History's Lessons and Remembrance: BookMarks Update #85 August, 2025

When you open this email, Susan and I will have just arrived in Berlin at the beginning of a twelve day visit to a country that I had once vowed never to visit. The Nazis, WWII, and the Holocaust were subjects which were too horrifying, painful, and unsettling for me to consider confronting on the sites where they had occurred. But here we are because the opportunity to travel with a special group of people and a remarkable educator overcame my resolve. It's too early to share reactions, but I can share the reading I did in August in preparation for the trip. You will note that in addition to the books about the Third Reich and the Holocaust I also read books that provided some relief from the tension and pain of the others.

Here's what I read in August:

Before delving into the Holocaust-related material, I'll share my impressions of the five other books, a heterogeneous and delightful group.

James Rebanks is a shepherd and a farmer in Yorkshire, doing the work that his family has been engaged in for generations. What distinguishes him from most shepherds is his brilliant writing in service to a sensitive soul and an eye for the special detail. I've read three of his previous books "The Shepherd's Life" (2015), "The Shepherd's View: Modern Photographs from an Ancient Landscape" (2016), and "Pastoral Song: A Farmer's Journey" (2020), so I was eager to read "The Place of Tides" when it caught my eye at a bookstore in London in March. The story is set a long way from his Yorkshire home as Rebanks recounts his experience spending 10 weeks on a remote Norwegian island with two "duck ladies". Anna and her friend Ingrid are among the disappearing generation of women who build nests for eider ducks on small islands off Norway's coast, protect the eggs from predators, gather the eider down the ducks use to line their nests, and make eider down duvets. Rebanks' descriptions of the beauty of the seascape and the quiet lives of these women as the world changes around them made for a wonderful and soothing reading experience.

Percival Everett wrote "The Trees" four years before he won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction last year for "James". It's a strange hybrid: a classic 'who done it' murder mystery, a social commentary on lynching and racism in the South, a laugh-out-loud cop dialogue, and a zombie novel. Confused? Don't let that put you off. However one categorizes this book, the bottom line is that Percival is a superb writer and has created a fascinating plot addressing the wrongs of the past. I'll never hear the word "rise" in the future without a shiver.

I have a shelf full of Robert B. Parker's books in our Vermont library, and from time to time I will pick one at random when I need a break from the real life mayhem in the world today. "Cold Service" is a late Parker novel (he wrote 40 Spenser books) and one of his best, featuring the usual cast of Spenser, Hawk, Susan Silverman, and Boston Police captain Martin Quirk. After Hawk is nearly killed in an ambush by Ukrainian gangsters, he and Spenser are intent on revenge and determined to clean up Marshport, a North Shore town which the gang has taken over. The bodies pile up and so does the psychobabble between the Harvard-educated therapist Silverman and tough guy hero Spenser, but all in all, the book did the job---I was distracted and delighted.

I saw "Nice Fish" at Cambridge's American Repertory Theater nine years ago. It's a play written by and starring Mark Reylance, the Oscar, BAFTA, Olivier, and Tony-winning actor and playwright. There was little action on stage other than a guy ice fishing, but Reylance was superb as he delivered lines almost entirely drawn from the poems of Louis Jenkins (who also turned out to be the guy on stage fishing). Reylance had become fascinated with Jenkins' work and had even quoted his poetry in his acceptance remarks when he received his 2008 Tony and 2011 Drama Desk Awards. What other poet has been quoted on these award shows? Jenkins, who died in 2019, wrote 16 books of prose poems from his home in northern Minnesota, and "Before You Know It" features selections from most of them. The poems are a bit weird as Jenkins connects experiences, observations, and thoughts in unorthodox and random ways, but some of the later poems, especially those about aging, are quite wonderful. The poems may not be everyone's taste, but try them. Reylance did and loved them.

Alison Bechdel is a Vermont cartoonist whose graphic memoir "Fun Home" won accolades from the New York Times, Time magazine's Ten Best Books of 2006, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. It was adapted for the stage and took home five Tonys, including Best Musical, for its Broadway run in 2013. Bechdel lives in the rural Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and teaches at both White River Junction's Center for Cartoon Studies and at Yale where she is a Professor in Practice, English, Film and Media Studies. Since 'Fun Home", she has written two more graphic memoirs and this graphic novel. "Spent" can be appreciated on at least two levels. First the cartooning is wonderful. Bechdel is a genius at depicting the unique physical characteristics and emotional state of her characters in just a few strokes. Second, "Spent" is a pointed commentary on our world's emphasis on accumulating money and 'stuff', our endless distraction with social media, the weird behavior that our libidos drive us to, and once again, family, family, family. If you liked "Fun Home", "Are You My Mother", and "The Secret to Superhuman Strength", you will also enjoy "Spent". If you haven't yet read Bechdel, run out and get one of them. I liked her first three books better than "Spent", but each of these books is a treat.

As has been my practice in reading English literature and history in anticipation of our time in England, I tried to prepare for our Germany trip by gathering the relevant books in my library and taking several books on the 'suggested reading' list out of the Cambridge and Harvard libraries. The latter three, Lawrence Rees' "The Holocaust", Dan Stone's "The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story", and Susan Neiman's "Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil" proved to be either too upsetting or too unreadable so I stopped part way through them. On the other hand, the four books from my own library provided powerful reading experiences and a good foundation for our upcoming encounters.

