Tag Archives: History

The Red Leather Diary — Lily Koppel

April 7, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Alas: Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary goes far past the point of diminishing literary, intellectual and emotional returns. The book feels stretched, as though it doesn’t contain enough material for its size—which might appropriate, since its genesis is “Speak, Memory“, an article Koppel wrote for the New York Times two years ago.

The Red Leather Diary is structured in an unusual way: it has an introduction and conclusion written in Koppel’s voice, in which she describes finding the diary and then its writer, Florence Wolfson. The middle section is the longest, which contains the raw diary entries in italics, like this:

How my heart’s wagging! I have no right to complain—Four boys called last night and there wee many moments when I would have preferred solitude—but. I made three or four appointments next week.

Below, a section in the reportorial third person explains or elaborates on the passage, presumably with the help of today’s 90-year-old Wolfson. The companion for the diary entry above says:

The Wolfsons’ telephone, a heavy black Bakelite French model, had recently replaced the old candlestick kind with the receiver hanging from a hook. It was always ringing, its loud, clear bell announcing new admirers for Florence. […] Her father, who had his office in their apartment, answered calls at night in case it was a patient, but usually it was for that “boy crazy girl.”

This passage also illustrates some of the book’s problems: the long strings of adjectives piled on, the general statements that don’t add much to the narrative or mise en scène, and the tendency to give random detail, like the nature of the Wolfsons’ phone. I liked reading The Red Leather Diary but tended to skip parts like the one above in favor of the introspective or, to use an anachronism appropriate in the context of the late 1920s, “racy” parts. The dull and exciting could exist back to back; on page 62 we learn that Florence “enrolled in a life drawing class at the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street […] There she drew for a few hours several days a week after school and on Saturday mornings.” Page 63 brings something beyond reportage: “The other students were older than Florence, serious about their art, but seemed defeated by life. They were weighed down by unhappy marriages and boring office jobs.”

The “defeated by life” cliché annoys, but the move toward commentary on the anonymous and, presumably, unsuccessful would-be artists reminds me of the precariousness of hope and talent. This juxtaposition of solid, understated writing and what induces yawns continues throughout. On 299, Koppel tells us “It was a sad day when [the Claremont Riding Academy] closed in 2007.” Sad? Why? And is “sad” all that can be said for it? From pages 312 – 314, however, Koppel evokes the passing of time well, thought it succumbs to The Wonderful Past:

“The people, the culture, the brains […] It’s terrible today. Does anybody think and write philosophy? I can’t imagine my grandchild or my great-grandchild or anyone writing this,” she said, tapping the diary.

Consider that in relation to a critic responding to a fake diary of 18th century Europe, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal: “No modern girl will ever write a diary like this. Cleone Knox breathes the very spirit of the witty, robust, patriotic, wicked, hard-drinking, hard-swearing 18th century.” This theme of past greatness is a persistent irritant in The Red Leather Diary. Apparently, in the 1920s, reporters were also recalling how it used to be, as Koppel quotes one who writes of actress Eva Le Gallienne, “‘She evokes another age, far removed from our restless today, a time when Leonardo lay for hours watching a tiny flower unfold, when living itself was a fine art.'”

Maybe so, but for most people in most places I suspect life has been hectic and filled with strife, whether physical or mental, even for the wealthy and privileged like Florence. Yet her life was rich and she was perceptive; one entry says, “Out with Pearl [one of Florence’s female lovers] and accidentally came upon a life that was real and beautiful and made me feel loathsome—a blind pianist who is happy—in a small cheap restaurant.” So it is with this book: the generic and the oddly touching juxtaposed, with too much of the former and too little of the latter.

The Red Leather Diary also has distracting statements that are bizarre and probably wrong, as when Koppel says, “Our colossal spires are no longer seen as great lighthouses for the triumph of the human spirit but as dusty old stage sets, the backdrop of chain stores.” She’s talking about skyscrapers, and “colossal spires” is an artistic reach that falls flat, and, furthermore, I’m not sure they were ever seen as “great lighthouses for the triumph of the human spirit,” and, if they were, why would that have changed? And who is doing the seeing and perceiving in this sentence? I could take some guesses, but reading thoughts like this one combined with the aforementioned one about drawing frustrated me. The original article was all substance, while The Red Leather Diary is considerably less than all substance, and even if the absolute amount of substance might be greater than “Speak, Memory,” trawling through the filler lessens its impact.

