Blessed are the peacemakers

It’s not 1938, Ed Miliband is not Chamberlain, Cameron is not Churchill, Assad is not the danger to Britain that Hitler was, and the Munich Conference is not any kind of decent analogy for the events of this week. But considering the current popular and political resistance to military action against the mass-murdering Syrian regime, and wondering how it will be perceived in future years, I think it’s worth remembering just how popular appeasement was in 1938 – remembering just how many people thought it fine and good and worth celebrating.

The following snippets are from Lynne Olson’s book, Troublesome Young Men, an account of the anti-appeasement Tory rebels who eventually brought Churchill to power. From Chapter Eight:

Most Britons greeted the news with an almost hysterical outpouring of relief and thanksgiving. The newspaper coverage, lavish in its praise of Chamberlain, helped orchestrate the jubilant mood. In two-inch type, the single word “PEACE!” was emblazoned across the front page of the Daily Express. Of the prime minister, The Times declared: “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield had come adorned with nobler laurels.” Lord Castlerosse, the portly socialite gossip columnist for the Sunday Express, exulted: “Thanks to Chamberlain, thousands of young men will live. I shall live.”

...

When Chamberlain’s plane returned from Munich on the afternoon of September 30, a delirious crowd of several thousand people stood in a driving rainstorm at Heston Airport, waving newspapers and Union Jacks, waiting to greet the man they considered the saviour of the world. The crowds went wild when the prime minister, carrying his signature umbrella, emerged from the plane. The dozens of policemen on horseback had a difficult time holding back the surging mass; everyone, it seemed, wanted to shake Chamberlain’s hand.

From Heston, Chamberlain was whisked away by car to Buckingham Palace, where King George and Queen Elizabeth waited to offer their congratulations. Through the car’s rain-streaked windows, Chamberlain looked out at thousands of cheering, flag-waving Britons lining the streets, some of whom, in their exuberance, leaped onto the running boards of the car and banged on the windows. At the palace another huge throng waited, and when Chamberlain and his wife stepped out onto the palace balcony with the smiling king and queen, there was an earsplitting ovation. It was an unprecedented event, the first time a ruling monarch had allowed a commoner to be acknowledged from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. According to Tory MP Edward Grigg, it was also “the biggest constitutional blunder that has ever been made by any sovereign this century.” By appearing on the balcony with Chamberlain, George VI was publicly associating himself with the prime minister’s policy, a violation of the political impartiality required of a sovereign in a constitutional monarchy.

But few people were thinking of such issues that day. Continuing his triumphal procession, Chamberlain returned at last to Downing Street, which was jammed by hundreds of people who had been waiting in the rain for hours. Across the street from the prime minister’s residence, Orme Sargent, an assistant foreign affairs undersecretary and a strong opponent of appeasement, watched the crowd from a first-floor balcony of the Foreign Office. Turning to a colleague, he acidly observed: “You might think that we had won a major victory instead of betraying a minor country.”

From Chapter Nine:

For weeks after Munich it was impossible to escape from Neville Chamberlain. Everywhere one went in Britain, it seemed, there were reminders of the prime minister and his historic journey. Toy shops featured booted Chamberlain dolls, holding a rod and reel in one hand and a little sign saying PEACEMAKER in the other. Candy stores sold sugar umbrellas, while florists displayed Chamberlain’s picture framed by flowers and bearing the inscription WE ARE PROUD OF YOU. Companies took out large newspaper advertisements lauding the prime minister, and the poet laureate, John Masefield, wrote a poem comparing him to the tragic Greek hero Priam and declaring that he had been “divinely led.”

Ten Downing Street meanwhile was flooded with letters, telegrams, flowers, umbrellas, toys, trinkets, and other items celebrating Chamberlain’s achievement. He put many of these articles on display in a large showcase, which he loved to show off to visitors. When Kenneth Clark and his wife came to lunch one day, Chamberlain proudly led them to the showcase, explaining that the articles “were sent to me in gratitude for the Munich agreement.”

As John Colville noted in his diary, Munich fed the prime minister’s vanity as well as his arrogance. With Chamberlain “almost canonised” because of Munich, it was “small wonder,” Violet Bonham Carter dryly remarked, “that he began to see himself as a Messiah sent down from heaven...”

The events of 1938 are seen in a very different light now. I wonder how will 29 August 2013 be remembered?

_

Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill To Power And Helped Save England is copyright © 2007 by Lynne Olson.

The still of Conrad Veidt surrounded by plaster statues of Chamberlain is from the Powell and Pressburger film Contraband, via the blog in so many words...

