Tag Archives: Books

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

December 23, 2007 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Adam Tooze describes the inner workings of how Nazi Germany came to be in The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, a book detailing the trade-offs Germany made and the unprecedented extent to which Germany’s entire economy was reshaped intentionally and solely into a war machine. Tooze clarifies the enormous amount senior leadership knew and understood about the economic problems facing Germany and, in response, their willingness to feed people into the war machine in return for manufactured products. In addition, The Wages of Destruction shows the extent to which Hitler gambled on so-so odds in France and won, briefly, and then further gambled and lost. The win came from an extraordinary combination of the military’s skill in invading France and the inept allied response to it, while the loss came from trying to apply the same thinking to the Soviet Union. The German and occupied territory economies simply lacked the production and resources to fight multiple-front wars. All this is demonstrated with copious detail—the book’s strengths are its weaknesses in that it is relentlessly technical, and what I write by necessity lacks the evidence Tooze presents to make his case.

Recent history is largely a history of Germany’s aggressive wars, which shaped and continue to shape the world; it is hard not to see the offspring of World Wars I and II in many guises, from the current problems in the Middle East to international relations to art (the book to read is David Andelman’s A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today). In looking back, it is easy to read earlier art in terms of later developments: in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross gives this description of Wotan, the protagonist of Wagner’s Ring cycle: “He resembles the head of a great bourgeois family whose livelihood is destroyed by the modernizing forces that he himself has set in motion.” This is not far from what happened to Hitler, who oversaw the linking of primal fears, modern technology, and nationalism, creating what can only vie with Communism as the worst disease of the century.

This book has been part of my larger history kick, as The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 – 1815, A Farewell to Alms, and From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present show. All three, like The Wages of Destruction, synthesize an enormous amount of the ideas and events that have wrought the world, from attitudes to culture to politics to technology to art. I say “art” intentionally because so much is caught up in the struggle of individuals against societies, the effort to retain individuality in the face of history, and the struggle of nations (it is also hard not read the larger world into art). Historical fiction rests on these ideas and often occurs at these turning points, where we know that the hero of a novel cannot change the historical event which is about to occur. Although individuals destinies might be shaped in such narratives, grand historical sweeps cannot be altered by such characters. To me this causes many narratives to be unsatisfactory and thus demands that they must focus on the small to succeed, or the world of the individual. Yet the appeal is continual, as the idea of the past is reshaped through the present and through additional evidence in both fiction and nonfiction. The Wages of Destruction is the latter and puts World War II into the larger context of economic systems.

Most of all, The Wages of Destruction is an exploration of the most fundamental idea of life and economics: we all face trade-offs at every level of existence, from the personal in a minute-by-minute sense to the national and world levels. The Nazis made numerous trade-offs favoring war and military spending, and despite their extreme ideology they could not escape from history or from the reality that they could not destroy large parts of German society and simultaneously do their utmost to defeat their enemies. Some commentators have noted that the primary world power of virtually any age is marked chiefly by its pluralism and willingness to provide tolerance, especially tolerance relative to others; by that standard, the U.S., Britain, and Rome before it have done relatively well. The numerous counter-examples toward plurality are well-known, as all three societies practiced slavery and numerous other horrendous practices, but at least two of the three trended toward liberalism, while Rome reached its zenith thanks to its republican beginnings. By contrast, Nazis tremendously damaged their economy by expelling and imprisoning large numbers of people and causing other nations to stop trading with the Germany bloc, and while Tooze shows the extent to which slave and imported labor helped the regime, it could not make up for the enormous disruptions it caused.

This common theme of slavery differs in that the Nazis moved towards it long after Britain and the United States had repudiated it. All three relatively liberal societies—Rome, Britain, the U.S.—were able to succeed in large part because they did what the Nazis would not: choose for the material betterment of their people and choose to incorporate more of their people into their economies and societies. Germany chose the opposite and paid, giving up living standards that Tooze demonstrated were already lower than most of Western Europe and the United States, a chance at real victory, and much more to their ideology of death and racial purity. Still, without ideology the Nazis would not have launched their attacks on Europe and the world. The United States and Britain chose pluralism. The Nazis faced trade-offs in their hatred for Jews; although the regime actively tried to convince Jews to emigrate in the 1930s, it made actually leaving difficult by forcing Jews to abandon their assets—especially hard currency—behind. This occurred because Germany had an enormous balance of payments problem, meaning the country paid out more money every year for imports than they sold in exports, constraining their financial system and their ability to implement their racial purity goals. Consequently, the Nazis prevented Jews from leaving thanks to their hard currency problem, as Tooze explains in the “Breaking Away” chapter detailing the financial crises during the early part of Hitler’s administration.

