A Historic Moment

The Magic Lantern:          The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague 

by Timothy Garton Ash

“In this crowded world, we must learn to navigate by speech, as ancient mariners taught themselves to sail across the Aegean Sea.”   ― Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

Written by a brilliant witness who also took part in epochal events, The Magic Lantern is one of those rare books that defines a historic moment. Covering events such as the first free parliamentary elections in Poland, where Solidarity was forced to try and limit the extent of its victory, or attending the meetings of an unlikely alliance of Catholic clerics and free-thinking intellectuals planning the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Garton Ash writes with a great deal of empathy and impact.

This book is a stunningly evocative portrait of the revolutions that swept Communism from Eastern Europe in 1989 and whose aftereffects are still being felt today. From the perspective of more than three decades, Garton Ash writes in a sharp afterword, "Freedom's battle is never fully won. It must be fought anew in every generation.” I would recommend this to all readers who are interested in modern European history.

A Renaissance Diary

At the Court of the Borgia 

by Johann Burchard

On Christmas Day the pope came in procession to the Basilica where he celebrated High Mass with all traditional ceremony and splendour.  -  John Burchard, At the Court of the Borgia





This book is structured as a diary that narrates a description or overview of Pope Alexander VI's reign. written by Johann Burchard, the Borgia pope's master of ceremonies, on life under his rule. The pontificate of Alexander VI (born Rodrigo de Borja and lived from 1431 – 1503) stands out in Papal history with a reputation that is infamous and unmatched, and the name Borgia symbolizes for everything that is regarded as corrupt and unlawful in the church of the fifteenth century.

Following Columbus' discoveries in 1492, Alexander's papal bulls of 1493 recognized or reaffirmed the Spanish crown's rights in the New World. Alexander VI served as Cesare Borgia's condottiere for the French king during the second Italian war. His foreign policy's main objective was to secure the best possible conditions for his family.

The author tries to avoid some of the more salacious stories about Alexander and he never disclosed the work during his lifetime. It wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that a complete edition of his diary was published. Even though I am not a Catholic, nor am I a scholar of the Renaissance, I found this book fascinating. For those interested in the history of the Borgia's or of the Renaissance culture and politics this is an excellent source.

Roman History: The Early Centuries

The Early History of Rome: Books I-V of the History of Rome from its Foundation 

by Livy

“The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”   ― Livy , The History of Rome, Books 1-5 





From the founding myth of Rome, narrated so eloquently by Virgil in The Aeneid, augmented with the tale of Romulus and Remus, Livy tells of the history of the republic to the beginning of the fourth century BC. This is an account that presents prosaic events enlivened with exciting moments of wars, political changes, the evolution from a monarchy to a republic, and great speeches by characters both unfamiliar and, sometimes, larger-than-life. Livy himself was born in Padua in 59 BC and died in 17 AD (about 40 years after the death of Virgil).

The early years of Roman history include the myth of Aeneas and the historic rule by Numa Pompilius whose life was also chronicled by Plutarch. There are battles like that of Lake Regillus and rulers both good and bad, the latter best represented by Canuleius the demagogue. My favorite was Cincinnatus who was the epitome of the farmer-soldier- ruler and who assumed the consulship only to return to the farm when his moment in the limelight had ended. 

The many battles and usual successes highlight a barbarity that provides a foundation for that which is evident in the later empire (see Tacitus for that history). There are also the political battles between the Patricians and Plebes for control of the republic. In some ways they reminded me of more recent political contretemps in our own republic. It may come as a surprise that after many difficulties and resultant growth in the power of Rome, near the end of this part of Roman history the city itself is sacked by the Gauls. It must be the memory of that which explains some of the ruthlessness of the Romans under Caesar in the last days of the Republic (see Caesar's Gallic Wars for that story).

Ultimately Livy's history is readable both because of his engaging prose style and his ability to enliven most of the more critical events of early Roman history. With interpolated speeches from primary leaders the book reminded me of Thucydides masterpiece on the Peloponnesian Wars.

J'Accuse

The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus 
by Jean-Denis Bredin


I have but one passion, one for seeing the light, in the name of humanity which has so suffered and which is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is but the cry of my soul.  - Emile Zola, "J'Accuse"

While reading Proust's classic novel, In Search of Lost Time, I was impressed with the importance and pervasive nature of the Dreyfus Affair. While Proust abstained from politics most of his life, he made an exception of the Dreyfus Affair, when he actively took up the defense of Captain Dreyfus. Traces of this appear throughout his masterpiece. In a letter to his friend Mme Geneviève Strauss (née Halévy), daughter of the composer Jacques Fromental Halévy, widow of Georges Bizet, model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in Proust’s roman fleuve, and whose salon was a center of Dreyfusard activity, Proust attempted to enlist her aid in the fight.  Ultimately most of the major characters were identified with one side or the other of the Dreyfus Affair.

