A Bolshevik Gothic novel

The subject of the following selection is most germane to That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions, 2013 but it was from a chapter on the 1920s and I decided to eliminate the chapter from the book and instead make a stronger thematic connection by linking the October Revolution and Leninism to Stalinism and his war on the peasantry.                             

Alexandra Kollontai

One of the most outspoken in her criticism of NEP (New Economic Policy) was the prominent female Bolshevik, Alexandria Kollontai, the only woman to hold a position in the Central Committee of the Party. She was Commissar of public welfare and the director of the Party’s Women Division. In the 1920s, in both her expository articles and especially in her fiction, she attempted to demonstrate how NEP provided a climate for the moral debilitation of men and women who succumbed to its sensual pleasures. The Nepman’s great sin lay in his economic exploitation   and his accumulation of wealth at the expense of others. In her agitprop novella, Love of Worker Bees (1923, 1988), Kollontai sets up a triangle with two-dimensional characters that juxtaposes the young heroine, Vasilisa, with her lover Vladimir, an opportunistic Nepman, and his mistress, Nina, a parasitic Nepwoman.

Ian Rankin's investigation into evil

I highly recommend a YouTube video that is germane to both volumes of That Line of Darkness in which Scottish novelist, Ian Rankin, investigates evil by interviewing a number of experts, including Daniel Pick and Christopher Browning. He begins with a discussion about Robert Louis Stevenson who was a major influence on his own work and proceeds with an analysis of the ideas of Francis Galton, Cesare Lombroso and the serial killer.  He then enters into a discussion with historian, Browning, about how ordinary policemen in the 1940s had a choice about whether to participate in the mass shootings on the Eastern Front. His conclusion, which he links the individual killer with the perpetrators of mass atrocities, should not surprise anybody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RJLQVxN9E

The Armenian Tragedy

This selection that was originally written in the context of  the British press's fabrication of atrocity stories did not survive the final editing of  That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, Encompass Editions, 2012.

One of the consequences of the over-the-top “revelations” of reported atrocities in Belgian and the Western Front was the inability to absorb in Britain real horror amid the welter of false and exaggerated propaganda stories. A case in point is the officially orchestrated Turkish campaign to ethnically cleanse the Ottoman Empire of Greeks and Armenians. Humiliated by the loss of their European lands during the Balkan wars of 1912-13 and the subsequent expulsion of Muslims, the ultra-nationalistic Young Turks that acquired power after the 1908 revolution believed that only a homogeneous state of unified Muslims and Turks could stave off further disintegration. On the eve of the First World War, the Turks deported 150,000 Greeks from the coast, and another 50,000 to the interior to Anatolia in the northeast, a process that continued throughout the war an took thousands of Greek lives. The conscription of Greek men into backbreaking labour battalions, the beatings, the hunger, the expulsions and killings accompanied by the confiscation of their wealth were a harbinger that awaited the Armenians albeit on a larger scale. According to Taner Akçan, who is the first Turkish historian to designate the genocide label for the miseries inflicted on the Armenians, the success of expelling large portions of the Greek population emboldened the leadership to embark on a “comprehensive scheme of ethnic cleansing that could allow the application of massive genocidal violence.”

The Myth of Betrayal in post-war Germany

This selection could not be included in the final editing of  That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, (Encompass Editions, 2013) for reasons of space.

The stab-in-the-back myth

The tumultuous aftermath of the Great War lent support to the conspiracy theories and demagogic politics that emerged as a response to the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and of the military defeat in Germany. It reinforced the paranoia of the times and created a receptive mood for “the canonical text of the Jewish conspiracy theorists, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The joint heads of the German war effort, Paul Hindenburg and Eric Ludendorff, recognized by late September 1918 that Germany could not win the war. The German public long deceived into believing that their sacrifices would lead to German victory were enraged. To deflect anger from their failure to deliver that victory, both generals circulated the lie the Germany Army had not be militarily defeated but had been stabbed in the back by an unpatriotic public and from sabotage undertaken by Jews, socialists and Bolsheviks. 

This canard was their cowardly attempt to cover themselves for losing the gamble when they launched a massive all-out spring offensive in 1918. And they had concealed all knowledge of the war’s developments, especially bad news, not only from the German people but also from the government and the Kaiser. The lie seemed to have some plausibility since German troops were more than one hundred miles inside enemy territory and, with the exception of the Rhineland, no Allied troops were stationed on German soil and since early 1918 the public had grown increasingly restive even rebellious. But despite the circulation of the dolchstoss (dagger thrust) legend by the radical right and a future staple in the Nazi propaganda armoury, the reality was that the unrest was a product of military failure not a cause. In the wake of some of the heaviest losses since the war began, especially among the officers, 1.75 million German soldiers succumbing to the influenza epidemic and an estimated million men ducking duty, a sense of war weariness led to a collapse in morale and scattered outbreaks of rebelliousness among the military itself motivated more by self-preservation than any political ideology.  A mutiny broke out among sailors in the North Sea port city of Kiel, motivated by a desire to end the carnage, one that spread to soldiers and workers in other cities.

Psychic Vampirism in Nineteenth Century Rome

A selection that could not be included in That Line of Darkness: The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War, (Encompass Editions, 2012).

