Collected Articles
Caravan! Van der Graaf Generator! Yes! Genesis! To Englishmen of a certain age, just reading some of these old names will take them back to an era when progressive rock haunted the turntable, songs stretched out endlessly (three minutes would barely be enough for a proper guitar solo), and lyrics—well, they took themselves more seriously than
In the months leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, Joseph Stalin was, recalled one fellow revolutionary, no more than a “gray blur.” The quiet inscrutability of this controlled, taciturn figure eventually helped ease his path to some murky place in the West’s understanding of the past, a place where memory of the horror he unleashed was quick to fade. Pete Seeger sang for Stalin? Was that so bad?
This bothers Paul Johnson, the British writer, historian and journalist. Hitler, he notes with dry understatement, is “frequently in the mass media.” Mao’s memory “is kept alive by the continuing rise . . . of the communist state he created.” But “Stalin has receded into the shadows.” Mr. Johnson worries that “among the young [Stalin] is insufficiently known”; he might have added that a good number of the middle-aged and even the old don’t have much of a clue of who, and what, Stalin was either.
Mr. Johnson’s “Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer” is intended to put that right. In this short book he neatly sets out the arc of a career that took Soso Dzhugashvili from poverty in the Caucasus to mastery of an empire. We see the young Stalin as an emerging revolutionary, appreciated by Lenin for his smarts, organizational skills and willingness to resort to violence. Stalin, gushed Lenin, was a “man of action” rather than a “tea-drinker.” Hard-working and effective, he was made party general secretary a few years after the revolution, a job that contained within it (as Mr. Johnson points out) the path to a personal dictatorship. After Lenin’s 1924 death, Stalin maneuvered his way over the careers and corpses of rivals to a dominance that he was never to lose, buttressed by a cult of personality detached from anything approaching reason.
Mr. Johnson does not stint on the personal details, Stalin’s charm (when he wanted), for example, and dark humor, but the usual historical episodes make their appearance: collectivization, famine, Gulag, purges, the Great Terror, the pact with Hitler, war with Hitler, the enslavement of Eastern Europe, Cold War, the paranoid twilight planning of fresh nightmares and a death toll that “cannot be less than twenty million.” That estimate may, appallingly, be on the conservative side.
Amid this hideous chronicle are unexpected insights. Lenin’s late breach with Stalin, Mr. Johnson observes, was as much over manners as anything else: “a rebuke from a member of the gentry to a proletarian lout.” And sometimes there is the extra piece of information that throws light into the terrible darkness. Recounting the 1940 massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, Mr. Johnson names the man responsible for organizing the shootings—V.M. Blokhin. He probably committed “more individual killings than any other man in history,” reckons Mr. Johnson. Ask yourself if you have even heard his name before.
To be sure, Mr. Johnson’s “Stalin” will not add much new to anyone already familiar with its subject’s grim record. It is a very slender volume—a monograph really. Inevitably in a book this small on a subject this large, the author paints with broad strokes, sweeping aside some accuracy along the way. Despite that, this book makes a fine “Stalin for Beginners.”
As Mr. Johnson’s vivid prose rolls on, the gray blur is replaced by a hard-edged reality. Stalin’s published writings were turgid, and he was no orator, but there was nothing dull about his intellect or cold, meticulous determination. As for his own creed, Mr. Johnson regards him as “a man born to believe,” one of the Marxist faithful, and maybe Stalin, the ex-seminarian, was indeed that: Clever people can find truth in very peculiar places.
But what he was not, contrary to the ludicrous, but persistent, myth of good Bolshevik intentions gone astray, was the betrayer of Lenin’s revolution. As Mr. Johnson explains, Stalinist terror “was merely an extension of Lenin’s.” Shortly before the end of his immensely long life, Stalin’s former foreign minister (and a great deal else besides), Vyacheslav Molotov, reminisced that “compared to Lenin” his old boss “was a mere lamb.” Perhaps even more so than those of Stalin, Lenin’s atrocities remain too little known.
Over to you, Mr. Johnson.
The finest English-language portrayal of the fate that came calling for the Baltic States in 1939 is William Palmer’s “The Good Republic,” a short novel written on the eve of the breakup of the U.S.S.R. that evokes both the horror that engulfed these nations and the monstrous dilemmas that the war left in its wake. Early in its pages, an aging émigré, back in his homeland after nearly 50 years, ruefully remembers how his (unnamed) Baltic country had, for a while, led “a charmed life . . . between mad giants.” That characterization is recalled in the title of Prit Buttar’s history of what happened when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia carved up northeastern Europe between them before turning on each other.
The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 consigned the Baltic trio of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to Moscow’s sphere of influence. Mr. Buttar, a British physician and independent military historian, recounts how these three small countries were first forced to accept Soviet garrisons and then incorporated into the U.S.S.R. in August 1940 after elections that were as bogus as the choreographed “popular” revolutions that preceded them. The arrests, deportations and executions that followed were the standard Stalinist script.
When the Germans invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, they quickly rid the Baltic States of their Soviet occupiers and were initially welcomed as liberators. This was an illusion that the countries’ Jews obviously didn’t share. Though Estonia had only a tiny Jewish minority, about 5% of the Latvian population (some 95,000 people) was of Jewish descent, as was around 9% of Lithuania’s (roughly 250,000). Most of these people were dead at the end of 1941, murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, German mobile killing squads.
