Hearts of Darkness

Robert Gellately: Lenin, Stalin and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe

The New York Sun, September, 19, 2007

In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust as the stout, solid bourgeois architecture then transforming their cities.

This self-satisfaction we now know was pure hubris, a lethal, beautiful, boastful illusion. Confronted in 1914 with the reality of industrialized warfare, that illusion died. As the war progressed, if one can use that word, the social and political restraints keeping man's atavistic ferocity at bay began to fray all across Europe, and nowhere more dangerously than in the Russian Empire. By 1917, this most backward, and therefore most fragile, of the continent's great powers was a society on the precipice. It only took the slightest of shoves, in the form of the Bolsheviks' opportunistic and initially bloodless coup, to topple it over into the abyss. The consequences were worldwide, appalling, and destructive on a scale that had never before been seen.

When in the subtitle of his new book, "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler" (Knopf, 698 pages, $35), Professor Robert Gellately refers to an age of "social catastrophe," it is no exaggeration. But his use of that phrase also makes a more subtle point. The devastation of the era he describes (roughly 1914–45) went far beyond the physical, far beyond rubble, ruin, and mass graves. The very notion of society itself was torn apart. As for man's idea of himself, it had been changed forever, and not, in any sense, for the better. Man could now be certain that the barbarian within him would always be there, however advanced the civilization — tempting, terrifying and, given an opening, unstoppable.

While Mr. Gellately explicitly narrows the focus of his book to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, its title still promises more than he manages to deliver. Rather than devoting himself to the wider implications of what he is discussing, Professor Gellately offers a conventional history within a largely conventional framework. For those in need of a serious, scholarly introduction to the subject, it's an excellent overview of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, but despite its great length — with footnotes the book runs to nearly 700 pages — an overview is all that it is. There's not a lot that's new about either the information or the arguments it contains.

Mr. Gellately worries that one aspect of his book may "disturb" some readers — the suggestion that Lenin was a monster to be ranked alongside Stalin and Hitler. As he himself might acknowledge, however, this insight is not particularly original: Historians Dmitri Volkogonov and Richard Pipes (to name but two he cites) have already covered much of this ground, and done so highly effectively. Nevertheless, despite their efforts and those of quite a few others, the real nature of Lenin's ideology remains poorly understood. In repeating the message that the story of Bolshevism is not one of good intentions gone awry, but of an evil that worked all too well, Professor Gellately is performing a very useful public service.

That the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did owed a great deal to the collapse not only of the old order, but of order itself. The rise of the Nazis was made possible by almost exactly the opposite, the desperation of a nation willing to try something, anything, to hang on to what it could of its former way of life. If that meant throwing democracy — and with it, the Jews — to the wolves, too bad.

Hitler's mandate was no blank check, however. As Professor Gellately explains in some of the most intriguing sections of his book, the prewar Third Reich was, in marked contrast with its Soviet rival, a "dictatorship by consent." Compared with what was going on in the USSR at the same time, the use of coercion was limited, largely predictable, and rarely truly murderous. The awful exception, of course, was the ever more hideous persecution of the Jews, but prior to 1939, even that was incremental, a slow-motion pogrom both camouflaged and reinforced by the language of bureaucracy and the law.

That Hitler found it necessary to proceed in this way was a paradox of his earliest years in power. The restoration of social calm was key to his popularity but difficult to reconcile with his long-term agenda of military adventure, unending conquest and relentless genocide. With the invasion of Poland, that paradox became an irrelevance, but neither the frenzy of war nor the intoxication of a victorious blitzkrieg, can fully explain the speed with which so many of the Wehrmacht's "ordinary men" either descended into barbarism or demonstrated their willingness to act as its accomplices. In some cases, it was merely a matter of days. That they did so was a sign that pointed the way to Auschwitz. It also suggested that, even before the tanks had begun to roll, the German people had already moved far, far down that most terrible of roads.

Disappointingly, Professor Gellately never fully succeeds in explaining what it took to make this possible. He takes refuge instead in the observation that, by the time World War II had concluded, it had "raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization." That is right, so far as it goes, but it's too simplistic. The more troubling questions posed by that war are not limited to any one civilization: They concern the essential nature of mankind itself. And there's no comfort to be found in the answer, none at all.

In the Land Of Mammon

Robert Frank: Richistan : A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich

The New York Sun, August 15, 2007

Despite unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural upheaval, there is, still, just a part of this country's vision of itself that is forever Bedford Falls. That was an idea of nation as extended community, diverse, but not too diverse, a land of opportunity, certainly, but one where no one was left too far behind, or ended up too far ahead. There was Potter, but he was an outsider, the moneyed exception that proved the modest rule, the rule that was also an ideal, of an America where everyone was in the same boat.

Robert Frank, the author of the entertaining, provocative, and dryly amusing "Richistan" (Crown, 278 pages, $24.95), was prompted to write his book by the realization that this was, quite literally, no longer the case. As the writer of the Wall Street Journal's "Wealth Report" (the existence of which tells you something about the times in which we live), his beat took him each year to Fort Lauderdale's International Boat Show, a "weeklong celebration of boats, beaches, and billionaires." There he met a Texas yachter who told him that "the American rich seemed to be floating off to their own country," a country that Mr. Frank has dubbed Richistan.

In Mr. Frank's view, today's new rich are busy creating their own virtual, self-contained nation, complete with their "own healthcare system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language...They didn't just hire gardening crews; they hired personal arborists". Yes, there's a touch of hype in that description (if any journalist is going to make it to Richistan, he's got to sell a lot of books), and a touch of the nothing new, too: The very rich have always been different. It's just how that's changed.

