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I don’t intend this critically, but Howard Jacobson seems to have one subject: being a Jew in Britain in the past 50 years. My evidence base is perhaps too weak, as I’ve read only three of his novels, all of which I’ve enjoyed. Jewishness is certainly present on every page of Howl, his most recent novel. It’s a great achievement (and I don’t mean this sarcastically) to explore the same subject endlessly and yet be funny, entertaining, insightful, and never boring. And the subject of being a Jew in Britain is high on the national agenda with growing antisemitism and Jews discussing whether it’s time to leave Britain. I read Howl as an attempt to understand more about being a Jew in Britain but knowing as well that I would be likely to enjoy the novel.

(I asked one Jewish friend, a great reader, what she thought of Jacobson’s books, and she said she’d never read them. She said I don’t want to know more about the anguishes of neurotic Jewish men and that’s why I didn’t marry one.)

Jacobson precedes his novel with a quote from Allen Ginsberg’s great 1950s poem Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” This is, writes Jacobson, “the story of how the world lost its mind and also – not incidentally – of how I, Ferdinand Draxler, lost mine.” 

Ferdie, as his family and friends call him, is a Jew who is the headmaster of a primary school in Streatham. He is not a religious Jew, but his Jewishness is central to him. His wife is a tall, red-haired Gentile actor. She tells him: “You are a relentless father, Ferdie. As you are a relentless husband” and asks him: “Is there no part of your mind that doesn’t have a Jew idea or a Jew thought or a Jew perturbation or even a Jew sexual fantasy in it?’ For himself, he says “I was, by temperament, an obfuscator. I wanted not to know anything for certain. I liked to live in the margins of doubt.”

His mother had been in a death camp and has written a book about the experience. She’s a hard, unforgiving woman. Ferdie has a theory that “Shakespeare was Jewish, they [his characters] spoke so well and knew such sadness. And everyone Jewish, like Mutti [ his mother] and me, was Shakespearean.”

Ferdie’s deputy head at the school is English but has converted to Judaism. Ferdie thinks he’s utterly fake: “He was too English for the rococo elaborations of Jewish anguish.” Ferdie’s wife asks the convert: “How secure do you feel in your Jewishness?’ …‘Entirely,’ he said. ‘Then you aren’t what I’d call a Jew.” Ferdie adds: “He’d been vouchsafed the truth, I – though I expressed myself vehemently – felt I had to find the truth anew every time I spoke or wrote a word. What else was my vehemence?….If anything proved that he was indeed no Jew, it was how ineffective he was at meeting sarcasm with sarcasm.”

Zoe, Ferdie’s daughter, is joining pro-Palestine marches, the marches that unnerve Ferdie and many Jews. The marchers, they feel, are not only against what Israel is doing in Gaza but against all Jews, including British Jews, many of whom do not support what Isreal is doing to Gaza. Ferdie says: “‘It’s getting harder and harder…to distinguish dream from nightmare, sleep from waking, today from yesterday …’”

Zoe is smart and Ferdie regrets what university has done to her:

“I am an educationalist. Ranked high among the literature of education I swear by is Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University. It was in order that Zoe should learn how, in Newman’s words, ‘to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse’, that we encouraged her to go to university. But instead of teaching her how to think, those charged with the cultivation of her reason taught her what to think. Zoe went into university bristling with animation and curiosity. She will come out of it a zombie. Who will be charged with her lobotomy?”

In touching on this, Howard refelects on a wider worry about the nature of universities and free speech.

There are other twists on Jewishness in a complicated plot. Ferdie has a nutty brother who became an Orthodox Jew and moved to Israel, but at the beginning of the novel he returns from Israel and has become a pro-Palestine Jew and links up with Zoe. The brother also has a mystical Jewish girl about whom Ferdie has fantasies.

Although Zoe comes back into the fold, there is no resolution—and how could there be. I’ve learnt that if you take your Jewishness seriously, whether or not you are religious, you are bound as a British Jew to be uncomfortable in Britain today. But I knew that. While reading this book, I came to realise that two friends whom I’d never considered Jewish (not that I had considered them as not Jewish) are Jewish. One of them recommended to me Philip Roth’s interview with Primo Levi, and I liked this sentence in the interview: “To possess two traditions, as happens to Jews but not only to Jews, is a richness: for writers but not only for writers.” But it can also, as Jacobson’s novel shows, be a torture, albeit a funny one. “Life as a Jew,” says Ferdie, “was either a catastrophe or a witticism,” and Jacobson prefers it to be a witticism.

Other quotes from Howl by Howard Jacobson

Jews and Jewishness

There’s one “thou shalt” the Jews should have been given it’s thou shalt not bang on about thy virtuousness. Thou shalt shut the fuck up about thine ethics.’

There’s a Yiddish verb that all Jewish families have recourse to – all families but mine, that is. To kvell. To take inordinate delight in someone – as a rule, your own children.

You had your brief hour as soldiers, felt bad about it, and now your spines are broken by guilt. A moral degradation is spreading throughout the Jewish armies. You have lost your moral compass. The best of you are full of remorse, the worst of you are grown cruel and mindless.

Britin and the world today

Today he is lost in the sense that what used to matter doesn’t and that what used to be true isn’t.

I’d have liked more panic than there was. I wanted to see people rending their garments. I wanted the sheeted dead to come howling out of their graves. Normality was an insult to the slaughtered.

This world of crazy idealogues.

Observations

The English nineteenth-century novel saved her. From what? From the twentieth century.

Christianity was Judaism interrogating itself.

Every life is a work of fiction. War-fiction even more so. Not entirely true, not entirely untrue.

As I read Janet Frame’s The Edge of the Alphabet, I wondered how much I was reading about her life. I thought as well that the three main characters—Toby, Zoe, and Pat—all of them lonely were in many ways her, as was Thora, who is writing the novel. I’ve already written something on her psychiatric history and how she just escaped a lobotomy.https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2026/05/03/might-neurodivergent-be-the-best-word-or-diagnosis-for-janet-frame/

Toby, Zoe, and Pat meet as they journey by boat from New Zealand across the Pacific to Britain. Toby, a New Zealander and an epileptic, is travelling to Britain to show his strength and independence:

“This obstinate conviction of his own power had driven him ten thousand miles across the world, to visit other lands, to walk in them as the rightful king, to force people to realize that Toby Withers was no ordinary epileptic whom people could put out of sight in an institution, or turn from and abandon when his fits became an embarrassment to them.

