The past in
perspective
Catriona Kelly
Julian Barnes
Antony Beevor
Mary Beard
Richard J Evans
Sameer Rahim
Andrew Marr
Simon Schama
2
PROSPECT
Foreword by Sameer Rahim
A
t Prospect we believe that reflecting on the past
can provide key insights into the present—and the
future. In the following pages, you can read a selection of some our favourite historical and contemporary essays we have published in the last year.
Julian Barnes’s new novel, The Noise of Time, is based on
the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In her
lively and expert review, Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian at
Oxford University, argues that Barnes has captured the spirit of
the “technician of survival,” who was in continual fear of having
his music—and his life—being eradicated by Stalin.
Staying on Russia, Antony Beevor’s column “If I ruled the
world” describes how after the publication of his bestselling Berlin: the Downfall, which criticised the Red Army’s conduct during the Second World War, the Russian ambassador accused
him of “lies, slander and blasphemy.” Beevor says that historical disputes should not be the subject of national laws—even
if that means allowing Holocaust deniers to put forward their
case. Scholarship should be robust enough to challenge lies
about the past.
Mary Beard made her name with revisionist accounts of
the Roman Empire, highlighting the women and slaves often
glossed over in traditional works. Reviewing Beard’s new book,
SPQR, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King’s College, London, hails her “exceptional ability” to keep up with modern
scholarship as well as her talent for plunging the reader into the
thick of the action right from the start.
Nazi propaganda presented Hitler’s Germany as the inheritor of the Roman Empire. The man who shaped that image
was Josef Goebbels. Richard J Evans, a leading historian of the
Nazis, reviews a biography of Goebbels that draws extensively
for the first time on his private diaries. What Evans finds is a
man, for all his fanatical bombast, who had “a soul devoid of
content.” Also included is my interview with Nikolaus Wachsmann, whose acclaimed book KL is the first comprehensive history of the Nazi concentration camps.
Finally, we have Andrew Marr’s review of Simon Schama’s
history of Britain through its portraits—“a terrific, fat book,
classic Simon Schama.” Marr, the BBC presenter who last year
wrote a history of the nation through its poetry, praises the book
for its “zest and intelligence.” These are also qualities we believe
mark out Prospect’s writing, whether it is about the distant past
or the present day.
Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Arts & Books editor
Contents
03Technician of survival
catriona kelly
07What the Romans really did
edith hall
12Anatomy of a genocide
sameer rahim
06If I ruled the world
antony beevor
09Hitler’s shadow
richard j evans
14An eye for a story
andrew marr
3
PROSPECT
Technician
of survival
Julian Barnes brings to life the troubled inner world of Dmitri Shostakovich
catriona kelly
T
he life of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich is at once and others have illuminated the circumstances in which the Soviet
well-documented and elusive. Famous from an early Union’s foremost composer lived and worked. Yet the surroundage, the Russian composer was surrounded for his ings only make the man at the centre seem less substantial. Lauwhole life by family, musicians, pupils, enemies and
rel Fay’s scholarly biography, recording what is known for certain,
admirers; he attracted the attention of the formida- is at once scrupulous and dry.
ble Soviet surveillance machine at every level. Material traces,
Myth-making annoys historians, but perhaps annoyed Shostaincluding an apartment museum in Moscow, abound. Yet he also kovich less. His Soviet biographer, Sofya Khentova, claimed that
skids away from definition. The latest
Shostakovich had recalled raptly listento re-interpret his life is Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
ing to Lenin’s speech at the Finland Stawhose new novel The Noise of Time is by Julian Barnes (Vintage, £14.99)
tion on 3rd April 1917; Volkov recollects
structured round three crucial episodes
Shostakovich saying he’d ended up in the
in Shostakovich’s struggle with state power.
crowd by mistake and hadn’t known what the fuss was about; Fay,
In private photographs and in the recollections of those closest following Lossky, states that Shostakovich was never there at all—
to him in his later years, Shostakovich has the reserved intensity of by the time Lenin arrived, a nicely brought up 10-year-old would
his late chamber music. But in some moods, according to the dis- have been safely tucked up in bed. The third version is much the
puted but likely in some respects accurate memoirs of the musi- most convincing. But that doesn’t disprove that Shostakovich
cologist Solomon Volkov, he could be both hilarious and pungent. told the other stories, or even, to some extent, believed them. Like
Winding his way through a dangerous patronage culture, he has many who witnessed the Revolution (particularly the February
often been understood as a martyr to the totalitarian state. But he Revolution) as a child, he had a genuine enthusiasm for popular
is also psychologically comparable with figures such as Alexander upheaval and mass action all his life, if not necessarily for what
Pushkin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Interpreting such art- resulted from that great political turmoil. Sticking to the facts can
ists exclusively in terms of encoded self-revelation and concealed mean, at some level, missing the point.
irony—as Shostakovich often is—would certainly not do justice to
Where historians subside into embarrassed silence, novtheir intentions or intelligence.
elists speak. In The Noise of Time, the different variants of the
Current academic study tends to avoid the hunt for “the real Lenin story are among many pointers to the fluidity of ShostaShostakovich” (a kind of perpetuation of state surveillance) in kovich’s relations with his past: “These days, he no longer knew
favour of a historical understanding. The archives have not pre- what version to trust. He lies like an eyewitness, as the story goes.”
served the young boy’s school reports, but they confirm his near- In an anecdote that frames the novel and is also repeated within
contemporary Boris Lossky’s account. Shostakovich attended it, three men drink a vodka toast on a wartime station platform:
what was known officially as a commercial school, but the title was “one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink.” The Shosa flag of convenience: the syllabus was shaped by the strong con- takovich of Barnes’s imagining includes all three: the barely
temporary interest among educated Russians in “free education,” surviving crippled alcoholic, limbless on his trolley, practisand it even had its own Montessori kindergarten. The emphasis on ing “a technique for survival”; the bespectacled listener who
self-directed study, personal development and community spirit offers him vodka with egregious courtesy; and the anonymous
had its echoes later in his life.
witness, who disappears even from recollection after the desulShostakovich was certainly not purely a victim—he managed, tory encounter.
after all, to outlive no fewer than three Soviet leaders, while many
Not that Barnes’s purpose is anything to do with allegory. But
of his artistic contemporaries preceded even Vladimir Lenin into The Noise of Time, largely based on memoirs (those collected by
the grave. As well as being moulded by his era, he helped to con- Elizabeth Wilson as well as Solomon Volkov’s) is a book about
struct it. Marina Frolova-Walker, Jonathan Walker, Kiril Tomoff Shostakovich’s memories, rather than a straightforward fictional account of his life. Complaining that the Leningrad symphony doesn’t figure, or that Barnes omits Shostakovich’s work
as a teacher of composition, or as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet
(and a conscientious one) would be obtuse. It would be equally
otiose to point out that as well as agonising over his new version of
Catriona Kelly is a professor of Russian at Oxford University.
