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#1
July 22nd 03, 10:52 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
snip
IMO, there are too many mavericks posting unorthodox, to put it politely, views. snip any dirt will do, even porky dirt snip No bias in *your* view of history, then... (don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of bias, since all historians are biased... did you, for example, see "A History Of Britain" on the BBC written by "porky" Simon Schama? That was full of "dirt" of all hues, and was certainly biased, but not distorted.) I have read nothing of the connection between Heine and Thiers. You write that the latter arranged a pension for the former. Why should that be "Hard to believe" (*notwithstanding* the cited later oppression)? Best Mark 
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#2
July 24th 03, 07:43 PM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
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#4
August 21st 03, 04:30 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article , says... I have not yet come across any additional facts about Mendheim or Isaac Hess. Yet I am pleased to find other people who may share some of my interests in German Jewish history and culture.... Nick, Thanks for trying. Dear Simon, "Youth will be served, every dog has his day, and mine has been a fine one." --George Henry Borrow (Lavengro) You once asked me whether I have ever read "The Bible in Spain" by George Henry Borrow (1803-1881). I have not, yet I do recall this passage from from the novel "Sharpe's Rifles" by Bernard Cornwell: "'So you're rich?' Sharpe could not help asking. 'Not I. But my aunt received a sufficiency to create trouble in the world.' Louisa spoke very gravely. 'Have you any idea, Mr Sharpe, just how embarrassing it is to be spreading Protestantism in Spain?'" According to what I read today, most history undergraduates learn their pre-university history from the TV; I hope this isn't true, as, IMO, there are too many mavericks broadcasting unorthodox, to put it politely, views. In a moderated professional forum for academic historians and independent scholars, a lecturer at an American university posted some results of a survey of undergraduates at the beginning of a course about the Second World War. Most of the American students believed that the Soviet Union or China (or both) had been enemies of the United States during that war. Nearly all of the American students believed that the United States had won the war with little, if any, assistance from any allied countries. Some "historical documentaries" on television have many inaccurate "facts". For example, one programme showed a map that claimed that Norway had already been liberated from German occupation by the time of the D-Day invasion. Around the 50th anniversary of India's independence, a major American news source reported this "historical fact": British India had been partitioned into three (not two) independent countries in 1947: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. (Then what was the war in 1971 all about?) "The nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some who would like to rewrite history--revisionist historians is what I call them." --United States President George W. Bush (June 2003) President Bush's denunciation of "revisionist historians" implies that there already exists a completely accurate, balanced, and fair edition of history that has been inscribed in stone somewhere (which Bush is privileged to read), and that "revisionist historians" are those annoying people who pass by and deface the sacred patriotic texts with scholarly graffiti. Actually, any intellectually honest historian is in the profession of 'revisionism'. Reviewing and revising the current interpretations of historical events is what historians are supposed to be doing. As a general rule, professional historians are discouraged from becoming engaged in public disputes with amateurs, who tend to feel qualified to do so only because they have "read many history books". Having read many popular books on health care does not qualify someone to be a doctor; having read many popular books on history does not qualify someone to be a historian. A layman might be able to observe an illness's symptoms without being able to diagnose the underlying condition. Likewise, a layman might have memorized many 'historical facts' without knowing how to place them in a historical context from which reasonable inferences could be drawn. And a reader of popular history books tends to be quite unaware of their critical reputations among professional specialists in that field. For example, some American supporters of Israel continue to cite a 1984 book, "From Time Immemorial: the Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine" by Joan Peters (someone with no known scholarly credentials whatsoever). "From Time Immemorial" was a work of pro-Zionist propaganda that was lavishly promoted in the American media because it served a pro-Israeli political agenda. It won the National Jewish Book Award. By 1985, the book began to appear in editions overseas, however, and the critical reviews were damning, including in Israel and the United Kingdom. Here's an excerpt from a review by Albert Hourani, then an eminent historian at Oxford University: "The whole book is written like this: facts are selected or misunderstood, tortuous and flimsy arguments are expressed in violent and repetitive language. This is a *ludicrous and worthless* book and the only mildly interesting question it raises is why it comes with praise from two well-known American writers." --Albert Hourani (5 March 1985, The Observer) An American scholar, Norman G. Finkelstein (a son of Holocaust survivors), wrote a painstakingly detailed expose of Joan Peters's fraudulent methods, "Disinformation and the Palestine Question", reprinted as a chapter of "Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question" edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens. In short, "From Time Immemorial" has been completely discredited in scholarly circles, and yet the book continues to circulate among the general public. "The historian has much to answer for. History--that is, written history--has made and unmade States, given courage to the oppressed and undermined the oppressor, has justified aggression and overridden law." --C.V. Wedgwood (Velvet Studies, p. 154) BTW, I share your view of G. It is a terrible thing to say, but he gives me the impression that any dirt will do, even porky dirt. "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" by Daniel Goldhagen has been lavishly promoted and become a popular success, complete with some endorsements from ignorant celebrities such as Stephen Fry (whom I did like watching with Hugh Laurie in 'Jeeves & Wooster'). But the book's