This book from last year is already being eclipsed by new discoveries. What were blurs are becoming clear. The Doppler effect and spectral analysis allow deduction of the nature of other suns and their orbiting bodies. A planet that transits its star can be detected with patient work–like observing a gnat in front of a car’s headlight miles away.

The Galileo spacecraft returned to our vicinity on its looping way to Jupiter in 1990, and the technicians had it strain for signs of life here. Methane and oxygen react to form water and carbon dioxide, so an excess of free methane in the presence of oxygen indicates that living things are blasting it out. The large oceans reflected light to make themselves known. Chlorophyll appeared in the spectra, and radio signals were likely of artificial origin. These would be the signatures to read from other worlds.

As things progress, one day we might be looking and listening in as thousand-year-old light and signals arrive, and we can eavesdrop on the long-gone goings-on.

Radio Dish, Raisting, Bavaria

In a future 1980 or so, the former Archbishop of Lviv (Anthony Quinn) is released from the Gulag by personal order of the Premier (Laurence Olivier) and, pursuant to an agreement with the Holy See, whisked to the Vatican, where he is made a Cardinal just in time for the Pope (John Gielgud) to die. After a number of inconclusive votes, the cardinals turn to this newcomer and make him Kiril I. In order to demonstrate his seriousness in the need to relieve world poverty, he refuses to be crowned with the tiara and pledges to give away all the wealth of the Church.

It’s full of holes, but still a lot of fun. Quinn’s earnest performance makes all the improbabilities go down easy: He’s an eastern-rite bishop made Pope–it’s never been done, but there’s always a first time; he is not attended by a gaggle of aides everywhere he goes, but seems to have all those big rooms to himself; Fr. Telramond (Oskar Werner, sounding like he attended boarding school in England with William F. Buckley Jr., as a stand-in for Teilhard de Chardin) is under investigation for heresy, but is trusted with delicate diplomatic missions; and finally, the dramatic gesture at the end–we see the Pope put aside the tiara (in Fr. Neuhaus’s phrase) and hear the cries of “Viva il Papa!“, but don’t get to see how this all turns out for good. It’s interesting to speculate–how much could the Vatican raise if it really wanted to sell everything off? Would there even be a buyer for St. Peter’s, or would it have to be stripped and pieces sold individually?

You can feel the tension in the script as the story was stretched from its pre-Vatican II origin to a post-Vatican II reality. Much of the stiffness and ceremony in Vatican proceedings was already starting to melt away by the time that the film came out. Kiril, for all his freshness and lack of pretension, is careful always to use the first person plural in dealings with clergy. This shows how on one level, the story is really a conciliarist’s fantasy–a Pope with all the strength of Pius XII, if not Gregory XVI, with the willingness to use it to cram through the much-needed change.  Of course, if Kiril governed as humbly as he spoke, he would be run over by those unwilling to join him–another St. Celestine V.

The last papal coronation was of Paul VI in 1963. He later sold his tiara to raise funds for the poor. The tiara lives only in the papal coat of arms (when not eclipsed by the miter), but the poor are still with us.

This 129-page book is the effort of a German scholar and is surprisingly readable. With generous illustrations, Simek shows that a spherical Earth was no scandal to the medievals and in fact was accepted opinion. The myth of a flat Earth was largely a construct of the Enlightenment, concocted to show the superiority of Rationalism over the Age of Religion. The myth may have arisen from misunderstanding of mapmaking convention, in which the three known continents–Asia, Europe, and Africa–were shown gathered into a disc form and surrounded by ocean on a square page. Still, everyone understood that the world was not actually a disc and that the maps only used a convention to show a spherical Earth in two dimensions. Schematically, the landmasses formed a “T,” with the largest, Asia, taking up the top semicircle, Europe in the bottom left quarter, and Asia in the bottom right quarter. East was at the top, and Jerusalem was the center of the Earth.

Travelers noticed the change of position of the Sun and stars as they journeyed south, and how new constellations came into view. It was known as well from observing the eclipse of the Moon that the Earth was round. A time-elapse photo from a recent lunar eclipse shows this phenomenon:

Earth was considered the center of the universe, but not the most important part of it. Rather, the Earth was the lowest point of a vast cosmos–the real center, in fact, was Hell.