Dann schon lieber Lebertran

Gert Klein in I’d Rather Have Cod Liver Oil, Max Ophüls’s first film, a short comedy written by Erich Kästner and Emmerich (later Emeric) Pressburger. The film is lost, I believe.

Photo from Film Exil 2, May 1993, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Edition Hentrich. The magazine includes a script for the film in German, as well as articles on Max Ophüls in English and German, and an article on Gert Klein in German.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Three clips from the silent film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1921, directed by Rex Ingram.



A short account of the plot, from Liam O’Leary’s excellent book, Rex Ingram, master of the silent cinema:

The story of The Four Horsemen began in the Argentine and told of the return of two branches of a wealthy family to Europe, one to Germany and the other to France. The pleasure-loving central character seduces the wife of one of his father’s friends but eventually fights for France when the war comes. His German cousins are fighting on the other side. The erring wife returns to her husband, now blinded by the war. Julio, the hero, is killed.

Julio was of course played by Rudolph Valentino in his first major role. The part of Marguerite Laurier was taken by Alice Terry, who later married Rex Ingram. Julio’s father was Joseph Swickard, and the injured husband was John Sainpolis.



Rex Ingram was born in Dublin in 1893, and went to the US in 1911. He studied sculpture, turned to acting and writing, and directed his first film aged 23. After achieving success in Hollywood, he eventually relocated to Nice where he had his own film studio, and where a young Michael Powell worked as his assistant.

Below, a sketch by Ingram for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, along with photographs from the production, all taken from Liam O’Leary’s book.

Above: Alice Terry and Rudolph Valentino rehearse the tango.
Below: Rex Ingram instructs Valentino.

Sequence 69, Exterior: Somewhere in Flanders

CLIVE: Murdoch! do you know what this means?

MURDOCH: I do, sir. Peace. We can go home. Everybody can go home!

CLIVE: For me, Murdoch, it means more than that. It means that Right is Might after all. The Germans have shelled hospitals, bombed open towns, sunk neutral ships, used poison-gas - and we won! Clean fighting, honest soldiering have won! God bless you, Murdoch!

From the 1942 script for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. More on this troublesome and complex film here, and more on the Colonel here. Did I mention troublesome?

Below is a fragment from Kevin Macdonald’s book, Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, on the consequences of the war’s end for Imre Pressburger in his home town of Temesvar (Timişoara) in the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Someone somewhere had decreed that he was to be Romanian or Serbian and he would have to accept it passively. For almost two years Temesvar was occupied by the Serbs, but ultimately, along with the rest of Transylvania, it was assigned to Romania at the infamous Trianon Treaty of 1920, when the allies, led by Britain, distributed about two-thirds of Hungary’s land mass and half its population to clamouring neighbours. It is said that Hungary’s Deputy Foreign Minister fainted when he saw the recoloured map.

Imre was now a Romanian - a foreigner in his own country. The pattern of his life as an eternal alien had begun. Without having to budge an inch from home, he had set out on the circuitous journey that would eventually lead him to England.

Finally a relevant Blimp clip via Bob.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp script copyright © The Estates of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1994.

Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of a Screenwriter copyright © Kevin Macdonald 1994.

Added: George Szirtes on changing maps and remembrance.

Tea and bacon

In A Canterbury Tale, Powell and Pressburger pointed out that the tea drinkers were winning the war. Now in Afghanistan, the bacon eaters stand tall. Following the links back from that post will lead to something more substantial.

Update: related, Crunch time in Afghanistan-Pakistan by David Kilcullen.

While the sun shines

Yesterday was a day off, after three or more seven-day weeks of work in a row. A late breakfast was followed by a visit to the Political Cartoon Gallery in Bloomsbury to see an exhibition of David Low drawings.

After so long indoors at my painting table, the sun's warmth, the crowds milling about, all felt overwhelming. For days my view of the outside world had been through news reports from over the horizon, of war, and war, and arguments about war. Here in central London the people in the streets felt happy and busy, energising and reassuring, but still in my mind brutal events beyond the visible insisted on their equal reality, and here too the potential for brutality was asserted in newspaper front pages about the knife murder in Oxford Street the previous afternoon.

On to the gallery and David Low, best known now as the creator of Colonel Blimp. The combination of precision and energy in his drawing, particularly in the work from the '30s, is startling. Even his earliest work betrays no doubt or insecurity.

