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.

Doctor Atomic by John Adams
English National Opera
Directed by Penny Woolcock
The London Coliseum
Running until 20 March 2009

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John Adams is America’s great hope for grand opera. He is among the country’s best-known classical composers and probably the only one to bridge the gap between critical and popular acclaim. His works, whether scored for string quartet or choral ensemble, are eminently dramatic, appealing directly to the emotions in a way that has long gone out of fashion. Adams’s music originates in minimalism, but finds inspiration in a wide variety of sources, such as Renaissance polyphony, the Romantic orchestral tradition and American folk music.

No contemporary composer is in a better position to commandeer the forces of a major opera house and produce a success that would achieve that elusive goal of operatic immortality: entering the standard repertory. Since World War II, such success has largely been limited to works that eschewed musical modernism and looked back to the grand tradition familiar to opera audiences. For better or worse, opera audiences seem to demand an expansive, accessible mode of expression, and this is precisely what Adams’s music offers.

Adams has essayed the genre twice before, with Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), both of which attracted loyal followings but never entered the mainstream. Doctor Atomic, premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and currently running in a revised staging at the English National Opera, is his strongest effort to date. Created with long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, it tells the story of the atomic bomb’s first test, focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic, cultured physicist and leader of the Manhattan Project. The subject matter—a turning point in 20th century history, remembered across the world with vehemence and passion—has huge dramatic potential. “These are Wagnerian topics,” Adams is quoted in the programme, “ideally suited to operatic expression.”

Doctor Atomic’s ambitions are, in their own way, no less grand than those of the scientists working in New Mexico in 1945. No homegrown American opera has entered the international repertory to date. Indeed, those that come closest (George Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 Candide and Philip Glass’s 1980s “portrait” operas Akhnaten and Satyagraha) were successful largely because they avoided the dramatic conventions and musical language of European grand opera. The Wagnerian ambitions of Adams and Sellars suggested that Dr. Atomic would confront the tradition head-on; the work, dubbed alternately an “American Faust” and “Prometheus” would be a contemporary, new-world Götterdämmerung.

Doctor Atomic is not the explosion it might have been, but it is nonetheless a stunning conflagration. Adams’s music offers some moments of gripping drama and is never less than engaging. Yet the effect of the piece as a whole is frustratingly uneven, as critics have remarked since its premiere. The English National Opera’s production, first seen at the Metropolitan Opera in October of last year, might have lain to rest lingering doubts about the piece. It is staged not by Sellars, but by Penny Woolcock, a British film director who has worked with Adams previously in film. The reasons for the change, particularly striking given that Sellars and Adams conceived and wrote the piece together, were made public when Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met, said in a New Yorker profile that he had loved the music, but the production “wasn’t realizing its potential”. Though the music was an unqualified success, Sellars’s staging, Gelb said, was “undramatic”.

Gelb was right about the effect, but wrong about its cause. The opera, as the English National Opera’s production establishes, did not lack drama because of Sellars’s staging, but because of its structure and libretto. The only action of the opera consists in waiting for the bomb to be tested. The text, a patchwork of myriad sources—historical, scientific and literary—creates drama obliquely: the characters express themselves largely in highly stylised, artificial language. Where the original staging was conceived in the same alien idiom as Sellars’s text (unmotivated gestures, dance sequences unconnected to the narrative), Woolcock’s staging seeks to mitigate the work’s dramatic idiosyncracies. The change is well-intentioned, but it creates a sense of incoherence between words and actions, and makes the libretto all the more inscrutable.

Most troubling is the lack of structure in the piece as a whole. Carried by Adams’s compelling music, the expository scenes of the first act manage to eschew the problems of the opera’s dramatic structure. The vocal and orchestral scores are sensitive to the opera’s dramatic context, and frame each episode and encounter subtly. The act ends with Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer, alone on stage for the first time, singing John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” The alien beauty of the words, the pounding orchestral accompaniment, and Finley’s lone, tortured voice combine in one of the most powerful moments I have ever experienced in an opera house.

In the second act, however, the opera’s structural deficiencies reveal themselves: there is little to do but wait. We can enjoy the variety of Adams’s music, but the narrative urgency of the first act is gone. The dramatic pace lags badly and we do not feel the tension the characters are experiencing. In these scenes, when the entire focus is on expression, the failure of Sellars’s libretto to confront emotion head-on is particularly frustrating. It is not until the final scene that the piece finds its footing again, as we and the characters wait anxiously for the explosion, unsure whether to hope for success or failure.

