In the case of Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War (Kindle edition here), Giles Milton was able to work closer to home for it tells the story of his father in law, Wolfram Aïchele, who managed to become a successful Paris-based artist after defiantly surviving several years in the German Army during the Russian Campaign and the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Milton based this story on 60 hours of recorded interviews with his father in law (he is still alive at the age of 87).  He also had access to various other relatives and also to  family letters and diaries from the time of the Third Reich.  The list of notes and sources at the end of the book is a tribute to Milton’s thoroughness in extracting the last grain of information about this story while eye-witnesses to these events are still alive,  even to the extent of making contact with an American airman, Doug Hicks who flew over Wolfram’s village on a bombing raid (Hicks’ account of the raid can be found here).

Modern-day Eutingen

I think we need ground-level accounts of the German experience of the Second World War to provide some balance to the way in which British people tend to think that all Germans were enthusiastic supporters of Nazi philosophy and behaviour.  Wolfram was brought up in a family of Anthroposophists (followers of the philosopher and theologian Rudolf Steiner) and were members of The Christian Community, a church which was banned very early on after Hitler came to power.  The family were peace-loving and found Nazi ideas abhorrent.  However, they lived in a remote house in Eutingen, a tiny village near Pforzheim on the edge of the Black Forest and were able to survive the war without being imprisoned or murdered as were so many other non-Nazis.

This is not to say that Wolfram’s family and their friends were wholly consistent in their rejection of the Nazi system – they tried to tread a quiet path of isolating themselves from the excesses of the regime while not becoming visibly dissident.  It is easy to criticise non-Nazi Germans who accommodated themselves to living under Nazism but when I read Milton’s thoughtful description of their predicament I could see that not everyone could be the heroes they would like to have been:

There were also large numbers of Germans who found themselves unwillingly ensnared in this Mephistophelian nightmare – one that was not of their making nor within their control. The Aïchele . . . family retained a deep attachment to Germany throughout the twelve long years of the Third Reich, but it was a very different Germany from the one that Hitler was attempting to create. Theirs was the Germany of Goethe and Schumann, Heine and Bach. Overnight (they) discovered that the Nazis had wrapped their beloved Fatherland in a web of darkness.

They despised Hitler for what he had done and they despised his entourage, but they also, naturally enough, wanted to preserve their own lives. They had young children to protect; they were scared of the Gestapo. They did not want to end their days in Dachau. Under the Third Reich, they had precious little room for manoeuvre, being forced to compromise their morals, their ideals and their beliefs. ‘Heil Hitler’ never tripped lightly off their tongues. ‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin,’ wrote Goethe, ‘mein Herz ist schwer.’ My peace is gone, my heart is heavy. They would have given anything to have opted out. Instead, they were impotently sucked into a regime and a war that would lead to the darkest hours of Germany’s history.

As I read this I questioned whether my own humanistic values, would have made me strong enough to protest, knowing that such a stance would lead to destruction of my home, my wife and children?   Some took this dissident course and paid with their lives – most found a way closer to that described above by Giles Milton.

The young Wolfram (photograph from Giles Milton's website)

Wolfram’s story is remarkable.  He was a boy with a unique talent for drawing and wood carving and as a young boy he spent his spare time visiting churches to study mediaeval architecture and ornamentation.   He managed to get taken on as an apprentice wood-carver at Oberammagau, but not long into his course, in 1941, he was conscripted into the army: the Germans had invaded Russia and was already finding stiff opposition in the terrible winter.

Compelled to attend military training, he found that life in the camp was physically exhausting with gun training and enforced marches which left him close to collapse each evening.   In June 1942 he was sent east and embarked on a 1700 mile journey by train which was to take four weeks of misery on overcrowded transport trains, 40 men to a wagon.  While living in a tented barracks near the front line he contracted diptheria and after a life and death fight for survival was eventually sent back to Germany to recuperate.  It is difficult to say that he was lucky to get such a serious illness, but in this case, it certainly saved him from being exposed to some of the worst fighting on the Russian Front.

However, when he was again ready to fight, Wolfram was despatched to Normandy, just as the Allied Invasion was about to take place – out of the frying pan into the fire!  For Wolfram, the war years were a time of abject misery with constant hunger and fear of death.  His artistic nature was not adapted to military life and the story of how he eventually surrendered to the Allies is another tale of deliverance which seems remarkable when you read about the annihilation of human life that was going on around him.