These financial crises made rearming all the more expensive, forcing consumer trade-offs, which were extreme, particularly in light of Hitler’s rhetorical striving for parity with the United States. The lives of most Germans were close to what we would associate with the nineteenth century; food and textiles consumed much of the population up through the middle of the war, when a massive amount of imported and often slave labor supplemented the tight German market. A massive portion of the population suffered from the lack of an export market combined with Hitler’s ceaseless redirection of money toward armaments. Germany was not particularly mechanized, either, and its army also wasn’t, and the demolition of these ideas about the modernity of Germany make this a fascinating and revisionist book. One section notes that “the rate of attrition amongst their motley collection of vehicles [tanks and supply trunks] had been high” in 1939 and only accelerated afterwards. Germany’s auto industry before the war was not particularly well-developed, and the overarching theme in Germany’s war planning from the late 1930s onward was fear of the United States’ industrial power. Germany also lacked raw material, particularly steal and oil, and Tooze shows that steel in particular limited production, as the necessity of armaments production brought their economy ever closer to the Soviet Union’s, despite Hitler’s antipathy toward Communism. This makes his alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union all the stranger given the Nazis’ fixation on ideology, and demonstrates further the paradoxical nature of the regime. The Wages of Destruction focuses on these numerous paradoxical aspects, their relationship to the Nazi economy, and their effect on the war, ultimately leading to the effects that still reverberate in the world.

The New York Review of Books has a good if characteristically lengthy essay about The Wages of Destruction here, although it is in a walled garden. Richard Evans is not as enthusiastic as some other reviewers:

Tooze is saying nothing very new [about Nazi civilian employment efforts]; and his claim to be overturning an entrenched orthodoxy that puts civilian job-creation at the center of the Nazi economic recovery has to be taken with a pinch of skepticism. Similarly, although he suggests that the evidence he presents for the recovery beginning in the late summer of 1932 […] “contradicts all subsequent portrayals of the German economy under National Socialism,” the fact is that economic historians have long known that the Nazis were lucky in their timing, taking over the German economy just as it was beginning to come out of the Depression.
What his book does offer is a mass of evidence that finally puts these arguments beyond dispute. Hitler’s drive to rearm was so obsessive, so megalomaniacal, that he was prepared to sacrifice almost everything to it.

Note the phrase “a mass of evidence”—the dense notes cite numerous sources, and this is a book more likely to be cited than read, given its pounding if necessary detail. The synthesis and conclusion sections may be slightly too short because of Tooze’s details, but such issues do not mar an otherwise good book.

After reading this, take a look at this short post about the modern monsters in North Korea, where the New York Philharmonic says it will play.

The New York Philharmonic consorts with the enemy

December 22, 2007 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , ,

As long as I’ve hit music once, I might as well again: Terry Teachout wrote an excellent column on The New York Philharmonic’s decision to play in Pyongyang, North Korea:

For three days earlier, Zarin Mehta and Paul Guenther, the president and chairman of the Philharmonic, had shared a platform with Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, and announced that America’s oldest orchestra would be playing in Pyongyang next February. It horrified me — no other word is strong enough — to see them sitting next to a smirking representative of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of a brutally totalitarian state in whose Soviet-style prison camps 150,000 political prisoners are currently doing slave labor.

This column is particularly salient because I’m going to post about The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy shortly, and if Hitler has a modern heir he is Kim Jong Il. Camp 22 in North Korea is a modern descendent of Hitler’s “work” camps.

EDIT: The promised post is here.

Life

December 21, 2007 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , ,

“Aaron Copland, whose story will be told in later chapters, once pointed out that the job of being an American artist often consists simply in making art possible—which is to say, visible. Every generation has to do the work all over again.”

—Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise

Faint Praise and good readers

December 19, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I noticed that Greg Harris linked to my post about Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Better still, he quotes approvingly from Robertson Davies on the subject of the clerisy (according to the Oxford American Dictionary, “a distinct class of learned or literary people: the clerisy are those who read for pleasure“), a word I had to look up too:

Who are the clerisy?…. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. As lately as a century ago the clerisy had the power to decide the success or failure of a book, and it could do so now. But the clerisy has been persuaded to abdicate its power by several groups, not themselves malign or consciously unfriendly to literature, which are part of the social and business organization of our time. These groups, though entrenched, are not impregnable; if the clerisy would arouse itself, it could regain its sovereignty in the world of letters. For it is to the clerisy, even yet, that the authors, the publishers, and the booksellers make their principal appeal.

Finding the word you’ve been needing for a long time without realizing it is a wonderful sensation and one that Word Court often tries and fails to elicit.

The rest of Harris’ post is here. Its major weakness is propagating the tendency to divide bloggers and critics, amateurs and professionals, into an “us” versus “them” dynamic, which I continue to find silly. To be fair, Harris might just be reflecting his subject matter.

Read and understand: Doris Lessing on books

December 17, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

Doris Lessing‘s Nobel Lecture is up at The Guardian:

Some much-publicised new writers haven’t written again, or haven’t written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: “Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don’t let it go.”

This would also be a good time to go back to Orhan Pamuk, Seamus Heaney, and J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel lectures. Notice the four have in common: a reverence and love for books, and their underlying power, knowledge.

(Hat tip to The Elegant Variation.)

The Indian Clerk

December 14, 2007 By in Books Tags: , , , , , ,

In college literature courses I heard and disagreed with endless refrains about the supposed division between the sciences and humanities, while in computer science I heard endless jokes about liberal arts majors’ only job skill being the question, “Would you like fries with that?” I opposed both smug camps, and David Leavitt’s excellent The Indian Clerk is there with me, making art and science equal part of the intellect. The Indian Clerk follows the great self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s time at Cambridge before and during World War I. His curious journey came thanks to G H Hardy, who helped bring him from India to Britain, and over several years the two worked together in numerous areas of math that went over my head when I tried to research them. Leavitt, however, builds a cohesive novel on this unusual partnership.

The novel covers Ramanujan’s stay in England without going much into the hidden genesis of his talent in India. We get the interior life of Hardy; The Indian Clerk is told chiefly from Hardy’s view, and concerns Hardy as much as his nominal subject, who is to me as enigmatic at the end of the novel as the start. In part this is because Hardy is neither interpersonally nor emotionally perspicacious, English/Indian cultural barriers are never fully surmounted, and, in a clever twist on unlike people forced together, mathematician culture emphasizes the quality and quantity of work above other considerations. As told through the fictional Hardy, the culture of mathematicians encourages the necessary but, it is implied, false belief that social culture matters not at all. The epigraph acknowledges the issue: “Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. ‘Immorality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.” But the story of Ramanujan and Hardy fascinates enough to drive a wonderful novel more for the unprecedented circumstances surrounding their collaboration than for purely technical achievements. To be sure, the former cannot exist without the latter, but it is the latter that most inspires.

Explaining technical and other issues is part of what Hardy, like any scientist or mathematician, must do. Much of the novel concerns the difficulty of relationships and expression, and statements like this early one are common: “Hardy tried to put his position in a language O.B. would understand.” Or, a few pages later, “For [Hardy], goodness was indefinable, yet also fundamental, the only soil in which a theory of ethics could take root. And where did goodness lie? In love and beauty.” Math is what he most often perceives as beautiful, as when he says, “I cannot tell you what pleasure I continue to take, even today, in the beauty of this proof; in the brief yet extraordinary journey it represents, from a seemingly reasonable proposition (that there is a greatest prime) to the inevitable yet utterly unexpected conclusion that the proposition is false.” These passages also demonstrate the myriad of math metaphors explaining the ideas of the characters; it’s a worthy method too infrequently used in novels, and Cryptonomicon’s similar usage made it far more successful.