That said, there's no doubt that Mr. Frank is on to something. The key, as he explains, is the remarkable growth in the numbers of America's rich. In 1995 there were nearly 4 million households with a net worth of more than $1 million. By 2004, that total had increased to more than 9 million (both tallies are based on 2004 dollars). Now, as Dr. Evil discovered, and as Mr. Frank concedes, $1 million is not what it was. It's not a bad start though.

It's not just that there are more rich folk around. They are also richer, much richer, than they used to be. By 2004, more than 100,000 households enjoyed a net worth of more than $25 million. If you feel like a loser reading those words, it's no better writing them, believe me. Be that as it may, this wild, if uneven, accumulation of wealth is basically a sign of good times, a largely benign side effect of capitalism on the move. Mr. Frank clearly understands this. His description of the wonders, extravagances, and peculiarities of Richistan is essentially travelogue and guidebook, neither indictment nor paean, and despite the mega-yachts, megamansions, and the $899 pair of children's shoes (crocodile-skin Sperry Top-Siders, since you ask), there is no suggestion of Robin Leach.

Mr. Frank may poke some fun, but for the most part he takes Richistan as he finds it. Yet, for all that, it's possible to discern some faint hints of unease. The source of this, I suspect, is partly aesthetic and partly (for want of a better word) patriotic. So much ostentation may not only be in poor taste, but is it also a betrayal of older, more austere American values, a rejection of Bedford Falls?

Above all, it's likely to be the unevenness that worries Mr. Frank the most, an anxiety betrayed by the statistics of rising inequality that occasionally surface in his pages. Not all of these are breaking news: For example, most of the shift in the concentration of wealth in favor of the top 1% took place two decades or so ago. Nevertheless, the fact that the share of national income now held by the top 1% of earners is at a postwar peak is food for thought, especially at a time when the median income of American households is under severe pressure.

The rich may be pulling away from the rest of the population, but "Richistan" shows how the richest are pulling away from those who are just by-their-fingertips rich or, horrors, merely affluent. Mr. Frank explains how this acts as both carrot and stick to the toilers of Lower Richistan (net worths of $1 million to $10,000,000 million as they try to buy, as well as work, their ways to higher status. In 2004, some 20% of these treadmillers spent more than they earned. That's neither sustainable economically, nor is it a recipe for happiness. Where it may lead is major political change.

Politics is, frustratingly, a topic that is largely beyond the scope of this book. To be sure, Mr. Frank makes the obligatory reference to the swerves to the left that followed both the Gilded Age and the Roaring '20s, but there's little discussion of the extent to which the very existence of Richistan (not to forget the threat it represents to social cohesion) may help history repeat itself. Nor does he examine what may be Richistan's most significant, if somewhat perverse, contribution to this country's political development, one that may follow from the increase in inequality within Richistan itself, and, more dangerously still, its approaches. As that trend continues, there's a clear risk that some of society's best, brightest, and most influential will be left feeling that they have missed not only the yacht, but also the boat.

Fathers, Sons, And Bogeymen

This  Is England

The New York Sun, July 25, 2007

Don't be put off by agitprop, achingly self-conscious blue-collar grit, and accents that may mystify some on this side of the Atlantic: "This Is England," the latest offering from the up-and-coming British director Shane Meadows, is a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes wrenching and, at its best, profoundly moving coming-of-age tale that also manages to find room to ponder questions of friendship, fatherhood, group loyalty, masculinity, and national identity. That's not bad for 98 minutes.

What's more, this is a film with a brilliantly evocative sense of time and place. "This Is England" offers the England of 1983, an era of great transition. As the origins of the movie's title (borrowed both from a classic World War II documentary and an even more melodramatic than usual offering from the Clash) suggest, it was a country on edge, and at the edge. The most difficult part of Margaret Thatcher's harsh, necessary cure was, we know now, over. Back then, however, it was by no means clear that the treatment would work, particularly in beaten-down provincial towns of the type where "This Is England" is set-- places that rapidly found themselves becoming post-industrial at a time when post-industrial was a euphemism for "nothing to do."

It is one of the ironies of history that, if there's one thing that came to symbolize Britain's brighter future, it was the Falklands War, a conflict rooted in Britain's imperial past, a conflict that Mr. Meadows has called "suspicious." Oh, whatever, Shane, whatever. The fact remains that victory in the South Atlantic was a reassuring reminder that there was life in the old lion. Still more important, it ensured Ms. Thatcher's re-election, something that Mr. Meadows probably still regrets. Get over it already, Shane: It's done.

It is one of the ironies of "This Is England" that triumph in those distant islands has brought only misery to the film's hero, 12-year-old Shaun (the remarkable Thomas Turgoose). Already something of a loner, Shaun has been left adrift by the death of his father in combat in the Falklands. Try as she might, his mother cannot fill the gap left by a much-missed dad, who survives only in vacation snaps and in one ramrod, khakiclad portrait, as Tommy Atkins, iconic and doomed.

After a bad day at the local Comprehensive (in his painfully-dated flares, he's ineligible for membership in any of the schoolyard's tribes), poor, battered Shaun is making his way home. Wearily, your poor, battered reviewer braced himself for the inevitable rain, concrete, and misery of almost any British film set in the depths of the Thatcher terror. What happens, instead, is that Shaun encounters a small band of skinheads-- lost boys (and girls) lurking, as lost boys (and girls) should, under the ground (well, in an underpass anyway). Before too long, the loner finds himself adopted into a tribe all his own.

Despite its daunting exterior, the tribe, genially presided over by the kindly and charismatic Woody (wonderfully played by Joe Gilgun), is benign. The time it spends together is purposefully aimless, purposefully companionable and just a bit daft. This reaches its peak in one oddball, joyful excursion that is transformed into something almost ecstatic by the bewitching ska rhythms of the film's skillfully compiled soundtrack. It concludes with the trashing of some empty municipal housing, but it's difficult to mind too much. As J.M. Barrie would have explained, lost boys can make for a rough crowd.

