The story opens with John Naomi, a couple who lost their first child to a congenital disease cause by an unfortunate combination of genes from both of them, planning to visit Dr Leo Dettore in his off shore clinic to seek help in conceiving their next child without this unfortunate genetic make-up.   Dettore’s clinic is located on a huge  yacht in the Atlantic Ocean – his work is so cutting-edge that it lies outside the boundaries of what is permissible in any Western country.

Having mortgaged themselves up to the hilt and borrowed money from friends and family to pay for the treatment, John and Naomi arrive on the luxurious yacht to find that the yacht is governed by a code of such secrecy that they are not allowed to meet any other patients and apart from seeing the lowly crew who service their rooms, they live in isolation until the time comes for their appointment with Detorre.   Dettore opens his consultation by running through an analysis of the couple’s genes and listing the medical conditions that any future child of their could be subject to – from bipolar mood disorder to Chrohn’s Disease, via 15 others – and even more on page 2 of the list.  He gives them the opportunity to turn off any of these illnesses and more – to enhance the child’s performance in every area of his life including physical strength and intelligence.  What started as an attempt to avoid an inherited genetic condition is rapidly turning into a designer baby programme.

SPOILER ALERT IN NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS!

To cut a long story short, the couple reject most of the designer options but accept the improvements to the child’s health prospects.  They return home to find out that Naomi is now pregnant with twins – not what they expected at all.  When they try to get in touch with Detorre they find that he has been killed in an air accident and it is impossible to find out from his associates what happened during their medical procedures .

The children are born, a boy and a girl, but are very strange.  They have the capabilities of a child prodigy but lack empathy. They are emotionally complete with each other and have no need to communicate with their parents, even to the extent of developing a complex language of their own.  They dissect the family guinea pig to find out what its internal organs look like and before long are banned from the local nursery for terrifying the other children.  A sub-plot sees a bizarre religious cult trying to kill John and Naomi and their off-spring for their sin of tampering with God’s will.  One day the twins are kidnapped by a strange couple who take them off by private jet to an island paradise – a sort of utopia led by Dettore (he wasn’t dead after all!).  Eventually John and Naomi are invited to visit them there and find a community of superior beings involved in work which will save the human race from future destruction.

It seems incredible that such a good writer of crime novels should turn his hand to this sort of low-grade science-fiction.  It makes no new points about genetic engineering or designer babies, but merely uses these concepts.  What we have is a book very reminiscent of John Wyndham’s 1950’s book, The Midwich Cuckoos.   I just can’t believe that it was written by the creator of Detective Inspector Roy Grace of Sussex Police!

The Second World War continues to interest many people.  Max Hastings new 768 page tome All Hell Let Loose currently stands at number eight in Amazon’s best sellers list and not without reason.  I have to agree with The Sunday Times reviewer who wrote, “a work of staggering scope and erudition, narrated with supreme fluency and insight, it is unquestionably the best single-volume history of the war ever written”.

Rather than just narrating the historic details of the war, Max Hastings has gone back to primary sources of personal accounts and diaries to interleave among the strategic history countless stories of how the war affected individuals.  I am finding it the most compelling book of the year which really does warrant the description “magisterial”.

The Sussex Ouse is a short river (less than fifty miles from its rising to the sea), and it flows through a rich countryside of woods and fields before flowing down between a gap in the range of hills known as the South Downs, until it reaches the port of Newhaven.  I live in this area and walk bits of her route regularly and would say that it is on the whole a cosy landscape, containing a few pretty villages and the ancient market town of Lewes.  Although it may lack drama, the route is steeped in history and this has given Olivia Laing a considerable amount of material to enrich the account of her walk which took place over the course of seven days in September, a couple of years ago.  I could not help but be impressed by the huge list of sources at the back of her book which takes up eight pages of small print – although the walk may be short, Olivia Laing’s readers won’t be lacking information about it.