There was some controversy about the existence of the Antipodes–land on the other side of the Earth from Europe. Legends circulated of such a place, populated by fabulous half-monstrous creatures. The controversy arose from a combination of science and theology. It was believed that the Antipodes was unreachable, and that all men were descended from Adam and Eve. Therefore, there could be no human beings in the Antipodes, because they would have to have another origin. Following opinion received from Ptolemy, medievals considered the Equator impassable–a torrid zone, if not a wall of fire, that no one could cross. It was only crossed in 1473, by the Portuguese.

Other stories were told of strange races on the edges of the known world (such as still told by Othello in the quotation above, 100 years after Columbus). St. Augustine taught in the City of God that such monstrous races were entirely possible as the punishment for original sin. St. Isidore of Seville took this up in the seventh century, and it became common medieval opinion. Later, Aristotle’s influence blamed exotic climates for these odd appearances.

Columbus believed that there were only some 130 degrees of longitude on the westward route to Asia, rather than the 230 degrees that we know now. This actually was known at the time, but Columbus chose to follow a minority opinion. This was the dispute over his voyage–not whether he would fall off the edge of a flat Earth, but whether it was really possible to sail over what was assumed to be open ocean for such a distance.

Returning to this large novel after twenty-five years, in the 1996 translation by John E. Woods, one notices the following:

1. The central figure, Hans Castorp, is not attractive–things happen to him, largely. This fits with the general theme of passivity in the novel, most of whose characters are taking the Alpine cure for their TB at a sanatorium above Davos. The first 200 pages or so establish the lay of the land, so to speak, as Hans Castorp discovers what life is all about “up there”; then, the action is largely made up of his efforts to sort out how to live while avoiding a return to the “flatlands.” (He comes from Hamburg, a stand-in for Mann’s own Lübeck, both flat areas indeed, where, appropriately, Plattdeutsch is spoken.)

2. Hans Castorp’s mentor, the cheerful humanist Settembrini, moves to the valley halfway through the novel. Whether this has any symbolic or other meaningful significance is hard to see, but for plot mechanics, it opens things up a bit and forces the action out of the sanatorium itself. Such simple considerations matter even in the most ambitious of works.

3. The Magic Mountain is not modernist in the tradition of English-language novels–James, Conrad, Joyce–there is an apparently omniscient narrator, with gravitational attraction to Hans Castorp–no events are narrated that don’t involve him or give us his thoughts, rather than someone else’s (one exception–his friend Joachim sees him enter the psychoanalysis clinic). There are some apparent slips in later chapters where the narrator acts as though the “we” is identified with those up on the Mountain, perhaps the director, Dr. Behrens himself. There is even a slip of an “I.”

4. One of the last chapters, “Fullness of Harmony,” describes Hans Castorp’s discovery of the gramophone and his love of certain specific works. Wagner is not mentioned, but the novel’s climax is distinctly Wagnerian–after so much raffiniert talking, differences are settled suddenly, with a gunshot. Listen to Act II of Tristan.

Early stethoscopes

The Israeli memorial Yad Vashem keeps a meticulous record of the “Righteous Gentiles,” those who made some effort to save Jews from the Holocaust. This book by British historian Martin Gilbert describes hundreds of these little acts of kindness in chapters arranged by geography. The detail is overwhelming in an odd inverse of other Holocaust histories. Rather than event after event of brutality, charitable actions of one kind and other tumble on in no apparent order, except for the organization by country that the chapters follow.

Some people saved their neighbors, others people whom they didn’t know at all. Some acted out of Christian imperative, or Communist doctrine, or a desire to give the conquering Germans a black eye. The motivation of some will never be known, because they were denounced and sent to the camps themselves, or shot in their own villages, or killed after the war was over by their neighbors who resented their assistance to the Jews. Without comment, Gilbert notes that many acted out of Christian duty while their coreligionists thought it equally their duty to aid the Germans in the roundups. Some even who had been vocally anti-Jewish before the war and agreed that the Jews were enemies of Christian civilization saved Jews, perhaps the first ones, whom they encountered as real people.