He was lonely and incomplete, like a house with one wall torn away.”

Zoe, a Brit and teacher, has travelled to New Zealand in search of something, probably love. Frame, who spent years in Britain and Europe, before returning to New Zealand is aware how pointless this long journey can be: “A year in the Antipodes, eleven thousand miles there and back in search of what most people find in the next room or, closer, in the lining of their skin.”

Australians and New Zealanders of my generation felt it almost obligatory to travel to Europe, a continent that their forebears had left comparatively recently. The younger generation doesn’t feel any such obligation.

Zoe hasn’t found love in New Zealand but while in the sick bay of the boat with sea sickness a drunken sailor kisses her. It’s the highlight of her life. I’m reminded of the character in Under Milkwood, who was “kissed once when she wasn’t looking” and was “looking ever afterwards but never kissed again.”

“In all my years in the Midlands no one kissed me. I am no sleeping beauty. Princes do not struggle through forests of thorn to reach me where I lie rose-red snow-white in my glass coffin. The only person who ever struggled towards me was a dirty seaman who had probably been drinking. He changed my life, Mr Sands.”

Back in Britain, Zoe doesn’t return to either the Midlands or teaching. Instead, she works as an usherette in a cinema in Clapham (where I live) in South London. Compared with being a teacher, being an usherette is a lowly, almost disgraceful, job. Zoe’s life comes apart.

“My life has been sucked at last into the whirlpool, made shapeless as water, and here I am trying to carve it as if it were stone; and how beautiful is water which never shows the marks of age and decay!”

Pat didn’t find what he wanted in New Zealand and returns to his digs in Clapham and his job as a bus driver. He has no partner or family: “He was like a big-game hunter, proud of the carcasses, but doomed to have no relationship with the living animal.”

Thora, who is writing the novel, tells Zoe of her effort and her difficulty: “Day and night, Zoe, I have walked in the market among the crowds and the cries, Lovely Oranges, Lovely Oranges, while the night-papers exhort Crucify, Crucify.” As I write this, the papers in Britain are crying “Crucify, Crucify “ to Keir Starmer.

Toby’s Aunt Cora and her husband make a brief appearance. Aunt Cora’s “only interesting attribute is that her bones are ‘turning to chalk’. Frame tells Aunt Cora’s unknown husband’s life in a two-sentence short story:

“Her late husband was a tobacconist. He used to sit in a box-shaped cigarette-lined kiosk in Herd Street from nine to five every day except Saturday and Sunday, and when he died he was laid quiet and still in a coffin shaped like his work-day retreat, but lined with padded satin instead of with cigarettes.”

All of these characters, like Frame herself, live at the Edge of the Alphabet, and throughout the novel Frame tells us about what it’s like:

“The edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence.

At the edge of the alphabet there is no safeguard against the dead.

At the edge of the alphabet all streamers are torn or trail into strangeness.

How can one really identify oneself, living so close to the edge of the alphabet?

The edge of the alphabet where words crumble and all forms of communication between the living are useless. One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech.”

The characters in the novel didn’t find their speech, but Frame did. She found magnificent speech that is all her own.

Other quotes from The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame

How humans live

For it is the rule; human beings must live in clusters, hanging like grapes from the scaffold, or in flocks like sheep in a bleating panic from the hawk.

She had always believed that people were separate with boundaries and fences and scrolled iron gates, Private Road, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted; that people lived and died in shapes and identities with labels easily recognisable, with names which they clutched, like empty suitcases, on their journey to nowhere.

On land one can go to church and speculate on the Second Coming; or watch television and wonder about the results of the Jackpot Quiz; or plan one’s week to the climax of Saturday evening when the Pools coupons are checked.

Everything is calm, people are clothed and fed and employed, governments sit in leather chairs and carry briefcases to and from tall buildings. We are safe. How safe we are! There is no War.

We are glazed people. There is no death by drowning or suffocation or disease. There is no pain.

Drink, women, the blacks, the government, the council, the neighbours, the people up north, the people down south – help yourself, shoplift from the supermarket of fear.’

How strange human beings are – their lamplit eyes, their raspberry peaked and infested skulls with the twisted thought impressed beneath leaving a faint print of meaning that soon wears away; the shell is hollow, the creature has departed or died.

For when one is ageing or ill, when one’s bones, turning to chalk, are in danger of breaking into articulate language, one is often put out for someone to ‘collect’ like the weekly refuse.

their favourite and rewarding habit of acquisition which showers human life with possessions as diverse as rattles, bottles, flowers, jobs, televisions, bank accounts, pictures, stamps; and other people.

Death

‘That most dramatic and convenient change in habits which we call Death’.

Love and death

His early enthusiastic reading of love explained, of course, his facility in the translation of death: the alphabet, the grammar, are the same.

Travelling overseas

But this was a voyage, it was a ship for overseas, it was Toby going overseas; an adventure as serious and fraught with peril as birth or death.

Schizophrenia

‘Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?’ Janet Frame

Waste

Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill-judged, costly, criminal – especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products. The creator of the world did not employ a dustman to collect the peelings of his creation. 

The edge of the alphabet

Words

Words change in the air, they get to me all minced up, topped and tailed, and sometimes it’s nothing but static.

Dreams

The archaeological zeal of dreams and memories which uncover the deepest graves.

You are fiction

It doesn’t make you afraid, does it, that you are fiction, that you are not really aboard the Matua sailing to England, that you exist only in someone’s mind, some poor writer who cannot do better than bring forth the conversation of musicians, poets, mice?’

Lonely

And the lonely ones – the Zoes and Tobys and Pats?

Zoe

The timbers creak, Zoe said to herself, deriving comfort from the unexpected thought that she lay in a pirate ship where the battered timbers were talking almost ceaselessly, as trees do, even when they are dismembered, mutilated, camouflaged, polished at their knotted knees or sliced in their bone-shafts, still they speak and make one aware of their silence also, their withdrawal on days of frost, and again their voice of complaint in the heat when they seek to burst from the iron hoops of the sun.