The perception that the Jews had collaborated with Soviet rule reinforced older prejudice, and all too frequently Hitler’s butchers had local assistants. Mr. Buttar relates the dismal chronicle of the Baltic’s willing executioners with some skill, if, perhaps, with too little consideration of the way in which the Soviet destruction of the established political, economic and social order had eliminated the elements that might have put some brake on the descent into atrocity.
The danse macabre of ethnicity and ideology didn’t stop there. Had the Germans so chosen, they could have restored a measure of self-determination to the Baltic States and bought some strategically useful loyalty. But Hitler had other plans for the region. In his Teutonic take on manifest destiny, the indigenous populations, even purged of the Jews, offered little more than prospective labor for the greater German good.
As the Red Army pushed back and then west, though, the Reich’s leadership began to view the Baltic nations as a source not just of auxiliaries but of front-line troops. Latvian and Estonian formations were established within the Waffen-SS and fought in battles on the Eastern Front. Some of these recruits were true believers in the Third Reich, and some were simply opportunists. But a good number—knowing what the return of Soviet power would mean—signed up in the belief that they were choosing the lesser of two evils, their countries’ last hope, however remote. Others were the conscripts of any war, young men in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mr. Buttar neither judges nor whitewashes these soldiers. But after going through his carefully balanced account of the predicament in which Balts found themselves in those years, readers will find it easier to understand why today’s reunions of Baltic Waffen-SS veterans, which include an annual parade through Riga, the Latvian capital, trigger not only outrage but also a degree of local approval.
The Red Army re-invaded the Baltic States in 1944 and in a sequence of brutal autumn battles evicted the Germans from Estonia and Lithuania. Several hundred thousand troops were cut off in Latvia’s “Courland Pocket” and continued fighting until war’s end in May 1945. Mr. Buttar is himself an army veteran, and it is from the military perspective that he relates the savage unraveling of the Baltic world during World War II’s last year. There’s plenty here on weaponry, on tactics and strategy, on the movement of units—and, as so often in volumes of this type, who won what decorations for what actions. Thus we are told that in January 1945 the soldiers holding out with desperate effectiveness against the Soviets were each “awarded a ‘Kurland’ badge or armband.” But what conditions were truly like in that cutoff redoubt has largely to be guessed from glimpses of exhausted men, references to continuous fighting and laconic details of “increasingly meaningless” battles fought on until the fall of the Reich many months later.
The Soviet “liberation” of the Baltic States, and their postwar reabsorption within the U.S.S.R., restarted the cruel machinery of Stalinist repression on an even more hideous scale than before. Unlike in 1940, however, tens of thousands of Balts took to the forests and staged a lonely epic of defiance often overlooked by historians. To his credit, Mr. Buttar takes his story through the postwar period. Partisan activity peaked in the mid- to late 1940s but was severely hampered by a wave of mass deportations—over 90,000 Balts were sent to Siberia in 1949. Despite this blow to its base, the resistance struggled on, outnumbered and outgunned, well into the next decade. They were hoping for effective Western support. It never turned up.
If Jeeves had ever written a memoir of his time with Bertie Wooster, it would have been discreet, faintly disapproving, quietly affectionate and just a tiny bit dull. Step forward Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, a Jeeves of sorts to the Rolling Stones for close to four decades, their “bank manager” but also, as he notes in his new memoir, the band’s “nanny, frequently, psychiatrist, on occasion.” Sure enough, his account of his years with Their Satanic Majesties is discreet, gently disapproving, resolutely unshockable, undeniably affectionate and just a tiny bit dull.
Yet, as an archly written comedy of manners, “A Prince Among Stones” has its merits. The prince hails “from a certain sort of distinguished background,” and, by Gotha, he wants you to know it. Fair enough to mention a lineage stretching back to a Duke of Bavaria who died, poor fellow, “repelling the Huns in 907,” but to conclude the book with page after page of Loewenstein genealogy may be a bit much for readers just hoping for insight into who did what to whom in Studio 54. On that, the prince is, for the most part, loyally, infuriatingly silent, preferring to pepper his paragraphs with names boldface only in the most self-referential of worlds, that of a European high society in which the participants are primarily defined by family and connections. When Mr. Loewenstein introduces us to one of his acquaintances, we quickly learn that his father “was married to . . . a niece of Aspasia Manos, the commoner who married King Alexander I of the Hellenes.”
The prince himself was born on Mallorca months after the launch of the Third Reich. His parents were somewhat bohemian Bavarian aristocrats, who were both also of part-Jewish descent, a fact that is only briefly alluded to in the book but which adds a dark resonance to Mr. Loewenstein’s carefully understated story of a privileged yet vagabond upbringing. He spent much of his early childhood in Paris until, at the age of 6, he fled France and the Wehrmacht for England. He eventually became a British subject but never truly left the Continent behind. By his 20s he was enjoying “a very jolly international time.” He shares anecdotes of a strangely antique midcentury, including grand hotels, Rothschilds, an Agnelli, two guano heirs and a Venetian countess—a roll call enlivened by traces of his endearingly bone-dry humor.
Read one way, the social whirl that Mr. Loewenstein records could easily be viewed as the last hurrah of a deracinated aristocracy, cut adrift from history by the fall of the empires their families had ruled and served. But this is no snooty tale of genteel decline. Dynasties that flourish for a thousand years do so for good reason. Mr. Loewenstein relates how, as a successful and well-connected stockbroker, he headed up a consortium to buy a London merchant bank in 1963. Deal done, “the dolce vita days were over,” he laments, but the bank fared well.