Her latest book is “St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past” (Yale)
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich negotiated hard over
© FRANCES BROOMFIELD / PORTAL GALLERY, LONDON / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
4
Reserved intensity: a portrait of Shostakovich by Frances Broomfield (2003)
PROSPECT
© RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHER (20TH CENTURY) / PRIVATE COLLECTION / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
PROSPECT
5
in the dining room, with the clock’s door
open, holding back the pendulum with one
finger.” In turn, the book is structured less
round onward time than time repeated:
particularly, the three leap-year moments,
1936, 1948, and 1960, when Shostakovich
came closest to destruction and despair.
In Russia, despair is sometimes difficult to separate from black humour: as
the joke goes, “If you’re over 40 and you
wake up, and nothing hurts, that means
you’ve died.” Unlike some English chroniclers of Russian life, Barnes has an ear for
this mood: “Music is not like Chinese eggs;
it does not improve by being kept underground.” When Shostakovich reflects on
what he sees as the passivity of Americans, he notes that “even the cows standing motionless in the fields looked like
advertisements for condensed milk.” One
of Shostakovich’s wry comments even has
a parallel life as an in-joke for people who
know Barnes’s previous work on Gustave
Flaubert: “Life was the cat that dragged
the parrot downstairs by the tail; his head
Shostakovich with fellow composers Sergei Prokofiev (left) and Aram Khachaturian (right)
banged against every step.”
But it is above all the “hard, irreducible
the 1966 film version and insisted only the Kiev production was purity” of music that drives the narration, expressed not just in
used. The Noise of Time is a distillation of experience into insom- key sounds (“four factory sirens in F sharp”) or Shostakovich’s visniac self-questioning, or the vertiginous doubt, otkhodnyak, that ceral reaction to conducting that he hates—“Toscanini chopped
succeeds the temporary confidence of a vodka high. The mode is up music like hash and smeared disgusting sauce over it”—but in
interior monologue, but in the third person sometimes used about the crafting of language itself. Shostakovich’s ageing shows not
themselves by particularly sensitive individuals alienated, lifelong, just in disillusion, or the shift of motion from “skitter” to “limp,”
from their own lives.
but in a transformation of tempi. First comes a nervous scherzo of
“It had got to the point when he despised being the person he love entanglements: “And so he and Nina met, and they became
was, on an almost daily basis,” a Shostakovich in his fifties reflects.
lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her husThis self-distancing permeates The Noise of Time, since the narra- band, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a
tive’s starting point is already the existential edge—the 1937 agony date for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so
of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady failed to turn up and ran away and hid…” Later, there is the slowMacbeth of Mtsensk in Pravda as “Muddle instead of Music.” Anna ing that Shostakovich himself liked to mark morendo, with the
Akhmatova, the poet with whom, as the novel reminds us, Shos- violist Fyodor Druzhinin told to play the slow movement of the Fiftakovich once sat in mutually appreciative silence for 20 minutes, teenth Quartet “so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience
wrote in Northern Elegies: “I shall not lie in my own grave.” Shostastart leaving the hall from sheer boredom.”
kovich had the same sense of self-distance.
At once self-deprecating and precise, the joke captures
The composer’s early years are summed up by his painfully not just Shostakovich’s capacity for evasion, but the nature of
delirious love affair with Tanya, the “hard, demeaning work” of his own composition, its saturated emptiness. Fictional porplaying cinema piano, or the open-air performance of his First trayals of music soften and sweeten the nature of the art (take
Symphony disrupted by a competitive concert from the neighbour- Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes),
hood dogs. Motifs repeat: a string of garlic threaded round a wrist reducing it to ethereal cliché; the result is not too far from
to ward off infections; a small case packed against possible arrest; novelettes such as Florence L Barclay’s The Rosary or Naomi
the cocktail sauce with bobbing shrimps in the plane Shostako- Royde-Smith’s Mildensee. But The Noise of Time shares with
vich gets to the United States, and where later the composer ima- Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata—another text which has at
gines himself afloat.
its centre the tyranny of music and its physiologically devasAt one level, this phenomenology of daily life echoes the tating potential—the capacity for evocation of music-making
shadow-double of Barnes’s novel, Osip Mandelstam’s memoir The that is worthy of the real thing. And, just as Shostakovich himNoise of Time. But where the hideous sideboard owned by a rela- self survived his encounters with power to transform dog barks
tion of Mandelstam’s, or the landscape of a Baltic beach, testify and factory sirens into some of the 20th century’s most exploto the age they came from, the objects here are pared to their sig- sive exercises in created sound, so this novel is, fortunately, much
nificance for Shostakovich. Two clocks, for instance, daily chime larger than the depiction of the composer in the familiar role of
together in perfect unison. “This was not chance. He would turn a “technician of survival,” a midnight meditator on life’s futility
on the wireless a minute or two before the hour. Galya would be and his own.
6
PROSPECT
If I ruled the world
Antony Beevor
© MIKKO STIG/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
States must stop trying to rewrite history
As world ruler, I would prevent countries from attempting to
control history. One saw the way the historian David Irving, who
in 2005 was sent to prison by an Austrian court for denying the
Holocaust, could make himself out to be a victim and a martyr.
Then there was former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who
tried to outlaw the denial of the Armenian genocide in 2012. It
was opportunistic and designed to get the Armenian vote. This
is a state attempt to control history, which is something I oppose
on principle. The issue has also come up in Russia. In 2013, Sergei Shoigu,
the country’s Minister for Defence, passed a law that he had been
trying to get on the statute books since 2009. It would imprison
anyone, in theory for up to five years, who criticised the Red
Army’s conduct during the Second World War. (I have to declare
an interest: I am a target of this law because my 2002 book Berlin: the Downfall also covered the mass rapes committed by Russian soldiers in 1945.) Shoigu described
the “crime” of criticising the Red Army as tantamount to Holocaust denial. It’s interesting,
considering that Joseph Stalin himself was, in
a way, the first Holocaust denier. He refused
to allow that the Jews should have any special category of suffering. After the publication of my book, the
Russian Ambassador to Britain, Grigory
Karasin, accused me of lies, slander and blasphemy against the Red Army. Karasin is now
Deputy Foreign Minister. I don’t know to
what degree I am still in the firing line
because I still get invitations to the
Russian Embassy. Vladimir Putin
does like to come up with totally
contradictory positions to confuse his opponents. Rather like
the way he accuses Ukraine of
fascism and then proceeds to support fascist or neo-fascist parties
in western Europe. His real goal
is the attempt to control Russian
history. In March, while planning
celebrations for Russia’s victory in
the Second World War, Putin said:
“Today we unfortunately see not
only attempts to misrepresent and
distort events of the war, but cynical, open lies and the brazen defamation of a whole generation who
gave up everything for the victory.”
He continued: “Their goal is clear:
to undermine the power and moral
authority of modern Russia and deprive
it of the status of a victorious nation.” It didn’t occur to me until after writing Berlin that the reason Russians found it so painful to acknowledge the mass rapes—
including those who suffered in the Gulag and hated Stalin—was
that for them the victory over Nazi Germany was a moment of
which they could all feel proud and which unified the country. In
fact Karasin warned me—before he knew exactly what was in the
book—that “what you have to realise is that the victory is sacred.”