Texan prisoner of war camp

Wolfram’s time as a Prisoner of War in France was spent in hard labour with inadequate food until he was eventually shipped off across the Atlantic to a camp in Texas.  When the war ended he was brought back to France, but had to continue to work as a labourer on re-construction work.  Eventually he got home to find that the town of Pforzheim had been completely flattened in the RAF bombing raids, but miraculously, his parents were still alive and were housing displaced people in their home.

Among the story of Wolfram, Giles Milton intersperses accounts of life at Wolfram’s home.  We read of how the rise of Nazism affected the citizen of the village, particularly in the deeply embedded system of informants who monitored every detail of daily life in their quest to expose dissent.  Nazism was a system of terrible oppression which seems like the cultish systems we see today in North Korea.  It had many adherents of course, and perhaps people like the Aïcheles were few in number.  It is quite an interesting to read this book “from the other side” and to learn what it felt like to be subject to an RAF bombing raid with the ensuing conflagration (17,000 people were killed in the raids on Pforzheim).  Despite finding sympathy for Wolfram and his family, a British reader will not be able to help but experience a vicarious thrill in the later pages of the book as the tide turned and the Allies gained the upper hand.

There have been many books recounting the experience of non-Nazi German people, many of whom were able to leave the country before the war started, but not so many from those who lived through the times despising the  regime and refusing to give it their support.  What makes this book stand out is the quality of the writing and the research behind it – and the descriptions of the dragon’s den that Wolfram and his family found themselves in.  Their survival makes for a thrilling if at times uncomfortable story.

Here is a video in which Giles Milton talks about his book.

Links

An interview in the Guardian newspaper with Giles Milton about this book can be found here.

Wolfram Aïchele’s website is here.

Giles Milton’s website is here.

Giles Milton’s wife, artist Alexandra Milton’s website here has photographs of Wolfram on the About page here.

The photograph of a Texan prisoner of war camp comes from this website.

However, I am interested in the Bloomsbury set as a whole and any new biography is worth a look.  This new one by Elizabeth Wright is an ideal introduction to Woolf’s life, while also providing some interesting discussion of her relationships with her fellow-Bloomsburys.   It also acts as a useful literary history because it covers her personal circumstances as she wrote each of her books and articles – including references to her many breakdowns and times of “mania”.  And at 112 pages, its not going to take very long to read.

Virginia was born in 1882, into a well-off, but troubled family.  Her mother died when Virginia  was only 13 and her father, Leslie Stephen, was unable to comfort his children, “making emotional demands for sympathy which ignored the claims of others to their own sadness and pity”. Until this point, Virginia’s childhood had been idyllic, but without her mother everything changed.  She had to cope with sexual molestation from her half brothers (her father had been married before).  She grew into a bookish young woman and attempts to introduce her into “Society” failed, for her social skills were not of the flirtatious, seductive type required to court the vacuous sons of aristocrats. She was a voracious teenage reader as shown by her diaries and reading lists (which covered biography, history, travel-writing and natural science)  and she boasted of reading four books at once.

Virginia’s father died in 1904 when Virginia was only 22 years old and Elizabeth Wright tells us that she “lapsed into madness” and attempted suicide by throwing herself out of a window. After a long period of convalescence in Yorkshire she returned to London and began her career as a writer, with her first article appearing in December 1904, nine months after her father’s death.  A year later, she was writing for four journals including the Times Literary Review and The Guardian.

"I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry" (Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway). Painting by Tom Cunliffe

Before long, we read of the emergence of the Bloomsbury Group – her future husband Leonard Woolf listed them as Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster, Saxon Sydney Turner, Roger Fry, Desmond, Julian and Quentin Bell and David Garnett.  These people, and those who joined later were incredibly influential in the worlds of art, economics, politics, social action and public culture such that to this day they are a model for innumerable groups and networks (and providing inspiration for countless interior designers who seem fascinated by their ambience – see this website for one of innumerable companies who invoke the Bloomsbury spirit in their publicity).

