Books
This Department features reviews and summaries of new books that link history and current events. From time to time we also feature essays that highlight publishing trends in various fields related to history.
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Reviews
Alberto Fernandez: Review of E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s The Knowledge Deficit
David J. Voelker: Review of Cormac McCarthy's, The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006)
James Munves: Review of Army GI, Pacifist CO: The WWII Letters of Frank & Albert Dietrich, ed. by Scott Bennett (Fordham University Press)
James Munves served in the European Theater of Operations in WWII as an infantryman in the Third Army. He is the author of “A Short Illustrated History of the United States,” and “Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence” plus a novel, “Andes Rising.” His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker Magazine.
This book should interest anyone exploring American attitudes toward participation in the Second World War. The GI letters of Frank Dietrich describe the usual travels and travails of service in various parts of the U.S., followed by his faithful wife, as well as perceptive comments on the Philippines in 1945, after the Japanese withdrawal and preceding Hiroshima. Frank served in the Army Air Corps but his justifications for serving lack the interest of Albert Dietrich’s for not serving. Among other things, the letters of his conscientious objector brother Albert offer a first hand glimpse of the difficulties in achieving CO status and, once status was granted, his existence as a CO.
Born in 1914 into a middle-class Pittsburgh family, the identical twins arrived at different perspectives on the war, probably because Frank visited a pen pal in Nazi Germany in the 1930s where, among other things, he attended a speech by the vicious hater Julius Streicher. Frank saw WWII as a “good war,” whereas to Albert it was just another useless armed conflict. The brothers graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in social work and had barely embarked on their careers by the time of Pearl Harbor. Their English mother had inculcated in them a love of classical music and the “finer things of life” and their letters show the difficulties of nurturing those interests in army and CO camps. From February 1942 until April 1945, Frank served at various bases in the U.S., mostly as an instructor in radio repair. In May 1943, he married a young woman he met while serving in Gallup, New Mexico, and there followed the need to find places to live and eventual absentee parenthood. Although seldom able to see each other, the brothers maintained a lively correspondence with Frank, who provided a strong endorsement of his brother’s pacifist views in a letter to the Selective Service Appeals Board that may very well have decided matters in Albert’s favor.
Albert’s letter of 11 June 1942, written when his status remained uncertain and prison loomed, sums up his objection to serving in the armed forces: ”I know that no good whatsoever will come out of this war. It is mass murder of the very worst kind and it is unthinkable for me as an intelligent human being to participate in it . . .I am positive that my going to prison is a far greater humanitarian act than were I to go out to the Pacific somewhere and murder one or a dozen Japanese young men.”
Albert endured the disapproval of his family but also found support in surprising places. He was hardly immune to the irrational patriotism of wartime; at one point writing that he would volunteer as a parachute fire fighter to show he was not a coward. Frank, on he other hand, safely in uniform, and in a job basically remote from danger, never entertained such thoughts. His introduction to the horrors of war came in Luzon. “Now about Manila. Honestly, the devastation and destruction is positively staggering. I don’t think I saw a single downtown building intact except the Cathedral. In the residential districts, home after home is in shambles.” (Frank to his wife, Chris, May 1945.) Unlike many of his fellow GIs, Frank made friends with local Filipinos on their own terms, fishing in streams and accepting their hospitality.
It’s sad now to revisit the mindset of those who experienced FDR and his New Deal. Albert, who appears more hardheaded than his brother, wrote this in June 1940, when France was defeated. Listening to the Republican National Convention (which nominated Wendell Willkie), he wrote: “We are in for a reaction and it will come both from the Democrats and the Republicans. It will take a world leader to gather the world out of the chaos in which it spins.”
The book is dedicated: “For Frank, Christine, Albert and Mary – the Dietrich branch of the “greatest generation” who fought for freedom and democracy on the home front and overseas.” Tom Brokaw, a TV commentator invented the appellation “greatest generation.” I find it nauseating. The “greatest generation” put off their uniforms and did what every generation has done before them, leaving the world as wicked and uncaring as before.
Luther Spoehr: Review of Jeffrey Rosen's The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America (Times Books, 2007)
Source: Providence Sunday Journal (1-28-07)
As legal affairs editor for The New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen has established himself as a deft, non-polemical Supreme Court analyst. Now the George Washington University law professor extends his analysis to book length and his coverage to over two centuries of the Court’s activities. The result is a thoughtful, thought-provoking, and only occasionally textbookish study of the Court’s history and its possible future under new Chief Justice John Roberts.
Nicholas Weir-Williams: Review of George Weller's First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches of Post-Atomic Japan & Its Prisoners of Wars (Crown)
Nicholas Weir-Williams wrote (as Stephen Weir) “Encyclopedia Idiotica: The Fifty Dumbest Things Done in History” and is an international publisher whose authors have won the Nobel Prize and the National Book Award. He took a Double First in History from Cambridge University.
Some sixty years after the end of World War Two, there remain two huge events that continue to dominate our thoughts – the Holocaust and the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan. The first remains almost too much for most people to understand, imagine or visualize, as much because of the numbers as the horror itself. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though in numbers killed and actual destruction pale in comparison to other events in the war, even the firebombing of Tokyo that preceded them, still stand as remarkable symbolic events.
There are few around now with the courage to defend the decisions, which are mostly reviled, and especially so the decision to drop a second bomb when Japan did not immediately surrender. A new book sheds some important light on that decision, quite literally from ground zero itself, as well as offering many interesting comparisons with our current war and its coverage in the media.
George Weller was a seasoned war journalist in his late 30s and with a distinguished record of coverage, stretching back to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Among other awards he had won a Pulitzer Prize, and become well acquainted with official censors. Arriving in Japan shortly after the surrender, he rapidly became convinced that the real story lay not in General MacArthur’s equivalence to embedding, but in the cities whose bombing had led to the sudden surrender of the Japanese, and which had been made off limits to all journalists. Using all his accumulated guile, he got himself into Nagasaki on September 6, 1945, less than a month after the bomb had been dropped. The core of this book -- namely the text of his dispatches from Nagasaki, none of which were published at the time or made it past MacArthur’s censors –- were lost to posterity until his son discovered carbon copies in his late father’s attic. They make for extraordinary reading now and pose some thought-provoking questions.