standing among almost all academic historians of modern Germany is quite low. Here are some excerpts from a chapter, "The Past Distorted: the Goldhagen Controversy" by Fritz Stern: "The book is a deliberate provocation--I consider this a neutral judgment. Provocations can shock people out of their settled, comfortable views; they can also be self-promoting attacks on earlier work and professional standards.... Goldhagen's book comes in two related parts: the explanatory model, or 'the analytical framework', as he also calls it, and the empirical evidence. The parts are joined by a single intent: the indictment of a people. The duality of presentation marks the style as well. Goldhagen depicts horror and renders judgment in evocative and compelling phrases. He bolsters polemical certainty with concepts drawn from the social sciences, relying on the vaporous, dreary jargon of the worst of academic 'discourse'. Unintelligible diagrams distract, even as horrendous photographs confirm....Astoundingly repetitive, the book has 125 pages of notes but, regrettably, no bibliography, which would have been a great convenience to other scholars. To say it at once: the book has some merit, especially in the middle section, which depicts three specific aspects of the Holocaust, and it has one overriding defect: it is in its essence *unhistorical*. It is unhistorical in positing that one (simplistically depicted) strain of the past, German anti-Semitism, explains processes that the author strips of their proper historical context; it is unhistorical in over and over again presenting suppositions as 'incontestable' certainty. Sir Lewis Namier, a great English historian, once remarked that 'the historical approach is intellectually humble; the aim is to comprehend situations, to study trends, to discover how things work: and the crowning attainment of historical study is a historical sense--an intuitive understanding of how things do not happen'. Goldhagen's tone mocks humility, and he seems to lack any sense 'of how things do not happen', of how complex human conduct and historical change really are.... Goldhagen draws on the rich literature about German anti-Semitism even as he dismisses it, distills what is useful for his thesis while ignoring whatever might contradict or complicate it, and then celebrates the originality of his own version. The result is a potpourri of half-truths and assertions, all meant to support his claim that German anti-Semitism was unique in its abiding wish to eliminate Jews, its 'eliminationist mind-set'. He suggests that one needs to look at Germans as anthropologists look at preliterate societies; they are not like 'us', meaning Americans or Western Europeans. He considers but dismisses the need to compare German anti-Semitism to other varieties, although we know that anti-Semitism was endemic in the Western world....Goldhagen certainly knows that thousands of non-Germans were willing executioners, willing auxiliaries to the Holocaust. But their motivation or, indeed, their historical role is of no interest to him. Even in his discussion of German anti-Semitism he fails to make the necessary distinctions. There was a wide range of attitudes toward Jews, from those few who did indeed see them as the enemy and chief corruptors of their society--as 'vermin' to be exterminated--to those men and women who welcomed Jews but regretted what they saw as Jewish 'pushiness' or preeminence in some realms. Goldhagen takes remarks out of context and treats almost equally the ranting of the rabble-rouser and the private musings confined to a writer's diary. Everything is grist for his mill. A Goldhagen version of anti-Semitism in twentieth-century America might lump Eleanor Roosevelt's early remarks about 'Jew-boys' in Franklin's law school class with Henry Ford's championing of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' or Father Coughlin's tirades. Only by summary judgment and indifference to nuance can Goldhagen contend that in the nineteenth century 'German society... was *axiomatically* anti-Semitic'...'It is *incontestable* that this racial anti-Semitism which held the Jews to pose a mortal threat to Germany was pregnant with murder' (my emphasis). Incontestable? I would say unprovable and implausible.... It is generally accepted that the more the National Socialists tried to widen their appeal, the more they muted their anti-Semitic theme. In one of Hitler's key addresses in 1932, for example, he hardly alluded to Jews at all. Yet Goldhagen insists: 'The centrality of antisemitism in the Party's world, program and rhetoric--if in a more avowedly elaborated and violent form-- mirrored the sentiments of German culture.' Actually, it exposed the sentiments of only *some* Germans. In the last free elections in 1932, some 67 percent of the German electorate did not vote for Hitler, although there can be no doubt that even among these were groups that harbored suspicion and dislike of Jews. Perhaps many Germans had some measure of anti-Semitism in them but lacked the murderous intent that Goldhagen ascribes to National Socialism. Put bluntly: for Goldhagen, as for the National Socialists, *Hitler was Germany.*" --Fritz Stern (Einstein's German World, pp. 273-8) For further reading: "A Nation on Trial: the Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth" by Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn Many German historians and lawyers have done sterling service trying to get at the truth: for instance the role of German historians in the lengthy debate as to who was responsible for the Great War, "Rathenau famously claimed that two hundred elderly men who knew one another controlled the fate of Europe and the world. He should have added the old truism that in war millions of young men butcher millions of other young men who have done them no harm and whom they have never met--all on behalf of a few old men who know one another only too well." --Amos Elon (The Pity of It All, p. 302) Yes, Fritz Fischer has become famous for writing "Griff Nach der Weltmacht" and other critical works about Germany's policies and war aims (1914-18). For further reading: "In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past" by Richard Evans Daniel Goldhagen, the American author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners", has written that the German people generally have been significantly more ready to face honestly the crimes of Germany's history than the American people have been willing to face honestly the crimes of the United States's history. and the psuedo-Darwinism that underpinned many of the beliefs of that time. In April 1920, "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" by Lothrop Stoddard (Ph.D. Harvard) was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in the United States. The book became a bestseller, and it