Her Inner Brezhnev

National Review, November 15, 2018

There was a time when Angela Merkel, like many young East Germans, would don a special shirt (blue rather than brown; different dictatorship) and parade for the Party, sometimes (not everything had changed) by torchlight. On occasion, she and her Free German Youth comrades would have marched behind banners carrying the portrait of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader whose extended (1964–82) rule has more than longevity in common with her own.

No, no, Merkel is not a Communist. Nor does she order the invasion of other countries; she merely bullies them. She may have participated in the overthrow of Italy’s unruly and unacceptably euroskeptic Silvio Berlusconi, but no tanks were deployed, just “suggestions” made menacing by Italian fears of what the bond-market vigilantes might do.

Look deeper, however, and unsettling similarities come into view. That Brezhnev was no democrat is hardly a surprise. That Merkel, the bien-pensant “leader of the free world,” has repeatedly demonstrated her disdain for democratic propriety is, by contrast, disappointing. Perhaps it is a legacy of her East German upbringing, but, whatever the cause, it has poisoned both the politics of the country she leads and those of the EU, the misbegotten union that Germany dominates with a mixture of passive aggression, money, and size.

In the early 2000s, Brussels, compelled as always by the imperative of “ever closer union,” midwifed an ambitious draft constitution only to see it felled by French and Dutch referendums. When voters get a direct say on deeper European integration, they have a way of saying no.

That should have been the end of the matter, but Merkel used Germany’s tenure of the EU’s rotating presidency (it’s complicated) to cobble together the Lisbon Treaty, a sly pact that reproduced the spurned constitution in every material respect but was structured in such a way that pesky referendums could be dodged everywhere other than reliably awkward Ireland. No matter: The Irish rejected the treaty in one referendum but, engulfed by the financial crisis, were cajoled into changing their minds.

The treaty became law, but, not for the last time, Merkel had underestimated the consequences of paying so little attention to popular feeling. Lisbon, which helped pave the way for Brexit, reinforced many Europeans’ anxiety that the EU was slipping into post-democracy, a perception later bolstered by Merkel’s role in the euro’s long ordeal and, more recently, by her efforts to bludgeon other EU countries into accepting more of the migrants and refugees she so carelessly welcomed in 2015.

Some of Merkel’s actions in the latter two instances were a straightforward defense of German national interests. But her insistence on Lisbon was another reminder that, at some level, this supposedly pragmatic politician clearly believes that European integration is on the right side of history, a phrase, Robert Conquest wrote, with “a Marxist twang.” If so, she is not alone, but it is reasonable to ask whether in Merkel’s case this dubious proposition has been made easier to swallow by formative years spent in a land where Marxism was a part of the ideology of the state.

Merkel’s authoritarianism has taken an even more disturbing turn at home. Her instinctive dislike of dissent — the dark side of consensus politicians — curdled into something more sinister in the wake of that 2015 decision to throw open Germany’s doors. With mainstream media hymning the chancellor’s Wilkommenskultur, Germans uneasy about the influx into their country had nowhere to go but online, sometimes via the gutter, often not.

Infuriated, Merkel began by bullying social-media companies to clamp down on what she regarded as hate speech. When they did not, in her view, do enough, she looked to her parliamentary colleagues for assistance. The result, prompted also by scaremongering over “fake news,” the switched-on censor’s excuse du jour, was Germany’s social-media law — the notorious Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz. It represents an attack on free speech so draconian (for example, if a social-media company fails to take down “manifestly unlawful . . . hate speech” or “fake news” within 24 hours of a complaint, it can be fined up to 50 million euros) that it has provided useful cover for Russian legislators looking to shut down undesirable talk online, a development that would have amused old Leonid.

When Mikhail Gorbachev launched his program to overhaul the Soviet Union, he attacked Brezhnev’s “era of stagnation,” a label encompassing political as well as economic inertia. While Brezhnev was appealing to a far smaller “electorate” — the party elite — than Merkel has done, the key to the length of their tenures was (obvious differences aside) sticking with consensus and maintaining stability. As a strategy, it worked, but the stagnation that ensued contributed to the Soviet collapse. As for Germany, it is too soon to say.

By ending the experimentation of the Khrushchev years, Brezhnev shrank the political and intellectual space within which the regime could safely operate. When his moment came, Gorbachev saw a relaxation of party control as inseparable from a desperately needed economic reset, but, after Brezhnev, it was too late to change direction. If the opening for reform within the system had ever existed, it had closed.

Germany is not, of course, lurching toward a Soviet-style implosion. That said, Merkel’s capture of the middle ground, inspired by both personal conviction and strategic savvy, is showing signs of backfiring in ways that, if events oblige, as they well may, will undermine the centrist order over which she has presided for so long. The middle ground ought to be a battlefield of ideas. That is not how it has been under Merkel. By moving her center-right CDU so far leftward, Merkel has occupied much of the territory that the SPD, the leading party of the center Left, once called its own. The SPD’s displacement was accelerated by its participation in coalition governments with Merkel between 2005 and 2009, as well as since 2013. As partners go, she has proved to be something of a black widow. Between 2013 and 2017, the SPD’s support fell by over a fifth, to 20.2 percent, half its level in 1999, and it is still falling. The SPD now trails the Greens, who are hipper, socially liberal, migrant-friendly, NATO-not-so-friendly, eurofundamentalist, but — and this is a major but — environmental issues apart, relatively centrist on economics.

Upheaval has come to the Right, too. Merkel’s agreement to the bailout of the euro zone’s casualties drove some classical liberals, skeptical about both the single currency and the steps being taken to preserve it, to set up “the professors’ party,” the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — its very name a protest against Merkel’s stifling consensus — in 2013. The AfD saw some early success but shifted into a higher gear, losing much of its former leadership in the process, when it also became a vehicle for social conservatives and immigration skeptics who felt that there was no longer a place for them in the CDU or the CSU (the CDU’s considerably more conservative Bavarian counterpart). This was particularly so after Merkel flung open those doors — and clamped down on those who dared to demur.