Why did the Americans insist on dropping another bomb a few days after Hiroshima? Received wisdom is that such was the devastation of the A-bomb that it was beyond cruel and inhuman to drop another. But what is abundantly clear from Weller is that the devastation was less than he had expected. He got to Nagasaki by train – trains to Hiroshima, as well as Nagasaki, continued to run – and on time. Large areas of the city, even what he perceived as strategic targets, remained intact and almost unscathed. For sure, the areas in the blast zone were obliterated, but the firm impression here is that the destruction was less than in the firebombings. Fires were localized; anyone with even basic cover mostly came out in one piece. Numbers of dead, even in the tens of thousands, were not as bad as what Weller and others had already seen over the past years. Travel out of Nagasaki was heavily restricted and only rumors of the reality of the bomb had got very far – suggesting that most Japanese and perhaps even some of the leadership were not fully aware of what had happened at Hiroshima. It is only later in the week that Weller became aware of what is termed ‘Disease X’. This of course was the then undiagnosed results of the radiation that affected so many, and which was only just beginning to be even remotely understood by the doctors who were treating the suddenly and horribly afflicted. This realization of the after-effects of the Bomb somewhat altered Weller’s thinking as to the real consequences of the explosion.
But set against all this – and taking up the bulk of the book – are extraordinary interviews with the true forgotten victims of World War II – the Americans and other allied soldiers who had survived years of Japanese prison camps, and suffered extraordinary privations and torture. There is no doubt, reading these stories and reactions of those who without question would have died had the war not been bought to a sudden end, that they saw the dropping of the Bomb as a salvation beyond their wildest dreams – both for giving them their freedom and for visiting destruction and death on a hated enemy. (I should declare a personal knowledge here, my father, grandmother and aunt having spent three and a half years as civilian prisoners in Singapore. None of them doubted what had brought them their freedom). Perhaps no group has been less documented in the annals of the war, not least by comparison with those of Japanese origins interned in the US, and their stories as told to Weller on the day of their liberation -- quite literally in some cases as Weller visited camps and actually was the one to break the news to prisoners as to what had happened and why their guards had melted away.
It is of course tempting to draw comparisons with current events, and many reviews have done so. But I think they are of doubtful validity. It seems more likely that the censorship meted out to these reports were less to do with government control over the media than personal fury from MacArthur and his staff that Weller had disobeyed them and made it to Nagasaki; and less to do with hiding the true horror of the radioactivity than an unwillingness from MacArthur to accept that the war had ended not because of his skills of generalship than because of a technological breakthrough that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Though as a powerful indictment of the horrors of what war can do to people, both military and civilian, “First Into Nagasaki” is as strong a first-hand account as you are likely to come across. Given its origins, it sometimes comes across as something of a hotchpotch of scattered pieces, and for that reason among many others it is sad that the publishers chose not to offer an Index. But it is a remarkable testament to one of history’s great turning points.
Alberto Fernandez: Review of E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s The Knowledge Deficit
Source: Common Review (Winter 2007) (1-1-07)
An educational experiment in 1989 pitted a group of students with high reading scores, selected especially for their lack of interest in baseball, against a group of low-scoring students who happened to be avid baseball fans. The two groups were asked to demonstrate their reading comprehension of a passage on baseball. Can you guess which team won?
In The Knowledge Deficit, E. D. Hirsch Jr. recounts this experiment and draws on the work of reading researchers and theorists to argue that “background knowledge,” knowledge not explicitly presented in a text, is essential to reading comprehension. Hirsch advances his case at a time when there is growing concern about the poor reading proficiency of American students compared to their international peers. What is worse, Hirsch points out, is that the longer these students are in school, the lower they drop—to a depressing 15th out of 27 countries by the tenth grade. The scores get worse after the early grades when students are increasingly tested for comprehension and not just for “decoding,” the ability to translate written marks into words.
“We need to see the reading comprehension problem,” Hirsch writes, “for what it primarily is—a knowledge problem.” Schooling, according to Hirsch, must supply our students with the broad knowledge—much less of baseball than of history, literature, science, and other traditional subjects—that is requisite for reading. This broad knowledge of words and of the world is also what standardized reading tests in fact test for, Hirsch says. These typically consist of passages on a variety of topics, undisclosed until testing time, for which only a good general education can prepare the student. In or out of the exam room or the research lab, there is no such thing as reading comprehension without prior knowledge of a text’s vocabulary (90 percent of it is the estimated minimum) and its references, and no such thing as effective education without imparting to students a wide range of specific knowledge.
Readers of Hirsch’s earlier work will recognize that the body of “enabling knowledge” he refers to, demarcated not by ideal criteria but by the actual intellectual demands of a culture, is nothing other than the “cultural literacy” that provided the title for Hirsch’s already classic 1987 work, and which he has ever since dedicated himself to elaborating and advocating in books, articles, and curricular projects carried out through his Core Knowledge Foundation. (Disclosure: the author of this review is currently involved in a Core Knowledge Foundation–Shimer College collaboration to develop a graduate curriculum for K–8 teachers.)...
Luther Spoehr: Review of William M. Chace's 100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way (Princeton, 2006)
Source: Written for HNN. (1-19-07)
Bill Chace had only about 25 semesters under his belt when I first encountered him: I took one of his courses on American Literature at Stanford very early in the 1970s. The young professor was already a terrific teacher, energetic, precise, vivid, and funny. I didn’t know then that he had done his graduate work at Berkeley, passing through Clark Kerr’s “multiversity” just as Mario Savio was urging students to throw their bodies upon the wheels, or that he had spent a year in Alabama teaching black students at Stillman College (and spent some time in jail for his pains).
Richard J. Evans: Review of Gotz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (Metropolitan)
Source: Nation (1-8-07)
[Richard J, Evans is the author of The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, both published by Penguin Press. A third volume, The Third Reich at War, is in preparation.]
Why did Germans keep supporting Hitler and the Nazis until the end of the war? Why didn't they rise up against a regime that was committing mass murder and atrocity on an unimaginable scale? Why didn't the mass Allied bombing of German cities lead to a popular revolt against Hitler?
Many historians have tried to answer these questions over the years since the Nazi regime collapsed in ruins in 1945. Older explanations looked to stereotypes of the German national character for an answer--militarism, love of violence, willingness to obey authority, desire for strong leadership, civil passivity and similar clichés of dubious validity. More recently, some historians have argued that propaganda played a central role in rallying Germans to the Nazi flag; others have stressed the growing terror to which the Nazi Party subjected the German people, above all in the later stages of the war. A few years ago, American political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen suggested that the overwhelming majority of Germans were fanatical supporters of Nazi anti-Semitism from the outset. Others have sought an explanation in the Germans' mindless enthusiasm for the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler.
