The past in

perspective
Catriona Kelly
Julian Barnes
Antony Beevor
Mary Beard
Richard J Evans
Sameer Rahim
Andrew Marr
Simon Schama
2 PROSPECT

Foreword by Sameer Rahim

A
t Prospect we believe that reflecting on the past glossed over in traditional works. Reviewing Beards new book,
can provide key insights into the presentand the SPQR, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Kings College, Lon-
future. In the following pages, you can read a selec- don, hails her exceptional ability to keep up with modern
tion of some our favourite historical and contem- scholarship as well as her talent for plunging the reader into the
porary essays we have published in the last year. thick of the action right from the start.
Julian Barness new novel, The Noise of Time, is based on Nazi propaganda presented Hitlers Germany as the inher-
the life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In her itor of the Roman Empire. The man who shaped that image
lively and expert review, Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian at was Josef Goebbels. Richard J Evans, a leading historian of the
Oxford University, argues that Barnes has captured the spirit of Nazis, reviews a biography of Goebbels that draws extensively
the technician of survival, who was in continual fear of having for the first time on his private diaries. What Evans finds is a
his musicand his lifebeing eradicated by Stalin. man, for all his fanatical bombast, who had a soul devoid of
Staying on Russia, Antony Beevors column If I ruled the content. Also included is my interview with Nikolaus Wachs-
world describes how after the publication of his bestselling Ber- mann, whose acclaimed book KL is the first comprehensive his-
lin: the Downfall, which criticised the Red Armys conduct dur- tory of the Nazi concentration camps.
ing the Second World War, the Russian ambassador accused Finally, we have Andrew Marrs review of Simon Schamas
him of lies, slander and blasphemy. Beevor says that histor- history of Britain through its portraitsa terrific, fat book,
ical disputes should not be the subject of national lawseven classic Simon Schama. Marr, the BBC presenter who last year
if that means allowing Holocaust deniers to put forward their wrote a history of the nation through its poetry, praises the book
case. Scholarship should be robust enough to challenge lies for its zest and intelligence. These are also qualities we believe
about the past. mark out Prospects writing, whether it is about the distant past
Mary Beard made her name with revisionist accounts of or the present day.
the Roman Empire, highlighting the women and slaves often Sameer Rahim is Prospects Arts & Books editor

Contents
03 Technician of survival 07 What the Romans really did 12 Anatomy of a genocide
catriona kelly edith hall sameer rahim

06 If I ruled the world 09 Hitlers shadow 14 An eye for a story

antony beevor richard j evans andrew marr
PROSPECT 3

Technician
of survival
Julian Barnes brings to life the troubled inner world of Dmitri Shostakovich
catriona kelly

T
he life of Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich is at once and others have illuminated the circumstances in which the Soviet
well-documented and elusive. Famous from an early Unions foremost composer lived and worked. Yet the surround-
age, the Russian composer was surrounded for his ings only make the man at the centre seem less substantial. Lau-
whole life by family, musicians, pupils, enemies and rel Fays scholarly biography, recording what is known for certain,
admirers; he attracted the attention of the formida- is at once scrupulous and dry.
ble Soviet surveillance machine at every level. Material traces, Myth-making annoys historians, but perhaps annoyed Shosta-
including an apartment museum in Moscow, abound. Yet he also kovich less. His Soviet biographer, Sofya Khentova, claimed that
skids away from definition. The latest Shostakovich had recalled raptly listen-
to re-interpret his life is Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time ing to Lenins speech at the Finland Sta-
whose new novel The Noise of Time is by Julian Barnes (Vintage, 14.99) tion on 3rd April 1917; Volkov recollects
structured round three crucial episodes Shostakovich saying hed ended up in the
in Shostakovichs struggle with state power. crowd by mistake and hadnt known what the fuss was about; Fay,
In private photographs and in the recollections of those closest following Lossky, states that Shostakovich was never there at all
to him in his later years, Shostakovich has the reserved intensity of by the time Lenin arrived, a nicely brought up 10-year-old would
his late chamber music. But in some moods, according to the dis- have been safely tucked up in bed. The third version is much the
puted but likely in some respects accurate memoirs of the musi- most convincing. But that doesnt disprove that Shostakovich
cologist Solomon Volkov, he could be both hilarious and pungent. told the other stories, or even, to some extent, believed them. Like
Winding his way through a dangerous patronage culture, he has many who witnessed the Revolution (particularly the February
often been understood as a martyr to the totalitarian state. But he Revolution) as a child, he had a genuine enthusiasm for popular
is also psychologically comparable with figures such as Alexander upheaval and mass action all his life, if not necessarily for what
Pushkin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Interpreting such art- resulted from that great political turmoil. Sticking to the facts can
ists exclusively in terms of encoded self-revelation and concealed mean, at some level, missing the point.
ironyas Shostakovich often iswould certainly not do justice to Where historians subside into embarrassed silence, nov-
their intentions or intelligence. elists speak. In The Noise of Time, the different variants of the
Current academic study tends to avoid the hunt for the real Lenin story are among many pointers to the fluidity of Shosta-
Shostakovich (a kind of perpetuation of state surveillance) in kovichs relations with his past: These days, he no longer knew
favour of a historical understanding. The archives have not pre- what version to trust. He lies like an eyewitness, as the story goes.
served the young boys school reports, but they confirm his near- In an anecdote that frames the novel and is also repeated within
contemporary Boris Losskys account. Shostakovich attended it, three men drink a vodka toast on a wartime station platform:
what was known officially as a commercial school, but the title was one to hear, one to remember, and one to drink. The Shos-
a flag of convenience: the syllabus was shaped by the strong con- takovich of Barness imagining includes all three: the barely
temporary interest among educated Russians in free education, surviving crippled alcoholic, limbless on his trolley, practis-
and it even had its own Montessori kindergarten. The emphasis on ing a technique for survival; the bespectacled listener who
self-directed study, personal development and community spirit offers him vodka with egregious courtesy; and the anonymous
had its echoes later in his life. witness, who disappears even from recollection after the desul-
Shostakovich was certainly not purely a victimhe managed, tory encounter.
after all, to outlive no fewer than three Soviet leaders, while many Not that Barness purpose is anything to do with allegory. But
of his artistic contemporaries preceded even Vladimir Lenin into The Noise of Time, largely based on memoirs (those collected by
the grave. As well as being moulded by his era, he helped to con- Elizabeth Wilson as well as Solomon Volkovs) is a book about
struct it. Marina Frolova-Walker, Jonathan Walker, Kiril Tomoff Shostakovichs memories, rather than a straightforward fic-
tional account of his life. Complaining that the Leningrad sym-
phony doesnt figure, or that Barnes omits Shostakovichs work
as a teacher of composition, or as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet
(and a conscientious one) would be obtuse. It would be equally
Catriona Kelly is a professor of Russian at Oxford University. otiose to point out that as well as agonising over his new version of
Her latest book is St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (Yale) Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich negotiated hard over
 FRANCES BROOMFIELD / PORTAL GALLERY, LONDON / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
4 PROSPECT

Reserved intensity: a portrait of Shostakovich by Frances Broomfield (2003)

