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The past in perspective Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes Antony Beevor Mary Beard Richard J Evans Sameer Rahim Andrew Marr Simon Schama

The past in perspective - Prospect Magazine · The past in perspective Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes ... of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of

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Page 1: The past in perspective - Prospect Magazine · The past in perspective Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes ... of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of

The past in perspectiveCatriona KellyJulian Barnes Antony Beevor Mary BeardRichard J EvansSameer RahimAndrew MarrSimon Schama

Page 2: The past in perspective - Prospect Magazine · The past in perspective Catriona Kelly Julian Barnes ... of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of

PROSPECT2

Foreword by Sameer Rahim

Contents

At Prospect we believe that reflecting on the past can provide key insights into the present—and the future. In the following pages, you can read a selec-tion of some of our favourite historical and contem-porary essays we have published in the last year.

Julian Barnes’s new novel, The Noise of Time, is based on the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In her lively and expert review, Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian at Oxford University, argues that Barnes has captured the spirit of the “technician of survival,” who was in continual fear of having his music—and his life—being eradicated by Stalin.

Staying on Russia, Antony Beevor’s column “If I ruled the world” describes how after the publication of his bestselling Ber-lin: the Downfall, which criticised the Red Army’s conduct during the Second World War, the Russian ambassador accused him of “lies, slander and blasphemy.” Beevor says that historical disputes should not be the subject of national laws—even if that means allowing Holocaust deniers to put forward their case. Scholarship should be robust enough to challenge lies about the past.

Mary Beard made her name with revisionist accounts of the Roman Empire, highlighting the women and slaves often glossed over in traditional works. Reviewing Beard’s new book, SPQR, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King’s College, Lon-don, hails her “exceptional ability” to keep up with modern

scholarship as well as her talent for plunging the reader into the thick of the action right from the start.

Nazi propaganda presented Hitler’s Germany as the inher-itor of the Roman Empire. The man who shaped that image was Joseph Goebbels. Richard J Evans, a leading historian of the Nazis, reviews a biography of Goebbels that draws extensively for the first time on his private diaries. What Evans finds is a man, for all his fanatical bombast, who had “a soul devoid of content.” Also included is my interview with Nikolaus Wachsmann, whose acclaimed book KL is the first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps.

We have Andrew Marr’s review of Simon Schama’s history of Britain through its portraits—“a terrific, fat book, classic Simon Schama.” Marr, the BBC presenter who last year wrote a history of the nation through its poetry, praises the book for its “zest and intelligence.”

Finally, Ruth Dudley Edwards explores the legacy of the Easter Rising a century on. She argues that the way the event has been commemorated reflects a change in perception, and a desire from the Irish public and from their government to look forward to a positive future.

These are also qualities we believe mark out Prospect’s writ-ing, whether it is about the distant past or the present day. Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Arts & Books editor

03 Technician of survival catriona kelly

06 If I ruled the world antony beevor

07 What the Romans really did edith hall

09 Hitler’s shadow richard j evans

12 Anatomy of a genocide sameer rahim

14 An eye for a story andrew marr

16 The fading myths of Easter 1916 ruth dudley edwards

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The life of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich is at once well-documented and elusive. Famous from an early age, the Russian composer was surrounded for his whole life by family, musicians, pupils, enemies and admirers; he attracted the attention of the formida-

ble Soviet surveillance machine at every level. Material traces, including an apartment museum in Moscow, abound. Yet he also skids away from definition. The latest to re-interpret his life is Julian Barnes, whose new novel The Noise of Time is structured round three crucial episodes in Shostakovich’s struggle with state power.

In private photographs and in the recollections of those closest to him in his later years, Shostakovich has the reserved intensity of his late chamber music. But in some moods, according to the dis-puted but likely in some respects accurate memoirs of the musi-cologist Solomon Volkov, he could be both hilarious and pungent. Winding his way through a dangerous patronage culture, he has often been understood as a martyr to the totalitarian state. But he is also psychologically comparable with figures such as Alexander Pushkin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Interpreting such art-ists exclusively in terms of encoded self-revelation and concealed irony—as Shostakovich often is—would certainly not do justice to their intentions or intelligence.

Current academic study tends to avoid the hunt for “the real Shostakovich” (a kind of perpetuation of state surveillance) in favour of a historical understanding. The archives have not pre-served the young boy’s school reports, but they confirm his near-contemporary Boris Lossky’s account. Shostakovich attended what was known officially as a commercial school, but the title was a flag of convenience: the syllabus was shaped by the strong con-temporary interest among educated Russians in “free education,” and it even had its own Montessori kindergarten. The emphasis on self-directed study, personal development and community spirit had its echoes later in his life.

Shostakovich was certainly not purely a victim—he managed, after all, to outlive no fewer than three Soviet leaders, while many of his artistic contemporaries preceded even Vladimir Lenin into the grave. As well as being moulded by his era, he helped to con-struct it. Marina Frolova-Walker, Jonathan Walker, Kiril Tomoff

and others have illuminated the circumstances in which the Soviet Union’s foremost composer lived and worked. Yet the surround-ings only make the man at the centre seem less substantial. Lau-rel Fay’s scholarly biography, recording what is known for certain, is at once scrupulous and dry.

Myth-making annoys historians, but perhaps annoyed Shosta-kovich less. His Soviet biographer, Sofya Khentova, claimed that

Shostakovich had recalled raptly listen-ing to Lenin’s speech at the Finland Sta-tion on 3rd April 1917; Volkov recollects Shostakovich saying he’d ended up in the

crowd by mistake and hadn’t known what the fuss was about; Fay, following Lossky, states that Shostakovich was never there at all—by the time Lenin arrived, a nicely brought up 10-year-old would have been safely tucked up in bed. The third version is much the most convincing. But that doesn’t disprove that Shostakovich told the other stories, or even, to some extent, believed them. Like many who witnessed the Revolution (particularly the February Revolution) as a child, he had a genuine enthusiasm for popular upheaval and mass action all his life, if not necessarily for what resulted from that great political turmoil. Sticking to the facts can mean, at some level, missing the point.

Where historians subside into embarrassed silence, nov-elists speak. In The Noise of Time, the different variants of the Lenin story are among many pointers to the fluidity of Shosta-kovich’s relations with his past: “These days, he no longer knew what version to trust. He lies like an eyewitness, as the story goes.” In an anecdote that frames the novel and is also repeated within it, three men drink a vodka toast on a wartime station platform: “one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink.” The Shos-takovich of Barnes’s imagining includes all three: the barely surviving crippled alcoholic, limbless on his trolley, practis-ing “a technique for survival”; the bespectacled listener who offers him vodka with egregious courtesy; and the anonymous witness, who disappears even from recollection after the desul-tory encounter.

Not that Barnes’s purpose is anything to do with allegory. But The Noise of Time, largely based on memoirs (those collected by Elizabeth Wilson as well as Solomon Volkov’s) is a book about 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 otiose to point out that as well as agonising over his new version of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich negotiated hard over

Technician of survival

Julian Barnes brings to life the troubled inner world of Dmitri Shostakovich catriona kelly

Catriona Kelly is a professor of Russian at Oxford University. Her latest book is “St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past” (Yale)

The Noise of Timeby Julian Barnes (Vintage, £14.99)

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Reserved intensity: a portrait of Shostakovich by Frances Broomfield (2003)

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Shostakovich with fellow composers Sergei Prokofiev (left) and Aram Khachaturian (right)

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the 1966 film version and insisted only the Kiev production was used. The Noise of Time is a distillation of experience into insom-niac self-questioning, or the vertiginous doubt, otkhodnyak, that succeeds the temporary confidence of a vodka high. The mode is interior monologue, but in the third person sometimes used about themselves by particularly sensitive individuals alienated, lifelong, from their own lives.

“It had got to the point when he despised being the person he was, on an almost daily basis,” a Shostakovich in his fifties reflects. This self-distancing permeates The Noise of Time, since the narra-tive’s starting point is already the existential edge—the 1937 agony of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in Pravda as “Muddle instead of Music.” Anna Akhmatova, the poet with whom, as the novel reminds us, Shos-takovich once sat in mutually appreciative silence for 20 minutes, wrote in Northern Elegies: “I shall not lie in my own grave.” Shosta-kovich had the same sense of self-distance.

