martin- davidson (2010)

What happens when someone discovers that his German grandfather had been an officer in the SS?

This is an important investigation, painting a very small-scale and personal portrait of National Socialism through the career of a man who had been one of its earliest converts. Bruno Langbehn never achieved any kind of status within the Third Reich, but still managed to be associated with some of its great events through his membership of the Berlin SA and later the SS security service, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD — and through the SD, with the Holocaust, the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler’s life, and the end of the war in the east.

It would take a brave person to write a book like this so close to their own family, and the author makes an altogether workmanlike and accessible attempt at it. Sometimes it verges a little away from history and towards dramatic reconstruction — we can’t be sure how Bruno felt at key moments, absent any documents or testimony — but in the main the conclusions drawn are rigourously supported and closely argued. The man who emerges is an ambitious, rather incompetent, petty follower of Nazism, who manages to rationalise his experiences in later life. It’s a great addition to the literature.

4/5. Finished Sunday 31 August, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Simon Sebag Montefiore (2011)

A real page-turner of a “biography”, as much of religion as of the city of Jerusalem: the two are essentially inseparable.

The author has done an amazing job covering so much history in a consistently interesting and engaging style, from the earliest occurrences of Jerusalem in the historical record up to (nearly) the present day. And in all that time Jerusalem has been at the central nexus of history, as empires have flowed past it despite its inconvenient location.

What makes this book most fascinating to me is the cast of familiar characters who turn up, but out of the place in history you generally associate them with. There are Franz von Papen, Rudolf Hess, and Rudolf Hoess there during the First World War, before their rise to power in Nazi Germany; Charles Warren, who later achieved notoriety hunting Jack the Ripper; Rasputin, on leave from the Tsar’s court. (There’s also a walk-on part by a man called Fulk the Repulsive, who I wanted to hear more about just for his name.) The same is also true to some extent of the architecture, where each new building is constructed from the spolia of a previous age, re-used and re-purposed in a way that lets the alert scholar find Crusader inscriptions hidden on Muslim walls. A book like this illuminates sides of the city that no ordinary visitor, even one with a detailed knowledge of some historical period, could ever extract for themselves. It’s enough to make one want to visit, with this biography as a guidebook.

5/5. Finished Saturday 23 August, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Liaquat Ahamed (2009)

A biography-led treatment of the Great Depression, differing substantially from the more traditional histories led by events.

The biographies are indeed fascinating, both those of the four protagonists (central bankers in the US, Germany, France, and the UK), but also of some of the bit-players. Of the main characters, I was only previously aware of Hjalmar Schact, and then only of his involvement with the Nazis: his pivotal role in the Depression really sets the scene for his later mischief-making.

I think it probably helps that the author is a former banker: he locks-in on the financially significant events whose importance might elude a less specialised historian. This wouldn’t be my first choice as a financial history, but it certainly complements other better-known versions like JK Galbraith’s The Great Crash of 1929.

4/5. Finished Saturday 9 August, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Timur Vermes (2012)

A man wakes up in the centre of Berlin, with no recollection of how he got there. He stumbles around looking for clues, and eventually falls in with the proprietor of a newspaper kiosk.

So far so ordinary. Except that the man is Adolf Hitler.

Sounds a bit precious, but it works remarkably well. Hitler finds himself in Berlin wearing his uniform (a bit scuffed) and a coat smelling strongly of petrol (a nice touch, that). He’s still the same man he ever was, with the result that everyone takes him to be a Hitler impersonator. Over the course of the book he becomes a novelty television comedy act before being given his own show; gets beaten up by neo-Nazis for not being sufficiently respectful of their cause; and is courted by politicians and media personalities keen to be associated with the new phenomenon.

This a satire of quite epic proportions, working on different levels. On the one level it’s a confident portrayal of modern Germany where Hitler can express the same views as ever and be taken ironically, his words misunderstood and misinterpreted by everyone in a variety of ways. On another level it’s a critique of celebrity and the tendency of some people to want to be associated with anyone who happens to have caught mass attention, no matter how strange or distasteful his views.

What makes the book work is that Vermes writes in away that really does capture Hitler’s style. Anyone who’s ever read Mein Kampf can easily imagine Hitler writing a line like: “How can the poor reader, who during the years - nay, decades - of my absence has been drowning in the Marxist broth of history from the soup kettle of democracy, be capable of peering over the edge of his own bowl?”. The irony flows thick and fast, many of the misinterpretations that happen along the way are sheer genius and do indeed lead to lines one can imagine a comedian using to great effect.

4/5. Finished Sunday 3 August, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Charles Baudelaire (1857)

The best known of the decadent poets and a delight to generations of self-obsessed undergraduates, Baudelaire still has plenty of power.

Reviewing a book of poetry is different to reviewing prose or non-fiction, I think, in the sense that there’s much more sense of reviewing whether the poetry speaks to you in that particular moment. There was a time when I would have given Baudelaire five stars without question, for poems like “Meditation” or “Autumn song” alone - and those are still two of my favourites. Or perhaps he has to be read by candlelight or an open fire, and not on a sunny summer day. Nonetheless, as a poet of melancholy he still has no equal: an antidote to the constant pressure to be happy.

3/5. Finished Friday 1 August, 2014.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)