b i o g r a p h y & m e m o i r over leadership and ‘line’ in the Party. As Mao faded from the scene, the Gang of Four were thwarted in their attempt to succeed him. Deng recovered from a second fall from power in 1976 to manoeuvre his way to the very top in everything but name, setting China on the course of reform and opening up to the wider world.

sometimes perhaps intuits more than his sources strictly allow – and moves. You do not have to like everything that Deng did to acknowledge that he was a titan, reshaping his country’s status and destiny through the exercise of an unsentimental, steely resolve, often in the most difficult of circumstances.

Vogel is the master of this complex material. He had access to many who knew and worked with Deng, including Jiang Zemin. Deng selected him as Party leader in 1989 to succeed Zhao Ziyang, who had been sacked and disgraced because of his opposition to the use of force in Tiananmen Square. Vogel also spoke to two of Deng’s children. The documentary sources are copious and, in terms of access to material, this study is unlikely to be bettered until the Party opens its most sensitive archives – which could be a long wait.

It is hard to disagree with much of what Vogel writes and there is much to admire, particularly his judicious contextualisation of Deng’s motives – which Vogel

It was Deng who forced the Party to acknowledge that, despite thirty years of Communist rule, China was poor, backward and destined for national eclipse unless it woke up and started learning from the capitalist world. It was Deng who gave farmers the freedom to till their own land, and private businesses the right to prosper. Deng secured the return of Hong Kong and established diplomatic relations with the United States at the expense of rival Taiwan. He set the military on a path of modernisation and capacity-building that is raising eyebrows among China’s neighbours and concerns in the United States.

And it was Deng who ordered troops to open fire on unarmed protestors in

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1989, damning him in the eyes of some Chinese, and many of those who watched the horrifying scenes from Beijing on television. Vogel’s account of Tiananmen adds little to what has become a wellknown story. He does, however, confirm what is widely believed: that Deng had no regrets. ‘Deng’s family’, he writes, ‘reported that despite all the criticism he received, he never once doubted that he had made the right decision.’

Deng had one major political act still to perform: his so-called ‘southern tour’ of 1992, when he ambushed the leadership in Beijing that he had appointed after Tiananmen but now despaired of because of its timidity and reluctance to reform. Of few leaders can it be said that their most significant intervention was made when they were almost eighty-eight.

Future Chinese rulers may one day decide that Deng Xiaoping made mistakes. But even if they do, his place in the history of Chinese nationalism looks secure. To order this book for £23.95, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 49

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The Shadow of a Great Rock A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible Harold Bloom Distilling the insights acquired from his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, Harold Bloom offers readers at last the book he has been writing ‘all my long life’, a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece. £18.00

The Making of the English Gardener Plants, Books and Inspiration, 1560–1660 Margaret Willes A fascinating history of the people and publications that revolutionised Britain’s gardens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from extravagant estates to humble kitchen plots, and the links they forged with the wider world. 79 b/w + 22 colour illus. £25.00

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Literary Review | n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 1 6 b i o g r a p h y & m e m o i r dav i d c e s a r a n i

Man to Monster einrich Himmler By Peter Longerich

(Translated by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe)

(Oxford University Press 1031pp £25)

Ten years in the making, this biogra- phy of Himmler is a work of staggering scholarship. The 750 pages of text are followed by 200 pages of notes, most of which refer to original documents. Peter Longerich, a German historian, has delved into archives in several countries and read everything by or about the man who created the SS. Although there are several worthy biographies of Himmler, this is the first to incorporate material that became available after the end of the Cold War.

Access to Himmler’s appointment book, in particular, enables Longerich to chart his travels and meetings, and map them onto the development of policy or the sequence of events. Nevertheless, Himmler’s most intimate letters and diaries have long been available. They were used by Peter Padfield in his 1990 biography of Himmler. So, does Longerich get us any closer to the man himself?

