WWI

A Vivid Spy Story

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This is the biography of a wildly improbable life: born into wealth and privilege, Margaret Harrison changed careers from society news reporter to spy. That’s right, fluent in German, she was a spy for American military intelligence in post-WWI Germany. Harrison was tasked with taking the mood of the country from top to bottom. She did so, moving through a country filled with violence and practically dodging bullets in Berlin as various factions fought each other for control.

When she was assigned to discover what was really going on in Bolshevik Russia, Harrison learned Russian and sneaked into that country of vast convulsions, which was at war with Poland. She had no permission, but she had charm and wit and could think fast.  Harrison was totally clear-headed about the risk of crossing over from Poland:

She was aware that once she reached the Russian side, she would have no one to turn to for help: no American diplomats had stayed in the country, no foreign embassies remained to represent her; she had no way to send a message out, and no one she knew to receive a message inside. She would be at the mercy of a dangerous adversary.

Hobnobbing with the literati and enjoying Moscow’s cultural richness amid the shortages of food and just about everything else didn’t last. She was forced to spy for the Cheka, the secret police–but that didn’t last, either. The book tips over into a sort of horror story when she’s arrested and imprisoned for well over a year in shocking, grotesque conditions that severely undermined her health–but didn’t diminish her spirit. 

Multilingual, she was praised by spymasters for the best intelligence from Russia any agent was supplying, and as a media sensation, Harrison became a successful lecturer about Russian reality and her prison experiences. She left out being a double agent. Craving “hardships and adventures,” she went on to get more than her share as a reporter and occasional spy in Japan, Siberia, China, Korea, and Mongolia. Her energy is almost exhausting to contemplate, and the most astonishing episodes are worthy of an Indiana Jones reboot: a film she helped finance and starred in was set in an extremely remote part of Persia. 

Flirting with Danger is filled with a blizzard of famous figures: politicians, artists, and writers from Winston Churchill to Emma Goldman and Maxim Gorky. The author is a supremely confidant storyteller, but she deserved a careful copyeditor who, for instance, was aware that German nouns are capitalized and knew that Germany was not “under authoritarian rule” in 1924. She also needed an editor who could have reined in the profusion of adjectives, many over-long sentences, excessive attention to meals, and florid phrases like this one: “her eyes danced like clouds in a blazing sky.”

It’s also disturbing that the author twice labels gays and lesbians in 1919 Berlin as “sinister” when this was a time of unprecedented freedom and openness for that community. The portrait of Berlin seems skewed, perhaps reflecting Harrison’s own apparent prudishness, and readers will find a much more nuanced assessment of the city right after WWI in Claire McKay’s Life and Death in Berlin.

All the same, Flirting with Danger is a memorable book about an unforgettable woman.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for the Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications.  Biography is one of his favorite genres and he recently reviewed The Art Thief.

WWI “On A Knife Edge”

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How did the Germans lose WWI when at times, according to this new history, they came close to winning early on?  The reasons are varied and fascinating in a beautifully detailed, in-depth exploration of German motives, perceptions, actions, and failures of imagination.

One determining factor was that Germany’s high command was riven by strategic and personal disputes and these also existed across the various “power centers” in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s empire at the time including the Kaiser and his court, the German parliament, the army’s Supreme Command and the army itself.  Some generals wouldn’t even speak to each other for weeks at a time.  And conditions only got worse over time with miscommunications and fiction between generals and politicians, politicians and the high Command, with the Kaiser growing more and more delusional.

Just as significant, Germany’s new intelligence service was severely understaffed and thus prone to making wildly incorrect judgments, as for instance ranking the U.S. a less significant military power than Bulgaria. Or positing that England could be handily quarantined by only a handful of U-boats.  Far more devastating, in The Battle of Verdun, the Germans grossly overestimated French losses and never planned for heavy German losses.

German prejudice about the French was widespread among the powerful decision makers.  The French were under-rated in terms of their military performance, and perhaps just as seriously, as a people.  One high echelon leader thought that “the French national character showed a tendency towards hysterical mood swings.”  That’s funny and tragic at the same time.