And then, in late 1968, “the art dealer Christopher Gibbs” (a description too bland to do justice to a character even Keith Richards remembers as “adventurous”), who Mr. Loewenstein had “met, in that wonderful French phrase, dans le monde,” asks if he “would consider taking care of the finances” of the Rolling Stones. Mr. Loewenstein’s wife, in the know thanks to her “reading of the popular newspapers,” helps him sort out who these ruffians are. Until then “the name of the group meant virtually nothing to me.” He had (of course!) already “tripped over” Mick Jagger at one of “the new style of informal parties,” an encounter that he, the grander grandee, had managed to forget.
This revelation sets the tone of slightly superior distance that the prince maintains from his unruly protégés throughout the book. There’s talk of “tomfoolery,” of “criticisable” behavior, of “sniggering like schoolboys.” And there is what may be the most spectacular washing of hands since Pilate: “The Stones had their own dressing rooms or caravans where, in the privacy of their own space, Keith, Mick and the other artists could do whatever they wanted,” he writes. “What went on behind those closed doors was entirely their business. I understood that it was part of their own particular way of preparing for a show.”
But perhaps detachment both from the rock ‘n’ roll circus and, to a degree, from the England in which he had settled helped Mr. Loewenstein see the potential in Jagger’s errant crew. In matters of business, “calm dispassion is essential.” A mildly artsy upbringing had left him open to dealing with musicians too scruffy and too chaotic for most City financiers of that era. He understood that in swinging London the old hierarchies had swung apart. Besides, he was “rather bored.”
What he discovered was that the Rolling Stones’ finances were a shambles. What he appreciated was that they need not be so. For all their countercultural baggage, the band was a business, one that needed running properly. Mr. Loewenstein spirited them out from under the grasp of the British taxman and, so far as he could, replaced one-sided commercial arrangements on which they were on the wrong side with ones in which they were not.
As much as Mr. Loewenstein did not like their music (“I never played a Stones track by choice”), he recognized their strength as performers, a talent that, he saw, could be profitably exploited—but by the band and not just by promoters and other scavengers. So here, too, Mr. Loewenstein took charge, not only sorting out the contracts, and the merchandising, and the sponsors, but doing his best to bring a little more Ordnung, financial or otherwise, to the touring process. A leading figure in an “ancient” (naturally!) Catholic order, Mr. Loewenstein even modeled the band’s meet-and-greets on papal audiences. The author’s famous ancestor had died in an attempt to repel barbarians. A millennium later, his descendant embraced them, enriched them and, on the way, did pretty well for himself.
In 1971, François Bizot, a French ethnologist living in Cambodia, was seized by Khmer Rouge insurgents. Held in a prison camp for 77 days and then freed, he is the only Westerner to have survived anything but the briefest brush with Khmer Rouge captivity. His interrogation sessions evolved into a twisted facsimile of friendship with the camp’s commander, Comrade Duch. Convinced that his prisoner wasn’t after all working for the CIA, Duch persuaded the Khmer Rouge leadership to let the Frenchman go.
Phnom Penh fell to the Communists in 1975. Not so long after, Duch was appointed director of the new regime’s Tuol Seng prison. There some 17,000 people—men, women and children—would perish over the next four years, frequently after torture designed to “prove” a guilt that no longer had to be anchored in any reality. When Mr. Bizot later discovered what his tormentor-savior had become, he agonized over Duch’s “monstrous transformation.” Partly in response, in 2000, he published “The Gate,” a powerful, if lushly overwritten, memoir of his capture, release and eventual evacuation with other foreigners from Phnom Penh after that city’s surrender to the Khmer Rouge. He reached the perversely empathetic conclusion that Duch had merely managed to “tame” the terror that must have enveloped him in the nightmare world of the Khmer Rouge, just as Mr. Bizot had come to control his fear while chained up in that camp. In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Bizot described a return to Cambodia prompted by Duch’s arrest in 1999.
“Facing the Torturer” (at least notionally) picks up where “The Gate” left off and culminates in the author’s appearance as a prosecution witness at Duch’s 2009 U.N.-supervised trial. But this short book—and for a short book it can be very long-winded—is rooted in Mr. Bizot’s prolonged reinterpretations of his experiences in the Cambodia of four decades ago. It is a reappraisal colored by incidents that stretch even further back, and the book’s first chapter features a meditation on a possibly necessary evil from his youth—the killing of a beloved pet—and on an incident when, as a small boy in occupied France, he was punished by his panicked mother for sticking his tongue out at a German officer. “I understood that fear could push anyone beyond the normal limits of their behavior.” There is also a recollection of the unease he felt walking past a slaughterhouse as a child and memories of his time in the French army fighting in Algeria.
Such moments are assembled as evidence for a broader case, not so much against Duch, whose individual responsibility Mr. Bizot readily accepts, but against humanity as a whole. We are all capable of horror, he wants us to know: a discovery about as startling as the realization that, as a species, we walk on two legs. In 2010, Duch was convicted of torture, murder and “crimes against humanity” and is now serving a life sentence. Mr. Bizot sees the verdict almost as collective alibi: “We never look under the mask of the monster to make out the familiar face of a human being.” Oh, please.