 PROSPECT 5

in the dining room, with the clocks door

open, holding back the pendulum with one
finger. In turn, the book is structured less
round onward time than time repeated:
particularly, the three leap-year moments,
1936, 1948, and 1960, when Shostakovich
came closest to destruction and despair.
RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHER (20TH CENTURY) / PRIVATE COLLECTION / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

In Russia, despair is sometimes diffi-

cult to separate from black humour: as
the joke goes, If youre over 40 and you
wake up, and nothing hurts, that means
youve died. Unlike some English chron-
iclers of Russian life, Barnes has an ear for
this mood: Music is not like Chinese eggs;
it does not improve by being kept under-
ground. When Shostakovich reflects on
what he sees as the passivity of Ameri-
cans, he notes that even the cows stand-
ing motionless in the fields looked like
advertisements for condensed milk. One
of Shostakovichs wry comments even has
a parallel life as an in-joke for people who
know Barness previous work on Gustave
Flaubert: Life was the cat that dragged
the parrot downstairs by the tail; his head
Shostakovich with fellow composers Sergei Prokofiev (left) and Aram Khachaturian (right) banged against every step.
But it is above all the hard, irreducible
the 1966 film version and insisted only the Kiev production was purity of music that drives the narration, expressed not just in
used. The Noise of Time is a distillation of experience into insom- key sounds (four factory sirens in F sharp) or Shostakovichs vis-
niac self-questioning, or the vertiginous doubt, otkhodnyak, that ceral reaction to conducting that he hatesToscanini chopped
succeeds the temporary confidence of a vodka high. The mode is up music like hash and smeared disgusting sauce over itbut in
interior monologue, but in the third person sometimes used about the crafting of language itself. Shostakovichs ageing shows not
themselves by particularly sensitive individuals alienated, lifelong, just in disillusion, or the shift of motion from skitter to limp,
from their own lives. but in a transformation of tempi. First comes a nervous scherzo of
It had got to the point when he despised being the person he love entanglements: And so he and Nina met, and they became
was, on an almost daily basis, a Shostakovich in his fifties reflects. lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her hus-
This self-distancing permeates The Noise of Time, since the narra- band, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a
tives starting point is already the existential edgethe 1937 agony date for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldnt face it so
of possible non-survival that followed the denunciation of Lady failed to turn up and ran away and hid Later, there is the slow-
Macbeth of Mtsensk in Pravda as Muddle instead of Music. Anna ing that Shostakovich himself liked to mark morendo, with the
Akhmatova, the poet with whom, as the novel reminds us, Shos- violist Fyodor Druzhinin told to play the slow movement of the Fif-
takovich once sat in mutually appreciative silence for 20 minutes, teenth Quartet so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience
wrote in Northern Elegies: I shall not lie in my own grave. Shosta- start leaving the hall from sheer boredom.
kovich had the same sense of self-distance. At once self-deprecating and precise, the joke captures
The composers early years are summed up by his painfully not just Shostakovichs capacity for evasion, but the nature of
delirious love affair with Tanya, the hard, demeaning work of his own composition, its saturated emptiness. Fictional por-
playing cinema piano, or the open-air performance of his First trayals of music soften and sweeten the nature of the art (take
Symphony disrupted by a competitive concert from the neighbour- Vikram Seths An Equal Music or Kazuo Ishiguros Nocturnes),
hood dogs. Motifs repeat: a string of garlic threaded round a wrist reducing it to ethereal clich; the result is not too far from
to ward off infections; a small case packed against possible arrest; novelettes such as Florence L Barclays The Rosary or Naomi
the cocktail sauce with bobbing shrimps in the plane Shostako- Royde-Smiths Mildensee. But The Noise of Time shares with
vich gets to the United States, and where later the composer ima- Leo Tolstoys The Kreutzer Sonataanother text which has at
gines himself afloat. its centre the tyranny of music and its physiologically devas-
At one level, this phenomenology of daily life echoes the tating potentialthe capacity for evocation of music-making
shadow-double of Barness novel, Osip Mandelstams memoir The that is worthy of the real thing. And, just as Shostakovich him-
Noise of Time. But where the hideous sideboard owned by a rela- self survived his encounters with power to transform dog barks
tion of Mandelstams, or the landscape of a Baltic beach, testify and factory sirens into some of the 20th centurys most explo-
to the age they came from, the objects here are pared to their sig- sive exercises in created sound, so this novel is, fortunately, much
nificance for Shostakovich. Two clocks, for instance, daily chime larger than the depiction of the composer in the familiar role of
together in perfect unison. This was not chance. He would turn a technician of survival, a midnight meditator on lifes futility
on the wireless a minute or two before the hour. Galya would be and his own.
 6 PROSPECT

If I ruled the world

Antony Beevor

States must stop trying to rewrite history

As world ruler, I would prevent countries from attempting to it of the status of a victorious nation.
control history. One saw the way the historian David Irving, who It didnt occur to me until after writing Berlin that the rea-
in 2005 was sent to prison by an Austrian court for denying the son Russians found it so painful to acknowledge the mass rapes
Holocaust, could make himself out to be a victim and a martyr. including those who suffered in the Gulag and hated Stalinwas
Then there was former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who that for them the victory over Nazi Germany was a moment of
tried to outlaw the denial of the Armenian genocide in 2012. It which they could all feel proud and which unified the country. In
was opportunistic and designed to get the Armenian vote. This fact Karasin warned mebefore he knew exactly what was in the
is a state attempt to control history, which is something I oppose bookthat what you have to realise is that the victory is sacred.
on principle. It is seen almost as the defining moment of the Soviet Union and
The issue has also come up in Russia. In 2013, Sergei Shoigu, therefore cannot be tampered with.
the countrys Minister for Defence, passed a law that he had been That any state has to rely on legislation to defend this idea is
trying to get on the statute books since 2009. It would imprison deeply depressing. They have even set up the Russian Military
anyone, in theory for up to five years, who criticised the Red Historical Society, whose aim is to foster patriotism and resist
Armys conduct during the Second World War. (I have to declare attempts to distort military history. There have been some very
an interest: I am a target of this law because my 2002 book Ber- brave Russian historians, some of whom have lost their posi-
lin: the Downfall also covered the mass rapes commit- tions, simply by questioning the party line of today, which is
ted by Russian soldiers in 1945.) Shoigu described that there were only a few cases of rape and of course all of
the crime of criticising the Red Army as tan- those were prosecuted. We know this is absolute rubbish:
tamount to Holocaust denial. Its interesting, the numbers were far greater. Trying to foster patriotism
considering that Joseph Stalin himself was, in through history is something that many regimes have
a way, the first Holocaust denier. He refused done in the past, and they tend to be undemocratic in
to allow that the Jews should have any spe- one form or another. During the Russian victory cele-
cial category of suffering. brations on 9th May the orange and black St Georges
After the publication of my book, the ribbon was being used everywhere. This symbol from
Russian Ambassador to Britain, Grigory the past is being used in eastern Ukraine to represent
Karasin, accused me of lies, slander and blas- Russian heroism today.
phemy against the Red Army. Karasin is now History needs to be debated openly. You can ban cer-
Deputy Foreign Minister. I dont know to tain symbolsas Germany has done with the
what degree I am still in the firing line swastikaand you can even ban certain
because I still get invitations to the political parties. But it is quite wrong
Russian Embassy. Vladimir Putin to suppress a counter-argument in
does like to come up with totally history. For example, the great
contradictory positions to con- Jewish historian of the Holocaust
fuse his opponents. Rather like Raul Hilberg put the number
the way he accuses Ukraine of of deaths at a bit over five mil-
fascism and then proceeds to sup- lion, rather than six million.
port fascist or neo-fascist parties Did that make him a Hol-
in western Europe. His real goal ocaust denier? Its a grey
is the attempt to control Russian area. If you want to do
history. In March, while planning something about real
celebrations for Russias victory in Holocaust deniers you
the Second World War, Putin said: could prosecute them
Today we unfortunately see not under hate lawsbut
only attempts to misrepresent and not on the grounds of
MIKKO STIG/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

distort events of the war, but cyni- falsifying history.