Another military leader believed that Germany would always beat France no matter what, since “the character of our dear neighbours has hardly changed since 1870.”  Such dismissive and contemptuous views were widespread in Germany as a whole and certainly among the military’s elite, despite French superiority of numbers in many sectors of the Western Front and Germany’s continued inability to strike a knockout blow on their opponents.   As if such arrogance wasn’t enough to tip the scales against Germany, political and military leaders could not agree on war aims, what would be an acceptable peace agreement, and whether to annex conquered territory or not.  The politicians too often “chose the stupidest possible course of action” and overall throughout the war, “Germany’s  approach was largely incoherent and chaotic.”

Though tragedy abounds, sometimes the events slip into farce.  One example: Germany and Austria-Hungary had divided Russian Poland between them and wanted to mobilize a Polish army to fight against Russia.  They proclaimed a new Kingdom of Poland without there being a king, government, constitution, parliament or anything else you’d expect for a new nation.  The plan was a dud.

While the book is somewhat slow to get going, once the author delves deeper into the often chaotic decision-making process for Germany and its allies, this study becomes truly compelling.  I’ve read many books about WWI, but because this one focuses less on the battles and more on everything happening behind the scenes,  the progress of the war seems much clearer.  It’s a refreshing narrative and the memoirs, diaries, and letters of key figures that he quotes give the book startling immediacy.  ★★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other publications as well as three public radio stations in Michigan. He recently reviewed the classic WWI novel All Quiet on the Western Front.

Classic War Novel

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If you caught the recent Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front and wondered about the book it’s based on, don’t hesitate to get the handsome Everyman’s Library edition. You’ll see why it’s considered one of the greatest war novels every written and more than that, you’ll be amazed at how it doesn’t sound translated.  The prose is that clear, that vivid, that compelling. Translation, bringing a book into another language and its culture, is an art and this version of the book is incredibly artful.

The story is simple and complex. Paul and his German schoolmates are basically bullied into signing up for the German army by their jingoistic teacher.  However patriotic they are, life in the trenches changes them utterly. 

Life and death aren’t topics to read about and discuss: they are both majestic and ephemeral. You can be killed at any minute by a sniper, an artillery shell, a mine–or crushed by a tank. Conversely, you can miraculously escape death by stepping out of a bunker for a smoke or an errand. 

The fear, the tension, the horror of seeing people die in myriad grotesque ways are like an acid bath.  The dark realizations hit him early and hard:

“We are no longer young men.  We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world.  We are refugees.  We are fleeing from ourselves.  From our lives.  We were eighteen years old and we had just begun to love the world and being in it; but we had to shoot at it.  The first shell to land went straight for our hearts.  We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress.  We don’t believe in those things anymore; we believe in the war.”

Paul experiences one horror after another, loses friends, is wounded, has to kill or be killed, and one of the most amazing chapters of the book is the time he’s trapped for three days in a shell crater with a dying man.  But there are also surprisingly moving and even comic moments of camaraderie as he and his fellow soldiers bond around incredible events that soon become ordinary.

The novel is short, fast-paced, devastating and seems oddly current, given the network of trenches that Russia has built in occupied Ukraine.  Anyone interested in the history of WWI or amazing fiction should read this book. ★★★★★ 

Lev Raphael’s introduction to WWI was via a classic, The Guns of August, which he read one summer between sixth and seventh grade.  He recently learned that his paternal grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, fought in that war.

 

 

Life and Death in Berlin

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It’s been said that Berlin is a city with “too much history” and reading this fascinating, encyclopedic book you can see why. Relying heavily on the letters, diaries, and accounts of ordinary people like clerks, housewives, factory workers, and teenagers, the author charts the complex transition of Germany’s capitol from the end of WWI to the end of WWII and beyond, from rebirth to almost total destruction to rebirth, division and union. 