None of these explanations by itself has proved very convincing. Simplistic notions of a German national character have foundered, like Goldhagen's sweeping generalizations, on the objection that a majority of Germans, in the Social Democratic and Communist parties, the Catholic community and many other parts of society, refused to lend their support to the Nazis in any of the elections of the Weimar Republic, where the Nazis never got much more than a third of the vote. There is plenty of evidence that Nazi propaganda, though not wholly ineffective, was limited in its impact, especially among these previously resistant sectors of the population and above all in the second half of the war, when Germany was demonstrably heading toward defeat. Hitler certainly seemed immune from popular criticism, at least until 1943, but he was admired as much for what he did as for the image he projected. And terror, though a very real, continuing and in 1944-45 rapidly escalating force, was surely not enough in itself to keep the entire German population in thrall.
In this startling and absorbing new book, which created a considerable storm in Germany when it was published in 2005, Götz Aly advances another explanation. It was, he says, material factors that persuaded the great mass of Germans to support Hitler and the Nazis almost to the very end. The Nazi leadership, he claims in Hitler's Beneficiaries, made the Germans into "well-fed parasites. Vast numbers of Germans fell prey to the euphoria of a gold rush.... As the state was transformed into a gigantic apparatus for plundering others, average Germans became unscrupulous profiteers and passive recipients of bribes."
Already by the late 1930s, Aly argues, even former Social Democrats had become reconciled to the regime because it replaced the mass unemployment and economic misery of the Depression with full employment, generated not least by rapid rearmament, prosperity and consumer satisfaction. During the war, he continues, "the cascade of riches and personal advantage--all derived from crimes against humanity...led the majority of the populace to feel that the regime had their best interests at heart."
Aly has offered this kind of materialist explanation before, in dealing with Nazi genocide, which he portrayed in his book "Final Solution": Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, published in English in 1999, as the outcome of rational, or perhaps one should say pseudo-rational, processes of state planning and ethnic reordering generated in the Nazi and SS bureaucracies. In Architects of Annihilation, published in English in 2002 (more than ten years after its first appearance in German), written in collaboration with Susanne Heim, Aly turned his attention to the planners, demographers, civil servants and academics who devised these plans, and argued that in the drive to adjust the ratio between "productive" and "unproductive" population groups in Europe, the planners "advocated state-directed mass extermination as a necessary and logical component of social modernization," envisioning in the process "not only one 'final solution' but serial genocides, planned in detail to be carried out over several decades."
This approach originates in a particular German far-left understanding of Nazism, which seeks at every juncture to link it to processes of modernization culminating in the Federal Republic of the present day. In Hitler's Beneficiaries, for instance, Aly misses no opportunity to mention prominent figures in postwar Germany who were enthusiastic about the Third Reich as young men. Not long ago, he caused a stir by indicting much-admired German university historians of the 1950s for what he saw as their role during the Third Reich in planning or justifying Nazi genocide. What makes Aly such an uncomfortable figure for Germans is that his arguments are always buttressed by painstaking, meticulous and very extensive archival research. His voice may be an outsider's voice, but it has to be listened to.
In his new book, he caused an even greater upset in Germany than before by arguing that it was not only the elites whose support for the Nazi regime was based on rational, nonideological grounds but also the vast mass of the people. How does his new claim stand up to critical scrutiny?
Hitler's Beneficiaries, it has to be said, does not begin well. The opening pages on prewar Germany contain many sweeping claims that have long since been exploded by serious research. Thus, contrary to what Aly says, the German middle classes were not impoverished by the hyperinflation of 1922-23 (it was great for debtors, mortgage holders and the like); relatively few Communists went over to Nazism in the early 1930s; the plebiscite that brought the Saar (an ethnically German region on the French border under the control of the League of Nations since 1919) back to Germany was not a free election; and the Nazi leadership did not make automobiles "affordable to everyday Germans." Nazism preached equality, but as with so many aspects of Nazi rhetoric, the reality was very different, and to speak repeatedly, as Aly does, of the Nazis' "socialism" is to mislabel what is better seen as populism; real socialist regimes were very different in their basic political thrust, and few things in this book are less convincing than its attempt to show that the Third Reich was a genuinely redistributive regime that robbed the rich to pay the poor.
Desperate to demonstrate that the overwhelming mass of Germans enthusiastically supported Nazism from the start, Aly provides a highly selective list of examples of young people, some of them his own relatives, who waxed rhapsodic about the possibilities the regime offered them. Typically, he quotes Hanns Martin Schleyer, who became president of the Employers' Association in postwar West Germany, enthusing in 1942 about the opportunities Nazism gave to the young: "We learned at a young age during the movement's days of struggle to seek out challenges, instead of waiting for them to come to us--this and our constant efforts for the party, even after it took power, made us ready to take on responsibility much earlier than usual" (Aly neglects to mention that Schleyer was kidnapped and murdered in 1977 by ultra-left German terrorists from the "Red Army Faction," founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof). He also cites two male relatives' entries in the Aly family guest book during the war, with slogans such as "tomorrow belongs to us" and "our country is heading towards a great and glorious future." But one could of course cite just as many testimonies by Germans who were frightened and disturbed by what the Nazi regime was doing, even in the 1930s.
The leadership did not divert resources to fulfilling consumer desires "to the detriment of rearmament"--rather the opposite. True, the Nazis' charitable organizations like the Winter Aid, designed to support the unemployed and their families at a time when jobs were few, or the Nazi People's Welfare, a larger, more formal institution aimed at doing essentially the same thing through the year, raised a lot of money for the less well-off, but a very high proportion of this charity was collected through contributions coerced from the population, including compulsory deductions from wages. The profits gained from the "Aryanization" of Jewish property were significant for those who availed themselves of them, but Jews made up less than 1 percent of Germany's population, and not all of them by any means were rich or even well-off; the difference this made to the nation's living standard overall was minimal, though Aly claims that the Jews were dispossessed, and indeed eventually exterminated, not least in order for the German state to get its hands on their property and use it to raise the people's standard of living.
The reductio ad absurdum of all this is reached when Aly claims that "the Third Reich was not a dictatorship maintained by force," citing the small size of the Gestapo, and the fact that there were fewer than 5,000 inmates in concentration camps by 1936; but the Gestapo was only one of a huge range of institutions of coercion and surveillance, all the way down to the "block wardens" who kept order in every street block, and by 1936 the concentration camps had long since given way to the prisons and penitentiaries, where there were some 23,000 political prisoners at this time, put there by a series of draconian laws that abolished every civil freedom and even prescribed the death penalty for telling "hateful" jokes about Hitler.