The AfD’s transformation has given it a rougher-edged nationalist following. After a string of provincial successes, the party made it into the federal parliament in 2017, cutting into the vote won by the CDU and the CSU. In this October’s elections in Bavaria, home of the CSU, it took 10.6 percent. When consensus hardens into an orthodoxy enforced by establishment parties, voters, when worried enough, ignored enough, and silenced enough, look elsewhere.

Brezhnev’s era of stagnation was also an era of squandered opportunity. The USSR’s vast oil reserves could have made a substantial contribution to funding the reorganization of its economy. But, isolated within an increasingly archaic consensus, the Soviet leadership renounced even modest reform, preferring to anesthetize the population with (very) modest prosperity. The windfall was frittered away on massive defense spending, hugely generous subsidies of allies and satrapies, and a futile attempt to prop up a command-and-control system that could not meet the demands of a modern economy. The reckoning was not long in coming.

Whatever the criticisms that can be made of Merkel, splurging on the defense budget is not one of them. Her slide to the left may not have involved an embrace of the neutralism that runs through so much of German politics (Merkel is no fan of Putin and pushed for sanctions in 2014), but she has been reluctant to challenge either neutralism’s consequences — the armed forces have been so badly neglected that their combat-readiness has been called into question — or its assumptions. To be sure, Merkel has undertaken to increase defense spending (currently 1.2 percent of GDP), but only to 1.5 percent of GDP (still far below NATO’s 2 percent target) and only by 2024. Throw in the prospect of increased dependence on Russian gas once the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is operational, and after 13 years of governments headed by the alleged leader of the free world, it is uncertain how effective and reliable an ally Germany really can be.

On a brighter note, the German economy is booming, rich, and the envy of most of the world. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that in the 1990s Germany was, by its standards, struggling. Quite what changed is fiercely debated. Explanations include labor-market reforms and tax cuts (the latter, tellingly, opposed by Angela Merkel, then the CDU’s new leader) introduced by the Social Democrats under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s; the boost to Germany’s crucial export sector from a concealed devaluation (the switch from the deutsche mark to the euro); the easing of some of the strains associated with German unification; and, since the 1990s, the manner in which more-decentralized wage-bargaining has increased flexibility (and, with it, restraint) over pay. This turnaround gave Merkel the latitude to coast, but, given her own less-than-market-friendly views and her determination to command the center ground, she was never likely to build on the Schröder reforms. And she has not. Sometimes, such as by the introduction (in 2015) of a uniform minimum wage across the country, she has even subverted them. Business remains heavily regulated, a hurdle that goes some way toward explaining the relatively low levels of capital investment by German companies in their own country. That investment shortfall has, in turn, contributed to faltering productivity growth.

High taxation is another disincentive, and not only to investment. The writer of a recent article for the business daily Handelsblatt detailed how Germany had failed to keep pace with corporate tax cuts elsewhere. He blamed the complacency bred by the economy’s current strength, but that is only part of the story. Germany’s prevailing consensus has scant room for aggressive tax-cutting, something that Merkel has done nothing to change.

Meanwhile, a blend of panic after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan (which triggered a German decision to speed up the planned phase-out of nuclear power) and an enormous and hugely expensive program of investment in renewable energy prompted by panic over climate change (another critical element in the politics of Germany’s middle ground) has meant a dramatic hike in energy costs for industry and, even more so, consumers, while — central planning being what it is — failing to yield the promised environmental return.

So long as Germany prospers, none of this may matter, but a cyclical downturn, perhaps exacerbated by trade tensions, could well be approaching. That may cause difficulty in the immediate future — and it will not help the absorption of all those migrants into the work force — but longer-term concerns are beginning to surface, too. The old Soviet economic model was unable to cope with the changed world of the second half of the 20th century, and there are signs that its (admittedly immeasurably more flexible) German counterpart might not be doing what it takes to keep up with the evolving digital economy. This is so with basic infrastructure — according to a 2016 OECD report, under 2 percent of German broadband connections were fiber-optic — but also, more subtly, with the adaptation of business practices or, for that matter, products that lie ahead: With autonomous vehicles coming down the pike, will Germany’s automakers soon be facing off against Google?

That will be a problem for someone other than Merkel to contemplate. After the disappointing general election was followed by setbacks for the CSU in Bavaria and the CDU in Hesse, Merkel stepped down as the CDU’s leader. She will continue, she says, as chancellor until the next election. Maybe, maybe not — but there’s a suspicion that she sees hanging on in office as the best way of securing the CDU leadership for Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the party’s general secretary, a Merkel 2.0.

If “AKK” should win, the CDU will show that it has learned nothing from the failures of the Merkel years. Stagnation is like that.

The Propagandist and the Censor

National Review, June 21, 2018

In 1936, Oswald Mosley, Britain’s Mussolini-in-waiting, released a question-and-answer book that explained what a Fascist Blighty might look like. Freedom of the press? Fleet Street would “not be free to tell lies.”

Some 80 years on, German chancellor Angela Merkel, infuriated by criticism of her immigration policy (and, rather less so, by Russian disinformation), endorsed a new law, the catchily named Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, under which social-media companies must take down posts that constitute “manifestly unlawful . . . hate speech” and “fake news” from their sites within 24 hours of a complaint. Failure to do so can result in a fine of up to 50 million euros. Fake news is criminally fake if it amounts, say, to an insult, malicious gossip, or defamation — including defamation of a religion or ideology — sufficiently serious to contravene German law.  

