Jonathan Steinberg
Bismarck: A Life
Oxford UP, 2011
577 Pages
£25.90
ISBN 978-0199599011

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Everything about Otto von Bismarck was larger than life. Standing well over six feet tall (an impressive height in the 19th century), he bestrode the European political scene like a colossus. The Iron Chancellor—unifier of the German nation and inventor of Realpolitik—had an appetite to match his physique. In his own description, a light afternoon tea could consist of “tea [and] coffee, six eggs, 3 sorts of meat, baked goods, and a bottle of Bordeaux”. As a result, even Bismarck’s digestion was prodigious. His private secretary Christoph von Tiedemann recounted an episode after dinner one evening when he and a guest, the historian Heinrich von Sybel, were invited to follow Bismarck to his study.

As a precaution he offered us his bedroom, which was next to the study, as a place to relieve ourselves. We went in and found under the bed the two objects we sought which were of colossal dimensions. As we stationed ourselves at the wall, Sybel spoke seriously and from the depth of his heart, ‘Everything about the man is great, even his s—!!’

This is perhaps the most extraordinary tribute to the great man in Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography, but as the author convincingly demonstrates, Bismarck’s personality—specifically, his ego—was by far the biggest thing about him. Steinberg calls this Bismarck’s “sovereign self”: a sheer force of will that allowed him to ascend—and then fall from—the very heights of power, despite his having little by way of background and experience to mark him out as a conventional political leader.

Otto von Bismarck was born in 1815, the younger son of an undistinguished Junker family from Prussian Saxony. After studies at the University of Göttingen (where he met the future American diplomat and historian John Motley, who became perhaps his only lifelong friend), Bismarck entered the Prussian civil service, first in the law and then in the diplomatic corps. In 1847 he entered the Prussian Landtag where he cultivated a reputation as an outspoken reactionary—a quality for which he gained most notoriety in his famed “blood and iron” speech of 1862. He won royal favour, and soon found himself in Frankfurt as Prussia’s envoy to the German Confederation, then in St Petersburg as ambassador to Imperial Russia. A political crisis of 1862 saw him appointed minister-president of Prussia. He gained other offices as he directed the course of German unification, becoming chancellor of the North German Confederation in 1867 and ultimately chancellor of the unified German Empire upon its creation in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871. At the time of his appointment as minister-president he was an improbable choice for the role, yet he made it his own and held the post for 28 years until his eventual dismissal in 1890. He died eight years later in 1898.

Bismarck struck shrewd contemporaries like Benjamin Disraeli as a strangely multifarious character. He could be brutally coarse, yet was also a charming and refined conversationalist; a man of commanding power yet prone to melodramatic rage over the most trivial setbacks; the possessor of superhuman appetites and energy but also a hypochondriac and slugabed; the loyal servant of his country yet consistently disloyal to individual masters; the father of a nation but an alienating figure to his own children. All this provides rich material for a character study, and Steinberg (along with numerous earlier biographers) is blessed with a superfluity of sources from which to work. Bismarck was a prolific speaker, letter-writer, and memoirist, and those who encountered him often felt compelled to commit their impressions to paper. As Steinberg makes clear, however, Bismarck was often the least reliable witness to his own thoughts and deeds, and his near-pathological deceit—even in intimate letters to his wife—is one of the most psychologically telling features of Bismarck’s persona. Steinberg’s careful analysis and patient sifting of fact from fiction provides—in this respect at least—a satisfying portrait of a complex psyche.

Steinberg’s biography is also strong on diplomatic history and the international context in which Bismarck operated. His description of Bismarck’s techniques, his successes, and his failures is judicious and informative. Very often, he allows Bismarck to speak for himself, especially on the subject of Realpolitik, of which Bismarck’s own definitions probably cannot be bettered. Politics was “the art of the possible”; and after all “one cannot play chess if 16 of the 64 squares are forbidden from the beginning.” In international as in domestic politics, as Steinberg notes, keeping his options open was very often the key to Bismarck’s success.

In the domestic context, though, Steinberg sometimes seems less sure of his ground. In part, this seems to be because he seems unsure about how far to go beyond Bismarck’s own life into a discussion of wider social, cultural, or economic currents. Steinberg presents German unification, for example, as a rather decontextualised series of political and diplomatic manoeuvres, whose accomplishment seems strangely deflating in the absence of a richer explanation of why unification was an aspiration that mattered to so many Germans. Steinberg’s discussion of economic and financial matters is similarly thin: given the wealth of available data, it seems extraordinary that he should give an index of English grain prices as almost the sole quantitative guide to economic circumstances in Germany after 1873. Indeed, both the stock market crash of that year and the ensuing depression are dramatic enough on their own terms without Steinberg’s laboured references to CDOs and the 2008 financial crisis. A similar desire to appear modern probably lies behind the author’s praise of Internet sources in his preface, but many would doubt that historical standards have yet relaxed sufficiently for his use of Wikipedia as an authority to pass without negative comment.

Does the absence of very much social, cultural, or economic context matter? In the abstract, the answer is probably not, and many biographies are none the poorer for hewing closely to the subject’s own life. However, in Steinberg’s case the matter takes on an added significance because of his extended discussion of German anti-Semitism in chapter 10 (“The Guest House of the Dead Jew”), which he describes as being invented in its modern form by Richard Wagner. Völkisch and anti-Semitic currents were indeed a major and regrettable feature of life in the Second Reich, made all the more tragic by the overwhelming importance they gained in the Third. But they were not the only currents—progressive social legislation, by contrast, gets short shrift and is discussed in scarcely two paragraphs—and Steinberg risks creating an unbalanced picture of the era through selective emphases of this kind.

The capriciousness of these sorts of inclusions and exclusions points to a more fundamental problem in Steinberg’s biography. As the author acknowledges in his preface, Bismarck started life as a much larger work that was “cut” and “polished” into a more manageable and refined form. Very often, though, it seems that this editorial process has miscarried. Sometimes, it is a matter of including too much. For example, Steinberg gives us eight pages on the appealingly picaresque socialist Fedinand Lassalle, with whom Bismarck conversed and corresponded before his death in a duel in 1864, but this is probably six pages too many and an indulgence in an already-long book. Other times, frustrating omissions hinder the reader’s comprehension. We are told, for example, that at some point Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote to “Thiedemann” about agricultural tariffs. Most readers will need some help in identifying Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, the Silesian nobleman, iron and mining entrepreneur, ardent protectionist, and confidant of Bismarck—and making sense of who was communicating what to whom is made more difficult by the misspelling of Bismarck’s secretary’s name.

