Let's Write about World War One: Cantigny after the battle

Hello From a French Village Recalls the U.S. as a Staunch Ally: An Echo history report published in the New York Times by Graham Bowley.

A faded American flag with 48 stars thought to have been left behind in Cantigny after the battle.Credit...Mathieu Richer Mamousse for The New York Times

French visitors are coming to Washington with an old U.S. battle flag and a plan to rekindle memories of the American soldiers who rescued their region during World War I. (Merci❗ )

"Louis Teyssedou, a history teacher from Amiens, half an hour’s drive from Cantigny, :as hatched a plan to try to keep the communal memory alive. He has led his high school students through a study of the battle, and this month he is leading a group of them to Washington, D.C., to honor its significance."

Hello (Bonjour❗) From a French Village That Recalls the U.S. as a Staunch Ally:  French visitors from France are coming to Washington with an old U.S. battle flag and a plan to rekindle memories of the American soldiers who rescued their region during World War I. More than a century after the fighting stopped, the U.S. Army’s First Division has not fully faded from memory in Cantigny, the tiny hilltop village in northern France that it helped to save in World War I. In the woods, there is the trench that was once the unit’s muddy forward position. In a cellar, graffiti scrawled on stone by young, green doughboys, among the first Americans to see action in that war. In patches of farmland, the live shells that for years have turned up during plowing. And in an otherwise unremarkable back room, grenades and shell casings found in the fields, along with a faded flag with 48 stars, thought left behind as the unit marched east to fight more.

In the history books, the battle at Cantigny in May 1918, is recalled as a crisis point in the war. The Allied forces, replenished by the arrival of newly minted American soldiers, beat back a spring offensive by German units looking to aim their booming guns at Paris.

In the village, the remembrances have always been more personal: More than 300 Americans died there. Cantigny, population about 110, has but a single church but it has four monuments, a few hundred yards apart, that honor the men who fought alongside the French under Gen. John J. Pershing. Maj. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was among them. Pershing’s French military liaison was a descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who had been America’s military patron.

The American Monument in Cantigny, France, commemorates a battle there in 1918 when American forces fought their first major offensive in World War I.Credit...Mathieu Richer Mamousse for The New York Times

But Cantigny, like many places, has changed. The older villagers whose grandparents may have fought in the war are fewer. Many of the simple redbrick homes are still farms, though some newer residents are commuters who work in outlying towns. The young are consumed by their own evolving lives.
“Enthusiasts and history buffs have a sense of pride and a duty to remember and revive this entire military past,” said Gilles Levert, 73, a retired factory worker. “For the vast majority of others, parents don’t feel concerned. How can you expect their children to be able to take ownership of the history of their region?”
Louis Teyssedou, a history teacher from Amiens, half an hour’s drive from Cantigny, has hatched a plan to try to keep the communal memory alive. 

He has led his high school students through a study of the battle, and this month he is leading a group of them to Washington, D.C., to honor its significance.

They will be carrying the old battle flag and a hope to rekindle the warmth of Franco-American relations that stretches back to 1781, when the United States and France came together at Yorktown, brothers in war.

The group has a full schedule that includes efforts to meet descendants of those who fought at Cantigny and a plan to lay a wreath and unfurl the flag at Pershing’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.

“It’s a project to show how Americans helped France,” Mr. Teyssedou said.

Although the trip was planned long before the American elections, Mr. Teyssedou said he recognized that he arrives in Washington at a time when U.S. relations with Europe are severely strained. So strained that for some Europeans the memories of American heroism in past conflicts have begun to curdle.

“Coming in this context justifies … coming,” he wrote in an email, noting that his is not a diplomatic mission but an educational one. Still, he said, the historic archives that the students have been working in are “transmitters of memory.”

“They remind us,” he said, “that our two countries share a shared history.”

World War I was nearly three years old when President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1917, that the United States would join the fighting. The first American units were withdrawn from the Mexican border and shipped off from Hoboken, N.J., for Europe.

Their arrival bolstered Allied morale, and the U.S. troops, aware of the symbolism, paraded through Paris to the grave of Lafayette, who 150 years earlier had rallied France to the American cause. Col. Charles E. Stanton, a senior officer, stood before the tomb to announce that the United States honors its debts.

“Lafayette,” he declared, “we are here!”

From there it was on to war. At the time, Cantigny had been taken by the Germans, the foremost tip of an offensive that threatened to drive a wedge between British and French forces. From the elevated ground, German commanders could overlook the Allied lines and launch a devastating thrust deeper into France.

The military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, depicted the circumstances for readers at the time.

“On the one hand,” the dispatch read, “was a German army on the Western Front, reinforced to nearly twice its former proportions by the collapse of Russia, armed and trained to the last degree of perfection and animated by a hope of success, which, because it was based upon such almost immeasurable strength, amounted to conviction.”

“On the other hand,” it continued, “were the armies of France and England, doggedly determined still, but sorely-tried through nearly four years of ceaseless battle and cruelly battered by the gigantic plunges of the enemy in his spring offensive.” “What factor,” it asked, “could furnish to one side or the other the balance of weight which might turn the scale?”

The answer would be the charge of 2,000 American soldiers who initially stormed from their trenches at 6:45 a.m. on May 28, 1918, behind a barrage of artillery fire laid down by French and American guns. They were accompanied by 12 French Schneider tanks, French flamethrowers and French observation balloons and air support.
The combined forces captured Cantigny within an hour and pushed past it into fields to the east. For three days, they then held off German counterattacks.

Many of the American dead were buried on the battlefield, though they were later exhumed and moved to the Somme American Cemetery in Bony. Cantigny was left a lifeless, smoking ruin.

Much of the fighting was at night and combat tactics had evolved so that the artillery fire moved along with the infantry, the guns firing ahead of the troops as they advanced, according to Mike MacDonald, president of the 28th Infantry Regiment Association.

“It was a horrific battle,” he said. For all its horror, the battle made clear to skeptical Allied commanders that the untried American forces were dependable.

“It was just taking a little village on top of a hill, but it was a big statement that the American expeditionary forces could fight,” said Matthew J. Davenport, author of a book about Cantigny, “First Over There.”

Soldiers from the 28th Infantry Regiment going over the top of trenches during the Battle of Cantigny on May 28, 1918.Credit...Associated Press

“Bravo the young Americans!” crowed The London Evening News. “It was clean-cut from beginning to end, like one of their countrymen’s short stories, and the short story of Cantigny is going to expand into a full-length novel which will write the doom of the Kaiser and Kaiserism.”

Experts say the battle helped establish modern American military doctrine with its focus on combining and synchronizing the various elements of combat power — tanks, infantry, engineers, artillery and air support. After Cantigny, the number of American soldiers grew from about 300,000 at the time of the U.S. entry into the war to 4.5 million by the end, 2.5 million of them stationed in France.
For historians, the battle was also significant because of the remarkable constellation of personalities that were involved or associated with it.

Victor Hugo’s great-grandson, Jean Hugo, an artist, acted as a translator for the Americans and sketched the ruins of the battlefield. A cousin of Willa Cather died leading American troops,.there, his death becoming a central part of her novel “One of Ours,” which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Many men, like Roosevelt, gained experience at Cantigny that would be called upon decades later in the next world war. Capt. Clarence R. Huebner, who commanded a battalion of the 28th Infantry Regiment, led the First Infantry Division a quarter-century later at Omaha Beach. The officer who planned the Cantigny attack, Lt. Col. George C. Marshall, then 37, would become the U.S. Army chief of staff in World War II and later Secretary of Defense and State.

“This was the future leadership of the American army learning how to fight the German army,” Mr. Davenport said.

In his memoir, Marshall wrote in freighted terms about the importance of Cantigny to him and to the global democratic values at stake.

