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Robert Harris: Precipe. A novel set shortly before the outbreak of WWI and during its first year, focused on the unlikely yet historical love affair between British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and the decades younger Venitia Stanley, whom he wrote up to three letters a day. Reading this novel was weird for me because I had encountered this story before, in very clever and witty AU form; the fourth novel in Susan Howatch's Starbridge series, Scandalous Risks, tells the very same story, from Venitia's (she's called Venetia in this one, too, only Venetia Flaxton instead of Stanley) pov, and set in the early 1960s, instead of 1914, with the Asquith character a high ranking Anglican clergyman, not the PM. Now Scandalous Risks isn't even my favourite of the Starbridge novels and I have some nitpicks about it, but reading Precipe made me realise how good it is.

It's not that Precipe is bad. ( Some vaguely spoilery remarks about the novel. ) But nonetheless, I don't think the novel made me truly understand or believe what drew its central couple together to begin with. Or what really made them tick. And this is exactly what Susan Howatch as a writer excells at - with all her characters, up and including these two. Now, it's a bit unfair to compare her Neville Aygsgarth with Harris' H.H. Asquith, because Aygsgarth is one of the main characters in the Starbridgte series and at the point Scandalous Risks starts has already had a novel of his own, Ultimate Prizes, so the readers already know how the various paradoxical traits in him - the brain and iron ambition enabling the Yorkshire draper's son rising to the very top of the English class system versus the liberal and often sentimental idealism - intertwine. But Venetia Flaxton in Scandalous Risks versus Venetia Stanley in Precipe is a fair comparison - one novel each (up to the point where either ends, Venetia continues to be a recurring minor character in the rest of the Starbridge novels). Howatch within the novel makes me believe why this 26 years old has gone from just regarding the father of a friend (and a friend of her father's) as a mild crush to someone she has fallen obsessively in love with (and no, it's not the aphrodisiac of power), why she later is the one to end the relationship, and why nonetheless the entire affair damages her in the long term psychologically and emotionally. Harris' Venetia, by contract, just feels way too together from the outset to have let things go this far. I feel Harris' character would have been too sensible once she realised the PM wasn't just mildly flirting not to kindly turn him down, especially since Harris did not make me believe she's similarly in love. (I should clarify that Harris' Asquith isn't the type to to use any blackmail, nor does he have any leverage on her.)

Then, because i'm still sick, I browsed through the four hours diretor's cut version of Ridley Scott's Napoleon to check whether it significantly improves the film. Short answer: Not really. It does make more sense of Josephine, since much of the cut and now restored material are early scenes of hers, and more Vanessa Kirby is always a good thing. But the basic problems of the film are too deeply engrained to be improved by that. (Short version of said problems: Joaquin Phoenix way too old and too dour, showing Napoleon with no human relationships other than Josephine - not with members of his family, not with any of the Marshals - and not showing what Napoleonic France and occupied Europe actually was like leaves you with an endless series of battles and wannabe Edward Albee scenes as a movie, and one which simply doesn't work. For a longer critque, see here. I will say the director's cut version has one scene not starring Josephine which I liked and thought was a neat twist (though it was about her in a big way), and that's when Napoleon after he's become Emperor orders the guy who was Josephine's lover during his Italian Campaign, Hippolyte Charles, to him. Charles goes with weak knees, convinced this is it, now it will be revenge time, though at this point the affair was years ago, but stlll, Napoleon isn't famous for being nice in these matters. They are alone. But instead of going on a roaring rampage of revenge.... Napoleon asks Hippolyte Charles for sex tips. His intimate life with Josephine improves as a result. So that was unexpected and against clichés, but not enough to save the film. Short of getting different scriptwriters and/or doing a miniseries and definitely cast someone other than Phoenix as Napoleon, I'm not sure anything could have.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

I forget who called World War I the original catastrophe from which all the other catastrophes of the 20th century (and beyond) derived. Anyway, as the 100th anniversary year draws to its close, and I have a worrying suspicion that many a WWI contemporary would not believe us to be that much wiser if they could time travel and see how we were doing, I offer one more poem, this one by Erich Kästner, who is still on my mind. Kästner got drafted into the army at age 17 during the last year of the war, which made him a life long committed pacifist. He also had no patience for the Dolchstoßlegende (the claim of an undefeated army betrayed by those treacherous civilians back home). I just came across a translation that captures something of the sharpness and the wit one of Kästner's most famous poems dealing with the first world war has, which he published in 1930; three years later, he'd watch as his books were thrown into the fire for just such poetry.

The Other Possibility

(Die andre Möglichkeit)

If we had chanced to win the war
By dint of charging at the double,
Then Germany would be no more,
Would be a madhouse for its trouble.

They would attempt to make us tame
Like any other savage nation.
We'd jump aside if sergeants came
Our way and we'd spring to attention.

If we had chanced to win the war,
We'd be a proud and happy land.
In bed we'd soldier as before
While waiting for the next command.

Women would have to labour more.
One child per year. Or face arrest.
The state needs children for its store.
And human blood's what it likes best.

If we had chanced to win the war,
Then Heaven would be German national.
The parsons would be officers
And God would be a German general.

Then we'd have trenches for our borders.
No moon, insignia instead.
We'd have an Emperor issuing orders
And a helmet for a head.

If we had won, then everyone
Would be a soldier. An entire
Land would be run by goon and gun.
And round that lot would run barbed wire.