A rose-tinted spectacle? Yes. But one that is forgivable in such a nostalgic, openly autobiographical movie, particularly as, in contrast to what comes next, it serves an obvious dramatic (and too obviously didactic) purpose. Every Eden must have its serpent, every lagoon its Captain Hook. Sure enough, Shaun's skinhead idyll is soured by the arrival of Combo (a subtle, horrifying and ultimately heart-breaking Stephen Graham). A "first generation" skinhead now in his 30s, Combo is fresh from prison and ready to reassert his authority. He's a malign, thuggish Falstaff to Woody's gentle Prince Hal. Too weak to stand up to him, too strong to go along, Woody quits the group, taking his girlfriend and a few others with him. It's a measure of Mr. Meadows's sensitivity as a filmmaker that we see that this is the last thing that Combo wants.

Woody may have departed, but Shaun remains. In effect he abandons the mentor who befriended him for the brute power of a man who is, significantly, about the same age as that father now lying in a military graveyard. Combo appears content to fall into some approximation of the paternal role, but he comes with an unlovely agenda. He's with the National Front, a racist, proto-fascist political party that defaced the British political landscape at the time. For a while it looks as if Shaun might prove an all-too-apt pupil.

In reality, the National Front was always more of a bogeyman to be brandished by the left than a serious electoral menace, and it's as a bogeyman that Mr. Meadows uses it in this movie. Taking his film solely as a period piece is, I suppose, fair enough; but if it's contemporary political resonance he's looking for, it falls flat, too dated to be persuasive: Those best described as "fascists" in modern Britain are more likely to be interested in fatwas than führers.

If Mr. Meadows's politics tend to the one-dimensional, his skills as a director (and writer -- the screenplay is his as well) are anything but. Combo is a vicious bully, but, it turns out, there's more to him than that. Deeply conflicted and flailing desperately in a world that has left him behind, he is no cartoon Brownshirt. How Shaun reacts to him is the central drama of this fascinating, complex film, and this is a drama that will not date, so long as there are fathers, sons, and the need for a tribe.

Stench & the City

Emily Cockayne: Hubbub

The New York Sun, July 11, 2007

If there's one voice that can be heard above the hubbub described in Emily Cockayne's aptly titled new book, it is the voice, splenetic, dyspeptic, and thoroughly fed up, of the grumbler in high dudgeon. For all their traditional stoicism, the English have always known how to complain, and to do so with an acerbity and wit that leaves more famously querulous nations (yes, Jacques, yes, Pierre, I'm talking about you) looking like little more than whiny schoolchildren.

When it comes to the topic of "Hubbub" (Yale University Press, 335 pages, $35), the squalor, grubbiness, and general unpleasantness of everyday life in the cities of 17th- and 18th-century England, there was, as its author shows, plenty to gripe about. And to help her, she's recruited an awkward squad of sourly eloquent grumblers, from Samuel Pepys to the "slightly deranged" vegetarian and would-be "boghouse" reformer Thomas Tryon (who died in 1703, allegedly and appropriately, of "Retention of Urine") to the "notoriously peevish" Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood (1632–95).

Here, for example, is what Matt Bramble, the fictional alter ego of the reliably grumpy Tobias Smollett (1721–71) had to say about a society ball in Georgian Bath:

Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; beside a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.

Imagine that? You'd probably rather not. But after working your way through the vivid, splendidly horrible pages of "Hubbub," a book that so revels in the nastiness it describes that most of its chapters appear to have been named after Snow White's worst nightmare ("Ugly," "Itchy," and "Mouldy" are just three of their dank and dismal number), you won't be able to avoid doing so. Not only that, you will understand that the stench of assafoetida drops was merely one of the lesser assaults on the senses of poor Mr. Bramble. That party was about as good as it got. Beyond the masterclass theater of ballroom and grand house lay the smoky, reeking cityscapes of early modern England, territories where the medieval was only yesterday, and could, quite easily, have become tomorrow.

It was a muddy, desperate world of licentious fustilugs, determined dog-skinners, essential gunge-farmers, and rootling "piggs," of dissolute rakehells, and the drabs who serviced them, a world of urban dunghills and city "hog-styes," a world inhabited by people marked by tetters, morphew, "psorophtalmy" (eyebrow dandruff, since you ask), and pocky itch, and clothed in grogram tailored by botchers. If you suspect that one of the many pleasures of "Hubbub" is the exuberant vocabulary that so enriches the texts cited by its author, you'd be right. Delightfully, it's an exuberance that has infected Ms. Cockayne herself: She must be one of the few 21st-century writers to use words such as axunge, muculent, and smeech.

This evident, and endearing, empathy for the period of which she writes is more than a matter of language. Yes, it's true that, in a refreshingcontrasttothecarefully picturesque, fiercely scrubbed picture that is the hallmark of BBC manufactured-for-export flummery, the dryly amusing Ms. Cockayne "unashamedly" highlights the worst of urban life of the time. Nevertheless, it's also evident that she is, as she says, determined to guard against what historian E.P. Thompson has called the "enormous condescension of posterity." Some aspects of their ancestors' life might revolt modern Englishmen, but may have been a matter of indifference, or even enjoyment, to their grimy forebears.

At the same time, it would be even more condescending to believe that the citizens of the septic isle were simple fatalists, passively accepting the muck, chaos, and disease that surrounded and, not so occasionally, engulfed them. As Ms. Cockayne's grumblers, not to speak of countless lawsuits against slatternly neighbors and slovenly tradesmen, reveal, they were anything but. Life could be better. Life ought to be better. Life would be better.