might well have significantly influenced the passage of more restrictive immigration laws and the adoption of more punitive racial codes in the United States. "I stated: 'The world-wide struggle between the primary races of mankind--the 'conflict of color', as it has been happily termed--bids fair to be the fundamental problem of the twentieth century, and great communities like the United States of America, the South African Confederation, and Australasia regard the 'color question' as perhaps the gravest problem of the future.' Those lines were penned in June, 1914. Before their publication the Great War had burst upon the world....To me the Great War was from the first the White Civil War, which, whatever its outcome, must gravely complicate the course of racial relations." --Lothrop Stoddard (28 February 1920, The Rising Tide of Color, pp. v-vi) Here's a link to the online text of "The Rising Tide of Color": http://www.africa2000.com/XNDX/STODDARD.hmtl In November 1998, "My Awakening: a Path to Racial Understanding" by David Duke, an extreme right-wing American politician (formerly a leader of the Klu Klux Klan), was published by "Free Speech Books" in the United States. "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." "It's not we who lord it over things, it seems, but things which lord it over us. But that's only because some people make use of things in order to lord it over others. We shall only be freed from the forces of nature when we are free of human force. Our knowledge of nature must be supplemented with a knowledge of human society if we are to use our knowledge of nature in a human way." --Bertolt Brecht (The Messingkauf Dialogues) Fritz Stern, perhaps the foremost expert on this subject, has argued that the history of the assimilated Jews of Germany was much more than the history of a tragedy; it was also, for a long time, the story of an extraordinary success: 'We must understand the triumphs in order to understand the tragedy.' We must see the German Jews in the context of their time and, at the very least, appreciate their authenticity, the way they saw themselves and others, often with reason. --Amos Elon (The Pity of It All, p. 12) I take it you know that it was a Rothschild who used the words "Ost Juden". I don't recall that citation. By the way, Emma Rothschild, the Director of the Centre for History and Economics at King's College, University of Cambridge, is married to Amartya Sen, the Master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht.' 'I think of Germany at night The thought keeps me awake till light.' --Heinrich Heine (Nachtgedanken) Correct me if I'm wrong, but Thiers arranged for Heine, a very German, even though Jewish, poet, to receive a French pension. "He (Heine) claimed later that he had actually crossed the French border on May Day (1831). This claim gave birth to the legend that the first of May was chosen as the international workers' day (but it's not known as 'Labor Day' in the United States) to commemorate Heine's escape to freedom. Heine's stay in Paris was meant to be temporary. As it turned out, he remained there until his death in 1856... Heine very quickly won the admiration of France's leading writers--Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Alfred de Musset....Dumas said, 'If Germany rejects Heine we will willingly adopt him. Unfortunately, Heine loves Germany more than it deserves.'... Heine loved Paris. He felt 'like a fish in water'...Interviews with Heine continued to appear in the German press. His interviewers wondered endlessly whether he was 'homesick'; the idea that so important a German poet preferred to live in France mystified and disturbed them.... By 1835, the works of both Heine and Boerne--'evil, anti-Christian, blasphemous, wilfully defying all virtue, humility, and honour'--headed the lists of banned books in several German states....Although Heine and Boerne were the only Jews among more than a dozen banned writers associated with Young Germany, it was often derided as Young Palestine.... In France, Heine became the classic German poet of homesickness, an affliction that during the first half of the next century would become widespread among German Jews. He would now write his most beautiful poetry and his sharpest critiques and satires of German politics and manners....He voiced the first, most acute prophecies about German nationalism and militarism. His darkest forebodings reveal a stunning, uncanny prescience. He warned his German readers that they were their own worst enemies.... 'A Winter's Tale' unleashed widespread criticism. Heine was accused of being insolent, 'un-German from the bottom up'. The antisemitic historian Heinrich Treitschke credited Heine with possession of a dubious gift shared by Frenchmen and Jews alike, 'the graceful vice of making the mean and loathsome attractive for a moment'. Yet his fame continued to spread inside Germany as well as abroad, where he was swiftly becoming one of the great heroes of European culture.... Heine certainly did not return to organised religion. He considered himself the great Spinoza's Unglaubengenosse--his brother in disbelief--a term Freud would later apply to himself. He continued to despise the 'rotten clergical scum' of all faiths: rabbis, pastors, mullahs, and priests. He wanted no Mass sung and no Kaddish said at his grave. On his tombstone he wished to be identified only as a German poet. 'If I could walk with crutches, I'd go to church, and if I could walk without I'd go to the whorehouse', he told a visitor. He was still his own man, neither Jew nor Christian. His wife, whom he had married in a Catholic ceremony only to please her, wept at his deathbed. 'Don't be afraid, my dear', he said. 'God will forgive me; that's his job.'" --Amos Elon (The Pity of It All, pp. 140-8) "In the German Imperial Reich, united under Prussian tutelage by Bismarck in 1871 after the defeat of the French, Heine was widely regarded as a subversive, Francophile, and above all a Jew, three not inaccurate if somewhat oversimplified characteristics, each of which the Teutomaniacal squareheads increasingly dominant in the new country's cultural and literary establishments construed as a capital crime....In fact, in came to a definite end in March of 1933, when...all of Heine's writings were burned in public auto-da-fes all over Germany. How many, among the millions watching those pyres on the town squares, recalled the prophetic line from Heine's 'Almansor': 'Twas but a prelude. For where books are burned, they end up burning people.' The man who provoked controversy all his life has remained an embattled figure in his native land ever since....Nietzsche called him the greatest lyricist in the German language--'He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot conceive of perfection.' Nor did the Final Solution prove all that