It is seen almost as the defining moment of the Soviet Union and
therefore cannot be tampered with. That any state has to rely on legislation to defend this idea is
deeply depressing. They have even set up the Russian Military
Historical Society, whose aim is to foster patriotism and resist
attempts to distort military history. There have been some very
brave Russian historians, some of whom have lost their positions, simply by questioning the party line of today, which is
that there were only a few cases of rape and of course all of
those were prosecuted. We know this is absolute rubbish:
the numbers were far greater. Trying to foster patriotism
through history is something that many regimes have
done in the past, and they tend to be undemocratic in
one form or another. During the Russian victory celebrations on 9th May the orange and black St George’s
ribbon was being used everywhere. This symbol from
the past is being used in eastern Ukraine to represent
Russian heroism today.
History needs to be debated openly. You can ban certain symbols—as Germany has done with the
swastika—and you can even ban certain
political parties. But it is quite wrong
to suppress a counter-argument in
history. For example, the great
Jewish historian of the Holocaust
Raul Hilberg put the number
of deaths at a bit over five million, rather than six million.
Did that make him a Holocaust denier? It’s a grey
area. If you want to do
something about real
Holocaust deniers you
could prosecute them
under hate laws—but
not on the grounds of
falsifying history.
Antony Beevor is a
bestselling and awardwinning historian. His latest
book is “Ardennes 1944:
Hitler’s Last Gamble,” which
was published last year by Viking
Press
7
PROSPECT
What the Romans
really did
Mary Beard’s colourful chronicle of Ancient Rome debunks familiar myths
edith hall
A
ncient Roman literary critics admired writing
Beginners will then spend the next five chapters struggling to
that plunged readers into the thick of the action— understand the successive waves of data about the preceding cenin medias res—rather than boring them with pre- turies—the kings of Rome, the consolidation of the Republican
ambles. Mary Beard plunges her reader, from the regime, the widening of Rome’s horizons in the fourth and third
first page, into one of the most exciting episodes in centuries BC, the expansion of the empire, the violent upheavals
Roman history.
of the “new politics” at the time of the Gracchi in the late 2nd cenIn 63BC, the orator and statesman Cicero exposed what he tury down to the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73BC. We do not
claimed was a revolutionary conspiracy.
rejoin Cicero until nearly halfway through
It was led by the disaffected aristocrat SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
Beard’s narrative, in chapter seven, where
Catiline, whom Cicero accused of plot- by Mary Beard (Profile, £25)
he is now taking on Verres, the governor of
ting to assassinate all the elected magSicily accused of corruption. But that conistrates of Rome, set fire to the city’s buildings and cancel all frontation preceded Cicero’s denunciations of Catiline, with which
debts indiscriminately. Beard writes with her customary energy,
“we” had begun “our” history. As a Classics graduate I know some
charm and intensity, resurrecting the titanic personalities who Roman history, but must admit to intermittent bewilderment. I
struggled to control Rome while its republican constitution was would recommend any new Roman history enthusiasts to begin
hurled into its final death throes. She uses contemporary terms on page 78 with Beard’s enthralling account of the archaeological
like “homeland security” to make the unfamiliar accessible. Her evidence for early habitations in the Roman area. These include
ambivalence towards Cicero—brilliant, prolific, brave, eloquent,
the remains of a two-year-old girl found in a coffin beneath the
but vain and obnoxiously self-pitying—is palpable. By the end of
forum in a dress decorated with beads; in the 1980s archaeologists
the chapter we are primed to take the story forward to the next unearthed the sort of house she might have lived in north of the
phase: the assassination of Julius Caesar and the climactic con- city, a small timber edifice with a primitive portico. It contained
flict between Mark Antony and Octavian, soon to become Augus- the remains of the earliest known domestic cat in Italy.
tus. But Beard chooses instead to disorient us completely.
Beard is always at her dazzling best breathing life into the
In chapter two she abruptly transfers us back many centuries material remnants left by the ancient inhabitants of the Roman
to the very beginnings of Rome, or rather its mythical origins in world, as she did in her prizewinning 2008 book Pompeii: The Life
the stories of Romulus and Remus and of the rape of the Sabine of a Roman Town. One of her hallmarks is an exceptional ability to
women. All except the final two chapters then take a broad historiremain up-to-date with the most recent archaeological discovercal sweep, structured in conventional chronological order stretch- ies, and communicate their contents and significance in a lively
ing from archaeological finds dating to as early as 1000BC all the and user-friendly manner. The public has been waiting eagerly for
way to 212AD. The sense of chronological disorientation is, I think,
SPQR since her engaging 2012 BBC series Meet the Romans. The
deliberate. The version of the early history of Rome which has greatest virtue of SPQR is her ability to choose individual objects
come down to us was mostly filtered by later Roman writers, both or texts and tease out from them insights into Roman life and
Cicero and authors working under Augustus—Livy, Propertius, experience. These range from the enigmatic “black stone” found
Virgil and Ovid. Beard is laudably keen that we see the early his- in the forum inscribed with words including “KING,” to a relief
tory as not only gappy and inconsistent but artfully manipulated sculpture depicting a poultry shop, complete with suspended
to suit the political agenda of later writers. But the effect is con- chicken and caged rabbits. The book contains 21 colour plates and
fusing, right from her opening sentence: “Our history of ancient more than a hundred others embedded in the text, every one addRome begins in the middle of the 1st century BC.” By “Our history ing an exciting dimension to her colourful chronicle.
of Rome” she means “My history of Rome,” but any Roman hisThe leading dramatis personae are evoked in stunning pentory novice will assume her meaning is that “The history of Rome”
portraits. Some ask us to reassess figures we thought we already
commences at that date.
understood well. She is impressed by Pompey, who “has a good
claim to be called the first Roman emperor.” She is sceptical about
Brutus’s commitment to Republican ideals. She sensibly refrains
from trying to penetrate the assiduously crafted public image of
Augustus to the “real” man behind the propaganda, although she
Edith Hall is a Professor in the Department of Classics
admires some of his achievements. There are finely-tuned cameos
and at King’s College London. Her latest book is
“Introducing the Ancient Greeks” (Vintage)
in the whistle-stop tour of the 14 emperors who ruled between
© WARTBURG.EDU/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
8
PROSPECT
antness of life in ancient urban centres was
suffered by rich and poor alike: traffic jams,
uncollected refuse, disease, gangreneinfected water. She has a pitch-perfect ear
for class snobbery and the insults poured
on the allegedly vulgar newly rich by the
educated or aristocratic. She writes movingly about the gravestones of ordinary
Romans, artisans and semi-skilled labourers, informing posterity about their expertise and achievements as bakers, butchers,
midwives and fabric dyers. She evokes well
the squalid cafes and taverns where the
poorer urban classes caroused. Yet she
makes us face the reality that the majority of the empire’s 50 million inhabitants
would have lived on small peasant farms,
struggling to extract more than a subsistence livelihood. There were few changes
in agricultural technology or fundamental lifestyle from the Iron Age to medieval
times. The letters of Pliny the Younger are
a rich source of evidence for the relationship between Roman governors and such
“ordinary” people of the provinces, in his
case in Bithynia and Pontus; Beard leads
Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1784) portrays the Roman ideal of loyalty
us from these into a revealing discussion
and self-sacrifice
of the problems Roman governors faced in
policing the boundaries of empire (includthe death of Augustus in 14AD and the assassination in 192AD
ing Hadrian’s Wall) and how they largely tolerated local religious
of Commodus (the son of Marcus Aurelius who plays the villain
practices and cultural diversity, although Christianity became an
in Ridley Scott’s movie Gladiator). Although there are mercifully
exception.