Then children would be born by number.
For men are easy to procure.
And cannon alone without fodder
Are not enough to win a war.

Then reason would be kept in fetters.
And facing trial each single minute.
And wars would run like operettas.
If we had chanced to win the war -
But thank the Lord we did not win it!

[translated from German to English by Patrick Bridgwater]

If your German is up for it, here is a good recitation of the original:

"Erich Kästner „Die andere Möglichkeit"" (Watch on YouTube)

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Bamberg

It's odd how we put artists mentally in certain eras and only there when their lifetime more often than not lasts far longer than that. (My favourite example of this is Shaw, contemporary and fellow Irishman-in-England to Oscar Wilde, usually put just a bit later with the pre WWI Edwardians, but alive (and producing plays) well into the 1950s.) Recently I said to

ryda_wong that the German literature most associated with WWI is prose (Erich Maria Remarque's All quiet on the Western Front, of course, and it was a Remarque quote which was read last weekend at the WWI anniversary; but also, on the sinister side, Ernst Jünger's In Stahlgewittern, in which the author raves on in high aesthetic style about what a masculinity affirming thing war is; hardly read anymore today, but back then it was a bestseller), not poetry, unlike the British. I spoke too soon. There is at least one quite well known poem written in late 1917/early 1918 by a globablly known German poet. The problem is that he's usually so firmly associated with the Weimar Republic (and after) that one forgets he spent his chldhood and teenage years in Wilhelmian Germany and became an adult during the last years of the war. He didn't end up at the Western Front for two reasons: first, he could plead health reasons (without lying; he'd had his first heart attack at age 13), and later, when that wouldn't have mattered anymore, after, in 1917 he'd made his Notabitur (the graduation young male students in Germany went through) he chose to study medicine, hoping to buy some more time. Which it did (also, his father owned a paper factory and used all his influence to keep his older son from the front lines, when the younger had already been drafted), but he did have to serve as a medic in the hospitals his hometown put their returning soldiers into. (His stint as a medic there ended in January 1919; he didn't keep medicine as a subject much longer.)

Contrary to his later image as an unsentimental cynic, our young poet had started the war buying into the nationalistic rethoric wholesale, writing patriotic poetry praising the justness of the war and the emperor which made it into his hometown paper, his first published poetry; as a 15, then 16 years old teenager, he had a better excuse for this than many of his older colleagues, of course. As more and more of his classmates became cannon fodder, and his best friend returned for a home visit in a terrible state, he became rapidly disillusioned. He caused quite a scandal in his (remaining) class when the teacher had them talk about Horace's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori; without knowing Wilfried Owen existed, teenage future poet of world renown delibered a rant ending with the declaration that people most prone to preach that sentiment threw their shields away when it came to actual battle "like the Emperor's fat jester who coined that phrase". (He did like Horace otherwise and would repeatedly quote him throughout his life.) The main reason why he wasn't kicked out of school for that one was because another teacher, who liked him, said the boy was obviously having a nervous breakdown.

He wasn't having a nervous breakdown later when helping to patch up soldiers as a medic led to this ballad, called Legend of the Dead Soldier (and published both with his second play and in his first poetry collection), translated by John Willet:

And when the war reached its final spring
With no hint of a pause for breath
The soldier did the logical thing
And died a hero’s death.

The war however was far from over,
And the Kaiser thought it a crime
That his soldier should be dead and gone
Before the proper time.

The summer spread over the makeshift graves
And the soldier lay ignored.
Until one night there came an official army medical board.

The board went out to the cemetery
With consecrated spade
And dug up what was left of him
For next day’s sick parade.

Their doctor inspected what they’d found
Or as much as he thought would serve
And gave his report: ‘He’s medically sound
He’s merely lost his nerve.’

Straightway they took the soldier off.
The night was soft and warm.
If you hadn’t a helmet you could see
The stars you saw at home.

They filled him up with a fiery schnapps
To spark his sluggish heart
And shoved two nurses into his arms
And a half-naked tart.

He’s stinking so strongly of decay
That a priest limbs on before
Swinging a censer on his way
That he may stink no more.

In front the band with oompah-pah
Intones a rousing march.
The soldier does like the manual says
And flicks his legs from his arse.

Their arms about him, keeping pace
Two kind first-aid men go
Or else he might fall in the shit on his face
And that would never do.

They daubed his shroud with the black-white-red
Of the old imperial flag
Whose garish colours obscured the mud
On that blood-bespattered rag.
Up front a gent in a morning suit
And stuffed-out shirt marched too:
A German determined to do his duty as Germans always do.

So see them now as, oompah-pah,
Along the roads they go
And the soldier goes whirling along with them
Like a flake in the driving snow.

The dogs cry out and the horses prance
The rats squeal on the land:
They’re damned if they’re going to belong to France
It’s more than flesh can stand.

And when they pass through a village all
The women are moved to tears.
The trees bow low, the moon shines full
And the whole lot gives three cheers.

With oompah-pah and cheerio
And tart and dog and priest
And right in the middle the soldier himself
Like some poor drunken beast.

And when they pass through a village perhaps
It happens he disappears
For such a crowd’s come to join the chaps
With oompah and three cheers.

In all that dancing, yelling crowd
He disappeared from view.
You could only see him from overhead
Which only stars can do.

The stars won’t always be up there
The dawn is turning red.
But the soldier goes off to a hero’s death
Just like the manual said.

