More from Klemperer on the LTI

The Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich, infected everyone in Germany, albeit to varying degrees. One of the big questions that Klemperer grapples with in his book, yet never quite resolves, is what drove previously decent, thinking people - scholars and intellectuals much like himself and whom he had considered colleagues before the War - to become devotees of the Nazi Party. For all the observation and critical examination that he engaged in close-up at first hand in the War, the note of puzzlement, of disappointment, is still striking with every example of such an intellectual betrayal that he recounts, right down to the last chapter.

It was indeed a pervasive thing, this "language that thinks for you." He describes a friendly (Gentile) woman in the factory where he was a laborer:

Frieda [the woman] knew that my wife was lying ill at home. In the morning I found a big apple in the middle of my machine. I looked over to Frieda's work-place and she nodded to me. A little later she was standing next to me: 'For Mama with my best wishes.' And then with a mixture of inquisitiveness and surprise: 'Albert says that your wife is German. Is she really German?'

The pleasure in the apple was gone. This Sancta-Simplicitas soul, whose feelings were entirely un-Nazi and humane, had been infected by the most fundamental ingredient of the National Socialist poison; she identified Germanness with the magical concept of the Aryan; it was barely conceivable to her that a German woman could be married to me, to a foreigner, a creature from another branch of the animal kingdom; ...

Elsewhere in the LTI he reminds himself of the philologist's old dictum: that although two people may use the same phrase, they need not share the same motivation in using the same phrase. Here, however, it is clear that the words had controlled Frieda's thinking, and not the other way around. The concepts of 'German' and 'Jew' had existed for ages. What the Nazis did was to surreptitiously and thoroughly replace the old concepts with a new, racial one. Similar, and yet different, but not different enough to warrant new words for the new concepts; they instead took over the old words, and slipped all the more easily into people's minds as a result. The most insidious aspect of LTI may hence have been where it retained old words and gave them new meanings, rather than all the new coinages for which it was responsible.

Victor Klemperer on His Wife Eva

Selections from Lingua Tertii Imperii - A Philologist's Notebook, translated by Martin Brady.

From the foreword:

"As long as twenty years ago, my dear Eva, I prefaced the dedication of a collection of essays with the remark that a dedication from me to you in the conventional sense of a present was out of the question, given that you were already co-owner of my books, since they were in every way the product of an intellectual community of property. This is the same today.

But in this case things are rather different than with all my previous publications, this time I am even less entitled to present you with a dedication, and incomparably more compelled to do so than during those peaceful days in which we engaged in philology. But for you this book would not exist today, and its author too. If I were to explain this in detail it would require copious, intimate pages. ... You know, and even a blind man would be able to divine with his stick, to whom I am referring when I speak to my audience of heroism."

From the introduction:

"... a heroism which was completely deprived of support of being part of an army or a political group, of the hope of future glory, a heroism which was left to fend entirely for itself. These were the handful of Aryan wives (there were not that many of them), who resisted every pressure to separate from their Jewish husbands. And just imagine what everyday life was like for these women! ... What stoicism, what a huge outlay of self-discipline was needed to give fresh heart over and over again to their exhausted, broken, and desperate husbands. Amidst the grenade fire of the battlefield, surrounded by falling rubble in a collapsing bomb shelter, even confronted with the gallows, there is always a degree of pathos which affords some support - but in the debilitating nausea of everyday squalor, to be followed by an unforeseeable number of equally squalid days, what is there to keep you going? And to remain strong in this situation, strong enough to be able to embolden your partner the whole time, and convince him again and again that the hour would eventually come and that it is a matter of duty to wait for it, to remain this strong when one is left to cope entirely on one's own in lonely isolation, because the Jew's House does not constitute a community, despite the shared enemy and fate, and despite its common language - this is heroism {Heroismus} over and above any hero-worship {Heldentum}."

