The headline to my column last week was not a misrepresentation, but that clearly doesn’t make it a paraphrase. Headlines for op-ed pieces are frequently neither summaries nor paraphrases but, in the neutral sense, caricatures. They exaggerate in order to draw the reader’s attention; that is the (entirely legitimate) point of them. This is obvious, Henry; no reader of a serious newspaper is unaware of it, and no ‘misrepresentation’ is involved. To say it’s unscholarly and unprofessional for a critic to build his argument on a headline without troubling to cite what the writer has said is to understate the offence. I find it moderately demeaning to have got into a discussion where this needs to be pointed out, and will draw the appropriate inference about the utility of similar exercises.

I consider, however, that my erring in this respect is very far from the most graceless aspect of this web site or this exchange. In an earlier discussion I took some trouble – with greater politeness than I have shown here to Chris – to refer you, on a subject you had yourself chosen, to the relevant recent scholarship in that field (the role of strategic bombing in the end of the Pacific War). You may be interested to know that three of those leading historians have, to my knowledge, passed that exchange among themselves. Without wishing to disclose anything private, I think it is permissible to disclose that they have taken such an interest for reasons other than admiration for your ease in the literature of a subject at least tangentially related to your discipline. I was, and remain, astonished at how little you had read in it, and, more worrying, how little you appeared to be interested in it. Mine is not – believe me – an eccentric judgement either. In responding in similarly personal terms as here rather than engage in any substantive discussion, you did nothing to dispel that impression, and you serve little constructive purpose thereby for general readers or for yourself.

Why, with that precedent, you chose to vent your opinions on arguments about postwar German drama and prose is not clear to me. If you have an interest in the subject, then that’s admirable, but I’m reasonably certain from internal evidence that you are not a German speaker, and while my arguments need to be judged on their merits rather than on any authority, I do know this field well. Those I have learned from directly know this field without peer. I hope this won’t sound ungracious, but if you read back your contributions to discussion, I suspect you will at least mentally assent that they don’t actually do you any good beyond a momentary easing of exasperation. Seriously.

All the same, fair enough that you have had the decency to apologize to Chris.

In fact, it definitely wasn’t fair to you, so I apologise again. Anyone who appreciates and evangelises for modern German literature, in German or in English, is doing something important, and I applaud your efforts.

Henry – Feeble, I’m afraid, but I’m glad if it’s helped work out your frustrations.

There appears little scope to extend this discussion, but I encourage this site’s contributors to endeavour in future to discriminate thoughtfully among, and within, arguments they disagree with, rather than denounce in a manner reminiscent – save only for the interest in onanism – of my one-time (and only one time) interviewer Jamie Glazov of FrontPage magazine. It is because I do in fact rate Grass’s work highly that I queried CB’s attribution of a ‘glee’ that I do not feel. Having had no intelligent answer to this question, I assume there is none. Henry’s answer, BTW, is not an intelligent one, owing to his apparently not realising that a columnist doesn’t write his own headlines. The headline ‘Why Grass deserves to have his writing hurled back in his face’ is not, as he surmises, a paraphrase of my article, because what I wrote about was ‘the reason Grass’s discourse on the Nazi past… should be thrown back in his face’. The difference matters, and is independent of whether Henry is capable of grasping it.

You’re out of your depth here, Henry, and not for the first time from my experience.

In rem: Hitchens – you hadn’t said that he was a “serious writer;” what you had in fact said was that he was a “great writer.” Which is a rather grander and more preposterous claim. As I’ve previously noted on this blog, I believe that Hitchens should be taken seriously in the same way as Cyril Connolly. A superb prose stylist (albeit only sporadically in recent years), a fine polemicist, but not in any proper sense of the word a political thinker.

In rem: Grass bashing. As your intellectual hero once wrote (I don’t have the book in front of me, so forgive my doubtless inexact phrasing), one of the most difficult acts to pull off is the ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ review, because of the often well justified perception that the book review is being written less in sorrow than in schadenfreude. Your account of Grass’s career reeks of schadenfreude and political point scoring – and as noted, this isn’t the first time that you’ve been called on it. If your intentions are as pure as you say they are, it’s rather curious that others keep on making the same mistake when they read you.

Perhaps the only thing that has surprised me in all of this is that you’re a fan of Max Beerbohm. I should have thought that the subject matter of ‘Enoch Soames’ would have been a little too close to home to be entirely comfortable reading.

You make one fair observation in noting Bertram’s genuine interest, which I ought not to have questioned, in German literature. Bertram did something similar [emphasis added], however, in claiming – impossibly – “certainty” that Christopher hadn’t read a particular book he was commenting on. I consider it reasonable in the circumstances to query Bertram’s own facility with the works of the German authors he has written about (and whom, in the case of Sebald at least, both Christopher and I admire).