Mrs. Klima, in  Warsaw, took in a Jewish couple whom she didn’t know, out of a “sacred duty to shelter anyone in need.” When it was time to make her Easter duty, she didn’t see how she could avoid having to confess breaking the law by keeping the Jewish couple in her house. The Jewish couple moved out temporarily, in the thought that Mrs. Klima would thereby be spared having to confess what she had done. She went ahead and confessed anyway, but the priest was sympathetic and “assured her that she was performing a noble service in helping those in danger.”

Oskar Schindler gets attention here, as does Fr. Bruno of Belgium, who established a network to save over 320 Jewish children. Bishops, priests, and Protestant ministers are among the Righteous. Gilbert does not attempt to show who did enough, or the most, or whether the efforts of a particular Christian community were adequate under the circumstances. The focus is on the efforts actually made and the charity given. The book is generously illustrated with photos of those sheltered and their protectors. There are several pictures of young Jewish girls in their First Communion dresses as they hid out under assumed names.

Six Jewish girls hidden at convent of Lubbeek in Belgium (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

The author examines ten “fateful choices” that determined the course of the Second World War:

1. London, Spring 1940: Great Britain Decides to Fight On

2. Berlin, Summer and Autumn 1940: Hitler Decides to Attack the Soviet Union

3. Tokyo, Summer and Autumn 1940: Japan Decides to Seize the “Golden Opportunity”

4. Rome, Summer and Autumn 1940: Mussolini Decides to Grab His Share

5. Washington, DC, Summer 1940–Spring 1941: Roosevelt Decides to Lend a Hand

6. Moscow, Spring-Summer 1941: Stalin Decides He Knows Best

7. Washington, DC, Summer-Autumn 1941: Roosevelt Decides to Wage Undeclared War

8. Tokyo, Autumn 1941: Japan Decides to Go to War

9. Berlin, Autumn 1941: Hitler Decides to Declare War on the United States

10. Berlin/East Prussia, Summer-Autumn 1941: Hitler Decides to Kill the Jews

Through these more or less chronological decisions, though there is a great deal of overlap, the author explores how things happened to unfold and how they might have gone otherwise. There is a great amount of detail in the book, and probably too much for all but the most dedicated history buff–who met with whom when, what was said and written, movements in one direction stayed, reversed, moved to a new course, and sometimes back to the original plan.

FDR’s determination to get the US into the war in Europe to help Great Britain is examined closely. He knew his political limits and was careful not to go further than Congress would let him at any particular time, but always looking for the event that would justify a declaration of war against Germany. Hitler tried to hold off war with the US until he could achieve victory in the east, instructing the U-boats not to fire on American ships in the Atlantic. As it turned out, Japan struck first, and Germany declared war on the US under the Tripartite Pact, relieving FDR of having to justify getting into the war. As a matter of pride, Hitler wanted to beat the US to the punch and declare war first.

Stalin’s belief that he knew more than anyone around him made Barbarossa a surprise. It wasn’t that Stalin believed that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 would prevent an attack by Germany–Stalin expected an attack, but not until 1942 and was furiously working to rebuild the Soviet Union’s armed forces, whose officer corps he had largely destroyed in the purges. When the news came on June 22, 1941, he was flatfooted. Kershaw considers the interesting prospect of what might have happened if the Soviet Union had taken the initiative and attacked the Germans in Poland. In the end, though making for fun speculation, this is unknowable.

This third and final volume covers the more familiar events of the war itself, as well as experience for civilians at homefront. As a successor and rival to Shirer’s well-known (and still selling) Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the three-volume set, at least half-again as long as the earlier work, makes liberal use of diaries of ordinary citizens, as well as major figures (such as Goebbels) to tell the story. It is not the book for those interested in a history of the Second World War; the focus is Germany, so politics in Britain, France, Italy, etc. get only brief treatment. Military actions are not subject to equal coverage–there is great detail on the invasion of France, Operation Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Kursk, etc., but little on operations in Africa and Italy.

The dedication of civilians to the regime suffered strain through the repeated Allied bombings and terrific casualties in the East. The bombing of Hamburg on July 27 and 28, 1943, killed 40,000 in the firestorm. There was little recorded desire for vengeance among the survivors–they said that the Allies were just doing their duty. Later, the survivors of air raids began to see them as retribution for their treatment of the Jews. Jokes that couldn’t have been told without risk of internment began to circulate openly:

“A man from Berlin and a man from Essen are discussing the extent of the bomb damage in their respective cities. The man from Berlin explains that the bombardment of Berlin was so terrible that window-panes were still falling out of the houses five hours after the attack. The man from Essen answers, that’s nothing, in Essen, even a fortnight after the attack, portraits of the Leader were flying out of the windows.”

