by Alan Judd
When we first meet Krebbs he quickly shows himself to be a fool and a prig, obsessed by rules and regulations, lacking imagination, unable to understand the consequences of his own actions. Through a careful delineation of Krebbs’s character, and the particular influences which have formed him, Judd makes us not only understand the SS officer, but sympathize with him, and even like him. Judd readily admits that he can see something of himself in Krebbs, and can’t help wondering how he would have reacted if he had found himself in a similar situation. ‘What might I have been like if I had grown up in Germany in the twenties or thirties? It’s not an easy question.’
Judd has no doubt about the type of fictional characters who interest him most. He is fascinated by contradiction, and intrigued by people who carry contradictory impulses within themselves. We all do, of course. Each of us is drawn in different directions by different desires, different longings, different urges, and each of us has our own way of accepting these differences. Judd does so through fiction. As he says, ‘There are things in myself which I find difficult to reconcile, and therefore I dramatize them.’
Top Ten Favourite Books
1.Richard III
William Shakespeare
2.King Lear
William Shakespeare
3.War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
4.The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5.The Golden Bowl
Henry James
6.Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
7.The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
8.The Old Wives’ Tale
Arnold Bennett
9.The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
10.A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
About the Book
A Critical Eye
THE KAISER’S LAST KISS attracted lengthy, serious reviews from the broadsheets. In the Sunday Times Hugo Barnacle focused his attention on ‘the subtle character studies, the intriguing atmosphere and the crisp storyline’, and found himself surprised by the ‘curiously sympathetic portrayal’ of the Kaiser. In the Spectator Alan Wall praised ‘this highly accomplished novel’, paying particular tribute to ‘its intricate and superbly crafted plot’. He thought that ‘the greatest achievement of the book is its portrayal of the variegated human quality of Nazism and of the mentality of occupation.’
This point was taken up by William Leith in the Daily Telegraph, who enjoyed ‘a story that shows us how the nastiest of regimes are made up of real people. Judd has taken some unlikely ingredients – a bitter, senile old git, a brash young SS officer and Heinrich Himmler – and, brilliantly, fashioned them into a touching, poignant story.’
The Kaiser’s Last Kiss was not considered for the Booker Prize, but the chairman of the judges, John Carey, revealed that he had wanted to add Judd’s book to the list. It was one of the few books, he wrote, which ‘lit up the day for me when I read them and have stayed in my mind since’.
The Kaiser and P.G. Wodehouse
Josh Lacey
WHAT IS THE difference between naivety and innocence? Should people take responsibility for the consequences of their actions – even if they had never intended or anticipated those consequences? When the Kaiser jokes about gassing mosquitoes and Jews, does he unwittingly prepare the ground for the Holocaust? These are questions that Alan Judd invites us to ask throughout The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, neatly contrasting the Kaiser’s words with another man who failed to appreciate the extent of his responsibility for his own actions: Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
During the Second World War, Wodehouse made a series of broadcasts from Berlin which, according to British politicians and journalists, aided the Nazi war effort. Wodehouse was denounced as a traitor. In his defence, he offered only one justification for his actions: his own naivety. Ever since, historians have argued over the extent of Wodehouse’s culpability, and literary critics have wondered whether his political incompetence has any bearing on the interpretation of his fiction.
During the 1930s Wodehouse and his wife lived in Le Touquet, a smart resort in northern France, half-way between Paris and London. His wife enjoyed the social life and the gambling – the huge casino in Le Touquet is said to have inspired Casino Royale – but Wodehouse led a quiet and fairly dull existence. He wrote his books and walked his dogs. Wider events rarely intruded on this calm, cloistered life, and Wodehouse remained a political ingénue. He thought the Nazis were a joke. Unable to take them seriously, he simply couldn’t believe that anyone else would either.
Wodehouse was completely unprepared for Hitler’s military success. As the German army swept through Holland and into France, the Wodehouses leapt into their car and drove towards Calais. Almost immediately the car broke down. Not knowing what else to do, they returned to their house, where the Germans arrested them. Along with other ‘enemy aliens’, Wodehouse was driven onto a cattle truck, despatched on a three-day journey across Europe and imprisoned in a castle in Upper Silesia.
Having been to an English public school, Wodehouse could probably endure the camp better than most people. He even claimed to have enjoyed himself. He played cricket, gave lectures and wrote the first third of Full Moon. (This is, of course, the novel that the Kaiser reads aloud to his guests in The Kaiser’s Last Kiss.) After almost a year he was released from the camp, taken to Berlin and invited to make a series of broadcasts to America. He accepted. When his five talks were subsequently aired in Britain, Wodehouse was branded a traitor, cursed in the press and condemned in Parliament.