cal, open lies and the brazen defa- Antony Beevor is a
mation of a whole generation who bestselling and award-
gave up everything for the victory. winning historian. His latest
book is Ardennes 1944:
He continued: Their goal is clear: Hitlers Last Gamble, which
to undermine the power and moral was published last year by Viking
authority of modern Russia and deprive Press
PROSPECT 7

What the Romans

really did
Mary Beards colourful chronicle of Ancient Rome debunks familiar myths
edith hall

A
ncient Roman literary critics admired writing Beginners will then spend the next five chapters struggling to
that plunged readers into the thick of the action understand the successive waves of data about the preceding cen-
in medias resrather than boring them with pre- turiesthe kings of Rome, the consolidation of the Republican
ambles. Mary Beard plunges her reader, from the regime, the widening of Romes horizons in the fourth and third
first page, into one of the most exciting episodes in centuries BC, the expansion of the empire, the violent upheavals
Roman history. of the new politics at the time of the Gracchi in the late 2nd cen-
In 63BC, the orator and statesman Cicero exposed what he tury down to the slave revolt led by Spartacus in 73BC. We do not
claimed was a revolutionary conspiracy. rejoin Cicero until nearly halfway through
It was led by the disaffected aristocrat SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Beards narrative, in chapter seven, where
Catiline, whom Cicero accused of plot- by Mary Beard (Profile, 25) he is now taking on Verres, the governor of
ting to assassinate all the elected mag- Sicily accused of corruption. But that con-
istrates of Rome, set fire to the citys buildings and cancel all frontation preceded Ciceros denunciations of Catiline, with which
debts indiscriminately. Beard writes with her customary energy, we had begun our history. As a Classics graduate I know some
charm and intensity, resurrecting the titanic personalities who Roman history, but must admit to intermittent bewilderment. I
struggled to control Rome while its republican constitution was would recommend any new Roman history enthusiasts to begin
hurled into its final death throes. She uses contemporary terms on page 78 with Beards enthralling account of the archaeological
like homeland security to make the unfamiliar accessible. Her evidence for early habitations in the Roman area. These include
ambivalence towards Cicerobrilliant, prolific, brave, eloquent, the remains of a two-year-old girl found in a coffin beneath the
but vain and obnoxiously self-pityingis palpable. By the end of forum in a dress decorated with beads; in the 1980s archaeologists
the chapter we are primed to take the story forward to the next unearthed the sort of house she might have lived in north of the
phase: the assassination of Julius Caesar and the climactic con- city, a small timber edifice with a primitive portico. It contained
flict between Mark Antony and Octavian, soon to become Augus- the remains of the earliest known domestic cat in Italy.
tus. But Beard chooses instead to disorient us completely. Beard is always at her dazzling best breathing life into the
In chapter two she abruptly transfers us back many centuries material remnants left by the ancient inhabitants of the Roman
to the very beginnings of Rome, or rather its mythical origins in world, as she did in her prizewinning 2008 book Pompeii: The Life
the stories of Romulus and Remus and of the rape of the Sabine of a Roman Town. One of her hallmarks is an exceptional ability to
women. All except the final two chapters then take a broad histori- remain up-to-date with the most recent archaeological discover-
cal sweep, structured in conventional chronological order stretch- ies, and communicate their contents and significance in a lively
ing from archaeological finds dating to as early as 1000BC all the and user-friendly manner. The public has been waiting eagerly for
way to 212AD. The sense of chronological disorientation is, I think, SPQR since her engaging 2012 BBC series Meet the Romans. The
deliberate. The version of the early history of Rome which has greatest virtue of SPQR is her ability to choose individual objects
come down to us was mostly filtered by later Roman writers, both or texts and tease out from them insights into Roman life and
Cicero and authors working under AugustusLivy, Propertius, experience. These range from the enigmatic black stone found
Virgil and Ovid. Beard is laudably keen that we see the early his- in the forum inscribed with words including KING, to a relief
tory as not only gappy and inconsistent but artfully manipulated sculpture depicting a poultry shop, complete with suspended
to suit the political agenda of later writers. But the effect is con- chicken and caged rabbits. The book contains 21 colour plates and
fusing, right from her opening sentence: Our history of ancient more than a hundred others embedded in the text, every one add-
Rome begins in the middle of the 1st century BC. By Our history ing an exciting dimension to her colourful chronicle.
of Rome she means My history of Rome, but any Roman his- The leading dramatis personae are evoked in stunning pen-
tory novice will assume her meaning is that The history of Rome portraits. Some ask us to reassess figures we thought we already
commences at that date. understood well. She is impressed by Pompey, who has a good
claim to be called the first Roman emperor. She is sceptical about
Brutuss commitment to Republican ideals. She sensibly refrains
from trying to penetrate the assiduously crafted public image of
Edith Hall is a Professor in the Department of Classics
Augustus to the real man behind the propaganda, although she
and at Kings College London. Her latest book is admires some of his achievements. There are finely-tuned cameos
Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Vintage) in the whistle-stop tour of the 14 emperors who ruled between
 8 PROSPECT

antness of life in ancient urban centres was

suffered by rich and poor alike: traffic jams,
uncollected refuse, disease, gangrene-
infected water. She has a pitch-perfect ear
for class snobbery and the insults poured
on the allegedly vulgar newly rich by the
educated or aristocratic. She writes mov-
ingly about the gravestones of ordinary
Romans, artisans and semi-skilled labour-
ers, informing posterity about their exper-
tise and achievements as bakers, butchers,
midwives and fabric dyers. She evokes well
the squalid cafes and taverns where the
poorer urban classes caroused. Yet she
makes us face the reality that the major-
ity of the empires 50 million inhabitants
would have lived on small peasant farms,
struggling to extract more than a subsist-
WARTBURG.EDU/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

