The books referenced in this section are among the most important works on the relationship between humanity and inhumanity ever published, and should be required reading for any person curious about the interrelationship between ‘civilisation’ and barbarism.
George Steiner:
Language and Silence
In Bluebeard’s Castle
The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H.
Jorge Semprún:
Literature or Life
Jean Améry:
At the Mind’s Limits
Sven Lindqvist:
Exterminate All the Brutes
Primo Levi:
If This Is a Man
The Drowned and the Saved
At times when I’m reading these writers I feel exhilarated, catching echoes and traces of thoughts I’ve had before, and sometimes wanting to go further; at other times I feel clumsy, almost shy, as if I have little of worth to say in their presence; little that they haven’t already thought or written. But then, they, in their time, would probably have felt the same.
I sometimes imagine what it would have been like to have brought these five writers and thinkers together, to have walked with them on a summer’s day, to have listened to these five voices, playing off each other. But, in the absence of this possibility, I have tried to bring them together in the pages of this chapter.
1 Weimar was also the place where Bach began writing his sonatas and partitas for solo violin, including the astonishing Partita No. 2 in D minor, which Brahms said contained ‘a whole world of the deepest thoughts’ and Yehudi Menuhin believed was simply ‘the greatest structure for solo violin that exists’.
2 ‘In living nature nothing happens that is not in connection with the whole …’ ‘Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt’ (‘The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject’) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
3 The ‘mortality among them was extraordinarily high’ quote about the Dora works is from Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer.
4 Levi’s comment on wanting the sequel to The Drowned and the Saved to be an investigation into ‘the German industries (BASF, Siemens, Bayer) involved in the Nazi camps’ is from Ian Thomson’s biography Primo Levi (‘In London 1986’). The material on Levi’s post-war dealings with IG Farben companies comes from the same biography: ‘Levi went out of his way to ruffle sensitivities at Bayer …’ from the chapter ‘Journeys into Germany 1954–61’.
5 ‘civilisation itself produces anti-civilisation and increasingly reinforces it …’ from the opening of ‘Education After Auschwitz’ by Theodor Adorno.
Chapter Seventeen: The Lawyers of Washington
1 ‘It has always been my attitude that a life has only been worth living …’ Clara Immerwahr’s letter was written in 1909 to her friend Richard Abegg (quoted in Hitler’s Scientists by John Cornwell, also the source of the Fulda manifesto quotation: ‘Were it not for German militarism … German civilisation would long ago have been destroyed …’).
2 ‘Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.’ I believe this is a quotation credited to Peter Ustinov.
3 The story of Fritz Haber, Clara Immerwahr and Claire Haber has recently been made into a play, The Forbidden Zone, by Katie Mitchell and Duncan Macmillan, performed in Salzburg and London in 2014–15.
Chapter Eighteen: Past Continuous
1 ‘Happiness came and went without anybody noticing.’ I’ve just checked the screenplay of Jules et Jim and, as so often with seemingly vivid memories, mine seems to be unreliable. The nearest I found were these words: ‘We were happy a while but happiness didn’t become a part of us.’ (Though I prefer my remembered version to the original …)
2 ‘We all carry within ourselves a world made up of all that we have seen and loved …’ from Voyage en Italie (1803–04) by François-René de Chateaubriand.
3 ‘for this discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls …’ from Phaedrus by Plato, written in 360 b.c.
4 There are certain things in life with beginnings, middles and endings. And in fact, I love such activities. But they are few in number and perhaps not connected to the greater existential questions. Or maybe they are? Over the years I’ve come to see washing up as a therapeutic, almost a spiritual exercise. It has a kind of beauty, partly because it has that rare thing – a beginning, a middle and an end. A daily act of renewal. Of turning a pile of dirty, encrusted plates and bowls and cups into gleaming, steaming china again. Switching the radio on. Doing the glasses first, plates and cutlery in the middle, anything oily at the very end. Go slowly, don’t hurry these Zen moments. Really focus totally on this particular cup in front of you. And finally, the inexplicable sense of satisfaction watching the dirty water and bubbles spiralling away …
Sport too, I now understand, also has a similar quality, which perhaps explains the time lavished by so many people on playing, or watching, sports. Football, for instance: the absolute perfection of limitation, only three results possible – win, draw, lose. In the muddied, grey messiness of our compromised lives, the liberation that comes from such clarity!
5 ‘For the week or so before she was hospitalized, my mother couldn’t keep any food down …’ is from ‘Meet Me In St Louis’ by Jonathan Franzen ,New Yorker, 24 December 2001.
6 ‘Only you in all the world know what my heart always held, before any other love …’ is from ‘Prayer to my Mother’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Chapter Nineteen: The Wood Pigeons and the Train
1 ‘They’ve taken out insurance against pity …’ from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy.
2 The historic material on Schmitt and Allianz’s close links to Nazism from various sources, including findings from the main study on this subject, Gerald Feldman’s Die Allianz und die deutsche Versicherungswirtschaft 1933–1945 (Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945), published in 2001.
3 The praise for Anne Frank’s diary (‘this apparently inconsequential diary by a child … embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together’) comes from the Dutch historian Jan Romein, who had read the first manuscript of the diary, before it was published. His comment came in an article called ‘Children’s Voice’ in the newspaper Het Parool, 3 April 1946.
4 Here, for what it’s worth, is my attempt to summarise a chronology of some of the most significant books published on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and related areas in my lifetime (and some which have had the deepest impact on me), and certain other events connected to this historiography over the last fifty years or so. I am aware that any such list is, by its very nature, highly personal and idiosyncratic. But here it is anyway, and I’ve no doubt that many will agree that these were – and are – landmark works.
1970: Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich is published in English (after coming out as Erinnerungen (Memories) in Germany the year before.