few signs of the controversialism which used to be her sole irriThe turbulent showdown between the Illyrian Emperor Diotating characteristic, Beard rightly challenges the tradition of
cletian and the martyrdom-hungry Christians in the early fourth
dividing the rulers of the Imperium Romanum into heroes and
century is one of many fascinating episodes in the history of the
felons. The tradition, extending back to Tacitus and Suetonius,
Romans which Beard excludes from her account by ending it in
was inherited by Edward Gibbon. Beard pleads, instead, for a less
212AD. Her logic for ending here is impeccable: this was when
judgemental and more nuanced appraisal of the way that the senthe Emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the Roman
sational ancient accounts of the emperors reveal the anxieties and Empire a Roman citizen, thus causing 30m individuals to “become
socio-political values of the imperial era. She also emphasises that
legally Roman overnight.” Beard stresses the significance of the
for many inhabitants of the empire, especially those living in the
erasure of the millennium-long boundary between the rulers and
more far-flung territories, the personality of the emperor made litthe ruled—the completion of what she calls the Romans’ “citizentle difference. This is a wonderful, lucid and thoughtful section of
ship project,” from which we can still learn, even though it subsethe book and should be required reading for anyone setting out to
quently failed and had always been fundamentally blemished by
study Roman emperors.
slavery.
There is an attempt at a thematic rather than linear approach
Besides the history of Rome as it continued in the third and
in one central chapter, “The Home Front,” where the discussion
fourth centuries CE, the element I most miss is an attempt to
of family life and women is compromised by being focused, yet
get inside the minds of the remarkable ancient Italians in terms
again, on Cicero—or rather Cicero’s relationships with his wives
of their philosophy and ethics. Beard writes well on priesthoods
and daughter. But the two other thematic chapters—the last in
and public religion, but is not much interested in philosophy.
the book—are outstanding. Here she abandons the chronologiDespite her fixation on Cicero, who wrote philosophical treacal structure and looks at the rich-poor divide and the experience
tises, she offers less on the complex thought-world and extraordiof people living under the Romans outside Rome. The luxurious
nary psychological strengths—self-control, resilience, acceptance
lifestyle of the wealthy across the empire was astounding: some
of uncompromising discipline, fearlessness in the face of death,
owned dozens of sumptuous villas with central heating and lavmoral fortitude, high ideals and principles—which many memish murals, swimming pools and shady grottoes, all serviced by
bers of this tough and soldierly people drew from their Stoic, Neoarmies of slaves. Some rich people paraded their wealth by indulgplatonic and Epicurean convictions. She is good on Virgil’s Aeneid
ing in ostentatious feasting and pastimes; others subsidised public
as a political poem, but has little to say about the earliest survivamenities—libraries, theatres, gladiator shows—in order to ward
ing Roman epic, Lucretius’s inspirational work On the Nature of
off the dangers posed by the inevitable envy of the poor.
Things. I finished SPQR hoping that we will one day be treated to a
Beard points out, however, that much of the physical unpleasBeard book on the inward contours of the Roman psyche.
9
PROSPECT
Hitler’s shadow
The first study of Joseph Goebbels based on his recently-published diaries yields important
insights into his sense of inferiority, his affairs, the Holocaust and the downfall of the Reich
richard j evans
I
n April 1983, the Sunday Times, together with the Ger- archive was opened up after the fall of communism.
man magazine Stern, revealed to an astonished world the
Since then, a team from the Institute of Contemporary Hisdiaries of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Running to a tory in Munich, led by Elke Fröhlich, has been transcribing the
total of 60 volumes, the diaries had been authenticated often difficult handwriting and publishing it in 29 volumes, the
by two leading historians of the period, Gerhard Wein- last of which appeared in 2008. A few extracts have appeared in
berg and Hugh Trevor-Roper. “I am now satisfied,” declared English, but the vast majority of the diaries are only accessible
Trevor-Roper after examining the documents in a Swiss bank in this German edition. The historian Peter Longerich, author
vault, “that the documents are authenof a major study of the Holocaust and a
tic; that the history of their wanderings Goebbels: A Biography
biography of Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader
since 1945 is true; and that the standard by Peter Longerich (The Bodley Head, £30)
Heinrich Himmler, has now delivered the
accounts of Hitler’s writing habits, of his
first study of Goebbels to be based on an
personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in exhaustive and critical evaluation of the whole run of the diaries,
consequence have to be revised.”
augmented where appropriate by the use of other sources ranging
This was certainly true, or would have been had the diaries from official documents to Goebbels’s own propaganda producbeen genuine. Hitler was well known for his irregular lifestyle, tions. It is an impressive achievement.
staying up into the small hours watching movies, getting up late,
And it’s an achievement that has immediately got Longerich
and preferring to make decisions on the hoof rather than plough- into legal difficulties. Extracts from the diaries appear on almost
ing through the mountains of documents that usually confront every page. But the diaries were still legally in copyright at the
heads of state. Was he, then, confounding everyone’s view of his time Longerich’s book was published, since European law states
character by writing down an account of his thoughts and deeds that copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death, which in
day after day for years on end? After the German Federal Archives
Goebbels’s case means 1st May 2015. Who exactly are the copyhad finally obtained samples of the diaries, they discovered that right owners? Longerich and his publishers, Random House, had
the ink and paper had been manufactured long after Hitler’s assumed that Nazi documents were free for anyone to quote, as
death, and that most of the diaries’ content was copied from his indeed should be the case. But there were people who disagreed.
speeches. As the forger Konrad Kujau was sent to prison, it seemed Last year, a successful lawsuit was brought in a Munich court
the standard account of Hitler’s writing habits and personality against Random House for breach of copyright. The lawyer bringwould not have to be revised after all.
ing the case was Cordula Schacht, daughter of Goebbels’s colEven before the decisive intervention of the archivists, however, league in the Hitler Cabinet, Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar
there was good reason to doubt that the Hitler diaries were authen- Schacht; it seemed as if the old Nazi regime was rearing its head
tic. There had been no mention of them before. Nobody, neither again from beyond the grave to lay claim to ownership of these
his friends and acquaintances nor his secretaries and assistants, crucial documents.
had betrayed even the slightest suspicion that they existed. By conCordula Schacht has form in this area, as legal advisor of the
trast, the fact that his chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was late François Genoud, a Swiss banker who had met Hitler in the
writing a diary had been well known for many years. Goebbels 1930s and become financial advisor to the Grand Mufti of Jerupublished edited extracts in a chronicle of the rise and triumph salem, a fanatical anti-Semite who wanted to exterminate Jewof Nazism and the party’s coming to power in 1933. Then at the ish emigrants to Palestine. Genoud was close to the international
end of the war, some of the pages were found amid the ruins of the
terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and advised the Popular Front for
Reich Chancellery, and subsequently published by an American the Liberation of Palestine in an airplane hijacking in 1972. An
journalist. Towards the end of the war, as he became concerned active Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler, Genoud once told
about the fate of the (by now voluminous) diaries, Goebbels had the journalist Gitta Sereny: “The truth is, I loved Hitler.” He gave
them filmed on to glass microfiche plates, taken to Potsdam, just financial support to old Nazis trying to evade capture, and conoutside the German capital, and buried. Here, however, the Red tributed money to the defence of Adolf Eichmann in his trial in
Army discovered them and shipped them off to the KGB Spe- Jerusalem in 1961. Genoud bought some of the papers of Hitler’s
cial Archive in Moscow, where they remained, unread, until the factotum Martin Bormann, although some of the documents he
published from them are widely thought to be forgeries.