The composer’s early years are summed up by his painfully delirious love affair with Tanya, the “hard, demeaning work” of playing cinema piano, or the open-air performance of his First Symphony disrupted by a competitive concert from the neighbour-hood dogs. Motifs repeat: a string of garlic threaded round a wrist to ward off infections; a small case packed against possible arrest; the cocktail sauce with bobbing shrimps in the plane Shostako-vich gets to the United States, and where later the composer ima-gines himself afloat.

At one level, this phenomenology of daily life echoes the shadow-double of Barnes’s novel, Osip Mandelstam’s memoir The Noise of Time. But where the hideous sideboard owned by a rela-tion of Mandelstam’s, or the landscape of a Baltic beach, testify to the age they came from, the objects here are pared to their sig-nificance for Shostakovich. Two clocks, for instance, daily chime together in perfect unison. “This was not chance. He would turn on the wireless a minute or two before the hour. Galya would be

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.

In Russia, despair is sometimes diffi-cult to separate from black humour: as the joke goes, “If you’re over 40 and you wake up, and nothing hurts, that means you’ve died.” Unlike some English chron-iclers of Russian life, Barnes has an ear for this mood: “Music is not like Chinese eggs; it does not improve by being kept under-ground.” When Shostakovich reflects on what he sees as the passivity of Ameri-cans, he notes that “even the cows stand-ing motionless in the fields looked like advertisements for condensed milk.” One of Shostakovich’s wry comments even has a parallel life as an in-joke for people who know Barnes’s previous work on Gustave Flaubert: “Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by the tail; his head banged against every step.”

But it is above all the “hard, irreducible purity” of music that drives the narration, expressed not just in key sounds (“four factory sirens in F sharp”) or Shostakovich’s vis-ceral reaction to conducting that he hates—“Toscanini chopped up music like hash and smeared disgusting sauce over it”—but in the crafting of language itself. Shostakovich’s ageing shows not just in disillusion, or the shift of motion from “skitter” to “limp,” but in a transformation of tempi. First comes a nervous scherzo of love entanglements: “And so he and Nina met, and they became lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her hus-band, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a date for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so failed to turn up and ran away and hid…” Later, there is the slow-ing that Shostakovich himself liked to mark morendo, with the violist Fyodor Druzhinin told to play the slow movement of the Fif-teenth Quartet “so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.”

At once self-deprecating and precise, the joke captures not just Shostakovich’s capacity for evasion, but the nature of his own composition, its saturated emptiness. Fictional por-trayals of music soften and sweeten the nature of the art (take Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes), reducing it to ethereal cliché; the result is not too far from novelettes such as Florence L Barclay’s The Rosary or Naomi Royde-Smith’s Mildensee. But The Noise of Time shares with Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata—another text which has at its centre the tyranny of music and its physiologically devas-tating potential—the capacity for evocation of music-making that is worthy of the real thing. And, just as Shostakovich him-self survived his encounters with power to transform dog barks and factory sirens into some of the 20th century’s most explo-sive exercises in created sound, so this novel is, fortunately, much larger than the depiction of the composer in the familiar role of a “technician of survival,” a midnight meditator on life’s futility and his own.

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States must stop trying to rewrite history

it of the status of a victorious nation.” It didn’t occur to me until after writing Berlin that the rea-

son Russians found it so painful to acknowledge the mass rapes—including those who suffered in the Gulag and hated Stalin—was that for them the victory over Nazi Germany was a moment of which they could all feel proud and which unified the country. In fact Karasin warned me—before he knew exactly what was in the book—that “what you have to realise is that the victory is sacred.” It is seen almost as the defining moment of the Soviet Union and therefore cannot be tampered with. 

That any state has to rely on legislation to defend this idea is deeply depressing. They have even set up the Russian Military Historical Society, whose aim is to foster patriotism and resist attempts to distort military history. There have been some very brave Russian historians, some of whom have lost their posi-tions, simply by questioning the party line of today, which is

that there were only a few cases of rape and of course all of those were prosecuted. We know this is absolute rubbish:

the numbers were far greater. Trying to foster patriotism through history is something that many regimes have done in the past, and they tend to be undemocratic in one form or another. During the Russian victory cele-brations on 9th May the orange and black St George’s ribbon was being used everywhere. This symbol from the past is being used in eastern Ukraine to represent

Russian heroism today.History needs to be debated openly. You can ban cer-

tain symbols—as Germany has done with the swastika—and you can even ban certain

political parties. But it is quite wrong to suppress a counter-argument in history. For example, the great Jewish historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg put the number

of deaths at a bit over five mil-lion, rather than six million.

Did that make him a Hol-ocaust denier? It’s a grey

area. If you want to do something about real Holocaust deniers you could prosecute them under hate laws—but not on the grounds of falsifying history.

Antony Beevor is a bestselling and award-

winning historian. His latest book is “Ardennes 1944:

Hitler’s Last Gamble,” which was published last year by Viking

Press

As world ruler, I would prevent countries from attempting to control history. One saw the way the historian David Irving, who in 2005 was sent to prison by an Austrian court for denying the Holocaust, could make himself out to be a victim and a martyr. Then there was former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who tried to outlaw the denial of the Armenian genocide in 2012. It was opportunistic and designed to get the Armenian vote. This is a state attempt to control history, which is something I oppose on principle. 

The issue has also come up in Russia. In 2013, Sergei Shoigu, the country’s Minister for Defence, passed a law that he had been trying to get on the statute books since 2009. It would imprison anyone, in theory for up to five years, who criticised the Red Army’s conduct during the Second World War. (I have to declare an interest: I am a target of this law because my 2002 book Ber-lin: the Downfall also covered the mass rapes commit-ted by Russian soldiers in 1945.) Shoigu described the “crime” of criticising the Red Army as tan-tamount to Holocaust denial. It’s interesting, considering that Joseph Stalin himself was, in a way, the first Holocaust denier. He refused to allow that the Jews should have any spe-cial category of suffering. 

After the publication of my book, the Russian Ambassador to Britain, Grigory Karasin, accused me of lies, slander and blas-phemy against the Red Army. Karasin is now Deputy Foreign Minister. I don’t know to what degree I am still in the firing line because I still get invitations to the Russian Embassy. Vladimir Putin does like to come up with totally contradictory positions to con-fuse his opponents. Rather like the way he accuses Ukraine of fascism and then proceeds to sup-port fascist or neo-fascist parties in western Europe. His real goal is the attempt to control Russian history. In March, while planning celebrations for Russia’s victory in the Second World War, Putin said: “Today we unfortunately see not only attempts to misrepresent and distort events of the war, but cyni-cal, open lies and the brazen defa-mation of a whole generation who gave up everything for the victory.” He continued: “Their goal is clear: to undermine the power and moral authority of modern Russia and deprive

If I ruled the world Antony Beevor

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A ncient Roman literary critics admired writing that plunged readers into the thick of the action—in medias res—rather than boring them with pre-ambles. Mary Beard plunges her reader, from the first page, into one of the most exciting episodes in

Roman history. In 63BC, the orator and statesman Cicero exposed what he

claimed was a revolutionary conspiracy. It was led by the disaffected aristocrat Catiline, whom Cicero accused of plot-ting to assassinate all the elected mag-istrates of Rome, set fire to the city’s buildings and cancel all debts indiscriminately. Beard writes with her customary energy, charm and intensity, resurrecting the titanic personalities who struggled to control Rome while its republican constitution was hurled into its final death throes. She uses contemporary terms like “homeland security” to make the unfamiliar accessible. Her ambivalence towards Cicero—brilliant, prolific, brave, eloquent, but vain and obnoxiously self-pitying—is palpable. By the end of the chapter we are primed to take the story forward to the next phase: the assassination of Julius Caesar and the climactic con-flict between Mark Antony and Octavian, soon to become Augus-tus. But Beard chooses instead to disorient us completely.

In chapter two she abruptly transfers us back many centuries to the very beginnings of Rome, or rather its mythical origins in the stories of Romulus and Remus and of the rape of the Sabine women. All except the final two chapters then take a broad histori-cal sweep, structured in conventional chronological order stretch-ing from archaeological finds dating to as early as 1000BC all the way to 212AD. The sense of chronological disorientation is, I think, deliberate. The version of the early history of Rome which has come down to us was mostly filtered by later Roman writers, both Cicero and authors working under Augustus—Livy, Propertius, Virgil and Ovid. Beard is laudably keen that we see the early his-tory as not only gappy and inconsistent but artfully manipulated to suit the political agenda of later writers. But the effect is con-fusing, right from her opening sentence: “Our history of ancient Rome begins in the middle of the 1st century BC.” By “Our history of Rome” she means “My history of Rome,” but any Roman his-tory novice will assume her meaning is that “The history of Rome” commences at that date.