So Oliver thinks himself licensed to question my familiarity with the modern German literature (about which, I’m happy to conceded that he knows more than I do), simply on the basis that I question someone else’s familiarity with one particular book. That’s really playground stuff. If he scrolls back to comment #6, Oliver will find that I gave reasons for doubting whether Hitchens had read Crabwalk , those reasons being that he gave an inaccurate account both of the size of the book and of its contents. Needless to say, those are reasons that ought to stand independently of our differing views of Hitchens’s politics and his character.

People can read my piece on Grass and judge for themselves whether I evince glee at his downfall, and whether Bertram has accurately characterised my argument thus. The answer, for readers of a minimal degree of competence, will not be obscure, and nor will my regard for Grass as a substantial writer and worthy Nobel laureate. I even have some kind things to say about his political writing. If you can’t see the difference between my argument and Christopher’s, then my point about this site’s partisan ineptitude is made.

It might help, in my case and with other writers you wish to criticise, if you were to refrain from attributing to us claims of superior authority (which I did not make – how would you ever cope if the word ‘seems’ were banished from your vocabulary?) in order then to dispute them, and instead deal with our arguments. You make one fair observation in noting Bertram’s genuine interest, which I ought not to have questioned, in German literature. Bertram did something similar, however, in claiming – impossibly – “certainty” that Christopher hadn’t read a particular book he was commenting on. I consider it reasonable in the circumstances to query Bertram’s own facility with the works of the German authors he has written about (and whom, in the case of Sebald at least, both Christopher and I admire). He doesn’t convince me.

jeekers – you are aware that this is nonsense, no?

as for Grass and Hitchens the funny thing is how very much alike, i.e. unbearable they are

It is true that, in private, Brecht’s views on Stalin were considerably more ambiguous. But this hasn’t prevented a string of critics from lining up clutching hammers and sickles to beat him with. The latest of these is the journalist Oliver Kamm. Writing in The Times earlier this year, he described Brecht as “a big propagandist for . . . an orthodox communism that followed every twist of Stalin’s whims.” The American writer Richard Grenier, who interviewed Brecht in the early 1950s, used similar terms in 1989, calling him “the East German regime’s most servile defender . . . [who] followed every zig and zag of the party line, always without the slightest qualification, even with zeal”.

It is impossible to dismiss Brecht’s political opinions when looking at his work in the way we might dismiss, say, Pirandello’s fascism. Pirandello’s views had little bearing on his plays, whereas with Brecht, as the scholar John Willett has pointed out, “no creative artist’s politics were ever less independent of his work”.

But equally, we should not confine ourselves to the “you’re either with us or you’re with the Stalinists” mentality of some critics. If Brecht’s Marxism forced him, in life, into a polarised world view that necessitated his support of a red-tinted tyranny, in his art it provided an ideal base for him to explore the moral ambiguities that arise in the conflict between an individual and his social conditions. His most important plays are driven by the question of how we can be moral in the face of adversity. As the narrator in The Caucasian Chalk Circle dryly notes when the heroine Grusha puts her life at risk to save an abandoned noble infant: “Terrible is the temptation to do good!”

Kamm condemns Brecht for producing “an exhortatory theatre that mirrored [his] corrosive political obsessions”. But even Kamm concedes that some of his plays are actually quite good. He cites The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage as plays that “transcend [Brecht’s] political vision to speak to the human condition”. But this is to miss the point. Brecht’s broader political outlook meant precisely that the “human condition” was inseparable from the material conditions in which the individual lived. When Shen Teh, the key figure in The Good Person of Szechwan, asks “how can I be good when everything is so expensive?”, she sets out the core dilemma at the heart of his world view. In his plays at least, Brecht is not the dogmatic propagandist that he is so often thought to be. To understand his work we must get away from what the director Jonathan Kent has described as this “finger-wagging”.

Funnily enough, people misunderstand you on this point, again and again. I wonder why.

Also – to be clear – I have no intention of entering into an extended email discussion with you on this. If you wish to reply, you are welcome do so in a publicly accessible fashion in the comments section here.

]]> http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/comment-page-1/#comment-169618 Oliver Kamm Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:52:09 +0000 http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/#comment-169618 Or to be precise, Bertram introduced the subject of Grass via the party line on Hitch. I wouldn't wish to accuse Bertram of an independent interest in German literature. Or to be precise, Bertram introduced the subject of Grass via the party line on Hitch. I wouldn’t wish to accuse Bertram of an independent interest in German literature.

]]> http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/comment-page-1/#comment-169617 Oliver Kamm Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:47:32 +0000 http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/#comment-169617 Apologies for my careless reading: the post is not about Grass, but Bertram has introduced the subject in this thread. My point remains. Apologies for my careless reading: the post is not about Grass, but Bertram has introduced the subject in this thread. My point remains.