We learn about the authors personal crisis early in the book

In the spring of 2009 I became caught up in one of those crises that periodically afflict a life, when the scaffolding that maintains us seems destined to collapse. I lost a job by accident, and then through sheer carelessness, I lost the man  I loved.

Olivia “lost the knack of sleeping” and at periodical intervals throughout the day she felt that she was drowning. The idea came to her clear out her life by walking the length of the River Ouse and while reading the account of her journey, we keep coming back to that underlying sadness in little asides and remarks indicating that the clearing out was a tough job to do.

The walk commences in an area of thickets, small woods and muddy fields bounded with barbed wire fences – maybe a place fitting for Olivia’s current state of mind.  However, we are soon treated to some descriptive nature writing,

The first pipistrelles were crossing Coos Lane as I reached the water.  It was just after sunset and everything had stilled, the sky shot faintly with rose.  The reflections in the lake seemed sunk very deep.  The water pleated as the carp sank and climbed, occasionally breaking the surface to shivers.  Beneath them, the slow clouds made their way east.  At the far side of the lake the trees were reflected in sooty green and when the fish jumped there the ripples ran in white concentric circles.

Olivia launches into many passages like this and they capture the quiet stillness of much of the route, which is only disturbed by the noise of passing cars from the roads which are never too far away.  As ex-Deputy Books Editor of the Observer newspaper, Olivia Laing’s book is full of literary references.  Sometimes these seem slightly overlong (ten pages of Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame for example) and I found myself skipping through some of these, but also realised that they are well written and do relate to the landscape she walks through.

The writing is of a style that will be bound to gain Olivia an invitation to next year’s Charleston Festival.  Apart from the considerable amount of material on Virginia and Leonard Woolf, she herself often moves into exploring the numinous aspects of her walk,

We navigate by omens such as these.  You don’t have to be a poet to be prone to apophenia, to seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday life.  In a certain mood, the earth itself can seem a ouija board, calling out its advice, discharging symbol after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single black and white bird winging down the sky.

You have to like this sort of digression to really enjoy this book for there is quite a lot of it.  I don’t mean to sound churlish, but the synergy with the whole Woolf thing is sometimes a little too laboured and as one who does not take over-much to it all, I found it a bit of a struggle not to giggle at times.  My male brain tends to see a walk as a walk, and perhaps an opportunity for some self-reflection, rather than a journey through a symbolic landscape.

Having said that, the history side of the book is excellent – Olivia Laing provides a lovely potted history of the Piltdown Man archaeological scam, a blow by blow account of the little known Battle of Lewes and a fascinating chapter on the terrible floods that came on Lewes in 2000.  It would not be fair on  the author to commend this book only for its excellent local history (which should make it an essential purchase for anyone who lives in East Sussex), when in reality this is a highly literary walking journal which adds another volume to the burgeoning Woolf-related library.

I feel sorry for making some slightly disparaging remarks about the tone of the book for it really is a very good production all round. Many people will love it and its quality is without doubt.  However when I look on my recent reviews I couldn’t help but compare this book with the travel journal of another woman writer – Susie Kelly who in her book, The Valley of Heaven and Hell managed to combine huge amounts of history with without the same high-mindedness of some of Olivia Laing’s writing.   I’ll probably give this one a five star review on Amazon, because this book does contribute a great deal to the literature of the area in which I live and despite my hesitations about its tone, its quality is beyond doubt.

For after the Second World War, the lands of East Prussia were parcelled out between Russia and Poland.  Those of the German population who could, fled westwards in the face of the retributive zeal of the advancing Russian troops.  Many others were recruited as forced labour by the Russians and found themselves in the Gulag system.  Towns and cities were renamed, gravestones were used as paving stones and so far as was possible, all traces of German residency were obliterated. The excellent Wikipedia article on East Prussia records that “a population which had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945″.