Beginners will then spend the next five chapters struggling to understand the successive waves of data about the preceding cen-turies—the kings of Rome, the consolidation of the Republican regime, the widening of Rome’s horizons in the fourth and third centuries BC, the expansion of the empire, the violent upheavals of the “new politics” at the time of the Gracchi in the late 2nd cen-tury down to the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73BC. We do not

rejoin Cicero until nearly halfway through Beard’s narrative, in chapter seven, where he is now taking on Verres, the governor of Sicily accused of corruption. But that con-

frontation preceded Cicero’s denunciations of Catiline, with which “we” had begun “our” history. As a Classics graduate I know some Roman history, but must admit to intermittent bewilderment. I would recommend any new Roman history enthusiasts to begin on page 78 with Beard’s enthralling account of the archaeological evidence for early habitations in the Roman area. These include the remains of a two-year-old girl found in a coffin beneath the forum in a dress decorated with beads; in the 1980s archaeologists unearthed the sort of house she might have lived in north of the city, a small timber edifice with a primitive portico. It contained the remains of the earliest known domestic cat in Italy.

Beard is always at her dazzling best breathing life into the material remnants left by the ancient inhabitants of the Roman world, as she did in her prizewinning 2008 book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. One of her hallmarks is an exceptional ability to remain up-to-date with the most recent archaeological discover-ies, and communicate their contents and significance in a lively and user-friendly manner. The public has been waiting eagerly for SPQR since her engaging 2012 BBC series Meet the Romans. The greatest virtue of SPQR is her ability to choose individual objects or texts and tease out from them insights into Roman life and experience. These range from the enigmatic “black stone” found in the forum inscribed with words including “KING,” to a relief sculpture depicting a poultry shop, complete with suspended chicken and caged rabbits. The book contains 21 colour plates and more than a hundred others embedded in the text, every one add-ing an exciting dimension to her colourful chronicle.

The leading dramatis personae are evoked in stunning pen-portraits. Some ask us to reassess figures we thought we already 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 admires some of his achievements. There are finely-tuned cameos in the whistle-stop tour of the 14 emperors who ruled between

What the Romans really did

Mary Beard’s colourful chronicle of Ancient Rome debunks familiar myths edith hall

Edith Hall is a Professor in the Department of Classics and at King’s College London. Her latest book is “Introducing the Ancient Greeks” (Vintage)

SPQR: A History of Ancient Romeby Mary Beard (Profile, £25)

SPQR: A History of Ancient Romeby Mary Beard (Profile, £25)

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Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784) portrays the Roman ideal of loyalty and self-sacrifice

the death of Augustus in 14AD and the assassination in 192AD of Commodus (the son of Marcus Aurelius who plays the villain in Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator). Although there are mercifully few signs of the controversialism which used to be her sole irri-tating characteristic, Beard rightly challenges the tradition of dividing the rulers of the Imperium Romanum into heroes and felons. The tradition, extending back to Tacitus and Suetonius, was inherited by Edward Gibbon. Beard pleads, instead, for a less judgemental and more nuanced appraisal of the way that the sen-sational ancient accounts of the emperors reveal the anxieties and socio-political values of the imperial era. She also emphasises that for many inhabitants of the empire, especially those living in the more far-flung territories, the personality of the emperor made lit-tle difference. This is a wonderful, lucid and thoughtful section of the book and should be required reading for anyone setting out to study Roman emperors.

There is an attempt at a thematic rather than linear approach in one central chapter, “The Home Front,” where the discussion of family life and women is compromised by being focused, yet again, on Cicero—or rather Cicero’s relationships with his wives and daughter. But the two other thematic chapters—the last in the book—are outstanding. Here she abandons the chronologi-cal structure and looks at the rich-poor divide and the experience of people living under the Romans outside Rome. The luxurious lifestyle of the wealthy across the empire was astounding: some owned dozens of sumptuous villas with central heating and lav-ish murals, swimming pools and shady grottoes, all serviced by armies of slaves. Some rich people paraded their wealth by indulg-ing in ostentatious feasting and pastimes; others subsidised public amenities—libraries, theatres, gladiator shows—in order to ward off the dangers posed by the inevitable envy of the poor.

Beard points out, however, that much of the physical unpleas-

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-ence livelihood. There were few changes in agricultural technology or fundamen-tal lifestyle from the Iron Age to medieval times. The letters of Pliny the Younger are a rich source of evidence for the relation-ship between Roman governors and such “ordinary” people of the provinces, in his case in Bithynia and Pontus; Beard leads us from these into a revealing discussion of the problems Roman governors faced in policing the boundaries of empire (includ-

ing Hadrian’s Wall) and how they largely tolerated local religious practices and cultural diversity, although Christianity became an exception.

The turbulent showdown between the Illyrian Emperor Dio-cletian and the martyrdom-hungry Christians in the early fourth century is one of many fascinating episodes in the history of the Romans which Beard excludes from her account by ending it in 212AD. Her logic for ending here is impeccable: this was when the Emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a Roman citizen, thus causing 30m individuals to “become legally Roman overnight.” Beard stresses the significance of the erasure of the millennium-long boundary between the rulers and the ruled—the completion of what she calls the Romans’ “citizen-ship project,” from which we can still learn, even though it subse-quently failed and had always been fundamentally blemished by slavery.

Besides the history of Rome as it continued in the third and fourth centuries CE, the element I most miss is an attempt to get inside the minds of the remarkable ancient Italians in terms of their philosophy and ethics. Beard writes well on priesthoods and public religion, but is not much interested in philosophy. Despite her fixation on Cicero, who wrote philosophical trea-tises, she offers less on the complex thought-world and extraordi-nary psychological strengths—self-control, resilience, acceptance of uncompromising discipline, fearlessness in the face of death, moral fortitude, high ideals and principles—which many mem-bers of this tough and soldierly people drew from their Stoic, Neo-platonic and Epicurean convictions. She is good on Virgil’s Aeneid as a political poem, but has little to say about the earliest surviv-ing Roman epic, Lucretius’s inspirational work On the Nature of Things. I finished SPQR hoping that we will one day be treated to a Beard book on the inward contours of the Roman psyche.

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In April 1983, the Sunday Times, together with the Ger-man magazine Stern, revealed to an astonished world the diaries of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Running to a total of 60 volumes, the diaries had been authenticated by two leading historians of the period, Gerhard Wein-

berg and Hugh Trevor-Roper. “I am now satisfied,” declared Trevor-Roper after examining the documents in a Swiss bank vault, “that the documents are authen-tic; that the history of their wanderings since 1945 is true; and that the standard accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in consequence have to be revised.”

This was certainly true, or would have been had the diaries been genuine. Hitler was well known for his irregular lifestyle, staying up into the small hours watching movies, getting up late, and preferring to make decisions on the hoof rather than plough-ing through the mountains of documents that usually confront heads of state. Was he, then, confounding everyone’s view of his character by writing down an account of his thoughts and deeds day after day for years on end? After the German Federal Archives had finally obtained samples of the diaries, they discovered that the ink and paper had been manufactured long after Hitler’s death, and that most of the diaries’ content was copied from his speeches. As the forger Konrad Kujau was sent to prison, it seemed the standard account of Hitler’s writing habits and personality would not have to be revised after all.

Even before the decisive intervention of the archivists, however, there was good reason to doubt that the Hitler diaries were authen-tic. There had been no mention of them before. Nobody, neither his friends and acquaintances nor his secretaries and assistants, had betrayed even the slightest suspicion that they existed. By con-trast, the fact that his chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was writing a diary had been well known for many years. Goebbels published edited extracts in a chronicle of the rise and triumph of Nazism and the party’s coming to power in 1933. Then at the end of the war, some of the pages were found amid the ruins of the Reich Chancellery, and subsequently published by an American journalist. Towards the end of the war, as he became concerned about the fate of the (by now voluminous) diaries, Goebbels had them filmed on to glass microfiche plates, taken to Potsdam, just outside the German capital, and buried. Here, however, the Red Army discovered them and shipped them off to the KGB Spe-cial Archive in Moscow, where they remained, unread, until the

Hitler’s shadowThe 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

Richard J Evans is President of Wolfson College Cambridge and the author of “The Third Reich in History and Memory” (Little, Brown)

archive was opened up after the fall of communism.Since then, a team from the Institute of Contemporary His-

tory in Munich, led by Elke Fröhlich, has been transcribing the often difficult handwriting and publishing it in 29 volumes, the last of which appeared in 2008. A few extracts have appeared in English, but the vast majority of the diaries are only accessible in this German edition. The historian Peter Longerich, author

of a major study of the Holocaust and a biography of Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler, has now delivered the first study of Goebbels to be based on an

exhaustive and critical evaluation of the whole run of the diaries, augmented where appropriate by the use of other sources ranging from official documents to Goebbels’s own propaganda produc-tions. It is an impressive achievement.