It was the author Emile Zola, however, whose article, "J'Accuse", was the most memorable moment of the Dreyfus Affair and it sits at the center of Jean-Denis Bredin's detailed study entitled The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus. The article electrified France and reinvigorated the Dreyfusards, as the supporters of the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus were called. While both monumental and essential, coming as it did two days after the scandalous acquittal of Commandant Esterhazy, it was only a single moment among many important moments and details that are recounted in Bredin's comprehensive history. Even for readers living more than a century later who know the outcome of the Dreyfus Case, this book reads like a detective mystery with twist and turns, double-dealing, missing documents, forgeries and more. It contains the details from the earliest moments when Dreyfus is first identified as a suspected traitor due as much to his race as to anything else and certainly not because he ever had any dealings that were remotely traiterous since he was, ironically, a model soldier and a patriot.

Bredin's artistry lies in his ability to weave the many sometimes disparate details together in a narrative that maintains the reader's interest. This he does ably with a lucid style that betrays the underlying complexity of the actual events. Other commentators have noted the suspense and drama that the author is able to portray with this lucid style. I agree with them but also admire his choice to go beyond the details to share the meaning of the affair for the family, the participants, their nation and the world. The era he covered was the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the next. It was one that saw much turmoil in both national and international cultural history. The Dreyfus Case was an important part of that history as this book makes eminently clear.

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Decline of an Empire

The Radetzky March 
by Joseph Roth

“That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”   ― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth's novel takes its name from a march by Johann Strauss Senior who composed the rollicking tune, and a hundred years ago you could hear it in market towns the length and breadth of the Empire. The story follows the destiny of a family of humble Slovenian origins who rise to prominence through valor on the battlefield. Ennobled by the Emperor, the Trottas become part of the establishment, but by this stage, the cosmopolitan empire is beginning to come apart at the seams. The author's ability to evoke a sense of place, and Michael Hofmann's translation present the novel to wonderfully lyrical effect. The whole work has a dream-like quality, but there is a brooding sense of foreboding. Much of the The Radetzky March is focused on Carl von Trotta, who on joining the army, struggles to live up to the legend of his grandfather. The novel is peopled with memorable characters, such as the nonchalant Polish Count Chojnacki and the troubled Doctor Demant. Even some of the peripheral figures are beautifully sketched, such as Lieutenant Taittinger, 'whose single passion in life was the consumption of pastries.' The decline in the Trotta family that is so exquisitely presented mirrors a similar decline in the fortunes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time of Carl the empire had frayed at its edges and was a mess after the First World War. The Radetzky March is far more than an exercise in mawkish sentimentality, and the Habsburg regime is not given a white-washing. Roth was largely a forgotten figure for several decades, and this, his most acclaimed novel, was rarely cited by Western academics. However, when Michael Hofmann published the current translation, writers queued up to hail The Radetzky March as one of the great European novels of the twentieth century - some consolation for the embattled author, who died tragically at the advent of war in 1939. But much consolation for readers like myself who were able to discover this author and include him in our personal pantheon of great twentieth century authors.

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The Coast of Utopia, III - Romantic Exiles

Salvage
by Tom Stoppard

"Herzen : I don't see how the well-being of society is going to be achieved if everybody is sacrificing themselves and nobody is enjoying themselves. (...) Who has gained by it ? 
Blanc : The future. 
Herzen : Ah, yes, the future."


Completing the trilogy that comprise The Coast of Utopia, Salvage opens with Alexander Herzen resting at his home in Hampstead, England. He dreams of a pantheon of emigre friends, political refugees from Germany, Poland, France, Italy and Hungary.  It is "A dream about exiles", he explains -- an almost unreal world much like the one he himself inhabits, in the center of the vortex of those trying still to organise and cause change in Russia from far abroad.  It is five years after the revolutionary turmoil of 1848, but the turmoil and lack of direction seem pervasive among the radicals.
The First Act continues juxtaposing domestic turmoils of the Herzen family, a new German tutor for the children, Natalie and Nicholas Ogarev and others. With their tribulations in the forefront the background of change for Russia becomes a descant that is briefly heard from with discussions of the new publication, The Bell, that provides a tocsin for the opponents of the Tsar. The freeing of the Serfs as an event seems not to satisfy either the radicals or the Tsar.
 In Act Two Nicholas Chernyshevsky appears on the scene providing another opportunity for dialogue with Herzen over the best approach to effect change in Russia. There is not a definitive answer to that question beyond the continuing disagreement.  There is also the voice of Turgenev who gently opposes those who deride him and what he does, believing that his art does also serve some purpose -- and responds when asked what his purpose was in writing a fiction: "My purpose ? My purpose was to write a novel."
The nostalgia of Herzen for his homeland leads him to rue his decision to leave it even though he would likely face prison and Siberia if he were to return. The lives of the Russian exiles are romantic only in an ironic sense as the fog and mist of England mask their disappointments.