Faithful readers: Bert Brecht, WWI poet.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

Had a very busy week on the road, in which I barely consumed anything fannish and was instead consumed by the two simultanously running "History: A Farce" soaps running in the UK and in the US. No, that's unfair, the US one had a serious plot thread (btw, it's really WEIRD how the Democratic Midterms victory was downplayed initially), with only the tantrum-throwing toddler-in-chief providing the completely over the top satire. Back to the drawing board, scriptwriters. This "President" just isn't believable, not even as a caricature.

More seriously, as an explanation of how the insanity across the channel came into being, this article putting Britain on the couch provides as good an explanation as any as to what went on in the murky depths of (a part of) the public subsconsciousness:

What’s striking is that we can begin to see in this hysterical rhetoric the outlines of two notions that would become crucial to Brexit discourse. One is the comparison of pro-European Brits to quislings, collaborators, appeasers and traitors. (...) But the other idea is the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, for example, stand as resonant examples of the potency of the myth of blood sacrifice. But in the ironic reversal of zombie imperialism, the appropriation of the imagery of resistance to a former colonising power, this romance of martyrdom is mobilized as defiance of the EU. (...) Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted. It does not greatly matter what the European Union is or what it is doing – its function in the plot is to be a more insidious form of nazism.

Meanwhile, this article sums it up shorter, but also to the point: Brexit fantasy going down in tears.

Given I have a lot of British friends whose life will get worse and worse and worse now, I really do wish this were all a tv or radio show, safely fictional. But it's not. Speaking of powerful symbols pertaining to nations, though, I discovered/was reminded again that one of those things I myself am sentimental about is the French-German post WWII relationship. Yes, our two countries have their problems and flaws. (Do they ever.) But dipping into pre and during WWI literature again, it struck me once more how ever present and insidious the assumption of a national feud was, and how self evident today (unless, of course, you're Marine Le Pen or Alexander Gauland) the alliance and friendship. (It's also encouraging to me when the way hatred is whipped up again today not just between nations but within nations makes me wonder how on earth all this tribalism should be overcome. Note to self: it's been done. Fait Accompli.) Macron and Merkel at Compiegne, where the WWI truce was made, was a great illustration for this. (As had been, decades earlier, Kohl and Mitterand at Verdun.) It was also, to me, an illustration of how to deal with a war anniversary without glamourizing the evilness of war in any way (and that war isn't glamorous and heroic but awful is to me the lesson that public consciousness first grasped with the WWI catastrophe, even though it seems we keep having to learn). So, have a few vids from that other reality show, Frankreich et L'Allemagne: c'est possible:

Macron and Merkel at Compiegne (btw, whoever choreographed everything really was extremely thoughtful; note that when they're sitting at the table where the truce was negotiated, they're not sitting opposed to each other, as their historical counterparts did, but at the head of the table, together):

"Powerful show of unity from Merkel, Macron to mark centenary of the end of WWI" (Watch on YouTube)

Summary of the entire weekend:

"WWI Centenary: Macron takes aim at nationalism at ceremony" (Watch on YouTube)

Macron and Merkel at the Peace Forum afterwards:

"France: Macron and Merkel slam rise in nationalism at Paris Peace Forum" (Watch on YouTube)

And to end on a fun note, here's the 101 years old lady excited to meet the President who thought Angela Merkel was Brigitte Macron and, after being told that she was the chancellor of Germany, said "'c'est fantastique':

"Watch: Elderly woman confuses Merkel for 'Madame Macron'" (Watch on YouTube)

Current Mood: exanimate
Current Location: Munich

This is the art installation by Christian Kuhn (with the help of a local school) honoring the hundredth anniversary of the armistice, at the Königsplatz in Munich:

photo 2018_1111Weltkrieg0023_zps1xlm3guw.jpg

photo 2018_1111Weltkrieg0020_zpsykocyxh8.jpg

Something WWI-related that is on my mind these days isn't just the evil of nationalism being back, but also the divisions within the same nation, which are currently going beyond avarage ideological divides and into stark hatred. Now pre-WWI, the majority of intellectuals and artists in Germany was in the grip of the same fervent nationalism, war fever and bashing of everyone else as in the other European nations, but there were exceptions here, too. And one of them led to our most famous literary family feud. I've translated the three key letters of it for you, shorted, of course, because when I tell you the feuding siblings were the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, you know the original letters were loooong. (But fascinating, I promise.)

Background: Anglosaxons associate Thomas Mann mostly with the later stage of his existence, as the dignified nobel prize winner in exile, recording speeches against Hitler for the BBC. In 1914, by contrast, he was very much pro-war, and singing the same tune as most people: superiority of German culture, decadent shallow France, perfidious Albion etc., you name it, he said it. Meanwhile, his older brother Heinrich was among the minority of writers firmly anti war. In the lead up, he'd written what is still the best satiric novel about Wilhelmian Germany, Der Untertan (translated as Man of Straw and later as The Subject); he'd also written an essay about Emile Zola (focusing specifically on Zola the political journalist, J'Accuse as the centre) which among other things was very much an attack on the increasingly nationalistic output of many other writers of the day. These of course included his younger brother, who was outraged and stopped talking to Heinrich at that point except through the press. (He also wrote Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - "Contemplations of an Apolitical Man" - in which he attacks the Zivilisationsliterat (guess who) and which is so anti democratic that it's not surprising Thomas in later years prefered not to talk about it.

