Nazism

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew. Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement. The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and became the owner and editor of the Observer during its mid-20th-century heyday.

The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities of Germany after 1945 (though no politicians were directly involved). The chief needs of the shattered population at the time were, of course, practical: food, water, sanitation and the reconstruction of buildings. But a vital supplementary effort was made to address what was left of German culture and history after the crimes and falsifications of the Nazis. The idea was that the arts should revive an alternative, peaceful and civilised way of life in the ruins of the country.

David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25 October 2015. The book now appears without its author, a kind of huge mausoleum for an astonishing enterprise. Cesarani wants to change our view of the Holocaust and to close the yawning gap between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject… to challenge the traditional concepts and periodisations … the term itself. He substitutes the ‘Final Solution’ for the Holocaust, but that Nazi term has become an alternative name for the Holocaust, which remains after 900 pages entirely unchallenged.

Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. He is now attempting to repeat the feat with a two-volume history of modern Europe, of which this is the opening shot.Inevitably, the figure of the Führer once again marches across Kershaw’s pages as they chronicle the years dominated by Germany’s malign master. First the Great War that gave Hitler his chance to escape obscurity, and then the greater one he launched himself. Opening with the continent’s catastrophic slide into generalised conflict in 1914, Kershaw apportions blame or the disaster more or less equally to all the combatant nations.

It is ironic that this weighty biography of Hitler’s evil genius of a propaganda minister is published on the day of a general election filled with Joseph Goebbels’s hallmarks: mendacity, media manipulation and the big lie. Seventy years after the spectacular suicide of Goebbels and his wife Magda, and their murder of their six children, in the Berlin bunker, the ‘little doctor’ is still a byword for the black arts of political spin and politicians regularly accuse each other of telling fibs ‘worthy of Goebbels’.

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near, their function expanded to gratify his obsession (and that of Reichsführer Himmler, as head of the SS which administered them) with ‘purifying the race’ by getting rid of gypsies, Jews, ‘asocials’ — prostitutes, criminals, vagabonds — as well as the mentally ill and handicapped. An all-female camp at Ravensbrück, set up in 1938, soon afforded the prison doctors a steady supply of women — the ‘rabbits’, as these prisoners became known — for medical experiments .

It is a strange paradox of our egalitarian age that a progressive publisher like Penguin should commission — at considerable expense, since the series editor Simon Winder has netted some top academic authors — brief lives of all 44 English, and later British, monarchs, from Athelstan to his distant descendent, our own Queen Elizabeth. The 45th book in the series is devoted to our sole non-royal ruler, Oliver Cromwell. The biographies — each costing £10.99 — though not exactly ‘potted’, are necessarily squeezed by space — none is longer than 150 pages — into extended essays that can be comfortably devoured in a couple of hours; ideal for a railway journey or a short-haul flight in our cash-rich, time-poor era.

Thuringia, a region of former East Germany, occupies a special place in the thoughts of Germans, who like to regard it as the origin of all their best virtues. It’s an alluring place, full of wonderfully untouched stretches of densely forested hills; the occasional small historic town seems hardly to have changed for decades, and the tourist can spend a happy week pottering from Schmalkalden to Ilmenau to Eisenach in the illusion that none of those unpleasant realities of the last century ever touched this place. I once asked the guide at the Wartburg, the magnificent medieval and mock-medieval castle on a snowy crop outside Eisenach, what this place meant to modern-day Germans.

At the recent Austin Film Festival, at every ruminative panel or round-table discussion I attended, I slapped my copy of this book down in front of me. The cover, I felt, was bound to catch the eye of the screen legends and louche suits from the big production companies. Above the uncompromising title, it shows a photograph of Adolf Hitler watching a movie with his entourage, his stern, blunt features palely lit by the glowing screen, his mouth small, his nostrils flared in concentration. What, one wonders, was he watching? Laurel and Hardy? Mickey Mouse? It’s not impossible, actually. We know for a fact that the psychotic cinephile adored cartoons and slapstick of this kind.