The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  The Karajan Dossier

  When Goethe was told there was a dispute as to whether he or Schiller was Germany’s greatest poet, he said why not be pleased there are two poets, and left it at that. The same applies to Furtwangler and Karajan; both were supreme musicians, albeit with very different characters. Frau Furtwangler is quoted as saying: ‘It’s a blessing having a husband who isn’t vain.’ Karajan was absurdly vain. Not about his music, where any amount of pride and vanity were in order, but about his appearance, or his driving of fast cars or speed-boats, and other irrelevances.

  The Karajan Dossier is a collection of interviews, reminiscences and reviews of great fascination. Round about the time when the maestro reached the preeminent position as Furtwangler’s successor with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, what he called the ‘music explosion’ occurred. Great conductors have always been idolized in Germany, but now they became world idols, and their recordings brought immense riches.

  It is the orchestra which chooses its artistic director and conductor, and when Furtwangler died in 1954 the Berlin Philharmonic voted unanimously for Herbert von Karajan. He was 46, and very experienced. For seven years he had been Aachen’s music director, he had conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg festivals, and at the Vienna State Opera, and had been guest conductor at the BPO a few times. Together they made wonderful records and videos with Deutsche Grammophon and Sony between concerts and world tours. He is said to have left 500 million marks to his family when he died.

  He and the Berlin Philharmonic were a splendid team, but there were frequent disputes behind the scenes. When Karajan wished to annoy his great orchestra he cancelled their concerts and went down to Vienna, where he was also artistic director of the State Opera, or to Salzburg, and stayed there.

  Intelligent and articulate, everything he has to say about conducting and music is deeply interesting. Thanks to modern recording everyone can hear the perfection of sound he and the Berlin Philharmonic achieved. As a young man Karajan joined the Nazi party, not once but twice. He was not interested in politics, but it was necessary for his career. This earned him a few little hostile demonstrations when he took the orchestra to America.

  He was an extremely brave man, often conducting when in acute pain from operations for intervertebral discs. He carried on right up to his death aged 81, when once again the orchestra had to choose its conductor. It voted unanimously for Claudio Abbado, who when he heard the news ‘for two minutes I couldn’t breathe,’ so overwhelmed was he by the honour of being chosen by the greatest orchestra on earth.

  There is not a dull page in The Karajan Dossier, and Klaus Lang has found a superlative translator. Stewart Spencer reads like a first class English journalist, with never an awkward sentence.

  The Karajan Dossier, Lang, K., trans. Spencer, S. Evening Standard (1992)

  Rebuilding Germany

  It is arguable that the Allies, in a back-handed way, were largely responsible for the ‘German miracle’. When, after nearly six years of war, they had defeated and over-run their great enemy, they tried to ensure that Germany should never rise again, or at any rate not within the lifetime of the allied politicians then in power. Roosevelt died just as the war was ending, and he died happy in the thought that Germany was a heap of rubble. His ‘experts’ told him it would take thirty years to rebuild the cities, for a start, and he doubtless relied on his Russian friends to see that it should take longer still. Roosevelt said that if he had his way he would ‘keep the Germans on the breadline for twenty five years’. The idea, heard with monotonous frequency during the war, that it was not the German people but their leaders we were fighting, turned out to be just Allied propaganda. Probably the Germans had no more believed it than had the men who broadcast it.

  The Morgenthau plan, which an enthusiastic Roosevelt induced Churchill to initial, was to deprive Germany of all its heavy industry. It would have entailed the death of millions. Part of the plan, the dismantling of factories and the stealing and using of patents, was in fact carried out. The armies of occupation behaved to the civil population in a way nobody has reason to be proud of; Aidan Crawley describes torture and starvation in the prison camps, and brutally undisciplined behaviour in general. De-Nazification, he says, ‘lost all semblance of purification and became an act of indiscriminate vengeance’. He adds that ‘more Germans died in the first two years of the occupation than had been killed in nearly six years of war’.