Mr. Bizot corresponded with his former captor and went to see him in prison. But what lies behind that mask remains, in the end, elusive. Duch’s sparse and dutifully contrite written response to “The Gate” is included in “Facing the Torturer” but gives little away: “Life forces us to do things we do not like doing.” Given the grotesque cruelty of Tuol Seng, there must have been something more than mere opportunity, or the chaos of midcentury Indochina, that turned Kaing Guek Eav, a former math teacher, into another of the 20th century’s lethal everymen.
Duch was a merciless jailer, killer and torturer. But he is neither insane, nor, it seems, a sadist. Nor was he just obeying the orders of a leadership too dangerous to defy. The best clues in the pages of either book (and “The Gate” and “Facing the Torturer” should be read together) as to why—and how—Eav became Duch are tantalizingly incomplete. We glimpse a “demanding and moral being” (he has now, make of it what you will, converted to Christianity) who becomes “possessed” by a cult that offers him the austere pleasures of purification and an intoxicating immersion in a quest for a liberation that was anything but.
Mr. Bizot explains how torturing was for Duch “part of a whole. It was nothing more than putting the ardor of his commitment into practice, the action being in proportion to the greatness of the revolutionary ends . . . a task that he could only carry out by making himself literally ‘out of breath.’ ” Doubtless, it became easier over time.
But of the cult that consumed this “man of faith,” there isn’t much analysis in either of Mr. Bizot’s volumes—just sightings of shadows and fragments of a greater malignancy. The “dreadful smothering” of Cambodia lurks, for the most part, either offstage or in echo or reflection. But the evil comes into clear view in Mr. Bizot’s terrible, telling details. In “Facing the Torturer,” he recounts the chaos of the refugee camps set up in Thailand for Cambodians as their country collapsed into darkness. The camp that the Khmer Rouge had—astoundingly—been permitted to run on Thai territory stood out for “its cleanliness, silence, discipline.”
It was there that some of the evacuees from the French embassy—”journalists and humanitarians”—came across a “half-naked boy tied to a post: He had fainted under the scorching sun.” They complained to the authorities, only to be told that the child was a thief. He had been caught stealing from “one of the bags of rice allocated to the collective.” Well, the camp was so much more orderly than anything else the visitors had seen that they found themselves “unable to utter any protest.” They muttered a few words of lukewarm praise and left. “I was,” recalls Mr. Bizot, “familiar with this kind of silence.”
By the late spring of 1945, Germany had lost a war, its honor and millions of dead. There was more to come. The Allies had decided that the country’s east should be carved up between Poland and the Soviet Union and that its German inhabitants should be moved to the truncated Reich. There they would encounter Sudeten Germans, Czechoslovakia’s second largest ethnic group, now also scheduled for deportation. In August 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed at Potsdam that these transfers, which had in any case already begun, should be “orderly and humane.”
They were to be neither, and they rapidly evolved into the greatest forced migration of all time. In total, 12 million Germans or more—mostly women and children—were stripped of all they owned and expelled from a vast swath of Eastern and Central Europe. At least 500,000 lost their lives (some estimates are far higher) due to neglect, violence, disease and the debilitating effects of freight wagon and forced march. From the Baltic to the Carpathians and beyond, communities that had flourished for, in some cases, more than half a millennium were smashed and scattered until all that remained were buildings and graveyards.
In “Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After World War Two,” R.M. Douglas quotes the comments of a British diplomat who visited East Prussia in September 1945: “The towns of Deutsche Eylau, Freistadt and to a lesser extent Marienwerder, as well as the smaller villages, are not only devastated but also almost empty,” he wrote. “These are ruins in the raw, untouched and untidied, looking like horses disemboweled in a bull-ring.” Deutsche Eylau, a part of the Duchy of Prussia since 1525, is, like the other two towns, a part of Poland today.
Mr. Douglas is careful, however, to guide his readers away from any notions of moral equivalence between these events and the Nazi slaughterhouse that preceded them. The treatment of the Germans was savage, cruel and frequently murderous, but it most closely resembled (in type if not scale) the “ethnic cleansing” that would tear apart Yugoslavia during the 1990s. It was no new Holocaust: The “Germanic vermin” (to borrow the words of one Polish general) were to be driven to the west, not annihilated. There were shootings, but no Babi Yars; camps, but no gassings. Auschwitz was reopened, and prisoners again shuffled through the yard at Majdanek.
Mr. Douglas relies rather less on the chronicling of particular horrors than many who write about atrocity, a display of self-restraint that somehow makes his narrative all the more chilling. To be sure, widespread fears of yet another German resurgence coexisted alongside a general acceptance of the idea of German collective guilt and the necessity of teaching the Hun a harsh lesson. But Mr. Douglas shows that the expellees were the victims of realpolitik as well as rage, righteous or otherwise. In 1943, Gen. Władysław Sikorski, the leader of the “London Poles,” may have been moving toward accepting a postwar Poland shoved westward (to accommodate Stalin’s theft of the country’s eastern portion) at Germany’s expense, but he was clear that there would be no room within it for a substantial Jewish minority. If this was to be punishment for Hitler’s crimes, it was taking strange forms.
Even before the war, in the run-up to the 1938 Munich agreement, Czechoslovakia’s president, Edvard Beneš, had, as Mr. Douglas explains, already proposed the expulsion of Sudeten Germans (sweetened with the transfer of some territory to the Reich). No good could come of a Teuton presence in his Slavic republic.