“Quitting the soil of Europe to escape oppression and the loss of personal liberties, the early settlers in America laid the foundations of a government based on equality, personal liberty, and justice,” he wrote. “Three hundred years later their descendants returned to Europe and on May 28, 1918, launched their first attack on the remaining force of autocracy to secure the same principles for the peoples of the Old World.”

In the century since the battle, the landing at Normandy and the liberation of Paris in 1944 have become more powerful reminders of the bonds between the Americans and the French. But in Cantigny there are always signs of the earlier struggle — not just the monuments, but street names like Rue de la 1ère Division Usa and the uniform buttons, rifle cleaners, belt buckles and horse buckles found in the wheat fields. 

The walls in the cellar of a farmhouse where American soldiers recuperated from their wounds still bear their idle inscriptions: “U S A,” “U.S. Forever.”

Let's Write about how ordinary Germans became Hitler's Nazis

Ordinary Germans Neal Ascherson

Published in The New York Review of Books:

We know who the Nazis were and what they did. In Hitler’s People, the distinguished historian Richard J. Evans seeks to explain what made them capable of doing it.

We know who they were, these men and women who served Adolf Hitler. We know what they did, because the ashes of so many millions lie under the fields and pavements of Europe, and because the words “Western Civilization” are still too charred to read. The thing we don’t know is what made them capable of doing it.

A master historian like Richard Evans, the author of three deservedly famous books on the Third Reich, must turn first to what the Nazis did and what the consequences were.
But he evidently remains tormented by the simple, nonacademic questions that twenty-first-century people still ask. 

How could the Nazis, as members of the human species, have done what they did❓ Could they be explained away as freaks, moral perverts, sadistic psychopaths, or war-crippled spirits driven by masochistic obedience or fantasies of vengeance❓

Evans does not waste much sympathy on those thoughts, which lead toward an absurd guilty-but-insane verdict. He is, of course, too young to have lived in Hitler’s time. But an example of what lies before his eyes as he writes is what British soldiers saw when they entered the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945:

Some 60,000 starving and disease-ridden inmates were found inside, with another 13,000 lying dead and unburied around them; 14,000 of the survivors were so weak that they died within a few weeks of liberation.

Irma Grese (center) an SS officer at Ravensbruck, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and the Bergen Belsen, at her trial for war crimes Luneburg, Germany.

The young camp guard Irma Grese was still there when the British arrived. She was “seemingly unaware that she had anything to fear from the representatives of the Allies.” The press went wild about her during her trial, creating a monster of sadistic sexuality that went far beyond her provable crimes of revolting cruelty and murder. 

But Evans doesn’t diagnose her as a monster: “Grese came across…as a rather immature, simple young woman who had little idea of why she was being demonized”—an unquestioning Nazi to the end. They hanged her eight months later.

During the war, people in Allied countries (and occupied ones too) generally assumed that there was something deviant, aberrant, about the Germans and their leaders—a deformity, in fact. As a wartime child I listened to English soldiers singing as they trampedpast in the rain: “’Itler’s only got one ball. Göring’s got two but ver-ee small. ’Immler…” and so on. (If they marched through a village, the sergeant made them change to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”) Twenty years later, before the Frankfurt “Auschwitz Trial,” journalists were taken to view the accused camp personnel in a dim basement under the Paulskirche. Seeing the terrible face of the torturer Wilhelm Boger—the yellow eyes and boulder skull—I felt for a moment that I was looking at some throwback hominin, not a twentieth-century Homo sapiens. But that thought had to be shaken off.

It was more challenging to face up to the notion that the low-level perpetrators and their commanders were just “ordinary men.” Christopher Browning’s 1992, book of that title broke the hearts of many who believed in humanity. It showed the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, often middle-aged family men with no fanatical Nazi views, shooting naked and defenseless Jewish villagers and their children into pits day after day, a total of some 38,000 victims. They were not even under compulsion. If a man said that he had had enough and asked to be withdrawn from execution duty, he was not punished. Since then, as Evans shows, research has weakened some of Browning’s conclusions. The policemen were volunteers, not conscripts; “they were carefully selected according to ideological criteria…. Their training included heavy doses of Nazi ideology and antisemitic indoctrination.” In short, they were not quite “ordinary men,” or a random sample.

But Evans writes later in Hitler’s People that the “hundreds of thousands of Germans [who] committed unspeakable atrocities” acted with free will and often with enthusiasm. They “positively enjoyed what they were doing.” That leads back toward Daniel Goldhagen’s spectacular claim in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) that “exterminatory” antisemitism and a yearning for dictatorship had long been integral to the German sense of identity: the nation as collective monster, indeed. Evans dismisses some of Goldhagen’s arguments (“an updated version of the wartime propaganda”) and offers a more nuanced reflection: Nazi perpetrators and leaders were not freaks, but they had been brought up in a culture of rancid, self-pitying national paranoia after the defeat of 1918. Almost all the prominent Nazis came from middle-class families with right-wing values—patriotism, antisemitism, fear of “Bolshevism”—for whom righteous violence seemed a sign of manliness.

Evans is attempting, in his own painstaking and carefully judicious way, to answer those two indelible popular questions about Nazi leaders and perpetrators: How could they have? Were they abnormal? His answers could be summarized as: the Nazis were not ordinary people; they were ordinary German people, living in the firestorm of hatred and delusion ignited after World War I.

"Hitler’s People" is divided into four parts: “The Leader,” “The Paladins,” “The Enforcers,” and “The Instruments.” 

Evans starts with a ninety-page essay on Adolf Hitler, a full, elegantly written account of the Führer’s life that uses the new research of the past few years to update older narratives. As he does throughout the book, he corrects some venerable myths and false details that have fossilized into accepted fact. The story that Hitler was psychologically crippled in his early years by a sadistic father and the death of his mother is ill-founded: “He did not…grow up in poverty; nor does his father Alois seem to have been an alcoholic.” He did not acquire his overwhelming antisemitism in Vienna but much later in Munich, after he emerged from World War I. It was not “big business” that financed and propelled him to power; many leading industrialists were repulsed by Nazi violence and disorder in the 1930s and backed other parties. He was not a drug addict in his last year, which ended in the Berlin bunker; his medication was “conventional,” and he was a wreck mainly because he was suffering from Parkinson’s. And Hitler was not invariably “cold” and “unemotional” or lacking a private life. He sought the company (though rarely more) of a series of pretty women, and at home with friends in the Bavarian Alps he could seem jokey and entertaining. But nothing now remains of the myth that he possessed Napoleonic military genius (the “greatest general of all time,” as the German media called him). The only mystery is how German armies survived to fight so long and so stubbornly under the disastrous orders he screamed to his generals.

Historians have held contrasting views on how Hitler came to exercise such absolute power after 1933. Evans notes that “the conservative German journalist” Joachim Fest concluded in 1973, that Hitler somehow expressed the general disorientation of the German people. 

Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography in the late 1990s, “portrayed Hitler as in part the creation of a ‘charismatic community’ of enthusiastic disciples whose adulation pushed the Nazi leader into an ever-stronger belief in himself.” The German historian Peter Longerich rejected this: Hitler was nobody else’s creation, and he alone achieved his total dominance. By 1940, after his conquest of France and much of Central Europe, he reached a frenzied peak of self-assertion, spraying Germany with Trump-like superlatives. The invasion of France was “the greatest battle of all time,” and the conquest of other European states was the “mightiest series of battles in world history.” Most recently scholars have grown interested in the practice by senior Nazi officials of “working towards the Führer,” that is, anticipating how the erratic Hitler might have carried out a policy he had left unexplained or uncompleted. It’s argued, not very convincingly, that this guesswork led to continual radicalizations of policy that he might not initially have intended.