In 1955, he purchased the rights to the diaries from the Goebbels family. Goebbels, he said, was a “great man.” Shortly before
his suicide in 1996, Genoud made over his share to Cordula
Richard J Evans is President of Wolfson College
Schacht, who since then has claimed to be the copyright holder.
Cambridge and the author of “The Third Reich in
History and Memory” (Little, Brown)
The case was complicated by the fact that the Bavarian State
10
© ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
PROSPECT
Joseph Goebbels (centre) watches the filming of Patriots in 1937 with the French ambassador, André François-Poncet (left)
also claimed to own the copyright, since it had taken ownership of
the Nazi publishing house which Goebbels had intended should
publish the diaries after his death. True, no written contract has
ever been found. But a 1936 entry in the diary suggests there was
an oral agreement. On this basis, Random House has refused to
pay Schacht for the right to quote from the diary. It is the first
publisher to take this stand; previously, for decades, publishers
had to crawl to Genoud for permissions, on occasion being forced
to allow him to write a preface or introduction expressing his
own obnoxious views. On 23rd April this year, a higher Munich
court accepted Random House’s appeal against last year’s ruling.
Schacht has appealed against this, demanding payment of just
over €6,500 (the publisher offered to pay if the money went to a
Holocaust-related charity, but Schacht refused). On 9th July the
case will come before the courts for a final decision.
Random House is taking its admirable stand on the principle
that the writings of a Nazi criminal should not be made the subject of commercial exploitation. As the diaries show, there can be
no doubt about Goebbels’s responsibility for murders, expropriations and much more besides. He began his career as a poet and
novelist. His PhD in German literature earned him the title “Dr
Goebbels,” by which he was invariably known in the Nazi years—
few leading Nazis were as well educated or as well read: Fyodor
Dostoevsky, as his early diaries show, was a particular passion. But
he did not embark on an academic career or find success as an
author. His two verse plays were never performed, and he could
not find a publisher for his semi-autobiographical novel Michael
for several years. Plagued by feelings of inferiority, generated not
least by the club foot that left him with a heavy limp, he earned a
meagre living as a journalist and for a while as a bank clerk, and
found a sense of self-worth in numerous affairs with women, a kind
of self-validation that continued throughout his life.
Whether or not Goebbels was, as Longerich claims, a narcissist, he certainly sought to compensate for his low self-esteem
by passionately attaching himself to Hitler. Already by 1923, he
had formed his deeply anti-Semitic and anti-democratic political
views, which he found expressed by the early Nazi party. Lacking any real power base, Goebbels profiled himself as a radical
when he became politically active in the Nazi party in April 1924,
using violent and inflammatory language to make a name for
himself. Although he found Hitler’s views on some issues “reactionary,” he was won over by the Nazi leader on a visit to Munich,
and his ascent up the Nazi hierarchy began. Soon Hitler put him
in charge of the Nazi party in Berlin, difficult territory in view of
the fact that the communists and socialists were extremely strong
in the capital. Goebbels’s diaries, however, lay bare the feuding
PROSPECT
between Hitler’s acolytes, during which Goebbels conceived a bitter hatred for his rival Hermann Goering. Partly because of this,
his position remained insecure for a long time. Hitler, he wrote on
one occasion, was his only friend in the party.
The diaries provide graphic details of Goebbels’s rabble-rousing tactics in Berlin, where he was unscrupulous in his use of violence, physical as well as verbal, to win attention for the Nazis.
Incidents where communists were attacked and Jews beaten up
on the streets landed Goebbels in court on numerous occasions.
The published version of the diaries for the early 1930s were heavily doctored, as a comparison with the originals shows; Goebbels,
to take just one example, altered the entries before publication to
make it look as if his rival Gregor Strasser had opposed Hitler’s
political tactics for much longer than he had in reality. Strasser’s
“For all his notoriety, Goebbels
was never really a member of
the decision-making group
within the Nazi leadership”
eventual resignation gave Goebbels control of the Nazi propaganda apparatus and, following Hitler’s appointment as Reich
Chancellor, he was soon put in charge of an entirely new department of government as Reich Minister of Popular Enlightenment
and Propaganda. Well before this, he had developed sophisticated
techniques of appealing to the masses, with spectacular torchlit
parades, mass meetings, sloganising, radio broadcasts and sensational stories in the press. As a member of the government, he now
brought the full resources of the state to bear on winning over the
half or more of the German electorate who had never voted for the
Nazis or their coalition partners in a free election.
By this time, Goebbels had married Magda Quandt, a middle-class woman with whom he had an enduring marriage
despite the fact that both of them had affairs—Goebbels, notoriously, with the Czech actress Lída Baarová. The scandal in
the end became so damaging that Hitler ordered Goebbels to
put a stop to it. The couple had six children and made sure all
their names began with an H. They provided a substitute family for Hitler, who depended on them emotionally, and did not
want to see the couple break up. The diaries reveal a continuing
string of extramarital affairs and lingering feelings for earlier
girlfriends. Goebbels’s restless energy found an outlet above all,
however, in his ceaseless political activism. He created for the
propaganda ministry an elaborate structure of cultural management headed by the Reich Chamber of Culture with subdivisions such as the Reich Chamber of Music and so on. And
yet, as the diaries reveal, he was unable to eliminate his rivals in
the party in this area of operations, notoriously the ideologue
Alfred Rosenberg, whose radical Fighting League for German
Culture frequently cut across the lines of the ministry’s policy,
but also the Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich. Leni Riefenstahl’s
notorious propaganda film Triumph of the Will was made behind
Goebbels’s back, to a direct commission from Hitler. Longerich is particularly illuminating here on the continued infighting
that characterised the Nazi regime from start to finish. There
was no perfectly disciplined, efficiently coordinated machinery
of government in Nazi Germany: as Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed
out long ago, it was riven with feuding and backstabbing.
11
For all his notoriety, Goebbels was never really a member of the
central decision-making group within the Nazi leadership. Time
and again, the diaries show how he only learned of major events at
second hand. The “Night of the Long Knives,” for instance, when
at the end of June 1934 Hitler ordered the murder of the leader
of the radical Nazi stormtroopers, Ernst Röhm, and scores of his
leading henchmen, came as a complete surprise to Goebbels, who
was expecting Hitler only to strike against the conservative clique
around Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. And Goebbels was kept
well away from crucial foreign policy decisions.