One recurrent source of irritation that arises from poor editing is the eccentric duplication or postponement of brief biographical précis of individuals mentioned in the text. For example, the illness of Frederick William IV and the regency of his younger brother Prince William are introduced twice in the space of four pages, yet Benjamin Disraeli is mentioned 12 times over 192 pages before he is introduced with the dates of his life and his status as British prime minister. Leo von Caprivi—Bismarck’s successor as chancellor—fares better, and has only to wait six pages and four mentions before his dates are included. These kinds of small distractions can be found in the index as well—which is, of course, no fault of the author himself. The episode with Bismarck’s chamber pots, for example, is listed as Sybel’s being “[s]tartled by the size of Bismarck’s bed-pans”. To those used to modern plumbing, the difference between a bedpan and a chamber pot may not seem terribly important, but it is a difference nonetheless, and one that becomes the more notable in the context of other typographical and editorial faults of this kind.

Returning to broader and more important themes, how does Steinberg’s work fit into the history of 19th-century Germany more generally? He frequently acknowledges his debt to Otto Pflanze’s magisterial three-volume biography of Bismarck, and likewise to Christopher Clark’s excellent Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, which is by far the best guide to Prussia (and indeed Germany) in this period. In a more abstract sense, Steinberg clearly places himself within the Sonderweg tradition, albeit without ever mentioning that term or its accompanying historiography. For him, Germany’s baleful inheritance was dysfunctional institutional structure operating in the context of an illiberal political culture; both, in Steinberg’s telling, largely of Bismarck’s creation.

Ultimately, Steinberg’s biography is rather like Bismarck himself. At its best, it is compelling and insightful, but these positive qualities are often marred by inconsistency, idiosyncrasy, and an indigestion caused by excessive length and poor editing.

James McComish is reading for a DPhil in History at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Jonathan Littell
The Kindly Ones
Chatto & Windus, 2009
984 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-0701181659

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Natural immunity is one of the great puzzles of epidemiology: for reasons not fully understood, certain small populations seem resistant to HIV, whereas for most people, exposure inevitably means contracting the virus. Max Aue, narrator of Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones, argues that succumbing to the temptation of evil is also a matter of statistical chance: some are born in circumstances of contagion; others are blessedly (and, Aue thinks, self-righteously) immune. “I am guilty, you’re not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did,” he berates the reader.  “Always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.”

By now, dozens of articles have been written on Littell’s fictional memoir of ex-SS officer Aue, first published in French as Les Bienveillantes in 2006 and released in Charlotte Mandell’s English translation earlier this month. Most critics have taken passages from Aue’s prefatory apologia, like the one cited above, to mean that anybody could have been born into Aue’s position, and that therefore Aue is supposed to represent everyone (or at least everyone coming of age in interwar Germany).

Then the scorecards are raised: The Kindly Ones is a daring achievement because it portrays Nazis as credible and possibly sympathetic human beings. The Kindly Ones fails because it continues to make people like Aue into ghouls and perverts, inaccessible to rational inquiry. Or, most smugly, The Kindly Ones fails because it portrays Nazis as plausible human beings, which they’re not. These three categories of response all imply that Aue’s insistent wish to be seen as Everyman (“I tell you I am just like you!” he later cries) must also be Littell’s wish for Aue. In fact, not only will nearly all readers find Aue impenetrably foreign, nearly all Nazis probably would have as well.

Aue’s early life reads like a concordance of psychoanalytic case studies. He was born 15 minutes after his twin sister, whose infant wrist was tied with red string to mark her primogeniture; he was allergic to his mother’s breast milk, but with envious memories of his sister’s nursing; he was abandoned by the father he adored; he was in love with his sister; he was furious with his mother and stepfather for their betrayal of his father’s memory. In another writer’s hands, this background might have become a source for dark comedy, but Littell has Aue dwell on these traumas with such violent longing that the potential for humour usually collapses long before the would-be punch line.

Littell surely does not intend Aue to be a representative sample either of humankind or of Nazism. This is clear from the way that Littell plucks at random from Freudian and tragedian sources. Aue as personnage de fiction is an overt construction, a collage of allusions—a creature we’re neither meant nor able to imagine without simultaneously picturing Littell right there beside him, making him, willing him into being.

Aue’s appearance is only hazily described; precise portraiture is instead reserved for his fixations. Take this statue, Apollo with Cithara, which Aue sees during a brief trip to Paris:

One detail struck me: regardless of the angle from which I looked at his eyes, painted realistically directly on the bronze, he never looked me in the eye; it was impossible to capture his gaze, drowned, lost in the void of his eternity. The metallic leprosy was blistering his face, his chest, his buttocks, almost devouring his left hand. [...] Looking at him, I felt overcome with desire, with a wish to lick him; and he was decomposing in front of me with a calm, infinite slowness.

Aue maintains throughout the novel that we are obsessed with the beings who are nearly our reflections, but not quite: one’s twin sister, for example, or, for Germans, the Jews. The statue that attracts Aue, then, is perhaps another case of near-likeness—like Aue, a fabrication, and increasingly “impossible to capture” because of the leprosy of history.

Littell delights in classical reference, whether implicitly (as in the Oresteia borrowings that critic Dan Mendelsohn traces so well) or explicitly (as in Aue’s repeated use of the adjective “homeric”). Even naming his narrator Aue, so close to the Latin greeting “hail”, suggests continuity between Aue’s impeccable classical education and his daily life in the SS, peppered as it is with Heil Hitlers and Sieg heils.

While Mendelsohn has traced The Kindly Ones’ Aeschylean conceits, the novel’s aspirations to epic form help articulate the difference between Aue and his creator Littell. Whereas Aue fashions himself as a latter-day Achilles, as often antagonised by his supposed allies as by his enemies, a more apt analogy would make Littell, not Aue, the besieger: after a near-thousand page attempt, we feel that Littell has never won access to the core of his character. Littell has imagined Aue as Homer imagined Troy: strong, handsome, almost impregnable. And whereas most readers know from the start that the Achaeans ultimately win, the drama of The Kindly Ones lies in watching its author try a succession of strategies to get inside the character he has somehow envisioned and yet not really known.

