The Struggle That Failed 1919 -- 1945

     . . . . Hitler: A Career (German: Hitler – Eine Karriere) (1977)

West German documentary film about the career of Adolf Hitler directed by Christian Herrendoerfer and Joachim Fest and written by Fest, a German historian.

 Everything on screen is documentary film footage shot at the time in real time, though the narration – in English -- is not, and overdubbed.

This latest edition of the digitally restored period film footage, which the team that got this on Netflix did, taking out the herkyjerky fast walking and so on that we were used to from footage of the time – the miracles that can be done now.  It’s much easier watching this 1977 film in 2022 than it was to watch on television in 1977.

As per usual, my first question was the same as it always is when watching nazi documentaries. Where did the nazi organizers get these hundreds of thousands participants in the spectacles, that are viewed by an equal number of wildly cheering spectators, how is it possible the paraders and performers can execute the endless vast unison parading and maneuvers that, among other things, create monumental swastikas of human beings?  (Later in the film there's some analysis as to why so many of these spectacles were arranged at night -- the dark covered up much of the reality of what was there.)  I also think, seeing the scenes of the nazi youth groups how much I’d hated growing up in nazi Germany – those girl youth camps in which one is told that washing clothes for the family was more fun for girls than going to school, forced to play volleyball instead of reading books. They sound like mother did, having a fit when she asked, "Why don't you like anything about housework?" and I looked at her as insane.

Poland, is often regarded as comically out of date confronting Hitler’s invasion of tanks and aircraft, without any of the weapons and infrastructure of a modern army.* However, we forget -- if we ever knew -- how little time Poland had in the last 100 years or so to even BE A NATION, much less have the money or time to create a modern army, since the partition and disappearance of it in the 18th C. Under the circumstances, that it took Hitler’s forces 2 weeks to subdue Poland seems, to me, at least, admirable and truly heroic, not something for non-Poles to feel superior about. Not to mention our current home-grown nazis would never heroically make a stand like that against even an equal force, much less such an overwhelming one.  Shoot, they can't even stand up to not having somebody cooking breakfast and handing to them, or have teenage girls laugh at their trux.

On! To Moscow. Mud up to the horses’ shoulders. Mud past the tanks' treds.  Then snow, higher than the horses' bellies. This is footage shot on that advance, and the defeat WWII -- a scene of Hitler walking in snow behind the lines and the front's 'advance', stating, "I hate snow.  I never want to see snow again." Then going back to Germany, where, presumably some heads rolled, due to snow not foretold or removed.

Whilst the viewer ponders how so many of the scenes of vast numbers adoring Hitler and the nazis, united in joy of hatred, often in tears – thousands of girls melting down over the Beatles have nothing on these hormonal charges – we’ve been seeing in the last few years. 

* Poland's cavalry charge against tanks and aircraft is a myth.

The true story behind the myth is as follows.

On Sept. 1, 1939, a Polish Cavalry regiment operating along Poland’s northwestern border attacked a column of unsuspecting German infantry.

The invaders were quickly scattered, but before the Poles could celebrate, a squad of German armoured vehicles appeared on the scene and inflicted heavy casualties on the horsemen with their canons and machine guns.

The next day, war correspondents were brought to the scene and told that the Poles had charged German tanks.

Despite no one actually having witnessed the supposed charge, seemingly overnight the story spread across the globe and was quickly accepted as true. Both Time Magazine and The New York Times described the incident in hyperbolic detail; high ranking German officers recalled it in their memoirs; and even Winston Churchill mentioned it in his history of the Second World War.

I suppose we need not be surprised that one of the most solid, enduring platforms of this myth is a film the nazis shot to show their infinite military superiority to everyone?

…. Perhaps the most notorious example was the pseudodocumentary Kampfgeschwader Lützow, which featured staged footage of Polish cavalry charging panzer tanks. ….

John Quincy Adams Twiddles His Thumbs

     . . . . John Quincy Adams is in that in-between place almost of all us have been at some time or another, or even, maybe, often. The job that has thoroughly occupied him, of which he complained so much for leaving him no time for reflection, study and writing, for over four years, is, over, and not through his own choice.  The (western and southern) voters and the senate chose Andrew Jackson to be POTUS, instead of returning JQA to the White House for a second term.