This was an age, perhaps the first, of a self-consciously progressive modernity. Raging in the 1740s against the state of the British capital's streets, Lord Tyrconnel sneered that they gave the impression of a place populated by

a herd of barbarians. … The most disgusting part of the character given by travellers, of the most savage nations, is their neglect of cleanliness, of which, perhaps, no part of the World affords more proofs than the streets of London … [the city] abounds with such heaps of filth … as a savage would look on with amazement.

Running through that speech is the implicit understanding that Englishmen had left barbarians and barbarism behind. Englishmen could do better. Englishmen ought to do better. Englishmen would do better.

So, eventually, they did. Twenty years later, parliament passed a series of laws designed to tidy up those streets of shame and much more besides, laws that were just part of an accelerating, if uneven, modernization that quite literally paved the way for industrial revolution and economic triumph.

And some of the credit for this must go to the grumblers. If necessity is the mother of invention, then discontent is the father. So buy this marvelous book, the most engaging work of social history I have read in years, and let Ms. Cockayne introduce you to a cast of characters you will never forget and a past we have failed to remember.

One tip: "Hubbub" is best enjoyed after eating, not before.

A Room With a Bloody View

1408

The New York Sun, June 22, 2007

I like hotels: the soothing anonymity, the agreeable sensation of watching people pick up after you, the questionable pleasures of pay-per-view. Needless to say, Stephen King, a writer at his best when conjuring up evil from the everyday, disagrees. In the prelude to his short story, "1408," he explains why hotel rooms are "naturally creepy": "How many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV?"

If you feel the same way, and you're reading this while slumped, quivering, and sweaty, in a Hilton, Hyatt or, God help you, Bates Motel, I'd prescribe clonazepam, not "1408." The latter is an effective, gripping tale, classic King, clammy and troubling, set in a hotel room so nasty that not even Basil Fawlty would dare explain it away. And if Mikael Håfström's new movie adaptation of the story has made it to that beckoning pay-per-view, keep clear. It'll only make matters worse.

Not that Mike Enslin (John Cusack, in a terrific performance) would. Mike is a once-promising novelist who now earns a good living churning out potboilers designed to discredit tall tales of hauntings, specters, and otherwise misbehaving dead. He's looking to conclude his latest book, so the arrival of a mysterious postcard hinting that room 1408 in Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel merits investigation proves to be an irresistible temptation. As a skeptic in a Stephen King story, Mike should know better, especially after being warned off by Gerald Olin (a splendidly forbidding Samuel L. Jackson), the Dolphin's manager. Gerald really, really doesn't want Mike to stay in 1408. Mike pays no attention, even after the solicitous Gerald plies him with good wine and a bad dossier. And what a dossier it is, choc-a-bloc with dangling corpses, bloody mutilations, and finales too disgusting to mention. It's not a question of ghosts, explains Gerald. It's just an "evil f------ room."

But Mike won't be deterred. Evil or not, the room is vacant. Under the law, he's entitled to book it (something to do with civil rights, apparently), and book it he does. This turns out to be the worst decision involving a hotel and a tale by Stephen King since Jack Torrance accepted that job at the Overlook.

As to what happens, you'll have to find out for yourself. Suffice to say, a bit of trouble with the heating (we've all been there) is the least of our hero's problems. If some of those problems (a sinisterly malfunctioning clock radio, attack by faucet, oozing walls à la " Barton Fink") are a touch clichéd, they don't detract much from what is, if not a masterpiece, a thoroughly competent, perfectly enjoyable horror flick — something that comes as a relief after the mess the Swedish Mr. Håfström made of his first English-language film, a train wreck of a movie called "Derailed."

A more serious objection to the approach he has taken is his recourse to sporadically spectacular special effects. These come close to turning "1408" into a generically chilling thrill-ride of a type that we have taken far, far too many times before. Worse, insofar as they open up and broaden the imagery of the movie, they risk throwing away the sense of claustrophobia that ought to be key to any narrative revolving around the plight of a man unable to escape from one murderous room. That this doesn't happen owes a lot to Mr. Cusack, who is horribly convincing as somebody caught in a trap that not only threatens his life, but also destroys the belief that has come to comfort, define, and enrich it — his conviction that the paranormal is delusion or fraud and that there's nothing that goes bump in the night.

It's no surprise to learn from an interview with Mr. Håfström on www.bloody-disgusting.com (you missed it?), that Mr. King has singled out Mr. Cusack for praise. The author was also, apparently, "very pleased" with the film as a whole. Given the mess that so many others, including, uh, Mr. King himself, have made of transferring his work to screen from print, it's a reasonable response. Even if the master of horror's judgment in this respect is not always sound (famously, he had major objections to the finest King movie of all, Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of "The Shining"), "1408" is a pretty good take on the original story. It's no "Carrie," but it's a long, long way from "The Lawnmower Man."

And if, in the end, it fails to deliver quite so much as the page-turner from which it has sprung, this was probably inevitable. The genius of Mr. King is more verbal than visual. It lurks in that curious mish-mash of the vernacular, the macabre, and the supernatural that he has made his own. In its blowsy excess, cornpone optimism, and bleary disillusion, it's as American as a slightly sour apple pie, yet it's so distinctive that, as Mr. Håfström is the latest to remind us, it is almost impossible to reproduce.

Nevertheless "1408" is well worth checking out. Just don't check in.

A Magical Mystery Tour

Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era

The New York Sun, June 7, 2007

At one time or another, most of us have gone through that gray-faced morning routine: the shameful stumble through the shambles of a living room reduced to a wasteland of empty bottles, dirty glasses, and elusive memories, you know how it goes. The night before had been fun, you think, you hope, but what was it, exactly, that had happened?