The diaries are a source of the first importance for many key
events of the Third Reich. Writing first thing every morning about
the previous day’s events, Goebbels had little time or opportunity
to doctor or manipulate his account either at the time or later on.
These were not considered, elaborate justifications but rapid-fire,
staccato, often abbreviated diary entries written down in haste.
Longerich uses the diaries intelligently as evidence for many episodes in the history of Nazism, taking account of their biases, but
recognising that they were generally truthful in their recounting
of events. There is not a hint in them, for example, that the leading Nazis knew anything in advance about the fire that destroyed
the Reichstag building on the night of 27th February 1933 and was
used by Hitler as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, permanently
as it turned out, using the excuse, vigorously propagandised by
Goebbels, that it was the signal for a communist uprising.
It is clear from the diaries’ account of the nationwide pogrom
of the “Reich Night of Glass Shards” (Reichskristallnacht), Longerich notes, that Hitler personally ordered the trashing of thousands
of synagogues and Jewish-owned shops across Germany. Goebbels’s record of the flight of Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess to
Scotland on a harebrained “peace mission” in April 1941 is another
episode on which the diaries are clear: “The Führer is completely
shattered… One wants to laugh and weep simultaneously.” Hess’s
letters, left behind in justification of his actions, were “a chaotic
confusion of primary school dilettantism.” The flight came as a
surprise and left the Nazi leadership hopelessly embarrassed.
Once he began dictating the diaries to a secretary, in June 1941,
Goebbels became more circumspect, and references to his private life grow more discreet. But the diaries leave no doubt about
Hitler’s central role in the extermination of European Jews. On
14th February 1942, for example, Goebbels recorded Hitler saying
that “the Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are experiencing today. As our enemies are annihilated so they will experience
their own annihilation too.” A few weeks later, on 27th March
1942, the process of extermination clearly came through Goebbels’s cautious and circumspect diary entry, where he refers to the
Jews being deported to the east in “a pretty barbaric procedure…
not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the
Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60 per cent
of them must be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to
work… Here too the Führer is the persistent pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution.”
Goebbels managed to secure appointment as Plenipotentiary
for Total War following his demagogic “Do you want total war?”
speech in the wake of the catastrophic defeat of the German army
at Stalingrad in February 1943 (“Yes!” the hand-picked crowd in
the Berlin Sports Palace roared back). But this was as much a
propaganda exercise as anything else, and the real command over
the economy was falling increasingly into the hands of Hitler’s
Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Goebbels, true to the last, continued to support Hitler while Goering and Himmler deserted
12
PROSPECT
him. In the final days of the war, Goebbels urged resistance to the
last drop of blood. But even he had to concede that defeat was now
overwhelmingly probable. On 28th February 1945, he announced
over the radio that if Nazi Germany was defeated, life would no
longer be worth living, neither for himself nor for his children. The
family moved into the bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery,
where Magda Goebbels had her children sedated with morphine,
then killed them by placing cyanide capsules in their mouths.
With her husband she then committed suicide on 1st May 1945.
Goebbels’s life, as Longerich shows convincingly, was one of
restless self-aggrandisement, a constant search for self-validation. In the end, there was nothing behind the propaganda minister’s fanatical exterior but emptiness, a soul devoid of content.
Yet perhaps because of this, we learn less about Joesph Goebbels
from this very long biography than we might. Part of the reason
is that Longerich’s book is less a biography than an extended critical commentary on the diaries. Too often, he fails to round out
his account of a diary entry into a full depiction of the events it
records and thus an assessment of Goebbels’s place in them. Time
and again, he assumes too much background knowledge in the
reader, and fails to set the diaries in their broader context. His
book, regrettably, is unlikely to appeal to anyone coming to the
history of Nazi Germany for the first time. But it will be indispensable to historians and students who want rapid access to one of
the major sources on the history of Nazi Germany without having
to plough through all the millions of words of the original.
Anatomy of a genocide
Historian Nikolaus Waschmann speaks to Prospect’s Sameer Rahim about his original
and comprehensive new account of the concentration camps
© USHMM/US NATIONAL ARCHIVE
traces the history of the camps from their
inception in 1933 as places outside the law
where the political enemies of Hitler could
be incarcerated to the end of the Second
World War, where Auschwitz was the site
of mass genocide. But rather than seeing
their development as the smooth implementation of a masterplan, Wachsmann
argues that their progress was surprisingly
haphazard. I began by asking Wachsmann
what the development of Dachau, the first
concentration camp, might tell us about
the nature of Nazi atrocities.
NW: There is this idea that the Nazis
must have had a masterplan and that all
roads led to Auschwitz. But what is notable is how the camp system changed—how
much improvisation and variation there
was. I start the book with three snapInmates of Ebensee concentration camp after their liberation by American troops on May
shots of Dachau, which started in March
6th 1945
1933 as a ramshackle camp for barely 100
prisoners whose lives were not actually
Peter Longerich’s biography of Joseph Goebbels, reviewed by threatened, and then became a brutally ordered system of terror,
Richard Evans above, was made possible by the opening up of the
with rows of purpose-built barracks, and scores of prisoners in
Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR. Other historians have identical uniforms and cropped hair, and finally descended into
also been exploiting these archives—and others recently made the mass death and disease the Allied forces found in April 1945. available such as the Red Cross archives—to draw fresh concluThis camp system went through a huge number of changes
sions about the Third Reich.
during the Third Reich. There was even an extraordinary
One of these historians is Nikolaus Wachsmann, a profes- moment early on when they nearly disappeared. When Hitsor of European history at Birkbeck College, University of Lon- ler came to power in 1933 the regime set up hundreds of camps
don, whose new book KL is the first comprehensive history of the like Dachau to destroy the political opposition. Once that had
Konzentrationslager or concentration camps. It has won praise been achieved almost all of these early camps disappeared and
from leading historians of the Nazi era including Evans, Ian Ker- almost all of their prisoners were released. There was now a
shaw and Saul Friedländer.
debate among the Nazi leadership about what kind of regime
The originality of Waschmann’s book is its focus on the con- they were going to run. Some leaders argued that they should
centration camps where prisoners were mainly worked to death have an authoritarian dictatorship based on Nazi law, without
rather than the death camps, where they were exterminated. He camps, but Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler con-
13
PROSPECT
vinced Hitler that they needed this extra-legal system of outright SS terror. This paved the way for the SS camp system of the
future. The story of the camps, the closer you look, is more complicated and counter-intuitive than it seems.
SR: You argue in the book that Nazi Germany did not follow
a preordained path to extreme terror. You quote the historian
Hans Mommsen’s description of the process as “cumulative
radicalisation.”
NW: Without any doubt one key moment is the Second World
War. When war breaks out in 1939 there are some 20,000 prisoners in six camps inside Germany; these are brutal places, but
prisoners are still more likely to survive than to die. Within a
few years, there were hundreds of thousands of prisoners in hundreds of camps across Europe—from the Baltic states to Alderney on the Channel Islands. (The Nazis built four concentration
camps on the island.) By now death is a constant, prisoners are
starving to death or worked to death, and the SS has become
well-versed in mass-killing. Also, this is an increasingly visible
form of terror. Ordinary Germans had a fairly good idea of what
went on inside: they saw the prisoners at work in factories or on
the streets, and smelt the smoke from the camps’ crematoria.