The ambivalence we feel waiting for the blast points to the difficulties of staging an opera based on so destructive an event in world history. Sellars and Adams are clearly attracted to the moral implications of the test. In the first scene, scientists discuss whether and how the bomb should be used after Germany’s surrender, and Oppenheimer repeatedly conveys his sense of awful responsibility (whether he felt it at the time is another question). The opera’s attitude, clear from the production notes as well, is a reflexive pacifism that judges the test of the bomb in light of its later use and condemns it unequivocally. But the treatment of guilt remains distressingly shallow, as if the test of the bomb were in itself an evil—which is not necessarily the case, even if one believes that the use of the bomb was a crime against humanity. This simplistic moralising might be excusable were it not an abject dramatic failure. Sellars and Adams do not portray the genuine moral conflict of the Los Alamos scientists, the aspect that might make their work a tragedy in the fullest sense: that in doing what they believe to be right, they unleash huge evil on the world.

The musical performance is a triumph for the English National Opera under the baton of Lawrence Renes. Stretched by a complex score in which no moment is like the last, the orchestra plays with passion and accuracy. The singing is excellent throughout, with special mention going to Edward Sherrat’s sinister Edward Teller and Met Young Artist Sasha Cooke, an astonishingly mature Kitty Oppenheimer. Gerald Finley has sung Oppenheimer in every performance of the opera since the premiere, and one can hardly imagine anyone else in the role, so commanding is his presence on stage.

Doctor Atomic leaves our hopes for Adams unfulfilled but intact, and even more urgent. One eagerly awaits the moment when his talent as composer fuses with the right libretto. Until then, we will watch like the Los Alamos scientists waiting all night for the test, wagering on the power of the blast. What have they created? When will they succeed? Doctor Atomic does not realise all its ambitions, but it provides moments of explosive drama, and leaves us anxious for Adams’s next experiment.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, where he is writing his dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800.

Photograph of John Adams © Margaretta Mitchell

James Appell

Last March, over 60 years after World War II, Prime Minister Gordon Brown recognised 27 men for their service during and after the war in a ceremony at Downing Street. Given the intensity with which Britain has remembered and commemorated World War II veterans, it hardly makes sense that men who served their country had to wait more than half a century before the government acknowledged their contribution. Yet this has been the fate of the Bevin Boys. Tom Hickman’s new book Called Up, Sent Down describes their peculiar wartime fate. Unlike Britain’s other veterans, the Bevin Boys served their country without ever leaving the United Kingdom or seeing military action.

World War II presented the opportunity for young men of fighting age to do for their country what their fathers and grandfathers had done in the Great War: to serve in the Armed Forces, to wear the uniform of the British Army, and to fight for King and Country. Month by month, those who reached the age of 18 registered, underwent medical examinations, and within weeks received their instructions to report for conscription. In December 1943 hundreds of young men, like those who had gone before them, anxiously awaited their assignments. They received an unwelcome early Christmas present: they were to be the first of 48,000 or so ‘Bevin Boys’, sent to mine coal in Britain rather than to fight the enemy in greater Europe. They would wear blackened overalls and steel toe-capped boots rather than military uniforms, and they would wield picks rather than pistols. They became Britain’s forgotten conscripts.

The minister of labour and national service, Ernest Bevin, devised this scheme in response to a severe shortage of both coal and coal workers. The declaration of war in 1939 saw a surge in the demand for coal, as industries at home and abroad mobilised. But export demand tailed off considerably by May 1940 with the fall of France and Italy’s decision to side with the Axis Powers. With around 5 percent of the mining workforce losing their jobs virtually overnight, Bevin dropped the protected status of miners, allowing them to seek employment in the construction and munitions industries. Former miners could now help the war effort rather than remain idle.

This was to be the fatal mistake with which Bevin’s name is now popularly associated. Miners streamed out of the pits in far greater numbers than he had anticipated, and coal production screeched to a halt. The government tried to convince miners to continue working at the pit-face, but to no avail. In the end Bevin settled upon compulsory conscription into the mining workforce to sustain production. Young men who had prepared themselves for war were picked by ballot, allegedly out of Bevin’s own hat, to prepare to go underground.