Combine the potential size of the fine with offenses that lend themselves to flexible interpretation (much like that “manifestly”) and it’s easy to see that Berlin intended to scare social-media companies into an approach to censorship that goes far further than the letter of the law, a ploy that appears to be working. The government wanted to shut down talk that was not necessarily illegal but — after Merkel flung open her country’s doors in the summer of 2015 — uncomfortably unorthodox. The mainstream media had enthusiastically echoed the chancellor’s Willkommenskultur narrative of kindly Germans cheerfully greeting the migrants, but establishment unanimity was not enough for the instinctively authoritarian Merkel. Her less “welcoming” compatriots had found an audience on social media. That would not do.

Others have taken note. Singapore, no haven of free speech, is taking aim at “deliberate online falsehoods.” Malaysia has criminalized “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false.” (Intent seems to be irrelevant.) Russian lawmakers, immune as usual to irony, have proposed their own laws against fake news.

Brussels is on the case — of course it is — urging social-media companies to sign up for a voluntary code of conduct to combat what the European Commission refers to as “verifiably false or misleading information . . . [that is] created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public, and [that] may cause public harm.” That word “verifiably” has to do a great deal of heavy lifting, and, as for “misleading,” well . . .

Some of Brussels’s proposals, such as more transparency about sponsored commentary, are sensible. Others could conceivably reflect an even more cynical view of the European public’s credulousness than that displayed by the Kremlin. It takes only an elementary understanding of how politics works to grasp that the call for EU member-states “to scale up their support of quality journalism” will be used to justify lucrative handouts for journalism that toes the party line.

Another recommendation, “enhancing media literacy,” isn’t an invitation to corruption, but if the enhancement is to be anything more than a lesson or two in applied skepticism (no bad thing), instruction on how to “read” media will just as likely — thank you, Michel Foucault — enable fake news as do the opposite. Equally, turning to “an independent European network of fact-checkers” is a less-than-reassuring idea: Fact-checkers have all too frequently shown themselves prone to bias. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? was a good question 2,000 years ago, and it’s a good question now, but it’s not one that worries many of those leading the charge against fake news.

Meanwhile, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is pushing a law to battle fake news that includes allowing politicians to complain to a judge about the spreading of supposedly false information online during or shortly before an election. The judge has 48 hours to respond and can, under certain circumstances, block the offending item, a power that — call me a cynic — could, just possibly, be abused. Fake news, Macron told the U.S. Congress in April, is a “virus,” an attack on the spirit of democracy: “Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy, because democracy is about true choices and rational decisions.” That prettily complimentary, pretty delusional description (take your pick) leaves open the question as to who is to decide what is true — Quis custodiet? again — and where reason is to be found. The madness of crowds is a perennial risk, but a ruling caste convinced that it has all the answers can be more harmful still.

Macron’s words contained the seed of the suggestion that if the electorate votes on a basis its betters find to be flawed, the result is not “really” democratic. To follow that logic through, should such a result be allowed to stand? Macron, it should be remembered, is one of those now steering the EU, an institution with a tradition of either condemning or ignoring electorates that have voted the “wrong” way, or, for that matter, nudging them back to the polling booth for a do-over.  

There is no reason for any complacency here in America. The First Amendment’s protections have never been absolute. While they have been extended a long way, that process can go into reverse. When intellectual fashions change, judicial precedent can be more elastic than is often assumed. And intellectual fashions have changed. The assault on free speech has long since burst out of the academy and, somewhat paradoxically, has been given extra heft by the ubiquity and indispensability of social media, private terrain where the First Amendment has very little application.

On Facebook, on Twitter, and elsewhere, the apparatchiks of Silicon Valley’s new class rule on the limits of free expression, a power they may well eventually have to share — not necessarily unhappily — with politicians who are no fonder of the wrong sort of talk than they are. Fake news could well give Washington a pretext to join in the effort to tame social-media speech. Always on the lookout for another excuse for 2016, Hillary Clinton has described fake news as a “danger that must be addressed,” and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) told social-media companies last fall that if they didn’t sort out the problem, “we will.”

That’s not a threat to take lightly. Social media are now an essential part of the public square. To the extent that social-media comments are policed, the approach taken — arbitrary, opaque, and (at least to a degree) biased — is, given the market power of the social-media giants, disturbing. But the alternatives are worse. What the market gives, the market can take away. What the state takes, it generally keeps. Giving the government the power directly (or indirectly, via proxies) to determine what social-media content is true — and, in some cases, to suppress that which it has decided is false — would be a menace to free speech too obvious to need explaining.

“Regular” media meanwhile would be untouched, protected, as they should be, by the First Amendment. They would also be left to promote their takes (far from monolithic, but still) on events with fewer challenges than they now face, a windfall that would be as unhealthy as it is undeserved. The First Amendment is not a guarantor of objectivity. In an age when the boundaries between reporting and opinion in newspapers, television, and radio have faded, disinformation is, to put it mildly, not confined to games played within the social-media feeds of the unwary.

When Donald Trump describes this more respectably sourced disinformation — and anything else he considers (or pretends to consider) to be disinformation — as “fake news,” he is sending a message that works on several levels. Hijacking a term that was already resonating with the public is not only a clever way of rebottling an old whine — politicians are forever grumbling about the press — but a way of making it stronger. It is not just an attack on the story, but on its source — and on what’s left of its authority. CNN? No better than Facebook.

Broadening the definition of fake news is also a subtle undermining of the argument that Trump owes his presidency to media manipulation. If anything, it carries with it the hint that he was elected despite fake news, not because of it. It may also, one day, provide a way for either Left or Right to begin the erosion of the First Amendment protections the press now enjoys. According to a Harvard-Harris poll from May of last year, two-thirds of voters believe that the mainstream media publish fake news, and that survey was by no means an outlier.