And it’s an achievement that has immediately got Longerich into legal difficulties. Extracts from the diaries appear on almost every page. But the diaries were still legally in copyright at the time Longerich’s book was published, since European law states that copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death, which in Goebbels’s case means 1st May 2015. Who exactly are the copy-right owners? Longerich and his publishers, Random House, had assumed that Nazi documents were free for anyone to quote, as indeed should be the case. But there were people who disagreed. Last year, a successful lawsuit was brought in a Munich court against Random House for breach of copyright. The lawyer bring-ing the case was Cordula Schacht, daughter of Goebbels’s col-league in the Hitler Cabinet, Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht; it seemed as if the old Nazi regime was rearing its head again from beyond the grave to lay claim to ownership of these crucial documents.

Cordula Schacht has form in this area, as legal advisor of the late François Genoud, a Swiss banker who had met Hitler in the 1930s and become financial advisor to the Grand Mufti of Jeru-salem, a fanatical anti-Semite who wanted to exterminate Jew-ish emigrants to Palestine. Genoud was close to the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and advised the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in an airplane hijacking in 1972. An active Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler, Genoud once told the journalist Gitta Sereny: “The truth is, I loved Hitler.” He gave financial support to old Nazis trying to evade capture, and con-tributed money to the defence of Adolf Eichmann in his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Genoud bought some of the papers of Hitler’s 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 Schacht, who since then has claimed to be the copyright holder. The case was complicated by the fact that the Bavarian State

Goebbels: A Biographyby Peter Longerich (The Bodley Head, £30)

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also claimed to own the copyright, since it had taken ownership of the Nazi publishing house which Goebbels had intended should publish the diaries after his death. True, no written contract has ever been found. But a 1936 entry in the diary suggests there was an oral agreement. On this basis, Random House has refused to pay Schacht for the right to quote from the diary. It is the first publisher to take this stand; previously, for decades, publishers had to crawl to Genoud for permissions, on occasion being forced to allow him to write a preface or introduction expressing his own obnoxious views. On 23rd April this year, a higher Munich court accepted Random House’s appeal against last year’s ruling. Schacht has appealed against this, demanding payment of just over €6,500 (the publisher offered to pay if the money went to a Holocaust-related charity, but Schacht refused). On 9th July the case will come before the courts for a final decision.

Random House is taking its admirable stand on the principle that the writings of a Nazi criminal should not be made the sub-ject of commercial exploitation. As the diaries show, there can be no doubt about Goebbels’s responsibility for murders, expropria-tions and much more besides. He began his career as a poet and novelist. His PhD in German literature earned him the title “Dr Goebbels,” by which he was invariably known in the Nazi years—few leading Nazis were as well educated or as well read: Fyodor

Dostoevsky, as his early diaries show, was a particular passion. But he did not embark on an academic career or find success as an author. His two verse plays were never performed, and he could not find a publisher for his semi-autobiographical novel Michael for several years. Plagued by feelings of inferiority, generated not least by the club foot that left him with a heavy limp, he earned a meagre living as a journalist and for a while as a bank clerk, and found a sense of self-worth in numerous affairs with women, a kind of self-validation that continued throughout his life.

Whether or not Goebbels was, as Longerich claims, a narcis-sist, he certainly sought to compensate for his low self-esteem by passionately attaching himself to Hitler. Already by 1923, he had formed his deeply anti-Semitic and anti-democratic political views, which he found expressed by the early Nazi party. Lack-ing any real power base, Goebbels profiled himself as a radical when he became politically active in the Nazi party in April 1924, using violent and inflammatory language to make a name for himself. Although he found Hitler’s views on some issues “reac-tionary,” he was won over by the Nazi leader on a visit to Munich, and his ascent up the Nazi hierarchy began. Soon Hitler put him in charge of the Nazi party in Berlin, difficult territory in view of the fact that the communists and socialists were extremely strong in the capital. Goebbels’s diaries, however, lay bare the feuding

Joseph Goebbels (centre) watches the filming of Patriots in 1937 with the French ambassador, André François-Poncet (left)

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between Hitler’s acolytes, during which Goebbels conceived a bit-ter hatred for his rival Hermann Goering. Partly because of this, his position remained insecure for a long time. Hitler, he wrote on one occasion, was his only friend in the party.

The diaries provide graphic details of Goebbels’s rabble-rous-ing tactics in Berlin, where he was unscrupulous in his use of vio-lence, physical as well as verbal, to win attention for the Nazis. Incidents where communists were attacked and Jews beaten up on the streets landed Goebbels in court on numerous occasions. The published version of the diaries for the early 1930s were heav-ily doctored, as a comparison with the originals shows; Goebbels, to take just one example, altered the entries before publication to make it look as if his rival Gregor Strasser had opposed Hitler’s political tactics for much longer than he had in reality. Strasser’s

eventual resignation gave Goebbels control of the Nazi propa-ganda apparatus and, following Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, he was soon put in charge of an entirely new depart-ment of government as Reich Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Well before this, he had developed sophisticated techniques of appealing to the masses, with spectacular torchlit parades, mass meetings, sloganising, radio broadcasts and sensa-tional stories in the press. As a member of the government, he now brought the full resources of the state to bear on winning over the half or more of the German electorate who had never voted for the Nazis or their coalition partners in a free election.

By this time, Goebbels had married Magda Quandt, a mid-dle-class woman with whom he had an enduring marriage despite the fact that both of them had affairs—Goebbels, noto-riously, with the Czech actress Lída Baarová. The scandal in the end became so damaging that Hitler ordered Goebbels to put a stop to it. The couple had six children and made sure all their names began with an H. They provided a substitute fam-ily for Hitler, who depended on them emotionally, and did not want to see the couple break up. The diaries reveal a continuing string of extramarital affairs and lingering feelings for earlier girlfriends. Goebbels’s restless energy found an outlet above all, however, in his ceaseless political activism. He created for the propaganda ministry an elaborate structure of cultural man-agement headed by the Reich Chamber of Culture with sub-divisions such as the Reich Chamber of Music and so on. And yet, as the diaries reveal, he was unable to eliminate his rivals in the party in this area of operations, notoriously the ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whose radical Fighting League for German Culture frequently cut across the lines of the ministry’s policy, but also the Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich. Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious propaganda film Triumph of the Will was made behind Goebbels’s back, to a direct commission from Hitler. Longer-ich is particularly illuminating here on the continued infighting that characterised the Nazi regime from start to finish. There was no perfectly disciplined, efficiently coordinated machinery of government in Nazi Germany: as Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out long ago, it was riven with feuding and backstabbing.

For all his notoriety, Goebbels was never really a member of the central decision-making group within the Nazi leadership. Time and again, the diaries show how he only learned of major events at second hand. The “Night of the Long Knives,” for instance, when at the end of June 1934 Hitler ordered the murder of the leader of the radical Nazi stormtroopers, Ernst Röhm, and scores of his leading henchmen, came as a complete surprise to Goebbels, who was expecting Hitler only to strike against the conservative clique around Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. And Goebbels was kept well away from crucial foreign policy decisions.

The diaries are a source of the first importance for many key events of the Third Reich. Writing first thing every morning about the previous day’s events, Goebbels had little time or opportunity to doctor or manipulate his account either at the time or later on. These were not considered, elaborate justifications but rapid-fire, staccato, often abbreviated diary entries written down in haste. Longerich uses the diaries intelligently as evidence for many epi-sodes in the history of Nazism, taking account of their biases, but recognising that they were generally truthful in their recounting of events. There is not a hint in them, for example, that the lead-ing Nazis knew anything in advance about the fire that destroyed the Reichstag building on the night of 27th February 1933 and was used by Hitler as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, permanently as it turned out, using the excuse, vigorously propagandised by Goebbels, that it was the signal for a communist uprising.