 Amy, Toby’s mother

Amy used to move back and forth from the past to the future, from the days recorded by fossils, temples, Victorian writings, to the Latter Days and Armageddon, avoiding the splash and spatter of the Present Day as if it were an inconvenient puddle in the road.

His mother who brushed past him, touching his cheek, pretending to be a respectable ghost keeping an eye on him when in reality she was an old witch preparing her brew.

Wally 

Although Wally did not pass the remainder of his exams and gave up studying to operate a milk-bar up north, Aunt Cora still referred to him as ‘My nephew Wally, a former medical student.’

South London

South London where the rivermists rise in autumn and the winkle-pickers walk bell hoop and melt and the cars on Sunday morning are polished left hand right hand.

Like Shakespeare I went to a grammar school. I didn’t stop to think deeply about why grammar schools were called grammar schools, but I did learn grammar at school. Now I learn with the help of AI that grammar schools were founded in the 16th century to teach not English but Latin, which was regarded as the fundamental “grammar” of the time and essential for academic, religious, and political education. Controversially I gave up Latin at school and switched to geography. Why, I stupidly thought, waste time learning a dead language? It’s a decision I’ve regretted. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/why-i-regret-not-learning-latin/

Although I enjoyed learning grammar and think it important, I can’t say that I lusted after it. But Dr Ferdinand Draxler MBE, FRSA, the hero of Howl, Howard Jacobson’s comic book about being a Jew in Britain today, does. He writes to his daughter, who has joined pro-Palestine marches and turned against her Jewish father:

“I lusted after the rigid systematics of grammar? Remember Ronald Ridout, whose books I taught you grammar from when other fathers were reading their children Thomas the Tank Engine? He memorably wrote ‘The study of grammar helps us to understand the contribution each word, or group of words, has to make to the total meaning we wish to convey by our sentence. If we can understand the work each word or group of words does, we shall be able to express ourselves more accurately, and this in turn will help us think more accurately …’

When I read those sentences as a boy I saw as into the heart of order. Grammar was the image of a perfect republic of language, wherein every individual word contributed, as in a dance, to the coherence and well-being of the polis. Careless expression equated to misgovernance. What I especially loved was the idea that you had to express yourself accurately before you could think accurately, and not the other way round. This described my own mental processes exactly. It was only when I put words in their correct relation to one another that I felt I was thinking at all. Grammar was creative: it was the fecund soil from which thinking grew. People who chaotically spluttered their views, looking for words in which to dress whatever it was they already thought they thought, were going the wrong way about learning to think at all.”

I hadn’t read or heard the word Ridout in more than 40 years, but when I read Jacobson’s reference I was taken back to a green hardback that I called Ridout. I’m not sure that I knew Ridout was a person. For me Ridout was simply a textbook, and I’d certainly never heard mention of Ronald.

The day after I read Jacobson’s thoughts on grammar I read in a Financial Times editorial on AI writing a quote from The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers, the great English style book: “The first requisite for any writer is to know just what meaning he wants to convey, and it is only by clothing his thoughts in words that he can think at all.”

I read The Complete Plain Words when I started as an editor at the BMJ in 1979, and I also read The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and EB White (know to all as Strunk and White) the Economist Style Book, and George Orwell’s great essay Politics and the English Language. I thought of all this reading as a duty, but it was also a pleasure. It didn’t amount to lust.

Although I never became a fanatical grammarian, I do notice the misuse of apostrophes, the confusion between infer and imply, and the gross abuse of the word literally. I certainly subscribe to the idea that to write clearly you must think clearly and that thinking and writing clearly are tied together. Like Draxler I write to know what I think. Talking allows imprecision when good writing does not.

Can I, like Draxler, see grammar as “the heart of order”? I almost can. Certainly the world is filled with bad grammar as it is with confused thinking and misinformation. Increasing amounts of that misinformation are put together using AI, and ironically AI, as the Financial Times editorial says, produces flawless grammar and spelling. Has grammar been debased by AI and flawlessness? Any illiterate hoodlum can now produce perfect grammar courtesy of AI.

Draxler, a sentimentalist and a committed Englishman, returns to Ridout when the word honeysuckle emerges in a polite row with an Arab:

“I only know that courtesy of the grammarian Ronald Ridout who found in the very word [honeysuckle] the quintessence of Englishness.

“Not twenty yards from the window runs a honeysuckle hedge, and close to the top a pair of linnets had with great cunning built their nest and hatched their little brood.”

The Arab smiled his scented smile. ‘Ronald Ridout’s books I remember from school in Damascus,’ he said. ‘If my English is passable I believe I have your Mr Ridout to thank for it.’

Draxler, the Jew and Englishman, the Arab, and me, all men of a similar age, learnt grammar from Ridout. Did good grammar hold the world together? And has AI now usurped that power as it seems likely to usurp all our powers?

In modern parlance the New Zealand writer Janet Frame might be called “neurodivergent.” Born in 1924 Frame took an overdose in her early 20s and then spent many years in and out of mental hospitals, some of which were still called “lunatic asylums” in post-war New Zealand. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electroconvulsive therapy and insulin. In 1951 her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won one of New Zealand’s most prestigious literary prizes, which caused the cancellation of her scheduled lobotomy. She was literally saved by fiction. I imagine her psychiatrists panicking and concluding “We can’t possibly perform a lobotomy on a woman who can win a major literary prize.”

To perform a lobotomy the neurosurgeon severs connections between the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the “thinking and person” part of the brain, and other parts of the brain, including those responsible for emotion. The logic was that the operation would “reset” the brain and reduce symptoms of mental disease. The Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz who proposed the operation won a Nobel Prize in 1949, not the Nobel committee’s finest hour. In retrospect, when we know more about the immense complexity of the brain, the idea that such a crude operation could help mental disorder seems almost simple-minded.

The operation was performed tens of thousands of times between the 30s and 70s, and, unsurprisingly, was more likely to be performed in women. It seems to have been used almost indiscriminately for a wide range of neurological and mental conditions, as if doctors resorted to it when “nothing else worked,” which was often because there were few effective treatments.