In the last year of the war, at a point when even the most fervent of war believers had to face the fact Germany was about to lose, Heinrich attempted to get into contact again. So, a hundred years ago, he wrote thusly:

Dear Tommy,

your article in the Berliner Tageblatt was read out loud in my presence. I don't know whether the other listeners had the same impression, but it seemed to me as if at least in some parts it was addressed to me, almost like a letter. Which is why I feel the need to reply to you, although without the press as an intermediary, if only to tell you how unjustified the accusation of fraternal hatred is.

In my public announcements, there is no "I" and hence also no brother. They are addressed to the public at large, disregard - at least this is my intention - my advantage or disadvantage, and are solely focused on an idea. Love for humanity (which is in its political manifestation: European democracy) is indeed love for an idea; but he who can open his heart this way has to be capable of doing it on a smaller scale. (...)

I've been following all your work with the best intention to understand and empathize with it. NOw I've always been familiar with the antagonism of your mind. If your extreme position during the war surprised you, well, I found it predictable enough. This knowledge of you never stopped me from often loving your work, even more often to penetrate it and to praise or defend it publically, and to comfort you, when you were doubting yourself, as my younger brother.

If you hardly ever returned this, I didn't mind. I knew that in order to define yourself you didn't just need self confinement but the active repelling of the other - and thus I coped with your attacks (...) without much effort. I did not return them, or returned them only once, when the issue at hand wasn't a literary preference anymore, or a intellectual knowing-all-ness, but the most basic threat and misery. My essay titled "Zola" was a protest against those who, as I had it see it, were falling over themselves to do damage. Not against solely yourself, but against a legion of writers. (...)

Perhaps my explanation today will be listened to. This could be possible if your newest lament against myself was dictated by pain. If this is the case, please know you need not think of me as an enemy.

Heinrich

Thomas was, shall we say, not in the mood for what he saw as being patronized by his older brother. His reply (Carla and Lula were their sisters):

Dear Heinrich,

your letter finds me at a moment where it is physically impossible for me to reply to its true sense. (...) Besides, I wonder what the point would be of pressing the mental torture of two years into a letter which of necessity would have to be much longer than your own. Oh, I believe your assurance that you don't hate me. After that absolving outburst of a Zola article and given your current circumstances and the way all is well for you, you don't need to anymore. Using the phrase "fraternal hatred" had been meant more generally anyway. (...)

Calling my behaviour during the war extreme is a lie. Your behavior was extreme, and despicable, completely so. I haven't suffered and struggled for two years, neglected my dearest plans, investigated, tested and contemplated myself, and condemned myself to artistic silence just to sobbingly hug it out with you - after a letter which exudes understandable triumph and was dictated in no line by something other than self righteousness and ethical smugness. (...)

You can't comprehend the rightness and the ethics of my life, because you are my brother. Why didn't either Hauptmann or Dehmel who even praised German horses to the skies or Harden who demanded a preventive war need to feel the insults of the Zola article adressed to them? Why was its entire sensational invective tailored to fit myself? The fraternal Welterlebnis (untranslatable term roughly meaning "way of experiencing the world and life") forced you to do it. (...)

Let the tragedy of our brotherhood complete itself. Pain? Ah, well. One gets hard and numb. Since Carla committed suicide and you broke off relationships with Lula, separation for all time isn't anything new for our community anymore, is it? I haven't made this life. I despise it. One has to live it out as good as one can.

Farewell.

T.

Heinrich drafted a reply:

Dear Tommy,

against such bitterness, I should fall silent. (...)But I don't do separations intentionally, and never forever. (...) I regard myself as a self reliant being. My Welterlebnis is not a fraternal one, it is simply mine. I don't mind you. As far as I can see, you have underestimated what you mean to me emotionally and overestimated your intellectual impact. (...) For example: if you ever wrote something other than childishness about French subjects, I'd be honestly delighted. But you know what you'd do if I suddenly decided to declare myself a follower of old Prussia? You'd throw your notes for a Frederick the Great into the fire. (...)

Don't see my life and actions as being all about you, they are not revolving around you and would be literally the same if you didn't exist.

Your inability to take seriously another life finally births monstrosities. And thus you find that my letter, which was meant as a gesture of simple kindness, "exudes triumph". Triumph because of what? "All being well for me" - i.e. the world smashed to pieces and ten million dead bodies in the ground. What a justification! How promising of satisfaction to the ideologue! But I am not the man to fashion the misery and death of nations after my intellectual pet peeves, not I. I don't believe the victory of any cause is worth discussion at a point where humanity itself is getting destroyed. All that will be left after the last, most terrible ending will taste of bitterness and sadness. I don't know whether any of us are able to help our fellow humans to "live better", but I should hope our literature will never again help them to die more eagerly.

They're still dying. But you, who approved of the war, who still approves of it and calls my attitude (...) "despicable, completely so" can have, God willing, another 40 years to "investigate and test", if not to reclaim yourself. The hour will come, I hope, in which you'll see human beings, not shadows, and then you will see me, too.