The author’s siege on his character, not a simple prurience, prompts many of the grotesque and bizarre sexual and scatological scenes that have garnered so much critical disapproval. They are notably repulsive, overly frequent and far too long, but one can imagine their having been part of the fiction-making process, albeit a part that perhaps ought to have been set aside by the final draft. We can picture Littell, early in writing, wondering how on earth to understand his character and deciding to start with the one thing that every killer, victim and bystander irrefutably have in common: a body. And then, having found that slender and fragile bridge, writing his way into every possible sensation that body might experience or desire. The process may well be helpful to the writer, but the result for the reader is a brutalisation of the notion of empathy: “feeling-in” becomes “forcing-into”.

Because this struggle towards interiority dominates Littell’s efforts, the novel is less convincing as a portrait of an age or a milieu; inflated critical appraisals comparing Littell to Tolstoy and Flaubert will inevitably disappoint readers. But for envisioning one of the most alien and most alienating characters in recent literature and trying doggedly to make him somehow penetrable and recognisable to human understanding, Littell deserves to be commended. A book that tests the limits of our capacity for empathy—even if, in the process, the book and the empathy fail—helps in some small way toward our definition of the human.

Laura Kolbe is reading for an MPhil in American Literature at Jesus College, Cambridge.

William I. Hitchcock
Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944-1945
Faber and Faber, 2009
464 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0571227723

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“Liberation” is a justification for war that has proven resistant to time and history, with one shining precedent of success: Europe’s liberation from Hitler. The 20th century’s truly Just War. The traditional heroic WWII tale begins with the painful Allied invasion of France in 1944, the stalwart fighting at the beachheads and the eventual move into Normandy. Then, the troops crush the Nazi occupiers, pushing them back across the Seine, into Belgium. Finally, liberating the concentration camps on their way, they sweep across Germany to shake hands with the Soviets in May 1945.

The undisputedly just cause for Europe’s liberation often leads us to forget the mass destruction that accompanied it: the innocents pulverised in carpet-bombings, the countless civilians robbed, raped, slaughtered, displaced along the way to Hitler’s defeat. In Liberation: the Bitter Road to Freedom, William I. Hitchcock offers a revisionist history that shows how the pursuit of a noble cause also brought immeasurable suffering to those liberated. Hitchcock explains why liberation was “a time of cruel paradoxes”, an experience that Europeans—unlike neo-conservative “just warriors”—are “slow to wish on others”. On the darker side, liberation unleashed cruelty and indiscipline against the enemy. More than speaking to the uncontroversial truth that “war is bad”, Hitchcock demonstrates that the liberation project in Germany was just as much about vengeance as it was about benevolence.

Hitchcock, a professor of history at Temple University, begins with the landing in France. For the sake of military strategy, the Allies virtually obliterated cities like Caen and Brest. The French bore the bombings stoically, but their relief at liberation was mixed with mourning for meaningless death, destruction of crops and farms, food shortages. The ethical dilemmas of liberation were grisly. The lack of high-precision weaponry meant that liberation was mixed with grief for millions of French, Dutch and Belgian citizens: breaking Hitler’s Atlantic fortresses cost the lives of 20,000 Norman civilians alone. Alive to this, Hitchcock only reluctantly weighs between the lesser of two evils, utilitarian language that strategists are so quick to embrace:

This harvest of innocent life by the liberators was not malevolent, as the [Nazi] atrocities described above were. But it was deliberate, because the Allied leaders reluctantly accepted civilian deaths as part of the price to be paid for achieving victory.

Mass indiscipline also took its toll on civilians. For soldiers, battle was a struggle to survive, and for some, non-chivalrous hatred of the enemy was at times the only fuel that kept them going. Brutalised and underequipped, they were not only “our good boys”, as correspondent Ernie Pyle wired home, but also bad boys—who looted, drank and stole from the liberated locals. In Belgium they received “a warm welcome with the bitter taste of loss”. In Brussels, the military went from having flowers rained upon the GIs to having to launch a large-scale campaign against venereal disease and prostitution. The number of assault complaints increased sharply. American soldiers wasted food stocks, occupied houses and humiliated their inhabitants. The Liège press referred to them as “gangsters”. Hitchcock quotes a police commissioner praying in September 1945: “O Lord, deliver us from our liberators.”

The picture Hitchcock paints of the war in Germany itself is altogether darker. The myth of “liberation”—defeat, reconstruction and the Marshall Plan—began as a project designed not simply to defeat Nazi Germany, but to destroy it, unleashing as it did a vengeance against German civilians. Hitchcock’s account of Allied carpet-bombing of cities is chilling: 2.7 million tons of bombs dropped; 3.6 million dwellings destroyed; at least 305,000 civilians killed, amongst them around 80,000 children; countless cultural sites destroyed forever. Neither Arthur “Bomber” Harris, chief of the UK’s Bomber Command, nor Churchill was at pains to hide his hatred for all Germans or the desire for “just” revenge. Stalin sent his “Armies of Justice” on a mission to rape and kill, the account of which defies all imagination. Much of the destruction wrought by the Allies in Germany was of a different character to that which occurred elsewhere. It was not simply the collateral damage of military strategy, as in France and Belgium; rather liberation in Germany entailed destruction for destruction’s sake.

Hitchcock’s Liberation speaks to the notion that gruesome revenge and indiscriminate slaughter offer neither fair punishment nor true justice. Rather, they spoil the chance for honest self-reflection and obstruct systematic justice. But one doubts that, as Hitchcock muses, the Germans felt “the weight of their consciences, which perhaps whispered to them that they had richly earned this awful fate”. In fact, Germans often blamed “the War” rather than themselves for their suffering. The terror of Allied area bombing increased Hitler’s popularity. After the war, the extended process of liberation turned Germans into exhausted subjects, who submitted by turns to Soviet socialism or American paternalism, with “normalisation” not to arrive until the 1990s.