It is difficult for those who live on an island to understand what it is like to live in an area with fluid borders where skirmishes with neighbouring countries redraw the shape of your nation several times each century.  The reshaping and re-ordering of East Prussia however far exceeds that of anywhere else in Europe, involving the forced emigration of well over a million people and yet it is largely forgotten by a Europe which prefers not to dwell on the terrible events of the 20th century.

Old cathedral of Kaliningrad

While the lands of East Prussia have buried their German past, it is perhaps Kaliningrad which shows the most dramatic change since it was the German city-port of Königsberg.   With the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989 the territory around Kaliningrad has been part of the Russian Federation but has had no land connection to the rest of Russia.  When Max Egremont visited it in 1992 he found it “a parody of Soviet planning, with cracked concrete, cratered streets, people bend against the cold and wet . . .”.    In the post-Soviet age he finds “black limousines and dark-suited security guards . . . wait outside the Kaliningrad clubs, restaurants and hotels; the show of money mocks any idea of communism”.  The tourists are mainly German, relatives and descendants of those who were expelled in 1945, or even elderly former residents who found themselves “overwhelmed, bursting into tears at the memory of terror or loss”.

East Prussia has, as Egremont puts it, “a layered history”, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky writing that “the trees whisper in German”. A couple of years ago I reviewed Elizabeth Denny’s The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City, in which she writes of visiting Kaliningrad and finding that “one cannot escape an uncanny feeling of the old Königsberg, like the negative of a damaged photograph, lying ten to twenty feet underneath the city’s surface”.  This layering is reflected in the subtitle to Max Egremont’s book, “Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia”.

Käthe Kollwitz - The Grieving Parents

At times the book seems to go off at a bit of a tangent.  For example, it is not immediately clear why we are treated to a chapter of mini-biography of the artist and sculptor Kath Kollwitz, particularly when it focuses on her years in Berlin.  Similarly, the passages on the memorials at Ypres, while relevant in terms of highlighting the tragedy of war seem not quite relevant to this book of explorations of East Prussia.  I really didn’t mind these digressions because Max Egremont is a writer with the gift of illuminating dark places,  providing a list of such in his chapter on Ypres,

certain landscapes are overshadowed by what happened or even by what was conceived there:  Hitler’s beloved Bavarian Alps; the still empty centre of Kaliningrad; the death camps. . . ; the forests of Belarus, eastern Poland and Ukraine where the Soviets and the Germans killed millions; the Wolf’s Lair . . .

Military victories in East Prussia during World War I became totemic symbols of German deliverance during the 1930s with General Von Hindenburg, who led the German armies in the Battle of Tannenburg, providing a potent symbol of Germanic heroism as he “stands in the snow, a Prussian spiked helmet on his head, binoculars in one hand, the other clutching his ceremonial sword”.  In later years, the Nazis “made sure that whenever Hindenburg did appear in public it was in Hitler’s company. During these appearances, Hitler always made a point of showing the utmost respect and reverence for the President” (from Wikipedia).  Max Egremont suggests however that the sending of huge reinforcements into East Prussia may so have  depleted the forces fighting in France at a critical time and that it may actually have prevented the Germans from winning World War I.

The book is a mixture of interviews old and new – Max Egremont had extended conversations with Marion Donhoff, writer and states-woman, who was born in what is now Kaliningrad and fled before the invading Soviet army on horseback to Hamburg, later becoming editor and publisher of the liberal newspaper Die Zeit.

A chapter on Königsberg poet Agnes Miegel reminds us of the life-long pull of a homeland on those who suffered exile, her poem “Es War Ein Land” expressing the feelings of thousands of Germans who had to flee westwards in order to survive -

Once there was this land—we loved this land—yet horror fell upon it just as dunes of sand.
As elks in marsh and meadow vanished, so the trace of man and beast is lost.
They froze in snow, they scorched in flames, how miserably they wasted in the hands of strangers. (see Wikipedia)

zelenogradsk (formerly Cranz)

Thomas Mann, who originated from the western end of the Baltic at Lubeck, fell in love with the wild coastline of the long spit of land near Zelenogradsk and used his Nobel prize money to build a summer house there which has somehow survived the upheavals of the years. The greatest name associated with the area is of course the philosopher Emmanuel Kant whose name keeps coming up in the book  – we learn much about Kant’s years in Königsberg and also his current influence, with ongoing proposals that the name of Kaliningrad be changed to Kantgrad.