Almost all the biographies in this book record the overwhelming impact of meeting Hitler for the first time. Some Nazis exaggerated its force, as if to excuse their subsequent crimes. Evans cannot quite explain it. Part of it, we can assume, was a suppressed wish to be morally dominated by a convincing leader. But part was tricks: Hitler’s use of his large eyes to drill into men’s psyches; his insistence on audiences spread broadly around him, not facing him lengthwise; his demagogic oratory (first lulling them with dull, impressive “facts,” then suddenly raising his voice to a shout and bursting into rabble-rousing passion). He spread the crazy conspiracy theories that drove him—above all, the idea of the Jewish world conspiracy in alliance with “Bolsheviks”—and yet he was skeptical about mystic cultishness. Evans could have written effectively about Hitler’s scorn for the pseudo-archaeology of the German race cooked up by Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg. (It may be only a myth that he lost patience with Himmler’s excavations and exploded: “Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past?”)

Evans does not conceal his own horror at the sheer ruthlessness of Hitlerite terror, a boundless hatred culminating in the Holocaust. Perhaps inevitably he gives only a few pages to anything worthwhile that the Nazi regime might have achieved. Yet the social welfare programs launched by Robert Ley and the Labor Front were vast and innovative, from the “Strength Through Joy” cruises and cultural activities for workers to improved, more egalitarian conditions in workplaces. All this was authoritarian, erected on the ruins of the crushed trade unions. But, for the first time the working classes could feel that a German government, even a fascist tyranny, was deliberately using its energies in their interest.

Some of that feeling survived the collapse of the Reich. It’s worth remembering that parts of Germany were scarcely affected by the bombing and battles of the war. For many Germans, the disaster came in the two years following the defeat, when millions suddenly found themselves lacking food, heat, work, and even soap. For this shame, people were disinclined to blame Hitler. The past was seen through selective tunnel vision. I remember being struck speechless when an old lady in Bonn said to me, “Say what you like about him, but in Adolf’s time at least there was no crime!”

The “paladins,” the leading Nazis who formed Hitler’s “court,” were variously explained away by their Allied conquerors. Churchill, invoking old American movies, called them “gangsters.” The Allied Control Commission observed unhelpfully that “so grotesque and preposterous are the principal characters in this galaxy of clowns and crooks” that it was impossible to see how anyone “could have taken them for rulers.” The psychiatrists appointed to observe the Nuremberg defendants asserted that they were variously psychopathic: Rudolf Hess was “a self-perpetuated hysteric”; Julius Streicher was “paranoid”; Ley had “frontal lobe damage” and “organic brain disease”; and so on. It was an English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who compared them to Roman courtiers. Evans rather agrees. It’s remarkable, he observes, that almost all of them survived to the bitter end. Unlike Stalin, who had most of his paladins arrested and shot, Hitler did not extend his paranoia to his inner circle until they began to desert him in the final days of the war.

Evans includes brief biographies of the members of that inner circle: Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Himmler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Ernst Röhm, and Rosenberg. He omits Martin Bormann, the grim careerist who rose after 1942 to become Hitler’s secretary and—next to the Führer himself—the most powerful figure in the Reich. With very few exceptions (Göring’s antisemitism was “perfunctory and conventional,” while Speer exploited the enslavement of Europe’s Jews without subscribing to racial theorizing), Evans insists that most of Hitler’s paladins believed unquestioningly and passionately in a “Jewish world conspiracy” that was directing the policies of foreign powers against Germany. This belief, he implies, was the most enduring motive for their actions and choices.

But there are other ways of looking at Nazi beliefs. The late Erhard Eppler, a radical Christian who became “the conscience of the Social Democrats” in postwar West Germany, used to invoke the Roman fasces as the image of twentieth-century fascism: a bundle of quite disparate rods (or policies) held together by the strap of the leader. When the strap is cut, the rods scatter, and people could claim that “I agreed with Hitler about revising the Versailles Treaty or ‘degenerate culture,’ but I always thought the persecution of the Jews a grave mistake. So I never believed in the whole fasces-bundle. So I was never truly a Nazi!” To which Evans’s book in effect retorts: During the Third Reich, you could not pick and choose between “rods.” You either accepted or rejected the bundle as a whole.

General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, commanding Army Group North in the Baltic, was revolted by the SS massacres of Jews around his units but did nothing to stop them, although he was formally responsible for what took place in his region. He and his deputy “accepted at the very least that there was a ‘Jewish question’ that was urgent enough to justify compulsory sterilization.” In his chapter on Franz von Papen, the right-wing politician who helped Hitler come to power in 1933, and in many other essays in the book, Evans reminds us how widespread a “conventional” antisemitism—no longer restricted to religious prejudice—had become in twentieth-century Europe. In many ways, the appalling experience of fascism has overshadowed the sheer nastiness of the European conservative parties it replaced: class-based, crudely patriotic, authoritarian, and clerical, often with racist colonial ambitions, and violently opposed to the political expression of the working class.

The broad notion behind Hitler’s People is that recent history requires the study of individuals. Evans is instinctively suspicious of broad-brush collective analyses. Writing about General von Leeb and the reputation of the Wehrmacht, he notes that “social-science approaches to history, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, strengthened…anonymizing tendencies.” It was not until the 1990s that a traveling exhibition caused furious protest in Germany by demonstrating that the Wehrmacht, and not just the SS, had committed widespread mass murder and crimes against humanity during World War II. At the same time historians began to examine the choices and conduct of individual Wehrmacht commanders, such as Leeb. Ironically enough, this had already been done fifty years earlier but then concealed. The American military tried fourteen German generals in 1948, including Leeb, and gave eleven of them heavy prison sentences, “but as the Cold War got under way, the Americans came under huge pressure from West German institutions”; the West needed to revive the German army, and the generals were freed.

It’s fair to say that the lives (and deaths) of most of Evans’s subjects are reasonably well known. What he adds is twofold: first, a scrubbing away of false myths; second, a sharp-edged series of discussions about the changing verdicts of historians over the eighty years since the Reich was destroyed. Hess, for instance, was not mad, although he pretended to be at his trial. He had once been a fanatical and effective deputy führer, and his lone flight to Scotland in 1941 to find the Duke of Hamilton and make a separate peace was not crazy, in the sense that it fit into the utterly distorted Nazi view of how the world worked.

Evans’s chapter on Adolf Eichmann becomes a “trial” of Hannah Arendt and her endlessly debated concept of “the banality of evil.” He stoutly defends her: "This phrase was widely, sometimes willfully misunderstood. What she meant by 'the banality of evil' was not that Eichmann was a mere bureaucrat…. For Arendt, he was typical of the kind of person who…were the executors of regimes like Hitler’s or Stalin’s: second-rate minds, lacking the faculty of independent or creative thought."

Evans shows that, far from being a faceless operative with no opinions, Eichmann was “a deep-dyed antisemite” and “a man of overweening ambition” who “lacked any kind of moral intelligence.” Hans Frank, the Nazis’ favorite courtroom lawyer, suddenly found himself ruling the “General Government” of occupied Poland. He is remembered now for his deliberate extermination of Poland’s elites (“the Polish lands are to be changed into an intellectual desert”) and for his corruption—he looted portable treasures from all over Eastern Europe. Less well known is Frank’s delusional attempt to outflank his rival Himmler by preaching a return to the rule of law, only to be silenced by an infuriated Hitler.