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Literary Journal Extraordinaire

Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 

by Janet Flanner

Reading Janet Flanner's unique journal is addictive. The material in Paris Was Yesterday includes selections from Janet Flanner's fortnightly "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, which she started transmitting in 1925, signed . . . with her nom de correspondance, Genet. This is a book you must read if you have any interest in art, literature, music, French culture, European history of the late nineteen-twenties and thirties. Here is an excerpt from her notes on one of the greatest musicians of the century:
"With the death of Maurice Ravel, France has lost its greatest petit maitre of modern music. He was still a prodigy pupil at the Conservatoire when he composed two of the three works for which he was most famous--the "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte" and "Jeaux d'Euax," regarded as the most perfectly pianistic piece since Liszt. The hypnotic Iberian quality of "Bolero" is partially explained by his having been born at Ciboure, near the Spanish border."(p 181)

Reading the brief items I was continually impressed with the literary and philosophical references embedded in her prose.  For example her note on Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles:
"Cocteau has always been a writer in the tradition of the great medieval mountebanks who worked with the charlatans of the Pont Neuf: as tightrope  walker he gathers his crowd, and as soothsayer-dentist he pulls teeth and illusions, he dazzles and delights, and sells moon-powder guaranteed to cure any human ill--and truly cheap at the price."(p 60)

Paris Was Yesterday by Janet Flanner.  Irving Drutman, editor. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988 (1940)

Degenerate Art

The Oppermanns

 by Lion Feuchtwanger

 "It is upon us to begin the work. It is not upon us to complete it."-Talmud.*

The Oppermanns is a beautifully written and touching novel that was included in my reading for a class in the University of Chicago Basic Program where we studied "Degenerate Art" during the Third Reich.  Feuchtwanger's novel is a moving story of a Jewish families in 1930s Germany who are divided in their views about how to respond to both the actual physical and economic threats from the rising National Socialist movement. The family members represented the varying views of changes that were occurring in Germany of the nineteen-thirties with some taking a more benign view and others showing more concern by moving to Paris and elsewhere.  As the book begins the Nazis were gaining more political control and the cultural and economic environment was beginning to change in Germany because of it.  For the first time in its history, the Oppermann’s furniture business was forced to take on an approved Aryan partner in order to keep it running. This is a move that contributes to their eventually losing it altogether.  The family must endure ever more personal tragedies as the worst becomes a reality.  Those family members who departed from Germany were proven to be more prescient in their caution as the ones who stayed too long found not just upheaval in their lives but real danger from the increasing limits placed on Jewish families and other "undesirables".  
Most of all this historical novel captured the cultural and political changes that made possible the burning of books and display of "degenerate art".  As such I would recommend it to anyone interested in understanding the history of Germany in that era.


*Epigraph to the third part of the novel.


The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger. Carroll & Graf, 2001 (1933).

Memento of an Age

The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

“We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.”  ― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

 A poet, novelist, dramatist and biographer, Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a brilliant writer, documenting both historical lives and his own. His non-fiction includes literary biographies that are seldom read today, but The World of Yesterday remains in print and is his personal memoir of growing up in fin de siecle Austria and the early years of the twentieth century. Written the year before he died, the book is a testament to his life - one that was formed in a world before the devastation of the twentieth century with its wars and other cultural shocks (on that topic see Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins). It is when the world of 1939 Europe is compared with the "naive credulity" of 1914 Europe that the impact of these shocks becomes apparent.  "The New Republic" commented on Zweig's book: "It is not so much a memoir of a life as it is the memento of an age, and the author seems, in his own phrase, to be the narrator at an illustrated lecture.  The illustrations are provided by time, but his choice is brilliant and the narration is evocative."
 Zweig lived a life of the mind and a life of letters - one that was at odds with the new world. Unfortunately, the last years of his life were spent as an exile from his homeland and in the year after finishing this memoir he and his wife committed suicide together.

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. University of Nebraska Press, 1964 (1943)

Marco Polo

"Marco Polo, a wise and learned citizen of Venice, who states distinctly what things he saw and what things he heard from others."