Even more bizarre, Aly describes the Third Reich as being run by a flat decision-making process, dependent on individual initiative rather than on a top-down hierarchy. The millions of people in Nazi Germany who were caught up in an undemocratic, totalitarian system governed by the all-pervasive "leadership principle" whereby Hitler's most casual remarks were immediately translated into official policy, often with devastating consequences, certainly would have been surprised to learn this.
Aly makes such crude and sweeping generalizations in part because he is almost entirely unfamiliar with the English-language literature on Nazi Germany, which is too large, diverse and sophisticated to be ignored with impunity. One feels that here, as elsewhere, his grasp of the secondary literature, and his knowledge of what other historians have written, including in Germany, is less than secure.
Aly's work rests overwhelmingly on documentary research. And here, once he gets beyond the simplistic account of Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the war, he has some interesting discoveries to present. Long ago, British historian Tim Mason pointed out that the Nazis' monomaniacal drive to rearm in preparation for a general European war got the German economy into increasing difficulties by 1939, as growing shortages of materials and labor began to impose growing constraints on production. Workers were increasingly coerced into working longer hours; they responded with rocketing rates of absenteeism, and the regime responded by drafting Gestapo agents into the factories to keep workers' noses to the grindstone. In this situation, economic salvation lay in conquest and plunder. Aly shows that as well as appropriating huge quantities of raw materials from Eastern and Western Europe, and eventually forcing more than 7 million workers from conquered and occupied countries to work for minimal pay in Germany, the regime also exploited the countries it occupied so as to prevent the mass of the German population at home from having to bear the real financial burden of the war.
It did this, as again Mason pointed out some thirty years ago, because Hitler and the leading Nazis were anxious to the point of paranoia about a possible recurrence of the "stab in the back" of 1918, when they believed--quite wrongly, of course--that a catastrophic deterioration of living conditions on the home front had led to a mass revolution, fomented by Jewish subversives, that had betrayed Germany's otherwise victorious army and brought about the country's defeat in World War I. As the Nazis pursued this deadly fantasy, more than half of Germany's Jews were forced out of the country by 1939, and the rest were dispossessed and marginalized and, from 1941 onward, deported and murdered. However, from the Nazi leadership's point of view, this still left the problem of how to maintain a decent standard of living at home.
At this point in the argument, Aly's exposition becomes quite technical and very hard-going for the reader, with a plethora of figures and calculations of tax burdens and exchange rates; but its broad outlines are clear enough. In every country they occupied, the Nazis either introduced a new currency or fixed exchange rates so that German soldiers, administrators and others could use a strong reichsmark to buy up goods cheaply and send them back home to their families. Buying goods abroad also helped control inflation at home. Special credit arrangements were made to assist in this process, and German troops in other countries were specifically allowed to receive money from their families at home to spend on goods they could not get in Germany.
Aly cites to dramatic effect the correspondence of a number of German soldiers who described with enthusiasm what they were buying and sending back to their families, among them the young Heinrich Böll, who many years later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels and stories. "I've got half a suckling pig for you," he announced triumphantly to his family just before coming home on leave in 1940. After the regime lifted restrictions on how much could be sent home in this way, the number of packages sent from France to Germany by military post ran at more than 3 million a month. Soldiers' pay was increased toward the end of 1940 explicitly in order to help them pay for the foreign goods their families desperately needed.
At home, taxes on the general population were kept as low as possible in order to avoid discontent, while business was taxed more heavily, not least on the grounds that this would not incur the wrath of the population at large. Elaborate welfare arrangements and benefits were put in place to insure that families did not suffer while their principal breadwinner was away on military service. More important, occupied Eastern Europe was subjected to a ruthless policy of exploitation and expropriation, in which foodstuffs were seized in vast quantities from the granaries of the Ukraine to feed the population at home, while more than 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately left to die of disease and starvation, and German war plans envisaged up to 30 million or in some versions 50 million Slavic civilians perishing in the same way. A similar policy was put into effect as soon as the German Army occupied Greece, with huge quantities of food being shipped home while Athens succumbed to a famine of terrible dimensions.
In 1941 Nazi planners urged the incorporation of "Russia's food economy into the European framework," leading to the "extinction" of "large segments of the population," running into "tens of millions." Aly cites many similar documents. German historian Christian Gerlach in particular has argued that the extermination of the region's Jews was hastened by the desire of German administrators to reduce the number of "useless mouths" in a situation where the German armed forces had to live off the land and food supplies at home constantly needed to be replenished from abroad. For Aly, indeed, a major reason for Hitler's decision to deport the remaining Jews in Berlin to the east in the summer of 1941 was the need to use their homes to house Germans made homeless by Allied bombing raids.
Here, however, a fundamental weakness of Aly's approach becomes apparent. In all his work, including his earlier study "Final Solution", he has applied a kind of economic reductionism that leaves other factors too much out of account--notably ideology and belief. His arguments are always stimulating and deserve the closest consideration, but they by no means tell the whole story, and they considerably exaggerate the impact of material factors on Nazi decision-making, which was fundamentally irrational at its core.
In a series of complex calculations, Aly comes to the conclusion that no less than 70 percent of the wartime revenues of the German Reich derived from occupied countries, from forced labor and from the murder of nearly 6 million of Europe's Jews (whose assets and possessions fell to the Reich once they were killed). One could make a case that Aly actually underestimates the amount of plunder extracted from the occupied countries, since he relies overwhelmingly on official documents and ignores the vast scale of the unofficial looting carried out by German soldiers as they marched into one country after another. Heinrich Böll described with disapproval how his fellow soldiers broke into deserted houses on their way into France, taking anything they wanted; and in Poland and the East, the troops stole food, jewelry, silver and gold, artworks of every description and much else besides from the country houses and monasteries they encountered on their victorious march toward Warsaw. The contribution all this made to the standard of living of the soldiers' families back home should not be underestimated, even if it is impossible to calculate.
But overall, Aly's figure is surely anything but an underestimate. Other calculations, notably by Adam Tooze in his forthcoming history of the Nazi economy, Wages of Destruction (to be published by Viking in April) put the figure more plausibly at around 25 percent; still substantial, but a long way from keeping almost the entire German people going, as Aly claims. Aly has relatively little in qualitative terms to say about the standard of living of Germans on the home front, and citing government social policy measures is no substitute. There can be little doubt that a deterioration in general living standards set in relatively early, as rations were steadily cut; people began to have recourse to the black market, where prices rapidly became inflated; and bombing raids from 1941 onward began to have their effect.