So, he's just hanging out in that house Louisa got them to purchase before, when he was Monroe's Secretary of State.  It's January, it is bitter winter.  There are storms and blizzards, and he's quite cozy tucked up in the house*, seeing the occasional agreeable visitor, reading, and working on the entry arrears of his Diaries, because being President meant he had to spend so much time in meetings and present at public affairs, deal with office seekers etc., he couldn't read and write as he was used. But now, with the weather and jobless he's able to do all these things, and catch up the Diaries' indexing, which means he's been re-reading his entries. This brings him inevitably to ... Thomas Jefferson, about whom a new multi-volume biography has recently been published. Which, JQ, who had known Jefferson since he himself was young boy, is reading.

JQ hasn't got anything good to say about Jefferson, and if anyone should know, it is him.  His father, John Adams, may have forgiven TJ for the abominable treatment TJ wreaked upon him -- and on President Washington -- but JQ most clearly has not. He suggests that someone really should write the history of Thomas Jefferson's and his boy Madison's presidencies.  His grandson, Henry Adams, will do this very thing -- using not only JQ's Diaries as primary sources, but many other primary documents and letters that JQ has carefully preserved and -- indexed and bound.

This jaundiced, occasionally bitter, but always detailed insider account of history only gets more fascinating as the Diaries go on. 

This is all the more fascinating as I've embarked on James Monroe: A Life (2020) by Tim McGrath.  JM was another of Jefferson's protege-boy-minions,  about whom I knew previously very little before JQA served as his Secretary of State. Despite the author doing his best, I am not impressed with JM, a fairly middling, at best sort,** within the brilliance of the early Independence and Constitutional circles.  JM wasn't much better at winning elections than John Adams was, nor ever possessed the intellectual fire power of Madison, nor the sheer cunning and duplicity -- or physical cowardice -- of TJ. Monroe played an instrumental role assisting TJ in the social downfall of Alexander Hamilton,*** in their long-range objective to take him out as a powerful office holder and political rival.  Monroe was just as bad as TJ with money, getting it and keeping it and making more (not that Madison was much better, once he rather ran his enormous inheritance of lands and slaves into the ground, leaving a penniless widow). What Monroe was fairly good at, comparatively speaking, was diplomacy, though he may have been given credit for a fair amount that was actually accomplished by someone else.  

We alternate reading the Diaries aloud with reading aloud Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe From The First Venturers to the Vikings (2013 - 2015) by Jean Manco.  This involves tracking the migrations via linguistic forensics.  It doesn't track via a linear narrative or chronological format, which can confuse things somewhat for the non-scholar.  But it is fascinating and illuminating.  With so much focus on language, el V is just gobbling this down with the greatest of pleasure.

There is a great lack in this book though -- nothing at all about African languages. And surely there must be some markers in the languages of the Ibercelts of Iberia of Africa, at the very least!

I am continuing alone with the massive Boundless Sea. However, I am finally getting Hillary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, the conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, so I'll probably be reading that this week.***

Well, the grocery delivery has arrived, now for the disinfecting  protocols -- and then finding somewhere to put it all.  This was a week for high quality fresh produce again, which takes up such an amount of space.

Moreover, it is a bright, chilly, windy day, and I feel sick to my stomach, dizzy and have a headache.  Arghh.  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*    

January 18th; 30 degrees.  I can go without a fire in my library, though I keep a small one in my sitting room.

(He is writing this in the library, wouldn't you just know! Good grief!  These people are so hardy; here I am complaining about feeling chilled right now in our apartment, with a chilly wind blowing and the outside temp at 61°.)

**    Moreover, Monroe's achievements such as the Monroe Doctrine we know were really John Quincy Adams's ideas and even doing, as revealed to us in John Quincy Adams's Diaries! Poor Monroe never had an original idea of his own in his whole life, at least as JQ tended to record things -- and alas, this biography kinda bears this out, at least so far.

***   As Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton created the First Bank of the US -- to which the Virginian slaveholder triumvirate of TJ, Madison and Monroe were unilaterally opposed, was very close to President Washington, and looked likely to be a serious rival to TJefferson for POTUS.

****  Still "saving" Chaucer: A European Life, for when I am without anything else that appeals. 

Let's Get Out of Here, Far, Far, Far Away: Son of Ishtar; Bronze Age Historical Fiction

     . . . .  Son of Ishtar (2019) by Gordon Doherty.

www.gordondoherty.co.uk

It appears to be self-published. If so, it’s still a professional and sophisticated production, well copyedited, and better written than quite a few other Ancient World historical fictions put out by trade publishers.

