A Common Reader is . . . . . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England. It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and books and currently receives over 4000 unique visitors each month. So far 212 book reviews have been published.
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 In The Perfect Nazi, Martin Davidson joins quite a long line of authors who have written about the Nazi past of their relatives. Perhaps the best book in the genre is The Himmler Brothers, by Katrin Himmler – a difficult book to surpass in view of the noteriety of the author’s grand-uncle and grandfather. But Wibke Bruhns (My Father’s Country) also scores in that her father was an SS officer who was executed for his part in the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1944. However, Davidson is the commissioning editor for history for the BBC and as the cover tells us, has two degrees from Oxford University so readers presumably may expect something worthwhile in his book.
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.
Continue reading Review: The Perfect Nazi – Martin Davidson
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In Bomber County Daniel Swift describes how he started to research the life of his grandfather (also Daniel Swift) who was lost at sea when his the Lancaster bomber he was flying was shot down over Holland. His researches, which included visits to military graves and other memorable sites in western Europe, led him to think about the nature of the Allied bombing campaign over Germany.
Then, being conscious of the poetic legacy of the First World War (Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke etc), he began to wonder why the Second World War did not produce a similar crop of memorable poetry. The result is a book part history, part memoir, part poetic history, but all beautifully written, with a style that befits a teacher of English Literature and a writer for the New York Times Book Review.
The work of Bomber Command in the latter years of Word War II is of course mired in controversy. It seems impossible to speak of what they did with unconditional admiration, despite the fact that the Allies would probably not have won the war without the massive contribution of so many brave young men who flew in Wellingtons and Lancaster to wreak destruction on German industrial centres – and ancient cities. As Winston Churchill said, “the fighters are our salvation, but the bombers are our means of victory”.
So great has been our embarrassment at the scale of the bombing campaign that it is only now that Bomber Command are going to get a memorial in Central London. It takes a book like Bomber County to remind us of the sacrifice made by the airmen who flew dangerous missions over and over again, usually until they eventually failed to return from that fatal run when anti-aircraft fire finally brought them down.
Continue reading Review: Bomber County – Daniel Swift
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 We have just come back from The Black Forest, having driven across France from Dieppe to Strasbourg and then into Germany, staying for a week in a very comfortable rented house in Titisee-Neustadt – a place I would recommend to anyone who appreciates wonderful scenery and all the facilities of a lakeside resort.
Before I left I borrowed a copy of Germania by Simon Winder. I was intrigued by the subtitle, A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern, as I tend to enjoy quirky travel books. However, while this book is definitely quirky, it is also a vast compendium of German history and culture, combining anecdote, travelogue, history and personal reminiscences in a very readable style, amounting to about 450 pages.
Simon Winder seems to have acquired all the information contained in this book the hard way – by slogging through the country from north to south, year after year, visiting castles, cathedrals and museums wherever he went, collecting as much information as he could. Whereas most of us would look cursorily around such places before moving on to the next location, Simon seems to have made a personal study of each site, obviously buying the guidebooks and then working out the connections with other places and other times – in other words he is a “synthesiser” who has brought together a vast array of information in order to create this substantial volume.
His background reading was also about as comprehensive as one could expect (seven pages of bibliography), and this has led to a book which while being in places very funny (in the humorous sense), it also seems authoritative.
Continue reading Review: Germania – Simon Winder
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 Even since reading Stefan Zweig’s remarkable description of psychological co-dependency in his novel, Beware of Pity, I’ve tried to read every thing I can get my hands on by this fine writer. In recent years, a minor publishing industry has developed around Zweig, with Pushkin Press leading the way with quite a few volumes of short stories and even an uncompleted novel, The Post Office Girl which I reviewed here.
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.
Continue reading Review: The World of Yesterday – Stefan Zweig
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 I love the cover of Fordlandia. It shows an idealised American suburb with mothers and children walking down a street of bungalows, complete with white picket fences bordering the gardens, and newly-planted apple trees. However, the backdrop is undeniably the tall trees of the South American jungle, for this illustration shows Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s attempt to build a new model community in Amazonia where rubber would be harvested to provide the raw materials for his ever-growing factories.