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 Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 – 1815

December 3, 2007 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I primarily read novels, along with other material about them, but once in a while something like The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 – 1815 comes along and engages me as few histories do. Two favorites are Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present (link goes to my post on Ravelstein) and Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. They, along with The Pursuit of Glory, share the unusual trait of making their subjects lively in a way that monographs and high school classes—at least the ones I read and took—too often don’t. All three have personality, which can’t be taught by graduate departments or journalism classes and separates good history books from the merely well-researched, constructed, and presented. You see the difference in a million places, like one where Blanning tells me something I didn’t know about a famous person: “More controversially, [Adam Smith] ventured the opinion that the benefit of a diet of potatoes could be witnessed in the impressive physiques of the labourers and prostitutes of London (‘the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions’) […]”. This is hardly essential for our understanding of the subject being discussed (agriculture), but it’s a deft way to give a concrete example of larger agricultural trends’ effect on the everyday. He gives numerous specific examples of grand ideas in action. In another showing of character, Blanning says about the growing professionalism of bureaucracies: “[…] nepotism, corruption, obstruction, incompetence—and all the other vices inseparable from public employment of any age—were certainly to be found.” Concise, witty, and true. Among other nonessential but amusing knowledge, we find that, “In France, even pornography was being published in Latin in 1650, but more than 90 per cent of all titles were in French in 1700, by which time Latin had ceased to be a living language.”

Summarizing a 500-page book that in turn summarizes more than 150 years of history is nearly impossible, but if one can discern a primary theme it is how long Europe took to recover from its descent into darkness after Rome. Ample references demonstrate the journey and changes—for example, the Languedoc Canal was called perhaps “[Europe’s] greatest [engineering work] since Roman days.” At least that took a mere 15 years of construction, as opposed to another large canal that required 38. And I thought, “hmmmm, sounds like the Big Dig,” a boondoggle that has become a joke in New England and the rest of the world. This isn’t the only resonance with today. Politically, the most obvious comparison between then and now is Russia, whose descent back into despotism has been covered by Slate, among many others. See, for example, here, here, and here. The “long” Eighteenth Century featured numerous despots, some better than others, when that mode of rule was virtually universal among city states. Russian politics are still trapped in pre-Twentieth Century modes, and the parallels between Blanning’s description of politics then kept bringing to mind Russia now. To give another example, “At the heart of Bonaparte’s success, therefore, was his ability to combine two apparently irreconcilable ideals: liberty and order. He managed this trick by giving the semblance of liberty but the reality of order.” The same is true of modern Russian, whose people were serfs, and effectively slaves, far longer than the people of any other nation, and in too many ways still are.

Like all historical parallels, however, the one I describe is imperfect. Unified countries in the modern sense of the word coalesced during the period Blanning covers. When he writes about the “people” of a country or empire during this time, he tries to define them by saying, “One possible way forward is not to seek what the people were but what they were not, and what they most obviously were not was part of the political establishment.” This formulation captures the nuances of the problems he is trying to describe. In the U.S., many if not most citizens still aren’t part of the political establishment, but by choice, while in Russia they aren’t and never really have been. Yet not very long ago by historical standards most of the West lived that way, drawing us back to the uncomfortable parallels Blanning brings out, of which Russia is only one. What The Pursuit of Glory most recalls is how big the changes have been in the way most people live, even if wider political and social currents still hold true from one era to the next.

In looking at these currents, Blanning offers two interpretations about the Eighteenth Century, one “‘progressive’ and ‘optimistic'” that examines the growth of science, the reduction of superstition, and increased literacy. It seems to have happened mostly on the individual and social level. The other he labels “‘conservative’ and ‘pessimistic,'” with land owners still controlling most countries, wars becoming tremendously expensive and damaging, and monarchs still controlling much of Europe. It seems to have happened mostly on the political and international level. Yet everything has a qualification, as when he writes that “The numerous international forces at work in early modern Europe […] were often powerful enough to deafen national voices.” Yet he qualifies that opinion when he says that nationalism had a long way to go before being tamed in Europe, and arguably has not entirely been. Choosing a progressive or conservative explanation says as much about the chooser as it does about the choice, and Blanning leans toward progressive. Regardless of interpretation, Blanning does a superb job in helping one understand the Eighteenth Century and how it leads to our time.