It is clear from the diaries’ account of the nationwide pogrom of the “Reich Night of Glass Shards” (Reichskristallnacht), Longer-ich notes, that Hitler personally ordered the trashing of thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned shops across Germany. Goeb-bels’s record of the flight of Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess to Scotland on a harebrained “peace mission” in April 1941 is another episode on which the diaries are clear: “The Führer is completely shattered… One wants to laugh and weep simultaneously.” Hess’s letters, left behind in justification of his actions, were “a chaotic confusion of primary school dilettantism.” The flight came as a surprise and left the Nazi leadership hopelessly embarrassed.

Once he began dictating the diaries to a secretary, in June 1941, Goebbels became more circumspect, and references to his pri-vate life grow more discreet. But the diaries leave no doubt about Hitler’s central role in the extermination of European Jews. On 14th February 1942, for example, Goebbels recorded Hitler saying that “the Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are experienc-ing today. As our enemies are annihilated so they will experience their own annihilation too.” A few weeks later, on 27th March 1942, the process of extermination clearly came through Goeb-bels’s cautious and circumspect diary entry, where he refers to the Jews being deported to the east in “a pretty barbaric procedure… not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60 per cent of them must be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work… Here too the Führer is the persistent pioneer and spokes-man of a radical solution.”

Goebbels managed to secure appointment as Plenipotentiary for Total War following his demagogic “Do you want total war?” speech in the wake of the catastrophic defeat of the German army at Stalingrad in February 1943 (“Yes!” the hand-picked crowd in the Berlin Sports Palace roared back). But this was as much a propaganda exercise as anything else, and the real command over the economy was falling increasingly into the hands of Hitler’s Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Goebbels, true to the last, con-tinued to support Hitler while Goering and Himmler deserted

“For all his notoriety, Goebbels was never really a member of the decision-making group within the Nazi leadership”

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him. In the final days of the war, Goebbels urged resistance to the last drop of blood. But even he had to concede that defeat was now overwhelmingly probable. On 28th February 1945, he announced over the radio that if Nazi Germany was defeated, life would no longer be worth living, neither for himself nor for his children. The family moved into the bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery, where Magda Goebbels had her children sedated with morphine, then killed them by placing cyanide capsules in their mouths. With her husband she then committed suicide on 1st May 1945.

Goebbels’s life, as Longerich shows convincingly, was one of restless self-aggrandisement, a constant search for self-valida-tion. In the end, there was nothing behind the propaganda min-ister’s fanatical exterior but emptiness, a soul devoid of content.

Yet perhaps because of this, we learn less about Joesph Goebbels from this very long biography than we might. Part of the reason is that Longerich’s book is less a biography than an extended crit-ical commentary on the diaries. Too often, he fails to round out his account of a diary entry into a full depiction of the events it records and thus an assessment of Goebbels’s place in them. Time and again, he assumes too much background knowledge in the reader, and fails to set the diaries in their broader context. His book, regrettably, is unlikely to appeal to anyone coming to the history of Nazi Germany for the first time. But it will be indispen-sable to historians and students who want rapid access to one of the major sources on the history of Nazi Germany without having to plough through all the millions of words of the original.

Anatomy of a genocideHistorian Nikolaus Waschmann speaks to Prospect’s Sameer Rahim about his original

and comprehensive new account of the concentration camps

Inmates of Ebensee concentration camp after their liberation by American troops on May 6th 1945

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Peter Longerich’s biography of Joseph Goebbels, reviewed by Richard Evans above, was made possible by the opening up of the Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR. Other historians have also been exploiting these archives—and others recently made available such as the Red Cross archives—to draw fresh conclu-sions about the Third Reich.

One of these historians is Nikolaus Wachsmann, a profes-sor of European history at Birkbeck College, University of Lon-don, whose new book KL is the first comprehensive history of the Konzentrationslager or concentration camps. It has won praise from leading historians of the Nazi era including Evans, Ian Ker-shaw and Saul Friedländer.

The originality of Waschmann’s book is its focus on the con-centration camps where prisoners were mainly worked to death rather than the death camps, where they were exterminated. He

traces the history of the camps from their inception in 1933 as places outside the law where the political enemies of Hitler could be incarcerated to the end of the Second World War, where Auschwitz was the site of mass genocide. But rather than seeing their development as the smooth imple-mentation of a masterplan, Wachsmann argues that their progress was surprisingly haphazard. I began by asking Wachsmann what the development of Dachau, the first concentration camp, might tell us about the nature of Nazi atrocities.

NW: There is this idea that the Nazis must have had a masterplan and that all roads led to Auschwitz. But what is nota-ble is how the camp system changed—how much improvisation and variation there was. I start the book with three snap-shots of Dachau, which started in March 1933 as a ramshackle camp for barely 100 prisoners whose lives were not actually

threatened, and then became a brutally ordered system of terror, with rows of purpose-built barracks, and scores of prisoners in identical uniforms and cropped hair, and finally descended into the mass death and disease the Allied forces found in April 1945. 

This camp system went through a huge number of changes during the Third Reich. There was even an extraordinary moment early on when they nearly disappeared. When Hit-ler came to power in 1933 the regime set up hundreds of camps like Dachau to destroy the political opposition. Once that had been achieved almost all of these early camps disappeared and almost all of their prisoners were released. There was now a debate among the Nazi leadership about what kind of regime they were going to run. Some leaders argued that they should have an authoritarian dictatorship based on Nazi law, without camps, but Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler con-

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vinced Hitler that they needed this extra-legal system of out-right SS terror. This paved the way for the SS camp system of the future. The story of the camps, the closer you look, is more com-plicated and counter-intuitive than it seems.

SR: You argue in the book that Nazi Germany did not follow a preordained path to extreme terror. You quote the historian Hans Mommsen’s description of the process as “cumulative radicalisation.”NW: Without any doubt one key moment is the Second World War. When war breaks out in 1939 there are some 20,000 pris-oners in six camps inside Germany; these are brutal places, but prisoners are still more likely to survive than to die. Within a few years, there were hundreds of thousands of prisoners in hun-dreds of camps across Europe—from the Baltic states to Alder-ney on the Channel Islands. (The Nazis built four concentration camps on the island.) By now death is a constant, prisoners are starving to death or worked to death, and the SS has become well-versed in mass-killing. Also, this is an increasingly visible form of terror. Ordinary Germans had a fairly good idea of what went on inside: they saw the prisoners at work in factories or on the streets, and smelt the smoke from the camps’ crematoria. By late 1944, most concentration camp prisoners were no longer held in large main camps like Dachau, which were at least par-tially shielded from prying eyes, but in hundreds of satellites, often near factories and building sites, and often inside towns and cities. This was one reason why SS terror became ever more visible. But almost all of these satellite camps have been forgot-ten about. In recent years, concentration camp memorials have tried to include the satellites in commemoration, as a way of highlighting the links between Nazi camps and their local sur-roundings. But much remains to be done.

SR: What role did the camps play in the Holocaust?NW: Nowadays most people think that the Holocaust, the con-centration camps and Auschwitz are identical—but the story is more complicated. There is more to the Holocaust than Aus-chwitz. Although it was the Holocaust’s most deadly single site, the majority of Jews were murdered elsewhere, in the fields of eastern Europe and in special death camps like Treblinka, which were not concentration camps: they served only a sin-gle purpose, to kill as many Jews as possible. At the same time there is more to Auschwitz than the Holocaust. The camp was set up in 1940 to destroy the Polish political opposition, not the Jews. In the following year, the focus shifted to the exploitation and extermination of Soviet prisoners of war, and in that con-text Auschwitz officials began experimenting with Zyklon B gas to exterminate prisoners. The path of Auschwitz to the Holo-caust was a quite circuitous and long one, and it wasn’t inevita-ble. And even after Auschwitz became an extermination camp, it still had other functions as well. Jews were divided on arrival into those who would be killed straight away—that’s the great majority, women with children, the elderly, the sick—and those who were forced into murderous slave labour.