Reality in these squalid bungalows did not conform to this idealised picture. Designed in Michigan and shipped in pre-fabricated form to Brazil, the houses had poured concrete floors and metal roofs lined with asbestos, and turned out to be “midget hells, where one lies awake and sweats the first half of the night ” and then “undergoes a fierce siege of heat provoking nightmares” in the second.
But let’s start at the beginning. By 1928, Ford had seen considerable success with the Model T Ford, but sales were slipping drastically as newer competitors came to the market. The Model A was about to be launched and the company seemed to be about to make a startling come-back, having received orders for 700,000 model A cars. Less well-known was that the Ford Motor Company had acquired a vast land concession in the Amazon, about the same size as a mid-ranged US state. It was Henry Ford’s plan to plant millions of rubber trees, but also tame the jungle, to sanitise it, and to form an idealised community with all the values of middle-America transported thousands of miles south into this notoriously inhospitable region.
Continue reading Review: Fordlandia – Greg Grandin
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 Most readers in Britain are so well-supplied by books in their own language that they rarely venture into reading books in translation and therefore miss out on the best literature of other European nations. About a third of titles reviewed on A Common Reader are European books in translation and I am pleased to add The Silences of Hammerstein to this number.
Hans Magnus Enzensburger is considered to be Germany’s most important modern poet and is a highly regarded publisher and essayist. But he is little known in Britain, or presumably other English speaking nations.
His book, The Silences of Hammerstein is difficult to categorise, being in parts biographical, fictional and critical. One of its features is the way Enzensburger intersperses his narrative with imagined conversations with the main characters in his book in which he asks them pertinent questions and records the answers he thinks they would give. The book ranges far and wide, and reminds me a little of W G Sebald’s books in the way photographs are insterspersed among the pages, providing enigmatic insights into the narrative.
The Silences of Hammerstein, chronicles the life of a German General and his family as they lived their lives through the 1930s and 40s largely while being largely opposed to the rise of Nazism. Continue reading Review – The Silences of Hammerstein: Hans Magnus Enzensburger
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 Like many people this years I’ve been thinking back twenty years to 1989 (see the Wikipedia entry for this momentous year), when the Iron Curtain collapsed and we saw the end of totalitarian rule in Europe. I well remember watching television news as East Germans flocked in their thousands through the Brandenburg Gate into West Berlin. Events escalated throughout Eastern Europe with perhaps none so dramatic as the execution of Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day.
Victor Sebestyen’s book Revolution 1989, is one of the first to attempt a comprehensive history of these events and reminds me that only twenty years ago we saw historic events of a significance to match any of the preceding 100 years. While I greatly enjoyed the personal account of the German liberation given by Peter Millar in his book The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall Sebestyen provides something far more ambitious in describing the equivalent events across the whole of the eastern continent.
Sebestyen is highly qualified to write this account, having reported from many of the countries he covers during these years of upheaval, and his book is based not just on meticulous research but also on his eye-witeness accounts of many of the events he describes.
The role of Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev was pivotal. The first Russian leader to see that the Russian Empire could no longer be sustained, economically or culturally, his refusal to prop-up regimes led by ossified old men led to his call for perestroika and glasnost (restructuring and openness). Sebestyen shows however that his vision was of a ring of reformed communist states bound in close alliance. He failed to see that his former satellites would utterly reject the dogmas which had kept them in chains for so long and rush to embrace free-market capitalism and then seek admittance to the European Union as rapidly as possible. Continue reading Review: Revolution 1989 – Victor Sebestyen
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 I find that some of the most interesting history books are those which focus on a neglected aspect of a person or event and Conspirator, Lenin in Exile, provides a fascinating and very readable portrait of Lenin and his long-suffering wife Nadya during a period of their lives which few bother to study. Helen Rappaport’s book gives its readers a very human view of the leader of the Russian revolution as he travelled through Europe while evading the attentions of the Russian secret police, the Okhrana. This is a new take on the “tour of Europe”, as the sometimes penniless but always poor couple traipse through London, Paris, Geneva, Brussels and Munich, gathering around them whoever would help them in their cause of purifying and perfecting the nascent Bolshevik movement.