  In the millions who survived, however, this bitter challenge evoked a brilliant response. They re-built their towns, their infra-structure and their factories in a very short space of time, being not only hardworking but skilled and inventive. The dismantling, which had seemed to the Allies at the time to be a clever way of punishing them, turned to the advantage of the Germans, who were not burdened with out-of date machinery. Before Roosevelt’s twenty five years were up, Germany had become the richest country in Europe and the deutschmark was giving a helping hand to an ailing dollar.

  The Allies had helped in another way too. Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne under Weimar, was elected mayor once more after the defeat. An English brigadier earned himself a footnote in history by dismissing him from this office for being obstructive. Thus a small-scale dictator bestowed upon Adenauer the status he needed among his fellow-countrymen, which shot him into politics. As Chancellor he served his country well. He was a good European, and he chose in Erhardt, a professor of economics from Munich, the very man to preside over Germany’s vertical take-off from rags to riches.

  Fate helped the West Germans in other ways besides dismantling and the general behaviour of the occupying powers, though these gave a great impetus to the effort. Refugees from Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, Saxony and other provinces, fleeing from communism, arrived in their millions. To begin with they were an additional burden, but they speedily became a precious asset.

  When, as was inevitable, the Allies fell out amongst themselves and the cold war began, there was an inexorable tug-of-war for Germany. By far the most interesting part of this very intelligent book is the chapter dealing with communist subversion in West Germany.

  The Russians never abandoned the hope of creating a united communist Germany with satellite status. They shrink from atomic war and attempt to attain their objective by other means. Blackmail is a powerful weapon, and a deadly threat to their relations in the DDR has induced many West Germans to work for the Soviets.

  Besides blackmail there have been kidnappings and murders. Unlike the kidnappings in South America, they seldom make the headlines. In a very real way, the Germans have lived with fear. Now that the DDR has been able to install consulates in West German cities, and the West German Communist Party has been revived, things have been made a good deal easier for the Russians. ‘The object of this underground warfare, which was carried on by thousands of Russian and East German spies, agents, and even assassins, was to undermine morale so completely that West Germans would come to prefer a reunited country under communist “protection” rather than live in a perpetual state of fear and suspense’, writes Aidan Crawley.

  In his summing up, Mr Crawley tries to sum up the Germans. He says they eat a good deal; so do the French, and so does anyone in his senses if the food is worth eating. Their houses, unless built before 1850, are not very beautiful. Unfortunately the secret of building beautiful houses was lost everywhere at about that date. At least the Germans have repaired their cathedrals and not let loose any local Sir Basil Spences.* They are very polite, but do their good manners come from the heart? They call the rectors of their universities Magnifizenz, and Mr Crawley is not too sure whether this might not be a sign of ‘supine’ respect for authority. (Yet it is only a relic of medieval times, the equivalent of calling a king who may be anything but majestic, ‘Your Majesty’.) He doubts that the Germans have acquired a ‘passionate belief’ in democracy. But what is this democracy? He approves of the fact that although an estimated eighty per cent of the population want the de
ath penalty restored, the Bonn parliament refuses to pay any attention. Passionate believers in democracy might attempt to define it, since it by no means coincides with the will of the benighted majority.

  Whatever the Germans turn to generally turns out to be wrong in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon commentators. One can easily imagine the strictures if the opposite of the behaviour here criticised chanced to be the norm. Mean and ascetic, hoarding their riches, rude to foreigners, insulting to the dons at their universities (incidentally ‘don’ is quite out of tune with modern egalitarianism. The Oxford Dictionary gives ‘a Spanish lord… a distinguished man, a leader. Hence, in the English Universities…’). No wonder the Germans are inclined to laugh at foreigners who are so ready and anxious to teach them the ABC.

  They have performed one ‘liberal’ act which is little short of sublime: they allow their Turkish guest-workers to use Cologne cathedral as a mosque. However surprising for the crusaders buried there, this must be gratifying to anyone inclined to wonder how broadminded they really have become.