Leonard Woolf married Virginia when she was 30, – a marriage of minds rather than bodies.  but Viriginia was soon to struggle with bouts of severe depression and made several suicide attempts.  Virginia records the onset of her illness in her diaries, “Oh, its beginning, its coming – the horror – the  physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart – tossing me up”.  She wrote Mrs Dalloway in this period about a shell-shocked soldier who commits suicide.

Monks House, Rodmell, East Sussex. A National Trust property well-worth visiting

I won’t summarise the whole book, but I particularly enjoyed reading about the Woolf’s time at Monks House in Sussex, where apart from the well-recorded servant problems (See my review of Mrs Woolf and the Servants), Leonard and Virginia found the peace and tranquillity required to do the thinking and planning so necessary for a writer’s career.  The furniture in the house was painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and books and apples lay everywhere – Leonard “loved the bountiful garden” and lived there until his death in 1969.

I hadn’t realised until reading this book that Virginia and Leonard were the founders of Hogarth Press, the publishers of so many influential writers of the time.  In the early days, Virginia helped sort the type, an activity which she found calming, “We get so absorbed . . . we can’t stop, I see that real printing will devour one’s entire life”.

Berwick Church - photo by Tom. "only the painting of Berwick Church seemed to cheer her up"

Throughout her life, Virginia was severely troubled by mental illness but struggled heroically to contain it.  At one point she gave herself a “writing prescription” – “The way to rock oneself back into writing is this.  First gentle exercise in the air.  Second the reading of good literature”.  She fell in love with the work of Marcel Proust, enthusing to Roger Fry,

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could only write like that! I cry.  And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures – there’s something sexual in it – that I feel  I can write like that and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that.  Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes and obsession.

Virginia’s story ends of course with her lonely death.  The war years had removed the audience for Virginia’s articles and books and she felt she was writing into a void, “No audience.  No echo.  That’s part of one’s death” . . . “Its odd to feel one’s writing into a vacuum – no-one will read it. I feel the audience has gone”. I recently walked down the lane from Monks House and imagined what Virginia must have felt like on her final stroll down to the river bank.  Its a lonely place, the river is hard to get to and you have to struggle through under-growth to get near it.  No wonder it took a few days for her body to be found.  A sad end indeed.

I started this article by saying that I am not a great fan of Woolf’s writings.  I would say until reading this book, I had a mild antagonism to her, stimulated in part by the Woolf band-wagon with all its faux-Bloomsbury artefacts and designs, and also by lack of enthusiasm for her books.  However, this little book has made me see Woolf in the context of her times as an  influential publisher, critic and opinion-former who had a huge influence on the literary world of the time while battling with terrible depression and illness.

Her hundreds of articles made her a well-known name in her era, deservedly so, for while I think of myself as a voracious reader, Virginia puts me to shame with a reading capacity which far exceeded my own.  I am grateful to Elizabeth Wright for putting this book together – most people will not need a longer biography than this for, despite its short length, it surely contains the essence of Virginia Woolf.  It deserves to be widely purchased by those like me who may have allowed prejudice against her rather precious style of writing to influence their opinions of her.

By the way, the University of Adelaide have the complete text for Woolf’s collection of articles, The Common Reader on their website here.

We lived in Bromley in south-east London at the time, and Medhursts, the local department store had a plaque on its wall showing that the great men had lived there.  I also remember my parents taking me to the West End show, Half a Sixpence, which was based on Wells’ novel Kipps. This is all long ago however and so I was ripe for a Wells revival in my own life, and what better place to start than David Lodge’s new books, A Man of Parts.

I sometimes find biographies difficult to read.  Very often the part of someones life which you’re interested in occurs in later years, and you don’t always want to slog through their childhood and youth or to learn about their parents and grand-parents.  A fictionalised biography like A Man of Parts can be useful in creating an overview of the subject’s life, and very often it will greatly increase its entertainment value – for better or worse.

I am probably never going to read one of the more comprehensive biographies of H G Wells and I came to this book with a degree of confidence that although “fictionalised”, David Lodge would have made a good job of presenting a rounded and fairly accurate picture of Wells and having read the book I have no reason to doubt that this is the case.  The acknowledgements section at the end shows that Lodge read very widely about Wells and also the wide circle of his friends and contacts.  As I read the book I got the impression that Wells had been Lodge’s constant companion for some time, even to the extent of enabling him to conduct mock interviews with him (if you were spiritually-minded you might even think he’d been channelling Wells!).