With such a crude operation complications were common and included bleeding into the brain, brain abscess, fits, dementia, and death. Many patients lost their personalities and ability to think, becoming inert and unresponsive. Imagine the novels and others works that would have been lost if Frame underwent the operation, and imagine what has been lost from those who did have the operation. The word “lobotomised” has entered ordinary conversation and is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “to deprive of sensitivity, intelligence, or vitality.” A British psychiatrist who followed up 300 patients concluded that the operation reduced “the complexity of psychic life”. It is, I suggest, the complexity of Frame’s psychic  life that makes her writing to strong and distinctive.

After escaping the lobotomy Frame travelled to Europe, spending most of her seven years in London, living sometimes in Clapham, where I live. She did continue to suffer from anxiety and depression and admitted herself to the Maudsley Hospital, Britain’s leading mental hospital, where the psychiatrists decided that she did not have schizophrenia. She began talking therapy, and her psychiatrist encouraged her to write.

Frame returned to New Zealand in 1963 and won multiple honours for her writing before dying of leukaemia aged 79. She is said to have been “on the list” for the Nobel Prize, and would have deserved it much more than Moniz. She does not seem to have needed further psychiatric treatment, but after her death an article in the New Zealand Medical Journal argued that she had been on the autism spectrum, something that her literary executor denied.

I started this blog intending to write a review of Frame’s magnificent novel The Edge of the Alphabet, which was published in 1962 but which I have just read. (That blog will come later.) The introduction to the novel told me about Frame escaping her lobotomy, and I had to find out more. I am medically qualified, and lobotomy shames psychiatry and all of medicine. Inevitably, I and others wonder which current medical treatments might look as mindless and cruel in years to come (if there are years to come).

As I read the wonderful, imaginative, and unique prose of Frame, I thought that somebody who thought with such richness and who also suffered various social difficulties, as Frame did, might easily fall into the clutches of concretely-minded psychiatrists and baffle them. Consider this passage from The Edge of the Alphabet:

“I must stop somewhere and begin my own life… Is it true that self-discovery ends in death? And is death the vacant lot out of town, full of rusty sharp-edged tins, motor tyres, human debris which only death volunteers to store? Or is it the oasis in the desert, with men constantly in search of it to build their homes and lives around it, that it may satisfy their hunger and thirst? Is it a pool which the years and their rotting vegetation have made stagnant but which in time can be freed to flow and irrigate our lives without the nightmare mosquito-sucking of our blood?”

Or:

“It is imperative, for our own survival, that we avoid one another, and what more successful means of avoidance are there than words? Language will keep us safe from human onslaught, will express for us our regret at being unable to supply groceries of love or peace.”

I could have taken almost any passage from the book, the whole of which is written in such teeming, exciting, and often amusing language.

Now I return to the new word “neurodivergent,” which the Cleveland Clinic defines thus:

“Neurodivergent is a nonmedical term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason. This means the person has different strengths and struggles from people whose brains develop or work more typically. While some people who are neurodivergent have medical conditions, it also happens to people where a medical condition or diagnosis hasn’t been identified.”

And later:

Neurodivergent is “a way to describe people using words other than “normal” and “abnormal.” That’s important because there’s no single definition of “normal” for how the human brain works.”

Every person and every brain is different, and thank goodness for that. Some, however, are more different than others, and Frame’s capacity to produce such sparkling and different language probably justifies the label of “neurodivergent.” I speculate—and it is pure speculation based primarily on reading one novel of hers– that if she had been born in 1994 rather than 1924 she might have avoided psychiatrists completely.

The bed, the holy bed,

Lit like an icon

Like a crucifixion.

“If you’ve never had an abortion you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Abortion

And another abortion

A smear of watercolour pink.

“You made me love you, I never wanted to.”

“Slag, slag, slag.”

The sea so blue

The video moving so fast.

“I left school at 13

Hung around bars

Had fish and chips and sex night after night

On the beach

In alleys

In the park

Sometimes in a hotel.”

“We will fight them on the beaches.”

My self-portraits are all parts

Sick parts, bloody parts

I never feel whole;

If scarlet is the colour of love

Brown is the colour of cancer.

Vibrant line drawings

That Matisse might have done if he had the guts.

Is this a joke?

Words, words, words,

And more words

I thought you were a painter.

Hazel would hate this

Good she didn’t  come

Being dead has its advantages

More perhaps than being alive.

All this sex

Sex, sex, sex

It is important

No sex, no people

But is it that important?

Answers not provided

Answers extra.

“I do like to come up and see the exhibitions.”

Where does she come up from

Weybridge, Chipping Norton, the Underworld?

Munch, the painter not the movement of the mouth, everywhere

But no syphilis, as far as we know.

So many respectable people

Mostly women

How many have had the experiences Tracey had?

Will anybody take their clothes off?

What do they feel when they look at the huge paintings

Of Tracey fucking, sleeping, masturbating?

Ecstasy

Disgust

Envy

Puzzlement?

Death and sex

The only subjects of consequence

Plenty of both.

Would you like one on your wall

Why not?

Worth coming?

Undoubtedly?

Worth coming twice?

I’ll have to think about that.

I watched myself die and come alive again. 2023

At the end of The Silences of the Hammerstein, his magnificent biography of the family of Kurt von Hammerstein, the head of the German army when Hitler came to power, the leading German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger explains in four short chapters “Why this book is not a novel.” That the book contains many posthumous conversations between Enzensberger and characters in the book tends to undermine his claim, but the book is a hybrid of history and fiction. Enzensberger may undermine his book further when he writes: “Even though this is not a novel, this work does not make scholarly claims.”

The explanation by Enzensberger of why his book is not a novel includes this powerful description of the impossibility of history from J L Motley, a 19th century American historian:

“Nothing can be more profoundly, sadly true. The annals of mankind have never been written; never can be written; nor would it be within human capacity to read them if they were written. We have a leaf or two from the great book of human fate as it flutters in the stormwinds ever sweeping the earth. We decipher as best we can with purblind eyes; but it is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which they key is lost.”

Enzensberger, who lived from 1929 to 2022 (making him an almost exact contemporary of my mother for all 92 years), thinks that view too negative, but he recognises that it is impossible to capture completely that remarkable time when Germany was taken over by a fanatic and pitched into an enormously destructive war. He could interview many who lived through those years as adults, but he sees three reasons why what he is told and reads is likely to be unreliable:

“Not only because memory deceives, because every witness remembers in his or her way and because every record is full of differing versions and contradictions.”