ence livelihood. There were few changes

in agricultural technology or fundamen-
tal lifestyle from the Iron Age to medieval
times. The letters of Pliny the Younger are
a rich source of evidence for the relation-
ship between Roman governors and such
ordinary people of the provinces, in his
case in Bithynia and Pontus; Beard leads
Jacques-Louis Davids The Oath of the Horatii (1784) portrays the Roman ideal of loyalty us from these into a revealing discussion
and self-sacrifice of the problems Roman governors faced in
policing the boundaries of empire (includ-
the death of Augustus in 14AD and the assassination in 192AD ing Hadrians Wall) and how they largely tolerated local religious
of Commodus (the son of Marcus Aurelius who plays the villain practices and cultural diversity, although Christianity became an
in Ridley Scotts movie Gladiator). Although there are mercifully exception.
few signs of the controversialism which used to be her sole irri- The turbulent showdown between the Illyrian Emperor Dio-
tating characteristic, Beard rightly challenges the tradition of cletian and the martyrdom-hungry Christians in the early fourth
dividing the rulers of the Imperium Romanum into heroes and century is one of many fascinating episodes in the history of the
felons. The tradition, extending back to Tacitus and Suetonius, Romans which Beard excludes from her account by ending it in
was inherited by Edward Gibbon. Beard pleads, instead, for a less 212AD. Her logic for ending here is impeccable: this was when
judgemental and more nuanced appraisal of the way that the sen- the Emperor Caracalla made every free inhabitant of the Roman
sational ancient accounts of the emperors reveal the anxieties and Empire a Roman citizen, thus causing 30m individuals to become
socio-political values of the imperial era. She also emphasises that legally Roman overnight. Beard stresses the significance of the
for many inhabitants of the empire, especially those living in the erasure of the millennium-long boundary between the rulers and
more far-flung territories, the personality of the emperor made lit- the ruledthe completion of what she calls the Romans citizen-
tle difference. This is a wonderful, lucid and thoughtful section of ship project, from which we can still learn, even though it subse-
the book and should be required reading for anyone setting out to quently failed and had always been fundamentally blemished by
study Roman emperors. slavery.
There is an attempt at a thematic rather than linear approach Besides the history of Rome as it continued in the third and
in one central chapter, The Home Front, where the discussion fourth centuries CE, the element I most miss is an attempt to
of family life and women is compromised by being focused, yet get inside the minds of the remarkable ancient Italians in terms
again, on Ciceroor rather Ciceros relationships with his wives of their philosophy and ethics. Beard writes well on priesthoods
and daughter. But the two other thematic chaptersthe last in and public religion, but is not much interested in philosophy.
the bookare outstanding. Here she abandons the chronologi- Despite her fixation on Cicero, who wrote philosophical trea-
cal structure and looks at the rich-poor divide and the experience tises, she offers less on the complex thought-world and extraordi-
of people living under the Romans outside Rome. The luxurious nary psychological strengthsself-control, resilience, acceptance
lifestyle of the wealthy across the empire was astounding: some of uncompromising discipline, fearlessness in the face of death,
owned dozens of sumptuous villas with central heating and lav- moral fortitude, high ideals and principleswhich many mem-
ish murals, swimming pools and shady grottoes, all serviced by bers of this tough and soldierly people drew from their Stoic, Neo-
armies of slaves. Some rich people paraded their wealth by indulg- platonic and Epicurean convictions. She is good on Virgils Aeneid
ing in ostentatious feasting and pastimes; others subsidised public as a political poem, but has little to say about the earliest surviv-
amenitieslibraries, theatres, gladiator showsin order to ward ing Roman epic, Lucretiuss inspirational work On the Nature of
off the dangers posed by the inevitable envy of the poor. Things. I finished SPQR hoping that we will one day be treated to a
Beard points out, however, that much of the physical unpleas- Beard book on the inward contours of the Roman psyche.
PROSPECT 9

Hitlers shadow
The first study of Joseph Goebbels based on his recently-published diaries yields important
insights into his sense of inferiority, his affairs, the Holocaust and the downfall of the Reich
richard j evans

I
n April 1983, the Sunday Times, together with the Ger- archive was opened up after the fall of communism.
man magazine Stern, revealed to an astonished world the Since then, a team from the Institute of Contemporary His-
diaries of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Running to a tory in Munich, led by Elke Frhlich, has been transcribing the
total of 60 volumes, the diaries had been authenticated often difficult handwriting and publishing it in 29 volumes, the
by two leading historians of the period, Gerhard Wein- last of which appeared in 2008. A few extracts have appeared in
berg and Hugh Trevor-Roper. I am now satisfied, declared English, but the vast majority of the diaries are only accessible
Trevor-Roper after examining the documents in a Swiss bank in this German edition. The historian Peter Longerich, author
vault, that the documents are authen- of a major study of the Holocaust and a
tic; that the history of their wanderings Goebbels: A Biography biography of Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader
since 1945 is true; and that the standard by Peter Longerich (The Bodley Head, 30) Heinrich Himmler, has now delivered the
accounts of Hitlers writing habits, of his first study of Goebbels to be based on an
personality and, even, perhaps, of some public events, may in exhaustive and critical evaluation of the whole run of the diaries,
consequence have to be revised. augmented where appropriate by the use of other sources ranging
This was certainly true, or would have been had the diaries from official documents to Goebbelss own propaganda produc-
been genuine. Hitler was well known for his irregular lifestyle, tions. It is an impressive achievement.
staying up into the small hours watching movies, getting up late, And its an achievement that has immediately got Longerich
and preferring to make decisions on the hoof rather than plough- into legal difficulties. Extracts from the diaries appear on almost
ing through the mountains of documents that usually confront every page. But the diaries were still legally in copyright at the
heads of state. Was he, then, confounding everyones view of his time Longerichs book was published, since European law states
character by writing down an account of his thoughts and deeds that copyright expires 70 years after an authors death, which in
day after day for years on end? After the German Federal Archives Goebbelss case means 1st May 2015. Who exactly are the copy-
had finally obtained samples of the diaries, they discovered that right owners? Longerich and his publishers, Random House, had
the ink and paper had been manufactured long after Hitlers assumed that Nazi documents were free for anyone to quote, as
death, and that most of the diaries content was copied from his indeed should be the case. But there were people who disagreed.
speeches. As the forger Konrad Kujau was sent to prison, it seemed Last year, a successful lawsuit was brought in a Munich court
the standard account of Hitlers writing habits and personality against Random House for breach of copyright. The lawyer bring-
would not have to be revised after all. ing the case was Cordula Schacht, daughter of Goebbelss col-
Even before the decisive intervention of the archivists, however, league in the Hitler Cabinet, Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar
there was good reason to doubt that the Hitler diaries were authen- Schacht; it seemed as if the old Nazi regime was rearing its head
tic. There had been no mention of them before. Nobody, neither again from beyond the grave to lay claim to ownership of these
his friends and acquaintances nor his secretaries and assistants, crucial documents.
had betrayed even the slightest suspicion that they existed. By con- Cordula Schacht has form in this area, as legal advisor of the
trast, the fact that his chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was late Franois Genoud, a Swiss banker who had met Hitler in the
writing a diary had been well known for many years. Goebbels 1930s and become financial advisor to the Grand Mufti of Jeru-
published edited extracts in a chronicle of the rise and triumph salem, a fanatical anti-Semite who wanted to exterminate Jew-
of Nazism and the partys coming to power in 1933. Then at the ish emigrants to Palestine. Genoud was close to the international
end of the war, some of the pages were found amid the ruins of the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and advised the Popular Front for
Reich Chancellery, and subsequently published by an American the Liberation of Palestine in an airplane hijacking in 1972. An
journalist. Towards the end of the war, as he became concerned active Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler, Genoud once told
about the fate of the (by now voluminous) diaries, Goebbels had the journalist Gitta Sereny: The truth is, I loved Hitler. He gave
them filmed on to glass microfiche plates, taken to Potsdam, just financial support to old Nazis trying to evade capture, and con-
outside the German capital, and buried. Here, however, the Red tributed money to the defence of Adolf Eichmann in his trial in
Army discovered them and shipped them off to the KGB Spe- Jerusalem in 1961. Genoud bought some of the papers of Hitlers
cial Archive in Moscow, where they remained, unread, until the factotum Martin Bormann, although some of the documents he
published from them are widely thought to be forgeries.
In 1955, he purchased the rights to the diaries from the Goeb-
bels family. Goebbels, he said, was a great man. Shortly before
Richard J Evans is President of Wolfson College
his suicide in 1996, Genoud made over his share to Cordula
Cambridge and the author of The Third Reich in Schacht, who since then has claimed to be the copyright holder.
History and Memory (Little, Brown) The case was complicated by the fact that the Bavarian State
 ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES
10 PROSPECT