These little interviews with Wells keep popping up at key points of Wells life and enable David Lodge to chalenge the great man on his behaviour.  They can seem a bit hectoring at times but on the whole they work well:

Granted that you were trying to honestly live our your belief in Free Love, wasn’t it rather tactless to do so with the virgin daughters of prominent Fabians?

- I didn’t pursue them: they went after me.  And I could never refuse an overture from a woman – it just isn’t in my nature.

You weren’t getting your own back on your opponents in the Fabian by deflowering their daughters?

- There might have been just a bit of that in the affair with Rosamund I suppose. It started just after Pease and Bland and Sidney Webb began to block my attempts to reform the Society. I can’t say I was irresistibly attracted to her, and there was a satisfaction in undertaking the sexual education of this girl under her hypocrite father’s nose.  But Amber was a genuine love affair. I missed her horribly after we had to part.

On the whole this device works well.  Wells’ behaviour was often so outrageous in how he treated young women that you almost wish Lodge had been able to conduct these “interviews” in person.  In today’s world we are so much more aware of the potential abusiveness of a wealthy, powerful man taking advantage of an adoring fan.  And it wasn’t just “having a fling” – Wells seemed to bind these young women to him over a number of years and in the case of Amber Reeves and Rebecca West, actually got them pregnant.

H G Wells in 1922

The mystery of course is how his wife Jane was able to cope with these affairs.  She herself was unable to satisfy Wells sexually (or perhaps vice versa!) and at a relatively early stage of their marriage the couple entered into an agreement whereby he could more or less do what he wanted so long as he continued to provide for his family.  Generally Wells was open with Jane about what was going on even to the extent of discussing his new conquests with her, but there were plenty of other assignations which  went on behind the scenes – it seemed to be his  usual practice when on a lecture tour to end up visiting a bordello as a reward to himself for a successful tour.

The book is not just about sex of course.  Wells was a committed socialist and became a member of the Fabian Society, associating with people like George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb.  He felt however that the Society was more interested in providing a debating forum rather than a launching pad for action.  These well-heeled socialists would have been not a little disturbed at the prospect of having their comfortable lifestyles disturbed by a real revolution.

Wells embarked on a programme of trying to reform the Society and while he was given every encouragement to produce draft constitutions these always seemed to get bogged down when older members began to take them apart.  In the end, he resigned from the Society – maybe ultimately this was due to the old British stumbling block of “class”, with Wells humble origins contrasting so greatly with the more “educated” background of the Fabian establishment.

Wells’ literary output was vast.  He seemed to publish books that matched the public mood and his more scientifically-based books caught the public’s imagination in their talk of aerial warfare, beings from other worlds and experiments on the fringes of science.  Their success was largely down to their sheer readability and they sold in the hundreds of thousands.  He produced novels in which he tried to illustrate his convictions about “Free Love” but learned that the public were not ready for these and the resulting outcry could damage his reputation.  His lifestyle, with mistress after mistress, required vast amounts of money and books like The History of Mr Polly and Kipps were far more productive in terms of cash value than the more outlandish books on sexual politics.

Wells was a friend of Henry James and throughout the book we read letters sent between the two men, in which they comment on each other’s work.  Wells seemed to be in awe of James’ acceptance as a literary writer while he could only reach the foothills of literary style – despite selling far more volumes than James.  Ultimately they fell out when Henry James could no longer hide his disdain for Wells’ populism and a sad exchange of letters brought the relationship to its end.

Lodge gives us a great insight into Well’s relationship with Rebecca West – and these chapters opened my eyes to how much I’ve been missing by not reading her books – an omission I am correcting at the moment.   West was far too young for Wells when she started the relationship with him, but Lodge provides us with enough echoes of West’s future greatness that we can see how in some ways she was able to eclipse Wells’ achievements.

Wells’ self-belief was almost incredible.  It is hard to understand how he could be so self-deceived in his assessment of the qualities of his personal relationships.  He wouldn’t last long in today’s world of tabloid newspapers and political correctness and neither is it likely that his wife Jane would have held on so long in her demeaning role as house-keeper and sexual confidante.