A minor criticism of the book is that it darts about rather more than is necessary and I sometimes felt that a better ordering of the material would have been welcome – the book jumps about between one era and another and in some ways is more an anthology of miscellaneous writings about East Prussia than a travel or history book.  However, its important to say that each chapter and section is well worth reading and even when Max Egremont goes off on one of his many digressions he is always interesting.  He seems at times to have trawled through every possible reference to the area even bringing in references to a forgotten British cycle traveller, Arnold Wilson, who passed through the region on a Baltic tour.

Of course, it is impossible to write about the region without touching on the horrors of the conclusion of World War II.  The last days before the Russians invaded were terrible times, with concentration camps being emptied and their prisoners being marched off to die in forests and even being driven into the sea to drown.  When the Russian Army came they brought their own brand of terror onto those who had not fled and Max Egremont recounts eye-witness reports of the killings and rapes inflicted on the remaining German residents.  It must be a strange experience to visit towns like Kaliningrad and to remember the layered history now obliterated by the new townscape.

Having finished this book I believe it is going to be a vital reference book for anyone interested in this region and its troubled history.  I can’t think how any future work could be more comprehensive in its range, covering as it does the social, cultural and political history of East Prussia.  While I wonder whether an editor couldn’t have slightly improved the arrangement of the material there is no doubting the quality of the writing or the depth of the research – and of course the many interviews the author conducted which have contributed much original material which cannot be found elsewhere.  I would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the region but also to anyone who enjoys reading well-written modern history.

Publishing format

The book contains a number of photographs, but these are printed in-line with the text and therefore lose definition.  On a book of this price, it is a shame that the publishers, Picador, could not provide a photograph section on glossy paper.  I also felt that there were not enough maps.  While the main map in the front is useful, the book sorely lacks maps showing the national boundaries at different stages of history. 

I regret that the book was not published simultaneously in paper and e-book format.  I have got used to making annotations by highlighting text on my e-reader and quotations by cutting and pasting, and I had to revert to pen and paper and later typing up my notes while reading this book.  The index is good, but not as effective as an electronic search feature.  It is also a book to read with the Internet to hand.  This is a finely detailed book and there is a vast array of maps, images and other supporting material available online to enrich the reading experience – the e-book format makes Internet cross-referencing so much easier to do.  A few years from now it will seem incredible that a reference book like this was not immediately available as an electronic text.

Various links

Museum of Königsberg

Wikipedia article on East Prussia

Wikipedia article on Käthe Kollwitz

Wikipedia article on Agnes Miegel

Wikipedia article on Paul von Hindenburg

Dorling Kindersley are famous for their illustrated guides – I have some of their travel guides which are guaranteed to make you want to visit the places described – and this new history book is up to their usual standard.  I’ve been happily browsing it for the last few days and have found it to be a great book to pick up for half an hour or so and its certainly attracted the attention of any visitors to the house – most of whom seems to have as patchy a knowledge of Britain’s history as I do.

Of course, for most of the topics covered, the book will me more of a jumping off point for further reading – you can’t really expect to cover 3000 years in 400 pages.  But for a brief overview of each period, its about as good as any I’ve seen.  I would think it would be invaluable for families with enquiring children, but there are few adults who would be able to resist browsing it to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.

Here are a couple of double page spreads to give you an idea of what’s in store -

Now that history is not even a compulsory subject under the national curriculum for secondary school students, I think that this book like would go some way towards helping those families who have missed learning about Britain’s heritage.