Son of Ishtar is the first volume in Empires of Bronze series, featuring the Hittite Empire, starting in 1313 B.C. Presumably there will be other empires in the following books, advertised as Egypt, Assyria and Ahhiyawa – the latter seemingly a loose confederation of Achaean states and Mycaneae. At the Hittite High King’s court we meet an arrogant Egyptian delegation's ambassador, who pays the expected price, the same price the Egyptian pharaoh had extracted needlessly from a Hittite delegation. (Egyptians are not the heroes here -- apologies, Egyptologist amigas / amigos!). In contrast there is a Trojan delegation led by their king, with whom the High King shares real friendship. About all of which, and others, we’ll presumably learn more, if in These Days, there are any following books, that is. Sigh.

Someone, whom I don’t know, and who wasn’t me, has observed:

Quote:…the bronze age was over before most of the Bible was written, so our world view of antiquity generally misses the 1800-odd years when bronze was the major metal.

This is the first fiction I have been able to immerse in, in a long time.

More about Son of Ishtar here:

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1443/author-interview-son-of-ishtar-by-gordon-doherty/

Eurasia, Winter, the Ottomans: History and Archeology, Television and Books

     . . . . El V's enthralled with Barry W. Cunliffe's Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (2015). 

It's lavishly illustrated with the most helpful maps possible, many photographs and other illustration, index, etc.  It's not quite a coffee table book, but its glossy paper, luxurious spacing and layout and dimensions does quite resemble more a deluxe museum catalog of a distinguished exhibit than a non-fiction hardcover.

Sir Barrington Windsor Cunliffe CBE FBA FSA

A Humanities Network review that hits the book's talking points can be read here.  

It goes well with the two books I read this year by Jack Weatherford -- The Secret History of the Mongol Queens (2010) and Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004). 

     . . . . It goes well too with the Turkish period series I began early this year and still haven't finished watching. One cannot and should not binge anything this long. I'm finally to episode 66, and it's still season 1 of Resurrection: Ertugrul (2014 --76 episodes in all).  The time period is the 13th century and the pressures from the Mongols are pressing hard on all nomadic peoples and everyone else, north, south, east and west, including Seljuk Turks (Salah ad-Din's people, falling into eclipse at this point), Arabs, Roman Christians, and Byzantine Christians -- none of which like each other and are in serious conflict.  The only uniting pressure for many of them is Islam.

Ertugrul is the legendary warrior who supposedly united and founded the peoples who became known as the Ottoman Turks, by re-uniting the Seljuk and the Oghuz Turks, was father of the equally legendary forefather of  Suleiman the Magnificent, whose grandfather, Mehmed the Conqueror, took out, finally, after many failed Ottoman attempts, Constantinople, in 1453.  Thus the Turkish television series' title, presumably -- resurrection of the Turks via union, which held back the Mongols, and defeated the European Christians, and the Greek Christians, to become the great Ottoman Empire which ruled the region for at least 500 years.

Season 2 of Ertugrul is also available on netflix (so far, I believe there are 3 seasons), again of 76 episodes.  So I could keep watching this for another year -- and probably will.  Among its many charms is seeing the western perceived exoticism of this eastern world through its own eyes.  It's great fun too, to see these palaces as filled with secret passages and vicious political assassinations as the romances.  It's stuffed with romance of story and character as well as the romance of its poetry, which runs through the cultures of all the peoples in this series -- and which illustrates from another angle than my grad courses in medieval and comparative literture courses how much Courtly Love and the Romances of the medieval world acquired from interaction with the Arabic cultures, particularly from Moorish Spain. The Pyrenees between Aquitaine and Al-andalus. 

Also, the horses are magnificent. (Cunliffe's book focuses a great deal on horses, of course!) How could I resist Ertugul, who confides at length to his lovely horse, all the doubts, fears and yearnings which he cannot express even to his loyal beyond death warriors?

El V says, "We're getting our winter on. Last winter: the Merovingians.  This winter: the steppes."

Ya, I say, "As winter disappears with the melting of the ice caps in Antarctica and the Arctic and the end of the glaciers. Winter, the primary fact of life since the beginning of life, of so many, including my own entire life until leaving the northern midwest, is rapidly becoming an exotic fantasy."

At least we still have books . . . .

You Know What Day It Is