Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  ‘Surrealism is the “invisible ray” which will one day enable us to win over our enemies’, he writes: ‘This summer the roses are blue; the wood is made of glass. The earth, draped in green, makes no more impression on me than a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.’

  Einstein is unsure. Should he break it off with Betty, or should he embrace the gift he has been given? Two voices compete inside him. He puts them both down in a letter to Betty. ‘First voice: You are a degenerate chap for allowing yourself to play with a young creature’s future for your own pleasure’, he writes. Then: ‘It’s deplorable if you abandon her against her will for the sake of an uncertain fate.’ In mathematics, and in physics, there are answers. Why is it that in love there are only probabilities and uncertainties? Einstein continues working on his unified field theory. It never comes off.

  The boom is on. Soviet industrial production is growing faster than anyone expected (in a few years it might even pass the level Tsarist Russia reached before the war). On Wall Street, stock prices are double what they were in 1921, when Henry Ford was blaming Jewish financiers for all the world’s ills. Millions of dollars in debt repayments, the financial sting in the tail of the Great War alliance, flow across the Atlantic from London and Paris to the money men of New York. Millions flow back as American loans and investment abroad. A loan of eight hundred million goldmarks to Germany is over-subscribed in fifteen minutes.

  America’s corporations are in expansive mood, buying up the world’s oil and rubber, taking control of Spain’s telephone and telegraphs, setting up new automobile factories in Copenhagen, Antwerp and London. There is no escaping it, Europe is fast becoming a wholly owned subsidiary. The Continent is flooded with American movies. American culture is surging across the world. In October, the New York Age reports negotiations for The Chocolate Dandies to go abroad. Above the article, the newspaper runs a picture of Josephine Baker, the star of the show. The twenties have finally begun to roar.

  A few days before the third election in a year, a letter purporting to come from the Comintern surfaces in London suggesting that Moscow is trying to influence British politics, and that Labour is aware of it. The scandal causes a swing to the right. Winston is elected with Conservative support and given a plum job in the new government. Political resurrection has come early.

  In October, France accords diplomatic recognition to the USSR (now only the United States does not). In Bizerte, Tunisia, the consequences are immediate. White Russian sailors are ordered off the ships they arrived on from Crimea in Wrangel’s retreat. The naval school becomes an orphanage. A Soviet delegation is invited to decide what to do with the sad remainder of the imperial fleet. Wrangel calls it a betrayal, ‘an insult to Russian national honour’. The ships are ultimately scrapped.

  ‘It is the duty of the Party to bury Trotskyism as an ideological trend’, Stalin announces. His enemy is made into an -ism, an impersonal tendency which can be censored and removed. ‘We did not want and did not strive for this literary discussion’, Stalin says. ‘Trotskyism is forcing it upon us by its anti-Leninist pronouncements: well, we are ready, comrades.’

  In Pravda the Georgian reverses the praise he once gave Leon for his contribution to the revolution of 1917. Now, he says the opposite. ‘Comrade Trotsky played no particular role in the party or the October insurrection and could not do so, being a man comparatively new to our party in the October period.’

  Within a couple of months, Trotsky’s long retreat to Mexico has begun, and Stalin’s rise has become inexorable.

  On the cover of Time magazine, a pencil sketch, taken from a photograph, shows a man in late middle age, wearing a Western-style bow tie. The high forehead and kindly demeanour suggest perhaps an inventor or a professor of engineering. The viewer’s eyes linger for a while on this face, not exactly good-looking, but nonetheless a picture of confident, masculine bourgeois respectability. Then they see a name they recognise: Sigmund Freud.

  The new world takes to Sigmund more than the old world ever did. America is infatuated. The country is abuzz with his theories. To ‘be psyched’ enters common parlance. Freud’s open coldness towards America seems to have produced the opposite effect to that one might expect. Perhaps America wants to be dominated after all.

  Investigations into the murder of Italy’s Socialist leader point towards orders from on high. Mussolini’s tyrannical impulses provoke acts of rebellion. In La Scala, Toscanini refuses to play the Fascist anthem, declaring the opera house is ‘not a beer garden’. But Benito plays his cards slowly and deliberately. By the New Year, his rivals have to acknowledge that they cannot remove him. He now assumes the role of dictator.

  Mayakovsky starts reciting a poem he has written–his longest yet–praising the dictator who never liked his work, and warning against his deification while contributing to it at the same time.

  I am worried that

  processions

  and mausoleums,

  celebratory statues

  set in stone,

  will drench

  Leninist simplicity

  in syrup smooth balsam–

  It is far too late for that. By the end of 1924, the Lenin Institute has already become so full of papers and books that a new building is planned for it to move into, with a large new library. The wooden mausoleum on Red Square is already six months old and new editions of Lenin’s works are being prepared in haste. The Soviet system is hardening like Lenin’s arteries before his death. The lifeblood of revolution is slowing.