And so it was with that starburst we call "the '60s." For a few brief, blinding moments, there was illumination, chaos, and destruction, sometimes creative, sometimes not, sometimes fun, sometimes not. When it all ended, we were left with the paradox of a world transformed, but little recollection of what had taken place, or why. As the saying goes, "If you can remember anything about the '60s, you weren't really there."

Now, 40 years on — 40 years after the sublime "Sergeant Pepper," 40 years after grubby Haight-Ashbury — the Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era." The exhibition is a botanical garden planted with flower power's best: posters, paintings, film, photography, album covers, crazed architectural blueprints, various installations that I cannot begin to describe, and other madcap cultural detritus all designed to place psychedelia within its wider intellectual framework. That this show's organizers have found a degree of coherence within the acme of exactly the opposite is no small achievement, but anyone hoping for a broader history of the 1960s will be disappointed. To the extent that larger historical themes can be detected, it is only as muffled echo or fun-house reflection, a presence barely visible through the fog of narcissism, self-congratulation, and intoxication that did so much to define artistic expression in those times.

The show itself is entertaining, playful, informative, visually striking, and comes glowing with a nostalgic enchantment guaranteed to delight many more than just those ancient enough to have spent three muddy, magic days at Max Yasgur's farm. The psychedelic moment may have been just that, but its afterlife lingered on. Even when that, too, had faded away, the symbols of the summer of love were quickly repackaged as nostalgia. You no longer have to have lived through the 1960s to miss them. The average age of the large crowd at the Whitney the Saturday that I came to gawp was well below 50, and many of those younger visitors, I reckoned, had been drawn there by more than just morbid, malicious fascination with boomer folly.

What's perhaps most interesting about this exhibition is the way that, implicitly more than explicitly, it ties psychedelia to what had come before. If this was an avantgarde, it was one with its eyes fixed firmly on the past. Superficially, this was simply a question of style. The curves of psychedelic illustration owe an obvious debt to the sinuous twists and seductive sexual suggestion of Art Nouveau, but the homage to earlier times, or at least, an imagined version of earlier times, ran far deeper than that.

Across the Atlantic, English psychedelia referred back constantly to the lost whimsy of the Victorian nursery, while back home, the vanished Arcadia seemed to have been located somewhere between late wigwam and early Klondike. As for "Sergeant Pepper," arguably psychedelia's most enduring monument, it came saturated in the sounds and sights of the prelapsarian, pre-1914 music hall, and packaged in a sleeve (naturally, it's on display at the Whitney) that famously mixed fanboy enthusiasm with hallucinatory historical eclecticism.

To harp on the past in this way is to suggest a profound discontent with the present, and, despite the prosperity of the mid-1960s, discontent there was. The psychedelic experiment aimed to derail the rationalism that was widely (if inaccurately) believed to lie at the heart of 20th century war, oppression, and alienation. The acid colors and ecstatic twirls of psychedelic art were an act of revolt against the clean lines, clarity, and stripped-down aestheticism of modernism. If the words on posters, such as those for the Fillmores (East or West) that make up a central part of this exhibit, were often barely decipherable, that was the idea.

The irony is that not much of this was particularly novel. For instance, it's a shame that there is little at the Whitney to suggest that an attachment to Eastern religion, concocted or real, fanatic or dilettante, had been a staple of a counterculture steeped in the rejection of reason for nearly a century before the Maharishi made monkeys out of Beatles. As for all those happenings (the Whitney has Jud Yalkut's film of "Kusama's Self Obliteration" as one notably entertaining specimen), it would have been instructive to note that there was nothing about them that would have shocked the salons of silver age Saint Petersburg.

What was different was the extent to which this particular celebration by the Western art world of the ecstatic, the irrational, and the Dionysian was first fueled by drugs (to furnish the vision) and technological know-how (to realize it), and then nourished by affluence and sped-up by mass media into the arms of popular culture and the maw of big business. The intelligentsia had found an audience for their games far beyond the salon, an audience that had trouble even spelling the word "Dionysian" but knew a good party when it saw one.

Despite a regrettably small section dedicated to Andy Warhol, chilly and prescient, an examination of the aftermath of the psychedelic explosion turns out to be largely beyond the scope of this show. The visitor is left with only insinuations of disaster, hints of disillusion, and suggestions of astonishing change, mere scraps of a fascinating story that the Whitney doesn't really attempt to tell. That's frustrating, but it shouldn't deter you from turning up and tuning in to what is a remarkable exhibition. Feed your head.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Frederick Taylor: The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Berlin, August 1978, © Andrew Stuttaford

To cross over into East Berlin in the 1970s, as I did on a couple of occasions, was to take a trip that, even then, seemed like a voyage back into a lost, almost unimaginable era. The rampaging ideologies, cruel and convinced, that had done so much to wreck Europe were in retreat across the western part of the continent, their fervor dimmed by exhaustion, bitter experience, sweet, if uneven, prosperity, and, credit where credit's due, careful American supervision. In East Berlin, by contrast, it was still 1945 or, if you prefer that date of a future that already appeared to have passed the West by, 1984.

There were occasional ruins and countless bullet holes, relics of Hitler's Götterdämmerung; there were the apartment blocks that proclaimed a utopia with no room for humanity, and then there was that sense, deadening, clammy, gray, of an oppression that Winston Smith would have understood all too well. Not just a sense, a reality: the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, was more than 100,000 strong, with at least another 200,000 informers, all for a population of just 17 million.

And then there was that wall, a symbol of horror, tyranny, and finally, deliriously, liberation. In his highly readable new book, "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89" (HarperCollins, 512 pages, $27.95), Frederick Taylor attempts to combine the tale of the Berlin Wall with a more general history of the German Democratic Republic, an approach that is understandable, yet sometimes a little frustrating: Mr. Taylor's account is very far from being a comprehensive study of what was one of the last century's most peculiar, disturbing, and interesting states.