I found A Man of Parts to be a fascinating read.  It reads like a novel only because Lodge has steeped himself in Wells’ life and times.  For a novelist like David Lodge it must have been quite an experience to find that his subject was one it would have been difficult to invent as a fictional character, so outrageous were his pretensions and behaviour.

We are on undramatic ground with The Perfect Nazi.  Martin Davidson’s maternal grandfather, Bruno Langbehn was an SS officer but did not rise to great prominence, his only significance perhaps being that he was committed to the Nazi party from its inception.  ”Bruno”, as the author refers to him throughout the book, was far from being a glamorous figure, being an artisan dentist by profession, and fairly clueless about his work for the SS.  Indeed, the final chapters of the book quote an official document which, the author tells us, provides little more than “a damning portrait of Bruno’s incompetence, his manifest self-importance and his blindness to the futility of the work itself”. It is therefore obvious from the start that this book is not going to provide any great new insights into the operation of the SS or the inner workings of the Nazi Party.

This book is not without its problems, the main one being the paucity of the source material. Davidson has some teenage memories of his grandfather. His grandmother and her sister seemed to be reluctant to talk about the war and events leading up to it, and it was only Bruno’s second wife who seemed able to provide useful personal reminiscences. The documentation of Bruno’s life seems very scant, consisting of a list of names from an SS directory containing a one line entry for Bruno, and also a set of twenty-five pages of personnel records, most of it badly burned and virtually illegible. The most significant find was a bundle of documents connected to Bruno’s application to join the SS, including Bruno’s lebenslauf (a hand-written CV), which sought to persuade the SS to take him on.

With so little original material to go on, Davidson is forced to make much of very little.  For example, when his cousin gives him a 1942 Berlin telephone directory, containing a one-line entry for Bruno, he writes,

The documents sheer ordinariness made it oddly compelling.  By their very nature phone books are as utilitarian as it is possible for a book to be. And yet how much information they contain.  Bruno’s entry shares the same elements as all the others – name, job title, area he lived in, address and phone numbers. What is so striking reading the page is how pristine, modern and untouched by war Berlin seems to be. A crisp list of names, addresses and telephone numbers depicts a city completely at odds with the burned out husk destroyed by three years of bombing and Russian artillery shells.

This “meditation on a phone book” may be significant for Martin Davidson but it makes for dull reading and is perhaps symptomatic of the smallness of this story.

With such a small amount of material to go on, Davidson falls back on recounting the rise of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler and making assumptions that Bruno took a full part in the many events that supported it.  For example, when dealing with the suppression of political opposition in the years 1933-37, Davidson goes to great lengths to describe the street-fighting and brawling that took place, but writes, “There are no records to tell us what role Bruno specifically played in all this . . . but as horrible as it was for me to picture Bruno in one of those cellars, holding somebody down or wielding a truncheon, it was entirely consistent with what I now knew about SA activities in Berlin”.

The bulk of this book could be summarised as a German history during the 20th century.  This is well-trodden ground and Davidson works hard to place his grandfather at its centre -

• “Shortly after Goebbels arrival in November 1926, Bruno, alongside Berlin’s few hundred other Nazis, found themselves summoned to Party headquarters to be harangued by their new city boss”.
• “Bruno was part of a drunken, seething crowd that had been worked up to a frenzy before Goebbels took to the stage”
• “For Bruno, the Great Depression was the miracle that the Nazis had been looking for”
• “.  . . in spring 1931 it erupted in the single biggest rebellion Hitler ever faced, and Bruno was caught up in the middle of it”
• “(Heinrich Kuhr) had a prickly and agressive streak that made him deeply unpopular with his men, Bruno included”
• “Bruno the political Nazi was busy as Bruno the storm-trooper, elaborating strategy, attending meetings, distributing leaflets and tirelessly hectoring potential voters.”

These statements, and countless others may well be true, but one would expect them to be backed up by a diary entry or other documentation rather than “because he could have, he probably did”.  This simply isn’t good enough for a work that purports to be history.

Sometimes, Davidson quotes a real source and places it so close to Bruno’s name that it at first you almost think that he is quoting his grandfather.  There are many examples of this, even in the footnotes. For example, we read on page 281, note 46:

The SA were, needless to say, in the thick of it, as described by one driven to a state of elated exhaustion, outlining what for Bruno must have become a regular experience: “prior to the elections we did not get to see our beds for two weeks.  Every night we put up posters and guarded them and tore off those of the enemies . . .