By late 1944, most concentration camp prisoners were no longer
held in large main camps like Dachau, which were at least partially shielded from prying eyes, but in hundreds of satellites,
often near factories and building sites, and often inside towns
and cities. This was one reason why SS terror became ever more
visible. But almost all of these satellite camps have been forgotten about. In recent years, concentration camp memorials have
tried to include the satellites in commemoration, as a way of
highlighting the links between Nazi camps and their local surroundings. But much remains to be done.
SR: What role did the camps play in the Holocaust?
NW: Nowadays most people think that the Holocaust, the concentration camps and Auschwitz are identical—but the story is
more complicated. There is more to the Holocaust than Auschwitz. Although it was the Holocaust’s most deadly single site,
the majority of Jews were murdered elsewhere, in the fields
of eastern Europe and in special death camps like Treblinka,
which were not concentration camps: they served only a single purpose, to kill as many Jews as possible. At the same time
there is more to Auschwitz than the Holocaust. The camp was
set up in 1940 to destroy the Polish political opposition, not the
Jews. In the following year, the focus shifted to the exploitation
and extermination of Soviet prisoners of war, and in that context Auschwitz officials began experimenting with Zyklon B gas
to exterminate prisoners. The path of Auschwitz to the Holocaust was a quite circuitous and long one, and it wasn’t inevitable. And even after Auschwitz became an extermination camp,
it still had other functions as well. Jews were divided on arrival
into those who would be killed straight away—that’s the great
majority, women with children, the elderly, the sick—and those
who were forced into murderous slave labour.
SR: You also question what you regard as the myth of the passive Holocaust victim.
NW: Much of what has been written—not least in the work of
Hannah Arendt, the famous chronicler of the Adolf Eichmann
trial—about “passive victims” has been revised by recent scholarship. The idea that the prisoners were apathetic in the face
of terror completely overlooks the fact that most of those sent
to Auschwitz didn’t know what would await them there. They
were also starved and bewildered. Reading the testimonies from
Jewish prisoners, I also found many instances of solidarity and
resistance. Prisoners tried to cling to religious or political beliefs,
and there were a great number of survival networks of those who
tried to share information or food. I think it’s important not to
portray prisoners as an anonymous mass with no agency. Obviously agency was extremely curtailed by the SS but nonetheless
prisoners tried to shape their own lives.
SR: There’s also the question of economics and extermination.
Why did so much effort and resource go into annihilating Jews
and other “asocial” groups, when they could have been kept alive
for war work. Was this purely ideological?
NW: For Himmler, economics and extermination went hand
in hand. By the middle of the war the Nazis were determined
to exterminate Jews as “deadly enemies”: it was a core mission
of the regime. At the same time Himmler also believed that it
was economically advantageous for Germany to work to death
those Jewish prisoners who could still work. This was the Nazi
policy of “extermination through labour” in the camps. Early
on, labour had been a way of tormenting prisoners, often with
completely senseless work, but gradually the inmates were seen
as an economic resource that could be used to aid a German
victory, and to improve the position of the SS within the regime.
By the last couple of years of the war there was a huge system
of slave labour, where the SS rented out its prisoners to private
enterprise.
SR: You write that the camp system was a great “transformer of
values” that changed the way the guards treated prisoners. Are
you surprised at how fast it became so brutal?
NW: It’s easy to write off SS perpetrators as monsters. Some of
them were sadists, but the majority were not, which then raises
the question of why they committed the crimes. Many of them
seemed to get accustomed, often quite quickly, to extreme brutality. There were some SS men who initially struggled with the
violence that was expected of them, like the Auschwitz doctor who broke down after his first selection of Jewish prisoners for the gas chambers; but he soon became used to his job
and performed it to the satisfaction of his superiors. One thing
that struck me is how often perpetrators tried to impress their
comrades, wanted to be seen as strong and manly, as real SS
men. There’s any number of instances where perpetrators commit heinous crimes to impress others. Ideology obviously plays
a significant role, but social and psychological factors also come
into play, probably more than many people think.
SR: At the moment 93-year-old Oskar Groening, an SS officer
who was an office worker at Auschwitz, is on trial for being an
accessory to murder. Is it useful to prosecute people at such an
advanced age?
NW: If he’s fit to stand trial then he should be tried. But the
trial highlights the ultimate failure of postwar justice. It’s taken
more than 70 years after Auschwitz was liberated for this man
to finally face a judge. And even if he’s convicted, he’s going to
be one of no more than perhaps 15 per cent of former Auschwitz
personnel to be tried.
“KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” is published by
Little, Brown
14
PROSPECT
An eye for a story
Few writers can bring a painting to life as dazzlingly as Simon Schama
andrew marr
T
his is a terrific, fat book, classic Simon Schama,
metic,” which allows Schama to rehearse, with fine gusto, the story
which doesn’t at all do what it says on the cover. The
from the same period of Prince George’s borderline insane pursuit
title, The Face of Britain: The Nation through its Porof Maria Fitzherbert—before veering off to the tale of Maria Hadtraits, suggests to this reviewer two things: a reliably
field, Cosway’s wife, and her fine Parisian romance (probably, but
sequential narrative, passing in stately fashion from
not certainly, unconsummated) with Thomas Jefferson. Both of
age to age; and a stern attempt at social and geographical incluthese are in the end stories about our desperate fear of being left
sivity. Instead, what this virtuoso historian and TV performer has
by the person we love and they give a sense of the rich, oily pickings
produced is an eclectic, often personal
Schama has rooted up along what would
and brilliantly written collection of essays The Face of Britain: The Nation
have been, in most historians’ hands, a
about what interests him. And thank all Through Its Portraits
predictable journey.
by Simon Schama (Viking, £30)
the prancing muses for that.
The structure of the book, I assume,
Schama’s greatest gift is a sure eye
follows the structure of the television profor an extraordinary story. Some of the narratives here are well
grammes it accompanies, so it is thematic rather than sequenknown: he begins the book with the great face-off between Wintial—“The Face of Fame,” “The Face of Power”—with the shorter
ston Churchill and Graham Sutherland in 1954, which lead to the
essays gathered into themed sections. This means that it can feel,
destruction of Sutherland’s portrait of the wartime prime minisin the hand, mildly disorientating. We never know after one essay
ter, a masterpiece by a modernist painter who has unfairly fallen
quite where we are going next, or why. Some readers may find
out of favour; and we get Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris;
the zigzagging in time irritating or distracting. But its strength
and towards the end of the book, Henry Tonks, the ferocious Slade
is that it allows Schama the freedom not to be bored, and thus
teacher, turning his pencils and pastels to the problem of facial
not to bore the reader. Wherever he chooses to, he leaves conreconstruction in 1916-17. The first is a story about patronage and
ventional art writing far behind, to gallop off on another crackits dangers; the last, a meditation on the uses of drawing. In a coning tale—of how Francis Drake was seen by the Spanish; or where
ventional art history, neither would probably have been included.
Emma Hamilton came from before she bumped into Horatio
Schama reconstructs art history with impish glee. Augustin
Nelson; or little David Garrick, the rain and the Shakespeare cult.