Nevertheless, there's an undeniable logic to looking at the "other Germany" from the perspective of a wall that was both an admission of its failure and the key to its survival. While Mr. Taylor has no sympathy for the communist regime, the picture he paints is more complex than the usual Cold War cartoon. The wall was, he shows, the desperate response of the dictatorship to the prospect that its state would collapse from within, emptied out by the lure of West Germany's remarkable economic recovery. For many East Germans freedom and an increasingly higher standard of living were there for the taking. All it required was a train ticket to East Berlin, and a little luck.

For all of Berlin, East and West, was supposedly still under the shared control of World War II's "big four." As a result, the border within the city continued to be porous in ways inconceivable elsewhere on the intra-German frontier. In the first 12 years of its existence, the GDR lost around a sixth of its population to the west. As the 1950s progressed, and the barbed wire and death strips went up around the rest of East Germany, Berlin was the escape hatch, the way out. This was unsustainable. If that hatch wasn't locked tight, East Germany would collapse, and if East Germany collapsed, it would almost certainly take the fragile Cold War truce down with it.

As 1960 turned into 1961, the rush for the exit only intensified. Torschlusspanik ("panic that the door will be closed") gripped the GDR. If anything, however, the panic was underdone. The door wasn't just closed that year. It was bricked-up. In chilling, precise detail, Mr. Taylor explains how the regime made its preparations (meticulous, cynical, and, somehow, very German), kept the Soviets onside (one of the many strengths of this book is its focus on the tricky relationship between the Kremlin and East Berlin), and then succeeded in incarcerating an entire nation in the course of one August weekend.

Critical to that success was the passivity of Britain, France, and America, nominal guarantors of a nominally united city. As Mr. Taylor makes clear, they huffed, and they puffed, but they never tried to blow that wall down. To have done so would almost certainly have meant war, and who was prepared to risk Armageddon for the right of East Germans to travel? It was an exercise in Realpolitik that condemned millions to imprisonment in their miserable abomination of a republic for nearly 30 more years, but the obvious implication to be drawn from Mr. Taylor's narrative is that this was the correct thing to do. And so it was.

That is not the same as saying that this was a morally straightforward decision, yet to read this book carefully is also to see the traces of another story, that of the West German politicians (mainly on the left) who appeared to have few qualms about accepting, and perhaps even liking, the idea of that socialist sibling of theirs. When in 1987 Gerhard Schröder pronounced (with, it seems to me, unseemly relish) that reunification was a "big lie," he was not, as Mr. Taylor reminds us, alone.

Fortunately, the future chancellor got it wrong. Two years later, time caught up with East Germany. When it did so, it came rushing in at a pace that suggested it was desperate to make up for those wasted, frozen decades. Mr. Taylor describes those lovely, wild, exhilarating weeks movingly and with undisguised enthusiasm. But, while he does mention some of the difficulties and ambiguities that have followed reunification, it's difficult to avoid the feeling that his head, like his heart, remains caught up in the optimism of 1989–90. History, however, moves on, remorseless, relentless, and forgetful. As Mr. Taylor himself notes, the PDS (essentially the old East German Communist Party in unconvincing democratic drag) is now an important part of the coalition that runs Berlin.

Some people never learn, and others never give up.

A Nation Safe for Autocracy

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, August 2000 © Andrew Stuttaford

Much as blood and soil may help, it takes more to make a nation than a happy coincidence of genes and real estate. Today's nation-states are, whatever they may claim, purpose-built, as artificial as they are organic. Many may now have developed a genuine sense of self, but that identity is often rooted in myth as much as history, in fantasy as much as fact, and in forgetfulness as much as memory.

Nowhere is that more the case than in those states where the past is as awkward as geography is inconvenient. Imperial Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, was an emerging power of jumbled ethnicities, shifting borders and a culture uncertain whether its dominant influence was Byzantium, the Mongols, "Europe" or, more prosaically, distance, backwardness, and poverty.

It was frustration over Russia's failure to adapt to modernity that led Peter the Great to turn westward in the early 1700s. Unfortunately for his successors, as the West itself evolved in a more democratic direction, it became increasingly obvious that the course set by Peter, modernization on Western lines, must in the end lead to some dilution of Romanov control. The liberal Decembrist rising against the incoming Tsar Nicholas I in 1825 may have failed — the new emperor brushed it aside with the traditional handful of executions and Siberian exile all 'round — but it was a clear sign of trouble to come.

If autocratic rule was to survive, Peter's idea of a westernized Russia had, Nicholas understood, to be replaced with something more congenial to absolute monarchy. This, in a sense, is where the New York Public Library comes into the picture. Its Wachenheim Gallery is currently featuring a fascinating exhibit dedicated to the work and impact of Fedor Solntsev (1801–92), an artist who made a significant contribution to Nicholas's new project, the fabrication of a notion of a nation safe for autocracy. The exhibition is small (it's confined to just one room), but its implications are not. The idea of an exotic, ageless Muscovy, distinct from, and morally superior to, the rest of Europe has shaped both Russia's history and its perception of itself up to the present day. Besides, the show's almost ecclesiastical setting — hushed, intense, and darkened, presumably to protect some of the artwork — is not inappropriate to showcase a man recruited by a tsar who liked to sum up his own vision of Russia with three nouns: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality."

