Waiting for the echo

I would like a television receiver capable of viewing this - an apparatus able to detect a distant echo of the signal bouncing off some faraway heavenly body. How much will it cost me?

Image from issue 6 of The Penguin Film Review, April 1948, live production at BBC Television, Alexandra Palace.

Liars good and bad

In his book The Lost Sea (1957), Dutch novelist Jan de Hartog tells of a young lad shanghaied to work as a cabin boy on a fishing boat sailing the Zuider Zee. During one evening in port, the sailors invite a Liar aboard:

I had heard about the Liars before, but I had never been very interested in them, for they never did anything real; they just sat down in a circle of people and told lies. I had never seen one because for some reason all  Liars were Urkers. Kris told me more about them; he said they were very funny because they told impossible stories about mermen ringing at midwives’ doors at night to get help for their mermaid-wives who were having a child, about turtles in China so big that whole gardens grew on their backs, about sea monsters with seven heads, and the skinning of Eskimo women. The funny thing about these stories was that the Liars told them as if all this had happened to them personally; they never told a story in the third person, but always began: ‘One day when I was in Tasmania,’ although everybody knew that they had never been out  of the Zuider Zee.

Like the boy in the book, the author was also a cabin boy on a sailing ship at the age of ten, but that doesn’t mean he claimed that The Lost Sea was a true story. On the contrary, Jan de Hartog was proud to call himself a Liar.

It’s a curious thing that as a species we have such a desire for lies. Lies hold pride of place in bookshops. In popular cinema it’s nearly all lies. Even when a film is based on some truth, a dramatisation is always more successful than a straight documentary. Art is a lie that tells the truth? No, art tells lies about the truth.

So if you’re looking for history, perhaps you shouldn’t turn to a renowned  Liar. Certainly that would seem good advice after reading some reviews and comments on novelist Nicholson Baker’s strange sounding history of the Second World War, Human Smoke.

While I don’t think I’ll have either the time or the inclination to pick that one up, there is a non fiction book by one of my favourite Liars that I would like to recommend, Erich Kästner’s memoir When I Was a Little Boy (also 1957), a book about childhood written for children.

Kästner was born in 1899 in Dresden, which he describes as follows:

If it is correct to say that I can not only judge of what is horrible and ugly but also of what is beautiful, I attribute this gift to my good fortune in having grown up in Dresden. I did not have to learn first out of books what is beautiful, neither at school nor at the University. I could breathe in beauty as foresters’ children breathe in woodland air. The Catholic Hofkirche, Georg Bähr’s Frauenkirche, the Zwinger, Pillnitz Castle, the Japanese Palace, the Jüdenhof and the Dinglingerhaus, theRampische Strasse with its baroque façades, the Renaissance windows of the Schloss Strasse, the Cosel Palace, the Palace in the Grosser Garten with the Little Houses of the Cavaliers and, looking down from the Loschwitzhöhe, the vista of the city in silhouette, with its noble and venerable towers... But really there is not much sense in reciting the glories that were Dresden like the multiplication table.

I could not describe even a chair so accurately that Kunze the carpenter could reproduce it in his workshop from my description. How then could I hope to describe Schloss Moritzburg with its four round towers reflected in the water, or that sculptured vase by the Italian Corradini near the Palace Pond, almost opposite the Café Pollender; or the Kronentor of the Zwinger? I can see that I shall have to ask the artist to please make a special set of drawings for this chapter so that you may get at least some faint idea of how beautiful my native city was.

[...] 

[...]

Yes, Dresden was a wonderful city. You may take my word for it. And you have to take my word for it, because none of you, however rich your father may be, can go there to see if I am right. For the city of Dresden is no more. It has vanished, except for a few fragments. In one single night and with a single movement of its hand the Second World War wiped it off the map. It had taken centuries to create its incomparable beauty. A few hours sufficed to spirit it off the face of the earth. This happened on the night of February 13th, 1945. Eight hundred planes rained down high explosive and incendiary bombs on it. When they had gone, nothing remained but a desert with a few giant ruins which looked like ocean liners heeling over.

Two years later I stood in the midst of that endles desert and could not make out where I was. Among the broken, dust-covered bricks lay the name-plate of a street - ‘Prager Strasse’, I deciphered with difficulty. Could it be that I was standing in the Prager Strasse, the world-famous Prager Strasse, the most magnificent street of my childhood? The street with the loveliest shop windows? The most wonderful street at Christmas-time? I was standing in a waste half a mile long by half a mile wide, a desert of broken bricks and rubble and utter desolation.