This last illustrates one small fault of the book–Evans has decided to translate into English nearly all German terms, even those that are familiar to English speakers, such as Führer. A more serious fault is that the charts sprinkled throughout the book need to be in color; this reader could not distinguish among three or four shades of gray used to denote differences in population, troop strengths, etc.

Evans doesn’t spend much time on assigning blame, and generally leaves that for the reader. His earlier volumes described German Catholics as more resistant to the Nazis’ appeal during the rise to power, but there are few points of light during the war years. Bishop von Galen of Münster successfully protested against the T-4 operation, which involved the gassing of mentally and physically disabled German citizens. Pius XII comes in for some measured disapproval for failing to act to prevent the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz. At nearly the same, time, however, Evans notes (though without connecting it to the roundup of the Italian Jews), “an open condemnation of the killing of ‘the innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped and mentally ill, the incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent’” by the Catholic bishops of Germany, following the publication of the encyclical Mystici Corporis, was read out from the pulpits in Germany. “The breadth of the terms in which it was couched was remarkable. Its overall effects were minimal.” The “Nazi bishop,” Alois Hudal, and a Croatian priest who blessed the execution squads also are mentioned. Evans quotes from the letters of Wehrmacht Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who helped the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman to survive in the ruins of Warsaw and died in a Soviet POW camp.

Evans includes the propaganda broadcasts of “Lord Haw Haw,” but not P.G. Wodehouse.

The V-1 and V-2 programs were intended to use the best technology to deliver destruction to the British. The earlier purge of Jewish scientists took its toll here. Just as important, the lack of access to raw materials otherwise needed for more conventional weapons doomed the program to little more than a sideshow. The two wonder weapons killed 9,000 people, but even more died as slaves in the factories producing them.

The diarist Victor Klemperer, who serves as the book’s chorus of a lost, liberal Germany, survived the bombing of Dresden:

“Above us, building after building was a burnt-out ruin. Down here by the river, where many people were moving along or resting on the ground, masses of the empty, rectangular cases of the stick incendiary bombs stuck out of the churned-up earth. Fires were still burning in many of the buildings on the road above. At times, small and no more than a bundle of clothes, the dead were scattered across our path. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax such as one sees in barber’s shop windows. Metal frames of destroyed vehicles, burnt-out sheds. Further from the centre some people had been able to save a few things, they pushed handcarts with bedding and the like or sat on boxes and bundles. Crowds streamed unceasingly between these islands, past the corpses and smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.”

He was able to regain a university position and publish works of criticism in the GDR.

Victor Klemperer

This continues a three-part history of the Third Reich–from 1933 to 1939–from the seizure of power to the beginning of WWII.

This volume borders on an encyclopedic approach. The author covers themes in each chapter, while trying to be chronological as well. This results in some overlap; or in other cases, leaving some important issues unaddressed or unexplained until later. The approach is not always successful.

Teachers were indoctrinated and expected to indoctrinate their pupils, who would inform on them if they did not. If parents expressed disagreement with Nazi policy, children were expected to inform on them. Employees denounced their employers. Neighbors, who held grudges for other reasons, informed on their neighbors.

Evans describes the Nazi touring exhibition of “Entartete Kunst”–“degenerate art.” Viewers were expected to tsk, tsk, but many sought out the exhibition because they couldn’t otherwise see the works. Goebbels, it turns out, was a fan of modern art, despite Nazi policy, and might have encouraged a broader view, if he could have had his way.

The Nazis tried desperately to get the economy out of the dumps while at the same time expelling some of the most productive citizens, in conformance to racial policy. The autobahns are a famous building project, though car ownership was never great (even the KdF-Wagen–Strength-Through-Joy-Car; the future VW–never went into mass production).

In order to raise the birthrate, couples were given interest-free loans upon their marriage, with fairly generous repayment terms. Other benefits came with each new child born. Still, the birthrate never took off.