While I was there I picked up a secondhand copy of Avisens Håndskrift (The Newspaper's Handwriting) by Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, a look at the work of members of Danske Bladtegnere, the Danish newspaper illustrators' society, on the occasion of the society's fiftieth anniversary in 1983. As I'd just been looking at Low, I was curious to see what the book would include from the occupation period. Not much was the answer. There were a couple of anti-Nazi cartoons from before the war, and a couple more from afterwards. The only images from the period of occupation were a couple of pleasant drawings, one of women on a beach, another of birds singing.

Absence makes the mind more curious. What did political cartoonists do during the occupation? Did they all turn to pretty pictures? Did any professional cartoonists also work for resistance papers?

So off I went to search—

Here's one anti-Nazi cartoon by Viggo Rohde from an underground book published in 1943 marking the second anniversary of war between Nazi Germany and the USSR. It's part of an online exhibit of underground wartime publications on the Danish Royal Library website.

1943 i tekst og tegninger, (1943 in words and pictures,) was a book from the Communist Land og Folk< underground press with cartoons by Herluf Bidstrup and Thorkild Holst. Images here and here and here and here. At least one of those same cartoonists seems to be responsible for the cartoons here and here in another Danish Communist Party publication, Ugens Nyt, (The Week's News,) again from 1943. Here and here are postcards by Herluf Bidstrup. According to Avisens Håndskrift, Bidstrup stayed with the Land og Folk paper after the war, and his work remained very much in line with party policy.

This cartoon, Leaders of the New Order is by Anton Hansen, who assumed a change in drawing style to hide his identity. His work had appeared before the war in Arbeiderbladet in Norway, Simplicissimus and Das Panoptikon in Germany, as well as Ekstrabladet in Denmark. After the war he worked for Information, a daily that had begun life as an underground news agency. This drawing however was published in Danske Tidene, an underground newspaper begun under the editorship of Nicolai Blædel, who as foreign editor of Berlingske Tidene prior to the invasion had been strongly critical of the Nazis, and was one of the first writers to be banned from publishing under the occupation.

Here's a poster published by Morgenbladet, an underground daily newspaper launched in November 1944 by the Dansk Samlings party, and here's a report on the poster in the paper - I was surprised by the scale of it! From the same press came a humour magazine Muldvarpen, (The Mole,) with a mix of Danish cartoons and material supplied by the allies, including this Donald Duck strip.

Altogether the volume of material published by various parts of the Danish resistance seems to have been enormous. Morgenbladet for example published 142 issues under occupation, with a circulation reaching 7,000 in the last months of the war. As you can see in the Danish Royal Library exhibition, most underground material was typewritten or very simply typeset, but a surprising amount was also illustrated to a high standard.

Illustrations:

The top four drawings are by David Low, all from The Complete Colonel Blimp, edited by Mark Bryant, and are copyright © Low estate/Solo Syndication.

Blimp in the '30s was portrayed as a conservative appeaser of fascism. The character in the fourth drawing, Pmilb, the inverse of Blimp, was his leftist mirror image, an equally wrongheaded appeaser.

I've written a little on the Colonel Blimp film here, and more on Denmark under occupation here.

The bottom three drawings are by Hans Bendix, all from Avisens Håndskrift, Dansk bladtegning gennem et halvt århundrede, by Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen, copyright © Dansk Bladtegnere.

Bendix's Hitler caricature, titled Dollfuss in Memoriam, was published in Tegning af tiden in 1935. The Port Jefferson beach drawing was for the cover of Hjemmets Søndag, a colour supplement to the paper Social-Demokraten, published in 1941.

Throwing flowerpots

Recently I had a look at the 1954 German film of Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives. The script for this version takes even greater liberties with the book than the 1931 film.

During the climactic chase, when scores of children pursue the thief Grundeis through the streets of Berlin, a man looks out an upstairs window and then starts chucking flowerpots. Is it Kästner? And is he aiming at the kids or at the film makers?

Here's another still to compare, Erich Kästner four years earlier seen  at the start of the 1950 film Das Doppelte Lottchen, adapted from Kästner's book Lottie and Lisa.

The first script for the 1931 Emil film was written by Kästner and Emeric Pressburger, later the writer of such classics of British cinema as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death. When they made the mistake of delivering the script early to UFA, the studio gave it to Billy Wilder to 'improve'. 

Emeric Pressburger also directed a remake of Das Doppelte Lottchen, titled Twice Upon A Time (1953). A later remake was more successful, Disney's The Parent Trap.

I've written more on Kästner's books elsewhere, and Kästner and Pressburger here. There are more Kästner posts on this blog too.

Stills copyright © Universum Film GMBH & Co. DVDs of the films can be found on Amazon.de. They are in German with no subtitles.