Evans shows no mercy for Speer, whose personal myth of being just a nonpolitical technocrat who tried to restrain the worst excesses was swallowed whole or in part by so many biographers and historians. He joins the consensus, however, in finding no good word to say about Ribbentrop, Hitler’s abominable ambassador to London and later foreign minister. Absurdly crude and tactless, Ribbentrop greeted the British king with a Sieg Heil salute that only just missed the royal nose. He sought to keep in Hitler’s favor by pushing his policies to extremes; at the end of the war, it was Ribbentrop who organized the overthrow of the Hungarian government in order to ensure the murder of Hungary’s Jews. The terrifying Reinhard Heydrich, the expressionless Aryan “god” who was head of the Gestapo and the SS, was dogged by the false whisper that he had Jewish ancestry. From a musical family, he played the violin beautifully. His boss Himmler was only briefly a chicken farmer; Evans shows that this man, more directly responsible than anyone for the murder of millions, was intensely concerned with respectability. He forced the SS into shirts and ties and smart black uniforms, and in his 1943 “Posen speeches” to his assembled killers insisted on the maintenance of “decency” (Anstand) as they shot and gassed.

Afew women appear in Hitler’s People, in spite of the regime’s “hyper-masculine ideas of toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” and its pseudo-Germanic segregation of gender roles. Two of them—Ilse Koch and Irma Grese—were concentration camp guards, but Gertrud Scholtz-Klink was Reich women’s leader, heading the huge Frauenschaft organization. Recent research has shown that its members—and many German women who were not members—were deeply involved in many aspects of the regime, even if they did not engage directly in its crimes. 

As wives and mothers, they knew, and for the most part tolerated or approved of, and sometimes even assisted in, the crimes of their menfolk.

As for the Reich’s most famous and argued-over woman, the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the book includes the photograph of her aghast face as she watched German soldiers open fire on a crowd of Jewish civilians. Evans recognizes her astounding talent, but he is unsparing about her long, intimate friendship with Hitler and her inestimable services to the image of Nazi Germany. Demolishing her efforts to denazify her past, Evans resurrects Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in these pages, which demonstrated the hidden continuities in Riefenstahl’s work, from Nazi propaganda in the 1930s to her postwar filming of Nuba tribesmen in Sudan.

He follows this by reminding readers (Eppler’s fasces image again) that “there were many Germans who were not fanatical Nazis but supported Nazism because it put into practice a sufficient range of their desires and aspirations for them to discount the other aspects.” His witness for this is the decades-long diary kept by the outwardly ordinary housewife Luise Solmitz in Hamburg. Solmitz felt patriotic ecstasy when she first heard Hitler speak in 1932 and was “drunk with enthusiasm” when he became chancellor; her only reservation was that the Nazis might turn out to be too “socialist.” She even denounced her brother for “disloyalty,” saying that she preferred to betray her own sibling rather than betray Hitler: “Like many other middle-class Germans, she was willing to accept almost any measure taken by the Nazis if it could be justified in terms of maintaining order and warding off the threat of revolution.” And yet she was married to a Jew.

Her husband, Friedrich Solmitz, was a decorated war veteran whose family had converted to Lutheranism and had lost any connection with the Jewish community. But as war approached, restrictions on this “non-Aryan” began to bite on the pair and on their “mixed-race” daughter Gisela, forbidden now to matriculate or to marry an “Aryan” German. Luise raged on Gisela’s behalf and even wrote a protesting letter to the Führer, but she recorded in her diary that “we were all exhilarated by happiness and enthusiasm” after Germany’s victory over France in 1940. Then, gradually, the balance between her pride in Hitler’s achievements and her distress over gathering antisemitism began to tip. Somehow Gestapo attempts to deport Friedrich (to his death, they could guess) were fended off by reference to his medals and his Aryan wife. But as the British air offensive against Hamburg began, killing 40,000 people in a few nights of firestorm, Luise turned at last against Hitler himself: “A great man,” she wrote, “is only one who knows how to moderate himself.” After the dictator’s suicide, she called him “the shabbiest failure in world history.” But as Evans notes, she always avoided identifying herself and Friedrich with the collective fate of Germany’s Jews: “Hitler’s ultimate crime indeed in her view was that he betrayed Germany.”

To emerge from Evans’s long gallery of criminals against humanity is to feel educated but pessimistic. So many of them came from respectable middle-class families, were educated, and played stringed instruments with love and skill. Is it possible that they were not only cruel and fanatical but also stupid? Evans won’t have this: “Many Nazis were neither stupid nor ignorant, but highly educated and well informed.” Well informed? It’s almost impossible now to imagine how little nations knew about one another ninety years ago and how they filled that void with every kind of cartoonish stereotype. Germany, knocked senseless by military, economic, and political disaster, was especially delusive. And yet the evidence about international reality was available. It took genuine stupidity for Nazis of normal intelligence to believe—or choose to believe—in a world Jewish conspiracy, or that the Duke of Hamilton could pull Britain out of the war, or that General de Gaulle would join Himmler in a new war against Britain. All those absurdities arose from the same stupidity and often willful ignorance that made Irma Grese expect a friendly welcome from the Allied troops liberating Bergen-Belsen. Evans concludes that Germans in that period “exercised their own individual will when making the decisions they took.” But one of those decisions was to abandon critical reason. Gloomily, he warns that the invitation to wide-eyed stupidity, ignoring evidence and common sense, has returned to degrade politics today.

Let's write about Kathryn Hepburn's brownie recipe!

A dinner invitaiton  typically ends with, "What can I bring? 

My response is "What about a dessert?". And so, that is how I found the story behind the recipe for Kathryn Hepburn's brownies! They are divienly delicious! Many thanks to my dinner guests who introced me to this recipe published in Food News and Trends. Bon appetit!

Katharine Hepburn’s #1 Trick for the Best Brownies Is Totally Brilliant!

If you dig fudgy brownies, you have to try her foolproof recipe.
By Karla Walsh  Published on April 19, 2024

Countless Allrecipes community members—and the whole of our staff—are a little (okay, a lot) in love with brownies.

On a constant quest to take them to the next level, we have tested and perfected Mmm-Mmm Better Brownies. We’ve got the Best Brownies. And if this recipe could talk, it would say “Not so fast, I’m, Absolutely the Best Brownies.” We can’t forget Brooke's Best Bombshell Brownies and The Ultimate Brownies, either.

The competition for the ultimate, absolute best brownie of all time is stiff, so we’ll leave that up to you to decide which earns your trophy. 

But. before you make your final call, we have another contender to add to the mix after scouring the archives of the PBS project, The History Kitchen: Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies.

We’ll be dishing up the recipe below, but before we do, we have to take a moment to highlight the silver screen icon’s remarkably simple secret that makes her brownies—and honestly, any brownie recipe—better.

Katharine Hepburn's Trick for Better Brownies: In the 1980s, Hepburn was in a car accident. Her neighbor had heard about this and brought her a batch of brownies to sweeten her day as she recovered. According to The History Kitchen, as well as a story in The New York Times, she “was opinionated and brutally honest,” telling her neighbor that his brownies were not quite up to par. “Too much flour! And don't overbake them! They should be moist, not cakey,” she advised.

The biggest key of all, and one that lives on in the memory of the daughter of the neighbor (who was also close with Hepburn and wrote the story): “Don't put too much flour in your brownies.” Her other life advice? Never quit and be yourself.

Dialing in the just right amount of flour is key to yielding that beautifully rich, gooey, and fudgy texture. Add too much flour, and your brownies dry, crumbly, and might taste slightly stale.

Since it can be tough to measure flour correctly in cups, we’ve included a gram estimate in Hepburn’s brownie recipe below so you can employ a kitchen scale if you have one handy.

P.S. Prefer your brownies with no flour at all? Don’t miss our ultra-easy two-ingredient brownie recipe.

How to Make Katharine Hepburn’s Famous Brownie Recipe

In addition to her pro tips about the flour and not overbaking the brownies, Hepburn shared her own signature brownie recipe with her neighbor. 

