The Pursuit of Laughter (41 page)

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)

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.

Other results of the lightening of the atmosphere are small but numerous; it is now permitted to take photographs of the Kremlin, tourists are once more allowed into Russia, a vast shop selling every description of consumer goods, from toys to televisions, has opened in Red Square—the biggest store in the world, say the Russians, who, like the Americans, admire hugeness for its own sake; and, they could truthfully add, the most expensive.

Mr Harrison Salisbury was Moscow correspondent of
The New York Times
for several years until September 1954. He travelled all over the country, including Siberia. Both he and Dr Starlinger point out that life there is just about as disagreeable whether you are a prisoner or not. The slave workers very often have more to eat and warmer bedding than their ‘free’ counterparts.

In the vast areas of permafrost everybody is miserable, the only consolation is the evening drunkenness, which brings brief oblivion. The cold light of June ushers in a thaw which is quickly followed by another long winter. Drains and water mains are an
impossibility
at those latitudes, where the soil is permanently frozen six inches beneath the
surface
. Mr Salisbury gives a nightmarish description of Siberian towns; again, so much worse than the country, as readers of Mme Krupskaya’s life of Lenin will agree. When she and Lenin were living in a Siberian penal settlement, before the first war, they had a hut to themselves and Lenin went out duck-shooting.

Dr Starlinger, looking into the future, sees China occupying the position that Russia at present occupies
vis à vis
the West. He tells the following ancedote. When, in 1949, Mao won his war against Chiang Kai Shek, the most intelligent and well-informed prisoners were discussing the matter, and they agreed that it was the greatest victory for Russia and Communism to date. In the circle was an old Russian General whose views carried great
weight among them. He sat silent. They urged him repeatedly to give his opinion about the triumph in China, and finally he got up saying: ‘Yes, yes; six hundred million men, and soon there’ll be more still—and then what?’ and went out of the room. This was followed by a long silence: nobody had anything more to say. The General had served for many years in the Far East.

This is where Mr Gale’s amusing little book comes in. He accompanied the Labour Party delegation to Russia and China last August as correspondent to the
Guardian
. They stayed a few days in Moscow, where (not having known it under the Stalin terror) Mr Gale duly noted the drab drear, and M. Malenkov’s bunch of flowers for Dr Edith, and then they all flew on to China.

The delegation, Mr Attlee, Mr Bevan, Mr Morgan Phillips and
genossen
, may have been the knock-about turn he describes, but it remains in the background, for the press
representatives
seem to have been kept at arm’s length by everyone. Although he was only in China a month, Mr Gale looked about him, and what he saw was a well-organised, unimaginably large country, most of whose six hundred million inhabitants are better off than they have ever been before, with more to eat, more to wear, and less disease. If one per cent or so happen to be worse off, there are plenty of prisons and firing squads to take care of them, even though one per cent in this case means six million souls. The
remaining
five hundred and ninety four million men and women are working hard for their
country
and Chairman Mao, and rapidly developing their industries, and having millions of healthy babies; and it is not surprising that thoughtful Russians look at them with a
certain
apprehension.

Dr Starlinger says: Russia is a
Raum ohne Volk
[room without people]. China is rapidly becoming, despite its vastness, a
Volk ohne Raum
[people without room]. He foresees the day when the West will have to protect Russia’s western frontier while she defends her eastern frontier against expanding China. This may be in the distant future, but he believes that it accounts in part for the
détente
in Russian relations with the rest of Europe in recent months.