After years of hard-fought Nazi occupation, Tito’s expulsion of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans citizens was perhaps no great surprise, but Moscow’s seizure of a slice of East Prussia was just the latest in a series of imperial land grabs engineered by Stalin. And the fact that Hungary and Romania, Axis partners for most of the war, turned on their Germans (admittedly prodded by the Kremlin) is yet another reminder that more than just vengeance was at work. The removal of this prosperous minority offered opportunities for looting, leftist social engineering and, for the region’s emerging communist parties, wrapping themselves in the national flag.
Above all, the expulsions of 1945 were, as Mr. Douglas shows, just the biggest in a series that had begun two to three decades earlier in Turkey, Greece, Central Europe and, even, France’s recovered Alsace-Lorraine. In many respects, the expulsion of the Germans represented the belated full flowering of the ideas that had shaped the Treaty of Versailles (1919). If ethnic self-determination was to be the basis of new European statehood, the multinational countries established by that treaty out of the wreckage of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires were a task half-completed, an invitation to instability and, as the world now knew, to war.
Most important of all, the “resolution” of what was left of Mitteleuropa’s ethnic muddle dovetailed with Stalin’s strategic objectives in lands now dominated by the victorious Red Army. The fate of the 12 million was sealed.
What followed was peace. Rather than attribute that to the brutal redrawing of Eastern Europe’s demographic and political frontiers (Germans were not the only expellees), Mr. Douglas gives most of the credit to the continent’s long Cold War domination by the two rival superpowers. Fair enough, but it’s impossible not to note that the only part of Europe to dissolve into war in the wake of the collapse of communism was Yugoslavia, a transnational federation whose blurred internal borders and overlapping ethnicities bore a resemblance to the old Eastern Europe and, in some respects, also to the more federal European Union that is now, however uncertainly, under construction. Brussels should take care: History does not always repeat itself as farce.
Tallinn, Estonia, January 1995 © Andrew Stuttaford
Looking for someone to turn lemons into lemonade? In his own distinctive way, Alexander Theroux might be your man. In 2008, Mr. Theroux, an American author (among his works are "Laura Warholic," a novel, and "The Strange Case of Edward Gorey"), moved to Estonia, the northernmost Baltic state, to join his artist-wife, who was then in the former Soviet republic on a "dismally small" Fulbright grant.
It didn't work out. It was never going to. But it appears that Mr. Theroux did not so much succumb to despair as embrace it. In "Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery," he mines his disappointment and catalogs his discontents to impressively crotchety effect. He detested the "unforgiving darkness" of Estonia's long winter; and in a country where conversation can be more elusive, and the company cooler, than the wan November sun, he was infuriated by what he regarded as the locals' "pinched unforthcomingness" and "Völkisch suspicion." He was no more impressed by the natives' often "concave, vaguely worn-out appearance." He does admit to the extraordinary allure of Estonian women (a concession on a par with saying that the Grand Canyon is quite something) but then mars the moment by wondering why such "perfect beauty" should be found in such an unpromising place.
But the flak is not confined to Estonia. Other targets include Israel, Ayn Rand, America's treatment of the Arabs (positively Nazi-like, apparently) and the "dunce" George W. Bush, a "smirking, bowlegged . . . frat-boy" who reduces the usually inventive Mr. Theroux to cliché. Diluting this leftist blah are gibes hurled at secularism, Woody Allen, Oprah Winfrey and a number of the other Fulbright grant-winners (including a "pedantic sod" and "a textbook miser").
Narva, Estonia, February 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford
The book's subtitle promises a "ramble"—a gentle, bucolic word that gives no hint of the bedlam to come. Mr. Theroux does offer a lightning tour of Estonia's chaotic history and a discursive but weirdly gripping introduction to both the Estonian language and the country's "cuisine." (The scare quotes are Mr. Theroux's: In truth, Estonian food can have a certain Breughelian élan.) For the most part, however, readers are left to wend their way through an often beguiling maze of digression, reminiscence, yakety-yak erudition and occasional unreliability.
Tallinn, Estonia, January 1995 © Andrew Stuttaford
It doesn't matter too much that the "techno lezpop duo called t.A.T.u." was Russian, not Estonian, or that the tap water in Estonia is in fact fine, but Mr. Theroux's decision to play down the remarkable progress that this robustly laissez-faire nation has made since breaking from the Kremlin two decades ago is perverse, even if it fits in nicely with his depiction of the country as a Baltic Dogpatch. More strangely still, Mr. Theroux says little about the fraught relations between ethnic Estonians and the large Russian minority that Soviet rule left behind.
The gap left by those under-discussed Russians is filled by a large cast of characters united mainly by their lack of any obvious connection with Estonia and, frequently, distinctly faded fame. Thus, after noting the Estonian language's "primitive cast," Mr. Theroux turns his attention to Lord Monboddo, an 18th-century sage who believed that apes were essentially humans without the power of speech, enjoyably esoteric information that tells us little about Estonia but a lot about Mr. Theroux's magpie mind.
As Mr. Theroux eventually unnecessarily and endearingly explains, his book is as much about him as it is about Estonia. To be fair, amid all the grumbling he finds plenty to admire, not least the lovely medieval jumble of Old Town in Estonia's capital, Tallinn; the music of Arvo Pärt; the Grimm flair of Estonian names (Tarmo, Gerli, Epp); and, with characteristic contrariness, Vana Tallinn, a revolting liqueur of unidentifiable sickliness and bogus antiquity.