The shocked recipients of conscription papers in late 1943 and early 1944 reacted with disbelief. Some refused to report and went absent without leave, even on pain of imprisonment. Others sought to appeal on medical grounds or simply argued for their greater suitability for the Armed Forces. They wrote to national newspapers, campaigned publicly, and generally made a nuisance of themselves in their efforts either to shame the government into improving their lot, or simply to express their disappointment at not being able, like so many of their peers and family members, to ‘do their Duty’.

Many continued to serve down the mines until 1948, long after those serving in the Army had been decommissioned. Bevin’s reputation suffered and MPs began calling the experiment a failure. Unlike soldiers, the Bevin Boys received no medals, no benefits and no pensions; while soldiers could return to their old jobs, the Bevin Boys, who had been forced out of previous employment by law, had no such provision. This was all the more damaging given the post-war demobilisation of industry, which brought the 5 million men and women who had served in the forces back into the civilian labour force. Many conscripts returned from the mines bearing physical and mental scars from work that was as demanding on the body and senses as war. Though many were injured or killed in combat overseas, miners suffered a considerable number of casualties underground. At the time, however, the government did not see merit in such a comparison.

Tom Hickman’s book charts the lives of the Bevin Boys in their own words, an oral history of the forgotten conscripts. Hickman marshals the individual testimonies of some 70 former Bevin Boys, who came from all parts of Britain to serve in coalfields in Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, the North East, Scotland, and Kent. These testimonies form the basis of Called Up, Sent Down, the author’s voice taking a backseat to the words of the men themselves. Hickman’s real skill has been to present the words of his interviewees both thematically and chronologically, giving the book a genuine narrative structure while allowing the conscripts plentiful focus.

Hickman’s subjects underwent such varied experiences in their host communities that Called Up, Sent Down maintains a pluralism in the story it tells. Some of those interviewed continue to look back in anger at their period in the mines. Ken Tyres’s story is perhaps the hardest to read in this respect. Tyres was injured after getting trapped between two tubs full of coal at a mine in County Durham:

The pelvis healed but never the internal injuries. I’ve never been able to travel far because of urinary problems, never more than a few miles. And since that day I’ve never had a full night’s sleep. Being a Bevin Boy wrecked my life.

Tyres received no war pension, despite having made a claim for one. The War Pensions Agency turned it down, explaining that he was ineligible either as a conscript or a civilian. As a Bevin Boy he had been ‘called up and allotted a National Service Registration number [but] was not enlisted and therefore remained a civilian’. As a civilian his ‘physical injury [was] not caused either by the enemy or in combating the enemy’.

But the book contains contrasting recollections. Other conscripts, initially critical, turned out to be grateful for the experience. One Bevin Boy may have spoken for many when he noted that ‘mining was a risky business, but I wasn’t shot at or shot down. Would I have survived as a ship’s stoker or if I’d taken part in the D-Day landing?’ A notable number continued in the mining trade after being decommissioned. Ian McInnes’s experience in the mines helped him obtain a first-class degree in mining at university in Nottingham, leading to a lifelong career as a consultant.

Hickman clearly is enthused by his subject. His previous works on National Service and the BBC during wartime demonstrate his preoccupation with the interaction of individuals and state institutions in the context of war. In this book he has collaborated with the Bevin Boys’ association, and he has integrated material from the published memoirs of Bevin Boys. This seductive technique allows the reader to become acquainted with the Bevin Boys themselves, through hearing their stories first-hand. But it also becomes very easy to be uncritical. The reader needs little invitation to recognise the dichotomy between the state’s crass treatment of the conscripts and the Bevin Boys’ stoicism. Such highly personal histories inevitably run the risk of becoming celebratory, lionising the efforts of ‘heroes’ in the face of huge obstacles. Yet the more one immerses oneself in the testimonies of the Bevin Boys, the more one cannot fail to be impressed by their story–irrespective of one’s academic reservations.

Called Up, Sent Down in fact offers much more than a portrait of the Bevin Boys’ courage in adversity. For one, it puts into perspective the popular aversion to war today. The choice between serving on the battlefield or in the mines would doubtless be unenviable in any age, but would the draftees of today be as disappointed as their predecessors in the 1940s if told they would not serve on the front? No doubt the combined weight of twentieth century conflicts and the unrelenting and often graphic news coverage of them has taken its toll on the romanticism of war. Moreover, the imperatives are different. Times have changed since adolescents 60 years ago ‘entertained the…hope that the war would last until they were old enough to get into the fight’. That, perhaps, is a good thing.