Still, math is only an aid to understanding the world and not understanding itself. The racism of Hardy’s colleagues against Ramanujan reminds us of prejudices among those in technical fields. It’s facile but true to lament that more people aren’t judged by ability or knowledge rather than appearance, but while I couldn’t help perceiving that idea, Leavitt is far too deft a writer to make banal if true statements in the fashion of Harper Lee. Hardy attacks the discrimination problem like a technical one, and successfully, even when similar approaches fail in other domains. Being a homosexual, Hardy faces problems like Ramanjuan’s, as homosexuals long have in Western society. This makes another parallel is laid between him and Ramanujan. Hardy’s outsider status, both in terms of financial upbringing and sexuality, helps explain his willingness to overlook Ramanujan’s native country and at his math.

The puzzle comes together from multiple sources: Hardy as a younger man, Hardy as an old man, and occasionally from minor characters. This structure suits a novel with historical figures and uncertainty; anyone who wishes to know the end of Hardy or Ramanujan can easily do so just by typing either’s name in a search engine. Leavitt uses a dual structure, with a present-tense timeline beginning in 1913 and a later, past-tense timeline in which Hardy is giving a mostly imaginary lecture at Harvard in 1936. Thus, he incorporates both the rush of events happening as well as the melancholy of things remembered. The things remembered include Britain before the devastation from World War I and Ramanujan before the mystery illness that took his life. The hints of what will happen never go beyond foreshadowing, giving the narrative fresh urgency instead of muted elegy.

The Indian Clerk has tremendous depth that I’ve only accounted for in small part because it is bigger than many critically esteemed works, and I suspect that many critics will try in vain to plumb its depths for a long time to come. Whole sections involving important characters have been left out. The Indian Clerk provides much pleasure and imparts much wisdom, even if too many subplots in the latter half sometimes flatten the effects. But I do not hesitate to call it the best novel published this year, and it is the kind of book that should narrow the artificial, academic rift between science and art. Commentary on both subjects and many others fill it without impeding the action, and one of the larger subjects is uncertainty, as at the end of part three when Hardy says, “One wonders what would have happened had the war not broken out. many wonder this, for all sorts of reasons. There is of course no answer.” It must be a painful thing for a mathematician to exist, especially in an era before or near the time of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorum. Just as it appears that mathematical discoveries will go on forever, so too will attempts to understand great art, of which math is a subset. The Indian Clerk concerns itself with the inability to know what others think and what causes history’s lunatic journey, and that uncertainty, about racism, about the relationship of abstract math to life, about life itself, will keep me interested in The Indian Clerk for a long time.

To learn more see Leavitt’s extensive blogging at The Elegant Variation.

Philip Pullman profile

December 12, 2007 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

I mentioned Philip Pullman again as a contract to the execrable fantasy described here; I wrote about Pullman’s wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy here. Now I’ve come across an interview with Pullman. A sample:

“I had been thinking about the central question, which is the innocence and experience business, and the transition which happens in adolescence, for a long time. I’d been teaching children of the same age as Lyra, children who were themselves going through this physical, intellectual and emotional change in their lives. The biggest change we ever go through really.” Once, when I interviewed Pullman in front of a packed house at the National Theatre, he drew a big laugh when he explained what was so special about this age: “Your life begins when you are born, but your life story begins at that moment when you discover that you are in the wrong family.”

This article, like so many appearing now, is coming about thanks to the movie version of The Golden Compass. Originally I’d planned to watch, until critics panned it; the Seattle Times‘ review is typical, saying the movie “has a by-the-numbers feel to it.” In other words, the movie appears to be what the studio sought: a slot machine instead of a story, and by jettisoning the latter is also seems to have lost the former.

These are the best?

December 11, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’ve looked at the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2007 with special attention to the fiction and can’t help but wonder if this is the best we’ve got. I discussed The Abstinence Teacher here and here, but Perrotta was better live than in print. The Bad Girl never lived at all; Harry Potter might have improved with age but I’m not about to find out. House of Meetings was better as history and essay than novel and The Savage Detectives overrated. I read five pages of Tree of Smoke in a bookstore and suspect B.R. Myers‘ slam is probably deserved. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was likable but not lovable.

Of the books listed, On Chesil Beach deserved its place, as did The Indian Clerk (more on that in the next few days). Of the ones I discussed in the paragraph above, a few were outright bad, but most were as The Indian Clerk says of the novels of Henry James: “[…] I admire them yet I cannot love them” (italics in original). So I feel about most picks from The New York Times, which, even if I admire them, I can’t really see how they would inspire love.

