Hitler’s Loathsome Paladins

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Some readers might immediately recognize the name and distinction of Richard Evans, now Sir Richard Evans, the author of the study Hitler’s People.[1] Evans, the retired Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, was the scholarly companion-in-arms to Deborah Lipstadt when she was accused of libel by the crypto-Nazi provocateur David Irving.  Even under the painful constraints of British libel law, requiring the alleged libeler (Lipstadt) to prove that she was right in having debased the libeled party, Lipstadt would win the case, thanks to Evans on her side. Irving had sought to enrich himself at Lipstadt’s and Penguin Books’ expense for falsely terming him a “Holocaust-denier” and “an ardent follower of Adolf Hitler.” Evans proved her correct.

In Hitler’s People, Evans makes a new departure from his previous achievement as a political and social historian of Nazi Germany. Here, he considers the character of the perpetrator. Who are these individuals who–along with Hitler, whom they worshipped—conspired to commit these monumental crimes against humanity, and quite particularly against the Jews?  Is there a “new acquist/of true experience” to be had in examining the brief lives of the best-known criminals of the Nazi Reich?[2]—an experience, which Evans hopes, will equip us to better deal with the likes of a Trump and an Orbán (whom we’ve recently met on these pages as members of Autocracy, Inc., the worldwide collective of autocrats)? The jury is out.

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Barry Lynn’s Anti-Monopoly Jeremiad

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In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Black Reconstruction,” assailed the American system of racism. Key both to his indictment of America and his dream for it, Du Bois provided perhaps the most perfect distillation of the American ideal of liberty:

“America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief, gift of Martin Luther and Leo X, a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”

Du Bois ended with a quiet exclamation: “What an idea.”

What a piece by Barry Lynn in the September Harpers where he quotes from Black Reconstruction (and underscores Du Bois’s wonder-ender). Lynn’s “The Anti-trust Revolution: Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech”—is a sharp yet rangy polemic.

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Adams Chronicle

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Every fall semester, as I did again last week, I have the privilege of showing my students episode 2 in HBO’s marvelous dramatization of the life of John Adams. Episode 2 covers the debate in the Continental Congress over declaring independence from Great Britain.

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Hunter Harris Goes High

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Hunter Harris’s talkback to our masters of entertainment has proven she has what it takes to become a vital voice of America. When she aims at official powers-that-be, the country benefits from her wit. Not that our ruling classes float above Harris’s usual beat. Her reporting in this swatch from her latest column places Mayor Adams inside the celebrity terrarium…

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is going through it to a degree that would make SZA¹ pick up her pen or make Martin Scorsese start storyboarding the saga of a new criminal conspiracy. On Friday afternoon Adams pleaded not guilty to five federal corruption charges, per The City.² He is the first New York City mayor to face criminal charges while in office. The news of his indictment went through Twitter like the night Trump got Covid, or the day Azealia Banks said Grimes smells “like a roll of nickels.”

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Joy And Pain x 2

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Donna Allen’s cover came through to me before Maze’s original. I dug how she seems to hold something back even as she doubles-down–wailing, crying, moaning for her life.  Allen’s version gets all of “Joy and Pain’s” deep bluesy amor fati. She’s performing for adults. This isn’t kid’s stuff…

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Harmon Killebrew

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The other night I learned what sui generis meant.
And then: schadenfreude.
I even felt schadenfreude when the Republicans couldn’t elect a speaker.

I looked into Marjorie Taylor Greene’s eyes: cold, vacant, hateful, ignorant.
Then I traded her for an outfielder who could also pitch.
……a throwback.

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Emergent

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Thanks to the Harris-Walz campaign, The Democracy is a deep far from where we were six weeks ago. There are countertruths implicit in this transition—lasting lessons about continuity and change that might even turn around exit leftists. (The breed who avowed earlier this summer: “We’re leaving the USA when Trump wins.”)

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The Wind from the Midwest

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We made it home. I’m sitting on the deck in 90-degree heat worrying that the 103 degrees we drove through in Nebraska might be on its way here. Uh-oh.

At any rate, a few random thoughts while driving across the West.