After Hepburn passed away in 2003, the neighbor’s daughter later sent this tale, along with the recipe, to The Times as a letter to the editor in the actor’s memory.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup cocoa or 2 squares (2 ounces) unsweetened baker's chocolate
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup (30 grams) flour
• Pinch of salt
• 1 cup roughly chopped walnuts or pecans

Directions: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Butter an 8x8-inch baking pan, then set it aside.

In a heavy saucepan over medium-low heat, melt butter with the cocoa or chocolate, whisking constantly until blended.

Remove the pan from the heat, then stir in the sugar.
Whisk in eggs and vanilla, followed by the flour, salt, and nuts. Mix well.

Pour the batter into the prepared baking pan. Bake in the preheated oven for about 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. After the brownies are completely cool, use a knife to cut them into squares (employing a spatula to help loosen them from the pan, if necessary).

Enjoy while watching your favorite Katharine Hepburn movie.

Adapted from PBS.

Indeed they are amazing brownies!  Thanks to our dinner guests!

Let's write about an episode in the sport of boxing year 1936: Schmeling and Lewis New York City

Chapter 14, segment from "The Boys in the Boat", by Daniel James Brown.  An interesting report about boxing history during the rise of Nazi Germany. This particular segment from the wonderful history about the University of Washington's 1936, crew team's olympic gold medal victory, is a story unto itself. 

In the final days before the Poughkeepsie Regatta with University of Washington's crew team, another big sports story dominated the headlines on sports pages and sometimes on front pages areound the country- the story of a heavyweight boxing match.

Max Schmeling of Germany had been the hearvy-weight champion of the world from 1930 to 1932, and he was set on reclaiming the title from James Braddock.

Joe Lewis (May 13, 1914 – April 12, 1981) was an American professional boxer who competed from 1934 to 1951. Nicknamed "The Brown Bomber", ...

But, a twenty-two-year-old African American boxer from Detroit (he was born in Alabama) names Joe Louis, stood in Schmeling's way.

Louis had battled his way through twenty-seven professional matches with twenty-three  knockouts and no defeats to reach his current status as the number one challenger in the world.

In doing so, he had gradually begun to erode the racial attitudes of many- though far from all- white Americans. He was on his way, in fact, to becoming one of the first African Americans to be widely viewed as a hero by ordinary white Americans. Louis's rise to prominence had been so spectacular that few American sportswriters or bookies gave Schmeling much of a chance.

In Germany, though, the view was very different.  Although Schmeling was not a Nazi Party member, Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi elite had enthuysiastically latched onto him and promised him as a symbol of German and Aryan supremacy.  The German press under the careful directonf of the minister of propaganda had made much of the umcoming fight.

Everyone on both sides of the Atlantic had an opinion about what would happen.  Even the crew tream's coaches in Poughkeepsie took time out to comment on the fight.  

"Schmeling might go four rounds," opined Al Ulbrickson*, Ky Ebright** was a blunter:  "Louis will murder him."

When the fight began, in a sold-out Yankee Stadium on the evening of June 19, 1936, (YouTube trailer here), Louis was at eight to one, the overwhelming favorite in New York. In Germany, though, interest in the fight was at a fever pitch, there was almost no betting on the fight. The odds were so low on Schmeling that few wanted to risk their cast, and no one wanted to be caught bettong on a black American.

In a small square of white light in the vast, dark void of the stadium, Louis stalked Schmeling around the ring like a predator for three rounds, lacing him with hard left jabs to the face.  It looked as if it would be a short evening. But, in the fourth round, out of nowhere, Schmeling landed a hard right to the temple that knowcked Louis to a sitting position on the floor. Louis took a count of two and then rose to his feet, covering his face and retreating until the bell sounded. Through the fifth round, Louis seemed dazed and ineffective. 

And then, at the end of the fifth, following the bell- which neither fighter heard over the crowd noise- Schmeling landed a particularly devastating right to the left side of Louis's head.  For the next six rounds,  Louis staggered about the ring, punished by a relentless barrage of rights to the jaw, somehow staying on his feet but scoring few if any points and inficting little damage on the German boxer.  Many in the overhwelmingly white crowd had by now turned suddenly and savagely against Louis.  "Delirious with joy," by the New York Times account, they screamed for Schmeling to end it.  Fiunally, in the twelfth, Schmeling went in for the kill.  With Louis now careening almost aimlessly around the ring, the German leaned into Louis's body and launched a rapid-fire flurry of hard rights to his head and fact, followed by one final cdrushing blow to the jaw.  Louis sank to his kneews, then toppled forward on his face.  Referee Arthur Donovan counted him out.  In the dressing room afterward, Louis said he couldn't remember anything about the fight beyond the fifth round.

That night in Harlem, grown men wee wept in the streets.  Younger men thres rocks at cars full of white fans returning from the boxing match.

In German American sections of New York, people danced in the street5s. In Berlin, Hitler wired his congratulatons to Schmeling and sent his wife flowers. 

Nevertheless, no one in Germany was happier with the evening's developments than Joseph Goebbles.  He had spent the night at his post summer house at Schwanenwerder, sitting with the fight on the radio, into the wee hours. He sent Schmeling a congratulatory telegram of his own.  "We are proud of you.  With best wishes and Heil Hitler."

Then, he ordered the state-controlled Reuters News Agency to issue a statement.  "Inexorably and not without justification, we demand Braddock shall defend the title on German soil."

The next day, still excited, Goebbels sat down and made an entry in his journal. "We were on tenterhooks the whole evening with Schmeling's wife. We told each other stories, laughed and cheered.  In round twelve, Schmeling knocked out the Negro. Fantastic. 

A dramatic, thrilling fight.  Schmeling fought for Germany and won.

The white man prevailed over the black, and the white man was German.  I didn't go to bed until five."

In the end, though, Jow Louis would have the last laugh. He would indeed fight Max Schmeling again, two years later, and Schmeling would las all of two minutes and four seconds befoe his corner threw in the towel. Jow Louis would reighn as heavyweight champion of the world from 1937 to 1940, long after Joseph Goeggeles charred body had been pulled out of the smoldering rubble of the reich Chancellery in Berlin and laid next to those of his wife Magda and their children. (Joseph and Magda Goebbels had six children: Helga, 1932, Hilde, 1934, Helmut, 1935, Holde, 1937, Hedda, 1938, and Heide, 1940. Joseph Goebbels had many affairs during the marriage.The children, born between 1932-1940, were murdered by their parents in Berlin on 1 May 1945, the day both parents committed suicide.)

*Alvin M. Ulbrickson, Sr. (1903-1980) also known as Al Ulbrickson Sr., was an American rower and coach. After rowing as a student at the University of Washington, Ulbrickson went on to coach the crew there from 1927 until retiring in 1959.

**Carroll M. "Ky" Ebright (1894-1979) was a revered coach for the University of California, Berkeley crew.

Let's write about Franz Kafka and antisemitism

This essay echo published in the New York Review by Deborah Eisenberg is a chaotic description about the Franz Kafka exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. I found it difficult to follow her point of view, because her exhibit analysis seemed to be as cryptic as the German translation of "ungeheuren Ungeziefer".....the hideous "bug" character in The Metamorphosis (published 1915). But, I recomment this article because of the connections made evident, describing waves of antisemitism in Europe. 

Franz Kafka and his sister Ottla in the Czech Republic (Bohemia).  Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917.

Urgent Messages from Eternity an essay by Deborah Eisenberg
An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

Franz Kafka an exhibition at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, May 30–October 27, 2024, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, November 22, 2024–April 13, 2025

Nevertheless, because Eisenberg threads her review with correlations to anttisemitism, and how Kafka grew up in Prague, her essay is worth the read, especially if you have read The Metamorphosis. 