Arriving as brutal conquerors and occupiers of the “defeated enemy nation”, the Americans and Brits brought undisciplined havoc to Germany as they did elsewhere. It was over several months, and only gradually, that they “chose to transform themselves into liberators”, rebuilding and investing in the country. The Americans and Brits decided not to dismantle West Germany, which meant hanging on to qualified civil servants through a policy of “gratifying forgetfulness” that fell short of denazification. In the East, anti-fascist propaganda suppressed the Red Army’s injustice for decades, and the post-war Soviet occupation of East Germany actually prevented sincere feelings of guilt or forgiveness among East Germans. Presenting long-term effects, Hitchcock delivers the largest blow to the rosy picture of just warriors crossing the Rhine to establish freedom and democracy in Berlin.

Liberation covers largely unremembered occurrences of 1944-45, like Holland’s famine, where 16,000 Dutch civilians starved to death in early 1945. Such disasters often remain confined to national historiography, yet Hitchcock integrates them into a larger Brueghelian picture of Europe at the end of the war. Given these experiences, it hardly surprises Hitchcock that to many Europeans all military force has become ethical anathema and discussion of it has been reduced to mantric condemnation of civilian deaths. Hitchcock goes further and reminds us that, in the case of Germany, what is now misremembered as liberation was, in reality, equal parts vengeance. Combining social, political and military history, Liberation at times tries to cover simply everything and trails off into strategic minutiae not all pertinent to the subject. Yet as a project to give a voice to the bitter fates of the liberated it succeeds. It is a timely book carefully re-opening discussion about the very nature of what is often seen as the paradigmatic Just War.

Therese Feiler is reading for a DPhil in Theology at Exeter College, Oxford.

John Armstrong
Love, Life, Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World
Allen Lane, 2006
512 pages
ISBN 071399679X

Understanding happiness is a project almost as old as consciousness itself. From Seneca (Letters to Lucilius) to Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness) and beyond, attempts to consistently produce happiness and tie it to some prescription on how to live have been the cornerstone of treatises on man’s inner life in every discipline. Yet, any attempt to find some all-encompassing feature intrinsic to the generation and maintenance of happiness has remained elusive.

Since perpetual happiness does not in reality exist, it continues to be a focus of theology. Note the Christian conceptions of a second life in heaven characterized by unending happiness, the reward for subservience to the tenets of religious doctrine. Yet, even in the Western, post-theological age, the quest to attain and reflect on the nature of happiness continues unabated, as reflected in the recent publication of texts as varied as Daniel Nettle’s Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile, Stefan Klein’s The Science of Happiness and Alain De Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness.

These books in particular reinforce the differences between an age when the promise of happiness in some afterlife was recompense for a life of hardship and a more secular present where happiness intersects with capitalism. Happiness has become caught in that awkward middle ground between materialism and psychologism. In this kind of world, the question ‘what makes one happy’ involves the possession of objects. Perhaps objects may produce a form of happiness, but those thinkers who write on the topic have spent much time hypothesising inconclusively upon the connection between acquiring things and the internal life.

But with the increase in the relative prosperity of Veblen’s ‘leisure class’ and their ‘conspicuous consumption,’ there is more time for the psychologising of happiness and its acquisition into easy-to-follow steps (e.g. Chicken Soup for the Soul). Yet over-analysing can be counterproductive to our happiness, as André Gide nicely captures: ‘Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.’ Memory, as Gide understood, can be a barrier to the experience of that emotion. If continual retrospection to previous moments of bliss is one’s only method for gauging happiness, it might as well be lost through perpetual comparison; the connection between immediate experience in the world and corresponding feelings becomes hampered.

Still, some kind of mental activity, whether in the hopes of self-knowledge or as a simple assertion of feeling, is necessary for the recognition of happiness. Knowledge of our emotional life seems to be the elusive goal of modernity; for while more and more individuals have the leisure to ruminate on their temperaments, what they discover can be less than appealing. No wonder Walter Benjamin thought that ‘to be happy is to become aware of one’s self without fright.’

One of the ways in which we ‘become aware’ of ourselves, according to John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe: How To Be Happy In An Imperfect World, is by reading, another great leisure activity. But Armstrong has one particular writer in mind from who we can allegedly acquire happiness in the face of worldly imperfection. Quoting Tomas Carlyle, he exhorts: ‘Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.’Byron, the agent provocateur of nineteenth century Europe, devoted his short, albeit iconoclastic, life to rebelling against conformity. Goethe dedicated his long life to bridging the gap between mind and society. Rather than trying to rail against our imperfect world, Goethe accepted its limitations and frustrations. Happiness sat at the intersection of individual man to the wider world. Thus Love, Life, Goethe sketches the life and writings of this titan of German literature from his birth and early fame following the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther, to his participation in a dizzying array of cultural areas. If ever a model of a productive life were needed, Goethe would, quite rightly, be an apt candidate.

It is Armstrong’s unflinching belief that Goethe is exemplary in two ways: as a writer, he displays remarkable perceptiveness in the representation of the moral and psychological complexities of human life and, secondly, he actually lives a remarkable life. It is this second belief which underscores Armstrong’s book: ‘When we think about Goethe—as when we consider any major writer—we are looking for hints on how to live.’ Consequently, the reader must ask whether Armstrong’s choice of author is sound, and whether literature should necessarily
be didactic.

What springs to mind, first and foremost, is the oddity in Armstrong’s choice of subject. As Susan Sontag once put it in an essay on German literature ‘some find Goethe a chore’ and despite his stature in Germany and his salience in literature departments, Goethe remains one of the most unread of canonical writers. It is, then, unsurprising that Armstrong’s overview in Love, Life, Goethe is, for the most part, biographically expository since he cannot presume an acquaintance with Goethe’s life and work in Britain. The choice of Goethe and his writings as a guide to life might be slightly more understandable if Armstrong’s aim was to acquaint non-specialists with a seminal figure of world literature, but Love, Life, Goethe is not quite so straightforward in its intentions. More than biography, it has life-lessons to proffer. According to Armstrong:

Intellectual sophistication needs to come into practical and fruitful contact with responsibility and the everyday world; otherwise it remains pointless and abstract …The marriage of depth and power–which is a good definition of civilisation–was not something Goethe merely wrote about or advocated: he tried to be that ideal himself.