Treating the partisan dishonesty of the news media and the real (so to speak) “fake news” as, basically, the same also risks overlooking the genuine hazard that the latter may represent. For now (but only for now) its most potentially dangerous manifestation comes from the dezinformatsiya orchestrated by a Kremlin once again appreciative of how destabilizing disinformation can be — and clearly aware of how neatly such disinformation can be slipped into social media. How much influence Russian fake news (a handy scapegoat for disconcerting electoral outcomes) has really had so far can be debated, but there is no doubt that the sophistication of its targeting and the quality of its material is going to improve rapidly. The day that a computer-generated Trump makes a fake but (to the right audience) truly incendiary speech mocking, perhaps, the prophet Mohammed is not far away.

The prospect is terrifying. But so is one element in the likely response: the unleashing of censors to block this, ban that, and, presumably, fight a long Pac-Man struggle with bots as the prey. But this cyberwar would probably do more damage to what’s left of the West’s free speech than to the lies of our opponents. Fake news can be suppressed or, infinitely better, rebutted, but, as it speeds through the Web, it can travel many times around the world before the truth has time to boot up.

The Gutenberg galaxy is expanding exponentially, generating unprecedented amounts of information — true, false, and everything in between. To the extent we can trust it — Quis custodiet? — technology may help identify what is reliable and what is not (I met the other day with the CEO of a start-up using artificial intelligence to rate the reliability of those posting on social media), but technology will have to contend with psychology. Our quest for objectivity is less diligent than we like to think. We are all too ready to collaborate in our own deception. Some stories are too good not to believe, some stories are too satisfying to unpack (how many birthers were there again?), some gossip is too good not to pass on, and confirmation bias remains as seductive and reassuring as it ever was.

Skepticism will help, but too much of it — easy enough in an era when old media are regarded with suspicion and new media are difficult to process, let alone trust — can lead to a perverse gullibility. In a 1974 interview, Hannah Arendt observed that “a people that no longer can believe anything . . . is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

Fake news is a challenge that the West must get right. So far, there’s little reason to expect that it will.

Not just remembrance

On Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada, Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig, A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré & The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi.

The New Criterion, May 1, 2018.

The past, wrote William Faulkner, lending a hand to generations of scribblers struggling for a first line, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” That was seldom more true than in Germany immediately after the Second World War, the setting for Nightmare in Berlin, the penultimate— and posthumously published—novel by Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947), the German writer better known as Hans Fallada, a pen name cobbled together from two of Grimm’s tales. This uneven but compelling book initially appeared in 1947 as Der Alpdruck (The Nightmare), but it was first translated into English (by Allan Blunden) in 2016 and released in the United States last year. Presumably adding Berlin—a city with a dark grip on the Western imagination—to the title was to boost the book’s sales, and to connect it to its successor, the better-known Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone). This became an English-language bestseller after its first translation (in 2009) and the award of a new title—Alone in Berlin—featuring that bookstore-bait burg along the Spree.

Even by the questionable standards of the creative class, Fallada had a rocky start. Highlights included two failed suicide attempts, the first of many sanatorium stints, murdering his opposite number in what may or may not have been a suicide pact, speedy discharge from the army in 1914 (in retrospect, a spot of luck), alcoholism, and drug addiction (both were problems for much of his life), and two terms of imprisonment for embezzlement. His first novel came out in 1920, after another go at suicide, but before he took up theft. By the beginning of the 1930s, however, Fallada was enjoying some success, notably with Little Man, What Now? (1932), in which he used the plight of one couple to illustrate the effects of the economic crisis that plunged the Weimar Republic into a night it could not survive.

Fallada’s decision to keep on in Germany after the Nazi takeover—and the sporadically squalid compromises that choice involved—contributed to the postwar eclipse of his reputation abroad. He expressed some support for the Nazis early in their rule (“this is the party which will save Germany from chaos”) but never joined them and soon lost whatever sympathy he’d had for their regime. Despite that, he largely avoided trouble by mainly confining himself to non-political fare, although Wolf Among Wolves (1937), focused yet again on Weimar woes, had the dubious distinction of being both praised by Goebbels (“a super book . . . . That fellow has real talent”) and being filmed for East German television.

Nightmare in Berlin draws heavily on Fallada’s existence amid the ruins of the Third Reich. Like Fallada, its hero (if that is the word), Dr. Doll, is a writer haunted by the sporadically squalid compromises he has made. Like Fallada, he shared a weakness for morphine with a much younger second wife. Like Fallada, he spends time in rehab, including —yes, like Fallada—a stay in a clinic where he is the only man: many of the other patients were prostitutes under treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. Like Fallada, Doll is appointed the interim mayor of a small town by the Soviet military authorities. Like Fallada, Doll is overwhelmed by the task and retreats to Berlin, “a city reduced to rubble, burnt out and bled to death,” a city of scant rations, hardscrabble squabbles, “trickling debris,” and “rats, looking for something unspeakable in the basement.” And, like Fallada, Doll finds a literary patron, the head of a new arts association. Nightmare in Berlin’s Granzow owes a lot to Johannes Becher, a future East German culture minister, back in Berlin after years in the USSR as a guest of Stalin’s more congenial tyranny.

When Doll greets the incoming Red Army as liberators and hails them as “comrades,” the response is a “withering gaze,” a reminder that as a German he “belonged to the most hated and despised nation on earth.” This realization may account for the most striking omission in a book Fallada described as “a faithful and true account . . . of what ordinary Germans felt, suffered and did between April 1945 and the summer of that year.” Maybe, but when it came to mass rape by the Soviet occupation forces, the dominant issue—beyond simple survival—for many “ordinary Germans” at that time (the victims included Fallada’s first wife, to whom he had remained close), Fallada opted for silence. Perhaps he had found he could live with a fresh set of jackboots. Nightmare in Berlin was first published by Aufbau, a company set up with Soviet approval. Becher was one of its founders.