But like the country's many invaders—Russians and Germans, and, before them, Swedes and Danes—Mr. Theroux largely uses Estonia as a space for his own purposes, transforming this admirable country into a grotesque but clever caricature perfect for use as a foil. A rain-sodden backwater of "rough-hewn awfulness"—complete with "a queer language . . . rummy food [and] eccentric people"—becomes a stage for Mr. Theroux's verbal pyrotechnics and some fine jokes: "Regarding food, Estonians are accomplished generalists, like crows."
Tallinn-Narva Road, February, 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford
I laughed a lot, but guiltily. (I have been visiting Estonia for nearly two decades.) Then I re-read the book as the draft of a play about a grumpy, logorrheic stranger stranded in a strange, laconic land, an exercise that turned the joke back on Mr. Theroux. His frustration and mounting fury—by the end he even hated the cows—became the stuff of more respectably comedic delight.
But it is a comedy performed on a stage built on bones. Mr. Theroux is evidently appalled by the tyranny imposed on Estonia by Stalin in the wake of the 1940 annexation and, again, in nightmare reprise, upon its "liberation" from brutal Nazi occupation in 1944, even if he skimps on illustrations of the savagery involved. He understands how nearly 50 years of communist despotism still deform behavior in this "wounded country," in ways that cannot solely be put down to direct memory of atrocity. Some of the rudeness that Mr. Theroux encountered was simply the post-Soviet standard, seen from Vladivostok to Vilnius; and, as he grasps, some of the distance he felt in his interactions with Estonians was merely the product of the way that living under a dictatorship had curdled the reserve natural to the peoples of the eastern Baltic.
But his empathy only goes so far: Mr. Theroux wants the Estonians to overcome their "insistent and terrible past" by a collective act of "forgetting." A dubious suggestion made all the more so if it would mean bidding a final farewell to Estonia's prosperous interwar republic, the first period of self-government in seven centuries—the one time when Estonians were just themselves. The memory of that cruelly shattered idyll still haunts this indomitable people, but it inspires them too: Look at who we were. Look at what we did. Look at what we are doing again. Look at who we are. Mr. Theroux looked. But what he saw were extras in his own drama.
In 1945, Stalin seized East Prussia, Germany's venerable redoubt on the Baltic Sea, as a spoil of war. A portion went to the "People's Republic" that the Soviets had just created in Poland. He kept the rest. The last surviving Germans were killed or deported. The cozy old Königsberg of the Teutonic Knights—the home, during the Enlightenment, of no less than Immanuel Kant—was transformed into Kaliningrad—a bleak Soviet place named after Mikhail Kalinin, the token peasant who was titular head of Stalin's USSR.
Nearly 70 years later, the countries behind these borders have changed, but the frontiers have not, and will not. The Polish part is finally and truly Polish; the sliver of East Prussia given to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic is now a part of independent Lithuania; the rest of the old Soviet slice is a seedy Russian exclave surrounded by the European Union. The only Germans there are tourists, in search of an elusive land that lingers on in family lore and in the dreams of the dispossessed for a vanished, fondly imagined, past.
Max Egremont's idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, "Forgotten Land" is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.
From East Prussia's tangled history Mr. Egremont extracts the one essential fact: To the Germans who lived there, this was the frontier, a vulnerable salient pierced deep into Slavic and Baltic realms. The Teutonic Knights of the Medieval Northern Crusades brought Christianity to the Eastern Baltic, and Germans into the region. Those who followed in their wake settled territories that became the Duchy of Prussia in the 16th century, then part of the larger Kingdom of Prussia in the 18th, before being absorbed into the German empire in the 19th. For all that, East Prussia was never quite able to shake off a vaguely colonial economy and a vaguely colonial unease, an unease exacerbated when the Treaty of Versailles left it separated from the Fatherland by a slice of newly reconstituted Poland.
The mansions of the Junkers that anchored this world—and this worldview—seemed frozen in a pre-industrial age, on occasion boasting moldering grandeur and aristocratic eccentricity on an English scale—Carol Lehndorff, owner between the wars of an ancestral pile that dominated Steinort (now Sztynort, Poland) rejoiced in alcohol, rejected vegetables and "when alone . . . lived in two rooms on the warm south side of the house, contemplating his collection of Prussian coins." Mr. Egremont grants us glimpses of an austerely gorgeous idyll, of untamed forests and wide Masurian lakes, of a "softly lit horizon . . . [and] the pale-blue East Prussian sky," of ice-sailing regattas and sleigh rides, of marzipan at Christmas.
The central tragedy of this book is the arrival of the Red Army in late 1944, raping, butchering and smashing its way through a civilization more than half a millennium old in a bloodbath that was both berserker vengeance and cold ethnic cleansing. But he does not let mourning for what was so cruelly lost obscure the edge to the old East Prussian idyll, the harshness that came from the hardscrabble rural life, an authoritarian culture and, always, the anxious politics of a borderland. Versailles turned this mix toxic; Hitler made it murderous.
And Mr. Egremont is unsparing in his account of the consequences. Thus he describes a massacre of Jews on the beach at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) just before the Soviets came, a killing field that, like so much in this area, came to be stripped of its story. When bodies were discovered in the 1960s, they were assumed to have been slaughtered Russian soldiers. A memorial went up. There was a wreath-laying each year and a parade. Decades later, a former Hitler Youth, returning to the scene of the crime, put the record straight.