That brings us to the New York Times‘ 10 best books, with two fiction books of limited interest to me, two already discussed, and one that I actually plan to read: Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. The nonfiction was better, with Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine and Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise, a book en route after I read a chapter online.

These year end lists—there are too many to bother linking to most—remind me how important the Everyman’s Library and Library of America are, as both feature excellent quality in thought and production; I suspect that I, like many others, will return to the books in their catalogs long after most copies of Harry Potter have been pulped and resurrected as grocery bags.

EDIT: Added a link to The Indian Clerk.

A better press corps?

December 7, 2007 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Two days ago I posted about CEOs’ libraries, which included one quote apparently made up by the reporter, Harriet Rubin: “Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.” Mr. Lopez quickly responded to an e-mail query about the subject, and I’m copying his note in full:

That was a very controversial statement in that article and it’s only somewhat incidental that I never actually said it. What I said went more or less along the lines of this:

She: [After we had talked for a half an hour or so about books, book collecting, and book collectors…] So how much does it cost to put together a book collection, anyway?

Me: That’s an impossible question to answer. There are too many variables.

She: Right. I understand. So how much does it cost to put a book collection together?

Me: [sigh] There’s no way to say. All collections are different. [Now thinking of a bone I can throw her, even though it’s a stupid question…] Well, in a lot of collections, if the field is not too narrow, you find the following characteristics: there are a large number of books that pertain to the field that are relatively easy to acquire and therefore not very expensive. But there are a lot of them. Then there is also a much smaller number of books that are very scarce, very important or desirable, and very expensive. If you try to assemble a collection in a field where there are a lot of books, and you try to get all or almost all of the relatively accessible and not-very-expensive books, and you also try to get all or most of the not-easily-accessible and much-more-expensive books, you could very easily end up spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars or more.

She: Thank you. [Hangs up.]

I wouldn’t swear that that’s a verbatim transcript, but that’s pretty much how it went.

By the time the quote appeared (and I was in the boondocks of northwestern Argentina when article was printed and the controversy about that supposed statement erupted), I barely remembered talking to her. The giveaway, though, was “my” use of the word “impossible”: I doubt I’ve used that word once in the last 40 years. I just don’t talk, write, or think that way. So I took a lot of grief for having supposedly said that, but it was just another case of a writer getting what she (thought she) needed to make her story “work.” Joan Didion said it in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” that writers are always selling somebody out. She may not have been talking about misquoting per se, but it certainly fits this case.

A very reasonable response! The situation Mr. Lopez describes makes sense, and I apologize for my snarky comment yesterday: “How does Mr. Lopez define ‘serious?’ The answer might in part be ‘expensive,’ judging from his line of business: ‘We deal in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions.'” That was undeserved, and I’m doubly impressed for the allusion to Joan Didion.

This incident relates to the bad- and wrong-press phenomenon I’ve seen covered elsewhere. Language Log has been finding misquotes and misstatements since I began reading it a few years ago, and they’re particularly keen on misused studies. Econoblogger and Economics Professor Brad DeLong has long (sorry, I couldn’t resist) been asking, “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps?” It’s a good if rhetorical question, and he’s compiled too many examples of professional journalist foolishness. The misquotes and bad science are particularly strange these days, because an army of interconnected bloggers can now point out examples of press speciousness or outright mendacity. When something doesn’t smell right, as happened with the fake quote attributed to Mr. Lopez, it’s relatively easy to find the truth.

To be sure, newspapers and magazines do an admirable job of getting most stories right most of the time, but it makes obviously ludicrous statements like the one attributed to Mr. Lopez all the more galling because I want to trust the media. When I can’t, I’m disappointed, and more likely to be skeptical next time.

CEO libraries

December 5, 2007 By in Books, Life, Links Tags: , , , ,

I normally expect to find book discussions in the Books or Arts sections of The New York Times, but last July they ran an article in the Business section called “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.” A friend reminded me of it and by extension its most ludicrous assertion: “Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.” What? Several hundred thousand dollars? How does Mr. Lopez define “serious?” The answer might in part be “expensive,” judging from his line of business: “We deal in rare books, specializing in modern literary first editions.”

I sent him a link to this post and my query about his definition, and if I hear back I’ll post his response.

UPDATE: I posted Mr. Lopez’s response here, and, as too often happens, things are not as they appeared.