SR: You also question what you regard as the myth of the pas-sive Holocaust victim.NW: Much of what has been written—not least in the work of Hannah Arendt, the famous chronicler of the Adolf Eichmann trial—about “passive victims” has been revised by recent schol-arship. The idea that the prisoners were apathetic in the face

of terror completely overlooks the fact that most of those sent to Auschwitz didn’t know what would await them there. They were also starved and bewildered. Reading the testimonies from Jewish prisoners, I also found many instances of solidarity and resistance. Prisoners tried to cling to religious or political beliefs, and there were a great number of survival networks of those who tried to share information or food. I think it’s important not to portray prisoners as an anonymous mass with no agency. Obvi-ously agency was extremely curtailed by the SS but nonetheless prisoners tried to shape their own lives.

SR: There’s also the question of economics and extermination. Why did so much effort and resource go into annihilating Jews and other “asocial” groups, when they could have been kept alive for war work. Was this purely ideological?NW: For Himmler, economics and extermination went hand in hand. By the middle of the war the Nazis were determined to exterminate Jews as “deadly enemies”: it was a core mission of the regime. At the same time Himmler also believed that it was economically advantageous for Germany to work to death those Jewish prisoners who could still work. This was the Nazi policy of “extermination through labour” in the camps. Early on, labour had been a way of tormenting prisoners, often with completely senseless work, but gradually the inmates were seen as an economic resource that could be used to aid a German victory, and to improve the position of the SS within the regime. By the last couple of years of the war there was a huge system of slave labour, where the SS rented out its prisoners to private enterprise.

SR: You write that the camp system was a great “transformer of values” that changed the way the guards treated prisoners. Are you surprised at how fast it became so brutal?NW: It’s easy to write off SS perpetrators as monsters. Some of them were sadists, but the majority were not, which then raises the question of why they committed the crimes. Many of them seemed to get accustomed, often quite quickly, to extreme bru-tality. There were some SS men who initially struggled with the violence that was expected of them, like the Auschwitz doc-tor who broke down after his first selection of Jewish prison-ers for the gas chambers; but he soon became used to his job and performed it to the satisfaction of his superiors. One thing that struck me is how often perpetrators tried to impress their comrades, wanted to be seen as strong and manly, as real SS men. There’s any number of instances where perpetrators com-mit heinous crimes to impress others. Ideology obviously plays a significant role, but social and psychological factors also come into play, probably more than many people think.

SR: At the moment 93-year-old Oskar Groening, an SS officer who was an office worker at Auschwitz, is on trial for being an accessory to murder. Is it useful to prosecute people at such an advanced age?NW: If he’s fit to stand trial then he should be tried. But the trial highlights the ultimate failure of postwar justice. It’s taken more than 70 years after Auschwitz was liberated for this man to finally face a judge. And even if he’s convicted, he’s going to be one of no more than perhaps 15 per cent of former Auschwitz personnel to be tried. “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” is published by Little, Brown

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An eye for a storyFew writers can bring a painting to life as dazzlingly as Simon Schama

andrew marr

T his is a terrific, fat book, classic Simon Schama, which doesn’t at all do what it says on the cover. The title, The Face of Britain: The Nation through its Por-traits, suggests to this reviewer two things: a reliably sequential narrative, passing in stately fashion from

age to age; and a stern attempt at social and geographical inclu-sivity. Instead, what this virtuoso historian and TV performer has produced is an eclectic, often personal and brilliantly written collection of essays about what interests him. And thank all the prancing muses for that.

Schama’s greatest gift is a sure eye for an extraordinary story. Some of the narratives here are well known: he begins the book with the great face-off between Win-ston Churchill and Graham Sutherland in 1954, which lead to the destruction of Sutherland’s portrait of the wartime prime minis-ter, a masterpiece by a modernist painter who has unfairly fallen out of favour; and we get Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris; and towards the end of the book, Henry Tonks, the ferocious Slade teacher, turning his pencils and pastels to the problem of facial reconstruction in 1916-17. The first is a story about patronage and its dangers; the last, a meditation on the uses of drawing. In a con-ventional art history, neither would probably have been included.

Schama reconstructs art history with impish glee. Augustin Edouart. Isaac Fuller. Jonathan Richardson. George Richmond. Samuel Cooper. Richard Cosway. Christina Broome. Each of these produced, on the evidence of this book, some remarkable work, if not of the very first quality. Most art lovers will have heard of one or two of them. Almost nobody outside the staff of the National Portrait Gallery, I daresay, knows them all.

This eclecticism allows the historian to scramble around for stories we ought to know, but mostly don’t: there’s a sizzling essay, for instance, on the bizarre, sadly comic story of the lumpish equestrian statue of Charles I by Hubert Le Sueur, which cur-rently stands on the traffic island known as Trafalgar Square, and which very nearly didn’t survive at all. Anyone familiar with the National Portrait Gallery will have paused by the portrait by Anthony van Dyck of Sir Kenelm Digby, a fat-faced, balding cava-lier who looks remarkably like a 20th-century stockbroker got up in fancy dress. The real story of Sir Kenelm’s dogged, tragic love for Venetia Stanley, and his remarkable career as a proto-scientist, privateer and magus, would have provided for some authors a long biography taking many years of blameless study; it’s recounted here in a couple of dozen fascinating pages.

Sir Kenelm is followed immediately by the story of the under-sized Regency artist Richard Cosway, also known as “Tiny Cos-

metic,” which allows Schama to rehearse, with fine gusto, the story from the same period of Prince George’s borderline insane pursuit of Maria Fitzherbert—before veering off to the tale of Maria Had-field, Cosway’s wife, and her fine Parisian romance (probably, but not certainly, unconsummated) with Thomas Jefferson. Both of these are in the end stories about our desperate fear of being left by the person we love and they give a sense of the rich, oily pickings

Schama has rooted up along what would have been, in most historians’ hands, a predictable journey.

The structure of the book, I assume, follows the structure of the television pro-

grammes it accompanies, so it is thematic rather than sequen-tial—“The Face of Fame,” “The Face of Power”—with the shorter essays gathered into themed sections. This means that it can feel, in the hand, mildly disorientating. We never know after one essay quite where we are going next, or why. Some readers may find the zigzagging in time irritating or distracting. But its strength is that it allows Schama the freedom not to be bored, and thus not to bore the reader. Wherever he chooses to, he leaves con-ventional art writing far behind, to gallop off on another crack-ing tale—of how Francis Drake was seen by the Spanish; or where Emma Hamilton came from before she bumped into Horatio Nelson; or little David Garrick, the rain and the Shakespeare cult.

But we know, from his earlier books on Rembrandt, Rubens and modern art, that Schama has an avid, restlessly shrewd eye for painting. The best art writing in the book is truly exhilarat-ing and happens when Schama’s dander is up and he is almost panting with excitement about something he’s just seen. His account of Laura Knight’s self-portrait while painting Ella Lou-ise Naper in the rosy-bottomed nude (a radical piece of picture-making, even if bringing in Barnett Newman, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp might be stretching it a tad) is not some-thing I will forget. Nor his lovely and sensitive account of an early sketch by Thomas Gainsborough of his daughters chasing a butterfly—and the sad story of what followed. Nor again, his description of the 1826 self-portrait by that tormented vision-ary Samuel Palmer, which Schama rightly compares to Rubens and Rembrandt: “The roughly cut hair, perhaps self-sheared, is more lovingly handled in black chalk than any barber could have managed and with a lot more attentiveness, too, for Palmer has found a way to draw dirt-stiffened, sweat-stuck individual hairs so that they cling greasily together, exposing glistening areas of his forehead.”

The quotation introduces the unavoidable issue of the Schama style. He is, to filch one of the 18th-century words he clearly much enjoys, a bit of macaroni writer—flamboyant, exuberant, a word-importer and a performer. It’s the opposite of the George Orwell and newspaper style-guide approach—make it simple, cut it down, prune away everything you don’t absolutely need. Again, I suspect some people may find this irritating, though for me the exuber-ance almost always works.

Andrew Marr is a writer and broadcaster, and host of BBC One’s “The Andrew Marr Show”

The Face of Britain: The Nation Through Its Portraitsby Simon Schama (Viking, £30)

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Here he is, opening his chapter about Francis Bacon and his self-destructive lover George Dyer: “1963. Man, 30-odd, walks into a pub. He’s wearing a cocky expression and a dab too much brilliantine; bit of a pompadour and his eyebrows look like two caterpillars are having a conversation on his forehead. But the Stepney spiv style is alright. London has barely begun to swing, Carnaby Street still has traffic running through it, and Soho means looking sharp the old way: bigger lapels, broad shoulders, clean-shaven with a bit of a curl to the lip; tight knot to the tie. George Dyer has all this. He’s done a little time in the nick so he knows what’s what, and he knows that a man who also likes a lit-tle grease on his mop is giving him the once-over.”