  Germany is not just a chunk of materialist America planted in Europe. The Germans would probably rather be rich than poor, it is one worry the less, but there are plenty of tragic things to worry about in Germany, even in the Federal Republic, now and in the foreseeable future. Awareness of this fact is the great merit of Aidan Crawley’s book.

  * In charge of the modernist rebuilding of bombed Coventry Cathedral. The Rise of Western Germany 1945-1972, Crawley, A. Books and Bookmen (1973)

  Goodies and Baddies

  A well-known writer of historical biographies once told me: ‘People love reading about what they already know.’ This is probably true, as witnessed by the popularity of the item ‘yesterday’s weather’ in the newspapers. Professor Joll has written a painstaking account of a period most of his readers know very well, and some of them almost too well, and his book will be enjoyed by them accordingly. There is nothing much in it that could be called original, or that might shake their preconceptions and set them thinking. All the idées are comfortably reçues.

  The book is well-written and objective, but suppose it were to be judged from the point of view of a completely ignorant newcomer, a man from Mars who knew nothing of the last hundred years, how would it rank? Rather high, I should say.

  Nevertheless, for somebody who has lived through half the period, as Mr Joll says he himself has, absolute objectivity is an almost impossible goal. A small example of the difficulty is to be found in the words he uses to describe the killing of a political opponent; they vary according to his view of the government which kills. Thus the pre-Franco Spanish Republicans ‘execute’, the Russians ‘purge’, the Germans ‘murder’. This will be acceptable to most of his readers; it is important to differentiate between goodies and baddies. It is axiomatic that freedom fighters are heroes while rebels are thugs; heroic resistants execute but cowardly terrorists assassinate or strike in the dark. Violent death has been the fate of countless millions of Europeans, in wars, in camps, as refugees fleeing from their homes, by fire bombs raining down and turning their cities into raging infernos. Were they heroes or villains, were they murdered or executed, were they martyrs or brutes? It depends upon who writes their history.

  To come down to details, there is a muddle in connection with the Balkan troubles of the 1870s. First, Disraeli ‘threatened to intervene in support of the Turks’, then a few lines further on we read of ‘Disraeli’s desire for unilateral action against the Turks.’ This is obviously a case of careless proofreading, but although nearly every schoolboy knows that Disraeli and Queen Victoria were pro-Turk, and Gladstone pro-Bulgarian, there might be the odd one who wished to learn; an erratum slip would not come amiss.

  After the First World War and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the Balkans and other small countries came into their own. The fashionable parrot cry was ‘self determination’. This was an idea and an ideal which, like Christianity itself, had never yet been tried. At Versailles the small countries had powerful lobbies and the defeated central powers were not heard. The predictable result was that great chunks of Germany and millions of Germans and German Austrians were included within the territories of the now swollen ‘small’ countries.

  In the long run, their excessive greed did not benefit the small countries. Poland and Czechoslovakia, to maintain whose arbitrarily drawn frontiers Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, are to this day firmly in the grip of Russia.

  Sometimes Professor Joll indulges in fantasy, as when he writes: ‘… democrats not only weakened the Weimar Republic, but also contributed to the establishment after the second world war of two rival German states, based on rival conceptions of society, one liberal and democratic and the other communist and authoritarian.’ Does he really believe that German attitudes, opinions or preferences were taken into account when the ‘zones’ were carved out by the Allies in 1945? The truth is, in 1945 Britain and France were only slightly more influential than Germany itself, and the map of our continent was drawn by a ruthless expansionist Russia, aided by a complacent America ignorant of European history.