He argues that a ‘comprehensive biographical approach’ is the only way to understand the evolution of the institutions shaped by Himmler, the ideas that inspired them, and their terrible impact. ‘The organisation and aims of the state protection corps were influenced by his phobias and prejudices, his fads and fancies, and his passions to an almost astonishing extent.’ To understand him better Longerich took advice from psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. On the strength of their diagnoses he asserts that in addition to a dodgy tummy that was probably psychosomatic, the ReichsführerSS also suffered from ‘an attachment disorder’. By contrast, Padfield deduced that Himmler was a classic ‘schizoid’ case. You can pick your shrink.

It is more pertinent that circumstances placed Himmler in the extraordinary position of being able to create a police apparatus and exercise power untrammelled by legal codes or moral norms. Longerich does an excellent job of explaining how he achieved this, although it is often a dull record of organisation building. Fortunately, Himmler also bequeathed us numerous writings, speeches and letters in which he set out his political vision and his ethical stance. These reveal his priggishness, intellectual myopia and lack of self-awareness. Longerich uses them cleverly, refraining from comment and allowing their author to damn himself with his own words. Himmler emerges as a practised tyrant and an unwitting buffoon.

His origins were perfectly normal. His father was a schoolteacher of modest origins who rose to tutor minor royalty and run a school. He was a strict but caring father with conventional, conservative beliefs. Young Heinrich, born in Munich in 1900, was a sickly child but worked hard at his studies and enjoyed success. His father was status conscious, as befits a parvenu, but his son was neither a misfit nor a failure. He did feel, though, that, unlike his elder brother, he missed out on the Great War. Despite a brief period as an officer cadet before the armistice he was always trying to prove himself as a soldier. He glorified the military virtues of discipline, loyalty, obedience, and ruthlessness.

As a young man Himmler experienced difficulty meeting women and ‘striking the right note’ with male friends. He rationalised his dissatisfaction by adopting a pose of celibacy and manly restraint. This was stressful, but sexual frustration and self-doubt are hardly unique. They certainly cannot explain why he drifted into right-wing politics, which was more to do with his frustration about Germany’s humiliating defeat. Between 1919 and 1922, he mixed university studies in agronomy with part-time soldiering in nationalist, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic militias.

The youthful Himmler escaped from his personal rut by dreaming of becoming a hero or a settler in some far-off land. His reading of Teutonic myths nurtured these reveries. Like Padfield, Longerich examines his neatly kept reading lists for clues about his political development. During the early 1920s Himmler read key texts on ‘racial science’, works defining and elevating the ‘Aryan race’, and anti-Semitic tracts.

Interestingly, until this point he had not displayed any antipathy towards Jews or interest in the ‘Jewish question’. He learned from books that the Jews were a race conspiring against Christians and capitalism, and then spent months chewing over the allegation until it became one of his fixed ideas. At around the same time, he abandoned Catholicism for a shifting kaleidoscope of mystical beliefs. These ideas were self-reinforcing. In the course of hammering out his Weltanschauung he came to regard Christianity, like socialism, as a pernicious Jewish invention. Both sapped the spirit and reproductive power of the Aryans, but Christianity was the true ‘destroyer of every nation’ and a greater threat to mankind than the Jews.

By 1922, Himmler was embedded within the völkisch, nationalist far-right camp in Bavaria. He first encountered Hitler through editions of his speeches, and was impressed. But Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser, the leaders of the SA,were his earliest heroes and patrons. For several years after the abortive Munich putsch he slaved away as a minor Nazi Party functionary in Bavaria. The traits of ‘pedantry and his obsessive need to exercise control, as well as his megalomania’ now appeared in full. He constantly drafted grandiose schemes that bore no relation to his or the party’s resources. However, he was never carried away by occult ideas or fads, such as the Artaman League, that came his way. Longerich shows that Himmler always had his eye on power: who held it, how to get it, and how to justify keeping or extending it. Anything that cut across these aims was jettisoned or consigned to his most private realm.

His life began to improve in 1927. He met his future wife and was appointed deputy leader of the SS, the hand-picked protection squad that Hitler was building up as a counterweight to the SA. In January 1929, Himmler assumed command of this quickly expanding praetorian guard. As it grew, he shaped it. He envisaged an n o v e m b e r 2 0 1 1 | Literary Review 7