Nightmare’s prose, typically for Fallada, is unvarnished. The book is intrinsically episodic: “the great collapse,” Doll’s mayoralty, the return to Berlin, a battle over an apartment, the time in clinics, and ultimately a resumption of his career. The plot was never the point. Fallada explained that Nightmare was “essentially a medical report, telling the story of the apathy that descended upon a large part, and more especially the better part, of the German population in April 1945.” Writing it, he confessed, had not “been an enjoyable experience,” partly, I suspect, because of the guilt he himself felt, guilt that he expresses through Doll, a man complicit simply by his passivity in the face of a tyranny that had tyrannized him: Doll had been interrogated, arrested, and spied upon. The Nazis had “banned his books some of the time, allowed them at other times,” but although he was “appalled” by them, he “never did anything about it.” Fallada once wrote that he did not like “grand gestures, . . . being slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly . . . is not my way.”

Fallada had few illusions about himself or his compatriots. Asked by the Soviets to address the locals on the day of the Reich’s capitulation, Doll notes the rote cheers and raised arms—“the right arm still, in many cases, raised in the salute that had been drilled into them over many years.” His “nation . . . bore its defeat without dignity of any kind, without a trace of greatness.”

For all that, this sour, subdued, exhausted novel staggers to an unconvincingly uplifting conclusion:

And maybe people will learn something, after all . . . . Doll, at any rate, was determined to be part of this learning process. He saw his path laid out before him, the next steps he had to take, and they meant work, work and more work.

It reads better if “The Internationale” is playing in the background.

By this point Fallada was, in the words of one biographer, “a physical and psychological wreck.” He died in the Soviet sector of Berlin almost exactly six months later, in February 1947.

At around the time that Doll and Fallada were trying to come to terms with their pasts, Alexander Alekhine was avoiding a reckoning with his. In the early stages of Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows, Alekhine, with only one brief interruption the real-life world chess champion since 1927, is the solitary guest in a hotel in Estoril, Portugal. It is March 1946. A heavy drinker for decades, Alekhine is hard-up, in poor health, deep into his own endgame. He is also waiting to hear which Soviet master will challenge him for the world championship in a contest that also will be a proxy for a broader ideological struggle. A traitor to the radiant future, Alekhine had quit revolutionary Russia in 1921, never to return, never forgiven.

Framed as a book within a book (playing games with narration is something of a Maurensig trademark) and as fiction inserted into fact, the complex and atmospheric Theory of Shadows falls somewhere between historical reconstruction and a seductive reimagining of Alekhine’s last days. Its Italian author is probably best known for The Lüneburg Variation, an extraordinary debut published, encouragingly, after his fiftieth birthday. As they do in Theory of Shadows, chess and the Holocaust intertwine in the earlier (somewhat superior, more tightly constructed) book, which also contains references to Alekhine, most significantly this:

[A]nti-Semitic articles appeared with increasing frequency under the byline of the world champion, who . . . noted that after having been so long polluted by Jewish blood, the world of chess would finally recover its purity.

That alludes to a number of articles in the Pariser Zeitung, a newspaper published by the Germans during their occupation of France. Unabashed by inconsistency, Alekhine maintained—take your pick—that these pieces were not his work, or that they had been written under duress, or that his text had been doctored: a clash of excuses undermined both by their contradictions, and, some years after his death, by the discovery of interviews he had given to two Madrid newspapers in 1941. Among the self-incrimination: huzzahs for Capablanca, that rival of rivals, for “depriving the Jew Lasker of the world chess scepter.”

In Theory of Shadows (which was translated by Anne Milano Appel), Maurensig revisits the Paris articles, but adds more to the charge sheet, including Alekhine’s participation in tournaments in Nazi-dominated Europe and his relationship with Hans Frank, Hitler’s proconsul in Poland, a lover of chess and of genocide. Alekhine recalls playing chess in Frank’s residence. Was it “possible to dance the polka in the middle of hell”? Yes, Alekhine had concluded, it was.

And so:

At the end of the war, he was left with few friends: to the French [Alekhine had become a French citizen] he was a collaborator, to the Soviets a traitor; even the White Russians who had settled in Europe would not forgive him for having worked, during the Revolution, for the ministry tasked with expropriating the assets of emigrants.

The past parades through his afternoon dreams, but benignly: his mother, the czar, long-dead acquaintances, an agreeable contrast to “bizarre” or “terrifying” nightmares after dark.

A violinist, David Neumann, comes to stay at the hotel. “Alekhine found himself thinking that the man was quite likable. Despite his surname, which clearly disclosed his race.”

Ah.

Someone slides newspaper articles beneath Alekhine’s door. All “without exception” concern the Nuremberg trials then underway. A man and his wife—two more new guests—dine with Alekhine for the first time; the husband’s remarks grow progressively more probing. The wife, ominously silent, stares at Alekhine and then “abruptly [runs] her index finger across her throat.” It is an unusually melodramatic moment. Maurensig writes in a sotto style that reinforces the impression of a trap slowly but relentlessly closing around the grandmaster: appropriate enough in a book where chess, that most implacable of games, is, as in The Lüneburg Variation, a deity—or demon—demanding attention and much, much more.

The hotel gradually fills, the Portuguese secret police show up, a Russian is overheard discussing Alekhine on the phone. Another clipping, a photo, another dinner conversation: French hit squads are hunting Germany’s collaborators all over Europe. One night Alekhine hears someone fumbling with the lock to his door. The ratchet continues to turn, sometimes, maybe, only in his imagination, sometimes not. Alekhine dies alone in his room. Choked on a piece of meat. That was the official story, difficult to reconcile with the widely circulated photograph of the dead man, seemingly asleep in his chair, wearing an overcoat that would have been unnecessary inside. But that was the official story.