To this day the Governments of the great Powers are disputing with each other as to who murdered Dresden. To this day people are arguing as to whether fifty thousand, a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand lie dead under that desert of nothingness. And none of them will admit having done it: each says it was the fault of the others. Ah, but what is the use of quarreling about it? You will not bring Dresden back to life by so doing - neither its beauty nor its dead. Punish the Governments in future and not the people. And don’t punish them afterwards. Punish them at once. Does this sound simpler than it is? No, it is simpler than it sounds.

I have beside me a Danish translation of Notabene 45, Kästner's wartime diary. I don’t believe it’s ever been translated into English. It tells in one part of how his parents lived through the bombing of Dresden while he was in a cellar in Berlin sheltering from a raid there, following dry radio announcements with a co-ordinate map called ‘Square-Else’ where each square had a name, and hearing more and more clearly that the bomber formations were approaching the square on the map ‘Martha Heinrich’. There was no telephone contact with Dresden after the raid. A travel ban was decreed. It was over a week later that he first heard from them. They were alive and well. But there was more news:

Berlin 27 February 1945

[...]

Yesterday evening Orthmann’s courier came with frightful news. Dresden is said to have been wiped out. The fire from the burning town hall sucked in people who were fleeing from Waisenhausstrasse, through the air into the flames, as if they were moths. Others were to have jumped into the reservoirs to save themselves, but the water boiled and they were scalded like crabs. Tens of thousands of corpses lay between and below the ruins. And my parents live! Sorrow, indignation and gratitude rattle together in my heart. Like locomotives in fog.

Roman generals threw themselves, face to face with the unavoidable defeat, onto their own sword. A suicide like that by foreign hand is being committed by the third reich. The third reich is ending its days. But the corpse is called Germany.

Related: all my posts on Erich Kästner are here, and on Jan de Hartog here, and on WWII revisionism here.

Elsewhere: Deborah Lipstadt about Liars and liars on Dresden, here and here, and Francis Sedgemore has a little bundle of posts on the importance of Liars linked to here.

The Lost Sea is copyright © 1957 by Jan de Hartog.

When I Was a Little Boy is copyright © 1957 by Atrium Verlag A. G. Zürich, English version copyright © 1959 by Jonathan Cape Ltd. London, translated from German by Isabel and Florence McHugh.

The drawings are by Horst Lemke, Kästner’s regular illustrator following the death of Walter Trier.

Quote from Notabene 45 is my translation from the Danish edition, copyright © 1961 by Branner og Korchs Forlag A/S, Copenhagen.

The Key

Following an earlier post that was in part about the author Jan de Hartog, I was very pleased to learn from Harrie Verstappen that The Key has been released on DVD.



Directed by Carol Reed, The Key is an adaptation of Jan de Hartog’s novel Stella. It’s about tugboat crews doing search and rescue work in the Atlantic during World War II.



Like his novel The Captain, which came up in the earlier post, the story is about war, about the difficulties and responsibilities of leadership, about the comforts of humanity, a little bit about religion, but mostly about the terror of death.



While the film has one or two flaws, it succeeds very well in evoking Jan de Hartog’s dark themes and powerful writing.



The cast is headed by William Holden, Sophia Loren and Trevor Howard.


Trevor Howard is particularly good as one of the tugboat captains.



The film was previously only available in pan and scan versions on laserdisc and VHS, and only in the American release version, which had a different ending to the European original.



Now at last I’ve seen it properly, in widescreen with the original finale, and I do recommend it. One glitch, however: the DVD is encoded in 2.35:1 ratio, which looks all wrong. I reset my player to show it in 16:9 ratio, which seems correct as you can see in these screenshots.



The Region 2 DVD is available from Amazon.

There are some more details and images on the Sophia Loren Archives site.


For Jan de Hartog, this account of his life is a compelling read.

Don't forget Harrie Verstappen’s comprehensive Jan de Hartog page.

All my Jan de Hartog posts are here, and my contribution to Normblog’s Writer’s Choice series on Jan de Hartog and others is here.

Images copyright © Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

Two Quakers

JOHN RUNNINGS

A few posts ago I referred to John Runnings, a Quaker and peace campaigner. He began his activism in the 1960s campaigning against the Vietnam War and against nuclear weapons.