To a certain extent, this attempt to draw Goethe the man beyond the Goethe of austere canonicity is welcome. As far back as 1949 Ortega Y. Gasset posed the problem with Goethe as one where ‘authors work on Goethe, but never question themselves about Goethe, never put Goethe in question, never work underneath Goethe.’ Armstrong admirably seeks to remedy this long-standing situation, but scholarly readers, familiar with Goethe’s work and his intellectual context, will find the book’s basic tone irksome. Armstrong consistently includes pithy generalizations, which make the book too straightforward for a more learned audience. Armstrong commits this error in the following footnote:

Mozart: no idea about money; pauper’s grave;

Beethoven: his friend had to take his money away because he was so irresponsible;

Balzac: dressed as a monk, drank forty cups of coffee a day, economic basket case;

Baudelaire: drug addict, compulsive gambler, squandered his inheritance;

Wagner: insanely egotistic, borrowed from all his friends, never paid his debts;

Tolstoy: wanted to be a penniless serf;

Nietzsche: didn’t make a penny from writing, later royalties went to his horrible sister;

Proust: didn’t know how to open a window or boil a kettle, lost lots of money through extravagance and inept speculation.

While his generalisations contain some humorous truth, the reduction of some of the greatest thinkers and writers of Western civilisation to a litany of failures is crass. At this point, the reader would benefit from a slightly more restrained conflation of the artist’s life with his work, which Love, Life, Goethe sadly lacks. Armstrong’s book would have benefited from taking his eye off Goethe, momentarily, to brush up on his French literary history. In one of his most famous essays, Marcel Proust quibbled with Sainte-Beuve’s insistence on the primacy of biography for literary interpretation so emphatically that he proposed a complete split between a great writer’s daily life (‘moi social’) and creative life (‘moi créatif’). Although Proust’s split might appear too absolute, it is, nevertheless, a hard balancing act for any author to straddle both areas: to ensure that the writer’s life doesn’t obscure the work and vice versa.

This problem has special relevance to Goethe, as his propensity for the unrestrained injection of his life into his works induced one considerable literary critic to abandon biography in the interpretation of Goethe’s works. Thus, Walter Benjamin avers that ‘the most thoughtless dogma of the Goethe cult, the most jejune confession of the adepts, asserts that among all the works of Goethe, the greatest is his life.’ Instead Benjamin proposes a revision of the most fundamental assumptions of what constitutes the writing self and its place in relation to the literary work. Armstrong never mentions Benjamin, and the fact that Love, Life, Goethe isn’t a scholarly study means he doesn’t have to. Yet familiarity with Benjamin’s ideas might have tempered Armstrong’s resolute belief that the details of Goethe’s life, conflated with his literary works, is where we should look to illuminate the author’s worth. Indeed, Armstrong spends a great deal of time joining the dots between morals and Goethe’s biography. As a result, we get a truncated form of biography laced with didacticism.

Goethe certainly should be well known to an educated readership. Faust is a masterpiece of Faust tradition. Elective Affinities is a brilliant meditation of the complexities of human relationships, and he virtually invented the buildungsroman with Wilhelm Meister. Indeed, Armstrong’s choice of Goethe is partially explained by the movements in German literature into which he has traditionally been placed, such as the Sturm und Drang and Weimar Classicism, both of which revolve around a desire to relate the emotional life of man to pragmatic ends. While Armstrong is quite right to centralise Goethe’s desire to ‘promote a kind of lucid inner stillness and equilibrium’ as a tenet of his aesthetic and philosophical development, his decision to write a lesson in ‘how to live’ via Goethe presupposes a reader who is made happy by knowing every detail of Goethe’s long life and what made him happy.

Love, Life, Goethe does display its author’s eye for detail with its light, readable summary of Goethe’s engagement with Spinoza and his great debt to Schiller; more of this balanced, observant intellectual contextualisation would have been welcome, but, unfortunately, this book doesn’t quite know whether it is intellectual biography, philosophical and literary examination, or self-help guide. Its judicious, limpid outline of Spinoza and monism are abandoned in fear that any more detail might become too academic, returning us to the drudge of ‘how getting to know Goethe might enrich life.’

Reading Goethe may enrich life in surprising, unpredictable ways; his works take in heaven, hell and everything in between. Getting to know the man via Armstrong is, however, an uneven affair. Armstrong catches the majesty of Goethe as an intellectual blessed with deft pragmatism, analytical thoroughness, and a polymath-like desire to learn everything, without abandoning humour or pleasure. In the end, Love, Life, Goethe seems most convincing when viewed as an entry into a niche market currently dominated by Alain De Botton’s Status Anxiety, How Proust Can Change Your Life and his documentaries such as Philosophy: A Guide To Happiness. Unfortunately, Armstrong lacks De Botton’s textual felicity and analytical sweep. Thus, if the reader wishes to get acquainted with Goethe, reading Goethe is by far the best method. You will acquire more knowledge, discover more about yourself and, ultimately, be much happier for it.

Andrew Hay is a DPhil student in English Literature at Balliol College. He works on issues of modernity in literary Modernism, and ideas of postmodern aesthetic/phenomenal experience.

Caché (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
France, 2005

Munich
Directed by Steven Spielberg
USA, 2005

Austrian director Michael Haneke has been making feature films for almost twenty years and yet only recently has he been recognised as one of the most challenging and compelling filmmakers in Europe. Having produced most of his early work for Austrian television during the eighties and nineties, Haneke came to broader public attention after directing La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) in 2001, which won him three awards at Cannes. His most recent offering, Hidden, is set to bring him deserved critical acclaim. This unsettling film clothed as a psychological thriller poses some urgent questions which extend beyond the confines of its genre and encompass our very modes of seeing and interpreting.

Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a bourgeois intellectual couple living in Paris with their son. The film opens with an uncomfortably long, silent shot of their house, filmed from the street. This is only the first of numerous moments during which the audience is left uncertain of exactly what, or who, lies behind this camera-eye—and whose perspective it shares. In this case it transpires that we are watching, together with Georges and Anne, a video posted through their own door, precipitating fears of a mysterious voyeur. The plot is thus driven by their own descent into paranoia as more videos and sinister drawings follow. Similarities with the opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway quickly dissipate as, rather than becoming entangled in a confusion of contiguous postmodern worlds, Georges gradually becomes convinced of the origins of the tapes in his own troubled history. The voyeur, he believes, is an Algerian farmhand who worked for his parents in his boyhood, and whose parents were killed in racist riots during the 1960s. Georges’s own lies and deception led to the boy being taken away from his home and into care. The campaign of voyeuristic tapes and drawings are thus, Georges reasons, an act of blackmail and revenge.

It is at this point that the film’s real subject begins to emerge. Haneke’s strategy comprises of a coldly distant, non-intrusive direction which allows the audience to form their own alliances and judgements in the accusations which accompany the disappearance of the couple’s son, and Georges’s subsequent confrontation of their supposed tormentor. The question which plagues viewers as they shuffle confusedly from the cinema following the film’s devastating conclusion is the extent to which their own prejudices have been revealed to them by this mirror-like quality in Haneke’s direction. The passivity and distance imposed by the camera and narrative structure has to be filled by the viewer’s own ideology, a troubling prospect for the white middle-class intellectuals who formed the majority of the Oxford audience watching this with me.

Hidden presents a bigger story than its plot suggests. Implicit in its tragic narrative is France’s brutal colonial history—a ghost that refuses to be exorcised as the rioting in its deprived and forgotten banlieues only last year demonstrated. More than this, though, the filmgoers of any nation which has colonised and oppressed, which has exploited and looked down upon its immigrants, will feel the quiet power of this movie. I say quiet, because the real stories in Hidden are the ones happening off camera, in the minds of its viewers. These are the stories of the immigrants who live, die and are judged without their voices being heard. In one harrowing, single-angle scene, the Algerian boy is dragged from Georges’ parents’ farmhouse into the back of a car. In attempting to escape he runs away from the authorities, off-camera. The steadiness of this shot, its refusal to slavishly follow its subject, its oblique depiction of the boy’s guardians turning away and retreat into the security of their house, is the perfect embodiment of Haneke’s professed credo:

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

*

Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, Munich, provides an ideal contrast to Haneke’s aesthetics and the ideal object of his polemic. His film, ‘based on real events,’ stars Eric Bana (fresh from his virtuoso performances in The Hulk (2003) and Troy (2004)) as Avner, the idealistic Mossad agent chosen to lead a group of assassins in killing men suspected of involvement in the terrorist murders at the Munich Olympics of 1972. The title of the film proves to be slightly misleading, as, despite the dramatic action sequence which opens the film, and the subsequent flashbacks (apparently haunting the mind of our hero, although he wasn’t actually there), the events in Munich function simply as a way to kick-start the plot. Predictably, the Jewish agents engaged in their cold-blooded task form a neatly diverse selection of moral stances to the job they have been assigned, ranging from ‘let’s shoot the bastards and enjoy it’ to the dawning revelation that ‘maybe we’re no better than they were.’ Tormented by moral scruples and the suspicion that killing people doesn’t really help much, Avner eventually breaks with his Mossad boss (a mercifully good performance by Geoffrey Rush) and returns to domestic bliss with gorgeous but curiously mute wife and newborn baby.

Fortunately for a film that clocks in at two-and-a-half hours, Spielberg is a master of the action/suspense genre. Deploying skills honed in films like Saving Private Ryan rather than Schindler’s List, he endows Munich with some genuinely high-quality scenes, pulling out all the stops in drawing the audience into high octane gun battles and heart-stopping suspense. Occasional excesses, such as an overdone orchestral soundtrack, mar the moments in which, it seems, we are expected to feel sorrow or pity. There is even the odd echo of Spielberg’s finest moments from the ‘Indiana Jones trilogy,’ in which brief flashes of ironic machismo humour penetrate the moral searchings of the protagonists. The only problem is the apparent demand of the film to be taken seriously.

As is usually the case with historical films, Munich’s ideological encounter takes place in the present rather than in the past it depicts. It doesn’t take Spielberg’s self-conscious placement of the twin towers in the final frame of the film to tell us that what is really at stake is the West’s and specifically America’s response to September 11. The necessity of maintaining some kind of moral high-ground in the response to these attacks, and the acknowledgement that a violent response will not prevent further violence but only increase its likelihood, has occurred to most (several governments notwithstanding, admittedly), without having it patiently dramatised for us at the cinema. It is precisely the events in Munich, in the quiet bits between the bomb blasts and flying bullets, which reveal its weaknesses. In the one clumsy attempt at giving an authentic voice to a Palestianian militant, Avner (implausibly posing as a Soviet agent) conveniently discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict with a PLO member. Unlike Haneke’s Hidden, Munich relies almost exclusively on words to signal interpretative potential. This set-piece jars as the inevitable deadlock of two earnestly given view-points is dutifully expressed. In Hidden, words are always lies, attempts, as Harold Pinter has memorably put it, at ‘continual evasion.’ The title of Heneke’s film comes to refer to that which the bourgeois intelligentsia has buried or obscured in language. There is something, Haneke seems to be saying, which film can do that other media cannot. The bare image, carefully chosen, and recorded unblinkingly, can act as something like a conscience. The space and freedom to discover this yourself is clearly not an option offered by Spielberg.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in English Literature at New College.

Siegfried by Richard Wagner
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Director: Keith Warner
Music Director: Antonio Pappano
2, 7, 10, 14, 18, 22 October 2005

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Gerald Barry
English National Opera
Director: Richard Jones
Conductor: Andre de Ridder
From 16 September 2005

Much has been made of Keith Warner’s new production of the Ring cycle, and justifiably so. His is a jejune retelling, abrasively gimmicky and filled with crass over-attention to detail commingled with blindness to the resulting silliness.