  Leaving wars, treaties, politics aside now and again, an attempt is made to assess the vast European contribution to science, engineering, art and literature. The author disarms criticism in his introduction by saying that ‘some of the greatest imaginative writers, painters and musicians have not been mentioned’. In a book of this length there has to be choice. Among the elect is André Gide, but not Céline; Debussy, but not Alban Berg. In the realm of musical comedy, Kurt Weill but not Franz Lehár; Weill is sanctified by his collaboration with Brecht. Not that it matters, since nobody is going to read a short history book in order to glean knowledge of the arts, particularly one which must deal with such an unusual number of wars, revolutions, executions, purges, murders and other miseries.

  It ends, as end it must, on a note of interrogation. Nobody can be dogmatic about the future of Europe. Is Spengler’s pessimism justified? Will Toynbee’s new Christianity transform the violent continent? According to Professor Joll: ‘To some people the Europe of the Treaty of Rome seems rather a provincial affair’. What a province! United Europe can be not only a world power the equal in strength of any other, but is already infinitely richer in everything that makes life worth living.

  Europe Since 1870: An International History, Joll, J. Books and Bookmen (1983)

  Old Russia and New China

  A German, an American and an Englishman have written these books within the last few months; they can conveniently be reviewed together, different though they are, because they all contain eye witness accounts of Soviet Russia. Dr Starlinger describes nine years spent in Russian prisons and concentration camps; his book is the most serious of the three, though Mr Salisbury, with the trained eye of the journalist who misses nothing (or, at any rate, nothing superficial) is well worth reading, and even frivolous, splenetic Mr Gale has a contribution to make.

  Dr Starlinger is a Königsberg doctor who was arrested in 1945 and released in 1954. At the end of the war he was at first permitted by the Russians to organise a hospital at Königsberg, full to overflowing with typhus patients, but after a few months they arrested him and sent him to Russia.

  The first part of his book describes life in a big town (Königsberg) where everything has been bombed to pieces—where the drains are smashed, and the water mains out of action; where food and medical supplies are almost non-existent; where there is neither electricity, gas nor fuel. (Perhaps the moral, for those who wish to survive the next war, is to live in the country, with an earth closet, near a spring of clean water and a well stocked vegetable garden.) Dr Starlinger writes with admirable calm and objectivity of his captors and of the incredible hardships he has endured at their hands, such as a journey lasting seven days and nights shut up in a railway prison cage truck of eight cubic metres, designed to hold six men but in which he was confined with twenty six others.

  After one or two
prisons he was sent to a camp where there were many educated Russians: intellectuals, politicians and generals, the survivors of various purges. Here he learned to know them in an intimate way such as no foreigner, outside a concentration camp, could hope to do. Mr Salisbury, after five years in Moscow, says that he had not a single Russian friend; he hardly even had an acquaintance, for so much as to pass the time of day with a foreigner was an unhealthy proceeding for a Russian, inviting the immediate intervention of the ubiquitous MVD. Dr Starlinger, on the other hand, spent many years in closest proximity with the most articulate of Russians, the political prisoners.

  Life in the prison camp was hard, grey, hopeless. Between two barricades of barbed wire was a no-man’s-land, covered day and night by machine guns mounted in towers. To attempt to escape meant instant death by shooting. Curiously enough, Dr Starlinger relates, although the prisoners often spoke of ways to commit suicide when their existence seemed intolerably hard to bear, he never saw a man take this obvious way out of life.

  Everything was discussed in the camp, including politics and religion, and happenings outside were quickly known to the inmates. Dr Starlinger inside his concentration camp, and Mr Salisbury living in Moscow and making lengthy journeys all over Russia dogged by MVD men, both come to the same conclusion: the death of Stalin, and to a lesser degree the fall of Beria, have altered everything in Russia. No one can calculate the extent of the change, and it is even now too soon to draw optimistic conclusions, but there is no doubt the terror has lifted a little, the man in the street feels less afraid, life has become a shade more normal.

  The most important result so far has been the release of many German prisoners, among them the author of Grenzen der Sowjetmacht. Usually when a man is released from a Russian prison or camp he is made to sign a paper promising not to speak or write of what he has seen inside. Dr Starlinger was let out with no formalities of this kind, and so were many others with him.