While Helen Rappaport gives plenty of human interest in this book, I found an underlying tone of horror (in myself, not the book), as I read of Lenin’s unfailing fanaticism and utter ruthlessness in dealing with family, friends and revolutionary colleagues. Fanatical hardly covers it: this man was possessed of a unique energy which compelled him to work unceasingly to eliminate compromise or dissimulation in the Commuist movement. He was prepared to drive those who loved him into the ground in order to get what he wanted. At one point in the book when the author tells us that Lenin could have faced the death penalty when he was arrested in Poland, I found myself inwardly crying, “if only” when I thought ahead to the years of terror which followed the implementation of his strategies in his homeland (and how fearsome to read of Lenin’s “wonderful Georgian”, Josef Stalin who stayed with Lenin and his wife in Poland). Continue reading Review: Conspirator, Lenin in Exile – Helen Rappaport
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 Twenty years ago I sat in front of my television watching crowds stream through the Brandenburg Gate as the East German border guards finally gave up the job of trying to prevent people crossing from one side of the Berlin Wall to the other. Anyone with a sense of history could not help but share in the jubilation as a whole nation was set free from the vast prison camp which was East Germany.
Peter Millar, a Sunday Times journalist, was present as these historic events happened around him, and his long years of living in East Germany and Russia have equipped him to write a vibrant and involved account of 1989 and the preceding years leading up to the year of liberation.
I enjoyed reading 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall as much as anything I have read this year. Millar’s eye-witness accounts of his time in Berlin provide a ground-level view of events and serve as a useful counterpoint to the other, more scholarly books on the period which have been recently published such as Victor Sebestyen’s Revolution 1989.
Despite being a “serious” journalist (Foreign Correspondent of the Year, 1989 etc), Millar has adopted an almost Bryson-esque approach to his description of his life, first as a young Reuter’s correspondent and then as a journalist on national newspapers. While his newspaper articles were serious and weighty pieces, there is obviously a humorist in his psyche too. Continue reading Review: 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall
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 There was so much “history” in the 20th century that it is easy to forget highly significant but more local events which have been lost among the big picture issues of world wars, evil dictatorships and million-strong massacres. The destruction of Smyrna (now modern-day Izmir) in 1922 is one such, and Giles Milton has done us a great favour in writing such a lucid and interesting book, Paradise Lost, about the destruction of this great city.
In outline, after the First World War, Greece, with the support of western governments, invaded Turkey in the hope of establishing a Christian Empire in Asia Minor. By 1922, the Turks had driven the Greeks back and their victory was imminent. The citizens of Smyrna, who inhabited perhaps the most cosmopolitan and multi-cultural city in the region, believed that as was shown many times before in their history, all parties had an interest in maintaining the peace and prosperity of their great city. In particular, they mistakenly believed that the Allied war-ships off their coast would protect them from Turkish retribution. Alas, how mistaken they were, for over the course of two weeks their city was almost totally destroyed, with almost 2 million people falling victim to the catastrophe.
This eminently readable book tells the story of these times through the personal history of many of the city’s inhabitants. In particular we read of the luxurious lifestyle of the Levantine trader dynasties whose influence reached into every corner of the city, due to the huge numbers of people they employed. They looked back to Europe for their culture and lifestyle and wealthy European visitors were amazed at the opulence of their lifestyle. This was a world where luxury goods from around the world were common-place, where families decamped in their limousines to summer residences and where Italian operas were performed in coastal band-stands.
Continue reading Review: Paradise Lost – Giles Milton
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