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The Art of Social Criticism (Excerpt from Barbara Hardy’s “The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray”)

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C.L.R. James once avowed that his moral imagination derived from Vanity Fair. When it came to James’ formation, Thackeray, not Marx, was the Man.  I can take a hint so I read Vanity Fair to my son when he was an elementary schoolboy. What a fuckin’ book! (And not just for the adult in the room, though I won’t speak for the youth.)

I was thrilled to find out (recently) the late critic and scholar Barbara Hardy was alive to the artful social criticism in Thackeray’s corpus. Fifty years on, Hardy’s The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (1972) remains a vital book, thanks to Hardy’s “exuberant” readings.

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Barbara Hardy: Life and Times of a Subtle Socialist Critic and Literary Scholar

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Barbara Gladys Hardy
24 June 1924 – 12 February 2016

When Barbara Hardy died, I lost one of the most profound friendships of my life. This memoir, therefore, will not have the distance of an official memorial. It celebrates a uniquely unusual woman. To meet Barbara was to encounter a woman of buoyant strength, with a capacity for warmth and joy and enthusiasm. It was to encounter a woman with a bold, crystal mind, whose power, precision and largeness of vision possessed extraordinary expansive energy. Her intellectual brilliance was everywhere apparent. She had a special charisma.

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Rushdie’s Knife with Occam’s Razor

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Salman Rushdie has written an eloquent memoir, a meditation on his near murder by an assassin’s knife, called, simply, Knife. On seeing this book, I immediately recalled another book title, a German counterthrust to Adorno’s 1951-dictum, “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric). The title of this resistant text, which appeared in 1955, is Mein Gedicht ist mein Messer: Lyriker zu ihren Gedichten (My Poem is My Knife: Lyric Poets on Their Poems).[1] Here is evidence that men and women will write poems, will continue to take dictation from their personalità poetica; but in this instance they do so at an extraordinary distance from their recent history, from the Nazi catastrophe and its aftershocks. An engaged German poetry needed another generation of writers.

What does that mean, “my poem is my knife”?

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The Uses of the Rothermans

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Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.

I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved short­ly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.

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Larry David, I Want My Life Back

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An open letter

I know fame.

I’ve experienced fame.

And I now know the price of fame.

All without being famous.

Larry David, I want my life back.

I notice the illusion starts with the sideways glance, followed by a series of yes/no/can’t/could/not sure/but hey that leads to the soft opening: “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Larry David?” Ever?  My new friend, you are the third person today.

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The Morning Crowd

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(an homage to/adaptation of/improvisation upon Lydia Davis’s “Old Men Around Town”)

The customer who had been coming to Espresso Bongo the longest had been a magician. He had white hair and blue eyes which were alert and bright. He arrived when the café opened and sat at a corner table opposite the rest room and told people if it was occupied and, if they had never known or had but had forgotten the lock’s combination, he clicked the remote he palmed and opened it. If a small child arrived, he bowed, introduced himself to its parent and, with their permission, pulled a quarter from the child’s ear.

Each rainy season, he left for San Miguel de Allende. This spring he did not return. He has an ex-wife and adult son but no one at the café knew how to reach them. His usual seat has been taken by a 95-year-old, former Pilates instructor, who can still raise one foot above her head while standing on the other foot but can not keep from offering books she has brought from home to people who declined them the previous day or, sometimes, the previous hour.

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London Calling (Or, Another Walker in the City)

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Walking north along Whitehall in the direction of Trafalgar Square, I felt an odd stirring as we passed the memorials to Britain’s bygone military heroes. I didn’t really know who most of the statues represented, many of them seemed to be related to the Great Wars of the twentieth century, but it didn’t matter. Or maybe it did – the First and Second World Wars seem to loom over this country in a way that is much more present, much more remembered, than in America.

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Contra Hamas & Israel’s New Centurions

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Your editor meant to post this Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari earlier this season but it’s still on time. Click here (and it might make sense to start around 4:50). Harari’s protest against Israel’s Roman turn remains urgent. As does his injunction to get representative voices from his country’s millions of Palestinian-Israeli citizens into mainstream discourse. (I don’t believe journalists have picked up on his prompts yet. Please let me know if I missed something on that front.) B.D.