final for Heine; the troubles he caused in post-Nazi Germany, some of them verging on the grotesque, demonstrate that unlike the certifiably Teutonic Dichter und Denker of classical stature long since transformed into pigeon roosts, he still retains the power to start riots, even in effigy. Attempts to erect Heine monuments in several at the time West German cities led to protest demonstrations and local government crises, and a proposal in 1953 to rename the University of Duesseldorf, his hometown, after him was soundly defeated after a long and acrimonious debate. In what used to be East Germany, on the other hand, he was used as a totemic figure to legitimize the Communist regime, a revolutionary exiled along with Marx and Engels as a resolute opponent of the bourgeoisie. This process of more or less simplistic politicization has tended to distort the core identity of the man, the more so since his poetic reputation in Germany underwent an inevitable eclipse with the rise of the modernist movement around the First World War." --Ernst Pawel (The Poet Dying, pp. 192-3) Hard to believe given that Frenchman's later brutal suppression of the Paris Commune. Wenn sich die Blutegel vollgesogen, Man streut auf ihren Ruecken bloss Ein bisschen Salz, und sie fallen ab-- Doch dich, mein Freund, wie werd ich dich los? When leeches have sucked their fill of blood, To get them off, some salt will do-- A bit on their backs and down they drop-- But friend, how shall I get rid of you? --Heinrich Heine By the way, Paul Verlaine was the press secretary of the Paris Commune. On the origins of the Paris Commune of 1871: "There were the appalling slums into which the workers were now concentrated despite (and partly because of) the works of Haussmann; the vastly inflated cost of living which had far outpaced wages; the long hours of work under disgraceful circumstances; child labour still involving several thousands of eight-year-olds in Paris alone; no security of employment, no sickness benefits, no pensions; restrictions on the right to affiliate, on freedom of the Press, and upon any means by which the workers might have achieved less intolerable conditions. Rossel, a regular soldier of middle-class extraction who later threw in his lot with the Commune, was moved by what he saw among the Parisians under his command to exclaim: 'These people have good reason for fighting; they fight that their children may be less puny, less scrofulous, and less full of failings than themselves.' The workers' attitude to all the glories left by the Second Empire was summed up simply by one who declared in Goncourt's hearing: 'What is it to me that there should be monuments, operas, cafe-concerts, where I have never set foot because I had no money?' As the Communards would ultimately prove, there were those who would rather all these glories of civilisation were expunged by fire than that the Parisian workers should continue to forfeit their claims for a better life." --Alistair Horne (The Fall of Paris, p. 295) On the reprisals against the Communards and their suspected sympathisers: "There seemed to be no end to the horror. Abroad it had already aroused bitter comment. There were meetings of protest in London, addressed by John Stuart Mill; and Thiers was not being entirely truthful when he claimed that the British Press 'declared that greater humanity had never been displayed toward greater criminals'. Exclaimed 'The Times' on May 29th: 'The laws of war! They are mild and Christian compared with the inhuman laws of revenge under which the Versailles troops have been shooting, bayoneting, ripping up prisoners, women, and children during the last six days. So far as we can recollect there has been nothing like it in history....'" --Alistair Horne (The Fall of Paris, p. 417) On what someone concluded about why the Paris Commune was crushed: "The proletariat stopped half-way; instead of proceeding with the 'expropriation of the expropriators', it was carried away by dreams of establishing supreme justice in the country...institutions such as the Bank were not seized....The second error was the unnecessary magnanimity of the proletariat; instead of annihilating its enemies, it endeavoured to exercise moral influence on them; it did not attach the right value to the importance of purely military activity in cvil war..." --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (18 March 1908) On some of the consequences of that conclusion: "When the moment came for the revolution for which his whole life had been a preparation, Lenin would not repeat the Commune's 'half-measures' and 'unnecessary magnanimity'. There could be no question of accepting, as the Commune had demonstrated, 'the available ready machinery of the State', and adapting it; everything had to be smashed and re-created in a new, proletarian image. To Lenin and his followers, the supreme lesson of the Commune was that the only way to succeed was by total ruthlessness.... To ensure that the revolution would not be frittered away by the paralysing squabbles such as had arisen within so feebly democratic a body as the Commune, Lenin split with his more moderate allies, the Mensheviks; then proceeded remorselessly to crush the left-wing Constituent Assembly, until the extreme Bolshevik dictatorship was complete. 'The Commune was lost', explained Lenin, 'because it compromised and reconciled'. His Red Army commissar, Trotsky, criticised the Commune for not meeting the 'white terror of the bourgeoisie with the red terror of the proletariat', and when civil war broke out in Russia neither Trotsky nor Lenin was backward in the dispensation of terror. How much of the ferocious brutality with which the Russian Reds fought for survival was attributable to the ever-present memory of May 1871, may be judged by the comment in retrospect of an old Bolshevik: 'In those grave moments, we said: 'Look, workers, at the example of the Paris Communards and know that if we are defeated, our bourgeoisie will treat us a hundred times worse.' The example of the Paris Commune inspired us and we were victorious.'" --Alistair Horne (The Fall of Paris, pp. 431-2) Thomas Mo ...And no doubt it delights God to see splendour where He only looked for complexity. But it's God's part, not our own, to bring outselves to that extremity! Our natural business lies in escaping--so let's get home and study this Bill. --Robert Bolt (A Man for all Seasons) --Nick
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#5
August 22nd 03, 03:06 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
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#6
August 22nd 03, 03:52 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
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#7
August 23rd 03, 01:04 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
Chapman billy wrote in message m...