It is only a dozen or so lines later that we read “Quoted by Merkl, Political Violence” and realise that once more, these are not actually the words of Bruno but of an anonymous other.

This tactic which is used to beef up a very thin account of his grandfather’s part in the Nazi party becomes quite wearing.  Davidson so often quotes genuine sources in juxtaposition to references to Bruno that I kept having to remind myself that this is NOT Bruno at all, but someone else.

Davidson sometimes takes off into greater flights of fancy, such as imagining his grandfather attending the premiere of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Now -

As Bruno was a senior party member and had actually attended the rally, it is safe to assume there was little chance he missed seeing the film.  As the lights dimmed he knew he was about to savour the greatest cinema experience of his Nazi life . . . I can only imagine with what kind of exultant swagger Bruno left the cinema.  Of course, as exhilarating as he found the film , it merely symbolised all he already knew.

There is so much of this stuff -

“Bruno had been a vociferous and energetic participant in the Nazi struggle for eight long years. His every effort had been directed towards this outcome and he had never flinched from the agresson and sacrifices it had demanded”.

When I read about Bruno’s part in Kristallnacht I wanted to call out to the author, MAYBE, but you don’t KNOW this.  Its all surmise and assumption.  This is not history unless you can document it!  Its really not good enough to say:

It is hard to suppose that Bruno, now an SS officer, hadn’t been drinking with his Kameraden in the familiar Sturmlokal, the Zur Aldstadt, or that he later consciously boycotted the night’s actions, when so many of those had had known, and fought with for over a decade, poured out of the pubs, armed with sledgehammers and cans of petrol.  I will never know whether he chose this of all nights to stay at home and break the habit of a lifetime by refraining from participating in the largest outbreak of anti-Semitism.

Really, this isn’t history at all.  Its mere surmise and I wonder what the point is of writing it, when there are so many first hand accounts of the events of the night which do not rely on assuming that someone participated in it.  Heck, for all we know Bruno was out of action on Kristallnacht attending an SS officer’s dental emergency.  It may be a good exercise in creative writing to imagine what Bruno got up to on that night but it doesn’t shed any new light on the real events that took place.

I am going to have to draw this review to a close.  I see very little merit is rehashing the history of Nazism in Germany and inserting the name of a relative at all the key points. No doubt this is fascinating history for Martin Davidson and his relatives but I can’t see that it would have much interest beyond the confines of his family.  I agree with Martin Davidson that his grandfather probably took part in many of the events described but I would prefer to read the many genuine, first hand accounts. And for a history of the times, there are so many better books its hard to see what the point is in this one.

Note:  In the same month, Penguin also published Bomber County by Daniel Swift, another book about the wartime experiences of a grandfather.  I highly recommended this book in my review.  For a completely different take on Nazi experiences I would recommend My Friend the Enemy by Paul Briscoe, about an English boy who was stranded in German on the outbreak of war and was adopted by a German family.  Now, that’s a real story to tell.

Other reviews

The Herald (Scotland)

Life as A Literary Device, is partly biographical, partly reportage, and partly miscellaneous musing on life.  The book consists of  ”seemingly disjointed snippets of real life, they connect by association alone – the random pieces of coloured glass that from themselves into a pattern if viewed through that wonderful children’s toy, the kaleidoscope”.

Early in the book he writes of being influenced by the Russian writer Valentin Kataev, the founder of a literary style which he called “mauvism” – “a literary device consisting of the complete negation of all literary devices”.  The term mauvism comes from the French word “mauvais” meaning “bad”, and as Kataev himself wrote, “I am the founder of the latest literary school, the mauvistes,  the essence of which is that since everyone nowadays writes very well, you must write badly, as badly as possible, then you will attract attention”.

I am pleased to say that Vitaliev does not write badly – far from it in fact, but he has certainly held to the principle of mauvism in writing a book for the Internet age where  ”one website routinely carries links to many others.  You open a link in a story that you are reading and it takes you away to another story loosely connected to the first one yet years and/or miles away from it;  you then close the link and return to the story you were reading in the first place”.