For those who found Umberto Eco's essay (in the NYRB) on the characteristics of fascism thought-provoking, Victor Klemperer's book, known succinctly as the LTI, is definitely worth reading with attention. Our modern age may often seem too cynical to be misled by hero-worship, or to be beguiled by the false promises of fascism. But after September 11th, we often easily acquiesce in calling certain people 'heroes' (I'm thinking of soldiers and firefighters as examples) without too much thought. The American armed forces are also hugely influential in the media, both in reportage and in fictional portrayal, projecting an image of aggressive, technologized masculinity - modern warriors in space-age body-armor that still manages to invoke a gladiatorial pose, bearing guns enhanced with lasers and scopes, gazing out inscrutably from behind glazed dark glasses. Military talk - "kinetic operations", "surge", "counterinsurgency" - has entered our civilian ken and work their way into our commonplace speech. Read Klemperer and learn why we should be worried about all this.

The Open Sea - The World of Plankton / Alister C. Hardy

London: Collins. 1956. Out of print.

Published in 1956 as part of Collins's acclaimed New Naturalist series, this volume focuses on the planktonic forms of the open sea around Britain. What's wonderful about it is the enthusiasm with which it is written, the obvious excitement and wonder of discovery (the electron microscope had just been invented, deep-sea research was hardly routine), and the quaintness of the technical methods in the pre-electronic age. Where we can today drop down a temperature probe and have a second-by-second readout of the temperature at different depths of water, oceanographers of the past used an ingenious device called the reversing thermometer:

"The mercury tube of the thermometer, just above the bulb, has a loop and a kink in it, so that when it is swung rapidly upside-down the thread of mercury breaks; as soon as this happens all the mercury that before was above the kink now runs to the opposite, and now lower, end of the tube. When this is brought up the height of this inverted column of mercury is seen against a scale which can only be read when the thermometer is upside down; it tells us the temperature that the thermometer was recording at the moment it was turned over."

This was also soon after the invention of the Thermos flask and refrigerator, the latter quite a luxury in post-war austerity Britain. The next quote, on what the amateur should do after collecting a net-full of plankton from a tow, is instructive of both the social relations of the day, and who Hardy thought the typical reader for his book might be:

"... the samples which you should now have safely in your Thermos flasks to take home -- just be quite sure once again that you haven't put too much into them! It is well to take a quantity of extra sea water home with you so that you can dilute the samples still further before you put them into glass jars in the refrigerator. Two 7 lb sweet-jars are very good for this purpose; they can be conveniently carried in an oblong basket with a space just big enough to take one jar on either side of the handle and with a partition to keep them apart. When you reach home divide your samples out into as many large sweet or preserving jars as your wife -- or your neighbour!-- will allow you to keep in the refrigerator."

Twenty Minutes in Manhattan / Michael Sorkin

Reaktion Books, London. 2009. US$27 / GBP 16.95

This is New York kvetching at its best. Michael Sorkin, an architect who lives in the City (i.e. Manhattan), walks twenty minutes every day from his 5th floor, rent controlled apartment to his studio. In this book, he describes what he sees in the landscape around him and his opinions, usually strongly held, about the way the city has taken shape.

Growing up in the carefully manicured Garden City of Singapore (which gets a few mentions in this book, as does our dear "Uncle Harry"), I am quite a naif about how 'real' cities come into being, grow, and are shaped by multifarious forces. The book was a crash course for me on the ins and outs of concepts like rent control, landlord-tenant relations, fire regulations, building codes, and city zoning, things which are not immediately obvious to someone who's lived in a landscape dominated by highly similar high-rise public housing.

Sorkin is keen on the work of Jane Jacobs, and he mentions her influential work The Death and Life of a Great American City several times. He is quite clear about who he doesn't like: rapacious developers, Robert Moses, the Modernists (especially Le Corbusier - "Corb"), Donald Trump.... This dose of crankiness can be quite excessive - I didn't think a whole chapter on the weasel-ways of his landlord was entirely necessary - and it sometimes strikes me as being simply reactionary. Beneath all the complaining, though, what Sorkin fundamentally argues for is a vision of the city (and urban life in general) as being scaled to the human being. He argues for walking over automobiles, lively streets over condos for the jet-set, equitable housing over gentrification, and for architectures that are designed for their climate and environment, rather than being hermetically sealed glass-and-steel towers. At first glance this book is about architecture and urban design, but it's really about society and the human being as a social being. In this context, his long rant about the landlord makes sense: it's really about social altruism, its fragility, and its ease of frustration; as a guide to the tragedy of the commons it is particularly eloquent.