Although Susie Kelly has a number of print books to her name, the book under review here, The Valley of Heaven and Hell – Cycling in the Shadow of Marie-Antoinette, (non-UK readers and people with ereaders other than Kindle can purchase from the links at the end of this review) is published only in ebook format, and as someone who enjoys reading about travel on foot or bicycle I can say its as good as any I’ve read and is a massively entertaining and satisfying read.  Not only is is about a cycle ride, but Susie Kelly has linked the journey to a historical journey, in this case, the route Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XV1 took to escape from Paris.  The escapees were apprehended at Varennes and then had to return to Paris under escort, thus providing the modern-day cyclists with a return journey of equal interest.

One advantage of an ebook is that hyperlinks are provided to many of the places visited. By using the Amazon “Kindle for PC” as well as the Kindle itself, it was easy to click on the links and see photographs and further information about the various locations.

The appeal of this book is its contrast between the stories which will inevitably arise when cycle-camping and the tragic events in the life of Marie Antoinette – a character for whom Susie Kelly has immense sympathy.  The poor Austrian princess was betrothed to marry Louis, a second cousin when she was only ten years old and was handed over to the French at the age of 15 to a most unattractive lumpen young man who at first took little interest in his new bride.  Her whole life was then lived in public, with audiences even watching the royal couple eat their meals.  Susie Kelly describes the unreal life of the young Queen of France and it is difficult not to share her liking for this much-maligned empress.

Susie’s journey with her husband Matthew begins in Paris.  Cycling in this bustling city is far from easy, and their hotel (the camping comes later) is surrounded by impenetrable road-works which provide confusion and noise sufficient to blight their first day on the road.

. . . the road is trembling beneath roaring machines gouging up the tarmac around the station. Temporary wooden walkways have been set up to allow pedestrians to move from one place to another; however, they are rather narrow, with sharp bends around which it is impossible to steer a bicycle carrying a wide load such as mine, as I discover about half way along. This means wheeling the machine backwards, against the oncoming crowds, the most difficult challenge so far on this afternoon of trials . . .

This is the first of many times when cycling is going to prove a very arduous experience for Susie and her husband Terry, even though Susie is equipped with an electric bike, this often proves to be less manoeuvrable and also heavier than her husband’s leg-powered model.

Although the journey is not very long in terms of cycle tours, the experience of camping is as always an unpredictable affair.  The first time I camped in France I found the sites could be a very mixed bag, and the site wardens could be a difficult bunch.  I always found it unsettling that they took our  passports away when I registered and didn’t return it until we left the site.  Sometimes the rules of the site seemed bizarre, while other times you could just turn up, pitch your tent and do what you liked.  I learned always to take masses of bedding with me – like Susie, I found that camping in June is no guarantee of warm nights -

After we’d shivered for an hour we writhed with great difficulty, in the limited space and pitch darkness, into all our cycling clothes. Then we spread over ourselves an aluminium survival blanket, and over that our wet waterproof coats. The whole lot slithered about noisily every time we moved without noticeably adding any warmth, and our faces occasionally brushed against the damp and clammy walls of the tent. There was continual noise from aircraft, trains, cars, roaring motorbikes and barking dogs.

Chalons en Champagne

We are treated to a history of Champagne as the riders cycle through Epernay and Chalons.  We were there last year and noticed like Susie that the region is not the most beautiful in France but has lots to interest.  The little town of Chalons en Champagne is a gem of a place and my wife and I walked through park surrounded by historic buildings then sat at a café table enjoying looking at the half-timbered houses around us.

Before long, the travellers reach Reims and book into an hotel during the annual folk-lore festival and pageant in honour of Joan of Arc.  This sounds a fantastic affair, the streets crowded with visitors from all over the world, with “a cacophony of sounds, cocktail of smells and a panorama of sights”.   They manage to get their bikes safely into their tiny hotel room (a story in itself), and then bask in the incredible mix of experiences presented by the festival.