Operating at the intersection of ethnography, archaeology, art, and propaganda, Solntsev traveled throughout Russia's ancient heartland recording the artifacts, architecture, and costumes he saw there. He then used their images to build up a picture of the country's past that, with diligent editing, could be shown to have been the story of one people, united around church and monarchy. Just a few years before, Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), the influential nationalist historian, had written that poets, sculptors, and painters could contribute to the creation of patriotic feeling. Solntsev proved Karamzin's point, and helped make the tsar's too. This was underlined by Nicholas's decision to fund the publication of "Antiquities of the Russian State" (1849–53), six volumes showing Solntsev's depictions (some are on display in this show) of the medieval artifacts that could be found in Moscow's Kremlin. Recently invented chromolithography meant that this skilled draughtsman's careful, almost photographic images could be disseminated in vivid color throughout the empire they were designed to promote.

Those six volumes represented the high point of Solntsev's career. His royal patron died in 1855. "Costume of the Russian State," a series of watercolors painted over the course of three decades and designed to show the traditional clothing worn in different parts of the tsars' domain, never found a publisher. By the end of his impressively long life, Solntsev was, in the view of the organizers of this exhibition, somewhat passé, a verdict that only appeared to be reinforced by the triumph of the Bolsheviks, barely 25 years later, and (it seemed) their irreparable break with the past. Less than two decades after the revolution, the cash-strapped Soviet government sold some of Solntsev's works to the New York Public Library. Like history itself, they were thought to be disposable.

But the real story is more complex than that. As is partly acknowledged by the exhibition's inclusion of designs by Natalia Goncharova for a production of "The Firebird" in the 1920s, Solntsev's influence on the arts, and the artistic interpretation, of Russia, was immensely important until, and beyond, a revolution that has, in this respect, proved to be little more than an interruption. By the 1930s, Russian nationalism, snarling and spiky, was back. The familiar iconography of onion domes, benign autocrats, and happy peasants reappeared shortly afterwards, along with the distinctively styled "Old Russian" design that accompanied it. It still flourishes today, nurtured by political support, fashionable taste, and genuine popular demand.

The fake, in short, has become real.

Victory at All Costs

Lynne Olson: Troublesome Young Men

The New York Sun, April 11, 2007

If there is one thing, and one thing only, to be grasped about Britain's failure to head off Hitler in time, it's that it was almost certainly inevitable. Unfortunately, this is something that readers of "Troublesome Young Men" ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27.50), a new book that explains how Winston Churchill rose to power and appeasement fell, will have to discover from another, more balanced source.

What's more, to describe "Troublesome Young Men" as a "new" book in anything other than the most literal sense is to be too kind. Yes, the additional, if occasionally rather gossipy, focus that Lynne Olson puts on some of the critics of appeasement who rallied around Churchill is welcome (she's particularly good on the studied ambiguity of Anthony Eden, the former foreign minister who had resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in early 1938), but for the most part, the story she tells is as dated as Chamberlain's frock coat. More morality play than serious study of the past, and riddled with the clichés of class warfare, it's a version of events that had already found its definitive form by 1940 with the publication of "Guilty Men," a fierce, best-selling tract by the pseudonymous "Cato" (in reality, a triumvirate led by Michael Foot, a young journalist who later became leader of the Labour Party).

"Guilty Men" was brilliantly written, brilliantly persuasive, and brilliantly unjust. Designed to saddle Britain's Tories with responsibility for the mess in which the country found itself after the collapse of France, while at the same time carefully exonerating the Left from any meaningful share of the blame, this cunning polemic succeeded to an extent that even its shrewd, deft, and manipulative authors cannot have expected. It helped pave the way for the crushing defeat of the Conservative Party (even with Churchill at its head) in the 1945 election, and it shaped the way that Britons thought of the disastrous run-up to the war. More than six decades later, it still does.

It's no surprise that it played so well. By making scapegoats of toffs and Tories, Cato spared the rest of the British people the embarrassment of asking themselves what exactly they had been doing while the threat from the Third Reich grew. It was, after all, a period in which Britons in their millions had not only participated in 1935's unofficial "Peace Ballot" (collective security, "effective" sanctions, you know how it goes), but had also, after three more years of Hitler, taken to the streets to celebrate the deal Chamberlain cut at Munich. Tellingly, Ms. Olson has nothing to say about the former. The latter she attributes to Chamberlain's manipulation of both the press and his own party.

To an extent she's right. Some of the most interesting passages in "Troublesome Young Men" are those that show how the prime minister was nothing like the ineffective weakling of popular legend, at least when it came to domestic politics. Despite that, Chamberlain could not (even had he wanted to) afford to ignore the concerns of an electorate ready to pay almost any price to avoid a fresh European war. Any price, that is, other than spending money soon enough on the rearmament that might have made a difference.

Might? Part of the appeal of "Guilty Men" was that it had no room for such shilly-shallying. To the armchair strategists that wrote it, all was clear. This should have been done. That should have been tried. It was an approach, helped by hindsight and the luxury of the hypothetical, which came with an additional advantage. Suggesting that the solutions to the conundrum posed by Hitler were obvious implied that the failure to adopt them (until too late) must have been the result of stupidity, stubbornness, naïveté, or something more malign. In essence, it presumes some sort of guilt. Like many before her, Ms. Olson has gratefully applauded that verdict.

In reality, the situation was far more complicated. There was indeed plenty of stubbornness, naïveté, and the rest of it to go round in the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments, but the idea that there were any easy answers to the problems that Britain faced is nonsense. For example, there was no significant political constituency for military action against Germany until at least the Anschluss, and even if there had been, how would it have been paid for? A few years after the worst of the Great Depression, there was little money to spare, especially for a nation already burdened by bills for the defense of an empire. As for the failure to cooperate with potential allies against Hitler (another key element in Chamberlain's rap sheet), one, the USSR, was a hostile, genocidal dictatorship with, as the Finns were shortly to demonstrate, a feeble army; another, France, was thoroughly demoralized; and a third, Poland, was to last less than three weeks when the panzers struck. And America, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

Even if we put moral considerations to one side, none of this necessarily justifies what was done at Munich, but it helps explain it. That Ms. Olson has largely chosen to ignore these issues is a shame. She's a skilled and lively writer, quite capable of handling complex topics in a way that would not deter the popular audience at which this book (with its occasional lapses into Harlequin baroque) is clearly aimed. As it is, "Troublesome Young Men," which finds itself on much firmer ground when its author turns her attention to the Phony War and Chamberlain's fall, is a fair read, but, all too often, an unfair history.