In article , Mark Houlsby says: I have read nothing of the connection between Heine and Thiers. You write that the latter arranged a pension for the former. Here's a quote from "Heine" by Francois Feijto (trans. Mervyn Savill; published 1946 by Allan Wingate). "His financial resources dried up just at the time when he was abandoning his bachelor existence. In addition to the money which his French publications brought in, his only income was the allowance of four thousand francs from his uncle Saloman. Under these circumstance, Princess Belgiojoso, to whom Heine confided all his worries, interceded through Mignet with Thiers, who appreciated Heine's works, to subsidise him out of the secret funds for Foreign Affairs." (page 196) "Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history." --George Eliot (Daniel Deronda) Dear Mr. Houlsby and Mr. Spivack, Here are some relevant excerpts from "Heinrich Heine: a Modern Biography" by Jeffrey Sammons (1979: Princeton University Press), which might be at some variance with what was cited earlier in this thread: "For years he (Heine) had been trying to maintain his claims to genuine progressive spokesmanship, while fending off radical changes of apostasy. A whole strategy of his life was damaged by this revelation, and he responded to it at once with a public explanation. He denied that the state pension had in any way compromised his views, declaring it was one of the numerous acts of generosity of the French government toward exiles seeking freedom. The pension made up for the loss of income incurred by the Federal decree of 1835. Guizot, Heine says, was pleased to continue the pension in November 1840, the first and last time Heine ever spoke to him....the statement that Guizot *continued* it implies strongly that it was granted by the other leading politician of the July Monarchy, Adolphe Thiers, whom Heine elsewhere describes as solicitous of his welfare...." --Jeffrey Sammons (Heinrich Heine, pp. 223-4) Why should that be "Hard to believe" (*notwithstanding* the cited later oppression)? Heine was trenchant in his criticism of the French political situation. This happened under both Thiers and Guizot, who also continued the subsidy. "When Guizot succeeded Thiers at the head of foreign affairs he informed Heine, who had attacked him more than once for his reactionary opinions, that he would continue to pay him the subsidy." (page 197) "Heine continued to attack Guizot's home and foreign policy just as violently. The majority of Heine's German biographers - even the most indulgent - could never bring themselves to understand how French statesmen, capable of distributing a considerable pension to a foreign writer without a quid pro quo, could possibly exist. In Germany it would not have been possible." (also page 197) "Heine is careful to say that *Guizot* required no services from him; he does not mention Thiers, who undoubtedly arranged the pension. It is very doubtful that Thiers did not have something in mind besides charity when he made this arrangement. Under the same heading of 'Service extraordinaire' are a number of men who did write for the advantage of the French government and were compensated for doing so. Heine's stipend, roughly equal to the annual salary of a French university professor, was too large to be a mere gratuity; others, who were supported on humane grounds, such as the blind and paralysed historian Augustin Thierry, whom Heine mentions in this connection, received much less. Heine had just renewed his contract with the Augsberg 'Allgemeine Zeitung', to which Thiers had previously close connections, and indeed in his first articles he spoke very admiringly of Thiers' person and statesmanlike gifts, if not uncritically of his policies, although a comparison with the partisan Parisian press of the time shows that he generally supported them...Heine did ultimately conclude that Thiers was without a sense for the 'ideal needs of mankind' and the 'great social institutions'. It looks very much as if someone got wind of the secret pension at the time. Insinuations that he was writing in the 'Allgemeine Zeitung' as an agent of Thiers appeared in a French newspaper in 1840, planted by Heine's German enemies in Paris. He published a notice defending himself and repeated the defence to Campe. There is too much guesswork involved to judge this matter with certainty. One would need to know to some details of how the arrangement came about in the first place, but this is wholly obscure. It does seem that the original motivation cannot have been as innocent as Heine makes out, and such a connection must necessarily have put his much vaunted political independence under some strain. On the other hand, Heine's reportage does not show him unduly attachd to French policies and purposes. To a remark in the 'Allgemeine Zeitung' that he was paid not so much for what he wrote as for what he did not writer, he riposted that the 'Allgemeine Zeitung' knew perfectly well, not so much from what it printed of his as from what it did not print, that he was not a 'servile writer'. This seems fair, and Heine appears truthful when he indicates that he exchanged no favours with Guizot, though from time to time he praised him personally as he did Thiers in articles for the 'Allgemeine Zeitung', passages that in the book version after the Revolution he tended to delete." --Jeffrey Sammons (Heinrich Heine, pp. 224-5) "We are not accustomed to carry things with the same hand, or to look at 'em from the same point." --Charles Dickens (Bleak House) --Nick
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#8
September 22nd 03, 12:20 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message ...