Heinrich

In the end, he didn't send it. But three years later, when he fell sick and ended up in the hospital, Thomas showed up with flowers and a "dear Heinrich, get better" note which ended with "let us now continue - together, if your heart feels the same as mine". He's written to his publisher "you may have heard about my feud with my brother - I mean of course the elder; in the higher sense, I only have one brother. The younger one is a nice kid one can't argue with " (so much for poor Vicco, who never taken very seriously by any of his siblings). The feud was now over, but not the brüderliches Welterlebnis; siblings in either brothers' work more often than not get pretty intense. The letters between the brothers have been published since many decades, but when I was in Los Angeles, I had the pleasure to hold the originals of the later years correspondance in my hands when researching at the Feuchtwanger archive (since Heinrich was friends with Lion Feuchtwanger and thus after his death his correspondance ended up with him). Leaving aside my fondness for complicated family relationships, I think one of the reasons why these letters resonate with me the way they do is that they mix the big emotional and intellectual division of their day with personal issues in a way no novelist could improve on. And they were both expert novelists.

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Munich

Firstly, congratulations re: House of Representatives in the US, and conmiserations re: Senate. But as only a third of the later was up for election, as opposed the entirety of the House, I'm choosing to regard this as a great triumph of democracy over hatemongering authoritarianism. And the over hundred new female Congresswomen are truly inspiring (says she who noted that the last few elections over here ended in fewer, not more women in parliament).

Speaking of inspiring women, I had never heard of Kitty O'Neil until reading her obituary yesterday evening, and now I'm duly in awe at this real life Wonder Woman. Definitely a case of "if fictionial, would be declared too unlikely". (Not to mention the people who'd cry "Mary Sue!" at a character who is deaf from toddlerdom and still learns to play instruments, becomes an Olympic level athlete, holds the record for speed for woman, performes incredibly dangerous stunts, beats back cancer twice before she does most of this and has a Cherokee mother who became a speech therapist because of her.)

On to vaguely Weimar Republic related things, since it is on many people's minds these days. This week isn't just the centennary of the ending of WWI, but in Germany the 100th birthday of the first German republic, ill-fated as it was (but was it always? That's currently debated among historians). Today, November 7th, is the day Bavaria had its very own revolution, kicked out its monarch and declared a republic two days before the rest of Germany did, which is a handy bit of historical trivia when the province is declared backwards by Those Prussians. (The continuation of that story is depressing, though, because our first Bavarian Ministerpräsident, Kurt Eisner, a Jewish Socialist, no less, ended up murdered by a proto Nazi who subsequently got a minimum sentence and was told by the judge he was clearly acting out of burning patriotism.) On November 9th, the German Republic was declared in Berlin (twice, once by Philip Scheidemann and once by Karl Liebknecht), which is why last week the movie I mentioned being curious about in my book fair report in October, Kaisersturz, was being broadcast. Kaisersturz is a docudrama dealing with just one aspect of the 1918 goings-on - the various schemes leading to the end of the monarchy in Germany. It's not about the political movements per se, which is a bit frustrating, because things like the mutiny of the seamen in Kiel which was absolutely key to the early November goings-on, or, well, Kurt Eisner & Co. successfully organizing a revolution in Bavaria would have been not only fascinating stories to tell with democratic heroes in them. Whereas no one comes out of Kaisersturz looking particularly well, but then the movie doesn't claim to be about more than this very specific aspect, and what it wants to tell, it tells well (with one exception, I'll get to that.)

Here's how things went down for Wilhelm II., German emperor famous for his bombast, his hang-ups about his British cousins (his mother having been Victoria's oldest daughter), his hate-mongering speeches leading up to WWII and his utter lack of smarts and judgment, according to this docudrama (in which Wilhelm was played by Sylvester Groth, whom viewers of Deutschland '83 might recall as the most prominent Stasi official):

Wilhelm: It's October 1918, and I was just told by Generals Luddendorff & Hindenburg we're losing the war. How can this be? I'm feeling depressed.

Auguste Victoria (his wife, played by Sunni Melles): Never you mind. You're chosen by destiny. Don't give up!

Kurt Hahn (future school founder, but right now young good looking idealist employed by Max von Baden as his secretary and confidant, to his employer): Clearly, this is your hour. Only you can restore Germany's international reputation and negotiate an honorable peace.

Max von Baden: Kind of you to say so, Kurt, especially since this drama represents me as a weak-willed pushover only and doesn't even mention stuff like my work for the international Red Cross to ensure prisoners of all nationalities get medical care. But since I have no political experience whatsoever, how do we go about making me a good candidate for chancellor?

Kurt Hahn: We'll offer an alliance to the Social Democrats in order to save Germany.

Friedrich Ebert (leader of the SPD): Guys, I'm willing, but you are aware everyone hates the Emperor's guts by now, aren't you?

Max von Baden: I would never conspire against my cousin the Emp...

Kurt Hahn (hastily interjecting): Details, details! Saving Germany is all that matters, right?

Wilhelm II: What's this about me accepting Cousin Max as the new chancellor? Never!

Auguste Viktoria: He's gay and a tool in the hands of his Jewish secretary. Never!

Luddendorff & Hindenburg: Your Highness, we think you should accept Max von Baden as the new Chancellor.

Wilhelm: But why?

Luddendorff: Because we need someone to blame later. Also, I'm told I have a date with Wonder Woman in a parallel universe where I'm allowed to poison all other generals, so I'm off for now. Please sign this declaration.

Wilhelm: This is so humiliating. I hate my life. Ah well, a roaring speech to munition workers about how this is all England's fault will cheer me up!