Then there's the tale of Walter Frevert, senior forest master for Herman Goering at the kaiser's old hunting grounds at Rominten (now Krasnolesye, Russia). Asked to extend the estate into conquered Poland, Frevert complied, evicting inconvenient locals, a comparatively mild rehearsal for his subsequent transformation of another Polish forest, an exercise that involved the destruction of 35 villages and killing or deporting their inhabitants. After the war, Frevert published "Rominten" (1957), an evocative, if evasive, book about the "paradise" from which he—and Germany—had been expelled. It was a hit. And then the investigations began. The hunter shot himself. An accident, some said.
For others, confronting the past was easier. In early 1945, Marion Dönhoff, a countess long opposed to Hitler, jumped onto her horse and rode west, stopping off at the Bismarck estate at Varzin (now Warcino, Poland: Old Otto would not be pleased) to stay with the widow of the iron chancellor's youngest son. Dönhoff remained for two days listening to reminiscences of empire "as the refugees trailed by outside and an ancient butler served bottles of vintage wine." Then she rode on.
Dönhoff next saw her homeland 44 years later. In 1989, she gave Kaliningrad a statue of Kant, a symbol of reconciliation between old city and new. It was well-received. She was well-received. But the friendliness could not mask what everyone knew. East Prussia's mournful coda was coming to an end. The dwindling band of exiles grows smaller, and their sorrows, at last acknowledged, give off an ever fainter sound. Some buildings, some ruins and some tourists will soon be all that there is to show for the grand Teutonic centuries.
On visiting Kaliningrad in the 1960s, the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote that the trees "whisper in German." They don't any more. But Max Egremont heard their last words.
Like the ideal victim in the rougher sort of slasher flick, the Motion Picture Production Code was clean-cut, gradually gutted and took a while to die. But there's no need to mourn. Its slow passing (the code was finally scrapped in 1968) threw open a door through which tumbled the horror that turned the 1970s into a golden decade for the darkest of cinema. Born again in "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), the Devil became a superstar in "The Exorcist" (1972). Meanwhile, monsters terrified the multiplex in movies such as "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), "The Hills Have Eyes" (1977) and "Alien" (1979), and Michael Myers established himself as the first of a series of serial killers busily butchering their way to a franchise.
Jason Zinoman's "Shock Value" chronicles the rise of what is sometimes called "The New Horror," telling its story through the films of the group of directors at its center, including George Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, the often overlooked Dan O'Bannon and, slightly to one side, Brian De Palma. The originality and intelligence of the best of these directors were remarkable. As Mr. Zinoman points out, they benefited from an interlude in which censorship was ending but the domination of special effects had yet to begin. They filled that gap with their imagination, creating spaces in which fear could grow and myths could thrive, most notably in Mr. Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974), hallmark and herald of a new American gothic:
"The last look on [Sally's] face sums up the spirit of the New Horror: crying, exhausted and terrified, she stares at the monster from the back of a pickup truck. . . . Raising his buzzing chain saw to the sky, Leatherface, wearing a jacket and tie, spins around under the blazing sun, thrilling to the madness of the moment."
Didn't we all?
Even if Mr. Zinoman's gossipy and engaging book won't teach students of horror much that they don't already know, it will serve as a fine introduction to the revival of a genre whose popularity had plummeted from peaks once crowned by Castle Dracula and Frankenstein's Tower, if not quite so far as its author would like you to believe.
As Mr. Zinoman tells it, outside grubby grindhouse and the drive-in's exuberant wasteland, the cinema of terror found few takers in the America that Eisenhower left behind, but that's to exaggerate. The genre had no cachet, so the h-word was probably more rarely deployed than it should have been, but how else to describe movies such as 1962's "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" More horror was out there than Mr. Zinoman admits, but it hid in plain sight.
Indeed, if "Shock Value" has one key flaw, it is that its author sometimes forces the facts to fit his thesis—of horror's death and rebirth—rather than the other way around. Mr. Zinoman thus makes almost no reference to television, a medium with room for twilight zones amid the Cleavers and their Munster kin.
Equally, with some savage Italian exceptions (films by Mario Bava and Dario Argento), foreign influences on horror's revival are largely overlooked. Mr. Zinoman regards "Psycho" (1960), with its brutality, killer's-eye perspective and avoidance of the supernatural, as a precursor of what was to come. He has nothing to say, however, about Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom": a contemporaneous British film that covered similar territory with greater sophistication.
Mr. Zinoman's thesis of a horror resurrection is greatly helped by the argument that what came back was not the same as what went before. "New Horror" is an elusive term, but the author does his best to distinguish it from both its predecessors and pure exploitation fare, not least by highlighting the way its directors liked to play with cinema and its lore. Cinematically literate movie-makers like Mr. Craven relished the self-congratulation implicit in making films that were often "about" film. The scenes in which the power-tool-assisted killer of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is bullied by his family, for instance, are meant to evoke the pathos that enveloped Frankenstein's original monster. Similarly, themes of voyeurism run through Mr. De Palma's work, challenging movie audiences to ask what it was that they were really doing in those auditoriums.