Joseph Goebbels (centre) watches the filming of Patriots in 1937 with the French ambassador, Andr Franois-Poncet (left)

also claimed to own the copyright, since it had taken ownership of Dostoevsky, as his early diaries show, was a particular passion. But
the Nazi publishing house which Goebbels had intended should he did not embark on an academic career or find success as an
publish the diaries after his death. True, no written contract has author. His two verse plays were never performed, and he could
ever been found. But a 1936 entry in the diary suggests there was not find a publisher for his semi-autobiographical novel Michael
an oral agreement. On this basis, Random House has refused to for several years. Plagued by feelings of inferiority, generated not
pay Schacht for the right to quote from the diary. It is the first least by the club foot that left him with a heavy limp, he earned a
publisher to take this stand; previously, for decades, publishers meagre living as a journalist and for a while as a bank clerk, and
had to crawl to Genoud for permissions, on occasion being forced found a sense of self-worth in numerous affairs with women, a kind
to allow him to write a preface or introduction expressing his of self-validation that continued throughout his life.
own obnoxious views. On 23rd April this year, a higher Munich Whether or not Goebbels was, as Longerich claims, a narcis-
court accepted Random Houses appeal against last years ruling. sist, he certainly sought to compensate for his low self-esteem
Schacht has appealed against this, demanding payment of just by passionately attaching himself to Hitler. Already by 1923, he
over 6,500 (the publisher offered to pay if the money went to a had formed his deeply anti-Semitic and anti-democratic political
Holocaust-related charity, but Schacht refused). On 9th July the views, which he found expressed by the early Nazi party. Lack-
case will come before the courts for a final decision. ing any real power base, Goebbels profiled himself as a radical
Random House is taking its admirable stand on the principle when he became politically active in the Nazi party in April 1924,
that the writings of a Nazi criminal should not be made the sub- using violent and inflammatory language to make a name for
ject of commercial exploitation. As the diaries show, there can be himself. Although he found Hitlers views on some issues reac-
no doubt about Goebbelss responsibility for murders, expropria- tionary, he was won over by the Nazi leader on a visit to Munich,
tions and much more besides. He began his career as a poet and and his ascent up the Nazi hierarchy began. Soon Hitler put him
novelist. His PhD in German literature earned him the title Dr in charge of the Nazi party in Berlin, difficult territory in view of
Goebbels, by which he was invariably known in the Nazi years the fact that the communists and socialists were extremely strong
few leading Nazis were as well educated or as well read: Fyodor in the capital. Goebbelss diaries, however, lay bare the feuding
PROSPECT 11

between Hitlers acolytes, during which Goebbels conceived a bit- For all his notoriety, Goebbels was never really a member of the
ter hatred for his rival Hermann Goering. Partly because of this, central decision-making group within the Nazi leadership. Time
his position remained insecure for a long time. Hitler, he wrote on and again, the diaries show how he only learned of major events at
one occasion, was his only friend in the party. second hand. The Night of the Long Knives, for instance, when
The diaries provide graphic details of Goebbelss rabble-rous- at the end of June 1934 Hitler ordered the murder of the leader
ing tactics in Berlin, where he was unscrupulous in his use of vio- of the radical Nazi stormtroopers, Ernst Rhm, and scores of his
lence, physical as well as verbal, to win attention for the Nazis. leading henchmen, came as a complete surprise to Goebbels, who
Incidents where communists were attacked and Jews beaten up was expecting Hitler only to strike against the conservative clique
on the streets landed Goebbels in court on numerous occasions. around Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen. And Goebbels was kept
The published version of the diaries for the early 1930s were heav- well away from crucial foreign policy decisions.
ily doctored, as a comparison with the originals shows; Goebbels, The diaries are a source of the first importance for many key
to take just one example, altered the entries before publication to events of the Third Reich. Writing first thing every morning about
make it look as if his rival Gregor Strasser had opposed Hitlers the previous days events, Goebbels had little time or opportunity
political tactics for much longer than he had in reality. Strassers to doctor or manipulate his account either at the time or later on.
These were not considered, elaborate justifications but rapid-fire,
For all his notoriety, Goebbels staccato, often abbreviated diary entries written down in haste.
Longerich uses the diaries intelligently as evidence for many epi-
was never really a member of sodes in the history of Nazism, taking account of their biases, but
recognising that they were generally truthful in their recounting
the decision-making group of events. There is not a hint in them, for example, that the lead-
within the Nazi leadership ing Nazis knew anything in advance about the fire that destroyed
the Reichstag building on the night of 27th February 1933 and was
used by Hitler as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, permanently
eventual resignation gave Goebbels control of the Nazi propa- as it turned out, using the excuse, vigorously propagandised by
ganda apparatus and, following Hitlers appointment as Reich Goebbels, that it was the signal for a communist uprising.
Chancellor, he was soon put in charge of an entirely new depart- It is clear from the diaries account of the nationwide pogrom
ment of government as Reich Minister of Popular Enlightenment of the Reich Night of Glass Shards (Reichskristallnacht), Longer-
and Propaganda. Well before this, he had developed sophisticated ich notes, that Hitler personally ordered the trashing of thousands
techniques of appealing to the masses, with spectacular torchlit of synagogues and Jewish-owned shops across Germany. Goeb-
parades, mass meetings, sloganising, radio broadcasts and sensa- belss record of the flight of Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess to
tional stories in the press. As a member of the government, he now Scotland on a harebrained peace mission in April 1941 is another
brought the full resources of the state to bear on winning over the episode on which the diaries are clear: The Fhrer is completely
half or more of the German electorate who had never voted for the shattered One wants to laugh and weep simultaneously. Hesss
Nazis or their coalition partners in a free election. letters, left behind in justification of his actions, were a chaotic
By this time, Goebbels had married Magda Quandt, a mid- confusion of primary school dilettantism. The flight came as a
dle-class woman with whom he had an enduring marriage surprise and left the Nazi leadership hopelessly embarrassed.
despite the fact that both of them had affairsGoebbels, noto- Once he began dictating the diaries to a secretary, in June 1941,
riously, with the Czech actress Lda Baarov. The scandal in Goebbels became more circumspect, and references to his pri-
the end became so damaging that Hitler ordered Goebbels to vate life grow more discreet. But the diaries leave no doubt about
put a stop to it. The couple had six children and made sure all Hitlers central role in the extermination of European Jews. On
their names began with an H. They provided a substitute fam- 14th February 1942, for example, Goebbels recorded Hitler saying
ily for Hitler, who depended on them emotionally, and did not that the Jews have deserved the catastrophe they are experienc-
want to see the couple break up. The diaries reveal a continuing ing today. As our enemies are annihilated so they will experience
string of extramarital affairs and lingering feelings for earlier their own annihilation too. A few weeks later, on 27th March
girlfriends. Goebbelss restless energy found an outlet above all, 1942, the process of extermination clearly came through Goeb-
however, in his ceaseless political activism. He created for the belss cautious and circumspect diary entry, where he refers to the
propaganda ministry an elaborate structure of cultural man- Jews being deported to the east in a pretty barbaric procedure
agement headed by the Reich Chamber of Culture with sub- not to be described in any more detail, and not much is left of the
divisions such as the Reich Chamber of Music and so on. And Jews themselves. In general one may conclude that 60 per cent
yet, as the diaries reveal, he was unable to eliminate his rivals in of them must be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to
the party in this area of operations, notoriously the ideologue work Here too the Fhrer is the persistent pioneer and spokes-
Alfred Rosenberg, whose radical Fighting League for German man of a radical solution.
Culture frequently cut across the lines of the ministrys policy, Goebbels managed to secure appointment as Plenipotentiary
but also the Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich. Leni Riefenstahls for Total War following his demagogic Do you want total war?
notorious propaganda film Triumph of the Will was made behind speech in the wake of the catastrophic defeat of the German army
Goebbelss back, to a direct commission from Hitler. Longer- at Stalingrad in February 1943 (Yes! the hand-picked crowd in
ich is particularly illuminating here on the continued infighting the Berlin Sports Palace roared back). But this was as much a
that characterised the Nazi regime from start to finish. There propaganda exercise as anything else, and the real command over
was no perfectly disciplined, efficiently coordinated machinery the economy was falling increasingly into the hands of Hitlers
of government in Nazi Germany: as Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed Armaments Minister Albert Speer. Goebbels, true to the last, con-
out long ago, it was riven with feuding and backstabbing. tinued to support Hitler while Goering and Himmler deserted
 12 PROSPECT