Workers: *boo and hiss*

Wilhelm: Clearly socialist plants were in the audience, but I think I'll make no more public appearances. As in, ever. *has nervous breakdown*

Philipp Scheideman: Fritz, why the hell should we join a crumbling government? We'll only be blamed after the war. Also, as Social Democrats we oppose all these aristos stand for!

Ebert: Because you don't want us to have something like the Russian Revolution complete with bloody civil war, do you? Also, we're getting two ministeries, and one of them is for you. I'm cunningly not taking one so that as leader of the party, I can maintain my independence.

Hahn: Bad news, your highness. The Americans just said they won't negotiate for peace with you, either, as long as your cousin the Emperor is still Emperor.

Ebert: Look, I'm all for preserving the monarchy, but getting rid of Willy sounds awesome. Since his sons are no better, how about making his kid grandson Emperor and you the regent?

Auguste Victoria *makes a phonecall*: Max, you evil traitor, if you as much as think of taking the throne in any way whatsoever, we'll go public about you being gay!

Max von Baden: *has a nervous breakdown*

Luddendorff: I need to work on the Dolchstoßlegende about the army remaining undefeated. Therefore, I'm performing an U-Turn. Forgot what I said earlier. We don't want peace and will continue fighting.

Max von Baden: *has even more of a nervous breakdown, and a cold which might or might not have been a case of the coming Spanish Influenza*

Seaman in Kiel: *revolt*

Bavarians: *also revolt*

Rest of Germany: *rumblings*

Wilhelm: I'm off to army headquarters, and when I get back with my loyal soldiiers, you traitorous lot will all hang! That goes for you, too, Max!

Luddendorff & Hindenburg: Sorry, no can do. Marching on Berlin is out.

Ebert: Hahn, I swear, we WILL have a Russian Revolution here if your prince doesn't finally get off his butt and does something. Starting with declaring that the Emperor has resigned.

Max von Baden: But the Emperor hasn't... fine. Here's the public declaration that the Emperor has resigned.

Wilhelm: The Germans are a nations of traitorous pigs who don't deserve me. I'm off to the Netherlands, becoming a gardener.

Philip Scheidemann: Hooray! WE HAVE A REPUBLIC! I'M TELLING EVERYONE!

Ebert: Oh, for God's sake! How anti democratic is that? We'll have a people's vote about which state they want first. *takes off to visit Max von Baden again* Okay, if you want to save the monarchy in Germany in a parliamentary monarchy fashion, this is the very last moment. Declare your regency already.

Max von Baden: No can do. Cousins Willy and Auguste Victoria told me they'll destroy me by going public about my sex life if I do that. Sorry, Ebert, it's your turn. I'm declaring you Chancellor in my last act of government.

Ebert: ....I gess we have a Republic now. Also, I think I prefer being President.

All every well acted. As you may guess, my one problem is the presentation of Max von Baden. Not that I doubt he made his share of mistakes, but he's being presented so clueless and weak-willed that it's incomprehensible why Hahn and Ebert for the entire movie until five minutes before the ending think it's a good idea this man should rule the country in its worst crisis ever. And since he's the tale's sole declared homosexual character, with said sexuality explicitly used against him (which, btw, according to Machtan, the historian who consulted for this movie, Auguste Victoria actually did), this is doubly unfortunate. (Now you could argue that the movie doesn't let him do anything he didn't historically do, but they also don't mention, see above, things like his championing of the Red Cross (and the YMCA), which would have at least made it clear where his good reputation comes from. Also, there's a scene where he's getting a massage while the situation is getting ever more desperate which definitely falls under script and direction laying the "weak decadent" characterisation on even thicker.)

Other than that, though, I thought it was a well made docudrama focusing on an aspect in a key period of German history I hadn't known that much about, being more focused on what happened directly after the war was over. It was careful about the details (no one mentions Wilhelm's left arm, for example, but the actor never forgets Wilhelm couldn't move it). It's a story without heroes - though in terms of good intentions, Philip Scheidemann and Kurt Hahn come closest, plus Mrs. Ebert wins for sardonic comments every time her husband comes home with a new development -, but without villains, either, since the generals only show up twice very briefly and Wilhelm has already done all his damage before the war and is increasingly impotent within the chosen time frame. Otoh, no one (other than poor Max von Baden) comes across as one dimensional and you can get where everyone is coming from.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

New Wonder Woman trailer, which is nifty. I must admit to not having read a single Wonder Woman comic in my life; the most I know of her is that in one continuity, though not the current one I hear, she's Lyta Hall's mother. (Lyta Hall from Sandman.) So the trailer is enough to get me curious... though it has one massively distracting aspect.

So, World War I. I know the Anglosaxon world treats WWII as the ultimate good versus evil fantasy role playing game, but WWI, if Michael Gove's complaints about Blackadder are anything to go by, still has the same "senseless bloody mass slaughter" reputation there it has in my part of the world, right? So when Diana says she wants to save the world/help people, I have to wonder "and you're accomplishing this by joining any party in the great slaughterhouse how?"

Am reminded of the bit in the tv show about David Llyod George (who took over from Asquith as British PM during WWI) that went like this:

Frances Stevenson (DLG's secretary and lover): Bad news. Revolution in Russia, there go the Romanovs, our allies and the Eastern front.
DLG: Well, look at the bright side.
FS: ?
DLG: Now I can sell this to the Americans as being about zomg freedom. Before, they had thought it was just a bunch of corrupt European dynasties duking it out.