“There remains the doubt whether later generations have sufficient imagination to do justice to what happened many decades ago.”

“If someone has to learn in a time of dictatorship that it can be dangerous to say everything that goes through one’s head, then such a training may become second nature and it may not be easy to desist.”

The story of the Hammerstein family allows a way into the story: “Via the story of the Hammerstein family it is possible to find and describe in a small space all the essential motifs and contradictions of the German emergency: from Hitler’s bid for total power to Germany’s reeling between East and West, from the destruction of the Weimar Republic to the failure of the resistance, and from the attraction of the Communist utopia to the disappointment of the dream and the end of the cold war.”

Enzensberger adds in one of his posthumous conversations: “I am interested in your family because it says a great deal about how one could survive Hitler’s rule without capitulating to it.” Of Hammerstein’s seven children three daughters were active communists and two sons joined the July 1944 plot against Hitler, remarkably managing to survive. In  Hammerstein’s  immediate family, writes Enzensberger, “there was not a single Nazi. There are not many German families who can say that about themselves.”

Hammerstein, who was from a Prussian aristocratic family, was born  in 1878, fought in the First World War, and became head of the German army in 1930. He saw the dangers of Hitler and the Nazis as early as the 1920s and said: “If it had been up to me, I would already have fired on the Nazis in August 1932.” He repeatedly advised President Hindenburg against appointing Hitler as Chancellor and resigned his post ten months after Hitler became Chancellor. His son Franz von Hammerstein said of him after his death: “Although he never talked about it, it must have been terrible for him to stand and watch Germany being destroyed without him being able to do anything. Hardly anyone predicted developments as accurately as he did.”

As well as posthumous conversations, The Silences of Hammerstein is filled with long quotes, and here are two that give a sense of Hammerstein. The first comes from General Wilhelm Adam:

“Hammerstein was a man of great farsightedness, indeed with a gift for political prophecy. He always kept the coolest of heads and betrayed no visible passion. He never disguised the fact that he wasn’t greatly interested in military affairs. He was a pacifist and citizen of the world. In December 1939, when I moved from Berlin to Garnish, and we took leave of one another, he predicted the terrible end of the war.”

Hammerstein wrote in his diary of 6 September 1939: “The whole war can be described as a crime, which will destroy us all.”

And from the journalist Ursula von Kardoff:

“I knew hardly anyone who so overtly rejected the regime, without any caution, without any fear. Astonishing that he was never arrested. He told anyone who wanted to hear that we could never defeat Russia, and already in 1939 predicted that we would lose the war. During the service [his funeral] I couldn’t help thinking about how I experienced him at Neuhardenberg, how I sat on the shooting stand with him, held his cigar while he shot at boar—and hit them. In his simple hunting jacket, he appeared easy going and relaxed, quite without vanity. This outward bonhomie contrasted with the biting condemnations he expressed, in a slight Berlin accent, slowly, almost by the way, but with deadly accuracy. This earned him the reputation of being embittered. How easily are such adjectives bestwoed on those who see more clearly.

To me Hammerstein behaved with an almost patriarchal courtesy. Keep you head clear for important decisions,’ was the motto of this wonderfully lazy man who made no compromises.”

Hammerstein was proud of his laziness, claiming that with laziness “One has time to think. Diligence is only an intrusion.” He was the author of the idea that an army us best led by the smart but lazy.

Part of the interest in Hammerstein stems from his close connection with the Russian army before the war. Under the Treaty of Versailles the Germans could not manufacture arms or have an army of more than 100 000, and cooperating with the Russian government and army was a way round these restrictions. The cooperation was one source of Hammerstein’s recognition that the Germans could never defeat the Russians. Enzensberger points out that these Russian connections are particularly hard for modern Germans to understand: “Although it’s not long ago, no more than a couple of decades since it came to a standstill, ‘we,’ the Germans, have already almost forgotten the feeling of dizziness that the Russian seesaw caused in our heads over many generations. Strange!”

Enzensberger tells the story not only of Hammerstein but also of his wife and seven children together with a bewildering but fascinating array of characters living dangerous and complex lives. One of them was Ruth von Mayenburg, an Austrian journalist close to Hammerstein who was a communist activist who lived in Moscow for years. In a posthumous conversation Enzensberger asked her about being a communist, and she answered: “Well, my dear, have you never had anything to do with drugs? I don’t mean your cigarettes, but more refined, stronger and much more dangerous ones. Substances which you hope will give your fairly useless existence a meaning. The promise of a game with high stakes. A risky drug which goes to your head and frees you from boredom. That’s what communist was for me.” This was a time when many, including Hammerstein’s children, resorted to the strong drugs of rebellion, communism, and, I suppose, Naziism.

I read this strange book for the slightly odd reason that a friend is the great granddaughter of a brother of Hammerstein. I had no idea what the book would be like, but I loved it—perhaps partly, I must confess as somebody who prefers to read on a Kindle, because it is a physically beautiful book. The writing is direct and honest with its posthumous qualifications and its many excellent quotes, but Enzensberger repeatedly needs to explain the difficulties he is encountering in telling the story: “The silence of the Hammersteins rests on a mutual agreement which is not accessible to any outsider. There remains an unspoken remnant, which no biography can clarify. And perhaps it is this remnant that counts.” The bit, in other words, that we can’t read.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is surely one of the greatest poems in English, worth reading again, again, and again. Odd that the main character has become a dreadful bore, but maybe that’s a risk for all who have an extraordinary experience. They must tell of it again, again, and again.

In the passage below from The Edge of the Alphabet, which amuses, warms, and impresses me, Janet Frame imagines what a boat in the 1950s on its way across the Pacific from New Zealand to Panama (and later onto England) would do if it spotted the Ancient Mariner. The boat takes him onboard with an unfortunate outcome.  Frame urges you if you if you meet the Ancient Mariner on the High Seas to let him continue his journey.

“In these seas the Ancient Mariner has no hope of pursuing his voyage of doom. When he is sighted alone in his craft ‘all all alone’, the Matua steams to rescue him, he is taken aboard, put in the ship’s hospital, given a sedative. The passengers talk excitedly among themselves. ‘They say he has been without food or water for days. He keeps raving about an albatross. They say he did it for a dare – he was challenged on television; he writes for the Sunday papers. But he is so ancient – have you seen him? Have you seen his eyes and heard his delirium about snow and snakes and curses?’

