Downfall (2004): Inaccuracies.

 Before I begin, this isn't going to be some scathing review of what is otherwise a very entertaining movie. I hate to be the guy who ruins the magic of Star Wars by pointing out the impossibility of lightsaber technology, or telling everyone there could be no sound in a vacuum and therefore no Formula 1 race car sound coming from the TIE fighters as they fly through space. Nevertheless I'd like to point out two historical inaccuracies in the 2004 movie Downfall, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.

 If anyone is reading this (god forbid) and can point out some other flaws please do and I will update this post to include them (only if they are properly referenced!).

Goebbels' "Throats cut" remark. 

Around 50 minutes into the movie, Joseph Goebbels is informed that his personal recruits are being "mowed down" due to their substandard weaponry and poor training. Goebbels insists that what they lack in capability they make up for in zeal. Eventually, he becomes impatient and has an outburst about the culpability of the German people.

Script:

"I feel no sympathy. I repeat, I feel no sympathy! The German people chose their fate. That may surprise some people. Don't fool yourself. We didn't force the German people. They gave us the mandate. And now their little throats are being cut."

Not to nit-pick here, since Goebbels did express this kind of sentiment to one of his subordinates, but what he really said was was far more powerful.

'His comments represented a total attack on the old officer corps and 'Reaction'. He accused them of treason, treason which they had been committing for years…

   I objected to these ideas, this cheap excuse… 'Even if there may have been instances of treason, are they not more than compensated for by the loyalty, the self-sacrifice, the courage and the faith of the German people, who have shown more good will towards their government than any other nation has ever done.'

   My interjection had an unexpected effect. Dr Goebbels abandoned the topic of the alleged treason of the officer corps and turned, initially full of cynicism and then of anger, against the German people. He accused them of cowardice. He began his objections with the words: "What can I do with a nation whose men don't even fight any more when their women are being raped."

Then, he poured out justifications for his and Hitler's policies. It was no longer the old virtuoso performance of cold, calculating eloquence. It was an outburst in which for the first time ideas poured out with elemental force, which hitherto have been most carefully hidden, even denied.

   For then he suddenly announced: the German people had failed. In the east they were fleeing, in the west they were preventing the soldiers from fighting and receiving the enemy with white flags.

   His pale face became red with anger, his veins and his eyes bulged as he shouted that the German people deserved the fate that awaited them. And then, suddenly, calming down, he remarked cynically that the German people had after all chosen this fate themselves. In the referendum on Germany's quitting the League of Nations they chose in a free vote to reject a policy of subordination and in favour of a bold gamble. Well, the gamble hadn't come off. 

   I sprang up and wanted to interrupt him. I wanted to say that he himself and Hitler had never interpreted that referendum in terms of a choice between peace and an adventure. On the contrary, both had always insisted that they only wanted to use peaceful means in Germany's fight for existence.

   Dr Goebbels saw my gesture but didn't let me speak it. He too got up and continued to speak: 'Yes, that may surprise some people, including my colleagues. But have no illusions. I never compelled anybody to work for me, just as we didn't compel the German people. They themselves gave us the job to do. Why did you work with me? Now, you'll have your little throat cut.'

   Striding towards the door, he turned round once more and shouted: 'but the earth will shake when we leave the scene…' (1)

For reasons other than length, I can't understand why this was altered. My problem isn't merely the lack of historical accuracy, but also the fact that:"but the earth will shake when we leave the scene." would have added far more meaning to Goebbels' tantrum.

Albert Speer visits Magda Goebbels.

 Roughly an hour into the movie, Albert Speer is seen visiting Magda Goebbels alone in her room while she is sick. Just prior to this conversation, Speer also has a brief but sobering conversation with Trudl Junge about whether she plans to escape or stay and die with the Fuhrer. This conversation is not mentioned in Albert Speer's recollection, which is surprising since many other conversations with those surrounding Hitler (which seem far more trivial) are recalled by him. In fact, Trudl Junge/Humps is not mentioned in the entire book.  Speer's visit to Magda Goebbels is also completely different to his recollection.