  In December, the Hollywood film producer Samuel Goldwyn departs on a business trip to Europe. He tells reporters that there is one man he is particularly keen to meet, ‘the greatest love specialist in the world’: the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. With Freud as a collaborating screenwriter, the producer explains, films can be made which have ‘audience appeal far greater than any productions made today’. He is perfectly serious.

  A few days before Christmas, the Bavarian Supreme Court decides Adolf Hitler should be released from prison after all. The man can be no harm. Germany is stabilising. The Nazis did not do well in recent elections.

  Adolf is picked up at the fortress gates. He rejects the notion of going to see Ludendorff. No time for old generals now. Instead, he visits his only friends. He asks Putzi to play some Wagner on the piano. He talks about the war. And then he talks about the putsch last year. ‘It’s all been a terrible disappointment, dear Frau Hanfstaengl’, he tells Helene. ‘The next time I promise you I will not fall off the tight-rope.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book took far longer to write than I ever imagined, with the consequence that my debts to my publishers, to my friends and to those I love most of all are far greater than I ever intended or would have ever wanted them to be.

  The patience of Stuart Williams at the Bodley Head and Clive Priddle at Public Affairs commends them as candidates for the high priesthood of a new Zen-inspired sect of publishers, omming through the ether to their frantic writers. My agents Karolina Sutton and Jennifer Joel have been there when I needed them most, which was more than I should have. I could not have asked for a better editor than Jörg Hensgen at the Bodley Head, whose historical expertise, sense of narrative and unstinting humanity have made the process of getting the book into its current shape as much of a pleasure as any difficult process can be. Mary Chamberlain’s eye has improved the faults of my writing while being generously indulgent of my stylistic oddities. Alison Rae has lasered textual errors out of existence. I take all responsibility for those that remain.

  Through the writing process, I have had the good fortune to have been able to work with several researchers and translators: Sofia Gurevich and Inga Meladze (on Russian language documents), Dr Tomasz Gromelski (on Polish sources) and Zehra Haliloğlu (particularly on Mustafa Kemal’s trip to Karlsbad). Eleanor Watson’s voice and humour and intelligence and inspiration run through every page
of this book from beginning to end, between and under and behind all the words that I have written. Without her, everything would be less good, less bright and less funny. In fact, I am not sure there would be anything to publish at all.

  In turning the manuscript into what you are holding in your hands I am indebted to the whole team at the Bodley Head in the UK and Public Affairs in the US. We got there in the end. In London, my thanks are due to Lauren Howard and Eoin Dunne. The cover of the book was designed by Sophie Harris. Lucie Cuthbertson Twiggs has helped get the book to the market which it deserves (and hopefully much more than it deserves). In New York, my thanks go to Jaime Leifer, Jocelyn Pedro, Melissa Raymond, Olivia Loperfido and Pete Garceau, the very patient jacket designer and art director.

  I have not been much separated from my laptop since I started writing this book. I have lugged it from archive to archive and library to library, and other places when I really should have left it at home. It is true that some of this book was written by a pool in the south of France, some of it on a Greek island and some of it in a barn in Wales, but the vast bulk of it was written in the Humanities 2 Reading Room of the British Library. I thank the staff of the BL (and its baristas) who probably thought I somehow lived there, under a desk, surviving on energy bars. Some of the best moments of the past three years have been those shared fleetingly over a coffee in the BL stone circle, talking about something just learned, or laughing about one of the many foibles of the all-too-human characters who inhabit this book. Those moments gave joy and impetus to the rest of the work.

  Friends old and new have provided me with comradeship, inspiration and home cooking during the writing of this book. We have swum, feasted and laughed together. And that has made everything else all right. Thank you, Hugo, Lottie, Catherine B., Alex McB., Eugenio, Erin, Ginny, Nick, Alissa, Dario, Danae, Teresa, Ron, Mara, George, Camilla P., Valeria C.K., Ali, Hema, Robin, Gina, Soraya, Vali, Amrita, Vivek, Yolanda, Dagna, Alex B., James, Leo, Sarah, Ingrida, Ben, Tobie, Michael, Matt, Andrew, Stian, Nick, Alex v. T., Rajesh, Svenja, Henry, Layli, Lilly, Cic and Ed, Daphna, Danny, Georgie and Hans (and of course my Nina, Billie and Hubert). My family has been wonderful throughout: my father David, who has pointed out the odd slip-up on ancient history and been kind enough to assume it was a typo; my sister Chloe; Robert and Pirjo; JB, Theo and Genevieve. Troilus and Cressida have been particularly unstinting in their moral support, as well as their demands for food and affection, which no human being of feeling could deny them, and certainly not me.

  To those I love most, I wish with all my heart that ‘the book’ had not made me, at times, the unbearable, single-minded, difficult person that I know it did, and distanced me from you. All these words on a page are so unimportant to me compared with your wonderful and joyous reality in front of my eyes. Forgive me.

