HISTORY

in the last weeks of war to be reminded that violence to Germans did not happen in a vacuum. Hatred was intoxicating for both sides. It was also spasmodic and arbitrary. As the war drew to a close some of the German security forces gave up, while others engaged in a final orgy of mindless savagery. By the same token the violence of the Czechs or Poles in 1945 came in waves, but began to ebb away once the first major spasm was past, to be revived here and there when opportunity presented itself. Stafford’s account follows a number of individuals from different backgrounds – soldiers, reporters, aid workers, and so on – through the weeks of defeat and liberation. The device works reasonably well in evoking the grimy milieu of war’s end, and there are nice vignettes to remind readers that amidst the grimmest of moral landscapes small pockets of humanity poked through. But most of the stories are remorselessly unpleasant. In Buchenwald the reporter Robert Reid finds a few SOE men still alive, but discovers that the rest were hanged on meathooks jabbed under their chins, for easy disposal to the nearby crematorium. In the Netherlands the Canadian army, obeying orders, handed over former German deserters to the German commanders, who then ordered them shot until the disgust of local Canadian officers brought the grotesque charade to a halt. Allied troops everywhere found that sex could be bought for a few cigarettes, and seem to have had few moral qualms about such uneven trade. Neither of these books tries to explain the horrors, which speak for themselves. MacDonogh goes into the macabre detail of rape, torture and brutality to an extent that most readers will find repellent. No one would expect a historian to tiptoe around the truth, but there are limits to what needs to be told. Otherwise the response will be to tar all the Czechs and Poles and Russians who perpetrated these barbarisms with the same brush applied to their former German persecutors. These things certainly happened, but the people who committed them would never have done so in circumstances where national sovereignty and the rule of law had not been torn up by German expansion. What was so hideous about this war was the way it reduced so many to a moral primitivism, turning ordinary people into criminals on both sides. The message would be uniformly bleak were it not for the knowledge that Central and Eastern Europe stabilised by the 1950s and a new Germany emerged from the devastation, leaving thousands of survivors with bitter recollections that no one wanted to hear. These two books will force anyone bold enough to read them to recognise just what modern war does to people. It is impossible not to think of Iraq. But will British historians in sixty years’ time be writing of the Endgame in Baghdad? To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

“Brooks treats his subject with much subtlety, solid scholarship, and flexibility of mind.”

—Victor Brombert, author of Trains of Thought

Henry James Goes to Paris PETER BROOKS

“Under the guise of simply ‘telling a story’ about the young Henry James’s stay in Paris in 1875–76, Peter Brooks describes the progressive emergence of the whole of novelistic modernity during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. You have to be, like Brooks, both historian and theorist, a scholar both of things French and American, to so masterfully carry out this project.”

—Philippe Hamon, Professor Emeritus, La Sorbonne Nouvelle

Cloth $24.95 £15.95 978-0-691-12954-9 Due April

“Lee’s immensely enjoyable study . . . should become essential reading for aficionados of literary biography.” —Publishers Weekly

New in paperback Virginia Woolf’s Nose Essays on Biography HERMIONE LEE

“Lee’s tales of the battles of the biographers are gripping and vivid. . . . The nose is a funny thing anyway; stick it on to ‘Virginia Woolf’ or any other of the illustrious names Lee discusses, and you are bound to bring them down a peg. All part of the biographer’s power to make or unmake, sniff out or sniff at, which Lee so engagingly shows us.” —Rachel Bowlby, Financial Times

Paper $12.95 £8.50 978-0-691-13044-6 Due April

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007