Newspaper reports from the continent rekindled interest in the alleged Jewish threat even as stories from the liberal press generated sympathy for Jewish victims. In June 1858 in the Papal city of Bologna, Vatican officials seized and transported to Rome a young Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara. There he was taken to the House of the Catechumens to be instructed as a Catholic, and subsequently embraced by Pope Pius IX as his “son.” The ostensible rationale for this cruel abduction was that a Christian girl, while working for his family, had baptized the boy when he was a sick baby believing him to be close to death. Under Church law, a baptized child must be raised a Catholic. Despite the frantic efforts of the family and the local and international Jewish community to secure his release, the boy became a devout Catholic and later a priest. For years Edgardo Mortara was completely alienated from his family because they would not convert to the true faith. Although he had a reunion with his mother twenty years after the kidnapping, he could not persuade her to convert. The supreme irony was that he lived a long life to the age of eighty-eight and died in Belgium on March 11, 1940, one month before the Nazis fanned into the country. Nazi race laws would have classified him as a Jew. This irony underscores a fundamental distinction between the treatment by the Catholic Church with respect to Mortara, as deplorable as it was, and Nazi immutable race laws; they would have killed him as a child and as an aged adult priest.

Soul Survivor: Philip Kerr’s A Man Without Breath

My piece  from  Critics at Large

Somebody has to give a damn, otherwise we are no better than the criminals themselves.
– Bernie Gunter speaking in The Pale Criminal

Scottish writer Philip Kerr’s ninth Bernie Gunther novel, A Man Without Breath (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), has all the familiar trademarks of its predecessors: impeccable research and textured detail, an ability to weave history with a mystery, and to some extent, the unabashed sass and defiance of authority by the chief protagonist, the onetime homicide detective in Weimar Berlin. In The Pale Criminal (1990), Gunter displays that barbed wit when mocking Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “That funny old book they gave free to all newlyweds? It’s the best reason to stay single I can think of.” That hard-boiled sarcasm is one of Gunter’s weapons as an anti-Nazi German who never abandoned his belief in the democratic values of the Weimar Republic. He valiantly struggled to retain some semblance of his own humanity amid the inhumanity and immortality of National Socialist Germany, the Eastern Front during the Second World War, and postwar Vienna, Argentina, Cuba and Germany.

Gunther’s idiosyncratic moral code not deter him from dispensing rough justice or complying with the orders of the powerful men in Hitler’s inner circle that he despises. In The Pale Criminal, he executes a man responsible for the deaths of several young women. In A Man Without Breath, he kills a man who threatened to expose an assassination plot against Hitler, and he feels badly about it. In 1936 Berlin, the setting of March Violets (1989), he is caught in a power struggle between two Nazi rivals, Herman Goring and Heinrich Himmler. Reinhard Heydrich, second in command under the Gestapo chief, Himmler, offers the arrested Gunther a deal. He can save his life by going undercover into the hell of Dachau to interrogate a fellow prisoner, a safe-cracker who knows the whereabouts of politically sensitive documents that could incriminate Goring. (The indescribable horror of his experience in Dachau enabled Gunther to appreciate the “true strength of the grip that National Socialism had in Germany.”) In Prague Fatale (2011) it is 1941 and Heydrich, the newly-minted Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, fears – with good reason since he is known as Hitler’s Hangman – that he could be assassinated and remembers Gunther. Despite Gunther’s Republican politics, Heydrich values his investigative skills as a detective and orders him to Prague to uncover the Czech spy within his inner circle and track down “terrorists” who are resisting Nazi domination. Gunther has no alternative but to accede to Heydrich’s commission. Yet Gunther could display a creative insubordination when negotiating the moral cesspool of the Third Reich. As an SS Lieutenant who is entrusted with presiding over a massacre of civilians, he requests a transfer to the front, is refused because of his age and time in the trenches during the Great War but is sent back home to be assigned to the War Crimes Bureau, a public relations exercise that will strike most readers as an oxymoron. 

The Ethics of Forgiveness in The Storyteller

My piece from Critics at Large

Simon Wiesenthal

In the Epilogue of That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Encompass Editions, 2013, I wrote that “not a single SS officer arrested after the war demonstrated any remorse.” I had not yet encountered a perpetrator seeking forgiveness from a victim until I read The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (1969, 1997) by the late concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. He recounts that when in the camps he was once assigned to hear the death-bed confession of a SS officer in the hope that he, a Jew, would offer the dying man absolution. Although the young man appeared to show remorse over the crimes in which he had participated in the East, he was also self-centered, as he repeatedly indicated that he was too young to die, and more offensively, he contended that Jews died quickly, whereas, he was suffering a slow death. Wiesenthal offered compassion by holding his hand and by listening, but he remained silent throughout this ordeal. He left without saying a word. That meeting unsettled him and disturbed his equilibrium when he debated with camp inmates the morality of forgiving this man. Two years later, his companions are all dead but that encounter with the SS officer continued to preoccupy him and invaded his dreams as he talked about it again. After the war, he visited the young man’s mother to hear her story about her “good son” who would never have committed the crimes that she had heard about. He decided not to compound the woman’s sufferings by disabusing her. Wiesenthal came to the conclusion that the only individuals who could offer forgiveness were those who had directly suffered from a perpetrator’s actions. He also noted that twenty five years later at the Stuttgart trials only one of the accused acknowledged his crimes and showed contrition; the rest challenged what the victims said and, according to Wiesenthal, only regretted that there were survivors to testify against them.