Read today, these talks seem good-natured and innocent. If anything, Wodehouse ridicules his captors and provides some comfort to their enemies. However, his goofy charm was horribly inappropriate. Having been confined in a camp for almost a year, he had no understanding of what Britain had endured, and failed to realize that after the Blitz no one was going to be amused by a cheerful comedian broadcasting a stream of gags from Berlin.
The condemnation was immediate. Newspapers roared. The BBC banned his work. Public libraries stripped his books from their shelves. His friends tried to mount a defence, pleading that Wodehouse was a fool rather than a traitor. He was politically naive, they said, and had little comprehension of worldly affairs. Their protests failed. After the war Wodehouse went straight to New York, avoiding Britain, and made his home in the USA. Shortly before his death in 1975 he was awarded a knighthood, which he seems to have regarded as a gesture that his broadcasts had finally been forgiven.
At the end of the war Wodehouse wrote to his close friend William Townend and asked, ‘Do you find your private life affects your work? I don’t. I have never written funnier stuff than during these last years, when I certainly wasn’t feeling exhilarated.’ There is no point looking for hidden significance in Full Moon. Neither Tipton Plimsoll, the American millionaire, nor the Empress of Blanding, who has twice in successive years won silver medal in the Fat Pigs’ class at the Shrewsbury Show, reveals anything about Wodehouse’s treatment by the Nazis. Brought up against the realities of war, Wodehouse retreated even further into his imagination.
However, in his own way he had already manned the barricades against the spread of fascism. As Charlie Chaplin demonstrated with The Great Dictator, ridicule is a potent political weapon. Wodehouse used it brilliantly in the 1930s with his depiction of Roderick Spode and the massed cohorts of Black Shorts. Having read The Code of the Woosters, could anyone resist giggling when they saw Oswald Mosley marching with the British Union of Fascists?
‘The trouble with you, Spode, is that because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your
puff see such a perfect perisher?’”
Satire worked against Mosley, but failed against Hitler. The Nazis were immune to ridicule. Because they looked camp, crude and ludicrous, Wodehouse assumed that no one would be able to take them seriously. That failure of his imagination cost him not only a year in an internment camp and two years of virtual house arrest, but the whiff of treachery which still lingers whenever his name is mentioned.
Read on
Have You Read?
A Breed of Heroes
Alan Judd’s first book follows a young officer, Charles Thoroughgood, on his first posting to Northern Ireland. Written in a sparse, ironic prose which is beautifully suited to Thoroughgood’s character, this brilliant debut ensured Judd’s place on Granta’s list of Twenty Best Writers Under 40 in 1983 alongside Amis, Barnes and Rushdie.
* * *
The Devil’s Own Work
A short, beguiling novel which combines elements of familiar genres – a ghost story, a satire on literary life – to create a very unusual and chilling story about the hidden life of a writer.
* * *
Ford Madox Ford
In his prize-winning biography, Judd never allows his enthusiasm for Ford’s best writing to blinker his view of Ford’s worst writing or personal shortcomings. Judd has also written an introduction to the Everyman edition of The Good Soldier.
* * *
Legacy
In this recent novel Judd continues the story of Charles Thoroughgood. In the mid-1970s Thoroughgood leaves the Army for a desk job in MI6, but his new career is disrupted by revelations about his father’s background.
If You Loved This, You’ll Like…
The Assault
Harry Mulisch
The masterpiece of Holland’s best contemporary writer follows the life of a man who grows up in German-occupied Haarlem. A movie based on the book won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1987.
* * *
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
One of the greatest novels written in English. In the emblematic words of the book’s first line: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’
* * *
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Evelyn Waugh
Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and The End of the Battle.
Although less witty or precise than Waugh’s best novels, these three books are a bitter, brutal and honest account of his wartime experiences.
* * *
Full Moon
P.G. Wodehouse
One of Wodehouse’s most enjoyable novels.
Find Out More
www.huisdoorn.nl
A guide to Huis Doorn, packed with useful information in English, Dutch and German. The site also includes a guide for visitors with opening hours, details of entrance charges and a description of how to get there.
Wodehouse at War by Ian Sproat
A succinct account of P.G. Wodehouse’s life during the Second World War. The book includes the full transcripts of the broadcasts that Wodehouse made from Berlin.
The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II
by Giles MacDonogh
Kaiser Wilhelm II
by Christopher Clark
Wilhelm II
by Lamar Cecil
Three useful biographies of the Kaiser. Cecil’s is published in two volumes, Wilhelm II: Prince and Emperor, 1859–1900 and Wilhelm II: Emperor and Exile, 1900–1941.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
FICTION
A Breed of Heroes
Short of Glory
The Noonday Devil
Tango
The Devil’s Own Work
Legacy
NON-FICTION
Ford Madox Ford
The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the
Founding of the Secret Service
First World War Poets (with David Crane)
The Office Life Little Instruction Book (as Holly Budd)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
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