In fact, for a latter-day parable of frail gods and heroic men, Warner’s production is redolent with the frailties of man. Hubris and sycophantic populism collide in its design, mingling a futuristic minimalism—lots of steel and white, and oddities like a downed Messerschmitt whose propeller fuels the bellows of the forge—with an infantile insistence on actualizing every last symbol (hardly necessary given Wagner’s own proclivities). The Woodbird not only appears onstage but skips about (rather laboriously) dragging a bird-shaped kite; Mime’s final scene sees him clad in a rat’s head straight out of Toad Hall; leitmotifs drop with the delicacy of anvils. The absurdity climaxes in the dream sequence, when two children appear on stage covered in flour and wheeling a life-sized white plastic stag glued to the top of a gurney. Siegfried then clambers onto it and hugs it like a rich girl does her first pony. Overall, it is a condescendingly literal staging—except when it is not: Siegfried’s discovery of Brünnhilde occurs behind a stage-sized white panel with a small door, leaving his narration to come when he throws himself in vaudeville shock-horror back into the flood-lit portal. An odd device, given this moment’s dramatic potential.

With last spring’s Die Walküre, superb musicianship easily transcended such ridiculous staging. With Siegfried, however, we’ve no such luck. The role of Siegfried is physically exhausting, demanding that the singer be on-stage for the better part of four hours. Unfortunately John Treleaven as the eponymous hero had neither the vocal stamina nor the charisma to carry it off. Act One’s interminable forging scene is supposed to be a show-stopper, but for all of its accompanying pyrotechnics Siegfried’s triumphant cry of ‘Nothung!’ was feeble and noticeably flat. In fact, Treleaven’s tuning throughout was unreliable. More so his acting, which turned the naïve narcissism of Siegfried into loutish idiocy, leaving little sympathy for his exploits. And though the orchestra was serviceable, it was also a bit messy, imperfectly tuned and with the horns—important for all of those fanfares—often out of sync.

Fortunately, the other principals picked up some of the slack. Phillip Ens’ Fafner was darkly resonant and Lisa Gasteen’s Brünnhilde was every inch the Valkyrie. And even his Gandalf costume couldn’t interfere with John Tomlinson’s interpretation of Wotan: he sung magnificently, bringing a disillusioned, decaying maturity to the role captured so energetically by Bryn Terfel earlier in the year. But that the slapstick Mime (a brilliant Gerhard Siegel) so easily stole the show hardly cemented the gravitas of Siegfried’s epic premise.

Although a Greek tragic mask occupies a prominent space on stage, the premise of the English National Opera’s recent The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is pointedly anything but epic. Usually celebrated/derided for its accessibility, this time the ENO has attempted a more adventurous tack by staging Gerald Barry’s dissonant score of Rainer Warner Fassbinder’s 1973 play. So text-dense that the Coliseum employed supertitles, Petra is a black comedy of the Abigail’s Party mold, stuffed to the breaking point with the banality of love, materialism, and middle-class pretensions.

Unlike Abigail’s Party, however, there’s no dramatic progression—no massive fall, and certainly no transformation or redemption. It’s merely a snapshot of middle-aged haute couture designer Petra von Kant (think Eva Peron meets Norma Desmond) and her love for vacuous redneck-cum-model Karen. They flirt, Petra breaks down, they shag a lot, Petra obsesses, Karen leaves, Petra remains drunk. Fassbinder’s script is appropriately colloquial and everyday. The two biggest laughs, for instance, come from an apathetic ‘Go fuck yourself’ (amusing, I suppose, simply for the venue in which it was sung?) and Petra’s bored inquiry into her daughter’s latest crush: ‘Let me guess: tall, thin, blonde and looks a little like Mick Jagger?’ Of its much-vaunted lesbianism, Petra doesn’t say much—as the playwright said about a former film of his, it could as easily have revolved around heterosexual love affair. In fact, the script doesn’t say much about anything: its point is the mere chronicle of bathetic hysteria, the tedium of a diva doing the diva thing.

The nominal lesbianism does, of course, permit an entirely female cast, which in turn allows for a registration that glibly slips into the intended shrillness. The score must be a challenging one for musicians: because it is so verbose, there is lots of recitative; because it is histrionic, there are no grand themes and many subtly-changing dissonances. Overall, it’s brassy and frantic, full of chromatics and jagged vocal lines. There’s no relief, either, no moments of contrasting gentleness: the poor, bored strings are practically non-existent; the orchestra’s dynamic remains at a rather distant, reedy forte; and there are certainly no arias. Petra’s blustery personality dominates throughout—the only other character with a noticeable theme is her secretary/slave Marlene, whose oboes, clarinet and flute peer out occasionally and then are squashed by the horns of her mistress. There are a few laughs in the music: after Karen emotionally relates her parents’ darkly comic deaths, the score camps it up, ascending chromatically into squeaky breathiness long after she’s finished. Mostly, though, the music operates by contrast. Dramatic and jarring, its operatic clichés—marching music during quarrels, fanfare during toothbrushing—reminds us again that this ain’t exactly the stuff of myth.

For the most part, the production itself was superb. Stephanie Friede as Petra stumbled across the stage with conviction, and managed to add nuance and pathos to a vocal line lacking any. Rebecca von Lipinski as Karen was a better actress than she was singer—even from a few rows back it was difficult to hear her, and while she excelled at capturing Karen’s listlessness, some of her more impassioned musical moments fell a bit flat. The other highlight was Linda Kitchen as Marlene, Petra’s personal assistant, whose perpetual silence (infuriating for a trained opera singer, surely) and deadpan expression inspired more sympathy than all of Petra’s frenzies. Director Richard Jones’ staging was entertaining: calling in a man named Ultz as set-designer, it featured a television and record player used, respectively, for comedic non sequitur (flashes of adverts, a documentary on the Masai’s tribal dance) and for a kind of meta-tedium (orchestra echoing LP echoing orchestra). The aesthetic was fun as well—the stage was meticulously mod (bare wood, bubbled patterns with space-age aspirations, greens and browns and oranges predominant), and the costumes were empire-waisted and, appropriately, none too flattering.

However, the unfortunate problem of the score, as with the play itself, is that the depiction of banality is, ultimately, banal. Appreciating its ironies and wry cultural critique only diverts for so long. In the end, the monotony of both plot (another fight, another shag, another hangover) and score (chromatic, jagged, loud—yeah, we get it) made it easy to loose attention: after a few measures of ‘Fetch me another gin and tonic’ jumping between the first and the fifth repeatedly (har.), you start thinking about Christmas shopping. And while there is something kind of charming about a desultory ‘Yeah’ sung by a resonant mezzo at full concert-hall volume, the joke wears thin rather quickly. Unlike with Siegfried, the company and the director do as best they can with a limited subject matter, but at the end of a long two hours, there’s little worth remembering. Whether Barry and Fassbinder’s invocations of Wagner (Karin’s stay at the down-at-heel Hotel Rheingold, Wotan’s hunting call during sips of tepid coffee) are employed to trivialize Wagner or to trivialize their heroine (I suspect both), Petra is very much the flip side of Covent Garden’s rusty coin.