The Captain radios Southampton. When the ship berths the Mariner will be taken into custody as a prohibited immigrant. He will never see the lighthouse top, the hill, the kirk, the bay ‘white with silent light’; the Hermit Good. He will appear before a Southampton Magistrate. They will deport him.

Where? May I ask all ships at sea, if you voyage into the path of the Ancient Mariner, even though he may be dying of thirst and burned black by the sun, do not take him aboard, let him reach his own private country, meet the Hermit Good, attend the Wedding Feast. Let him tell his story! Give him paper and pen and ink or a quill a goose or turkey-quill plucked from the silk house of lice, lately warm against wings and jagged by deep snow-filled winds from the North.”

I’m excited. I have a vote in the Lambeth Council elections, and my vote is going to matter. Although I’m 74, my vote usually hasn’t mattered as I’ve always lived in a safe Labour seat and in local authorities that have been Labour controlled. Lambeth has been Labour since 1971, although with a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition from 2002-2006. (My vote must have mattered in 2002, and I think that I must have voted Liberal Democrat. I certainly wouldn’t have voted Conservative.) Now PollCheck says there’s a 60% chance that the Greens will take control of Lambeth Council. It predicts as well that our ward will switch from three Labour to three Greens. What should I vote?

I’m certainly not going to vote Reform, a nasty, populist, right-wing party. Although they may do well across the country, they will not do well in this ethnically diverse borough. They are predicted to get only 7% of the vote and not win a single seat. We’ve received no leaflets from Reform. They must know it’s hopeless.

I’ve never voted Conservative and expect to die never having done so. The Conservatives have delivered material, but they have made a terrible mistake with me by “warning” that if Labour are elected our road is likely to be included in a “healthy neighbourhood” (their inverted commas). That’s exactly what I would like to happen. The Conservatives are predicted not to win a single seat.

The Liberal Democrats, a traditional centre-left party that is left of Labour and wants to rejoin the European Union, might be a natural home for me, but they are predicted to win only six seats and none in our ward. We have had nothing from them, presumably they are concentrating their campaigners on where they might win.  A vote for them would not count.

Lambeth is a straight fight between Labour and Greens, and to make my vote count I must vote for one of them.  Both have delivered several leaflets and knocked on our door. Like much of the rest of the population, I’m not impressed by the performance of the Labour government, although I recognise that they are grappling with intractable problems. They have not done well on nature and climate change, issues I think crucial. I do appreciate our MP, who sees climate change as THE issue and always answers my letters. I am likely to vote for her in a general election, but this is a local election. I should vote on local not national issues, but I don’t pay attention to local issues as I do to national and global issues. This is an admission of failure, but I’m sure that I’m not alone and that many people will be voting on national not local issues.

I don’t have any complaints about Lambeth Council, which perhaps means I should vote Labour. The leaflets tell me that they have refurbished the leisure centre, won a new post office, and created a waterplay area, which our granddaughters have used. They seem good things, and now they are promising free swimming and gym access for those under 16, neighbourhood skips, and safe street patrols. They too seem like good things.

Unfortunately Labour have sent a leaflet saying that in our ward “it’s Labour or the Tories” and that “Greens and Lib Dems can’t win here.” That’s not true, which they must know. They are counting on me to want to keep the Tories out and vote Labour, but I’m not fooled. I don’t like their dishonesty.

In contrast to Labour, the Greens don’t make specific promises about Lambeth and Clapham. They promise “decent homes for all,” and that they will “listen to residents” and “save our services.” In another leaflet they say they will “build real communities,” including “lower bills,” “unite our communities,” and “protect our parks.” They say nothing about how they will pay for what they promise, and ironically don’t mention climate change or the destruction of nature. I challenged the man who called at our door about this, and he said they needed to have policies that appealed not to wealthy people like me but to poorer people. I see that. Their leaflet also accuses Labour, with a picture of Keir Starmer, of letting rents and bills keep rising, protecting billionaires (does Lambeth have even one billionaire, I doubt it), and supporting genocide in Gaza.

The Greens are a populist party, making sweeping promises without explaining how they will be paid for and achieved, attacking “others” (admittedly billionaires not immigrants), being casual with the truth, and avoiding policies that may be unattractive. Better left than right populism (although not if it mutates into Chavez, Maduro, AMLO, lor even Stalin), but I don’t like populism.

Two things are pushing me towards the Greens: Mark Twain’s saying that “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason”; and my environmentally-concerned friends turning from Labour to the Greens.

I must decide soon—because I have a postal vote and will be away on the day of the election. I’m still swithering, but I will vote, I see it as my duty, although I recognise Rousseau’s assertion that we are free only one day every four years, the day when we vote, and the rest of the time are slaves, subject to whatever those elected impose on us.

Julian Barnes’ first novel Metroland was published in 1980, and I read it soon after it was published. I’ve read perhaps as many as ten of his other books and been particularly impressed by his writings on death and dying. My relationship with Barnes (or rather his books) has lasted more than 40 years, and now he says goodbye to me and his many other readers in what he says is his final book Departure(s).

His farewell I found the most affecting part of his readable but unsatisfactory final book. He tells me and all his other readers: “I hope you’ve enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has delighted me – indeed, I would be nothing without you.” You can, of course, be singular or plural, and I read it as singular. I have never met Barnes in person and haven’t wanted to, but I have certainly enjoyed our relationship. He will recognise that I have been far from faithful and had such a relationship with many others, men and women, dead and alive. Indeed, I hope that Barnes won’t take offence when I say that my relationship with him is not nearly as important as my relationship with many others, including, for example, Anthony Trollope and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“Let me thank you,” Barness writes, “for your sturdy presence – invisible yet lurking, like my cancer.” Does the word “sturdy” imply loyalty, hard work, or even a degree of suffering? I’m not sure, but I like the joke of comparing your readers to your cancer.