Susie and Terry have a fantastic time at the festival, but later in Reims cathedral, she is overwhelmed by a numinous experience which leave her overcome with emotion.  And this is one of the features of this book, the mixture of light-heartedness with the sombreness of tone brought by her reflections on the World War 1 battlefields of the Marne or the tragedy of Marie Antoinette’s life.

You have to admire Susie and Terry’s persistence.  At one point, rather than go travel along roads, they choose a canal-side route, but this proves to be more difficult than expected.

We battered our way through the jungular undergrowth beside the river, bouncing over rocks and tussocks. It was extraordinarily hard work keeping the wheels in the ruts. My head ached from the fierceness of concentrating. My hands dripped perspiration, and when I tried to change gear they slipped on the handles. The long grass poked through our wheel spokes, frequently tangling itself so thoroughly that the wheels were brought to a sudden halt. I was first to fall off. . .

I’ve cycled along canal tow-paths myself and found them to be full of tree-roots and sudden ditches – to attempt it while carrying full camping gear is not something I would choose, and when Susie and Terry encounter a long tunnel with a narrow towpath winding into the darkness, I think I would have given up.

Susie insisted on visiting every site she could find that had any link to the journey of Marie Antoinette and her husband.  This takes her into some spectacularly beautiful buildings, but also some which are frankly disappointing.  After the revolution, the remains of all the royals dating back to the 6th century ended up as a jumble of bones residing in the Church of St Denis in Paris – a building of “unkempt and dismal appearance”.  Susie finds the tombs of Louis and Marie-Antoinette down in the crypt but there is no guarantee that after the turmoil of the Revolution that the correct bones were deposited in them.

The French seems to have a very equivocal of their royalty – in Britain most people have a half-hearted interest in  their royal history while grudgingly acknowledging its significance.  In France, the attitude seems to have become complicated by pride in the Republic and a reluctance to condemn the revolutionaries who dealt so harshly with kings like Louis who Susie describes as,

a kindly, humane king who wanted to improve the lives of the poor and underprivileged. Louis XVI abolished the forced unpaid labour previously imposed upon the peasants. He banned the use of torture as a means of extracting confessions. Under his rule Protestants, discriminated against since the time of Louis XIV, were tolerated, and the hitherto harsh taxation of Jews was lifted.

I have enjoyed this book not only as an entertaining “traveller’s tale” but also for the insight it has given me into the bloody phase of French history which so marks the landscape of Paris and the surrounding cities.  It is difficult to fault The Valley of Heaven and Hell and for the price of £1.39 it seems remarkable value.

This book can also be purchased from here and here.

Frances Welch has written a fine “what happened next” book in The Russian Court at Sea,  describing the escape from Russia of the remaining members of the Romanov tribe as they departed Russia from the Ukraine port of Yalta on the British ship HMS Marlborough.  The party consisted of the Tsar’s mother, The Dowager Empress Marie and his sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia and fifteen others, including the man who killed Rasputin, Prince Felix Youssoupov.

The Romanov party was far from being one happy family.  At least two squabbling factions were represented, and the British crew seemed bemused by the intricacies of the social relationships among the Russians.  First Lieutenant Pridham had been led to expect a party of twelve and was taken aback at having to accommodate fifty refugees.  The crew gallantly freed up all 35 officers’ cabins and commandeered additional mattresses and sheets as they could find them.  Indeed, the Tsarina’s lady in waiting wrote in her diary,

All the officers had cleared their cabins and let us have them, while they themselves were content to sleep in the hold.  When I lay in my bunk, I could see “my host’s” family portraits all around me and many small keepsakes from his loved ones at home.

After the terrible events arising from the revolution, including the mass slaughter of other members of the family and the flight into the Ukraine is must have been a relief to find such hospitality on-board a British ship, even though at the time of embarkation they did not know where they were going.