Script: 

Speer: Fever?

Frau Goebbels: Albert, my heart can't take it. 

Speer: Why don't you take the children and get out of here?

Frau Goebbels: But where to?

Speer: I once told you, I can send a barge to Schwanenwerder. It can be fixed up as a hideout until it's all over... Which won't be long.

Frau Goebbels: I've thought it through carefully. I won't let the children grow up in a world with no National Socialism. 

Speer: Think it over again, Magda. The children deserve a future.

Frau Goebbels: If the idea of National Socialism dies, there is no future.

Speer: (gets up to leave, then turns once more) I can't believe you really want this.

Frau Goebbels: Go...

(Speer leaves)

Albert Speer in his own words:

"An SS doctor informed me that Frau Goebbels was in bed, very weak and suffering from heart attacks. I sent word to her asking her to receive me. I would like to have talked to her alone, but Goebbels was already waiting in an anteroom and led me into the little chamber deep underground where she lay in a plain bed. She was pale and spoke only trivialities in a low voice, although I could sense that she was in deep agony over the irrevocably approaching hour when her children must die. Since Goebbels remained persistently at my side, our conversation was limited to the state of her health. Only as I was on the point of leaving did she hint at what she was really feeling: ''How happy I am that at least Harald [her son by her first marriage] is alive." I too felt confined and could scarcely find words - but what could anyone say in this situation? We said good-by in awkward silence. Her husband had not allowed us even a few minutes alone for our farewell." (2)

 A completely different picture from that depicted in the movie scene, in which Joseph Goebbels is nowhere to be seen.

Anyway, sorry for spoiling everyone's fun! Next week I will be showing how Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark and Inglorious Basterds are also somewhat unreliable in an academic setting (sarcasm).

References: 

(1) (1998) Noakes. J, Pridham. G, Nazism 1919-1945, Volume Four: The German Home Front in World War II, doc. 1379. From "Hier spricht Hans Fritzsche. Nach Gesprächen, Briefen und Dokumenten" edited by Hildegard Springer,  (Stuttgart 1949), pp.28-9.

(2) (1995) Speer. A, Inside the Third Reich, Chapter 32: Annihilation, Phoenix, London, pp. 642-3

George Orwell's "Bookshop Memories"

Blogger's remarks:
I thought I'd do something different today. I couldn't help chuckling at this memoir by George Orwell of his experience working in a second-hand bookshop. I can't help but admit to being one of those romantics picturing it "as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios". Working in a second hand bookshop has long been a small fantasy of mine, but I am a little wiser from reading this. Having worked at an Oxfam bookshop, I can also relate to Orwell's experience with the purchasing habits of social rejects with very rare and specific tastes, as well as women looking for books for their nephews (specifically that relative too). Nevertheless I am relieved that there are no complaints of a repeated customer asking for the same items (in my case: ladybird childrens books or books on British birds) but never being satisfied with what is presented to them. Lastly of course, who doesn't enjoy the smell of old books?
Anyway, enjoy!

"When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.
  Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. 
  The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.
  Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) 
  We did a good deal of business in children's books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.
  But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.
Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.
In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that's old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying ‘I don't want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.
Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole — in spite of my employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't see an ad. for Boswell's Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.
  But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles."

- George Orwell: ‘Bookshop Memories’
First published: Fortnightly. — GB, London. — November 1936.

