Archivo

Missed yesterday (let's say in honor of May Day, given the theme of this section of essays), so here are two for today.

“Victor Klemperer: Survivor”

The essay is noted as a review of Victor Klemperer’s The Lesser Evil: Diaries 1945-1959 about his life in East Germany. It is also, by default, a review of the earlier two volume set I Will Bear Witness, a diary of Klemperer’s life from 1933-1945 as a Jew, converted to Protestantism and married to a Protestant. It sounds fascinating, particularly because you read along through his day-by-day discovery as things progress in war time Germany.

Hitchens calls it “…a nonfiction event that quite eclipsed the journals of Anne Frank,” and later “… a firsthand and intimate account by somebody who ‘survived’ both versions of ideological dictatorship at close quarters, and who was in an unusually strong position to take, and to compare, notes.”

Sounds very interesting. Adding to my “to read” list.

Klemperer's other book, a glossary of terminology of the Third Reich:

New learning: As Germany progressed through the establishment of restrictions on the Jewish population, they instituted a policy that Jews could not own pets. Jewish households had to euthanize their pets themselves or give them up to the government for extermination.

New phrase: un homme moyen sensuel = French for an average non-intellectual man (who, by the way, would be unlikely to know what un homme moyen sensuel means)

“A War Worth Fighting For”

Hitchens’ review of Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. Yes, that Pat Buchanan…the former Republican Presidential candidate. To start with Hitchens’ ending, he writes, “History may judge whether the undesirability or the impossibility [of the war] was the more salient objection, but any attempt to separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as this one unmistakably does.”

He obviously doesn’t like the book. Here’s why, his summary of Pat’s arguments:

·      That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.

·      Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.

·      That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.

·      The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.

·      That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

·      That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

He goes on to say that Buchanan argues that the “…West should have allied itself with Hitler, at least passively, until he destroyed the Soviet Union.” Really, Pat?

New learning: Douglas McArthur was said that all military defeats can be summarized in two words, “Too late.”

New word: Spenglerian = referring to Oswald Spengler, pre-WW II German historian best known for the book, The Decline of the West. You don’t run into that phrase often.