He continues: “When asked how I see our relationship, I reply that I am not a didactic writer. I do not tell you what to think or how to live. I do not write ex cathedra: novelists shouldn’t speak down to readers from an assumption of greater wisdom.” I’m grateful for that, and I like the image he now conjures of us sitting together: “Instead, I prefer an image of writer and reader on a cafe pavement in some unidentified town in some unidentified country. Warm weather and a cool drink in front of us. Side by side, we look out at the many and varied expressions of life that pass in front of us. We watch and muse. From time to time I will murmur things like: ‘What do you make of that couple – married, or having an affair?’ ‘Look at those fashion victims, so pleased at being themselves it’s almost touching.’ ‘Where’s that priest off to in such a hurry?’ ‘What does that kiss mean?’ ‘An old couple holding hands – that always gets to me.’ ‘Do you think he’s a tramp or an artist?’ ‘Is that a quarrel, or just a lovers’ playful riff – it’s a bit Chekhovian.’”

Departure(s) is unsatisfactory as it’s a succession of ramblings, albeit entertaining—on memory, aging, illness, death, and writing (Barnes’ usual themes)—disguised as a novel. The novel part, which is well done as far it goes, can’t be much more than 20% of the book, and you know the story even before you start of a couple getting back together with Barnes’ help after a 40-year interval. The story is based on a “true story” (or so we are led to believe), and Barnes swore on the Bible that he would never tell the story—but, of course, he has. He points out that both he and the women who asked him to swear were both atheists, casting doubt on the commitment of either.

One result of this broken promise is that readers inevitably wonder about Barnes’ statement that this is his last book.

Much of the book—too much, I’d say—deals with Barnes’ cancer, a blood cancer, but I was pleased to see that his terror of death and dying, great themes in his previous works, has faded as both come closer. He know what is about to happen to him:

“I am aware that shortly I shall exist as only a shelf-ful of books plus a cluster of Biographical Anecdotes. And life is not a tragedy with a happy ending, despite what religion promises; rather, it is a farce with a tragic ending, or, at best, a light comedy with a sad ending. Or, in the old formulation, it is ‘a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel’.”

Despite my dismissive comments, I’m glad that I read the book. It takes only a few hours to read, and I finished it in three days as I walked the Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury.

Quotes from Departure (s) by Julian Barnes

Writing

Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material.

Terror and anguish were kept away by writing about terror and anguish.

But I think the great novelists understand love, and most aspects of human behaviour, better than, say, psychiatrists or scientists or philosophers or priests or lonely-hearts columnists.’

I thought I was wise, just because I’d written so many books; I thought I knew what made people tick; I even thought of myself as an advice centre. But I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels, believing I could gently direct them towards the ends which I desired. I’d been confusing life with fiction.

Illness

We take illness so personally, don’t we? What else can we do, given that it’s happening to us? Yet there is also something grossly impersonal about it.

Ageing

From my partner R, who is eighteen years younger than me: ‘You’re allowed to be old, but you’re not allowed to behave like an old person.’

Death

All deaths inflict collateral damage. The dying person will soon feel nothing, while the griefstruck will be irradiated for years to come.

Rekindling old love affairs

The classic problem in such emotional revisiting, I discovered, is that the parties unconsciously reproduce the same behaviour which had led the initial relationship to founder. The manipulative continued to manipulate, and the over-possessive to over-possess, but without acknowledging it. Usually, they convince themselves that the intervening years have brought greater – or some – maturity, and assume that they will thereby avoid what had torpedoed their relationship the first time around. But the years have not brought greater maturity; worse, the couples fail to realise that they are, like doomed creatures in some ancient play, cursed to repeat their lives without recognising or understanding that they are doing so. This last sentence, I admit, is mine, rather than taken from some psychiatric journal.

Knowledge

If humankind cannot bear very much reality, I suspect it also cannot bear too much knowledge about itself. We can only live successfully – or ‘happily’ – it seems, by consciously or unconsciously limiting our knowledge and our reality. Too much of either might drive us mad.

Quotes

Our brains have far more on us than we have on them: they know all that we know, whereas we know only some of what they do.

Medicine is  ‘a compendium of successive and contradictory mistakes on the part of doctors’. Proust

No matter how you wrap memory in camphor, the moths will get in. T S Eliot

One of death’s effects is that it ‘smoothes the folds’ of the person one had known. ‘The figure contained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities.’ Henry James

‘Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither’, Shakespeare. Edgar in King Lear

I have read Kingsly Amia’s 1966 novel The Anti-Death League for three reasons, all of them poor: firstly, it was mentioned in Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin, which I’ve just read; secondly, I was intrigued by the title; and, thirdly, the book is a Penguin Modern Classic. How, I wondered, could it be a modern classic when I’d never heard of it, and what does it mean anyway to be a modern classic? “Classic” implies something special, something superior, or at least something that has great and consequential originality.

I couldn’t see that The Ant-Death League had any of those qualities. I found it an arid and unconvincing read, a great contrast to This is Happiness by Niall Williams, the novel I read before Amis’s novel. (On Goodreads, The Anti-Death League scores 3.39, a very low score, and This is Happiness 4.22, a particularly high score.) Reviewers in the 60s were baffled by the book, and one wrote: “The Anti-Death League has the materials for two good novels. The one we have is, unfortunately, incoherent.” I’m not sure why I didn’t abandon the book, but it didn’t take me long to read it.

The plot is complicated and unconvincing, and the characters flat and uninteresting; some are stereotypes—the mad psychiatrist who thinks that everybody’s mental instability results from suppressed homosexuality, a nymphomaniac, and the spy who sees spies everywhere. The novel feels almost surreal, something I’d never associated with Amis.

Several critics see the novel as being strongly against God and religion, and two long quotes on the subject were the things in the book that appealed to me the most, although I wasn’t sure whether to take them at face value. The context is a young soldier who is incapable of getting out of bed because his girlfriend is away undergoing an operation for breast cancer. First, the army chaplain tries to convince him to get up, saying:

“To believe at all deeply in the Christian God, in any sort of benevolent deity, is a disgrace to human decency and intelligence. Of course it is. We can take that as read. I was so convinced of it when I was about your age that I saw the Church as the embodiment of the most effectively vicious lie ever told. I declared a personal war on it. That was why I joined – so as to be able to work against it more destructively from within.