In the first part of the book we follow Berlin’s path from imperial capital to hotbed of anarchy to democracy to the rise of fascism.  It all seems to happen with dizzying speed in a city internationally renowned in the Teens and Twenties for its striking architecture, its art and music, its amazingly open gay culture, and a boom and bust economy that ruined the lives of far too many citizens. 

Life seemed even faster-paced than in New York City and change could happen with frightening rapidity; equally frightening was the violence that broke out between varying political factions well before the Nazis took complete control and the insane mob violence directed at Jews.

The author deftly captures the bureaucratic madness of Nazi rule as when he lists some of the attempts to control the jazz that citizens enjoyed.  Rules stipulated, for instance, that jazz played on the radio should not have “rhythmic reverses characteristic the barbarian races and conducive to dark instincts alien to the German people.”  As opposed to the dark instincts that they were at home with?

In the second part, we enter the downfall of Berlin at the end of the war, experiencing life under ceaseless bombardment by Allied bombers and then Soviet attacks as they seek to pulverize the city and extirpate fascism.  It’s suitably grim as citizens live without electricity, heat and adequate water inside subway stations and basements, scrounging for food, desperate not to be killed while out in the open or buried alive.  Anyone reading news about the current war in Ukraine will recognize the horrendous living conditions under siege, though the aggressor is different.

Surprisingly, the shortest section of the book might be the freshest for people who’ve read books like Berlin at War by Roger Moorehouse or Germany 1945 by Richard Bessel.  Here McKay explores the chaos in a city not fully divided between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, the growing iron fist of Soviet rule, the ways in which people coped or escaped, the re-emergence of cultural life across the city and the widely-held alarm in East and West Berlin about rock music and how it supposedly endangered teens.

Given how often jazz comes up, it’s strange that there’s no entry for it in the index, and though the author occasionally mentions Berlin’s famous cynical humor, he doesn’t offer enough of it to match his characterization of Berliners as ultimately resistant to authority.  Readers interested in that side of the story would probably enjoy Rudolph Herzog’s Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany.

These minor flaws aside, the book is an evocative tribute to a city whose energy is admired worldwide.   ★★★★

Lev Raphael is the author of the memoir/travelogue My Germany and 26 other books in many genres.

 

When Wilson Declared War in 1917, America Went Berserk

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Shocking and brilliant, this book delves into a period most Americans know little about, the years just after America declared war on Germany, when dark currents in American culture were at a flood tide.  One of the historians the author quotes put it bluntly: “The years from 1917 to 1921 are probably unmatched in American history for popular hysteria, xenophobia, and paranoid suspicion.” 

Pogroms against African-Americans were widespread, with men, women and children being burned alive or stoned to death in East St. Louis as just one horrific episode.  Black soldiers at army bases could be hanged under the false charge of raping a white woman.  Union members were spied on, beaten, arrested without warrants, and imprisoned.  Police forces across the country formed “red squads” to surveil and harass leftists, and the U.S. Justice Department actually encouraged vigilante associations to aid in the terrorizing of American citizens.  

Government and civic officials believed the craziest stories, like the one about Germany sending “gypsy fortunetellers” to Harlem to rile up people against the war.  And Members of Congress broadcast delusional warnings that warned about our border with Mexico–one of which claimed Russian communists were using Japanese submarines to get to Mexico and invade the U.S. to spread chaos.

Newspapers that were perceived as “leftist” or “un-American” were bullied, threatened,  censored, vandalized, or shut down because the out-of-control Postmaster General refused to let them travel through the mails. 

Mainstream newspapers were basically either stenographers, repeating anything they were told to print, or worse, cheer leaders, like The Washington Post noting “In spite of such excesses as lynchings, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening.”

Jury trials were a farce and police did nothing to maintain real law and order, often assisting in the barbaric mayhem which did not shock President Wilson in the slightest.  He cared about the war and his League of Nations plan–mob violence and violence against Black citizens didn’t bother him.  Wilson grew up in the South with slave labor in his household and when you read about him here, you won’t be surprised that as reported in The New Yorker, Princeton students have called for “the school [to] strip the name and imagery of Woodrow Wilson from all of its institutions and buildings.”