There is, moreover, a fundamental contradiction at the core of Aly's book. For if the overwhelming mass of Germans had been as positively committed to the Third Reich as he claims they were already before 1939, sustaining an "accommodating dictatorship" from below and participating fully in a flat decision-making process, then why would the regime have felt it necessary to divert such enormous resources into trying to avoid discontent on the home front during the war? Ironically, too, the decision-making processes that Aly describes, from tax reform and welfare measures to the regulation of food parcels and the raising of soldiers' wages, originated with central figures and institutions in the regime, including Hitler and Göring themselves, and were implemented in a top-down fashion through the Finance Ministry. If the Nazi leaders had decided not to tolerate the plundering of occupied countries and stopped the troops from enriching themselves and their families, they could have done so, and things surely would have turned out differently.
A central feature of Nazi ideology and rhetoric, explored by many historians but for obvious reasons completely ignored by Aly, was the cult of self-sacrifice, the appeal to self-surrender in the interests of nation and race. Much of this was coupled with promises that everything would get better once the war was over, but it also had a clear message for the present. Germany was everything, the individual nothing. Goebbels's propaganda machine constantly exhorted Germans to live frugally so that resources could be focused on financing the war. There is plenty of evidence that the deep-seated identification of a majority of Germans with the nation--their nationalism, in a word--was more important than anything else in maintaining their commitment to the war effort.
In 1939, 1940 and 1941, this produced an almost hysterical euphoria, as with startling rapidity and ease German forces overran territories whose conquest had largely eluded them in 1914-18. From 1942 to near the end of the war, coupled with growing and in many respects quite justified fear of the Red Army, it instilled a grim determination to preserve the nation in the face of its advancing enemies. At the same time, disillusion with the Nazi regime escalated rapidly in 1942-43, until by 1944 even Hitler was coming under increasing criticism from the populace, and the regular morale reports produced by the Security Service of the SS had to be stopped because they made too depressing reading.
When the Red Army finally overran Berlin, and Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, any remaining allegiance to his regime among the overwhelming majority of ordinary Germans collapsed. There can be little doubt that the material conditions of their life deteriorated sharply in 1945-47, now that the income and produce of occupied countries was no longer available to them, the country's huge arms and munitions industries ceased to exist, the armed forces were demobilized and returned home to begin the difficult search for a job, millions of refugees and expellees flooded in from Eastern Europe, and the burgeoning black market fueled inflation until it reached dangerous levels. Yet despite these appallingly difficult material conditions, there was no resistance to the Allied occupation, and no serious attempt to revive National Socialism after its defeat. If material factors had been so central in creating Germans' loyalty to the Third Reich, one would have expected far more serious levels of discontent after it collapsed. As it was, the death of Hitler, the central, integrating figure of Nazism, had cut the bonds of people's allegiance to his movement. And a regime that had constantly insisted that might was right, and that the spoils went to the strong, was now unambiguously hoist by its own petard.
It was not just the end of the good times, economically speaking, therefore, that tore people's allegiance away from the principles and practices of National Socialism, important though that was. Ideology, as always, was just as important, if not more so. Götz Aly has once more done a service to our understanding of Nazi Germany by drawing our attention to material factors, but as in much of his previous work, he has exaggerated their significance, and to concentrate on them alone is to show only half the picture.
Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
Antoine Capet: Review of Michael Bess's Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006)
[Antoine Capet, Fellow of the British Historical Society, is Professor of British Studies at the University of Rouen (France) and the editor of a book on Britain, France and the Entente Cordiale since 1904 (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006)]
“Choices Under Fire” is a “difficult” book. Not that it is written in incomprehensible pseudo-philosophical jargon: it is written in very clear English, with a perfect logical structure. The “difficulty” lies is the subject treated. To treat it well – as the author certainly does – you have to offer a comprehensive, worldwide panorama of the issues at stake (and to do that you must do more than simply give a brief summary of operations in the crucial theatres of war), and you must refuse the Manichean oversimplifications at every stage.
Now, just as brief overviews and one-sided arguments make for books which are "easy to read" (and equally easy to dismiss), the author's cautious, meticulous approach --in the best academic tradition--makes the book "difficult to read," both because of the complexity of the moral arguments, which Michael Bess, Chancellor's Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, examines in the most thorough fashion imaginable, and because of the wealth of new information which you have to assimilate. How many American readers will be familiar with the French Resistance in the Massif Central? As for me, I learned a lot about the Pacific War, especially on the mind-boggling Japanese casualty rates when the various islands were reconquered.
The reasoning is made even more complicated – but this is inevitable – when one distinguishes between “then and now,” i.e. when the reader is invited to renounce the benefit of hindsight (as it should be)and to attempt to put himself in the contemporaries’ shoes.
Finally, the arguments are often made more complicated by a counterfactual examination of the likely or possible results of a different decision (the archetype being “what if…” the American President had decided not to resort to the atomic weapon in August 1945 – and as if to make things even “worse” Bess does not only discuss the necessity for recourse to the bomb, but for dropping two bombs in short sequence, which notably changes the perspective). The difficulties and complexities are in fact clearly stated straight from his Introduction:
"Exploring the moral dimensions of the Second World War thus presents the historical observer with an unusually difficult challenge, because it was really two kinds of conflict at the same time: a morally straightforward war of defense against unprovoked aggression, and a morally complex conflict pervaded by ambiguities, trade-offs, agonizing choices, and unresolvable dilemmas. Doing justice to this irreducible duality of the war experience – the purely black-and-white dimension and the far messier gray areas – is necessary in order to capture accurately the full range of the war’s many contradictory realities."
For Bess, this “duality” leads to the uneasy coexistence of two “stances”: “the stance of celebration” (“the triumphant crusade”) and “the stance of critical scrutiny” (“the troubling elements of moral controversy that refuse to go away”). There are of course many books on the market (less so perhaps on the academic market) depicting and celebrating “the triumphant crusade” (Bess duly quotes from Stephen Ambrose’s “Citizen Soldiers”)(1) and even though the author has a chapter arguably devoted to the genre (on Admiral Spruance as the unassuming sailor who reveals his true worth at Midway), what makes “Choices Under Fire” so valuable is that most of the book is – magnificently – devoted to “critical scrutiny”.
Germany’s so-called “grievances over the Versailles Diktat” are well documented, especially in the United States, where the powerful isolationist press adopted the German point of view wholesale as early as 1919. Japan’s “grievances” before 1941 are probably not so well known, and we learn a lot about the humiliating imperialist attitudes of the Europeans and Americans towards Japan from the mid-19th century in a chapter whose subtitle sums up Bess’s conceptions: “Causes of the Pacific War: A Longer View on Pearl Harbor.” And who could in conscience deny that Japan had more claim to taking Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya/Burma and the Philippines under its “protection” than France, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States of America? By the 1930s, only “racist” arguments (the object of Bess’s opening chapter) could reject the highly-advanced Japanese society as an equal partner of the “whites” in the region.