If one of your allies is the most backward Empire on the continent, the one that used to have serfs not that long ago, it's a bit hard to claim to represent the cause of democratic progress, yes. But then, that tv series was made in the 1970s.

I mean, I noticed in the trailer there's the obligatory German villain declaring "we could rule the world", but seriously, not even idiotic Willy with his hangup about competing with his British relations had that ambition. WWI brings to mind gas attacks, a French landscape that looks as if its the moon full of craters, Wilfried Owen poetry on the one hand and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front on the other. What it does NOT bring to mind is a good versus evil conflict conducting to a super hero story set up. Unless, of course, you throw away decades of both history and pop culture history (not always the same thing) and go straight back to WWI era propaganda, which did have German soldiers eating Belgian babies. One of the most acid passages in Robert Graves' memoir Goodbye to all That is about that aspect of the era.

Then there's the technical aspect, if you like. What WWI is famous for is both sides fighting endlessly about a few feet of mud, and the new weapon, mustard gas, with so horrifying results that even the Nazis in WWII didn't break the ensuing ban on it as far as battle was concerned. There's a bit of gas and a gas mask in a few seconds in the trailer, but it only underlines that, because: how does this compute with Diana having a go with her lasso? It's hard not to imagine soldiers coughing their lungs out, with half their faces melted away taking a look at that and saying: Seriously?

I think you could do, in theory, something interesting stuff with a "superhero meets WWI" scenario. But I doubt it will involve:

Diana: I want to help.
Soldier: Take out the officers on both sides, will you?

Or:

Diana: I want to save the innocents.
Soldier: Well, a couple of my shellshocked mates are going to get shot at dawn for cowardice, so rescueing them and bringing them far, far away from the front would be really welcome.

...My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Current Mood: indescribable
Current Location: Munich

In Germany, November 11th is always overshadowed by November 9th, which is when just about everything of impact in the 20th century happened: the declaration of the first German republic in 1918, Hitler's attempted coup in the early 20s, the so called "Reichskristallnacht", aka the nation wide progrom that started the worst phase of the persecution of the Jews in 1936, Georg Elser's unsucessful attempt to kill Hitler in 1939, and of course the fall of the wall, the opening of the East German border, in 1989. So we don't have the same emotional focus on two days later. But we do remember.

During the last year, I came across the author Vera Brittain and her book Testament of Youth. Vera Brittain, a feminist, had been a V.A.D. in World War I, had served in France and Cypres, and had written her memoirs not least because in the flood of poignant post war literature, she missed hearing about women's experiences in the war. As she put it: The war was a phase of life in wich women's experiences did vastly differ from men's, and I make no puerile claim to equality of suffering and service when I maintain that any picture of the war is incomplete which omits those aspects that mainly concerned women.

I found her book as moving and shattering to read as those by Sasson and Graves. For this Armestice day, I would like to quote a passage in which she writes about nursing German prisoners. Bear in mind Brittain lost her fiancé, her brother and her two closest male friends in the war, which hadn't happened yet at the point she describes but of course did before she wrote her memoirs.

Before the War I had never been in Germany and had hardly met any Germans apart from the succession of German mistresses at St. Monica's, every one of whom I had hated with a provincial school girl's pitiless distaste for foreigners. So it was somewhat disconcerting to be pitch-forked, all alone - since V.A.D.s went on duty half an bour before Sisters - into the midst of thirty representatives of the nation which, as I had repeatedly been told, had crucified Canadians, cut off the hands of babies, and subjected pure and stainless females to unmentionable atrocities. I didn't think I had really believed all those stories, but I wasn't quite sure. I half expected that one or two of the patients would get out of bed and try to rape me, but I soon discovered that none of them were in a position to rape anybody, or indeed to do anything but cling with stupendous exertion to a life in which the scales were already weighted heavily against them.
At least a third of the men were dying; their daily dressings were not a mere matter of changing huge wads of stained gauze and wool, but of stopping haemorrhages, replacing intestines and draining and re-inserting innumerable rubber tubes. (...) Soon after my arrival, the first Sister-in-charge was replaced by one of the most remarkable members of the nursing profession in France or anywhere else. (...) Sister Milroy was a highbrow in active revolt against highbrows; connected on one side with a famous family of clerics, and on the other with an equally celebrated household of actors and actresses, she had deliberately chosen a hospital training in preference to the university education for which heredity seemed to have designed her, though no one ever suffered fools less gladly than she. When she first came to the ward her furious re-organisations were devastating, and she treated the German orderlies and myself with impartial contempt. On behalf of the patients she displayed determination and efficiency but never compassion; to her they were all "Huns", though she dressed their wounds with gentleness and skill.
"Nurse!" she would call to me in her high disdainful voice, pointing to an unfortunate patient whose wound unduly advertised itself. "For heaven's sake get the iodoform powder and scatter it over that filfthy Hun!"
The staff of 24 General described her as "mental", not realising that she used her reputation for excentricity and the uncompromising candour which it was supposed to excuse as a means of demanding more work from her subordinates than other Sisters were able to exact. At first I detested her dark attractiveness and sarcastic, relentless youth, but when I recognised her for whatshe was - by far the cleverest woman in the hospital, even if potentially the most alarmingk and temperamentally as fitful as a weathercock - we became constant companions off duty.
(...) (T)he German officers seemed more bitterly conscious of their position as prisoners than the men. There were about half a dozen of these officers, separated by a green curtain fron the rest of the ward, and I found their punctilious manner of accepting my ministrations disconcerting long after I had grown accustomed to the other patients.
One tall, bearded captain would invariably stand to attention when I had rebandanged his arm, click his spurred heels together, and bow with ceremonious gravity. Another badly wounded boy - a Prussian lieutenant who was being transferred to England - held out an emaciated hand to me as he lay on the stretcher waiting to go and murmured: "I thank you, Sister." After barely a second's hesitation I took the pale fingers in mine, thinking how ridiculous it was that I should be holding this man's hand in friendship when perhaps, only a week or two earlier, Edward up at Ypres had been doing his best to kill him. The world was mad and we were all victims; that was the only way to look at it. These shattered, dying boys and I were paying alike for a situation that none of us had desired or done anything to bring about.