Review: In Defence of History by Richard Evans

 Although originally written fifteen years ago, Richard Evans' In Defence of History is still a book I would recommend to both students of history, and those simply curious about the possibility of historical knowledge. Evans, contrary to various postmodern thinkers hoping to cast doubt on the possibility of objectivity in history, argues that:

"...when Patrick Joyce tells us that social history is dead, and Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth declares that time is a fictional construct, and Roland Barthes announces that all the world's a test, and Hans Kellner wants historians to stop behaving as if we were researching into things that actually happened, and Diane Purkiss says that we should just tell stories without bothering whether or not they are true, and Frank Ankersmit swears that we can never know anything at all about the past so we might as well confine ourselves to studying other historians, and Keith Jenkins proclaims that all history is just naked ideology designed to get historians power and money in big university institutions run by the bourgeoisie, I will look humbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened, and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self critical, found out how it happened and reach some tenable though always less than final conclusions about what it all meant." (pp.253) 

 Far from being an angry attack on postmodernists by some orthodox conservative elitist, the book grants many concessions to their criticisms. Rather than denying their validity outright, Evans shows that historians have long since been aware of many of their criticisms, however on most occasions the postmodernists have completely overstated their case. Although I think this book should be read by postmodernists, I suspect that (as acknowledged in the afterword section in the 2000 print) some will see it as an attack on only the more vulgar manifestations of postmodernism, rather than a theoretical treatise or an in depth debate with one specific and more sophisticated viewpoint. One criticism Evans makes can be summed up as "if nothing is objectively true, why should we accept the postmodernist argument as true?". I myself had to roll my eyes at this, which in my view is akin to asking a libertarian "who will build the roads?", or a communist "who will do all the difficult jobs?"

 In my view the real strength of the book lies in its evenhandedness. Despite coming from a (qualified) Marxist tradition himself, Evans has no remorse in taking E.H. Carr to task on the issue of the predictive capabilities of the "science" of history. Furthermore, Evans also brings up the poor scholarship of the now disgraced David Abraham, who in his The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, tried to argue that the Nazis rose to power at the hands of big business. Abraham was eventually accused of falsifying the facts to suit his thesis, and a damning example was his misquote of a German industrialist, in which he left out the crucial "not" in the original document thus completely misconstruing the actual meaning of the statement. (pp.116-124)
 This is not to say that Evans writes without any venom whatsoever. In the chapter Historians and their Facts, Evans mentions a critic of "documentary fetishism" H. Stuart Hughes, who has "of course a strong vested interest" in insisting that progress in the field of history comes not necessarily from the discovery of new material, but also from the re-reading of readily existing material. Evans remarks that Hughes would obviously argue this way given that "he has never discovered any new material himself in any of his publications, but has devoted his entire career to going over old grounds." (pp.84-85) It is unclear if Evans is deliberately trying to be insulting here or simply making an observation. If it is the former then it is ironic because as I have argued elsewhere: in his entire 3 volume history of the Third Reich, probably 99 percent of the sources referenced were secondary, in other words ground already covered by other historians.

 Evans often uses simple common sense to dispel the accusations railed by postmodernists and various "radicals". For instance, when the case is made that history is propaganda and that academia acts as the gatekeeper of the "dominant ideology", Evans simply points out that academia really doesn't have all that much of a sway over public opinion. This can be deduced from the fact that despite overwhelming acceptance among scientists, 46 percent of American's do not believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection, and less than 31 percent of the British public believe in climate change. Evans also mentions the classic The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson, a non academic historian, with a view against the grain in 1963 who was able to have an immense impact on the field, thus refuting the idea that academia is rigid in its convictions.

 All in all, the book is a fascinating read and provides basic defences against the more vulgarized postmodernist arguments, gives us an insight into the methods and strategies used by the author himself, and provides us with an entertaining history of, well... history!

Rating: 3.5 stars

Protip: "Definitive" history.

A slightly different post here today!

If anyone ever describes the work of an historian, be it their own work or somebody else's as "definitive", (for example: "This recent book by John Historian is the definitive History of the Malaysian Spice Industry!") you can safely write them off as full of it.

There can be no "definitive history" of anything, there will always be new sources previously unknown or overlooked, old translations that need improving upon etc. Anybody who uses the term "definitive" (and is not engaging in deliberate hyperbole), has one of two things in mind:

1) They don't want to have to read the accounts of anyone else out of sheer laziness or dogmatism. 

2) They don't want you to read the accounts of anyone else because they have their own agenda that they need you to play a part of, or at the very least keep out of the way of.