HMS Marlborough

Fortunately the Dowager and Princess Xenia had Anglophile tendencies and had visited Britain (The Dowager was the sister in law of King Edward VII) and we well-disposed to the officers and crew – who reciprocated with a degree of deference only to be expected towards royal guests.  The family had brought with them incalculable riches including rolled-up Rembrandts, jewellery and silver.

A good relationship developed between the officers and their Russian passengers as the Marlborough sailed to Malta, where they finally parted company.  They were impressed by the beauty of the island and were accommodated in a fine house belonging to the British government, San Antonio, Prince Dmitri writing,

The grounds were full of orange tress and we were able to pick and eat the choicest fruit.  The palace was reputed to be haunted not by one but by several ghosts including a phantom grey cat.  Meals were taken together at a long table and our Maltese butler would solemnly announce at the end of each meal “port or marsala” which always amused me.

Life in exile was never to equal that of a Royal family in their home country.  They arrived in London and were greeted by King George and Queen Mary but although the Dowager tried to with her sister Alix at Marlbourough House, the two elderly ladies did not get on and she decided to return to Denmark.  Even there life was difficult at times and her nephew King Christian was “particularly disagreeable”, at one point telling her to turn off lights as she was using too much electricity.

Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich and Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna

Princess Xenia remained in England at the King’s expense but was troublesome to the end, eventually being exiled to Wilderness House at Hampton Court.  The young English Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were quite taken with their Russian relation, “merrily singing the Volga Boat Song whenever they passed Xenia’s house”.

The research that went into this book is impeccable, and the list of sources is impressive.  Frances Welch evidently found many useful contacts while researching the book and translated documents from French and German.  While the voyage is perhaps a footnote in history, is is always interesting to have small events recreated in this way, revealing as they do many different aspects on greater issues.  I particularly liked the way in which the author followed up the history of the officers and their passengers right up to the 1970s and 80s (Marina died in 1981).

The book is nicely produced by Short Books and contains many photographs which illuminate the text.

As I read this book I couldn’t help but wonder what the late Beryl Bainbridge would have made of this story.  Frances Welch’s book would have provided her with exactly the sort of material she could have used for a hilarious fictional recreation of these events as she did in books like Every Man for Himself (about the Titanic) or Master Georgie (about the Crimean War).

What is the fascination of these books?  As someone who loves visiting Germany and is an avid reader of German literature, I find myself fascinated with two things – how “ordinary” people came to be so fascinated with the false promises of Nazism, and also how they coped with the destruction of their dreams and the devastation of their lives that resulted from their infatuation with Adolf Hitler.

Berlin at War is particularly interesting because it presents a “street-level” viewpoint of the terrible events that befell the city.  Roger Moorhouse has gone back to a vast range of primary sources including memoirs, diaries and interviews and the result is that the reader gains a good idea of what it was like to be a resident of the city between 1939 and 1945.  He interviewed many elderly Berliners over coffee and cake and also used the wealth of published memoirs and unpublished diaries including a vast number which were never (and probably never will be) translated into English.  Some of the published books were once well-known, but now rather forgotten such as Christabel Bielenburg’s The Past is Myself, or William Shirer’s Berlin Diary and I was pleased to be reminded of what important eye-witness accounts are these and other books.

The amount of material collected was so vast that the only way the author was able to use it sensibly was to build the book around a wide range of themes, each chapter covering topics such as “Faith in the Fuhrer”, “Brutality made stone”, Enemies of the state” and others.  The book is illustrated with maps and photographs which enable the reader to visualise the events described, and a copious index and bibliography is provided.