Hickman’s study also hints at some fascinating patterns in the sociological map of Britain. The North-South divide at times reads as a gaping chasm, with Bevin Boys from London and the South East posted up to the coalfields of the North seeming to enter a different country, where regional dialect ‘might just as well have been a foreign language’. The mining communities come to life through the eyes of the interviewees as distinctive social entities, with idiosyncratic cultures, languages, manners, and rhythms. To one London Bevin Boy posted to Staffordshire ‘it was…like living in a time warp’. One gets the feeling that Britain’s mining communities were a world apart from the Britain that was busy at war.

Indeed, Hickman makes few references to the ongoing war which the Bevin Boys were helping to power. Notwithstanding the odd meeting with soldiers on leave, or the encounters with civvies that left many Bevin Boys ashamed of their status (they were often mistaken for conscientious objectors or shirkers), Hickman barely mentions the action on the battlefields over the Channel or the nightly bombing raids suffered by many across the country.

Is this an oversight by the author or his demonstration of the all-consuming nature of mining work? The latter suggests an important undercurrent of the book, perhaps one not anticipated by Hickman. That miners and their communities were so integral to the war effort and yet so removed from the war, almost forgotten by it, may be the most valuable conclusion one derives from Called Up, Sent Down. Although the book tells the story of the forgotten conscripts, it is the unheralded local career miners–those who worked alongside the Bevin Boys–who take centre stage.

Coal-mining in Britain during the 1940s was quite literally a matter of life and death. The coal that miners hewed fired the factories and fuelled the troops to keep the war effort going. It was the fuel that kept the home fires burning (especially during the famously bitter winter of 1947-1948). Conscripted or not, the miners faced daily threats to life and limb. Rock-falls, dust, low ceilings, flammable gas, and the grind of manual labour all threatened lethal consequences, making mining ‘the industry with the worst safety record in Britain’. One miner told Bevin Boy Tom McGuiness: ‘Son, you have a worse job than a rear gunner.’ Presumably he was fully aware of the irony of his comment. For Bevin Boys mining was a hazardous, but ultimately temporary, form of employment; for the men of the mining communities, it was their life.

Miners have had a tough time in recent years in the British popular consciousness. The mining industry in Great Britain has dwindled considerably since the war. UK Coal, Britain’s largest mining company, has only 12 mines in operation today, employing only 3,500 workers. The dark days of the 1980s, when Arthur Scargill led unionized mineworkers out on strike, formed the iconic image of British mining. The wounds from the year-long Miners’ Strike, as well as the subsequent closure of the pits and destruction of the very communities about which Hickman writes, have reconfigured Britain, making British miners an endangered species. In the popular mindset, the Bevin Boys are to be pitied for having had to live and work in such places, when 40 years later the miners drew ire for striking or leaving the mining profession.

As if to underline this disparity, the Bevin Boys are no longer ‘forgotten’. Former Bevin Boys such as Warwick Taylor (The Forgotten Conscript) and Reg Taylor (The Reluctant Miner) have published their experiences. School curricula on the Second World War make mention of the Bevin Boys. Since 1998 they have been allowed to march to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. And in March 2008 Gordon Brown presented a number of former Bevin Boys with commemorative badges in honour of their service.

The Bevin Boys have been acknowledged, and rightly so, for their employment in the mines was without choice. They most certainly ‘did their Duty’. But Called Up, Sent Down also highlights the contribution of the men who worked alongside the Bevin Boys and, though sometimes as hostile as they were helpful to the young conscripts, shared in the hard, dangerous but vital work. Now their industry and way of life have largely disappeared. Perhaps Hickman has missed the ‘scoop’ here: are they not also forgotten?

James Appell is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

S.S. Schweber
In the Shadow of the Bomb
Princeton University Press, 2006
288 pages
ISBN 0691127859

In the years before his death in 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer was perhaps the most famous living physicist in the world.  A universal genius, he wrote poetry and read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit.  In the world of physics, he made seminal contributions to our understanding of molecules, quantum field theory, and astrophysics.  Despite this work, he never received the Nobel Prize.  Then and now, his fame rests on the events of July 16, 1945.