German claims, on the contrary, were met without real difficulty in the late 1930s, so much so that those who had blamed Britain and France (especially France) for being too belligerent after 1919 poured their contempt on the surrender at Munich. Whole shelves of books have been written on “Appeasement” and “Munich” ( Neville Chamberlain’s latest—and superb-- biography (2) appeared too late to have enabled Bess to consult it). One relatively short chapter, “Causes of the War: The Paradoxical Legacy of Munich” is hopelessly inadequate to examine the extraordinarily complex external and internal constraints which weighed on Chamberlain and Daladier, and therefore to give an informed answer to the fundamental question, which continues to exercise the historical profession, especially in Britain: Given these constraints, could they have done otherwise in October 1938? Bess’s short answer is that this would have required “wiser leadership” (and not only in Britain and France). But at least one good emerged from the abject surrender: nobody could (then and later) doubt that Britain and France had done their utmost to avoid war, thus clearly laying the blame on Nazi Germany – this is the “paradox” which Bess sees in Munich. Thus the Second World War (unlike the First World War, whose real origins are still disputed) always was a “just (defensive) war” – a “Good War” from its very start.
Some authors have argued that the Second World War in fact started with the Japanese aggression of 1931 against China (though Bess does not discuss the point), but whatever the viewpoint – Manchuria, 1931 or Pearl Harbor, 1941 – Japan’s immediate responsibility for the war in Asia and the Pacific was equally indisputable. Add to that that Barbarossa, June 1941, was also a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, and it is clear – as Bess reminds us (though curiously he does not add or discuss the fact that it was Germany that declared war on the United States, not the reverse, thus also allowing the American Administration to label Germany as the aggressor during and after the war) – that all the ingredients were there to make the Second World War a “Good War” for the Allies. Fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism were crushed. Freedom and democracy triumphed. Where, then, is the “difficulty”?
First, it is clear that “freedom and democracy” only triumphed among the Western victors and paradoxically in the former tyrannies conquered by these victors. Bess has excellent discussions of the German and Japanese post-war “miracles”. But in the Orwellian Cold War world “freedom and democracy,” though proclaimed priorities in the Soviet bloc, fared hardly better than before the war – far worse in the case of countries like Czechoslovakia. Bess curiously does not discuss the British and French Empires after 1945, or continued United States backing of corrupt Latin American dictatorships; clearly “freedom and democracy” were also hollow words there. So, totalitarianism (adequately documented by Bess) and colonialism – open or disguised – (which he ignores) continued to have field days after 1945. The “world” war had not in fact resulted in “making the world safe for democracy” (a common wartime slogan in Britain) – only a tiny number of countries, victorious or vanquished, benefited from that priority war aim. Clearly, the Second World War was only a “Good War” for some.
Secondly, Bess argues, victory was all too often achieved without due concern for human, humane and humanitarian preoccupations. He has no time for the age-old Judaeo-Christian Biblical precept (he does not even mention it as a possible motive among the large number of Allied believers whose everyday morality was at least partially modelled on Judaeo-Christian principles), Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).
The two best known cases of controversy in this field are the bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb in 1945, though in fact we learn that the “conventional” bombing of Tokyo produced more victims than that of Dresden. On the bombing of Dresden, the publication of this book could not be more timely, as the launch of the English translation of the controversial German book, “Der Brand” is imminent.(3) It will be interesting to compare the two interpretations. The bombing of Dresden is much more a British than an American matter for debate, but the reverse is true for the use of the atomic bomb, and naturally Bess devotes a lot of space to the controversy, which it seems reached a peak over the proposed exhibition of Enola Gay, the plane which carried and dropped the first bomb, at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. The reader who only has a hazy notion of the debate in the United States will learn a lot, from the reported opinion of the President who had it in his power to refuse the slaughter: “Harry Truman, when interviewed after the war, claimed that he never lost a night’s sleep over his decision to use the bomb against Japan” to the opponents who absolutely rejected its use: “To someone who believes that massacring helpless civilians is always an absolute evil, under any circumstances, the notion that the A-bomb saved Allied lives will ring hollow.” Bess examines all the intermediate options then available, like dropping only one bomb or doing so only after some Japanese officials had been invited to a demonstration on an uninhabited island, and he gives all the calculations that have been made on the life-saving alternatives.
Two comprehensive chapters are devoted to the psychology of perpetrators whose attitudes seem totally alien to sane readers. One covers the “ordinary Germans” of Reserve Police Battalion 101, made famous by Christopher Browning’s book (4), who personally killed about 38,000 defenseless Polish Jews in cold blood in 1942. As Bess puts it, “This was not the machinelike, impersonal murder of the gas chamber in the death camps: it was close-up, messy, and laborious.” But then, “ordinary students” were easily persuaded to show no mercy to people who claimed to be in pain because of their action in the course of an experiment organised at Yale University (5). Why? Because, the expert psychologists say, behind all this was the authority of science and a propensity to obey orders, to which one can add peer pressure and group cohesion in a military context. “If citizens of Connecticut – in the civilian context of peacetime – could so easily be made to inflict pain and perhaps even death on helpless victims in a laboratory setting, the implications for the far more extreme circumstances of Nazi-occupied Poland were grim indeed”, Bess concludes – not as an excuse, of course, but as a more than plausible explanation.
The common phrase implicit in the literature produced by the fringe groups who continue to use Hermann Goering’s line of defense at Nuremberg, tu quoque (you also [did it]), unfortunately and embarrassingly springs to mind when one reads about these laboratory experiments. This forms in fact one of the basic themes of the book: Can the reader in his armchair today be sure how he would have reacted in the extraordinary (in the literal sense) situations of war? Curiously, Bess makes no mention whatsoever of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, a real-life (not laboratory) example which would have perfectly illustrated his point that it is too easy to blame Nazism or whatever group of people for a type of behavior which can unfortunately and unpredictably affect a wide number of humans: “Any society is capable of degenerating into the atrocious behavior shown by the Germans, Japanese, and Russians in the 1930s and 1940s, if the right ingredients come together.”
Also, when he discusses the atrocities committed by SS-troopers at Oradour-sur-Glane, in southern France, 1944, he does not mention the embarrassment of the French during the trial which took place at Bordeaux in 1953, when it was revealed that some of these SS-troopers were in fact Alsatians – technically German between 1940 and 1944 (though of course the Allies never recognised Hitler’s annexation), but legally French if you considered (as the French and Allies did) the annexation null and void. The vicious beast in man can reappear anywhere at any time – especially under the extreme stress of war: a “difficult” notion to live with.