him. In the final days of the war, Goebbels urged resistance to the Yet perhaps because of this, we learn less about Joesph Goebbels
last drop of blood. But even he had to concede that defeat was now from this very long biography than we might. Part of the reason
overwhelmingly probable. On 28th February 1945, he announced is that Longerichs book is less a biography than an extended crit-
over the radio that if Nazi Germany was defeated, life would no ical commentary on the diaries. Too often, he fails to round out
longer be worth living, neither for himself nor for his children. The his account of a diary entry into a full depiction of the events it
family moved into the bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery, records and thus an assessment of Goebbelss place in them. Time
where Magda Goebbels had her children sedated with morphine, and again, he assumes too much background knowledge in the
then killed them by placing cyanide capsules in their mouths. reader, and fails to set the diaries in their broader context. His
With her husband she then committed suicide on 1st May 1945. book, regrettably, is unlikely to appeal to anyone coming to the
Goebbelss life, as Longerich shows convincingly, was one of history of Nazi Germany for the first time. But it will be indispen-
restless self-aggrandisement, a constant search for self-valida- sable to historians and students who want rapid access to one of
tion. In the end, there was nothing behind the propaganda min- the major sources on the history of Nazi Germany without having
isters fanatical exterior but emptiness, a soul devoid of content. to plough through all the millions of words of the original.

Anatomy of a genocide
Historian Nikolaus Waschmann speaks to Prospects Sameer Rahim about his original
and comprehensive new account of the concentration camps

traces the history of the camps from their

inception in 1933 as places outside the law
where the political enemies of Hitler could
be incarcerated to the end of the Second
World War, where Auschwitz was the site
of mass genocide. But rather than seeing
their development as the smooth imple-
mentation of a masterplan, Wachsmann
argues that their progress was surprisingly
haphazard. I began by asking Wachsmann
what the development of Dachau, the first
concentration camp, might tell us about
the nature of Nazi atrocities.
USHMM/US NATIONAL ARCHIVE

NW: There is this idea that the Nazis

must have had a masterplan and that all
roads led to Auschwitz. But what is nota-
ble is how the camp system changedhow
much improvisation and variation there
was. I start the book with three snap-
Inmates of Ebensee concentration camp after their liberation by American troops on May shots of Dachau, which started in March
6th 1945 1933 as a ramshackle camp for barely 100
prisoners whose lives were not actually
Peter Longerichs biography of Joseph Goebbels, reviewed by threatened, and then became a brutally ordered system of terror,
Richard Evans above, was made possible by the opening up of the with rows of purpose-built barracks, and scores of prisoners in
Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR. Other historians have identical uniforms and cropped hair, and finally descended into
also been exploiting these archivesand others recently made the mass death and disease the Allied forces found in April 1945.
available such as the Red Cross archivesto draw fresh conclu- This camp system went through a huge number of changes
sions about the Third Reich. during the Third Reich. There was even an extraordinary
One of these historians is Nikolaus Wachsmann, a profes- moment early on when they nearly disappeared. When Hit-
sor of European history at Birkbeck College, University of Lon- ler came to power in 1933 the regime set up hundreds of camps
don, whose new book KL is the first comprehensive history of the like Dachau to destroy the political opposition. Once that had
Konzentrationslager or concentration camps. It has won praise been achieved almost all of these early camps disappeared and
from leading historians of the Nazi era including Evans, Ian Ker- almost all of their prisoners were released. There was now a
shaw and Saul Friedlnder. debate among the Nazi leadership about what kind of regime
The originality of Waschmanns book is its focus on the con- they were going to run. Some leaders argued that they should
centration camps where prisoners were mainly worked to death have an authoritarian dictatorship based on Nazi law, without
rather than the death camps, where they were exterminated. He camps, but Schutz-Staffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler con-
PROSPECT 13