If Franz Kafka, whose arresting appearance we know so well from photographs, had looked like Ernest Hemingway or Homer Simpson or Boris Johnson—almost anybody other than Franz Kafka—the figure of a hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, self-enclosed neurotic, whose quivering otherworldly sensitivity unfitted him to the trivialities of human intercourse, might not stand so firmly between us and him. The ears suggesting extraterrestrial ancestry, the “intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control,” as Philip Roth puts it. Even Kafka’s baby picture reproduced on a wall of the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition “Franz Kafka” says, Uh-oh, here comes trouble.

Those indelible images of a lone witness about to be engulfed in darkness function as graphic emblems of Kafka’s writing, and reinforce a wariness among potential readers. In any case, there seem to be a lot of people who approach (or avoid) Kafka’s fiction in anticipation of something somber, cryptic, too abstruse to enjoy. It’s unfortunate, because the fiction is mesmerizing, unendingly rewarding, and often wildly funny. It comes to the page from very deep regions of the mind—a narrative alloy of matchless realness, shocking intensity, and essential mystery. True, one might be baffled, horrified, resistant, or impervious, but reading Kafka’s fiction requires no more special skills or knowledge than dreaming does. As in a dream, each image, each narrative element, is a condensed amalgam of multiple associations whose relationships are both protean and tightly entwined. And like dreams, his fiction invites—provokes, demands—interpretation. To which it is ultimately unsusceptible; it’s just too—pardon me, but—perfect. The enigma is irreducible.

Showing at the Morgan until April 13, “Franz Kafka” marked the centennial of Kafka’s death when it opened last fall and was first mounted as “Kafka: Making of an Icon” at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. An exhibition of this sort is possible because scrupulous and inspired scholarship over the past decades has yielded an enormous amount of information about Kafka. At the very least, the conventionalized portrait of the writer has gained detail, and quite a different man comes forward from the darkness. It’s not that the familiar epithets are inaccurate in themselves—Kafka was in fact hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, and afflicted by neurotic symptoms—but that the brand is; he was also, we find, exceptionally alive, fairly sociable, reasonably athletic, widely curious, unusually able and multitalented, with charm to burn. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, it turns out that a number of those striking solo images of him were extracted from photographs in which he appeared with other people, including his first (and second) fiancée, Felice Bauer.

The apparently ineradicable notion that he was incapable of a “real” sexual or romantic relationship is a bit of a fiction. True, his love life was conflicted and tormented, filled with obstacles and sorrows, vexed by the restrictive ambivalence and fears particular to his nature, but was it that much more conflicted and tormented, filled with obstacles and sorrows, vexed by idiosyncratic psychological tendencies, than—frankly—the usual?

His oeuvre (the real word might be "collecion" of writing 😕😦) is considered very small, and compared to its stature and to the commentaries, translations, analyses, biographical studies, and slag heaps of verbiage it has generated, it certainly is. It includes the portion of his short fiction that was published during his lifetime (a small fraction of everything he wrote) and the vast majority of his writing that was never intended (by him) to see the light of day: aphorisms, three unfinished novels, various other fragments, and an abundance of notebooks, diaries, and letters. He was sharply observant of himself as well as others, and maybe it’s the purely private writing that has licensed the opinion of many people (who themselves might keep journals) that he was significantly more self-involved than they.
Kafka’s reservations concerning the publication of his fiction are well known, as is the stipulation in his will that his close friend and champion, the writer Max Brod, burn his unpublished work, and it’s well known that Brod did not. Less well known is that Kafka himself burned a certain amount, and that his final love, Dora Diamant, whom he wished to marry, said she also burned some, though that seems not to have been true. What is true is that what we have was saved from oblivion only by chains of improbable circumstances, starting in 1939—as the exhibit tells us—with Brod’s escape from Prague on the last train out before the Germans invaded, with a suitcase full of Kafka’s papers.

Selections at the Morgan of this treasure, available to be seen in the United States for the first time, include the manuscript of Die Verwandlung (the story whose title is usually translated as The Metamorphosis), a notebook containing the story “The Judgment,” a notebook opened to the page where Kafka broke off his unfinished novel Das Schloss (The Castle) in midsentence, other manuscript pages, notebook and diary entries, letters, four original pages of his aphorisms, postcards sent from his European travels—several of them, amusing and affectionate, to his youngest and favorite sister, Ottla—and a few of his drawings.

Also on display is a facsimile page of the novella-length letter he wrote to his stormy, belittling, dismissive, blowhard father, Hermann, who, even when Franz was gaining recognition in Prague, considered his son’s consuming drive to write to be an inexplicable pastime, like a fancy for model trains. 

Reiner Stach, in his enthralling three-volume biography of Kafka, notes that Hermann often spoke of his own childhood sufferings “as though his miseries were great achievements.” (The letter never reached him; it was intercepted by Kafka’s milder, more sympathetic mother, Julie.)

It’s an odd sensation—a little bewildering—to drift through a show of a writer’s papers, especially if one doesn’t read the language in which they’re written. After all, unless one is a graphologist or an expert in the composition of ink or paper, what exactly are we looking at? How do they illuminate the life of a writer who lived in another time? And what does a writer’s life have to do with the writing, anyhow? For that matter, what does the writing have to do with the writer? Does the moral conduct, for instance, of the writer correspond to the validity of the writer’s work?

The fashion of the moment says yes, I say no, but even on the off chance a correct answer exists, it will not be derived from pieces of paper on a wall. And although there have been a great many children with a parent or two as crushing as Hermann Kafka—children who have been made to feel miserable inadequacy, persistent guilt, shame, resentment of the injustice, and as much fear of their own internalized feelings as of the parent who levied them—no manuscript fragment, or indeed anything else, will explain how it came to be that Franz Kafka and only Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis. Yet the sheer physical fact of these papers, the intimate small shock of the handwriting, of a word or phrase crossed out, the irrefutable existence of a time that once existed in exactly the same materiality as ours, is at moments uncannily effective; one feels that urgent messages from eternity, written in an indecipherable language, are emitting an inextinguishable afterglow.

If you were new to the planet, it might never occur to you that eggs and butter and sugar and flour, of all things, constitute cupcakes, but you might very much enjoy eating one. And the more you learn about the particulars of Kafka’s life, the clearer it becomes that the use he made of those particulars in his work has emptied them of biographical significance and mobilized their transcendent essences: the anxiously readjusting logical progressions; the specters of shame, guilt, justice, and power inequities; the tasks that must, but cannot possibly, be accomplished; the conundrum of the individual’s relationship to social authority—the father, the colonizer, the judge, the academy.

Most mysterious is the tensile strength of the pieces. Nothing feels arbitrary or random or empty. The integrity, the inner coherence, is—though unfathomable—unassailable. The core seems to unfold and unfold; sometimes one has a sensation of falling from a great height at several speeds simultaneously—a breathtaking plummet with leisure to see the passing details outlined with a preternatural clarity.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: “Life and Times,” “The Metamorphosis,” “The Castle,” “Journeys,” and the fifth, implicitly culminating section, which repeats the startling phrase “Making of an Icon” from the title of the catalog. A display of this kind can provide only sparkly little points of orientation to Kafka’s “life and times,” but radiating out from his fairly stable social and historical position, their coordinates connect as a huge, threatening net, pulsing with violence, past and future, in which Kafka was deeply enmeshed.

Hermann and Julie were Jewish, as the exhibition makes clear. As we know, for centuries throughout much of Europe, Jews were de facto aliens, frequently herded into semiautonomous communities, barred from many ways of making a living and from owning land and therefore from participating in the civic life of their nation. But conversant by default with disreputable things like trade and currency, Jews also had their uses, and from time to time a reformer would come to power, loosen restrictions, and confer various rights.