The terror didn’t end with the war because it was followed by The Red Scare, which takes up the second half of the book.  Civil rights were pulverized, many hundreds of people arrested without warrants or deported, and machine guns were positioned in city streets to “protect good Americans,” which meant Anglo-Saxons for the most part.

This was a time in which people could be arrested for what we might call “thought crime”: expressing private doubts about the war or criticism of the government.  That could even extend to a judge damning people because he could read what was “in people’s hearts.”  Jury trials were a farce and sentences for supposedly violating the vague, newly-passed Espionage Act were egregiously severe.

America in these years truly sounds like an authoritarian state, with a rampaging government, aided by vigilantes, peering into every nook and canny of its citizens’ lives and punishing any word or deed it thought was subversive. It’s hard not to see similarities with Nazi Germany in the manic propaganda campaign for the war and “patriotism” that bombarded Americans with signs, pamphlets, speeches, and films–and the advice to spy on one’s neighbors.

Hochschild lays all of it out in calm, cool detail that will sear itself into your memory.  This is the kind of book that white-washers of our past would want to ban but which every thinking American should read. 

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery.  He has taught creative writing at Michigan State University and currently edits, coaches, and mentors writers at writewithoutborders.com

The New Agatha Christie Biography

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This engaging biography explores why and how Agatha Christie in effect lived a life of disguise: Despite her international fame and mammoth audience, she sought to be inconspicuous.  Not an easy task given that fans could come from as far away as Finland to try to meet her–and bang on her door!

When Christie was growing up, the ideal British woman and wife was like the one depicted in a revoltingly sentimental poem by Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House.”  This ideal figure was meant to be “devoted and submissive to her husband….passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all–pure.”

Christie was anything but passive, however, in both her marriages or when dealing with agents, publishers, and directors.  As a young woman she was funny and flirtatious despite being shy, a great dancer, loved to surf and seemed nothing like the grande dame we see in later publicity photos.  Through most of her adult life she was a “compulsive writer” despite self-deprecating remarks about her work as an author and she could turn out a fine mystery in six weeks when inspired.

If she were alive today, she might be a fan of makeover shows on HGTV because one of her great loves was buying a house, then remodeling and redecorating it.  At one point she actually owned eight homes.

The book devotes a great deal of time to Christie’s famous “disappearance” in 1926 when she seemed to be missing (and possibly dead) for almost two weeks.  Worsley does a fine job untangling what really happened amid of welter of possibilities, and is especially clear on how Christie’s image seemed to suffer at first when journalists and others suggested it was a publicity stunt.  That story gripped England and America, and readers might be surprised at how sexist some of the contemporary analysis of her reasons for going off the grid were.

Curiously, the author doesn’t tell us anything about Christie’s sales figures until almost midway through the book.  That’s especially puzzling for her early books.   Surely sales figures are a significant part of her story as a famously best-selling author who’s sold more books than anyone else in the world?  And how can we judge the success of her early books–or even later ones like Death on the Nile–without comparisons to books by her contemporaries?  Worsley also classes a number of Christie’s techniques as “tricks,” which seems a strange label.  There’s nothing unusual about novelists using real settings and real news stories in their books–it’s common practice.

Mystery fans can sometimes be ticked off that the genre they love is considered inferior  to Literature, but what struck me as revelatory was the sexism she face throughout her career. Christie was demeaned, diminished, and derogated not because of her genre but primarily because she was a woman.  Far too many critics couldn’t resist saying something sexist when they reviewed her books or plays. 

In An Elusive Woman, Christie has found a keen-eyed and witty biographer who honestly assesses her strengths and weaknesses, and makes a solid case for considering Christie one of the 20th Century’s most important writers.

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations.  He recently reviewed a collection of Christie ghost stories and a volume of new Miss Marple stories.