What of the kamikaze pilots, then (the subject of Bess’s chapter “Kamikaze: Wartime Suicide Attacks in Anthropological Perspective”)? They did not act in the cowardly comfort of people in conquered territories killing defenseless Untermenschen. What can explain their “senseless” (to us) self-sacrifice? One senses that they are in a different class than the war crime perpetrators. Whereas many readers will feel unsure what they would do under the extreme stress of war, most will be sure that they would never adopt a kamikaze behaviour. All will agree with Bess that this is “the powerful example of how utterly futile a fanatic’s death can be,” but that does not explain why “there were about three times as many volunteers for the kamikaze corps as there were slots available.” In other words, why were there so many “fanatics” in 1945 Japan? Why not in beleaguered Nazi Germany, 1945? Surely the SS-troopers also deserved to be called “fanatics”? Why did they not, say, throw themselves as human bombs under Allied tanks? Probably they realised it was “utterly futile”. So there must be degrees in fanaticism – a “difficult” fact which Bess does his best to explore, but he faces an uphill task because it will always remain impossible for the sane reader to penetrate the mental framework of the SS-trooper or Japanese kamikaze pilot (as opposed to the “ordinary man” momentarily transformed into a beast in Poland, 1942 or Vietnam, 1968). About the kamikaze ethos, Admiral Halsey said it all in one short sentence: “Americans, who fight to live, find it hard to realize that another people will fight to die.” What was true of Americans in the Pacific War remains true of many people on earth in 2007. How many being one of these important questions which Bess cannot of course answer, even indirectly, in his ambitious book.
“Choices Under Fire is, therefore, a “difficult” book above all because it certainly does not offer ready-made answers to the reader – if anything, it shakes many of the certainties which he or she may have entertained before opening it. Bess tells us that some of his students find this “deeply frustrating” because they would much prefer to be given ready-to-digest facts – “But there is no other way: our historical knowledge is irreducibly interpretive.” The author is of course fully aware of the danger of “moral and epistemological relativism,” if only because pro-Axis right-wing activists are always on the lookout for revisionist arguments against the Allies. So we can only agree with him when he concludes, “we are still fighting to win World War II.” His book contributes to the struggle in no small way.
*******
(1) Ambrose, Stephen E. Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
(2) Self, Robert C. Neville Chamberlain: A Biography. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. See review: http://www.cercles.com/review/r28/self.html
(3) Friedrich, Jörg. Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945. München: Propyläen, 2002. (The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
(4) Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
(5) Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Gil Troy: Review of Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
Source: News & Observer (12-31-06)
Despite the epidemic of red versus blue talk, most Americans share common assumptions about how the world works. Most of us believe that mass prosperity promotes mass happiness, that nationalism is better than imperialism and that multiculturalism is good.
Niall Ferguson challenges those assumptions in his impressive new book, "The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West." His compelling history reveals the great harm done by boom times, nationalism and multiculturalism, arguing that these three phenomena helped make the 20th century "the bloodiest century in modern history." Ferguson warns that unless Westerners identify the true causes of our past failures, we will be hampered as we face what he considers the 21st century's great threat: Islamist terror.
Ferguson, a Harvard professor, best-selling author and British television personality, is one of those Oxford polymaths who makes Americans feel deliciously inadequate. He is so darned erudite, smoothly shifting gears from philosophy to economics to politics. He is equally compelling speculating about the underlying nature of racism, analyzing economic booms' destabilizing impact, and explaining how absolutist ideas overrode Western enlightenment to spawn Adolf Hitler's monstrous murder spree. This wide-ranging virtuosity, along with a European's tragic sensibility, shapes the book's central argument: that a toxic combination of ethnic conflict, "economic volatility, and empires on the wane" set the conditions for murderous conflict expanded beyond recognition by modern technology.
Look no further than Iraq or recall the fighting in the Balkans during the 1990s to see part of Ferguson's thesis in action. There, nations of diverse people had been held together by authoritarian leaders; after Tito's death and Saddam's removal, ethnic tensions were unleashed.
Similarly, Ferguson writes that many 20th century conflicts were rooted in the breakup of old empires -- including the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the British. Today we tend to condemn those imperial behemoths, but they were means of both creating and controlling multicultural societies. Most of the great traumas of the 20th century resulted when diverse societies degenerated into warring ethnic enclaves.
Why should that be? Modern scientists have proved that the differences among humans are biologically negligible, "beneath the skin we are all quite similar." If so, then, why as humans discovered our similarities scientifically have so many emphasized our differences so brutally?
If racism is hatred of the "Other," Ferguson notes, the other is often very familiar. Just as murderers usually know their victims, the worst massacres and bloodbaths have been perpetrated at least in part by neighbors -- even the Nazis' vast killing machine depended on the collaboration of Poles, Ukranians, the Dutch and the French.
Ferguson further observes that in many of the 20th century's most infamous sites of ethnic bloodshed, from Nazi Germany to the Balkans to Rwanda, much assimilation and intermarriage preceded the burst of racial slaughter. In addition, many of the greatest killing sprees involved mass rapes too, suggesting a pathological paradox of intimacy and brutality.
Ferguson argues that throughout Europe, even before the Nazi Holocaust, Jews frequently suffered from this widespread and "volatile ambivalence," this "mixture of aversion and attraction." During the "Age of Hatred," from 1904 to 1953, Jews assimilated magnificently, shaping the European communities they joined. Yet, when instability struck, Jews were often the first to be forcibly expelled from the body politic, with bloody results.
Ferguson argues that such instability involved not only bad times, but good. Prosperity, Ferguson shows, can also be unnerving -- good times create losers as well as winners, and can induce a dizzying vertigo that undermines well-established loyalties and unleashes long-suppressed hatred.
During the 20th century, this destabilizing economic volatility was exacerbated by the waning of empires, which had brought diverse people together, then left them with healthy approaches for living together. In a changing world, the desire for uniformity of thought or of identity often brought out the worst in people. Charismatic demagogues often appeared, infecting people with a desire for an ethnic purity that the broader multinational empires could never achieve.
The long history of anti-Semitic pogroms, riots and expulsions shows that hatred is not a 20th-century invention, but mass production of murder is. The Holocaust became a singular crime because the Germans allocated tremendous state resources and modern science toward fulfilling their gruesome goals as technology and ideology became intertwined in a 20th century dance of death.
