The Wall Writes Back

THE LATE IAN JACK in his last decades was bothered by what it still meant to be British, instead of, say, English or Scottish. Across the Chan­nel, they wonder if it still means anything to be European. It’s ironic that it takes a British scholar (and journalist), from the fringes of a continent shunned by the damp island again, to answer that question. Timothy Garton Ash is, if one dares to use the adjective these days, the quintessential European—an extinct species. His Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Bodley Head), call it a love letter or exactly what the subtitle proclaims, will turn out to be one of the most moving and insightful books written about the continent that made the modern world, destroyed and rebuilt itself, and now seems to be fumbling in the dark of the 21st century. It’s not an au­tobiography but “history illustrated by mem­oir”, whether his soldier father’s accounts of Europe after D-Day or his own adventures on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. ‘Personal’ makes it ‘living’; the past, and the present, illuminated by the experiences of real people, from the immediate aftermath of World War II to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Febru­ary 2022. Ash, author of The File and The Uses of Adversity, has written the perfect book about and for a Europe where full-scale war has returned after 1945 and the far-right has just won another important election. “Those ghosts are waiting there for you, just a conver­sation away,” he thinks in a German village.

 

A few months before Milan Kundera died in July, his publisher brought out A Kidnapped West (Faber & Faber), a new collection of two old essays: ‘The Literature of Small Nations’ (1967), Kundera’s seminal address to the Czech Writers’ Congress, and ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (1983). A publishing trick, this slim volume’s appearance is justified by not merely the writer’s name but the fact of another small nation’s existential battle for survival against a murderous giant, something Kundera knew only too well.

On the subject of Europe and small nations, Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (Allen Lane) is not nos­talgia for the vanished, half-hearted creation of the ideology that turned half of post-War Europe into a prison. Rather, it shows, draw­ing on records, letters and interviews, that East Germany did have a life of its own. Born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), UK-based Hoyer, author of Blood and Iron, was four when the Berlin Wall fell. The book meets a historical imperative: of remember­ing, retrieving, and recording a story that Germany, three decades since reunification, doesn’t want to hear because it “needed to see reunification as a happy ending to its tumultuous twentieth century”. However, the GDR’s “political, economic, social and cultural idiosyncrasies deserve a history that treats it as more than a walled ‘Stasiland’ and gives it a proper place in German history.” The book’s USP is the glimpse of everyday life in the GDR. There are tragicomic wonders too, and not just in Erich Honecker’s desperation to keep the youth pacified with imported (and subsidised) Levi’s jeans. To solve its coffee crisis, the GDR invested heavily in Vietnam in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, the coffee plant takes a long time to mature. When Vietnam was ready to dispatch the coffee a decade later, the GDR was already gone.

But the country that created the GDR and quickly followed it into the netherworld has ghosts much bigger and more numerous. Karl Schlögel, historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, has produced a 900-page tome that’s an encyclopaedia, nay, a museum of Soviet life and times, from the quotidian to the epoch-making. The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (Princeton University Press, translated by Rodney Livingstone) is not a pedantic iteration of the lingering shadows of the material past but informed by Schlögel’s firsthand experience of the subject over decades of travel. On Russia again, an­other interesting book this year is Ekaterina Pravilova’s The Ruble: A Political History (OUP). A political biography of the Russian paper currency from its inception in the mid- 18th century to the Lenin-era reform of the early 1920s, the book traces the rouble’s role in effecting and negating structural transforma­tions in state and society. Russia kept its currency inconvertible for most of its history. Considered ‘backward’, such financial particular­ism was actually more complex. Just the debate between Enlightenment-influenced liberals and conservative votaries of mo­narchical absolutism, with their competing notions of what the rouble should be, is a fascinating read. Pravilova’s work is a political-intellectual-social history told through a paper currency.

New York-based Uri Kaufman spent 20 years researching and writing his history of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, Eighteen Days in October (St Martin’s Press). He has produced a political-military thriller, as reviewed in these pages recently , which has now turned into one of the most relevant books of 2023 given the inadvertent insight it provides into Israel’s mistakes on the eve of the October 7 Hamas attack. But with the brutality of Hamas’ massacre and the human toll of the consequent war in Gaza both ripping the thin veil that masked the ‘new’ anti- Semitism, Roger Moorhouse’s history of the Ladoś group, The Forgers (Bodley Head), has acquired a poignancy beyond an account of a forgotten Holocaust rescue operation when a few Polish diplomats and Jewish activists had gathered under the wing of Aleksander Ladoś, the Polish envoy in Bern, to forge South American identity documents to save the lives of almost 10,000 people from the Nazi death camps. The predicament of Ladoś who, controversially, didn’t get Yad Vashem’s ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ recognition, is a story of largely unacknowl­edged heroism and moral courage.

The prize for polemical book of the year goes to Christopher F Rufo’s America’s Cultur­al Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books). The title’s debt to Mao is not puerile. The revolution that failed in the 1960s’ street triumphed as the New Left’s strategy of a “long march through the institu­tions”— slowly capturing the universities, schools, newsrooms, and bureaucracies—that is, a structural revolution powered by the criti­cal theories developed by Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire and Derrick Bell. But the new exclusivist ideological regime is also the revolution’s endgame. By understanding what happened, those who prefer “an equality society” to a “revenge society” can yet liberate America from its iron cage.

Five other books I have enjoyed and would recommend are: Christopher I Beckwith’s The Scythian Empire (Princeton University Press), a new history of a Eurasian saga that enriches an old story with a lot of new information; Simon Schama’s Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster) which strangely consoles by showing it has all hap­pened before; Nigel Biggar’s cancelled and then rescued Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins), which isn’t an apologia for empire but a call for a balanced judgment; Agata Bielik-Robson’s Derrida’s Marrano Passover (Bloomsbury Academic), an exami­nation of Jacques Derrida’s famous trope of the Marranos whose non-identity as either Jews or Christians mirrors the evasive fundamentals of his own thinking; and last but not least, Callan Davies’ What Is a Playhouse? (Taylor & Francis), an entertaining but scholarly introduction to England’s century (1520-1620) of dramatic licence.

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