vinced Hitler that they needed this extra-legal system of out- of terror completely overlooks the fact that most of those sent
right SS terror. This paved the way for the SS camp system of the to Auschwitz didnt know what would await them there. They
future. The story of the camps, the closer you look, is more com- were also starved and bewildered. Reading the testimonies from
plicated and counter-intuitive than it seems. Jewish prisoners, I also found many instances of solidarity and
resistance. Prisoners tried to cling to religious or political beliefs,
SR: You argue in the book that Nazi Germany did not follow and there were a great number of survival networks of those who
a preordained path to extreme terror. You quote the historian tried to share information or food. I think its important not to
Hans Mommsens description of the process as cumulative portray prisoners as an anonymous mass with no agency. Obvi-
radicalisation. ously agency was extremely curtailed by the SS but nonetheless
NW: Without any doubt one key moment is the Second World prisoners tried to shape their own lives.
War. When war breaks out in 1939 there are some 20,000 pris-
oners in six camps inside Germany; these are brutal places, but SR: Theres also the question of economics and extermination.
prisoners are still more likely to survive than to die. Within a Why did so much effort and resource go into annihilating Jews
few years, there were hundreds of thousands of prisoners in hun- and other asocial groups, when they could have been kept alive
dreds of camps across Europefrom the Baltic states to Alder- for war work. Was this purely ideological?
ney on the Channel Islands. (The Nazis built four concentration NW: For Himmler, economics and extermination went hand
camps on the island.) By now death is a constant, prisoners are in hand. By the middle of the war the Nazis were determined
starving to death or worked to death, and the SS has become to exterminate Jews as deadly enemies: it was a core mission
well-versed in mass-killing. Also, this is an increasingly visible of the regime. At the same time Himmler also believed that it
form of terror. Ordinary Germans had a fairly good idea of what was economically advantageous for Germany to work to death
went on inside: they saw the prisoners at work in factories or on those Jewish prisoners who could still work. This was the Nazi
the streets, and smelt the smoke from the camps crematoria. policy of extermination through labour in the camps. Early
By late 1944, most concentration camp prisoners were no longer on, labour had been a way of tormenting prisoners, often with
held in large main camps like Dachau, which were at least par- completely senseless work, but gradually the inmates were seen
tially shielded from prying eyes, but in hundreds of satellites, as an economic resource that could be used to aid a German
often near factories and building sites, and often inside towns victory, and to improve the position of the SS within the regime.
and cities. This was one reason why SS terror became ever more By the last couple of years of the war there was a huge system
visible. But almost all of these satellite camps have been forgot- of slave labour, where the SS rented out its prisoners to private
ten about. In recent years, concentration camp memorials have enterprise.
tried to include the satellites in commemoration, as a way of
highlighting the links between Nazi camps and their local sur- SR: You write that the camp system was a great transformer of
roundings. But much remains to be done. values that changed the way the guards treated prisoners. Are
you surprised at how fast it became so brutal?
SR: What role did the camps play in the Holocaust? NW: Its easy to write off SS perpetrators as monsters. Some of
NW: Nowadays most people think that the Holocaust, the con- them were sadists, but the majority were not, which then raises
centration camps and Auschwitz are identicalbut the story is the question of why they committed the crimes. Many of them
more complicated. There is more to the Holocaust than Aus- seemed to get accustomed, often quite quickly, to extreme bru-
chwitz. Although it was the Holocausts most deadly single site, tality. There were some SS men who initially struggled with the
the majority of Jews were murdered elsewhere, in the fields violence that was expected of them, like the Auschwitz doc-
of eastern Europe and in special death camps like Treblinka, tor who broke down after his first selection of Jewish prison-
which were not concentration camps: they served only a sin- ers for the gas chambers; but he soon became used to his job
gle purpose, to kill as many Jews as possible. At the same time and performed it to the satisfaction of his superiors. One thing
there is more to Auschwitz than the Holocaust. The camp was that struck me is how often perpetrators tried to impress their
set up in 1940 to destroy the Polish political opposition, not the comrades, wanted to be seen as strong and manly, as real SS
Jews. In the following year, the focus shifted to the exploitation men. Theres any number of instances where perpetrators com-
and extermination of Soviet prisoners of war, and in that con- mit heinous crimes to impress others. Ideology obviously plays
text Auschwitz officials began experimenting with Zyklon B gas a significant role, but social and psychological factors also come
to exterminate prisoners. The path of Auschwitz to the Holo- into play, probably more than many people think.
caust was a quite circuitous and long one, and it wasnt inevita-
ble. And even after Auschwitz became an extermination camp, SR: At the moment 93-year-old Oskar Groening, an SS officer
it still had other functions as well. Jews were divided on arrival who was an office worker at Auschwitz, is on trial for being an
into those who would be killed straight awaythats the great accessory to murder. Is it useful to prosecute people at such an
majority, women with children, the elderly, the sickand those advanced age?
who were forced into murderous slave labour. NW: If hes fit to stand trial then he should be tried. But the
trial highlights the ultimate failure of postwar justice. Its taken
SR: You also question what you regard as the myth of the pas- more than 70 years after Auschwitz was liberated for this man
sive Holocaust victim. to finally face a judge. And even if hes convicted, hes going to
NW: Much of what has been writtennot least in the work of be one of no more than perhaps 15 per cent of former Auschwitz
Hannah Arendt, the famous chronicler of the Adolf Eichmann personnel to be tried.
trialabout passive victims has been revised by recent schol- KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps is published by
arship. The idea that the prisoners were apathetic in the face Little, Brown
14 PROSPECT

An eye for a story

Few writers can bring a painting to life as dazzlingly as Simon Schama
andrew marr