As he explores the sources of past conflict, Ferguson worries about the West's ability to defend itself in the future. Western decadence and distraction are especially worrying. He believes that bold pre-emptive action could have stopped the Nazis sooner -- and doubts we have internalized that essential lesson for today. He acknowledges Allied brutality due to what Norman Mailer brilliantly called "the osmosis of war." Yet he is even more critical of the West for mollifying Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union with the greatest spoils of war -- control over Eastern Europe -- rather than properly pressing the advantage.
Obsessed with Western weakness, Ferguson views the Cold War as a wash. He claims that the "United States did as little for freedom as the Soviet Union did for liberation." This judgment is too harsh, considering the American role in rebuilding Western Europe and in spreading democracy in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union imploded.
Still, Ferguson's warnings are very relevant today. Even though global warfare has dropped by 60 percent, marking the lowest level since the 1950s, this book lacks a happy ending. The United States faces a "new economic rival" in China, which outlasted the Soviet Union by crossbreeding aggressive market capitalism with repressive Communist autocracy. More ominously, whereas entrepreneurs in the Far East embraced some Western values, fundamentalists in the Near East repudiated them. "There, the revolution was not about profits; it was about the Prophet," Ferguson writes in a characteristic wordplay. "And whereas the Far East exported products, the Near East exported people."
Radical Islam, in its aggressive and expanding form, rose just as feminism and consumerism led Europeans and Americans toward zero population growth and self-indulgence. Radical Islam, fed by the Muslim birth rate, threatens to overwhelm Europeans demographically and ideologically. In 1950, there were twice as many Britons as Iranians; today there are more Iranians than Britons. The radicalism of the Muslim immigrants to Europe has created what Ferguson calls "a new enemy within," with "the frontier" running through every major European city.
The Balkanizing forces that "negate our common humanity ... stir within us still," as the West, weakened and eclipsed, seems to lack the will and the skill to confront this radical enemy. Ferguson is too cautious to declare conflict "inevitable along these new fault lines." However, he worries. "If the history of the twentieth century is any guide, then the fragile edifice of civilization can very quickly collapse, even where different ethnic groups seem quite well integrated." Thus this lengthy, indispensable guide to the past ends by warning that, only by taking preemptive action and finding a unity of purpose will we preserve the West's future.
David J. Voelker: Review of Cormac McCarthy's, The Road (New York: Knopf, 2006)
[Mr. Voelker is an assistant professor of humanistic studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He would like to thank Ruth Homrighaus and Brian Steele for their assistance in preparing this essay.]
Cormac McCarthy has made a name for himself as a profusely literate author of
fiction about the American past. His 1985 novel,
Blood Meridian, for instance, desanctified
the ideology euphemistically known
as "Manifest Destiny." In McCarthy's
blood-soaked visions of the past,
violence is violence, and death, death. His latest novel,
The Road, envisions a future just as
violent as his imagined past. But there is a difference. In this
bleakest of fictions--all the bleaker because of its plausibility--history
provides a faint gleam of hope, even as global catastrophe eclipses
civilization.
The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic
future, a future in which death is legibly written upon the landscape.
Ravaged by nuclear winter, the earth no longer sustains plants or animals, save
for a scattered and debased remnant of humanity that survives by scavenging,
thieving, and cannibalizing. With uncharacteristic economy, McCarthy
describes the catastrophe that triggered the destruction of the global ecosystem
and, with it, human civilization: "The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long
shear of light and then a series of low concussions. . . . A dull glow arose in
the windowglass" (45). These few words provide all the explanation that we
need.
Set several years after the cataclysm, the novel follows a father ("the man")
and son ("the boy" of about four or five years old) on their journey along "the
road" through an unnamed region of what used to be the western United
States. They are heading south to escape a winter whose harshness is
exacerbated by the fact that the sun barely penetrates the ashened sky.
The earth itself has become a death camp where starvation and other humans pose
a constant threat.
Civilization has totally collapsed. History itself has been irrecoverably
destroyed. The few survivors sift through the rubble with no possibility
of reassembling the pieces. Society exists only in the form of gangs of
thugs who hunt down, dispossess, and eat other survivors. Survival
requires a readiness to fight. Fittingly, then, the narrative eye falls
continually on the man's pistol, which figures as both a tool of defense and a
means of possible self-annihilation, should death become preferable to life.
While the man keeps himself going solely
for the sake of his son, he sustains the boy with stories about their
journey. The barely articulated theme of these stories, that the two are
"carrying the
fire," seems to refer to preserving
some essence of civilization, of life before the collapse.
(McCarthy also used the image of "carryin fire in a horn" in the last page of No Country for Old Men, which was published in 2005.)
In the stories,
the man and his son are different from the "bad guys" marauding on the
road. They are the "good guys" who try to help other people.
Although the stories do not reflect the ugly reality of the pair's struggles,
they provide the man and the boy with a purpose: they are searching for other
people like themselves.
When push comes to shove--as it inevitably and repeatedly does on the road--the
man readily uses violence to defend himself and his son, although he has a
tendency to pull punches for the sake of the boy, who functions as the pair's
conscience. Somehow, despite all of the death, dying, and even killing
that the boy has seen, he has absorbed from his father a sense that rules of
right and wrong still apply. He knows little of the world that has
passed. And he does not quite see his world for what it is: the scene of a
zero-sum struggle for survival, where helping someone can mean forfeiting one's
own existence.
Even as the man tries to relinquish his grip on the vanished past, he gifts
something of it to his son. Herein lies the glimmer of hope, the father's
hope against hope that his son might carry some spark of human
culture--something that transcends the primal drive to survive--into the future,
however uncertain that future might be. At moments, naturally, the hope
seems quixotic. The father likens his son to a performer "who does not
know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves"
(66). Later, when the boy, imitating his father's diction, asks about
their "long term goals" (135), the father has no ready response. Still,
his sense of loss does not lead him to total despair.
In this novel, destruction happens in a flash, but one has to ask the
question: Are we not already on the road? Many civilizations of the
past have faced extinction, but we live in the only civilization that could
destroy itself (and is) by immolating the very earth that sustains it. The
novel ends with a lament: "Once there were brook trout in the streams in the
mountains. . . . On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps
of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could
not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where
they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery"
(241). This passage evokes the conclusion of
On the Origin of Species, in which Charles
Darwin beautifully describes the grandeur of "an entangled bank," bustling with
life. Evolutionists and creationists both recognize that humanity did not
create itself; we cannot survive planetary ecological catastrophe. We
already live in a world where some things cannot "be made right again," but we
have not yet witnessed the end of history. McCarthy's darkly brilliant
novel urges us to continue asking: Where are we? How did we arrive
here? From what possible futures can we choose?