The result is a book which holds the interest throughout as Vitaliev describes his travels in various parts of the globe, muses on countless contemporary themes and journals his way through marital breakup, unemployment and temporary states of depression.  I am sure that there are hundreds of topics and themes covered in this substantial, 565 page volume, but the book does not seem to be particularly long when you are reading it.

Its very difficult to describe this book, a vast potpourri of thoughts, impressions, reminiscences so perhaps the best way in to describing it is to give a few examples of the topics covered.

The plight of asylum-seekers sent to live in almost uninhabitable blocks of flats in Sighthill, Glasgow:

Covered with graffiti – like the body of a hardened criminal with tattoos – Sighthill was far from a pretty sight.  What struck me most however, was neither dust and litter flying in my face, nor frozen spittle in the lifts or putrid puddles of dubious origin under my feet, but the behaviour of some of its Scottish residents.  Whereas foreigners  were invariably civil, neatly dressed and polite, the “locals”, particularly teenagers, were – with very few exceptions – foul-mouthed, agressive, uncouth and either tipsy or dead-drunk (or stoned).  They corresponded to the image of would-be terrorists better than any of the asylum-seekers of Sighthill.

The growth of “book towns” such as Hay on Wye and Wigtown:

In the tiny picturesque Ardennes village of Redu in Belgium, there are now as many bookshops – twenty four – as there are children and the trade is drawing in 350,000 visitors every year.  Interestingly, before bookshops appeared in its centre, the village was experiencing the same economic woes as Hay on Wye.  Bredevort in the Netherlands also copied the magic “Hay forumula” and now boasts 300,000 visitors a year.

Vitaliev’s love for old guidebooks:

I am proud to have discovered my own way of time-travelling – Baedekers, Murrays, Bradshaws, Cooks – of all of which I am a passionate collector.  To me these pocket-size tattered volumes are full of time travel magic, especially when I find an old London Tube map (with a curtailed pink “Northern line” ending at Highgate), a faded landing card, or just a dried out hundred year old flower in between their tattered pages.  Touching such books is like touching eternity itself, for bygone realities and small practicalities of a distant past come to life in their estranged, meticulous and matter of fact style.  In this respect old guide-books are preferable to fiction:  they provide me with an ossified time carcass, which I am free to fill with the contents of today’s reality.

Not that there aren’t major themes running through the book.  The core experience Vitaliev was going through in the years he compiled this material was separation from wife and family and unemployment.  During this period he was offered at cheap rent, a small cottage in the run-down South Coast town of Folkestone.  Folkestone proved to be a dispiriting place for Vitaliev and he captures the sense of down-at-heel decay which has afflicted the harbour area of the town now that the ferry services have largely departed the town.  The place matched his mood only too well, and having had a similar time of isolation in a small town myself in my early twenties I could relate all too well to these sections of the book while giving thanks that I have never had to endure such a time again.

Each of the book’s countless sections is complete in itself but they all offer interest, for Vitaliev has an enquiring mind which leads him into meandering reflections on most things around him.

This book is going to be a great travel-companion when its released in paper-back.   You can dip in and out of it and not need to remember what went before.

As to the “mauvism” – this theme keeps coming up in the book – and Vitaliev like to categories his own work as following in the style of his Russian mentor.  One of his own descriptions of his work is, “the Badlands of literature” which is true only insofar as he covers a vast miscellany of messy subjects somehow synthesising them into this quite unique volume which is by no mean “stylish” in the usual sense but certainly kept my interest throughout.

The World of Yesterday is the final book Zweig handed to his publisher before he and his wife committed suicide in 1942, despairing at the destruction of European culture resulting from by the rise of fascism.  Having a bit of a completist tendency with my favourite authors, it was hard to resist another book by Zweig, particularly one which is both autobiography and memoir, describing literary Vienna’s golden age, and its sad decline through the first half of the 20th century.

Let me say at the start of this review, that despite the adulatory reception this volume had when published by Pushkin Press last year, I found it a very difficult book to read.  This is not conventional autobiography in the sense of describing the relationships and events which formed the subject’s life.  It is really a cultural history, in which philosophical development (and decline) is given greater prominence than the life described.  I found it to be a heavy read, with page after page of solid text unrelieved by any touch of human drama or even humour to lighten it.   When I look at the appreciative reviews elsewhere I feel rather embarrassed to report that I didn’t actually enjoy this book.  I found it not at all difficult to see this book in the context of Zweigs imminent suicide, for it has an air of gloom and failure about it which, while not detracting from its value to those with an interest in the era, on the whole makes it an unhappy and depressing read.