Theory of Shadows opens in 2012 with a novelist (with just a touch of Maurensig about him) explaining that he is in Portugal to research what he is convinced was Alekhine’s murder. Despite an Orient Express–load of potential culprits—including the Soviets and those French hitmen—he has been unable to decide who was responsible: “And I know that you cannot write a story centered on a crime without unmasking the killer at the end.” The pages that follow, written by Maurensig, a trickster-writer layering a narrative where reality has a way of slipping out of sight, disprove that. And Maurensig’s crumbling Alekhine—cold and narcissistic under the camouflage of a brilliant naif consumed only by chess—and the circumstances in which he finds himself, would be book enough without a death, let alone a solution.

In an epilogue, the novelist (whom Maurensig never names) meets the individual who discovered (“or so they wanted people to believe”) Alekhine’s body. But what he really saw, or so he says, was the aftermath of a murder. He then reveals who he thinks arranged the killing and their motive for doing so. It is right, this witness-of-something suggests, that the novelist is telling this story as fiction: “Perhaps only the imagination allows us to arrive at certain hidden truths.” That is what Maurensig has done. Perhaps.

Berlin, August 1978 © Andrew Stuttaford

In A Legacy of Spies, David Cornwell, the author better known as John le Carré, returns entertainingly, and with some relish, to his past—to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the novel that made his name. And the past catches up, unpleasantly, with Peter Guillam, a former agent first encountered in Call for the Dead (1961): the elastic lifespans and variable biographies of some of the Le Carré regulars who crop up in this book will niggle the pedantic.

Guillam is now retired in Brittany, “resolutely” fighting off the “accusing voices” that occasionally—the night is kinder to him than to Alekhine—“attempted to disrupt my sleep.” Then his former employers write, asking him back to London: “A matter in which you appear to have played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head.”

Appear to. Le Carré has not lost his ear for cautious bureaucratic prose.

When Guillam arrives at the Service’s “shockingly ostentatious new headquarters” (and so it is from the outside: disappointingly, I have never been in a position to assess the interior) across the Thames, it’s evident that time has moved on, and so has Leviathan. Different accents—Le Carré’s prickly sensitivity to the nuances of English class is as acute as ever—different, careful jargon (“assets” now, not “joes”), impersonal electronic security, more women, tracksuits, quietness, cleanliness, no windows, sealed windows, locked doors: “Somewhere . . . between Cambridge Circus and The Embankment, something has died.”

But the performance lives on—“Bunny . . . managed a half-squeeze of the eyes for friendly”—and so, for all that regrettable ostentation, does the parsimony. A flat is found for Guillam—in, of course, Pimlico’s Dolphin Square, a massive 1930s apartment complex famous for politicians, spies, and scandal, some of it true—at “a concessionary rental of £50 per night . . . set against [his] pension.” Ashe, the low-level operative who was the first to contact Alec Leamas on East Germany’s behalf in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, had lived there, too. Le Carré likes an old tune.

Le Carré’s writing before the Wall fell was marked by a world-weariness that periodically edged close—but not as close as is sometimes claimed—to calling down a plague on the houses of all the Cold War’s antagonists. Nevertheless, it is difficult to read A Legacy of Spies without detecting some sympathy for the hard edges of those who operated London’s vanished Circus. The stakes, after all, were higher back then. Regret, or, more rarely, guilt, was—generally—for later. Their successors are tough enough, but they have a sickening primness about them. They mouth, and some may even believe, the platitudes of a legalistic, self-righteous society with little awareness of, let alone understanding for, the cruel dilemmas of the past. Rather than risk too much embarrassment over that past, they are—times have changed, you see—willing to throw one (or two) of yesterday’s men under the bus. The embarrassment? The lives knowingly and unknowingly put in danger—and then tragically lost—in the interest of a cause rather more worthwhile than the avoidance of a scandal that in saner times would not be a scandal. A cause, writes Le Carré, acidly, if oddly oblivious of still strong sentiments east of the old curtain, that “the world barely remembers.”

And so, arriving in front of the block of flats that has concealed a safe house for decades, one of those investigating Guillam asks which bell she can press “without catching gangrene,” a phrase mixing contempt with an undeserved presumption of moral superiority. Guillam suggests that she press the one marked “ethics,” “Ethics being Smiley’s own choice for the least alluring doorbell he could think of.”

Smiley. He may have been transformed into a brand like Fallada’s bolted-on Berlin (“George Smiley novels” are now a thing), but it’s good to see him back, if only in flashback up until almost the end, conjuring up memories —to me, anyway—of Alec Guinness on the telly nearly forty years ago.

In one chair sits George Smiley, looking the way only George looks when he’s conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you.

If you have watched the BBC’s adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, try to read that passage and not think of Sir Alec. Gary Oldman can have Churchill: that ought to be enough for anyone.

This time Smiley is in the shadows. A Legacy of Spies chronicles a long-delayed aftershock of the events described in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Smiley, who planned that grand deception, is frequently discussed, but appears principally in those flashbacks, his presence only emphasized by absence, an absence that will be a challenge to preserve if the children of three of those killed as a result of that (in Leamas’s phrase) “filthy, lousy operation” —and what preceded it—get their way. They want revenge. It is perhaps indicative of where, perhaps despite himself, Le Carré’s underlying feelings lie, that, of these vengeful offspring, one is an unrepentant believer in the old East Germany, another is a thug, and we never meet the third at all.

“We were not pitiless,” argues Smiley. “We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity.”

Prospero has forgotten neither the magic of espionage noir (“there is a flicker to his smile like a faulty light bulb that doesn’t know whether it’s on or off”) nor the appeal of knowledge, real or imagined, passed on to us bumpkins by someone who was a real spy for a while: “The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine—just—where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.”

A Legacy of Spies delivers, if only near its finale, an unmistakable political message, particularly for Brits. Le Carré’s stories typically come with a subtext. There were those nods to moral equivalence between the Cold War’s two sides and, often, a revealing combination of class resentment (a souvenir of an upbringing on something of a tightrope) and center-left mandarin condescension. In the introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he brags that he was “writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote.” It was?