At 5:29 am, dawn burst violet-fingered and terrible over the New Mexican desert near Alamogordo.  As the flash faded and the desert trembled to the roar of a new world being born, Oppenheimer thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ Less than ten years after he had ushered that awful Trinity of light, smoke, and thunder into existence, Oppenheimer—the archetypal insider and charismatic leader of the scientific community—was a broken outsider: crucified by Communist witch-hunters and the military establishment for his guilty opposition to the nuclear arms race, shunned by many of his colleagues for his shameful and unsuccessful attempt to avoid persecution by naming names.

Hans Bethe, one of the eulogists at Oppenheimer’s funeral, outlived his friend and colleague by several decades, dying in 2005 at the age of 98.  Bethe was in many ways the professional mirror of Oppenheimer.  Unlike the temperamental ‘Oppie’, whose Berkeley group worked on virtually every significant problem in theoretical physics in the 1930s, Bethe was a ‘master craftsman,’ insisting on a total command of established technique in his chosen field.  While Oppie essentially  stopped doing physics after  World War II, Bethe remained productive into his eighties; while Oppie’s ambition in attacking every difficult problem excluded him from the elite circle of Nobel prize winners, Bethe’s focussed, careful analysis dramatically demonstrated that nuclear reactions were the source of the sun’s energy and earned him the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics.  Oppenheimer may have been in some sense more brilliant, but there is no doubt that Bethe was the greater physicist.

Bethe also played a greater role in averting nuclear holocaust.  Hand-picked by Oppenheimer to head the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the war, Bethe directed the essential calculations behind the implosion device that dawned over Trinity and devastated Nagasaki. Like almost all Los Alamos scientists, Bethe was deeply disturbed by the reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the U.S. began its drive for the hydrogen bomb, Bethe declared it ‘a terrible error.’  But when he perceived that its development was inevitable, Bethe realised that he could most effectively advocate disarmament from within Los Alamos. Thus Bethe again played a pivotal theoretical role in the design of a terrible weapon, this one even more fearsome because it was a weapon of genocide.  Crucially, it was this continued technical involvement with weapons research that provided Bethe the practical authority to argue for disarmament, and Bethe played a central role in a 1963 ban on atmospheric testing, as well as opposing the Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s.

It is through the lives of these two men—not parallel so much as ‘entangled’—that  Silvan Schweber examines the timely question: What are the moral responsibilities of the scientist? The book that emerges from Schweber’s ruminations is difficult but important.  Although written in the context of an ongoing biographical project on Bethe, In the Shadow of the Bomb is not a biography of either Oppenheimer or Bethe.  In fact, it expects that the reader is familiar with much of the contemporary physics and history.  But one need not submit to an undergraduate training in physics before approaching this book. Much of the relevant physics and history can be gleaned from reading one of the excellent recent biographies of Oppenheimer. Jeremy Bernstein’s Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (2004) is a fine, short introduction, with Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus (2005) the undisputed authority on Oppenheimer’s life and times.  Armed with some background, the reader can appreciate the twin virtues of Schweber’s book: its tight focus on Oppenheimer and Bethe’s moral development and agency, and its extensive use of original sources to drive the story.

In Schweber’s view, both Oppenheimer and Bethe are ‘children of the Enlightenment.’  He takes his understanding of Enlightenment from Foucault, who identified it as ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.’  Both men had imbibed this Enlightenment attitude from their schooling: Oppenheimer in the Ethical Culture School and Bethe in the Gymnasium.  But while Bethe remained a true Kantian, believing in the universalism of principles like knowledge, reason, truth, progress, Oppenheimer developed an almost postmodern worldview, striving always to ‘go beyond’ the limits of his present circumstance and moment.

Oppenheimer’s moral stance was certainly relativist. He wrote to George Kennan in 1951, ‘What I question is our ability to put ourselves, as a nation, in the place of these other peoples and decide what is right or wrong in the light of their standards and traditions.’  This moral relativism, remarkable in its Cold War context, was complemented by a vigorous intellectual pluralism.  In 1959 Oppenheimer wrote, ‘Only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; [...] that total knowledge is possible.’  One year later he noted that ‘No part of science follows, really from any other in any usable form [...] One is dealing with a wholly different order of nature.’  These prophetic words are a refreshing counterpoint in the current debate on ‘consilience,’ the unity of all human knowledge.  They present a modest and humanist vision of science’s scope, an antidote to contemporary scientific triumphalism.