The opening chapter describes the state of mind of the people as Poland was invaded.  Roger Moorhouse shows that the people of Berlin were far from jubilant as news of the German invasion spread across the news media.  A seventeen year old school girl wrote,”I remember that we all sat there with these frightfully serious faces.  We were depressed.  We had the feeling that something quite terrible was coming . . . I can still see them before my eyes, how those faces looked”.  In the cinemas, the newsreels were greeted with dead silence, and only a very few members of the audience cried out in approval.  The British ambassador noted that “the whole atmosphere of Berlin was one of utter gloom and depression” and people clung on to the hope of peace negotiations even after war had been declared by the British, even though the more realistic members of the population were foreseeing imminent catastrophe.

The mood of Berlin recovered rapidly when the German army successfully took Norway, Denmark, France and Belgium but was knocked back again at the news of operation Barbarossa, the attack on Russia. With three million German soldiers crossing the border into Russia, every family was now had a personal involvement in the war and it was impossible to expect an early end to it.

1940 saw an exceptionally hard winter, with temperatures falling below -20°C.  Coal supplies to the city were halted due to the frozen waterways and railways and people began to literally freeze to death. Food rationing bit hard on the people’s diets and even products which were rationed were often in very short supply.  Theft, and the black market flourished, despite the terrible penalties meeted out to those who were caught obtaining illegal goods.  From now on, there was to be no remittance of the hard times Berliners had begun to experience.  Conditions could only get worse as the Russian campaign failed, and the Allies began to increase the frequency and effectiveness of their bombing raids.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on radio, “The People’s Friend”.  The Nazis had decided early on that radio was to be a key means of propaganda and the government produce a “People’s Receiver” at a low cost subsidised by the government.  The smaller version of this soon received the nickname, “Goebells’ gob” (Goebells Schnauze).  From 1939 it became illegal to listen to foreign radio broadcasts, punishable by imprisonment, or even death where a listener spread the foreign news he heard to his neighbours.

This must have been one of the most broken Nazi laws because Berliners generally became addicted to tuning into stations like the BBC, even with blankets over their receivers and a watcher posted at the front-door.  It was estimated that three-quarters of the population listened into foreign broadcasts – with most believing that what they heard from the BBC was more reliable than the German stations.  One spur to encourage Germans to tune in to Russian and British broadcasts was that they read out lists of prisoners of war – often the only way that Germans could find out whether their relatives were dead or alive.

The chapter on the evacuation of Jews, “Into Oblivion” tackles the question of how much Berliners knew about the Holocaust.  Moorhouse points out that the evacuation was conducted in an extremely orderly fashion and non-Jewish residents and the organisation of the early stages was actually conducted by Jews.  This seems to have enabled non-Jewish Berliners to cast a blind-eye on the evacuations and to not ask too many questions about it.  The censorship of mail meant that news of the elimination of the Jews did not actually get back to families in Berlin, but this very lack of information allowed rumours to flourish.  Historians today believe that about one third of the German population knew about the mass murder of Jews – but even then it was easy for this information to be dismissed as enemy propaganda. The majority could simply “not conceive of mass killing on the scale of the Holocaust”.

Potsdamer Platz 1945

The final chapters of the book are of course terrible to read.  The relentless bombing campaign reduced the city to ruins, and conditions became unbearable for Berlin citizens with many having nervous breakdowns because of the horrendous noise of the bombing and the destruction and death they saw around them.  The troubles of the survivors were far from over when eventually the war was lost, for it is well known that the Russian invaders raped and robbed with abandon in the early days of their occupation – although they did in fact restore order reasonably quickly and made arrangements to feed the population.

I enjoyed this book greatly, not least because it is so very readable.  This is far from being an academic book, but it is full of information which fills out a picture already well-known with personal stories and anecdotes.  We gain an impression of a people who were reluctant to go to war and had a typical big-city cynicism about their rulers.  Jokes and satire were rife throughout the war years, although the population was also capable of being rallied to patriotic fervour when news of victories arrived.  It is generally thought that only about a third of the population were supporters of the Nazi regime, and Roger Moorhouse catalogues some of the brave acts of resistance which took place by people called to a level of bravery they did not know they had in them.

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.

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