I used to have a lot of fun in those days with things like devising an order of service that would please God much more than merely grovelling and begging for mercy or praising him for his cruelty in the past and looking forward to seeing more of the same in the future. Selected members of the congregation getting their arms chopped off and/or their eyes put out as a warm-up. Then a canticle about his loving-kindness. Then some whips and scorpions treatment on children under sixteen, followed by a spot of disembowelling and perhaps a beheading or two at the discretion of the officiating priest, with the choir singing an anthem about the beauty of holiness. Then an address explaining about God’s will and so on. Then a few crucifixions, bringing out the real meaning of the Christian symbol.

Finally a blessing for the survivors, plus a friendly warning that it’ll probably be their turn next. I used to think it was the Aztecs who came nearest to establishing the kingdom of God on earth. What was it they were notching up, a thousand human sacrifices a week? But then the Christians arrived and soon put them down. He’s a jealous God.

But I got converted. That’s to say I realized that not wanting to see these things as they are, which most people don’t, doesn’t necessarily make them completely stupid or insensitive or not frightened of life and death. Christianity’s just the thing for people like that. A conspiracy to pretend that God moves in such a mysterious way that asking questions about it is a waste of time and everything’s all right really. I joined that conspiracy. As you know. The only awkward part is covering up one’s sex activities and so on. One can’t bring the cloth into disrepute because that would weaken the conspiracy. And then there are times like this.”

The speech does not rouse the soldier, and the chaplain is followed by an Indian, presumably a Hindu:

“Death is not your enemy. Death’s nobody’s enemy. Your enemy’s the same as everybody else’s. Your enemy is fear, plus ill feelings, bad feelings of all descriptions. Such as selfishness, and not wanting to be deprived of what comforts you, and greed, and arrogance, and above all belief in your own uniqueness and your own importance. All these bad feelings come from considering yourself first.

It’s hard to say and I don’t want to be a preacher, but if you could simply begin to love life in everything there is, then your bad feelings would start to diminish. You must make up your mind to love Catharine with all your heart, so that your heart has no room for the fear that you’ll be deprived of her. You must cast out that fear, and then you’ll have begun to cast out all fear. At the moment you’re so afraid that you’re pretending to be dead. Please stop, James, and begin to try. We must all try to become men.”

This speech doesn’t work either, but they have energy about them—perhaps they are enough to make the novel a classic

Here are the few other quotes I took from the book:

All emotional attachments are bad. Get what there is to be got out of somebody without undue effort and then pass on to the next. It’s better for everyone that way.’

I feel rather more strongly about poetry than about music. At least with music the general sense of uneasiness and misery isn’t tied down to anything. Poetry’s got messages in it. You know, about love and spring and getting into a state. It says you ought to notice things.’

 ‘I don’t see any harm in that.’

‘I do. The best way of dealing with the problem would be to send any author to prison who wrote a book that sold less than a million copies. That would put paid to most of the stuff I’m against. [Amis joking, and perhaps aiming the joke at his friend Larkin, who would appreciate it.]

‘A well-known paper on the effects observable when a subject’s fantasies seem to be confirmed by something in his experience,’ said Mann. ‘As when, let’s say, a man with a neurotic fear of being poisoned by his wife finds real arsenic in his soup.’

An impasse whereby the evidence necessary to prove a man guilty was unobtainable except by methods that were only to be used on men already proved guilty by other methods. [Shades of Catch 22]

‘I hope you do. It’s our job to be pro-death, Leonard, and don’t you forget it.’ [The army]

I’m reading The Silences of Hammerstein by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany’s leading writers. He died in 2022. I’m reading the book, which is a compelling combination of fiction and non-fiction, for the slightly odd reason that Kurt von Hammerstein, who was head of the German army when Hitler came to power, was the brother of the great grandfather of a friend of mine. Hammerstein saw Hitler for what he was, when most Germans didn’t, and resigned shortly after Hitler came to power.

The book jumps around in time, geography, and style in a way that I find attractive rather than irritating. It even includes many conversations between the author and the dead.  I find myself hungering for more and racing through the book.

Inevitably Enzensberger writes about the Weimar Republic, and he gives his conclusion in the first short sentence: “The Weimar Republic was a fiasco from the start.”

Like many people of my generation (born 1952) when I think of the Weimar Republic I think first not of hunger, gross inflation, unemployment, and the rise of the Nazis but of Cabaret and the paintings of the German Expressionists. Enzensberger is annoyed by this:

“It is puzzling that the lie about the ‘Golden Twenties’ could ever have been believed by later generations. This cannot be excused either by ignorance or by a lack of historical imagination. Instead, this fragile myth is nourished by a mixture of envy, admiration, and kitsch: by envy of vitality and admiration for the achievements of a generation of great talents, but also by cheap nostalgia. We watch the thousandth production of The Threepenny Opera, are astonished by the prices fetched by Beckman, Schwitters, and Schad in the auction rooms, are full of enthusiasm for replicas of Bauhaus furniture and revel in films like Cabaret which shows a hysterical, polymorphous perverse, ‘disreputable’ Berlin. A bit of decadence, a pinch of risk and a strong dose of avant-garde and pleasant send thrills down the spines of the inhabitants of the welfare state.”

But, as I read Enzensberger’s account of the Republic I begin to wonder if we are living in a version of the Republic. Does this not make you think of our politicians now?

“Moderate politicians were unable to keep up—they appeared colourless and helpless, and entirely lacked the capacity to mobilise the fears, the resentments, the capacity for enthusiasm and the destructive energy of the masses. And so, without exception, they underestimated Hitler, who understood how to do that better than anyone else. In the end, there was nothing the political class could do except manoeuvre between panic and paralysis.”

And this section makes me reflect that we are probably living through an “unpredicted turning point in history” and that the state of President Hindenburg is akin to that of President Trump now:

“One gets lost in an impenetrable jungle of rumours, backstairs gossip, intrigue and manoeuvring. Contradictions, versions, excuses and lies and propaganda wherever one looks. That’s perhaps true of most of the unpredicted turning points in history.

Rarely, however, is the helplessness of the political figures as evident as in this case. All of them, starting with President Hindenburg, who was no longer formulating a clear thought, appear incomprehensibly weak and out of their depth, swinging irresolutely between hysteria, illusion, and panic.”