From: (Nick) Message-id: ... "'Yes, I am fond of history.' 'I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs-- the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.' 'Historians, you think', said Miss Tilney, 'are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history, and am very well contented to take the false with the true....' --Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) "I believe--these are the simple premises of my efforts--that present and past are indissoluble, that life and work are hard to separate even if the connections may remain obscure and partly unconscious. These are commonplaces that have replaced the older notions of a J.B. Bury, who believed in history as science, or a Fustel de Coulanges, who said--in genuine modesty, I believe--"It is not I speaking, but history speaking through me." The reckless subjectivity that has invaded our field in some areas might make one regret the passing of the older austerity, exemplified in Leopold von Ranke's wish to 'expunge the self', but I believe that only totalitarian societies can extinguish the self. In all other situations, historians are unlikely to escape their own times or their own complicated selves." --Fritz Stern (Einstein's German World, pp. 200-1) "In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental." --Eric Hobsbawm ('The New Threat to History' in the "New York Review of Books" 16 December 1993, p. 63) "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." --Bertrand Russell Yes, quite. 'The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with many; for what is genius or courage without a heart?' --Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield) Dear Mr Houlsby, I am afraid that most people tend to confuse what they may believe is thinking for themselves with simply reiterating what they have been taught that they should believe, without any further thought. Interestingly (or uninterestingly, if you're an adherent of the views expressed through the medium of Ms. Austen's typically adept characterisation) Would an anachronism be avoided by referring to Our Jane as 'Miss Austen'? :-) Mr. Spivack has been unable to substantiate his assertion that his namesake Mr. Schama supports the contemporarily popular policy of appeasement pursued Chamberlain's administration of His Majesty's government. Evidently, Simon Spivack did not make that assertion, but you had misunderstood him to have done so within the context of your discussion. I prefer not to comment here on your dispute with Mr. Spivack beyond stating that I have appreciated both some of your and his contributions to this forum. I hope that you and he may be able to resolve your differences soon with mutual satisfaction. No doubt Mr. Spivack might equally assert that because his namesake, Mr. Schama, stated that after the resounding victory of Parliament's army in the decisive battle of the English Civil War, at Naseby on June 14, 1645 "...God was clearly on the side of Parliament", then Mr. Schama (who is Jewish) truly believes that God is a Puritan... Hmmm... Perhaps you should not hypothesise more on what Mr. Spivack might assert. God might be an Englishman (according to R.F. Delderfield), yet how many Puritans can be found amongst the English today? :-) 'What has emerged in place of the stiff upper lip of Trevor Howard and the trembling lower lip of Celia Johnson is the most effervescent youth culture in the world.' --Jeremy Paxman (The English: a Portrait of a People, p. 231) Now, "appeasement", as Government Policy, of course, (while maintaining an intrinsic similarity) meant something rather different at the time of, say, Baldwin's government, from what it meant in Chamberlain's time. In the latter case, here in Britain we were in the position of needing to rearm, as quickly as possible. We had limited resources available to us. What was not altogether clear was whether we should be concentrating upon preparing for a desert war (in north Africa, against Italy) an air war (in northwestern Europe, against Germany) or a naval war (in the Pacific, against Japan). This dilemma perhaps goes some way towards explaining the reason why pursuing a policy of appeasement (which bought time while the above question was beginning to clarify) was considered, in late 1930s Great Britain, by the-powers-that-be, not only to be expedient, but actually rather prudent. I lack the time now to discuss the 1938 Munich Crisis in detail. Prime Minister Chamberlain was then advised that the Royal Air Force (nearly all of its fighter squadrons were still equipped with biplanes) was thoroughly unprepared to fight the Luftwaffe (which was armed with the Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter, which had ruled the skies in the Spanish Civil War). "It is worth recording that, at the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938, six Gladiator squadrons were still operational with Fighter Command, compared with two of Hurricanes (a monoplane) and no Spitfire squadrons; the balance of its strength comprised Hawker Furies and Demons, and Gloster Gauntlets. By the outbreak of war one year later the transformation to monoplane fighters was almost complete." --Francis Mason (The British Fighter Since 1912, p. 245) Its popularity, by contrast, derived, in large measure, from the memory of the terrible toll exacted by the 1914-18 conflict with Germany and its allies. "When Daladier landed at Le Bourget after returning from Munich there was a large crowd to acclaim him. Chamberlain was equally popular. There was a brief vogue for buying Chamberlain umbrellas--which people called 'mon chamberlain'--and one paper set up a fund to buy him a country house in France. An opinion poll in October 1938, the first ever undertaken in France, showed that Munich was approved of by 57 per cent of the population." --Julian Jackson (The Fall of France, p. 149) Freeman Dyson was a thirteen-year-old English schoolboy in 1937. "The older generation had fought The War and built the the War Cloister. They were determined that we should constantly be reminded of their tragedy. And indeed our whole lives were overshadowed by it. Every year on November 11 there was the official day of mourning. But much heavier on our souls weighed the daily reminders that the best and the brightest of a whole generation had fallen. English life had sunk into sloth and mediocrity, we were told, because none were left of those who should have been our leaders. The missing generation was conspicuous by its absence in the government and in the professions. Everywhere tired men of sixty-five were doing the work that vigourous men of forty-five should have done. The arithmetic was simple. Our school put out each year a graduating class of eighty boys. Our six hundred dead (from The War of 1914-1918) were more than seven complete years. The classes of 1914, 1915, 1916 were wiped out. Few survived from the eight years 1910-1917. We of the class of 1941 were no fools. We saw clearly enough in 1937 that another bloodbath was approaching. We knew how to figure the odds. We saw no reason to expect that the next round would be less bloody than the one before. We expected the fighting to start in 1939 or 