You’d read on, wouldn’t you? And here, again in London, he is ventriloquising Godfrey Kneller as he ushers in up to 14 sitters in a day in his 1690s workshop: “A very good morning; please be seated, there in the light, just so; excellent; thank you thank you, now if you would be so good as to hold quite still for a time, I would be most obliged... Mr such and such will be sure to let you know when the likeness is done. Truly most obliged. Good day to you. Next, I believe? Are yes, Lady so and so. Pray, do come in…”

This isn’t what you get from conventional historians or con-ventional art writers, more’s the pity. Even if sometimes you won-der whether there isn’t a bit too much brilliantine, and at other times he pushes slangy informality pretty far, you read on. As that extract implies, Schama is very much a metropolitan writer, a creature of London, New York and, occasionally, Edinburgh.

The most immediately affecting writing is autobiographical, when he heads back to the Notting Hill of his youth to meet the black photographer Charlie Phillips, or when he recounts the loss of his much-val-ued collection of cigarette card portraits in a boys’ gambling game. This made me think that the next Schama book, or per-haps the next-but-one, really has to be an autobiography. It would, I gently suggest, really be something.

Away from the metropolis, and his own world, he has the humane curios-ity of a good historian. There is an essay about Octavius Hill and Robert Adam-son, who took famously stunning early photographs of Newhaven fishwives and their husbands, which might be the best thing in the book. He just looks harder. He empathises.

I’m beginning to rave. This book isn’t perfect. I would really love to have read Schama on Allan Ramsay and Henry Raeburn—those biting Georgian wives, those great, livid, farmers and traders—and am genuinely puzzled why they don’t appear. Plus, I never want to read about Alice Liddell ever again. I think he’s too fond of Francis Bacon, excessively cen-sorious about Lucian Freud and bor-derline brutal about Tracey Emin. He tells us that the first self-portrait in Eng-lish art was made around 1240 by William de Brailes in a psalter. But James Hall, in his recent The Self-Portrait: A Cultural His-

tory, has tracked down a much earlier self-portrait by St Dun-stan of Glastonbury, from around 950, in which he crouches at the feet of Christ. Other misses include John Singer Sargent, whose reputation was recently rebuilt at the National Portrait Gallery, and who did for the Edwardians what Joshua Reynolds did for the Georgians, but with more wit; and David Hockney. If you want to know what the super-rich look like now, with their insecurities and strange clothing, Hockney is where you have to go.

Yet it’s the pathetic default mode of the modern book review to attack a book for all the things it isn’t, rather than look closely at what it is. And this is both excellent and highly unusual. Schama has written books which will still be bought and talked about a century from now—I’m thinking of The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens, Rembrandt’s Eyes. He’s been at the top of his game for most of his career and he hasn’t lost an ounce of zest or intelligence. Damn him. Television tie-in books rarely garner enthusiastic reviews. They are designed, almost handcrafted, to sandpaper the pursed insecurities of the academy. All I will say is that every reader of this magazine should have a copy of Simon Schama’s The Face of Britain—no, not in a bookcase, but right there on the desk, broken-backed.

He can look at something we think we know and make it seem fresh and new to us, and this is a great gift. He very nearly persuaded me to find George Romney and Johann Zoffany interesting.

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Self Portrait (1913) by Laura Knight, featuring model Ella Louise Naper “in the rosy-bottomed nude,” was “a radical piece of picture-making,” says Andrew Marr

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I reland being Ireland, the centenary of the Easter Rising is enveloped in romance, mythology and intellectual argu-ment, much of which is conducted through poetry, prose, song, theatre and striking imagery. The forces behind the rising were complex. They included the 17th-century plan-

tation of Ulster, which brought large numbers of English and Scottish Protestants to live uneasily with dispossessed native Irish Catholics; the fomenting of revolution from 3,000 miles away by an Irish-American diaspora; and, from 1914, idealism and war fever induced by what was taking place on the Continent.

One hundred years ago, 1,600 people, mainly from the national-ist Irish Volunteers, occupied some buildings in Dublin and began shooting police and soldiers. Almost 500 would die in the next few days—mostly civilians—and the executed rebels would achieve heroic status. But in Irish history, little is straightforward. Take the seven leaders of 1916, lazily considered to have been a homo- genous group. The two Fenians (Tom Clarke and his young pro-tégé Seán MacDiarmada) were violently Anglophobic and despised democracy; the Irish Irelander Eamonn Ceannt wanted an island with no outside influences other than the Vatican; the three mystical poets Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett valued European influences and toyed with hav-ing a German Catholic king. And Scots-born James Connolly, once a British soldier, wanted to light the spark that would ignite a worldwide Marxist revolution.

There are plenty of disputed issues about the violence in Dub-lin in Easter 1916, including whether it should be celebrated or commemorated at all—and, if so, when? The “when” is perplex-ing for outsiders: the insurrection, revolution, uprising—whatever you choose to call it—began on 24th April, yet while that date will be marked, the main centenary ceremony was held on Easter Sun-day, 27th March. This is because in the mind of Irish Catholics, the événements quickly became entangled with Easter and concepts of sacrifice and resurrection. To confuse the issue further, the Rising actually began on Easter Monday—but the current Irish govern-ment held the formal events on Sunday so Monday could be given over to a day of culture.

In Dublin the week before Easter this year, prior to engaging in a television punch-up about whether the Rising was morally justi-

fied, I went to two exhibitions, the first sponsored by Sinn Féin and the second by the Irish government. Some of the dramatis perso-nae featured were the same, but the differences in approach were a vivid illustration of the widening gulf between the way republi-cans and mainstream Irish nationalists view the past.

The Sinn Féin exhibition, held in a rundown cinema, was a trip down memory lane to my childhood in the Republic, when no deviation was permitted from the narrative imposed on us post- humously by the seven leaders of 1916. We were indoctrinated about their vision and their heroism in bravely facing the firing squads of the brutal British army. Pictures of these venerated icons appeared in most public buildings. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which they had signed, was treated as holy writ. It hung in classrooms and was read out on state occasions and in graveyard ceremonies for those regarded as Irish patriots.

The author of the Proclamation, Pearse, we were told, was the greatest and noblest man in Irish history. He was certainly, because of his extraordinary gifts as a propagandist, one of its most influential, for it was he who created a historical narrative we were all enjoined to accept—and most of us did. He had laid it all out in a series of pamphlets explaining “the body of teach-ing” passed on by nationalist “evangelists”: “Like a divine religion, national freedom bears the marks of unity, of sanctity, of catholic-ity, of apostolic succession.” It was no wonder that confused peo-ple thought Pearse a martyred saint.

“In every generation,” the Proclamation said, “the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sover-eignty; six times during the past 300 years they have asserted it in arms.” “The rosary beads of rebellion,” was the name given by the historian Liam Kennedy to this decidedly dodgy selective approach. The pre-1916 dates to which Pearse was alluding were 1641 (a Catholic rising in support of absolutist Stuart monarchy that led to the slaughter of thousands of Protestant settlers in Ulster); 1798 (a French Revolution-inspired rebellion led by Prot-estants that ended in a sectarian bloodbath); 1803 (an inept Prot-estant-led coda to 1798 involving fewer than 100 people); 1848 (a European-inspired rebellion so badly run and supported it was a fiasco); and 1867 (a total flop led incompetently by largely Catho-lic Fenians). In no case, as Kennedy put it, “can it be truly said that the ‘Irish people’ were asserting national rights,” since the vast majority of them were uninvolved.

The Irish people had no say in 1916 either since the rebels, who had sought arms from Germany—described in the Proclamation as “our gallant allies in Europe”—had the support of fewer than 2,000 at a time when 250,000 Irishmen were in the British army.

The fading myths of Easter 1916

The Irish public’s considered commemoration of the Easter Rising reveals a country that wants to live for the future

ruth dudley edwards

Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of “The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic” (Oneworld)

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Yet “the dead generations from which she receives her old tradi-tion of nationhood” were cited as the justification by these seven conspirators—who had no electoral mandate whatsoever—to set themselves up as the provisional government and demand the alle-giance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. These, in their view, included the half a million Protestants who had signed a covenant to resist home rule.