Such arguments can only be pushed so far. Mr. Craven's 1972 "The Last House on the Left" may (loosely) be based on Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," but the involvement of a chain saw reveals more the nature of this unlovely shocker than its vaguely Nordic antecedents. John Carpenter may have sprinkled "Halloween" with allusions to film history, but it was the panache, style and cleverness with which his tale of a lethal spree was directed (and, yes, that soundtrack) that made it a movie to take seriously. Above all, there was the nature of the killer, Michael Myers himself. He stood for nothing. He was nothing. He had no motive. He had no meaning. As Mr. Zinoman understands, it is this that makes him so terrifying. The audience is left in the dark. And that darkness is a frightening place.
But even this was anticipated, as Mr. Zinoman concedes, by the sniper in Peter Bogdanovich's "Targets" (1968), a strikingly smart film, co-starring Boris Karloff, that elegizes the passing of horror's old guard. As such, it signaled the arrival of the New Horror a little ahead of Mr. Zinoman's schedule, something that returns us to the question of what was so new. Mr. Zinoman never quite pins that down. Maybe that's just as well. To do so would be to create too narrow a framework for the sprawling survey of 1970s fright movies that this book really is.
And, unlike Mr. Zinoman, don't read too much into the success of these films. Humans have a taste for the grotesque and the gruesome. Our fairy stories, folk tales and literature are filled with ghouls, ghosts and slaughter most foul. The horror film has been around since the dawn of the movies. It should come as no surprise that the fortunes of the genre took a dramatic turn for the better by taking a blood-drenched turn to the worse.
Marszalkowska 1, Warsaw, September 1988 © Andrew Stuttaford
Twentieth-century totalitarian art did not just gild the cage; it helped to build it. Paintings, movies, sculpture, architecture and festivals of choreographed joy were vital elements in the Nazi and Communist attempts to remake man. It is key to our understanding of the nightmare states that resulted, argues Igor Golomstock, and deserves to be classified as a distinctive artistic genre alongside Modernism, of which it was both byway and heir. Like Modernism, totalitarian art was intended to help sweep away what had gone before, but unlike Modernism it was prepared to steal from the past to do so. The style of the 19th-century "bourgeois" academy was thus conscripted into the service of Reich and eventually revolution, as hallmark, teacher and, to us, cliché.
In his newly updated (it was first published in 1990) "Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China," Mr. Golomstock convincingly demonstrates how the overlapping aesthetic values of these superficially disparate regimes underlined how much they had in common. This was never clearer than at the Paris exhibition of 1937. In an unsettling preview of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Eiffel Tower found itself squeezed between massive Nazi and Soviet pavilions. Conceived as fusions of sculpture and architecture, both were expressions of brute power that played Neanderthal tribute to ancient Rome and were guarded by giant images, of the master race on the one hand, the master class on the other.
The strongest sections of the book concern the Soviet Union, as one might expect from an author whose career included membership in the Union of Soviet Artists and direct encounters with Stalinist brutality. Mr. Golomstock's father was sent to the camps in 1934, and then, some years later, his mother, taking the young Igor with her, signed up to work as a doctor at Kolyma, one of the worst of the Gulag's outposts.
Mr. Golomstock tracks the way that the smash-it-all-up trial-and-error of late imperial Russia's avant-garde (experiments that were paralleled, revealingly enough, by Italy's proto-fascist Futurists) initially meshed with the ecstatic starting-from-scratch of the Bolshevik revolutionary intelligentsia.
The extraordinary artistic innovation of the early Soviet years was rapidly replaced, however, by the stodgy conservatism of high Stalinist culture. The revolutionary past was sanitized, then mythologized. The hardscrabble present was transformed into a time of abundance by what Mr. Golomstock marvelously calls the "magic mirror" of Socialist Realism. The didactic, neo-Victorian paintings, the monumental if clumsily neoclassical architecture and, after 1941, the numerous evocations of martial valor and national pride, were all manifestations of an ersatz traditionalism that resonated with a people exhausted by decades of upheaval and were, of course, perfectly suited to the maintenance of a tightly controlled, rigidly hierarchical new order.
That said, for all Mr. Golomstock's experience and erudition, he falls some way short of conveying the ambition, allure and, well, totality of totalitarianism's cultural projects. While his examination of Nazi art takes useful detours away from the time-worn trudge through lumpen Arcadias and leaden Valhallas to include discussion of the centralized (Soviet-style) control of artistic production, he devotes relatively little space to the party's sometimes brilliant manipulation of design, its use of spectacle—Albert Speer's cathedrals of light—or, even, the films of Leni Riefenstahl. The whole picture never quite comes into view, and it was the whole picture that was the point.
It is no less frustrating that Mr. Golomstock allocates such a small portion of his book to China, the third of the 20th century's great totalitarian empires—particularly as he does find room for an addendum on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a revoltingly bloody but basically traditional despotism that left little behind it of artistic interest to anyone other than connoisseurs of peculiarly servile kitsch. By contrast, as Mao's Cultural Revolution gathered pace from 1966 on, the mounting political hysteria was reflected, channeled and amplified in and by the arts in ways still terrifying today.
There were the dazibao, the giant-lettered, largely hand-made "big character" wall posters that signaled its beginning. There was the hectoring banality of revolutionary opera. And there were the images—sometimes reproduced in their millions—that both drew upon Socialist Realism and transcended it, a process that culminated in the depiction of Mao as essentially divine. As a demonstration of the fundamentally religious nature of communism, the deification of the Great Helmsman is hard to beat, and it represents the logical conclusion of totalitarian art. Unfortunately, you won't find any direct reference to it in Mr. Golomstock's fascinating, painstaking but ultimately incomplete book.