The concentration camps were founded at the beginning of Nazi power and housed all sorts of dissidents and undesirables. Dachau, outside of Munich, was one of the first. With the takeover of the courts and abandonment of any more than a pretense of justice, often a convict was released at the end of a prison term to be met at the gates and taken straight to a concentration camp.

Many Jews emigrated in the first years of the Third Reich and were encouraged to do so. Others stuck it out and saw their civil rights restricted more and more. By 1936, some began to return, in a belief that the worst excesses of the SA were over. Kristallnacht in November 1938 began a new phase in Nazi policy.

The last chapters of the book describe the road to war and Hitler’s successes in the Saar, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. These gave him a sense of destiny, that Providence was guiding and protecting him. The string of diplomatic victories does appear fated. This is so even though Joachim von Ribbentrop was originally posted to Great Britain in 1935, where he earned the nickname “Ribbensnob” and, for such blunders as giving King George VI clicked heels and a Nazi salute, “Von Brickendrop.”

The cover of the book, uncredited, shows a group of preteen girls giddily welcoming–whom? Hitler? Parading soldiers? — while they gaily wave swastika pennants. I would love to know if anyone tracked them down after the war, if they survived it. Did they change their minds? Did they even have an opinion at the time that the photo was taken, or just do what their parents and teachers told them to do?

In the Preface, Evans states his objective to write a narrative history of the Nazi period using the latest scholarship. This book, published in 2003, is the first of three volumes. The second volume covers the pre-war Nazification of Germany, and the third the war itself.

Starting with Bismarck and his Kulturkampf, the story moves briskly into Weimar, the real heart of the book. (World War I passes by in about four pages.) It is clear that Germany didn’t have a tradition of democracy and that almost no one accepted the Weimar constitution. Rival parties fought for control–Social Democrats, Communists, Nationalists, each with its own uniformed paramilitary. The German army was limited by Versailles, but as though by hydrostatic pressure, paramilitary groups grew. Each party had its band that marched and intimidated others. The SA (Brownshirts) were the most powerful of these.

The dream of a “Third Reich” was current before the Nazis–after the fall of the Kaiser, a new Germany needed to be found. There was no agreement on what its form would be, except not Weimar.

The Nazis’ share of the vote grew in successive elections, but never over 50 percent until after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in a move that the other parties thought would keep him under their control.

The book probably spends too much time on the details of the repeated Weimar elections. As a result, many of the cultural aspects of the history get abbreviated treatment, leading to distortions and false impressions. The author does not dwell long on Hitler’s own motivations. He stresses that Hitler loved Wagner’s operas and attended “hundreds” of performances in Linz and Vienna. Did he listen to Mozart as well, or Beethoven?

The  desperation of the Great Depression and the appointment of Goering as Justice Minister for Prussia gave the Nazis what they needed to consolidate power. By 1934, opposition parties were outlawed; intellectuals were banished, cowed, or co-opted; and you couldn’t have an afternoon Kaffeeklatsch without the local Gauleiter’s approval.

A short book on the mission to capture the bureaucrat at the top of the Nazi killing operations.

Eichmann was organized. He took on the collection and transfer of Eastern Europe’s Jewish populations as a task to be managed. He set quotas and met his numbers.

When the war ended, he was able to slip away into the countryside under an assumed identity. He worked as a lumberjack in northern Germany for over a year and might never have been detected there, but boredom set in and he was able to get to Italy and from there to Argentina. A network of Germans there looked out for their own and found him work. By 1960, he had his wife and sons with him in a small brick block of a house that he built himself in the empty exurb of San Fernando. They called him “Uncle Ricardo,” and he used an alias; but his sons still went by “Eichmann,” which shone a beacon into the sky for those who could see.

He avoided Nuremberg, where his name came up again and again–his was the empty chair. The Allies lost interest in trying to find him; only the Israelis and other Jews kept up the pursuit. A lucky break from the dedicated attorney general of Hesse put them on his trail. Once he was found, the plan to get him to Israel went forward. A special El Al flight had to be scheduled (there was not yet regular service between the two countries), and the crew didn’t know who their passenger was until the plane was in the air.

The very public trial made the Holocaust an historical concept. He was hanged, his body burned, and his ashes dumped five miles out into the Mediterranean in the middle of the night. His sons flew back to Germany and never disavowed his actions.