Occupational Hazards

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The Collaborators, the dark, engrossing, and occasionally brilliant new book by the Dutch writer Ian Buruma is not about collaboration—at least not in the way it’s implied in the book’s subtitle. Not really. To be sure, a good portion of its narrative unfolds in countries or territories under foreign occupation during the Second World War (or its Asian preamble), societies reset where new rules had, as well as new rulers, replaced the old, creating undeserved opportunities for, or forcing unwanted choices on, those who lived in them. Buruma draws up a taxonomy of the types of collaborator and touches on the reasons they behaved in the way they did. Some were on the make, others were ideologues, still others told themselves they were the lesser evil, and the list goes on….

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On Maneuvers

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Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), the German writer, war hero, man of the Right, and sphinx, claimed that On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939) came to him in a dream.1 It may have. Jünger was a devotee and a hoarder of dreams, and this story reads as if it were one of them. Now available in a new, and significantly improved, translation for New York Review Books Classics by Tess Lewis, the book is a tale of mounting horror, in which its two principal protagonists (the unnamed narrator and his brother, Otho, are proxies for Jünger and his younger brother, Friedrich Georg) are participants and yet, in a sense, spectators, as in a dream: “While evil spread across the land like fungus on a rotten log, we delved ever deeper into the mystery of flowers.”…

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"The Windsors at War" tells the rest of Edward VIII’s story

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Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis ended with the former Edward VIII, “now exiled to Europe, traveling away in the night.” In his engrossing The Windsors at War, Larman relates what happened next. In some respects, the tale he tells can be read as a pitch-black comedy, something signaled by the dramatis personae that begins it. A “disgraced Yugoslavian prince” makes it into “Society — high” joining, among other grandees, a millionaire murder victim, and no fewer than three “playboys,” one of whom was the millionaire’s suspected murderer. A “would-be royal assassin” fares less well, banished to “Society— low,” along with the likes of a journalist (naturally) and an American engineer “unimpressed by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.”…

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Shipwrecks, amputations and polar-bear attacks: the doomed voyage of the Karluk

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The heroic age of polar exploration gave birth to epics as grand and as harsh as the landscapes in which they unfolded. And, as in all the best epics, their protagonists are often of interest not only for what they do, but also for who they are, or, in the case of the Arctic adventurer — “explorer” is too confining a word — Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), who they pretend to be…

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The Border of Borders

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In 2019, writer and historian Timothy Phillips embarked on a 3,000-mile trek along the route of Europe’s postwar dividing line—almost a third was on foot. The trip began in Norway’s far north and ended where Turkey and Azerbaijan meet, and in his engrossing “Retracing the Iron Curtain,” Mr. Phillips uses that journey to tell the story of this brutal “border of borders,” which in the early days after World War II reached much further than is typically recalled.

And so Mr. Phillips shows up in Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic, which was still being “liberated” by the Soviets when Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain….

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Wars After The Fall

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Despite a subtitle that suggests that it covers Russia’s two revolutions and the subsequent civil war, Antony Beevor’s new book is best seen as a history of that war (or, more accurately, wars) prefaced by a lengthy prologue chronicling the events that triggered it. To anyone reasonably familiar with the story of the months that culminated in the Bolshevik coup, there is little that is new in that preamble, although Beevor tells the tale of that year, 1917, briskly, with brio and characteristically sharp insight. Thus, the liberal February revolution that overthrew the czar is generally seen as a relatively peaceful affair, which it was compared with what was to come, but, as Beevor shows, that still left room for lynchings, rapes, mutilations, drownings, shootings, burnings to death. “The people’s hatred has been brewing for too long,” wrote one cousin of the czar.

Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, knew how to manipulate that hatred…

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Cometh the Hour

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History has no "right side." It follows no predetermined path and has no inevitable endpoint. This may dismay those hoping to find some meaning in the march of time, but the logical consequence of its absence is to leave room for an individual to make a significant difference to the course of history.

In Personality and Power, Ian Kershaw, the distinguished British historian best known for his two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, identifies 12 people who managed just that over one period in one place….

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On the Ground in Ukraine

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Walking home after dinner in Kyiv on Feb. 23, British journalist Luke Harding answers his phone: The Russian attack, he is told, is expected within hours. “Invasion” is his account of the war that ensued. Gripping and often moving, the book is primarily journalistic but goes beyond mere reportage as Mr. Harding draws on his knowledge of the region and a background that includes serving as head of the Guardian’s Moscow bureau.

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Hard times

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There is something peculiarly unnerving about glimpses of lives being lived without any awareness of approaching catastrophe—film footage of Edwardian England, say, or jfk at Love Field. This can be true too in fiction. Profoundly moving and, at times, surprisingly lyrical, Grey Bees, by the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, is gently powerful, and made even more so by what has happened since it was first published in 2018 (the American edition, translated by Boris Dralyuk, was released this year)…

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Facing Impossible Odds

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“It is hard to pin down,” notes Halik Kochanski toward the end of her enormous, but eminently readable, history of resistance to German occupation during World War II, “why certain people chose the path of resistance . . . . [T]he resisters themselves often give unsatisfactory responses: ‘one had to do something’ or ‘one just did what one could.’ ”

Perhaps that is because the experience was, in retrospect, so strange, so out of time and place. Ms. Kochanski, a British historian, quotes Jean Cassou, a resistance leader in Toulouse who remembered this “as a unique period . . . impossible to relate to or explain, almost a dream. We see . . . an unknown and unknowable version of ourselves, the kind of people no one can ever find again, who existed only in relation to unique and terrible conditions, to things that have since disappeared, to ghosts, or to the dead.”

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