Current Mood: sad
Current Location: Darmstadt

While Goodbye To All That is among other things one of the classic WWI memoirs, Robert Graves usually counts as lucky as far as the authors participating in this war go. After all, he survived (unlike Owen) and didn't have to spend time in an asylum, either (unlike Sassoon). True, he almost died (and was reported dead; his mother even go the requisite condolence letter), but he survived, went on to have a tumultous private life and become a bestseller not with his poetry but with I, Claudius. He was lucky. Wasn't he?

From Wild Olives, the memoirs of his son William, about Robert Graves' final years on Mallorca during the 70s, when he was diagnosed with senile dementia:

Father began getting up in the middle of hte night and walking to the village. Lost, he would knock on the first door he recognized. Francisco Mosso opened his door: 'Don Roberto, you're out late tonight. Wait for me to get dressed and I'll take you home.' The villagers looked after him. (...) Perhaps the most horrible aspect of the now accelerating process was that Father's war neuroses and shell shock returned. It was tragic to see the terror in his eyes as he tried to run away, supported by his nurse and a walking stick, from the ghosts of the Somme. His lucid periods grew shorter and shorter. And still he tried to run.

This is what war did. This is what war does, still.

Current Mood: sad
Current Location: Munich

Two days ago I watched There Will Be Blood, which is one of those movies you can't bear watching again any time soon but are glad to have watched. It gives you the sense of some monolithic lethal landscape, to be regarded in appalled awe. I've seen comparisons to Citizen Kane, but aside from the fact that both central characters spend the last ten minutes of their respective movies lonely in castles of their own, I can't see a bsis of comparison; two very different animals, those films and those characters. We see Charles Foster Kane from various perspectives, and among many other things, Citizen Kane has rapid-fire dialogue; you can tell that Herman Mankiewiciz, the scriptwriter, comes straight from the Hollywood of the screwball comedy era. Daniel Plainview, the main character of There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, is the viewpoint character of the film, there are probably just three or so scenes he's not in, and if he resembles any epic millionaire in cinema or real life, it's Howard Hughes rather than William Hearst (or Kane). It's a tour de force performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, and it needs to be, because the script takes no prisoners as Daniel Plainview gets more obsessive, crazier and more inhuman by the minute. It's Lear without Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia; a terrible, terrible old man at the end, but you can't look away. (Plainview has a Cordelia, and a Fool, too, but when his adopted son whom he does love has an accident and is deaf as a result, Plainview can't handle it and sends him away; and the man claiming to be his half-brother Henry, his Fool, affectionate in his harmlessness, whom Plainview opens up to a bit, suffers a terrible fate when Plainview feels himself betrayed.)

Plainview gets introduced in fifteen minutes of mostly silent film, and only then do we hear his voice, and you can tell Day-Lewis goes for Shakespearean, too, "I am an Oilman" rolling of his tongue as if it's "I am determined to be a villain". Speaking of silent film, his early scene with the baby that is to become his adopted son has echoes of Chaplin's The Kid which is a truly horrid irony considering how this father-son relationship will end up, and yet strangely appropriate: there is joy and sudden tenderness in both scenes, but Plainview isn't the Tramp, he's the millionaire, and the millionaire might occasionally befriend the tramp but in the end will always turn on him.

If I have a cricitism, it's that the script doesn't make clear whether two crucial characters played by the same actor are meant to be the same person using different names, or two different people; I had to look up the novel the film is vaguely based on, Upton Sinclair's Oil!, to find out they were in fact meant two be brothers. Still, it's just one flaw in the whole larger than life monstrosity which is this film, and the feeling of awe still persists, so I don't mind.

****

A postscript to my Mallorca vacation: on Tuesday, our last day, the sky was still cloudy, so we didn't make the hiking tour we had planned but went back to Deia to visit Robert Graves' house-turned-museum, which had been closed due to an electricity fallout the week before. The house, called Ca'n'Alluny or Canellun (the later name was the one Graves himself used), makes you wistful and doesn't come across as morbidly museal at all but as if he'd left it just five minutes ago.

( Photographic proof! )

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Location: Bad Wiessee

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Folies a deux
More Kästner
...as Germans always do...
That was the week that was
Centennary
Those days in November
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood...
...to end all wars....
Armistice Day
There Will Be Blood review and Mallorca postscript regarding Robert Graves

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Entries tagged with world war i

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Folies a deux

More Kästner

...as Germans always do...

That was the week that was

Centennary

Those days in November

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood...

...to end all wars....

Armistice Day

There Will Be Blood review and Mallorca postscript regarding Robert Graves