Oppenheimer’s relativist and pluralist stance externalized a radical personal complexity.  His friend George Kennan described him as ‘a bundle of marvelous contradictions’; his nemesis Edward Teller testified in Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing that ‘I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better and therefore trust more.’  Oppenheimer’s science mirrored his drive to ‘go beyond’ and his failure to integrate his internal contradictions and complexity.  He pushed constantly and everywhere along the boundary of the known, driven to tackle problems too difficult even for one of his genius.  Schweber notes that Oppenheimer, ‘conscious of his fracturedness,’ yearned for ‘wholeness and a more integrated self.’  Yet this unity would forever evade him; Schweber makes a moving comparison to Nietzsche’s ‘man without any power to forget who is condemned to see “becoming” everywhere.’  At last, ‘he will hardly dare to raise his finger.’

In contrast, Bethe’s Kantian universalism flowed into, and perhaps from, his personal and professional integrity.  His friends speak of his remarkable serenity, of his ability to ‘act decisively as a moral agent’; he was not a man in conflict with himself, but could rationally integrate (perhaps rationalise) his actions, even so far as deciding to work on the H-bomb.  Bethe’s drive towards integration even appeared in his science, which was characterized both by the synthesis of fields (in the case of his many famous review articles) and by the analysis of how reductive parts combine into synthetic wholes (for example, his work on nuclei or the source of energy in the sun).

Bethe and Oppenheimer’s experience of community provides an interesting lens through which to examine their personalities, integrated and fractured. Both men treasured community, and indeed Oppenheimer was the leader of two of the most remarkable communities in the history of physics.  In addition to the extraordinary laboratory at Los Alamos, Oppie’s group at Berkeley comprised the largest and the best school of theoretical physics that America had ever seen.  Bethe wrote of Los Alamos that ‘it was an unforgettable experience [...] I never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives.’

In both cases, Oppenheimer was not first among equals—he was the animating genius.  At Berkeley, he was the centre of his students’ intellectual and social world, while at Los Alamos he was, in Bethe’s words, ‘a leader [who] brought out the best in all of us, like a good host with his guests.’  Both communities were urgently committed to their goals, and this common purpose allowed Oppenheimer to overcome his personal flaws and bring his enormous charisma to bear in forging ‘the spirit of belonging together.’

But in the post-atomic wasteland, with moral and intellectual bearings universally disordered and fragmented, Oppenheimer’s charisma and reach proved his undoing. Overconfident from his success at Berkeley and Los Alamos, Oppenheimer sought, and briefly wore, the mantle of scientist-statesman, becoming the representative of the entire scientific community.  In assuming this enormous responsibility—in effect shouldering the entire moral burden of the scientific community himself—Oppenheimer unwittingly began the journey to his personal Calvary.  Oppenheimer approached Truman in 1946 and explained that ‘I have blood on my hands,’ deeply offending the President.  Oppenheimer’s subsequent, tireless activity within the corridors of power, particularly his effort to prevent the design of the H-bomb and forge a ‘Soviet-American agreement to ban [its] testing,’ made him the symbol of the scientific community’s meddlesome presumption among dissenting elements of the military and national security apparatus.  As these political enemies plotted Oppenheimer’s downfall, seeking to make him a cautionary example, his all-too-human moral failures rendered him an unwitting accomplice.  Schwerber writes extensively of Oppie’s appalling conduct in betraying Bernard Peters to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and quotes Victor Weisskopf’s plaintive letter to Oppenheimer on the Peters affair: ‘we are all losing something that is irreparable.  Namely confidence in you.’

Yet  Oppenheimer’s deepest disappointment came at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had become director in 1947.  Driven by his catholic interests and near-infinite intellectual reach, Oppenheimer had hoped to create there a replica of the camaraderie of Los Alamos.  While surveying the fractured intellectual landscape and accepting that it would be misguided to search for any unifying system of ideas, he dreamed that at least a community of respect and fellowship could be built across the disciplines.  In this he experienced bitter failure. His friend Kennan wrote that ‘he himself remained so largely alone in his ability to bridge in a single inner world those wholly disparate workings of the human intellect.’  In both cases Oppenheimer had sought to write large a personal struggle: in the first case, to wash his hands of the blood of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; in the second, to maintain integrity against the centrifugal force of his manifold intellectual passions.  Yet in both instances, his inability to leave his personal struggles behind condemned him to speak of a fellowship and a community he himself could never achieve, and from which he was forever excluded.

