Orwell on the Germans

[DWM]

Here's George Orwell, writing in his blog - well, diary, really. The date is the seventh of February, 1941:

There is now more and more division of opinion – the question is implicit from the start but people have only recently become aware of it – as to whether we are fighting the Nazis or the German people. This is bound up with the question of whether England should declare war aims, or, indeed, have any war aims. All of what one might call respectable opinion is against giving the war any meaning whatever (“Our job is to beat the Boche – that’s the only war aim worth talking about”), and this is probably bound to become official policy as well. Vansittart’s “hate Germany” pamphlet is said to be selling like hot cakes.

(The "pamphlet" is a recently published book by Robert Vansittart, the senior British diplomat who opposed the appeasement of Germany and took a hardline stance towards that country and its people in the postwar era.)

[hdw]

What's brought on this sudden interest in Germany and the Germans?

Harry

[DWM]

It's a subject I've been reading about at various times throughout most of my life - I was born in 1945, towards the end of the war, and I studied German later on, in the mid-to-late 1950s and 1960s. GO's "blog" is fascinating for the insights it gives into the Britain and Europe of the late 1930s and 1940s, and I believe it has a lot to tell us about the Europe of today. I recommend the other posts in Orwell Diaries 1938-42.

Orwell's diaries also give a unique impression of the man himself.

[Eric]

/In a shouting SS voice/:

Harry asks ze kwestion, und vee vont ze answer, ja?! Vhy don't you like ze Krauts!?

Harry does have a point. As I soon as I say on several threads that I admire Angela Merkel for accepting a prize from the Israelis (one of the more Jewish countries on Earth), there is suddenly a tirade against the Nazi bastards of Jamel who threaten the peace and sanity of the whole of Germany.

While Egypt and several other countries in the region are in danger of implosion, I think Germany is going very much in the right direction. Remember, because of the inconsistency of the Allies after WWI, first Germany was humiliated at Versailles, then in 1932, I think it was, the Allies stopped demanding reparations, so that Germany had the money to re-arm. I read this last fact recently in Edvard Benes' memoirs.

Nowadays, however, Germany is one country again, always good for a country's self esteem. The Ossie-Wessie differences cannot be tackled overnight, because they still have to flush out all vestiges of the GDR mentality. But the economy is reasonable and if the Germans tackle the problems of failed multiculturalism head on, there is no reason why the brownshirts will be marching again.

I personally would like to go to some of those cities in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern that once belonged to the Swedish Empire (1648-1720). I could then go and stand on the town square in Greifswald and shout, in John Cleese fashion: "Bloody Swedish imperialists! Bloody V-2s! Bloody architects of Prora!" And so on, until my anger and frustration subsided. But I'd rather spend the evening in the Kneipe rather than the nuthouse. (This idea of nutty railing stems from the Jaan Kross novel I've just translated, where the protagonist goes nuts on a marketplace in Hamburg and yells at the "cockroaches", i.e. the Nazis, in the Germany of 1935.)

But to return to sanity for a brief moment, I would be intrigued to hear why indeed David has suddenly got a downer on Germany and the Germans. It seems quite the wrong period of history to be so bitter. As well as being an upper-class twit, as we read in Anthony Powell novels, Orwell (or Blair as we should call him) was an excellent and perceptive essayist, and he certainly understood Soviet Communism. But maybe now, more than half a century later, we should look at Germany through new eyes.

[hdw]

My wife and I only lived in Germany for two years, but that's two years longer than the vast majority of Brits have spent there. I'm not counting elderly people who were involved in WWII or the post-war reconstruction. My eldest sister worked for a while as a carer and home help to a Lord * in Edinburgh, a retired judge who worked as a lawyer at the Nuremberg trials.

But if you've lived and worked in the country, made friends there, even given birth in a local hospital (as my wife did), and so on and so forth, you must have a different perspective from the average Brit who can't see beyond the Nazis and the death camps. Try telling them that the Third Reich only lasted for 12 years.

British people don't even go on holiday to Germany, although it's a beautiful country with every kind of town and urban landscape you could imagine, culture, mountains, beaches, what you will.

So we were very pleased by the sudden rash of German-themed programmes on TV here recently, with the comedian Al Murray giving a surprisingly thoughtful and informative guided tour of places like Weimar and Dresden, and Julia Bradbury doing a series of walks which not only promoted the German countryside but also touched on artistic movements like Romanticism.

Harry

[Eric]

And now, an advert for a new travel agency, Murkle Holidays. A lovely song, the tune no doubt written by the kloset Chew, Hoarse Whistle:

Die Fahnen hoch, die Ryanair geschlossen,
Murkle marschiert ze holidays to make,
Vee vi-ill house zem all in ze great Prora,
Vee vill rebuild and ze vurld overtake.

Sorry, sorry, tactless, tasteless, Cleeseful.

[buffoonicturkey]

The Expressivity of Elemental Destitution and the New Possibilities of Barbarism

What is concerning is the tortuous road to Russian neo-Nazism and aggression, the stormtrooper’s emergence from the nationalist ferment. Orwell, with his greatly misplaced ethical force, expresses the essence of obscurantism, he calls down the cosmos of accidents connected to the Soviet calamity forgetting the dew drop from which it arose was the Russian soul in its concrete historical circumstance, he paints Cromwellian Stalins stomping their boots over English faces. A subtle analysis would reveal that the Orwellian preachment about arbitrary propaganda and manipulation, his great leitmotif, which he places everywhere, is a paranoiac condition of the soul (meaning that it is to be found, and also those who love and glorify war, but that the disposition to look for it everywhere is decrepit). Life is populated with unaccountable turns, the language that represents it can’t fail to express this and so to be confused and inconsistent; the morbid man finds morbidity everywhere (:Orwell wanted to, or pretended to want to, all the while dimly seeing the way he lied to himself; misrepresenting his own idiosyncratic fears as political and communally important, warn his countrymen against the Soviet sickness sprouting out in Britain.) Orwell pretends he is revealing some truth in his political cartography, but his critique is too naive to distinguish between the form of a government and its management. Socialism is a good form and with good administration would give a new voice to the spirit of freedom, but Orwell attacks the good form under bad conditions of administration, because he projects his illness on all potential administrators seeing them only as manipulators and villains and himself as a piece of impotent trash in their hands unable to guide the machinic apparatus and deeply doleful, and as he is further carried away by his sickness and weak mindedness he gathers many sympathetic ears.