Le Carré’s politics have taken a harder, angrier turn in recent years, both inside and outside his books. Much of the grumbling is standard fare: wicked America, wicked corporations, wicked neocons, wicked climate change, wicked Thatcher, although an attack on Salman Rushdie added surprising variety. Rushdie should have, Le Carré advised, withdrawn The Satanic Verses until things calmed down: “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.”

Impertinent. So judges the mandarin, so rules the former Eton beak.

Naturally, Le Carré disapproves of—the impertinence of it—“that jingoistic England that is trying to march us out of the EU,” and his lofty disapproval permeates Smiley’s grand farewell in A Legacy of Spies, degrading it to a mandarin whine. No, Smiley says, his work has not been for capitalism (the appalled italics are Le Carré’s), or Christendom, or even, after a while, for England. It was for Europe (the appalled italics are mine). If he had an “unattainable ideal,” it was an ideal he still holds, that “of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason,” now managed, we must assume, by Brussels.

Can a fictional character be embarrassed by his creator?

When the Soviet empire collapsed, some worried that Le Carré would have nothing more to say. When North Korea failed to follow suit, the pseudonymous writer known only as “Bandi” (the name comes from the Korean for “firefly”), supposedly a member of North Korea’s state-controlled writer’s association, must have wondered whether he would ever see what he really wanted to say in print in his own land. Between 1989 and 1995, he had secretly turned to writing fiction that told the truth about a country where fact is drowned out by mandatory fantasy.

Nearly two decades later, or so the story goes, Bandi told a relative who was planning to defect about what he had done. Taking the manuscript—handwritten, bulky, and lethally incriminating—with her was too risky, but she agreed to try to send for it if she got out. And that is what she managed to do. The manuscript was smuggled out, and the stories it contained were published in South Korea in 2014 and translated into English (by Deborah Smith) last year. A collection of poems included in the same bundle of papers was published in South Korea a few months ago.

The Accusation’s American publishers, Grove Atlantic, concede that they cannot be sure that its author is not an emigré already beyond Pyongyang’s grasp. We do not even know for certain that it is the work of just one person. That said, there is enough circumstantial evidence, including the involvement of a respected human rights activist, and analysis of both the paper on which the manuscript was written and of Bandi’s language—like East and West German before reunification, North and South Korean have drifted marginally apart—to accept, for now, these stories for what they are said to be.

Bandi has been compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but the collection of seven short stories that make up The Accusation has neither the sweep of The Gulag Archipelago nor the heft of Solzhenitsyn’s best-known novels. A more fitting comparison might be Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales, terse, precisely crafted glimpses of horror, some just a few pages long, that, taken as a whole, provide a vivid depiction of life—and death—in Stalin’s concentration camps, a guidebook to one kind of hell.

Bandi’s more discursive stories are accounts of what, in North Korea, passes for ordinary life. The camps, the prisons, and the mass graves cast a deep shadow but are largely offstage—until they are not. Schoolchildren suspected of “counter-revolutionary tendencies” are forced to watch the execution of a victim, bound, gagged, and allegedly guilty of an absurd charge: smearing “feces on supplies that were to be exported to the Soviet Union.” It works: “Myeong-chol . . . began to feel ever more cowed and docile, rushing to obey whatever task his teachers . . . might set him.”

Bandi’s characters are cogs in a machine that straitjackets, exploits, and never ceases to watch them. They fear it, worship it, or both. North Korea has been run by leaders saluted by portents (the birth of Kim Jong-il was reputedly heralded by a double rainbow), and associated with superhuman feats and the miraculous. It is a country where the uncertain boundary between communist rule and theocracy has been blurred more brazenly than usual. In one story, “Pandemonium,” the elderly Mrs. Oh, struggling through the countryside to see her daughter, is suddenly summoned to meet one of the passengers who emerges from one of a convoy of passing cars.

[His] pale golden clothes seemed to shed a soft veil of mist . . . a man who was unmistakably “the Great Leader, Father of Us All, Kim Il-sung . . .”

. . . Mrs. Oh dropped to her knees about five paces in front of Kim Il-sung. As she did, words slid as smoothly from her mouth as a coiled spring being released.

“I respectfully pray for the long life of our Great Leader, Father of Us All.”

No matter who you were, if you lived in this land, beneath these skies, you would have memorized these words time and time again ever since you learned to speak; hence they flowed without a hitch from Mrs. Oh’s mouth.

“Oh, thank you.” This cheerful voice came from somewhere above Mrs. Oh’s head.

North Koreans know that the apparatus that contains them can turn on them for infractions that the paranoid logic—in one story curtains drawn in the daytime not only disrupt the obligatory unity of a streetscape, but could be a signal to spies—of totalitarianism can make into the gravest of sins. And as Bandi reminds us, such sins can endure across the generations, reducing the children and grandchildren of the guilty to pariahs, to “hostile elements,” to “crows.” The past is never dead. There is a timelessness about this collection and the state it describes. Most of these stories could have been written twenty years before or, for that matter, twenty years after Bandi put pencil to paper. Even the calendar has been torn out of history and rebased to the glorious year—1912—in which the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, was born on the very day that the imperialists’ Titanic disappeared beneath the waves. Just a coincidence, comrade?

Kim follows Kim follows Kim, and, even after his death, the first of them, Kim Il-sung, selflessly carried on as its head of state, “the Eternal President of the Republic,” a position slightly renamed now that he shares it with his son, the equally deceased Kim Jong-il. “If you want a picture of the future,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” It is a forever that North Korea has made its own:

One by one, columns began to form in the square, neatly divided like blocks of tofu. Each column accumulated new blocks in rapid succession, as though the phrase “without exception” were a long steel spit, skewering people in bunches and delivering them promptly to the square. Eventually, with only five minutes to go, the entire square was a sea of color, with columns stretching out on both sides of Department Store 1 . . . .