1940, and we observed that our chances of coming through it alive were about the same as if we had belonged to the class of 1915 or 1916. We calculated the odds to be about ten to one that we should be dead in five years. Feeling ourselves doomed, we were comforted by the thought that the whole society in which we lived was doomed equally. The coming war would certainly bring massive bombing of civilian populations. We expected bombing, not with old-fashioned high explosives, but with poison gas such as the Italians had recently been using in Ethiopia, or with the anthrax bombs that Aldous Huxley described in 'Brave New World'. We expected biological weapons to be used more and more recklessly, until some new Black Death would get out of control and destroy half the population of Europe. Gas had been used recklessly by both sides in World War I, and there was no reason to hope that germ warfare would lend itself to any greater restraint. We then expected World War II to end with man-made plagues destroying our civilisation, just as inevitably as forty-five years later we are expecting thermonuclear weapons to do the job in World War III. .... We were not so naive as to blame our predicament upon Hitler. We saw Hitler only as a symptom of the decay of our civilisation, not as the cause of it. To us the Germans were not enemies but fellow victims of the general insanity. The first book I read in German was Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front', describing the German class of 1914 torn to pieces by The War in the same way as their English contemporaries. Remarque's book is as powerful a memorial to them as our War Cloister is to our six hundred. My tears stained the pages of my German dictionary as I came to the end of the story. We did not bother to read 'Mein Kampf'. We looked around us and saw nothing but idiocy. The great British Empire visibly crumbling, and the sooner it fell apart the better so far as we were concerned. Millions of men unemployed, and millions of children growing up undernourished in dilapidated slums. A king mouthing patriotic platitudes which none of us believed. A government which had no answer to any of its problems except to rearm as rapidly as possible. A military establishment which believed in bombing the German civilian economy as the only feasible strategy. A clique of old men in positions of power, blindly repeating the mistakes of 1914, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the intervening twenty-four years. A population of middle-aged nonentities, caring only for money and status, too stupid even to flee from the wrath to come." --Freeman Dyson (Weapons and Hope, pp. 109-12) Of course, if it had not been for Mitchell, Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895-1937) was the chief designer of the Supermarine Spitfire fighter. After being diagnosed with cancer, Mitchell defied his doctors' orders to rest and follow a prescribed course of treatment. Instead, Mitchell urgently continued working on his design because he believed that it was more important for his country that his work should approach its completion than that his life could be prolonged. R. J. Mitchell's life was dramatised in the 1942 film, 'The First of the Few'. (Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895-1937) should not be confused with Reginald Price Michell (1873-1938), a British chess master.) The Hawker Hurricane, not the more glamourous and less numerous Spitfire, was Fighter Command's workhorse in the Battle of Britain. The Hurricane was slower than the Spitfire, yet it was preferred in the vital role of intercepting the Luftwaffe's bombers. The Hurricane had these advantages over the Spitfi 1) The Hurricane could withstand more battle damage. 2) The Hurricane was a more stable gun platform. 3) The Hurricane probably was easier for the inexperienced pilots to fly. Royce The North American P-51 Mustang became a successful long-range escort fighter in the United States's strategic bombing of Germany only after it was installed with a British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. and, perhaps most especially, Turing, we would have lost WWII. Some historians have contended that the United Kingdom did lose that war in the sense that, at least partly as a consequence, it lost most of the British Empire not long afterward. O, ye of little faith! Should you not have simply trusted the Americans to "save the world" then, as they like to keep saying that they always have and will again? :-) "Le voilą donc connu, ce secret plein d'horreur." --Voltaire 'Perhaps, on the whole, more power is lost than gained by habits of secrecy.' --Anthony Trollope (The Eustace Diamonds) --Nick
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#9
September 22nd 03, 01:08 AM
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Mendheim et al (OT)
From: (Nick) Date: 22/09/03 00:20 GMT Daylight Time Message-id: -remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message ... From: (Nick) Message-id: ... "'Yes, I am fond of history.' 'I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs-- the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.' 'Historians, you think', said Miss Tilney, 'are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history, and am very well contented to take the false with the true....' --Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey) "I believe--these are the simple premises of my efforts--that present and past are indissoluble, that life and work are hard to separate even if the connections may remain obscure and partly unconscious. These are commonplaces that have replaced the older notions of a J.B. Bury, who believed in history as science, or a Fustel de Coulanges, who said--in genuine modesty, I believe--"It is not I speaking, but history speaking through me." The reckless subjectivity that has invaded our field in some areas might make one regret the passing of the older austerity, exemplified in Leopold von Ranke's wish to 'expunge the self', but I believe that only totalitarian societies can extinguish the self. In all other situations, historians are unlikely to escape their own times or their own complicated selves." --Fritz Stern (Einstein's German World, pp. 200-1) "In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental." --Eric Hobsbawm ('The New Threat to History' in the "New York Review of Books" 16 December 1993, p. 63) "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so." --Bertrand Russell Yes, quite. 