]]> http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/comment-page-1/#comment-169611 Oliver Kamm Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:14:16 +0000 http://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/#comment-169611 The same question that Ajay raises has occurred to me. I was also puzzled by the charge that I had been gleeful about Grass's revelations, so I wrote to the author of this post to ask him, just as a matter of interest, what he was talking about. I thought I had been at pains in my <em>Times</em> article to express a balanced and non-partisan appreciation of Grass's literary output, in line with my view that aesthetic criteria are independent of politics. I should have been surprised if Bertram had been able to show how I had breached that principle in this or any other case. I'm not at liberty to quote his reply, but I think it's permissible to disclose what it did <em>not</em> include, viz. any quotation from, or any reference to, anything I have written about Günter Grass. I think I can understand why Bertram prefers to keep the charge unfalsifiable. This is a rum blog altogether. Supposedly commenting on an issue of moment for European culture, you elect to ... attack Christopher Hitchens. In two sentences with a point that isn't even your own. I don't agree with his judgement on Grass's works, but Christopher is a gifted literary critic with a great appreciation of European culture. He is, as Jonathan Rée writes in the new issue of <em>Prospect</em>, a great writer, and a thinker of depth, range and vigour. I suppose we should at least be thankful, from the standpoint of this blog's quasi-academic pretensions, that there has been no reprise of the <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/19/there-can-be-only-onewanker/" rel="nofollow">CT post</a> that consists in calling Christopher a wanker and seeking further nominations for that title (it would be false modesty if I didn't disclose my pleasure on noting my own appearance in that list). The level of discussion on this site might be better served by approaching the subject of, e.g. (but unfortunately far from limited to), postwar German literature in its own terms rather in accord with its contributors' political prejudices. I don't know how far Bertram has read in this field (he has given scant evidence of such familiarity, especially in this post), but I recall he has on one occasion referred to a book by the late Max Sebald. Let me then refer him to another, <em>Campo Santo</em>, in which Sebald remarks (pp. 120-1): <em>In choosing Dürer's demonstration of suffering [in his Melancholia] as the emblem of his own philosophy of mourning, Grass transcends the question of whether melancholy is a constitutional or a reactive condition, a question which ultimately cannot be clinically determined. It may be true that the chronicle of Grass's journey through Germany would have been a far less intelligent book without that contrapuntal excursus into mourning, but it is equally true that there is something laboriously constructed about the excursus, making it rather like the performance of a historical duty.</em> Sebald's characteristically astute insight seems to me an exceptionally fruitful path to understanding Grass's political themes. I know that at least one sometime CT contributor, Steven Poole, has read Sebald's book, because he reviewed it for <em>The Guardian</em> when it was published in English last year. Perhaps in the circumstances this site might wish to give some serious thought to Grass's place in German political history and letters. Alternatively you could just fester where you are. The same question that Ajay raises has occurred to me. I was also puzzled by the charge that I had been gleeful about Grass’s revelations, so I wrote to the author of this post to ask him, just as a matter of interest, what he was talking about. I thought I had been at pains in my Times article to express a balanced and non-partisan appreciation of Grass’s literary output, in line with my view that aesthetic criteria are independent of politics. I should have been surprised if Bertram had been able to show how I had breached that principle in this or any other case. I’m not at liberty to quote his reply, but I think it’s permissible to disclose what it did not include, viz. any quotation from, or any reference to, anything I have written about Günter Grass. I think I can understand why Bertram prefers to keep the charge unfalsifiable.

This is a rum blog altogether. Supposedly commenting on an issue of moment for European culture, you elect to … attack Christopher Hitchens. In two sentences with a point that isn’t even your own. I don’t agree with his judgement on Grass’s works, but Christopher is a gifted literary critic with a great appreciation of European culture. He is, as Jonathan Rée writes in the new issue of Prospect, a great writer, and a thinker of depth, range and vigour. I suppose we should at least be thankful, from the standpoint of this blog’s quasi-academic pretensions, that there has been no reprise of the CT post that consists in calling Christopher a wanker and seeking further nominations for that title (it would be false modesty if I didn’t disclose my pleasure on noting my own appearance in that list).

The level of discussion on this site might be better served by approaching the subject of, e.g. (but unfortunately far from limited to), postwar German literature in its own terms rather in accord with its contributors’ political prejudices. I don’t know how far Bertram has read in this field (he has given scant evidence of such familiarity, especially in this post), but I recall he has on one occasion referred to a book by the late Max Sebald. Let me then refer him to another, Campo Santo, in which Sebald remarks (pp. 120-1):

In choosing Dürer’s demonstration of suffering [in his Melancholia] as the emblem of his own philosophy of mourning, Grass transcends the question of whether melancholy is a constitutional or a reactive condition, a question which ultimately cannot be clinically determined. It may be true that the chronicle of Grass’s journey through Germany would have been a far less intelligent book without that contrapuntal excursus into mourning, but it is equally true that there is something laboriously constructed about the excursus, making it rather like the performance of a historical duty.

Sebald’s characteristically astute insight seems to me an exceptionally fruitful path to understanding Grass’s political themes. I know that at least one sometime CT contributor, Steven Poole, has read Sebald’s book, because he reviewed it for The Guardian when it was published in English last year. Perhaps in the circumstances this site might wish to give some serious thought to Grass’s place in German political history and letters. Alternatively you could just fester where you are.

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