In the late 1970s he first became involved in non-violent civil disobedience as part of the campaign against the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington. During this time he met Gene Sharp, author of The Politics of Nonviolent Action and other related works, who helped give shape to some of John Runnings' growing doubts about the peace movement. In his pamphlet Discovering the Obvious he quotes at length from Sharp, including this passage:

Peace groups have been willing to settle for things far short of abolishing war: witnessing to one's piety and purity – and the stupidity of everybody else; witnessing to being a "holy remnant" or the only sane people around; struggling for the rights of conscientious objectors to war. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these things. The point is not that. But they serve as substitutes for serious efforts to abolish war as such. Peace groups oppose a particular war and try to speed up its end with no confidence whatsoever that, even if successful, the military systems will thereby be weaker. Peace groups oppose the development of a particular weapon or a particular piece of technology – without that necessarily being a vehicle for reversing the whole dependence upon military hardware and military weapons. Or advocates of peace support giving all of the world's weapons to one government – a world government – or support the army of the other side – and call that anti-war activity!! Or peace workers support universal negotiated disarmament when there is no historical evidence that that has ever worked or ever will. Or peace workers settle for some measures of arms control and arms regulation which – although they may help and may prevent a particular outbreak, or destruction, or attack under certain circumstances – can easily be broken and leave the military system more or less as it is.

John Runnings described his own doubts about the strategy of the anti-war movement as follows:

During the years with the peace community I had occasion to pass out anti-war literature on the streets of Seattle. And it was not uncommon to have someone respond to what I was doing this wise, "It is all right for you to take advantage of the freedom of speech that we enjoy in this country to disparage the United States for their part in the arms race, but the Russians are going all out to match and exceed our arms build up. Who is protesting in Russia? Why aren't you there?

And I had a tendency to read into this protest an implicit expectation that if I were to do such a protest in Russia that I would be sent to Siberia for a long, long time and that my loyalty to the U.S. was questionable, and that I had a partiality for the communist philosophy.

The easy answer was that it was more convenient to protest in Bremerton than in Moscow and that we were responsible for our government and the responsibility for protesting arms in Russia was with the Russians.

But I was not at all satisfied with this answer. I felt that the conservatives had a point here that we were refusing to look at, that we were making a political contest between Americans and Americans on how to reduce the military threat between Americans and Russians.

Runnings' conclusion was that anti-war activists should seek to implement an alternative to war by challenging military borders through non-violent direct action. He viewed war as the inevitable result of there being no global civil law, only treaties between military states.

He was as good as his word, and in 1985 went on to leaflet on the streets of Moscow before being deported, (in a 100 seat Aeroflot jet with no other passengers,) then to physically attack the Berlin Wall several times, and carried out repeated "political invasions" of East Germany, entering the DDR without permission, and with as much publicity as he could organise. On an early attempt he was injured by East German border guards and jailed for three months. During later events he found that East German forces treated him with increasing care and expeditiousness as they sought to rid themselves of him with the minimum of fuss.

JAN DE HARTOG

I first came across John Runnings' writing when looking for online material on another Quaker, author Jan de Hartog.

In Discovering the Obvious, Runnings writes at one point about de Hartog's novel The Captain. The title character is Captain Harinxma, skipper of a Dutch ocean-going tug in the Murmansk convoys during the Second World War. From the brief claustrophobic description of London during the Blitz to the relentless brutality of the Nazi attacks on the convoys, the book is a powerful account of overwhelming fear.

John Runnings obviously admired the novel greatly, as did I when I read it, but when it comes to de Hartog's pacifist conclusion, Runnings the peace campaigner parts company with him. He writes:

[De Hartog] knows certainly that civilization is an ongoing commercial and political contest for the goodies of civilization, and it's also lawsuits, black eyes, spitballs and cheating. Nor is it an issue of peace and war. If we define war as contest, all life is war. We are at battle from the time the doctor slaps us on the rump to the time we wrestle with the diseases of old age. Peace, the absence of strife, is not an achievable goal. There can never be an end to war defined as strife, until there is an end to breathing. Life, in a sense, is an anti-peace campaign to escape death and boredom. At issue is the kind of war. We have a form of non-military war that is so much a part of us that we do not recognize it as such, and this, of course, is civil law. In contrast to military war it is called peace.