'The ignorant peasant without fault is greater than the philosopher with many; for what is genius or courage without a heart?' --Oliver Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield) Dear Mr Houlsby, I am afraid that most people tend to confuse what they may believe is thinking for themselves with simply reiterating what they have been taught that they should believe, without any further thought. Yes, quite. Interestingly (or uninterestingly, if you're an adherent of the views expressed through the medium of Ms. Austen's typically adept characterisation) Would an anachronism be avoided by referring to Our Jane as 'Miss Austen'? :-) Is it anachronistic to refer to a proto-feminist in that manner? Would she disapprove? Does she care (what's left of her)? Does anyone? Mr. Spivack has been unable to substantiate his assertion that his namesake Mr. Schama supports the contemporarily popular policy of appeasement pursued Chamberlain's administration of His Majesty's government. Evidently, Simon Spivack did not make that assertion, but you had misunderstood him to have done so within the context of your discussion. Evidently. Whatcha tryna do, antagonise the guy even more? I prefer not to comment here on your dispute with Mr. Spivack beyond stating that I have appreciated both some of your and his contributions to this forum. For my part, I have appreciated his and yours in like manner. I hope that you and he may be able to resolve your differences soon with mutual satisfaction. Given that it is he who has placed certain preconditions upon the proximity of my posts to his, perhaps it is to Simon that you need to repeat this assertion (I know that you did so in the Zaitsev thread). For my part, I wish no such restrictions. Evidently, Simon doesn't appreciate being misinterpreted. Equally he has envisaged our (his and my) posting in the same thread in parallel. Will we observe this phenomenon shortly, I wonder? :-) No doubt Mr. Spivack might equally assert that because his namesake, Mr. Schama, stated that after the resounding victory of Parliament's army in the decisive battle of the English Civil War, at Naseby on June 14, 1645 "...God was clearly on the side of Parliament", then Mr. Schama (who is Jewish) truly believes that God is a Puritan... Hmmm... Perhaps you should not hypothesise more on what Mr. Spivack might assert. "Perhaps, perhaps" (Geri Halliwell) "Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps" (Farres/Davis) God might be an Englishman (according to R.F. Delderfield), yet how many Puritans can be found amongst the English today? :-) 'What has emerged in place of the stiff upper lip of Trevor Howard and the trembling lower lip of Celia Johnson is the most effervescent youth culture in the world.' --Jeremy Paxman (The English: a Portrait of a People, p. 231) Now, "appeasement", as Government Policy, of course, (while maintaining an intrinsic similarity) meant something rather different at the time of, say, Baldwin's government, from what it meant in Chamberlain's time. In the latter case, here in Britain we were in the position of needing to rearm, as quickly as possible. We had limited resources available to us. What was not altogether clear was whether we should be concentrating upon preparing for a desert war (in north Africa, against Italy) an air war (in northwestern Europe, against Germany) or a naval war (in the Pacific, against Japan). This dilemma perhaps goes some way towards explaining the reason why pursuing a policy of appeasement (which bought time while the above question was beginning to clarify) was considered, in late 1930s Great Britain, by the-powers-that-be, not only to be expedient, but actually rather prudent. I lack the time now to discuss the 1938 Munich Crisis in detail. Phew! :-) Prime Minister Chamberlain was then advised that the Royal Air Force (nearly all of its fighter squadrons were still equipped with biplanes) was thoroughly unprepared to fight the Luftwaffe (which was armed with the Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter, which had ruled the skies in the Spanish Civil War). Yes, quite. "It is worth recording that, at the time of the Munich crisis in September 1938, six Gladiator squadrons were still operational with Fighter Command, compared with two of Hurricanes (a monoplane) and no Spitfire squadrons; the balance of its strength comprised Hawker Furies and Demons, and Gloster Gauntlets. By the outbreak of war one year later the transformation to monoplane fighters was almost complete." --Francis Mason (The British Fighter Since 1912, p. 245) Yes, quite. Its popularity, by contrast, derived, in large measure, from the memory of the terrible toll exacted by the 1914-18 conflict with Germany and its allies. "When Daladier landed at Le Bourget after returning from Munich there was a large crowd to acclaim him. Chamberlain was equally popular. There was a brief vogue for buying Chamberlain umbrellas--which people called 'mon chamberlain'--and one paper set up a fund to buy him a country house in France. An opinion poll in October 1938, the first ever undertaken in France, showed that Munich was approved of by 57 per cent of the population." --Julian Jackson (The Fall of France, p. 149) Freeman Dyson was a thirteen-year-old English schoolboy in 1937. "The older generation had fought The War and built the the War Cloister. They were determined that we should constantly be reminded of their tragedy. And indeed our whole lives were overshadowed by it. Every year on November 11 there was the official day of mourning. But much heavier on our souls weighed the daily reminders that the best and the brightest of a whole generation had fallen. English life had sunk into sloth and mediocrity, we were told, because none were left of those who should have been our leaders. The missing generation was conspicuous by its absence in the government and in the professions. Everywhere tired men of sixty-five were doing the work that vigourous men of forty-five should have done. The arithmetic was simple. Our school put out each year a graduating class of eighty boys. Our six hundred dead (from The War of 1914-1918) were more than seven complete years. The classes of 1914, 1915, 1916 were wiped out. Few survived from the eight years 1910-1917. We of the class of 1941 were no fools. We saw clearly enough in 1937 that another bloodbath was approaching. We knew how to figure the odds. We saw no reason to expect that the next round would be less bloody than the one before. We expected the fighting to start in 1939 or 1940, and we observed that our chances of coming through it alive were about the same as if we had belonged to the class of 1915 or 1916. We calculated the odds to be about ten to one that we should be dead in five years. Feeling ourselves doomed, we were comforted by the thought that the whole society in which we lived was doomed equally. The coming war would certainly bring massive bombing of civilian populations. We expected bombing, not with old-fashioned high explosives, but with poison gas such as the Italians had recently been using in Ethiopia, or with the anthrax bombs that Aldous Huxley described in 'Brave New World'. We expected biological weapons to be used more and more recklessly, until some new Black Death would get out of control and destroy half the population of Europe. Gas had been used recklessly by both sides in World War I, and there was no reason to hope that germ warfare would lend itself to any greater restraint. We then expected World War II to end with man-made plagues destroying our civilisation, just as inevitably as forty-five years later we are expecting thermonuclear weapons to do the job in World War III. ... We were not so naive as to blame our predicament upon Hitler. We saw Hitler only as a symptom of the decay of our civilisation, not as the cause of it. To us the Germans were not enemies but fellow vi |
