Stephen Henry Roberts (1937)
I have a thing for books written without a knowledge of the future events that will make them extremely relevant. This is one such. It was clearly influential in its day, having done through three printings in the last three months of 1937. But that means it’s written before World War 2, and indeed before the Anschluss and other events, at about the last point at which it was possible to believe that Nazism might be a movement that benefited both Germany and Europe.
The interesting thing is that it doesn’t – quite – do this. There are plenty of warnings that the author makes, warning that make appeasement and Munich even harder to understand: if an academic writer could see the signs they must have been available to governments, so why were they deliberately ignored? Of course Roberts couldn’t see into Hitler’s mind and so writes off as impossible the invasion of Poland that actually happened; but he correctly identified Austria and Czechoslovakia, and indeed France, as in danger.
It’s a book of its time, though. While deploring the repression and persecution of German Jews – and remember this was written before Kristallnacht – Roberts accepts the notion of there being such a thing as a “Jewish problem” in ways that no modern person can. He accepts the notions of colonies and Mandates as something argued over by “the Powers”, with scant attention paid to “the Natives” (his terms). Roberts also subscribes (or at least reports the views of those who subscribe) to the “if only the Führer knew” defence, now generally rejected as a fallacy and replaced by the view of Hitler as “the most radical National Socialist of them all” (to use Joachim Fest’s phrase from The Face of the Third Reich).
Reading this book gives support to the notion of how widespread anti-Semitism really was in 1930’s Europe in ways that we now forget, and it’s easy to see how this might explain how people managed not to see what was coming. It definitely gives weight to CS Lewis’ notion of the importance of continuing to read old books.
There are also some interesting presentiments of the modern age of information in the way that Roberts admits to falling easily into the traps set by propaganda that is endlessly repeated – by a State’s media rather than by social media as we see now, but the risks are easy to see and they lead in a terrifying direction.
4/5. Finished Saturday 8 August, 2020.
(Originally published on Goodreads.)