T
his is a terrific, fat book, classic Simon Schama, metic, which allows Schama to rehearse, with fine gusto, the story
which doesnt at all do what it says on the cover. The from the same period of Prince Georges borderline insane pursuit
title, The Face of Britain: The Nation through its Por- of Maria Fitzherbertbefore veering off to the tale of Maria Had-
traits, suggests to this reviewer two things: a reliably field, Cosways wife, and her fine Parisian romance (probably, but
sequential narrative, passing in stately fashion from not certainly, unconsummated) with Thomas Jefferson. Both of
age to age; and a stern attempt at social and geographical inclu- these are in the end stories about our desperate fear of being left
sivity. Instead, what this virtuoso historian and TV performer has by the person we love and they give a sense of the rich, oily pickings
produced is an eclectic, often personal Schama has rooted up along what would
and brilliantly written collection of essays The Face of Britain: The Nation have been, in most historians hands, a
about what interests him. And thank all Through Its Portraits predictable journey.
the prancing muses for that. by Simon Schama (Viking, 30) The structure of the book, I assume,
Schamas greatest gift is a sure eye follows the structure of the television pro-
for an extraordinary story. Some of the narratives here are well grammes it accompanies, so it is thematic rather than sequen-
known: he begins the book with the great face-off between Win- tialThe Face of Fame, The Face of Powerwith the shorter
ston Churchill and Graham Sutherland in 1954, which lead to the essays gathered into themed sections. This means that it can feel,
destruction of Sutherlands portrait of the wartime prime minis- in the hand, mildly disorientating. We never know after one essay
ter, a masterpiece by a modernist painter who has unfairly fallen quite where we are going next, or why. Some readers may find
out of favour; and we get Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris; the zigzagging in time irritating or distracting. But its strength
and towards the end of the book, Henry Tonks, the ferocious Slade is that it allows Schama the freedom not to be bored, and thus
teacher, turning his pencils and pastels to the problem of facial not to bore the reader. Wherever he chooses to, he leaves con-
reconstruction in 1916-17. The first is a story about patronage and ventional art writing far behind, to gallop off on another crack-
its dangers; the last, a meditation on the uses of drawing. In a con- ing taleof how Francis Drake was seen by the Spanish; or where
ventional art history, neither would probably have been included. Emma Hamilton came from before she bumped into Horatio
Schama reconstructs art history with impish glee. Augustin Nelson; or little David Garrick, the rain and the Shakespeare cult.
Edouart. Isaac Fuller. Jonathan Richardson. George Richmond. But we know, from his earlier books on Rembrandt, Rubens
Samuel Cooper. Richard Cosway. Christina Broome. Each of these and modern art, that Schama has an avid, restlessly shrewd eye
produced, on the evidence of this book, some remarkable work, if for painting. The best art writing in the book is truly exhilarat-
not of the very first quality. Most art lovers will have heard of one ing and happens when Schamas dander is up and he is almost
or two of them. Almost nobody outside the staff of the National panting with excitement about something hes just seen. His
Portrait Gallery, I daresay, knows them all. account of Laura Knights self-portrait while painting Ella Lou-
This eclecticism allows the historian to scramble around for ise Naper in the rosy-bottomed nude (a radical piece of picture-
stories we ought to know, but mostly dont: theres a sizzling essay, making, even if bringing in Barnett Newman, Henri Matisse
for instance, on the bizarre, sadly comic story of the lumpish and Marcel Duchamp might be stretching it a tad) is not some-
equestrian statue of Charles I by Hubert Le Sueur, which cur- thing I will forget. Nor his lovely and sensitive account of an
rently stands on the traffic island known as Trafalgar Square, early sketch by Thomas Gainsborough of his daughters chasing
and which very nearly didnt survive at all. Anyone familiar with a butterflyand the sad story of what followed. Nor again, his
the National Portrait Gallery will have paused by the portrait by description of the 1826 self-portrait by that tormented vision-
Anthony van Dyck of Sir Kenelm Digby, a fat-faced, balding cava- ary Samuel Palmer, which Schama rightly compares to Rubens
lier who looks remarkably like a 20th-century stockbroker got up and Rembrandt: The roughly cut hair, perhaps self-sheared,
in fancy dress. The real story of Sir Kenelms dogged, tragic love is more lovingly handled in black chalk than any barber could
for Venetia Stanley, and his remarkable career as a proto-scientist, have managed and with a lot more attentiveness, too, for Palmer
privateer and magus, would have provided for some authors a long has found a way to draw dirt-stiffened, sweat-stuck individual
biography taking many years of blameless study; its recounted hairs so that they cling greasily together, exposing glistening
here in a couple of dozen fascinating pages. areas of his forehead.
Sir Kenelm is followed immediately by the story of the under- The quotation introduces the unavoidable issue of the Schama
sized Regency artist Richard Cosway, also known as Tiny Cos- style. He is, to filch one of the 18th-century words he clearly much
enjoys, a bit of macaroni writerflamboyant, exuberant, a word-
importer and a performer. Its the opposite of the George Orwell
and newspaper style-guide approachmake it simple, cut it down,
prune away everything you dont absolutely need. Again, I suspect
Andrew Marr is a writer and broadcaster, and host of some people may find this irritating, though for me the exuber-
BBC Ones The Andrew Marr Show ance almost always works.
 PROSPECT 15

The most immediately affecting writing is

autobiographical, when he heads back to
the Notting Hill of his youth to meet the
black photographer Charlie Phillips, or
when he recounts the loss of his much-val-
ued collection of cigarette card portraits
in a boys gambling game. This made me
think that the next Schama book, or per-
haps the next-but-one, really has to be an
autobiography. It would, I gently suggest,
REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION OF THE ESTATE OF DAME LAURA KNIGHT DBE RA 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

really be something.
Away from the metropolis, and his
own world, he has the humane curios-
ity of a good historian. There is an essay
about Octavius Hill and Robert Adam-
son, who took famously stunning early
photographs of Newhaven fishwives and
their husbands, which might be the best
thing in the book. He just looks harder.
He empathises.
Im beginning to rave. This book isnt
perfect. I would really love to have read
Schama on Allan Ramsay and Henry
Raeburnthose biting Georgian wives,
those great, livid, farmers and traders
and am genuinely puzzled why they dont
appear. Plus, I never want to read about
Alice Liddell ever again. I think hes too
fond of Francis Bacon, excessively cen-
sorious about Lucian Freud and bor-
derline brutal about Tracey Emin. He
tells us that the first self-portrait in Eng-
Self Portrait (1913) by Laura Knight, featuring model Ella Louise Naper in the rosy- lish art was made around 1240 by William
bottomed nude, was a radical piece of picture-making, says Andrew Marr de Brailes in a psalter. But James Hall, in
his recent The Self-Portrait: A Cultural His-
Here he is, opening his chapter about Francis Bacon and his tory, has tracked down a much earlier self-portrait by St Dun-
self-destructive lover George Dyer: 1963. Man, 30-odd, walks stan of Glastonbury, from around 950, in which he crouches at
into a pub. Hes wearing a cocky expression and a dab too much the feet of Christ. Other misses include John Singer Sargent,
brilliantine; bit of a pompadour and his eyebrows look like two whose reputation was recently rebuilt at the National Portrait
caterpillars are having a conversation on his forehead. But the Gallery, and who did for the Edwardians what Joshua Reynolds
Stepney spiv style is alright. London has barely begun to swing, did for the Georgians, but with more wit; and David Hockney.
Carnaby Street still has traffic running through it, and Soho If you want to know what the super-rich look like now, with their
means looking sharp the old way: bigger lapels, broad shoulders, insecurities and strange clothing, Hockney is where you have
clean-shaven with a bit of a curl to the lip; tight knot to the tie. to go.
George Dyer has all this. Hes done a little time in the nick so he Yet its the pathetic default mode of the modern book review
knows whats what, and he knows that a man who also likes a lit- to attack a book for all the things it isnt, rather than look closely
tle grease on his mop is giving him the once-over. at what it is. And this is both excellent and highly unusual.
Youd read on, wouldnt you? And here, again in London, he Schama has written books which will still be bought and talked
is ventriloquising Godfrey Kneller as he ushers in up to 14 sitters about a century from nowIm thinking of The Embarrassment
in a day in his 1690s workshop: A very good morning; please of Riches, Citizens, Rembrandts Eyes. Hes been at the top of his
be seated, there in the light, just so; excellent; thank you thank game for most of his career and he hasnt lost an ounce of zest
you, now if you would be so good as to hold quite still for a time, I or intelligence. Damn him. Television tie-in books rarely garner
would be most obliged... Mr such and such will be sure to let you enthusiastic reviews. They are designed, almost handcrafted, to
know when the likeness is done. Truly most obliged. Good day to sandpaper the pursed insecurities of the academy. All I will say
you. Next, I believe? Are yes, Lady so and so. Pray, do come in is that every reader of this magazine should have a copy of Simon
This isnt what you get from conventional historians or con- Schamas The Face of Britainno, not in a bookcase, but right
ventional art writers, mores the pity. Even if sometimes you won- there on the desk, broken-backed.
der whether there isnt a bit too much brilliantine, and at other He can look at something we think we know and make it
times he pushes slangy informality pretty far, you read on. As seem fresh and new to us, and this is a great gift. He very nearly
that extract implies, Schama is very much a metropolitan writer, persuaded me to find George Romney and Johann Zoffany
a creature of London, New York and, occasionally, Edinburgh. interesting.