Distrust and murderous fear of this disenfranchised, persecuted, and excluded—and therefore unallied and politically “unreliable”—group didn’t automatically evaporate when restrictions were lifted; they did not evaporate, for example, in Prague, where Kafka was born and grew up. Active antisemitism was largely quiescent in Kafka’s youth—confined to a tense atmosphere—though the Jewish community, try as it might to fit in, was always aware that it was on historically thin ice, ice that was shattered from time to time by spasms of violence.

Owing to the Austrian constitutional reforms of 1849, Hermann Kafka—unlike his own father, a schochet (kosher butcher)—could legally marry and choose his means of livelihood as well as his place of residence. Like many liberated Jews in Bohemia, Hermann came to Prague, escaping a straitened life in a rural village, and with the help of Julie’s dowry, agreeable personality, and family experience in retail, this overbearing and abrasive man opened a fancy-goods shop, where the couple toiled like cart horses. The child of this basically secular pair, who were determined to assimilate into the bourgeois German-speaking Jewish culture of the city, was both stiflingly pampered and stiflingly pressured—a familiar social pattern; his mandate from birth was to shed ethnic signifiers and enact his father’s idea of what it meant to be a success, an idea that contained no template for weirdo writer.

Kafka was a born outsider—to the life his parents had put behind them, to the life they emulated, and to the language spoken by half of Prague. The city was populated by German-speaking Protestants as well as by Czech-speaking Catholics, between whom there was plenty of bad historical blood; the Kafkas spoke the language of the empire, but increasingly the prestige and social potency of German was waning in favor of Czech—the language of the nation.

The day of Kafka’s birth happened also to be the day on which an anodyne-sounding Bohemian parliamentary decision effected a momentous power shift that enabled many more of the Czech majority—and more Jews, too—to vote. Here’s what the Neue Freie Presse, the Viennese newspaper of record, had to say about that: “Will it really get to the point that Prague drowns in the Slavic inundation?” Not at all, the paper declared: “Prague will again become what it was, a center of human culture, that is to say German culture.” Reality had other plans. Throughout Austria-Hungary, countries and regions were chafing under imperial control and increasingly resentful of the imposition of German and Hungarian over their own languages. In Bohemia, tensions between the Germans and the Czechs heated up, and antisemitism was once again a live issue, with Jews being a handy—and unifying—target for all sides. The empire held together until 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, though in retrospect one hears the rotted seams tearing in 1883 as Kafka was laid in his cradle.

Thousands of years have not sufficed to settle the contentious (particularly among Jews) debates about what constitutes Jewishness—what makes a person a Jew. And in the absence of solid criteria, when push, so to speak, comes to shove, either self-definition or antisemitism will qualify you as a Jew to someone. And in that sense—although his relationship to both Judaism and Zionism (like Judaism a blurry category) was complex, conflicted, and vacillating throughout the course of his life—Kafka doubly qualified.

Formally, he was less engaged in Judaism than his parents, who observed the High Holidays and Passover and never disassociated themselves from the religion. But whereas they were eager to wash their hands of exotic stains, Kafka, like many acculturated young urban Jews, felt the pull of Jewish—that is, Eastern European and Russian Jewish—culture, stories, and mysticism. He studied some Hebrew and taught himself more, learned a bit of Yiddish, and periodically dreamed of traveling to Palestine.

There are a couple of photos in the show, discharging a faded carnival atmosphere, of performers in a traveling Yiddish theater company in which Kafka became very interested. Really, it’s not at all surprising that courteous, reserved, punctiliously dressed, and fastidious Herr Doctor Franz Kafka (the title was conferred with his doctorate of law degree) was entranced by this ragged, filthy, largely illiterate, stunningly amateurish company, and promoted their performances to a baffled audience of Prague’s middle-class Jews, who couldn’t understand a word they said. To the horrified revulsion of his father, he befriended the leader of the troupe, Jizchok Löwy.

Narrated by a former wild ape who is now a famous performing hybrid of some sort, “A Report to an Academy,” like all of Kafka’s fiction, neatly fuses associations of many sorts. The story most conspicuously concerns the unwilled betrayal of one’s own nature, the costs entailed—the quasi-freedom and third-rate approval gained in being forcibly deracinated. The overwhelming impact of the story doesn’t in the least depend on knowing about Kafka’s conflicted relationship to assimilation or that he referred to himself as his “parents’ ape.” But knowing it does make one feel worse for Kafka.

Kafka longed to escape Prague, which he called “this little mother” with “claws,” and to enter into the literary life of Berlin and Vienna. His curiosity about the world was active—the exhibition notes his dreamy attraction to China and Japan—but he never got farther than Paris and northern Italy. One of his pleasures (a pleasure that seems to have been sunnier in retrospect) was traveling, when possible with Brod. On these brief trips Brod ran off to see the sights while Kafka washed away travel grime and then went out to see the people.

Featured in the show is an architectural model of an apartment where the family lived for some time, which served, with a bit of imaginary reconfiguring, as the inescapable interior of The Metamorphosis. Kafka was said to be abnormally sensitive to noise, and if nature did not make him so, no doubt the layout of the apartment did. Unlike his sisters’ shared room, his was “private”—but it had two doors, one opening onto his parents’ room and the other onto the living room, and to get to their own bedroom, Hermann and Julie had to pass right through their son’s.

He lived with his parents until he was thirty, but oddly, the section of the exhibition devoted to The Metamorphosis—the ultimate domestic story, and Kafka’s best known, whose famous first sentence describes Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, awakening from troubled dreams to the reality that he is a giant, disgusting, bug-like thing—is largely given over to elegant drawings of bugs and entomological writings. This apparent deflection calls attention to a problem that has flummoxed Kafka translators from the outset: How to translate the physical form that Samsa has assumed in the new (and final) stage of his life cycle, an “ungeheuren Ungeziefer”?

Edwin and Willa Muir, Kafka’s first—and superb—English-language translators, settled on “gigantic insect”; among other approximations out there, Susan Bernofsky’s recent lively translation gives us “some sort of monstrous insect”; Mark Harmon, just “monstrous insect”; and Michael Hofmann, “monstrous cockroach.”

But the German original, something more literally like “monstrous vermin,” has a wealth of connotations, including uncleanliness and unfitness for ritual slaughter, that emphasize with fierce irony the title’s lofty promise: the fulfillment of a destiny. In The Metamorphosis we learn what that destiny is immediately: as the humble caterpillar will be in its fullness the glorious butterfly, the pitiably insufficient Samsa will be in his fullness an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. Anybody over the age of eleven or so—given a sense of humor, an empathetic nature, and a robust threshold for anxiety, grief, and horror—who has ever been, or met, a member of a bourgeois family will recognize, very possibly with gratitude and a gleeful feeling of vindication, the brute physics of family life.

Some fluent readers of German contend that Kafka is untranslatable. No doubt this is, in a strict sense, true; if languages and cultures all operated in the same way, literary translation would work sort of like Bingo, and Google Translate would be overqualified. 

But, the talents required of a literary translator include, even more than an understanding of the language being translated from, an extraordinary sensitivity to the language being translated into, an exceptionally alert responsiveness to tone, and fundamentally a deep insight into the text. As a literary translator once said to me, “If you don’t understand what’s going on between the lines, you can’t translate the lines.” Regardless of the degree of fidelity with which Kafka can be represented in another language, marvel after marvel has been rendered into English from Kafka’s German. And those of us who are confined to reading English have the somewhat compensatory pleasure of comparing the word choices of various translators, each of which emphasizes a particular coloration that influences the whole.