Runnings finds Captain Harinxma's solution to the unmitigated brutality of war, his decision to disengage, unsatisfactory. He continues:

In the natural world there is no such thing as fairness, justice, mercy or murder, or lunacy for that matter. And while some other species may share with us the emotions we call love and hate that may prompt them to violence or accommodation, they are subject only to the rewards and penalties of natural law. So if you disengage when you are being pursued by a bear in the natural world you accommodate to the bear's right to eat you for lunch. The military contest is a contest in natural law and the victorious state is going to eat lunch. And the defeated state, having been forced to disengage from the contest, is going to be the lunch.

We can have an end to military war and natural law as soon as we bring the rules of civilization to the militarily imposed divisions that define international states. War, as I have insisted before, is a contest in the terror of slaughter and destruction to determine, when all other means of conflict resolution have failed, which of the political entities so engaged will write the terms of the peace. If it could be determined at the beginning of the fight who would win, those that were sure to loose could surrender at the beginning of the contest and save the cost of the war and avoid the slaughter and destruction entailed. There is no doubt an untold number of wars that have been avoided when a nation faced with superior strength surrendered before the war started. Any war can be stopped as soon as one side is prepared to take the penalties of disengagement. The penalty is that by so doing one says loudly that one can be pushed around. And there are those among us who would rather die than be pushed around by military threat.

(...) if all of the members of the Allied Forces became offended by the slaughter and destruction and disengaged from the war, it would be the German High Command who would levy the penalties. The Allies suffered six years of the carnage because they did not want to take the penalties of disengagement and slaughter and destruction as de Hartog's story suggests. For a while it might be said it was a choice between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as opposed to Oranienburg, Buchenwald, and Dachau, more importantly it was a contest between invading dictators and defending democracies in the context of natural law. We do not need to see peace in terms of de Hartog's poetry to find disengagement to become lunch for the Nazis an intolerable option.

Many years after Harinxma's decision, "not to shoot back" whatever the consequences, he is writing to his son who is now contemplating joining the Air Force. And because Harinxma's author is culturally programmed to see the slaughter and destruction of war as the problem, rather than the absence of civil alternatives to natural law, he steers his son into the labyrinth of moral considerations, detached as they are in war from the supporting institutions of civil law for moral behavior as follows:

"So I cannot sit mutely by while you try on your first Air Force uniform in front of the mirror blissfully unconscious of the fact that to volunteer for the military training is to sign a pact with violence, and hand the ultimate moral decision - to kill or not to kill - over to a faceless committee of men who, by their very training and indoctrination, consider genocide a legitimate means of settling human disputes."

With apologies to Jan de Hartog, I think this is inaccurate and unfair. Hitler was using illegitimate means of conflict resolution. And the "faceless committee" is in charge of the illegitimate response that is the only option, since there is no legislature at the international level by which a legal, or a legitimate, response might have been pursued.

We are not charged with murder if we can show reasonable proof that we had to kill to avoid being killed. The protection of civil law not being available we are allowed to protect ourselves as best we may. The state of war is evidence that protection of civil law is unavailable. And had the Allies disengaged because of their repugnance to the horrors of war it would have been Hitler's concepts of peace and justice that would have prevailed rather than those of Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and other Allied leaders.

Here the issue that de Hartog raises is not how to change natural law into civil law, but rather on how the individual may avoid getting into a situation where doing violence to another person is required by the situation. It is clearly the fault of our cultural heritage that this marvelous intellect writes a superb portrayal of war, and the horrors of war, to conclude with so paltry a solution. For there are vast quantities of literature, ancient and modern, authored by persons of undeniable intellect and integrity in support of this pathetically inadequate approach to the abolishment of military threat and military strife between peoples.

It would have been interesting had there been a conversation between these two. I suspect that Jan de Hartog would have had some sympathy with John Runnings' point of view, for his books do not shy away from the primitive and visceral qualities of life that Runnings points to. Despite his pacifism, he wrote about war with power and imagination. He matched spirituality with feverish sensuality and sexuality, and described religious faith as much in terms of psychology as of divinity.

I wrote a few words in praise of de Hartog in my contribution to Normblog's Writer's Choice series. More Jan de Hartog posts here.

The top illustration on the theme of Roman gladiators is from the Times Higher Education Supplement, April 1, 1994. The lower image is a dustjacket for The Captain, illustrated by John O'Hara Cosgrave II.