I must admit that I was quite underwhelmed when I visited the great city myself - how could anyone love such an icky, dingy place? Compared to the great shiny cities like Shanghai or Dubai that are being built with amazing speed all over the developing world, New York could do with a facelift and some tidying up. But the point that Sorkin makes is that the 'tidying up' that well-intentioned (or corruptedly profiteering) city planners and developers push for will eventually end up killing the soul of the city, destroying its naturally-formed communities, and homogenizing it into a world where human relations matter less and less. And maybe it is worth having the streets a bit dingy and the walls a bit crusty if we can defer that bland, soulless future for some time yet.

Empires of the Indus - The Story of a River / Alice Albinia

John Murray, London. 2009. $16.20 (pbk) Book website.

The Indus River is a bundle of contradictions and disappointments: the origin of the name 'India' and yet in Pakistan, one of the classical rivers of fabled fecundity and yet now dammed to near-death, the source of one of the world's most splendid early civilizations and yet flowing through what are some of its most dangerous and economically backward places. The title of this book and its jacket design in friendly pastel colors, both bringing to mind exotic travelogue mingled with exotic culture, belie the real story that Alice Albinia is telling, that of the disappointments and tragedies wrought by history, and of the humanity caught up in its flow.

The premise of this book is a daring one, and despite the easy flow of the narrative, the actual journey that the author herself took must have demonstrated her resourcefulness and courage. She travels from the delta of the Indus, now brackish and more an inlet than a river mouth, up its course until its source in the high mountains of Tibet, and so accumulates a roster of some of the most notorious places in the world: Pakistan, the Pakistan-India border, Afghanistan, Tibet. Concomitant with her trip to the source of the Indus is the historical story told in reverse, from the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan, to the spread of Islam in the subcontinent, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the geological origins of the river itself.

As a woman she has access to the women of the households that hosted her, and as a foreigner she could also speak freely with the men, and it is this view of the home life of the people along her route that give this book some of its most poignant moments. There is also the peculiar disorientation when snippets of interculturality turn up unexpectedly; climbing up a hill in rural Kashmir to see a Neolithic rockface carving, a crowd of boys follows her and her guide to see what they are up to:

"The boys speak little English, but it is the cricket season now, and from the babble of Kashmiri that surrounds me, entire phrases of BBC commentary emerge fully formed: 'Flintoff is coming in to bowl,' says one twelve-year-old. 'It's a bouncer,' says another.'..."

Another repeating motif on the book is how easily history can become effaced. She visits a Sheedi community in Sindh, Pakistan, descendants of African slaves and immigrants to India from centuries before its colonial era. The Sheedi, despite being slaves, had held positions of responsibility under the Mughal rulers, but with the coming of European colonialism had lost that social position; the British imperial administrators regarded them with prejudice, even as they claimed to be emancipating the slaves. In the 1950s, a Sheedi writer named Mussafir wrote an account of Sheedi enslavement and persecution, informed also by his readings on abolition in America, and worked towards social emancipation of his community by education. Yet today his works are poorly known, even in Sindh, the Sheedi community still experiences discrimination in mainstream Pakistani life, and even Mussafir's legacy has been obscured. Most of his writings have been lost - his son's library was largely destroyed by a cyclone - and few copies remain even of his treatise on slavery, published only in Sindhi. Elsewhere, in the highland Yasin valley, Neolithic stone circles are being carved up for building material or looted for treasure. In the desert near Johi, 18th century tombs decorated with vivid murals are falling apart from neglect.

It is fitting, then, that the site of one of humanity's earliest experiments with irrigation and city-building should today illustrate so starkly the failings of that endeavor. Read this book, not just as travelogue and history, but also as a comment on the human condition itself.

Judge Dee Novels / Robert van Gulik

Don't judge a book by its cover - nor the reviews printed on the blurb. Going by those, this series of detective novels set in Tang China would be a painful read indeed:

• "Judge Dee... is one of those acquired tastes, like the ancient buried Chinese eggs...",


• "His cases are always as lusciously tangled as soft noodles...",


• "I never tire of this ingenious Chinese pastiche cookery...."

