare, and the changes in warfare. Specialists will not be surprised at such a conclusion, nor at the idea that Ludendorff botched the political/diplomatic and strategic handling of the War’s last two years. Rather than seeing Ludendorff as a sinister or mentally unbalanced tyrant, Showalter sees him as a product of the very nature of the Army’s culture. Overall, Showalter is quite balanced and convincing in his arguments. The Professor is a great lecturer and his writing is like his speaking style. He has some fresh insights for the specialist, but for the most part this book will serve well as an intro to the German Army’s role in WWI for the intelligent and well-read non-specialist. Instrument of War could use some (fairly minor) editing/proof-reading for the sake of clarity and to correct a few bloopers (my favorite was about the “German General Stairs Railroad Section”; I guess the generals had their own staircase?) All in all, however, a fine book and great introduction to any study of the German Army.