- Travels of Marco Polo, Book One

The Travels of Marco Polo is the usual English title of Marco Polo's travel book, nicknamed Il Milione (The Million) or Le Livre des Merveilles (The Book of Wonders). The book is a description of his travels and stays in the Orient, including Asia, Persia, China and Indonesia, between 1271 and 1298 is also known as Oriente Poliano or Description of the World. It was a very famous and popular book in the 13th century and has remained in print to this day. The text claims that Marco Polo became an important figure at the court of the Mongol leader Kublai Khan. However, modern scholars debate how much of the account is accurate and whether or not Marco Polo ever actually traveled to the court or was just repeating stories that he had heard from other travellers. The book was actually written in French by a romance author of the time, Rustichello da Pisa, who was reportedly working from accounts which he had heard from Marco Polo when they were in prison in Genoa having been captured while on a ship.

The title Il Milione comes from the Polo family's use of the name Emilione to distinguish themselves from the numerous other Venician families bearing the name Polo. Modern assessments of the text usually consider it to be the record of an observant rather than imaginative or analytical traveler. Polo emerges as being curious and tolerant, and devoted to Kublai Khan and the dynasty that he served for two decades. The book is Polo's account of his travels to China which he calls Cathay (north China) and Manji (south China). The Polo party left Venice in 1271. They left China in late 1290 or early 1291 and were back in Venice in 1292. The tradition is that Polo dictated the book to a romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa, while in prison in Genoa between 1298–1299; Rustichello may have worked up his first Franco-Italian version from Marco's notes.

The Travels is divided into four books. Book One describes the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia that Marco encountered on his way to China. Book Two describes China and the court of Kublai KhanKublai Khan. Book Three describes some of the coastal regions of the East: Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and the east coast of Africa. Finally, Book Four describes some of the recent wars among the Mongols and some of the regions of the far north, like Russia.*

The edition that I own and have read beginning when I was in high school was published in 1948 by Doubleday & Company. It is the version originally translated & edited by William Marsden and re-edited by Thomas Wright. In this version Books Three and Four are combined into a Book Three that includes the sections included in Book Four (above). This is an exciting tale of Polo's travels, and no matter how historically inaccurate it may be it provides a window into the Orient during an era that Europe was just beginning to awake from the slumber of the "Dark ages".


The Travels of Marco Polo The Venetian trans. by William Marsden. Thomas Wright, editor. Doubleday & Company. 1948.
*source: Wikipedia

The World of Yesterday

A poet, novelist, dramatist and biographer, Stephan Zweig (1881-1942) was a brilliant writer, documenting both historical lives and his own. During the First World War he took a pacifist stand together with French writer Romain Rolland, summoning intellectuals from all over the world to join them in active pacifism, which led to Romain Rolland being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Zweig remained pacifist all his life - but also advocated the unification of Europe before the Nazis came. Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies including lives of Balzac, Nietzsche and Rolland. He described his Erasmus of Rotterdam as a concealed autobiography.

Zweig fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He then lived in England (in Bath and London) before moving to the United States. Of his non-fiction The World of Yesterday is his personal memoir of growing up in fin de siecle Austria and the early years of the twentieth century. Written the year before he died, the book is a testament to his life, a life of the mind and a life of letters. It is a paean to the European culture he considered lost. As such it is a great source if you desire and understanding of that period of European cultural history.

In 1941 he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Lotte (née Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann) committed suicide together in Petrópolis, despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth," he wrote.


The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. University of Nebraska Press. 1964 (1943)

What I Saw

Not what I saw, but the wonderful selection of essays by Joseph Roth collected as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933. In this selection of "reports" by the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, best known for his masterpiece The Radetzky March, we are presented with a picture of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Roth was a young foreign correspondent for various newspapers, only twenty-six years old, when the earliest of these pieces was written. During the period he would also write some of the novels that have brought him posthumous fame.

The reports in this selection chronicle the underside of Berlin including Jewish immigrants, criminals and others. There are 34 pieces organized by topics such as Displaced Persons, Bourgeoisie and Bohemians, Berlin's Pleasure Industry and Look Back in Anger. In the essay "The Kurfurstendamm" he writes, "In the evening I walk along the Kurferstendamm. I slink along the walls like a dog. I am on my own, but I have a certain sense that destiny has me on a leash. . . . And so the Kurfurstendamm stretches out endlessly day and night. Also, it's being renovated. These two facts need to be emphasized, because of the way it's continually ceding particles of its true self to its designated cultural-historical role."

It is the essay of the last section, "The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind" that resonates in my memory looking back on my reading of this book. Let me quote:
"Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination . . . Now, as the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky, we German writers of Jewish descent must acknowledge above all that we have been defeated."

The essays in this book ring loud and clear over the decades and they bring home to the twenty-first century a sense of the life and decay of the era witnessed by Joseph Roth.


What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 by Joseph Roth. Michael Hofmann, trans. W. W. Norton & Company, New York. 2003 (1996)