Turning Myth Into Cartoon

300

The New York Sun, March 9, 2007

Hades, the ancients warned us, is dreary, morose, and subdued, its only pleasure a certain resigned tranquility. However, once news of Zack Snyder's "300," an account of the battle of Thermopylae, reaches the shades of the Spartan dead, even that sad calm will be gone. There will be shouts of rage, muttered, if laconic, threats and most ominous of all, the sound of swords being unsheathed as the finest fighting men of all time set off to hunt down Mr. Snyder, this son-of-a-Helot who should have stuck to the zombies he handled so well in "Dawn of the Dead."

"300" marks the second time the work of comic book maestro Frank Miller has been brought directly to the big screen. The first, 2005's "Sin City," a flawed masterpiece jointly directed by Mr. Miller and Robert Rodriguez, was undercut by poor plotting and incoherent showiness, yet redeemed by a wild visual élan. If "Sin City" was a flawed masterpiece, "300" is just flawed.

For that, much of the blame must lie with Mr. Miller himself. Best known for the way in which his "The Dark Knight Returns" revived DC's flagging "Batman" franchise, he is an artist most effective within genres characterized by excess and self-caricature. "Sin City," an inspired, loopy riff on hard-boiled fiction and film noir, worked in ways that "300," based on real events, never could.

It's telling that Mr. Snyder has described Mr. Miller's "300" as an attempt to turn history into mythology — telling because it reveals how little he understands what Thermopylae means. Fearless, implacable Leonidas already is myth, legend, and dream: He has been since those days in 480 B.C. when he, his 300 Spartans and a few thousand soldiers drawn from other Greek states, took on the vast army (numbering at least 250,000, though other estimates are far higher) assembled by the Persian king Xerxes to invade and subjugate Greece. In the end, Leonidas's tiny force was overwhelmed, but his heroic stand not only helped inspire the Greek victories that followed, but set an example that has shone, scarlet and bronze, grand and bloody, for the best part of 3,000 years.

Leonidas had, wrote Herodotus, "proved himself a very good man." No more needed to be said. The Spartan's deeds spoke for themselves. Compared with this, the bombast and bluster of the Miller version is simply tacky, a transformation of history not into myth, but kitsch.

Under these circumstances, Mr. Snyder's decision to stay so faithful to Mr. Miller's graphic novel ( Mr. Miller is an executive producer of the movie) can only be described as unfortunate. Even more dismayingly, the changes he has made are generally for the worse. Thus Xerxes's Immortals, his finest troops, are reduced to grotesques, stray orcs shipped in from Mordor. The rest of the Persian king's horde now features so many savage freaks and oddball beasts that Leonidas looks to be doing battle not with the might of Asia, but against the worst of Barnum & Bailey.

Yes, the manner in which the filmmaker has reproduced the look and feel of Mr. Miller's work is technically impressive (almost all the sets were "virtual"), but "300" would have benefited from concentrating less on the temptations of the digital backlot and more on old-fashioned storytelling. No less damaging, despite the occasional striking image, "300" is as aesthetically clumsy as it is technologically sophisticated. For the most part its visual style is an unhappy mix of Leni Riefenstahl and Iron Maiden, a ridiculous combination better imagined than seen. Despite some enjoyably gratuitous naked writhing (Oracle Girl!), bringing this tawdry vision to the big screen has almost nothing to be said for it, other, I suppose, than as another useful reminder that slow-motion shots of macho men walking together is a cliché that should have been killed off somewhere between "The Wild Bunch" and "Armageddon."

The cast does what it can, but it's not much. If most of the actors, including the bellowing, bellicose, and ripped Leonidas (Gerard Butler), appear to have been torn from the pages of a comic book, that is hardly their fault. They have been. On the plus side, Lena Headey as Leonidas's Queen Gorgo, fierce, foxy, and sort of feminist (well, they had to do something to persuade a few, you know, girls, to come to this movie), manages to deliver a performance verging on the three dimensional: She succeeds in emerging with dignity, if not clothing, intact.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Santoro as a Xerxes of indeterminate ethnicity, omnivorous sexuality, and undeniable power manages to steal every scene in which he appears. His god-king may owe rather too much for comfort to Jaye Davidson's Ra in "Stargate," but the final sequences he shares on-screen with Leonidas appear to hint that the tensions between the two men may be erotic as well as military, a concept that cannot be faulted for its novelty.

Intriguing though that idea might be, if there is any genuine interest to be derived from "300," it lies in seeing the extent to which it reflects (or doesn't) the conflict that dominates our own era. The last time Hollywood tackled Thermopylae was "The 300 Spartans" (1962), a blunt Cold War allegory from a time when the threat from the east came from Moscow, not Mecca. This updated version is not so direct. It couldn't be: Mr. Miller's original work predates the fall of the twin towers. But look at the movie a little more closely and the imagery of our current troubles creeps into view, not least in the way some of Xerxes's warriors opt for the Al Qaeda/ninja chic more usually associated with Osama bin Laden's training camps.

Perhaps even more revealing is the way that, like the graphic novel, the movie fails to address the central paradox of Thermopylae: the fact that freedom's most effective defenders cared so little for individual liberty themselves. Of course, in our age of Guantanamo and Jack Bauer, that's a question that still resonates. If Mr. Snyder has chosen to dodge it, he's not the only one.