Bethe’s modesty and the circumscription of his aims allowed him to succeed where Oppenheimer failed.  Oppenheimer had come away from Los Alamos convinced of both his terrible personal responsibility and of his enormous powers to forge and lead a community.  Bethe, who had been a loner before his Los Alamos days, took away the true meaning of Los Alamos: the importance of community as an end in itself, and the value of ‘small’ aims in shaping and guiding that community.  Although the design and construction of the first atomic bomb was certainly enormously difficult and of world-historical import, as an aim it was specific and ‘small,’ nothing compared to the moral struggle or the pan-disciplinary community Oppenheimer had envisioned after the war.

Hence Bethe understood that the struggle to prevent nuclear holocaust was the responsibility of the entire scientific community, and never sought the mantle of scientist-statesman.  Rather he was content to remain a craftsman, participating in weapons research on a  technical level, and it was this continued engagement with the weapons community that gave him the moral gravity and technical insight to argue for the goals of disarmament to which he was committed.  He remained convinced that the H-bomb was an ‘evil thing,’ writing in 1950:

It is argued that it would be better for us to lose our lives than our liberty; and this I personally agree with.  But I believe that this is not the question; I believe that we would lose far more than our lives in a war fought with hydrogen bombs, that we would in fact lose all our liberties and human values at the same time, and so thoroughly that we would not recover them for an unforeseeably long time.

These words were remarkable in the moment, and it is even more remarkable (and perhaps disturbing) that they remain relevant in the present-day war on terror.  Bethe saw that the existential threat posed by Soviet communism necessitated, in a way, the balance of terror. But after this threat had passed, Bethe spoke in 1995 at Los Alamos to ‘call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons.’  He had succeeded where Oppenheimer had failed; there was no blood on Bethe’s hands when he died.   He also succeeded in building a vibrant intellectual community, indeed a family, at the Cornell physics department, where he would remain until his death.  It was this community that afforded Bethe the occasion, and perhaps the courage, to take ‘forthright stands’ during the McCarthy era for the rights and the democratic values he cherished, displaying great moral strength in defense of his colleague Philip Morrison—in stark contrast to Oppenheimer’s moral weakness in the Peters case.

In the end, Oppenheimer and Bethe represent two possible responses to the failure of Enlightenment values in the nuclear age.  Both responses emphasise the importance of fellowship, with one’s fellow scientists and with one’s fellow human beings.  But in practice Oppenheimer’s response was deeply personal.  He held himself ultimately and irredeemably responsible for the tragedy of Trinity, and could never forgive himself this terrible sin, nor forget the blood on his hands.  His act of radical ambition—to take up responsibility for science’s fall from grace—drove Oppenheimer into a personal wilderness from which he could only cry out, exhorting the listener of his 1954 lecture on Christmas Day ‘to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing’.  Bethe’s response is heart-wrenchingly summarised by Schweber: he ‘lived the life that Oppenheimer had described.’  Because he learned to ‘express love through his work’ and ‘to express his love openly in words,’ Bethe was able to transcend the sins of Los Alamos; he ‘helped himself, helped others, and helped mankind.’

Oppenheimer’s thoughts at Trinity proved prophetic.  In the shattered landscape of the atomic age, Oppenheimer stood apart and alone, a July morning’s mushroom cloud reminding us that in its shadow ‘we can help, because we can love, one another.’  As for Bethe, he remained ‘til the end of his days as he had been at Trinity, standing before the ruin with his colleagues—his friends.

Bethe remarked after Trinity, ‘It was too much to say anything.’  We owe a debt of gratitude to this brave man, who would learn to say something through both his words and his life.  To make this debt so plain is Schweber’s greatest triumph.

Jacob Foster is a DPhil student in mathematical physics at Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD student in complexity science at the University of Calgary.  His current interests include the mathematical properties of complex networks to the geometry of the Big Bang.

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.