I’d think that one of the difficulties in translating Kafka is, paradoxically, the clean, bland, pedestrian plainness of expression—no holes or frills to hide in, nothing squishy or bendable, no suspect claims. That is to say, no room for errors or irrelevant associations. Although Kafka's fiction is often set in an indeterminate place whose natural laws are not necessarily appreciable, owing to that very precision and to the perfect verisimilitude (aka "natural sequence❓"  maybe some of Eisenberg's writing also needs translating, JMO) - in  detailed narratives, are indubitable from the very beginning.  (Huh❓ Maine Writer cannot traslate the above.....🤨)

When the coverlet slips annoyingly off Gregor Samsa’s carapace, we know, before we have a chance to think, that he’s a bug. And when he looks at the clock and understands that he didn’t hear its alarm, we experience his intensifying panic as he comes to understand that turning into a huge revolting insect is GOING TO MAKE HIM LATE FOR WORK. (Which incidentally Kafka almost was, almost always.)

Kafka’s civil service job with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute was a lot better than Samsa’s job. Less than half accurate, at best, is the notion that Kafka was a low-level clerk of some sort. On the contrary—although inconveniently Jewish, he was invaluable. His Czech was not as good as his German, but it was very good, his memos and legal briefs were outstanding in their logic and lucidity, and he was an excellent draftsman, capable of drawing a worker’s gruesome injury as well as the complicated machinery that had caused it. He was so indispensable that even when World War I broke out and he wanted badly to enlist, his employers arranged for a deferment.

Self-doubt and perfectionism, so closely but unhappily related, are common writerly characteristics, and both bedeviled Kafka to an excruciating degree. He had taken the position at the institute because it gave him time to write in the afternoons and evenings, but apparently he was incapable of doing anything with less than his full abilities—which, since he would have preferred to have no job at all, was highly counterproductive. As Reiner Stach writes:

He never left the only medium in which he could breathe: language. He longed for clarity and precision in every situation; the texts he wrote on behalf of the institute are ample proof of this…. It was not distractions, being forced to emerge from an overpowering inner intensity for hours at a time, that tormented him…. What tormented him was the endeavor to come up with the most precise linguistic expression for trivial matters. This misuse of his talent was a true act of prostitution…. Every effort of language spent on his official documents seemed to him a loss that could never be recovered.

Painful as this misuse undoubtedly was, we can’t feel, from our vantage, that it was a total loss. In his effort to extract compensation from employers for injured workers (this was at a time when insurance was supposed to help people) he was constantly required to exercise the clarity and precision that make his fiction gleam.

Published in 1914, the story “In the Penal Colony” is hectic—an almost recklessly satirical and sickening (and to me utterly hilarious) picture of sadism proudly rationalized as justice. It is also among other things a critique of colonialism, an echo of the Dreyfus Affair*, and a catalog of types and stages of complicity. The relationships of the characters to the reader and to each other keep altering, disclosing new, proliferating contingencies. Although the story obviously contains traces both of Kafka’s salaried life and of world events, its topical features have been distilled—purified of strictly local associations, absorbed into the condensed core, essentialized and timeless. Surely we can thank Kafka’s familiarity with industrial malfunctions and predictably spurious defenses of dangerous working conditions for the grotesque and preposterous machine at the story’s center, which is programmed to encode, with spikes, inscrutable scriptural corrective justice on a prisoner’s body.

It has been said of “In the Penal Colony” that Kafka anticipated the future. I doubt he envisioned the potential catastrophes of the digital world, and I hope he did not envision the murder of his little sisters, some twenty years after his own painful death from tuberculosis—one in Auschwitz and two in Chelmno. Not that there’s a hard and fast line—or really any line at all—between present and future, but it’s more remarkable to me that he saw his own present; he saw what was there to be seen. Even more remarkably, he could convey what he saw.

It would be hard not to notice that the two centenary exhibitions now at the Morgan—one celebrating a Jewish man and the other Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman, both celebrating literary history as well as literature itself—happen to have coincided with the 2024 presidential election in the United States. That was a ringing endorsement—if not ringing in numbers, ringing in stark practical consequences—of the intensifying enthusiasm for philistinism, anti-intellectualism, ignorance, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, vengefulness, antisemitism, misogyny, violence, and outright triumphal sadism that is casting its chilling shadow over our days. This is a background against which Kafka’s life and writing have a special, disturbing luster.

It’s also a background against which the show’s aim of demonstrating the astonishing reach of Kafka’s influence has an almost desperate poignancy. I’m still scratching my head over its final section, “Making of an Icon,” which includes many surprising things that have been engendered by his writing. An endearing characteristic of Kafka was that he didn’t care whether something fell into the category of high art or popular art; he liked what he liked. So it’s very possible that he would have been delighted, who’s to say, or selectively delighted, to find himself the subject of all sorts of cultural products, including comic books, children’s books, merch, what have you. The show even includes an architectural model for an apartment building in Barcelona, the architect Ricardo Bofill’s visualization of the Castle—a thing that, like an ungeheuren Ungeziefer, cannot be visualized.

The final item in the exhibit is Andy Warhol’s remarkable silkscreen print, based on the photo from which Felice Bauer was eliminated, from his 1980 series “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.” It’s beautiful and irrefutably Iconic. Warhol’s subtle tinkerings relieve Kafka of all emotional and psychological distress, and present us with a rather shy and very attractive young man.

But who is this Kafka? Where are Roth’s “enormous fears” and “enormous control”? Where is the sense—to me fundamental to Kafka’s writing—that our species isn’t well suited for the medium of life, that we don’t know how to properly inhabit it, that there’s some colossal misunderstanding at the very heart of our being, and that our lot is the unremitting, losing struggle to figure it all out?

Oh, well. It’s great to know, in this time of darkness, that Kafka has been freed from the sterile position of highbrow idol and now is recognized as one of the great influencers; that after the many adversities (including death) he endured, after the constant exhausting efforts devoted to articulating his intense, fiercely focused, visionary inner life, things have finally worked out for him.

Alfred Dreyful (1859-1935)

*The Dreyfus Affair a political scandal in France from 1894 to 1906. It involved the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer, for selling military secrets to Germany. The case exposed antisemitism in the French justice system.

The Dreyfus affair (French: affaire Dreyfus, pronounced [afɛːʁ dʁɛfys]) was a political scandal that divided the Third French Republic from 1894 until its resolution in 1906. The scandal began in December 1894, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old Alsatian French artillery officer of Jewish descent, was wrongfully convicted of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent overseas to the penal colony on Devil's Island in French Guiana, where he spent the following five years imprisoned in very harsh conditions.

In 1896, evidence came to light—primarily through the investigations of Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage—which identified the real culprit as a French Army Major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. High-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, and a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army laid additional charges against Dreyfus, based on forged documents. Subsequently, writer Émile Zola's open letter J'Accuse...! in the newspaper L'Aurore stoked a growing movement of political support for Dreyfus, putting pressure on the government to reopen the case.

In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society between those who supported Dreyfus, the "Dreyfusards" such as Sarah Bernhardt, Anatole France, Charles Péguy, Henri Poincaré, Georges Méliès, and Georges Clemenceau; and those who condemned him, the "anti-Dreyfusards" such as Édouard Drumont, the director and publisher of the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole. The new trial resulted in another conviction and a 10-year sentence, but Dreyfus was pardoned and released. In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated. After being reinstated as a major in the French Army, he served during the whole of World War I, ending his service with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He died in 1935.

The Dreyfus affair came to symbolise modern injustice in the Francophone world; it remains one of the most notable examples of a miscarriage of justice and of antisemitism. The affair divided France into pro-republican, anticlerical Dreyfusards and pro-Army, mostly Catholic anti-Dreyfusards, embittering French politics and encouraging radicalisation. The press played a crucial role in exposing information and in shaping and expressing public opinion on both sides of the conflict.

Antisemitic disturbances and riots broke out in 1898, in cities across Metropolitan France, mostly in January and February. Antisemitic riots predated the Dreyfus affair, and were almost a tradition in the East. But the 1898 disturbances were much more widespread.