Yet the Rising was a brilliant piece of theatre. Pearse’s rheto-ric was seductive and his essentially blasphemous use of the lan-guage of Christian sacrifice to condone killing (“Ireland will not find Christ’s peace until she has taken Christ’s sword”) helped to encourage the Catholic hierarchy to give it retrospective bless-ing. Catholicism and 1916 became intertwined: 50 years after the Rising, the image of the risen Christ in Galway Cathedral was flanked by mosaic representations of Pearse and John F Kennedy at prayer. Schools taught the received orthodoxy; pubs resounded with patriotic ballads extolling the deeds of one “patriot” or another, adding stars of 1916, the War of Independence, the civil war and various bursts of Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence deplored by the Irish Free State (from 1937 the Irish Republic),

British Regulars sniping from behind a barricade of empty beer casks near the quays in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising

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such as the bombings in England in 1939 and attacks on border police stations between 1956 and 1962.

Then came the anniversary celebrations of 1966 and a great outpouring of emotion that would scare unionists and embolden republicans. Seán Lemass, then Taoiseach, was anxious that there should be no dangerous glorification of violence, but the messages were too nuanced and the damage was done. The outbreak of the Troubles in 1969 would lead some to question discreetly why we had embraced the Easter Rising lock, stock and barrel, and why we sang songs praising people who killed in its name.

Sinn Féin’s “Revolution 1916: The Original and Authentic Exhi-bition” is designed to reinforce the Pearsean vision of Irish his-tory, the heroes-and-villains take on 1916 with politically-correct revisions, and to give a fillip to the continuous campaign of the Provisional movement to win retrospective justification for their role in putting Northern Ireland through almost 30 years of hell. It’s not easy riding all their political and historical horses. Sinn Féin, which disapproved of violence and wanted a dual monarchy, had nothing to do with 1916, but was the name used by separatist nationalists in the 1918 election. After various political upheavals, it would become the exclusive property of the political wing of the Provisional IRA, but now that the IRA is largely out of business (though senior members dominate the republican movement both openly and covertly and freelancers are engaged in criminality), in Northern Ireland Sinn Féin shares power with the right of centre Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In parliamentary opposition in the Republic, its policies are poised precariously between the centre-left Labour Party and the far-left Trotskyites.

Above the exhibition entrance are portraits of the seven signa-tories, and on the left a quote from Pearse: “If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom then our children will win it by a better deed.”

This is dangerous territory, since the supporters of the New IRA, who rejoiced over the recent murder of prison officer Adrian Ismay, use messages like that as a thumbs-up to carrying on with the war. They haven’t forgotten that the Provisionals claimed to be fighting for a United Ireland until they could fight no more, when they changed tack and made the preposterous claim that their aim had been equality with the Northern Irish majority (in jobs, hous-ing and so on), something achieved by 1972.

Obsessed with the trappings of political correctness, Sinn Féin’s 1916 is exaggerating the role of women in the Rising. It requires creativity, for although women were accepted in the tiny Irish Cit-izen Army, the paramilitary wing of James Connolly’s Irish Trans-port and General Workers’ Union, very few wielded a gun. They were banned from the nationalist Irish Volunteers, who made up the majority of the insurgents and had nothing to do with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and although their separate organ-isation, Cumann na mBan (an Irish Republican women’s para-military organisation), was tolerated, its members were largely confined to nursing, catering and carrying messages. You would not have known that from the atrocious mural in the exhibition’s entrance hall: based on The Last Stand (later renamed The Birth of the Irish Republic), a watercolour produced by the indifferent London illustrator Walter Paget with the help of photographs, it showed Pearse and four of the other signatories in the General Post Office—rebel headquarters.

Martial-looking women had been superimposed on it, in addi-tion to a large image (reminiscent of the French Marianne) of

a flag-waving Maureen O’Hara look-alike. She turned out to be Molly O’Reilly, a teenager in the Irish Citizen Army, a messenger during Easter 1916 and subsequently an uncompromising Repub-lican, whose claim to fame was that she had been asked by Con-nolly to raise a green and gold flag on his headquarters. She ticked the boxes of being female, working class and a lifelong supporter of the IRA. Elsewhere in the exhibition there were portraits of women associated with 1916, as well as unknowns apparently sup-posed to represent today’s immigrants.

A Christ-like Bobby Sands had been added to the mural as well, and the figure of a young man in jeans bound to a rock like Prometheus turned out to be Francis Hughes, the bravest, most effective and most vicious of the IRA terrorists who starved them-selves to death in 1981. So it was no surprise to find an entire room devoted to portraits of dead hunger strikers, whom Sinn Féin make explicit should join the official pantheon of 20th-century Irish heroes along with the seven of 1916.

I wasn’t surprised the exhibition was geared to suit the Sinn Féin agenda, but I was initially baffled as to why it was so poor in design and execution. There were huge slabs of text on the walls, the video was short and dull and recreated holy spots such as the execution yard at Kilmainham Jail didn’t hold one’s attention long: the only time the bored children seemed enthused was by the noisy simulation of machine guns and artillery. Sinn Féin is the richest Irish political party: it gets large sums from Irish-Ameri-cans, seems to require its political representatives to hand over part of their salaries to the party and has supporters in the wider republican movement. That wider movement includes elements

who have raised tens of millions from less orthodox enterprises (not condoned by Sinn Féin), which include smuggling, fraud and the Northern Bank robbery of 2004. But because Sinn Féin is try-ing hard to represent itself as the party of the disadvantaged, it has to present an image of poverty.

I went then to the opening of “Witness History,” a brilliantly-designed permanent interpretive centre located in the Gen-eral Post Office, which has cost the state several million euros. There is an agenda here as well, with the government

reflecting the present mood of a mature society sick of violence. Sinn Féin finds it hard to understand how much people in the Republic are repelled by the intensity of Northern Irish Repub-licans—whom they refer to disparagingly as Nordies. Every time Gerry Adams or one of his colleagues bang the drum about a United Ireland they lose more votes. When it was announced in 2011 that the Queen would make a state visit to Ireland, Sinn Féin misread the mood of the southern Irish and announced the visit was premature. They were left like children with their noses to a sweet shop window when she charmed the Irish public.

Political violence is a turn off, not least because there’s a lethal gang war going on in Dublin among people with connections to

“The Irish are curious about what happened in 1916 and are now aware that good Irishmen were killed in British uniforms”

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various IRA splinter groups, including Continuity, Real and New, whose brutality and easy access to arms rattle the public. So while the General Post Office exhibition was greenish, it was a commem-oration, not a celebration, and with ingenious and imaginative use of film and interactive graphics it told the story from the point of view of police, soldiers, civilians as well as the rebels; it conveyed superbly the sense of a city at war. There were lurking screens with talking heads of historians (including me) exploring the events as objectively as we could manage. Commemorative stamps include an unarmed Irish Catholic policeman, the first man to die, and the rebel who shot him, the second. Republicans have been furious at the even-handedness.

Sinn Féin is a cult in which there is no dissent and everyone speaks with one voice. Their parading of old grievances is remi-niscent of Samuel Beckett’s brutal description of his country as one in which “history’s ancient faeces... are ardently sought after, stuffed and carried in procession.”

Unlike cults, the Irish these days are no longer insular. The young travel widely, work abroad for substantial periods and despise sectarianism almost as much as racism. Sure, the coun-try has gone through a bad patch, as hubris and greed killed the

A mural in West Belfast depicting the seven signatories of the 1916 Easter Proclamation. L-R: Joseph Plunkett, Seán Mac Diarmada, Tom Clarke, James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt and Thomas MacDonagh

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Celtic Tiger, and has seen its economic sovereignty eroded by the European Central Bank. There is still a great deal of anger about the seeming invulnerability of bankers. But things are getting better and the Irish are fundamentally cheerful and tend to respond to misfortune with mordant wit and stoicism. They’re no longer inclined towards blind loyalty to the dead of 1916, not least because they see from the evidence of Islamic State, that merely being prepared to give your life for your ide-als doesn’t make you right.

At their most optimistic Sinn Féin had hoped that by 2016 they would be in government north and south, with Mar-tin McGuinness as President and Adams as Taoiseach on the stand reviewing the troops. It hasn’t happened, and the 1916 commemoration will not increase Sinn Féin’s popularity. The Irish are too sophisticated these days to accept inherited myths uncritically. They’re curious about what happened in 1916 and are now aware that good Irishmen were killed in British uni-forms: one bestselling book has been about the 40 children killed during the Rising.

Dying for Ireland is out of fashion. The young want to live for it.

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