The novels themselves, though they may be chinoiserie, are at least sinologically informed chinoiserie. Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat to the Far East, and an amateur sinologist, writing on such subjects as the Chinese detective novel, erotica and sexual life, and the gibbon as a motif in art. The Judge Dee series began as a diversion and soon became very popular. They are based, however, on a historical personage - Di Renjie, who was a Tang magistrate and later high official, who also served under the Empress Wu Zetian. Stories about his ingenuity and integrity were long in circulation, and served as a basis for a 18th century Qing novel called Di Gong An (The Cases of Judge Dee), which van Gulik translated during the 1940s.

According to van Gulik, Di Gong An was more likely to appeal to modern readers of the genre because in some ways it isn't the typical Chinese detective novel. It is relatively short and doesn't name the culprit at the very beginning. He used the characters of Judge Dee and his lieutenants to write his own series of stories imitating the style of the original, including the cheerful anachronisms typical of later Chinese fiction. The stories, though set in the Tang, are really describing life a thousand years later in the Ming, in the details of the exam system and bureaucracy, in the food that people eat, their modes of transport, and their religious practices. Other favorite literary tropes that van Gulik appropriated include the evil monks who feature prominently in the Chinese Bell Murders, one of the earlier books in the series. Their quality, though, is somewhat uneven. The later ones tend to be shorter and pay less attention to the task of imitating the original style, but despite those minor shortcomings, they are still highly entertaining.

So, is this fan fiction? Does what van Gulik do with Judge Dee compare to what thousands of adolescents do with Edward Cullen and other fictional characters (and sometimes get sued for it)? The Judge Dee novels are certainly fan fiction - they fit all the technical criteria of the genre - but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are campy or somehow inauthentic. That anxiety about authenticity is a strikingly modern phenomenon. Recall that the original Di Gong An itself appropriated names and characters from history and literature. This is not just a characteristic of Chinese literature - even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of his antecedents. The Judge Dee books show us what the potentials are for fan fiction broadly construed, and are real good reads in themselves.

Dictionary of Modern English Usage / H.W. Fowler

As a reference book on the use of the English language, "Fowler's" is by far the liveliest and most readable. In the long tradition of the English writing about their English, the best have consistently been those who were not timid in their opinion of what was good and what was bad writing; I think of Dr Johnson and Orwell, and of course Fowler.

The Oxford University Press is now reissuing the first edition, which we might want to call the Original of Fowler. The second, as that review notes, was lightly edited by Ernest Gowers, a career civil servant whose own tome, Plain Words is perhaps the British mandarin's equivalent of Strunk and White. The most recent edition of Modern English Usage, however, is a massively inflated book. The original could sit nicely in your hand on the bus. The newer book would prefer a desk. It confirmed what I feared when I leafed through it for the first time: bloodlessness, prevarication, and a particularly academic strain of frustrating equanimity. It is not a book that you would read for pleasure, while the older edition (I own the second) certainly was.

When I was in the army I sometimes read it in barracks on free evenings; once my bunkmate asked if I was reading the Bible - no, I said, I'm reading a dictionary, and got a funny look from him. What made it so riveting, I think, were the idiosyncratic (yet sound) entries and their occasionally oblique headings ("Out of the frying pan..." headed an entry on common errors), and the cross-references from one entertaining miniature essay to another, a strikingly prescient forerunner of serial-Wikipedia-procrastination.

A reactionary might say, in the face of news like the British Local Government Agency issuing a list of jargon and meaningless words for bureaucrats to avoid, that "we need a Fowler now more than ever", and other platitudes of that kind. Maybe so, but far worse than the purely unaesthetic qualities of bad writing, a reliance on cliche and faddish buzzwords has a more sinister aspect. In Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann, she noted how he seemed to fix on using certain catchwords or stock phrases that he favored. In our modern world, we might say that he settled into them like how a corporate-type might settle into "synergies" or "paradigms", or how the military likes clunky acronyms that it then repurposes to all parts of speech. Perhaps the banality of evil, then, grows best upon a banality of mind, and the best fertilizer for such minds is a soulless, thoughtless, and unfeeling bureaucratic banality of speech.