  Charles Emmerson

  Easter 2019

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  Photo credit: James Hill

  Charles Emmerson is a senior research fellow at Chatham House working on resource security, foreign policy, and global geopolitics. He is the author of The Future History of the Arctic and 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. He was formerly a writer for the Financial Times and continues to publish regularly on international affairs. He lives in London, England.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  Crucible has been swirling around in my mind as an idea for a book for several years, as a way of telling a story about the momentous period at the end of the Great War which goes beyond the memorialisation of the years 1914–1918 and gets into the disorder and the dynamism of the years which followed.

  In 1917, with revolution in Russia and the entry of America into the war, Europe passed a point of no return. Things would never go back to how they were before; the social and political order of the Continent was no longer tenable. In 1924, long after the Great War itself had formally ended, a superficial sense of orderliness returned, with peace across the Continent and economic recovery across the world. But in between, everything seemed up for grabs. These were years of extraordinary violence, marked by revolutions, civil wars, lynch mobs, putsches and famines. From that violence, from the ruins of the old world, new ideologies emerged: fascism, communism and a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But these were also the years of Dadaism and surrealism, when relativity was accepted and the psychoanalytical account of the human mind flourished, the years which re-energised the civil rights movement in the United States and produced the first nationwide successes of the suffragette movement in Europe and America. The tragic and the heroic, the absurd and the comical, the good and the evil: all life is here.

  My intention with this book has been to trace trajectories, rather than portray static sets of ideas or completed historical processes. Crucible is about movement: rises and falls, arrivals and departures. Hopefully the use of the present tense conveys a sense of immediacy, as if the moments described in the book are like scenes in a moving picture which we have not yet seen to the end. Crucible is also about how those trajectories intersected. It is perhaps these intersections which give the true, unsettling and eclectic flavour of the times, one of those rare and ‘terribly thrilling’ moments in history, as Freud described it in 1918, when ‘the old has died, but the new has not yet replaced it.’

  This was a world in which Benito Mussolini, the bowler-hatted former socialist, could tout Italian fascism as the most relativist phenomenon of the age (without mentioning Albert Einstein by name). André Breton’s surrealism drew on his experiences working in a psychiatric hospital during the war and his veneration of Freud (until he met him). German nationalists saw Mustafa Kemal’s success in rejecting a peace imposed by the victorious powers of the war as a token for what they might achieve themselves. Marcus Garvey saw a relationship between his fight for worldwide black empowerment and the struggle of Éamon de Valera to achieve recognition for an independent Ireland.

  Adolf Hitler looked admiringly over the Atlantic Ocean at Henry Ford, the American automobile manufacturer who helped popularise a conspiratorial anti-Semitic slander cooked up in the last days of the Russian Empire, a slander finally proven as fake by a British journalist in Istanbul, aided by an American diplomat who once refused a meeting with Lenin in Switzerland in 1917 because he had a tennis date. Emmeline Pankhurst spent several months of that revolutionary year not campaigning in Britain for women’s suffrage at home, but in Petrograd, visiting battalions of women soldiers sent to fight for democratic (non-Bolshevik) Russia against the Kaiser’s Germany. Years later, her daughter Sylvia was back in Russia, the Bolsheviks now having taken over and ruling a resurrected Red empire from Moscow, arguing with Lenin about how quickly Britain should move to full-on proletarian revolution (Pankhurst was more extreme).

  Fascism and communism both emerged in these tumultuous years, each proclaiming itself the sworn enemy and polar opposite of the other. But Mussolini was perhaps more honest when he expressed his admiration for the scale of the Bolshevik experiment in Russia, and spoke about the affinities between the two movements. (Lenin, when he heard about the March on Rome, chuckled that it was ‘a merry story’, and reflected that the experience of having men like Mussolini in charge might finally awaken the Italian proletariat to the need for communism.) Both political creeds found their footing in Europe at the same time, and developed side by side, evolving and mutating in response to and occasionally in emulation of the other.

  Coincidence is not causality, and certainly not equality; but nor is it entirely innocent of meaning. When the old order collapses, the new order does not emerge fully formed, and every experience, every prejudice, every idea floating around the world outside–even those of one’s enemies–becomes a potential source of inspiration, for good and for ill. It is in such times, when established hierarchies are collapsing and people are searching for new meaning
in the world, that the most unlikely characters–a field-runner from the Bavarian army, a professional revolutionary in exile in Zurich, a mushroom-picking Austrian doctor–are given their chance. Which comes first: the character or the times?

  There is a huge amount of historical scholarship and writing which has shaped my own approach to these years, and which I hope readers of Crucible will be encouraged to explore after reading this book. The recognition that the Great War did not end neatly in 1918 with the armistice in the West, nor in 1919 with the signing of the Versailles Treaty, is the underpinning thesis of Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (2016), showing how the violence continued across Europe, from Ireland to the Baltic, in Russia and in Turkey, long after the guns had fallen silent on the Western Front. Jay Winter’s seminal Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995) reminds us that, for those societies which had lived through war, the absence of military conflict did not bring a full sense of peace for years afterwards. The scars remained, and they were deep.