Senior state functionaries began to make their way out onto the VIP platform. A hushed silence descended on the square, which quivered with palpitations like the sea after a storm has just subsided.

Many of Bandi’s tales end with the protagonists turned against the regime, and, as far as we know anything about North Korea, the level of dissent has increased in the decades since Bandi wrote them, not least due to the famines of the 1990s. Nevertheless, that hushed silence still, for the most part, prevails.

Nothing has been heard of Bandi for over a year. Neither good news, nor bad news, nothing.

Gods and Monsters

Erich Kurlander: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

National Review, October 2, 2017

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, this volume shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

Kurlander contends that this supernatural dread was genuinely felt by “the Third Reich’s brain trust,” a claim that should be treated with some caution. When it comes to the supernatural, what people believe and what they say they believe are frequently very different — more so, indeed, than they might themselves understand.

When studying the translation of concepts of such malevolence into the deeds that became the Holocaust, it is easy to make the all too common mistake of treating the Nazis as a case apart, as an unparalleled eruption of evil. And, yes, there were aspects of the Third Reich — from the particular horrors it devised to an ideology that was as bizarre as it was sinister — that distinguished it from the other mass-murdering regimes of the last century. But take a step back and the similarities between National Socialism and its totalitarian counterparts on the left quickly become visible.

This is true of their shared “supernatural” dimension. All were essentially millenarian. Communist revolutionaries (nominally philosophical materialists despite a fundamentally mystical view of historical forces) would not have appreciated the connection, but it was there all right — the religious impulse is hard to discard — complete with the promise of a merciless sorting, after which the saved would march to a better world. Untethered to atheism, the Nazis could be more explicitly millenarian, referring to a “thousand-year” Reich. This number has, notes Kurlander (citing another author), “deep biblical overtones,” overtones to which he pays too little attention — a curious misstep in a history of this type, as is his relatively cursory handling of the Nazis’ knotty relationship with Christianity.

As Kurlander makes clear, the Nazis’ racial and occult obsessions did not come out of nowhere. The party that evolved into the National Socialists had roots in the Thule Society, a group formed in early 1918, focused on the occult, anti-Semitism, and, as Germany descended into defeat, politics. Its members sported a swastika in homage to the Aryans’ supposed Indo-European heritage — an important, if counterintuitive, theme that ran through much of esoteric German racism and was associated with the admiration for “Eastern” spirituality of the sort later felt by quite a few leading Nazis. The Thule Society (the name is a reference to a “Nordic” interpretation of the Atlantis myth) had in turn emerged out of a broader Germanic intellectual community that had wallowed in a swamp of Grenzwissenschaft (or “border science,” to give this nonsense — astrology, anthroposophy, “natural” medicine, parapsychology, radiesthesia, theosophy, and all the rest — a kinder name than it deserves), Aryan fantasy, and racial hysteria for decades.

There is no “right” side of history, no law that makes what we call progress inevitable. Other parts of Europe were also doing their bit to let the Enlightenment down. As Kurlander points out, it was a Frenchman, Arthur de Gobineau, who, writing some 40 years before the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, did much to popularize the idea of a superior Aryan race. Anti-Semitism was far from being solely a Teutonic vice. Kurlander accepts that border science had scant respect for borders but maintains (without satisfactorily explaining why) that Germans were more despairing of the growing ascendancy of scientific materialism than most Europeans, and therefore more prone to succumb to the “re-enchantment” offered by border science. If that was true before 1914, it was even more so after a war that shattered any illusions about modernity — and a defeat that brought humiliation, chaos, and revolution in its wake. As Kurlander tells it, “hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians” bought “occult and New Age literature,” read “border scientific journals,” and participated in “astrological and theosophical societies, séances and spiritualist experiments.”

A key element in this collective derangement was the suspicion — still flourishing in the West today — that modern science had torn apart the harmony that had allegedly once existed between man, nature, and the divine, a breach that could be restored by a more spiritual, holistic approach. More often than not, the results — such as “biodynamic” agriculture (a more straightforwardly superstitious variant of organic farming) — were largely innocuous, but the fact that there was a biodynamic “plantation” on the grounds of Auschwitz is a reminder of where the retreat from reason can lead, a lesson that, judging by our own overly relaxed response to resurgent pseudoscience (the anti-vaxxers come to mind) or political attacks on the scientific method, has not been learned.

The dream of restoring a lost whole — even one that had never seen the light of day — was particularly toxic when applied to ethnicity. Imagining a heroic national past (even one with mythic or supernatural undertones) was not confined to Germans, nor was a sense of being a cut above other races, but in Germany, such prejudices were unusually intense. Kurlander never specifies quite why, but the comparatively late (1871) creation of a unified German state — a state then partly unraveled by the Treaty of Versailles — must have increased the pressure on Germans, including, in different ways, their kin in the multiethnic Austria-Hungary of Hitler’s youth or the truncated Austria that was left after World War I, to define who they were. Among the ways they responded was by emphasizing who was not German, most notably the Jews, reviled for the threat they were meant to represent to the unity of the Volk: They were an Other that could have no place in a nation that wished to survive as a nation.

Even if he might occasionally exaggerate the contribution of the specific outlandish beliefs he describes to the catastrophe that unfolded, Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits. In remedying that, Kurlander offers a strikingly different and deeply disturbing perspective on the rise and subsequent trajectory of the Third Reich, and, most unsettling of all, on the numinous appeal of its Führer. Hitler both shared and channeled (some contemporaries referred to him as a medium) the discontents of a people so drastically detached from reality that they were seduced by a conjuring trick, albeit one in which the conjurer himself may well have believed. It was a dark magic so potent that it took an apocalypse to break the spell.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Prit Buttar: Between Giants -The Battle for the Baltics in World War II

The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2013

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.