Kristin Anderson is a DPhil student in English Literature at Exeter College, Oxford.

Der Untergang (Downfall)
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s $10 million epic Downfall has been billed as one of the greatest ever war films, but the poster’s misleading tag line will not prepare you for the idiosyncratic presentation of this ground-breaking film. Those expecting nail-biting or stomach-turning battle sequences, heroic feats of strength and determination or dramatic acts of violence will, for the most part, be disappointed. Downfall is set predominantly in Hitler’s bunker, charting in agonising detail the last days of the Nazi regime as Russian forces inexorably advance on Berlin in May 1945. Stylistically, it resembles a stage-play more than an epic, thriving on intimate and claustrophobic set-pieces: Hitler dining heartily with his secretary on the eve of his death; Eva Braun writing a final, chatty letter to a cousin; Joseph Goebbels and his wife calmly orchestrating their family’s group suicide; Hitler’s most loyal followers drunkenly awaiting their fate with cigarettes and schnapps. Downfall is not a film about the Second World War so much as it is a fi lm about endings — and in particular, about dying.

The fact the Downfall takes as its subject the collapse of a regime that continues to haunt European consciousness with an unease that discourages representation has made many viewers and commentators nervous. In a film which aspires to an unsettling naturalism, Hitler and his henchmen are occasionally in danger of appearing human, capable of wounded pride, tenderness, exuberance and even (most dangerously) love. In Britain, at least, there has been a tendency to stow away the complex and unstable idea of Nazism safely in a box labelled ‘Evil’, where it can be occasionally recovered and brandished by guileless journalists and politicians in response to suitably outrageous acts of bigotry, racism and authoritarianism. Hitler has been transformed into a symbolic and absolute embodiment of such wickedness. From Prince Harry’s fancy dress gaffe to Ken Livingston’s ill-judged comparison of a journalist to a concentration-camp guard, the invocation of Nazism has demonstrated its enduring power to outrage and unsettle the public. This film with its unshakeable focus on some of the most hated figures of history, seems to be indicating a difficult truth—that the Nazi hierarchy was made up of extraordinary, pathetic and faintly ridiculous human beings. This last point is particularly striking, for despite (or perhaps because of ) the film’s tragic intensity, the audience contrived to find occasional humour in Hitler’s impotent outbursts and Goebbels’ unhinged theorisings. Such moments depended on a brief separation of what was occurring on the screen from its historical reality, as, for a moment, the world’s most notorious dictator became little more than a senile, ranting geriatric with an increasingly weak grip on reality.

One of Downfall’s most striking features is its insistence on isolating this gap between the unshakeable will and authority of Hitler’s National Socialist ideology and the material reality of its consequences. The bunker in which most of the film is set serves as a metaphor for authority’s innate ignorance of the events for which it is responsible. While Eva Braun sips white wine and Hitler wistfully meditates on non-existent German divisions on their way to save Berlin, the film occasionally cuts to the carnage occurring in the streets only yards from the bunker, where child soldiers are sent out against the Russian tanks with neither adequate arms nor training. Significantly, this truth is inherent to all hierarchical power structures, not just to Nazism. The difference here is that, as every member of the audience knows, our on-screen Hitler and his officers were facing an inevitable end, one dictated by historical truth. Germany lost the war. Hitler was defeated. Weren’t the accounts settled?

This brings us to an important question. Most of the characters are despicable, the plot predictable, Hitler’s ranting grating…and yet the film is utterly mesmerising. Why? Perhaps for its historical value; the screenplay is based on Joachim Fest’s notorious first hand account The Last Days of Hitler. Downfall demands, through its style and sources, to be taken seriously as a historical document. It is not entertaining, but educative, promoting a more thorough ‘understanding’ of history. Perhaps we should ask exactly what kind of understanding this is, for there is little insight here into historical process, no revelations of vital factors affecting the outcome of the war. Perhaps, instead, the film satisfies an innate desire for truth, the thrill of the real—‘is this what really happened to one of history’s most enigmatic figures?’ If this is the case, then the film is reduced to documentary, something akin to the strangely vivid colour footage of Nazi parades and rallies which survived the regime and find their way regularly onto televised history programmes. These films always seem rather disconcerting, occupying an ambiguous space between a securely distant past and an immediate present. In some senses, this seems to be what Downfall aspires to, especially in its pre-credit sequence which details the historical fate of all the characters, as if the film flowed seamlessly from its end into the tides of history. The odd, jarring interview with Heidle Junge, Hitler’s personal secretary, now in her eighties, furthered this effect. Young and attractive in the film, the sight of this elderly lady grappling with her conscience as she attempts to make sense of her past in the light of the present unsettles the viewer as the film ends.

Having witnessed the unambiguous demise of Nazi Germany, an ending enacted not just politically but physically, in the bodily destruction of Hitler, Braun, Goebbels and the rest, are we now to be told that we cannot forget, that the meaning of this film spills out of the cinema into our present-day existence? This, ultimately, is Downfall’s alluring paradox. Meaning depends largely on the formless mass of cultural baggage an audience brings to the cinema. Despite, as its name suggests, its almost fetishist adherence to historical ending and demise, its very existence in the present and its aggressive insistence on authenticity, means that this particular episode of the past remains with us, un-exorcised. As so often with historical films, it tells us more about the place we are in now than the place we were in then. Not many years ago, a film of this kind, especially one made in Germany, would have been unthinkable. Its making demonstrates that the phenomenon of Hitler has begun to be assimilated into a cultural narrative. At the same time, however, its apocalyptic structure stubbornly resists being dragged into flow of time. Cinema by its very nature lays claim to an ability to transcend history at the same as it betrays its historical moment. Downfall revives, just as it simultaneously lays to rest, the memory of Nazism.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in English Literature at New College, Oxford. He writes on Nabokov.