Edouart. Isaac Fuller. Jonathan Richardson. George Richmond.
But we know, from his earlier books on Rembrandt, Rubens
Samuel Cooper. Richard Cosway. Christina Broome. Each of these
and modern art, that Schama has an avid, restlessly shrewd eye
produced, on the evidence of this book, some remarkable work, if
for painting. The best art writing in the book is truly exhilaratnot of the very first quality. Most art lovers will have heard of one
ing and happens when Schama’s dander is up and he is almost
or two of them. Almost nobody outside the staff of the National
panting with excitement about something he’s just seen. His
Portrait Gallery, I daresay, knows them all.
account of Laura Knight’s self-portrait while painting Ella LouThis eclecticism allows the historian to scramble around for
ise Naper in the rosy-bottomed nude (a radical piece of picturestories we ought to know, but mostly don’t: there’s a sizzling essay,
making, even if bringing in Barnett Newman, Henri Matisse
for instance, on the bizarre, sadly comic story of the lumpish
and Marcel Duchamp might be stretching it a tad) is not someequestrian statue of Charles I by Hubert Le Sueur, which curthing I will forget. Nor his lovely and sensitive account of an
rently stands on the traffic island known as Trafalgar Square,
early sketch by Thomas Gainsborough of his daughters chasing
and which very nearly didn’t survive at all. Anyone familiar with
a butterfly—and the sad story of what followed. Nor again, his
the National Portrait Gallery will have paused by the portrait by
description of the 1826 self-portrait by that tormented visionAnthony van Dyck of Sir Kenelm Digby, a fat-faced, balding cavaary Samuel Palmer, which Schama rightly compares to Rubens
lier who looks remarkably like a 20th-century stockbroker got up
and Rembrandt: “The roughly cut hair, perhaps self-sheared,
in fancy dress. The real story of Sir Kenelm’s dogged, tragic love
is more lovingly handled in black chalk than any barber could
for Venetia Stanley, and his remarkable career as a proto-scientist,
have managed and with a lot more attentiveness, too, for Palmer
privateer and magus, would have provided for some authors a long
has found a way to draw dirt-stiffened, sweat-stuck individual
biography taking many years of blameless study; it’s recounted
hairs so that they cling greasily together, exposing glistening
here in a couple of dozen fascinating pages.
areas of his forehead.”
Sir Kenelm is followed immediately by the story of the underThe quotation introduces the unavoidable issue of the Schama
sized Regency artist Richard Cosway, also known as “Tiny Cosstyle. He is, to filch one of the 18th-century words he clearly much
enjoys, a bit of macaroni writer—flamboyant, exuberant, a wordimporter and a performer. It’s the opposite of the George Orwell
and newspaper style-guide approach—make it simple, cut it down,
prune away everything you don’t absolutely need. Again, I suspect
some people may find this irritating, though for me the exuberAndrew Marr is a writer and broadcaster, and host of
BBC One’s “The Andrew Marr Show”
ance almost always works.
© REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ESTATE OF DAME LAURA KNIGHT DBE RA 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PROSPECT
15
The most immediately affecting writing is
autobiographical, when he heads back to
the Notting Hill of his youth to meet the
black photographer Charlie Phillips, or
when he recounts the loss of his much-valued collection of cigarette card portraits
in a boys’ gambling game. This made me
think that the next Schama book, or perhaps the next-but-one, really has to be an
autobiography. It would, I gently suggest,
really be something.
Away from the metropolis, and his
own world, he has the humane curiosity of a good historian. There is an essay
about Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, who took famously stunning early
photographs of Newhaven fishwives and
their husbands, which might be the best
thing in the book. He just looks harder.
He empathises.
I’m beginning to rave. This book isn’t
perfect. I would really love to have read
Schama on Allan Ramsay and Henry
Raeburn—those biting Georgian wives,
those great, livid, farmers and traders—
and am genuinely puzzled why they don’t
appear. Plus, I never want to read about
Alice Liddell ever again. I think he’s too
fond of Francis Bacon, excessively censorious about Lucian Freud and borderline brutal about Tracey Emin. He
tells us that the first self-portrait in EngSelf Portrait (1913) by Laura Knight, featuring model Ella Louise Naper “in the rosylish art was made around 1240 by William
bottomed nude,” was “a radical piece of picture-making,” says Andrew Marr
de Brailes in a psalter. But James Hall, in
his recent The Self-Portrait: A Cultural HisHere he is, opening his chapter about Francis Bacon and his tory, has tracked down a much earlier self-portrait by St Dunself-destructive lover George Dyer: “1963. Man, 30-odd, walks stan of Glastonbury, from around 950, in which he crouches at
into a pub. He’s wearing a cocky expression and a dab too much the feet of Christ. Other misses include John Singer Sargent,
brilliantine; bit of a pompadour and his eyebrows look like two whose reputation was recently rebuilt at the National Portrait
caterpillars are having a conversation on his forehead. But the Gallery, and who did for the Edwardians what Joshua Reynolds
Stepney spiv style is alright. London has barely begun to swing, did for the Georgians, but with more wit; and David Hockney.
Carnaby Street still has traffic running through it, and Soho If you want to know what the super-rich look like now, with their
means looking sharp the old way: bigger lapels, broad shoulders, insecurities and strange clothing, Hockney is where you have
clean-shaven with a bit of a curl to the lip; tight knot to the tie. to go.
George Dyer has all this. He’s done a little time in the nick so he
Yet it’s the pathetic default mode of the modern book review
knows what’s what, and he knows that a man who also likes a lit- to attack a book for all the things it isn’t, rather than look closely
tle grease on his mop is giving him the once-over.”
at what it is. And this is both excellent and highly unusual.
You’d read on, wouldn’t you? And here, again in London, he Schama has written books which will still be bought and talked
is ventriloquising Godfrey Kneller as he ushers in up to 14 sitters about a century from now—I’m thinking of The Embarrassment
in a day in his 1690s workshop: “A very good morning; please of Riches, Citizens, Rembrandt’s Eyes. He’s been at the top of his
be seated, there in the light, just so; excellent; thank you thank game for most of his career and he hasn’t lost an ounce of zest
you, now if you would be so good as to hold quite still for a time, I or intelligence. Damn him. Television tie-in books rarely garner
would be most obliged... Mr such and such will be sure to let you enthusiastic reviews. They are designed, almost handcrafted, to
know when the likeness is done. Truly most obliged. Good day to sandpaper the pursed insecurities of the academy. All I will say
you. Next, I believe? Are yes, Lady so and so. Pray, do come in…” is that every reader of this magazine should have a copy of Simon
This isn’t what you get from conventional historians or con- Schama’s The Face of Britain—no, not in a bookcase, but right
ventional art writers, more’s the pity. Even if sometimes you wonthere on the desk, broken-backed.
der whether there isn’t a bit too much brilliantine, and at other
He can look at something we think we know and make it
times he pushes slangy informality pretty far, you read on. As seem fresh and new to us, and this is a great gift. He very nearly
that extract implies, Schama is very much a metropolitan writer, persuaded me to find George Romney and Johann Zoffany
a creature of London, New York and, occasionally, Edinburgh. interesting.