The sense of oppression began for me with Zweig’s description of his school-days.

. . . my entire school career was nothing but a constant surfeit of tedium, inreased only by my impatience to escape this treadmill.  I don’t recall ever having felt either happy or blissful during that monotonous, heartless, dismal schooling, which thoroughly spoilt the happiest days of our lives . . . as soon as we entered the hated school we had to keep our heads down, so to speak, to avoid coming up against the the invisible yoke of servitude.  Schook to us meant compulsion, dreary boredom . . .

There are several pages of this which describe in largely abstract language, Zweig’s dismal experience of those years, without actually mentioning any friendships, family events  or happier times which might lighten the description, leaving this reader at least very pleased when finally the author graduated to university (which alas turns out to be a not much pleasanter experience).

Another chapter describes the sterile and stultifying condition of relationships between men and women in the Vienna of the early twentieth century.  A  rigid formality goverened communications between the sexes, with women placed on a pedestal so ethereal that it was unthinkable that they could have even an inkling of sexual desire.  Men on the other hand were allowed to “sow their wild oats” among a vast army of prostitutes who serviced their sexual needs, receiving money and gifts while returning incurable infections to their unhappy clients.

By this time I was beginning to wonder whether this unremitting gloom would come to an end and was pleased to discover that at about page 150, Zweig leaves university and escapes to Paris, London and other great European cities.  Unfortunately we read little to lighten these journeys, for Zweig discusses his cultural development to the detriment of any sense of his actual experiences in these cities.  We read of his discovery in London of William Blake and his quest to own even a single page of his work, his admiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who he got to know in Paris, and countless other writers and artists, many of whom are now largely forgotten.  While these chapters are of interest, they again lack that human touch which might bring them to life, with too many diversions into self analysis, the title of the chapter, “Digressions on the Way to Myself” perhaps saying it all.

Zweig was deemed unfit for active service in the First World War and was appointed an archivist for the Imperial Government, a role which occasionally required him to travel to the Front using a hospital train or even open artillery carriages as transport.  The years after the war saw Zweig enjoy literary success, but with the advent of Adolf Hitler, his works soon became politically unacceptable, containing as they did, critiques of militarism and nationalism quite opposed to the thrust towards rearmament.  Zweig describes how Hitler arose almost unnoticed:

It is an iron law of history that those who will be caught up in the great movements determining the course of their own times always fail to recognise them in their early stages.  So I cannot remember when I first heard the name Adolf HItler, one that for years now we have been bound to speak or call to mind in some connection every day, almost every second.

Despite the gangs of young men roaming the streets in support of Hitler, Zweig tells how cultured people simply didn’t take Hitler seriously, laughing at his pompous prose style and soothed by the national newspapers and their assurances that National Socialism must soon collapse.  Of course, the Nazis rose with unstoppable momentum and when Austria was seceded to Germany, in no time at all life was intolerable for Zweig and, after his house was searched in 1934, he and his wife decided they had to live abroad.

The book ends with Zweig in the English city of Bath, with

. . . the sunlight full and strong.  As I walked home, I suddenly saw my own shadow going ahead of me, just as I had seen the shadow of the last war behind this one.  That shadow has never left me all this time, it lay over my mind day and night.  Perhaps its dark outline also lies over the pages of this book.

While this book is undoubtedly important both as a personal record of Zweig’s life, and also as his account of the fall of the “old” European culture, I fear that it is too imbued with Zweig’s despair at the decline of so much he held dear and his pessimism about the future.  He is absorbed in his story, but it is a story which, in the way he describes it, can only go downhill and this makes for a depressing time for its readers.  I feel sure that if Zweig had been able to live for a few more years this would have been a very different book with perhaps a wider perspective on the events he describes.  As it is, its value is not disputed but anyone expecting to find something along the lines of his other published works may be disappointed.

Newspaper Reviews

Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian
Lewis Jones in The Daily Telegraph
Michael Hoffman in the London Review of Books

Book Blogger reviews

Dove Grey Reader
Just William’s Luck