In "The Director" Daniel Khelman writes a fictionalized account of G.W. Pabst's experience in Germany and Austria in the 1930's and '40's. Pabst was a world-renowned movie director when he fled Germany as Hitler came to power in 1933. Though not Jewish, he saw the move towards authoritarian rule as threatening to his creative life, and settled in L.A. along with many other German emigrants. Hollywood was not to his liking, and when he received a telegram urging him to return to Austria to see his dying mother, he jumped back into the frying pan. War broke out while he was there, and returning to America proved to be impossible. The descriptions of his passive response to witnessing the random arrests of friends and colleagues raises the key question of what does one do when indirectly experiencing violence and evil. The surreal elements that Khelman introduces into the novel at random points warp time, space, and person in an unsettling way which was likely his motive in introducing them. Well written and worth the time, the book forces the reader to face the 'what would you have done' question that hangs over all of these books about 1930's Germany. Pabst quietly acquiesced, looked the other way, and did his work with support from the Nazi government who used him to prove the worth and creativity of the Third Reich.

A second novel that fictionalizes a real family living in 1930's Germany is Lion Feurchtwanger's "The Oppermanns", but this novel, in contrast to Kehlman's, was written and published in 1933 in the midst of Hitler's rise to power. The Oppermanns were an affluent, assimilated German-Jewish family who had been solid Berliners for three generations and German citizens for nearly 300 years. Martin ran the family furniture business. Edgar was a renowned surgeon. Gustave was the literate, cultured bachelor eating fine food, riding his horse each morning, and well connected to high German society. Katie had married a wealthy American citizen who lived in Berlin. All of them were enjoying rich and successful lives when Hitler became Chancellor. Two years later the Nuremburg Laws were enacted, and life as they knew it came to an end. Martin had to sell his business for nearly nothing to a Gentile; Edgar's clinic was closed, and he was forbidden to practice medicine; Gustave, who had signed a protest petition, had to flee to Switzerland to avoid prison; Only Katie and her husband with his American passport were safe for the time being. When Gustave befriends a member of a German underground resistance group, his conscience prevails over practical concerns, and he returns to Germany, intentionally speaking out in public against the Reich. He is imprisoned for disorderly conduct, tortured, starved, and is freed only through the intervention of Aryan friends, dying shortly after his release. His death, Martin's exile to England and Edgar's to France, and Martin's daughter's emigration to Palestine provide a real time picture of how life changed overnight for Germany's Jews even when the deportations and mass murders were several years away, raising again the critical questions: Do you leave or do you stay? Do you resist or do you look away?

Jeremy Eichler's "Time's Echo" Music, Memory, and the Second World War" offers a completely different perspective on the Holocaust through his exploration of the lives and works of four composers---Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Dimitri Shostakovich: an Austrian Jew, a German, an Englishman, and a Russian. Each of them were powerfully affected by the Hitler's rise and WWII, and each responded in different ways in their compositions and musical activities after 1933. Schoenberg fled to the U.S. while emigration was still possible and spent years trying to alert the world to the peril facing Europe's Jews. His "Survivor of Warsaw" and "Moses and Aron" are powerful musical expressions of this anguish and overwhelming grief. Strauss, in contrast, if not a full-fledged Nazi, at a minimum supported the regime with his conducting and composing, though his late work "Metamorphosen" may have been an attempt to express some regret. Britten's "War Requiem" is considered a modern classic, and in its emphasis on WWI rather than WWII and its failure to refer to the Holocaust, was typical of England's delayed and muted response to that tragic history. Finally, Shostakovich laboring under the strict censorship of Stalinist Russia, managed to include references to Babi Yar in his 13th Symphony exposing the thousands of murders by killing squads in Ukraine and Russia. Eichler's book is well done and even for this tin-eared music lover, quite interesting, again raising those questions of how as an individual do I respond to tyranny and evil.

Finally, Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" provides a detailed history of how Germany moved from the country of Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, and Schiller to a killing machine through her reporting on the 1963 trial of Adolph Eichmann in Israel. Eichmann had been a mid-level officer in the SS after an undistinguished civilian career and rose to have responsibility for the logistics of deporting hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary and other occupied countries to their deaths at Auschwitz and other death camps. In the SS he had become an 'expert' on Jewish matters, and as the Final Solution became the official policy of the Third Reich, he was the right man in the right spot to take this central role. When the Israelis kidnapped him in Argentina in 1960, the stage was set for this show trial in which Eichmann's actions stood in for Hitler's maniacal focus on a Judenrein, a Jew-free Europe. Arendt's book, published in its entirety by 'The New Yorker' in February, 1963, provides a detailed history of how Europe's Jews were murdered. It was controversial when published due to her describing Eichmann's role as exemplifying the banality of evil as well as her characterization of Jewish compliance and cooperation with the Nazis as 'leading sheep to the slaughter'. It's impossible to give this important book its due in this brief summary. If you're going to read any books about the Holocaust, this one along with Primo Levi's works would be good candidates. (N.B. I have observed a strict rule to not list any book in these monthly updates that I had not read from cover to cover, but Arendt's book is the first exception to that rule. After 122 pages describing the humiliation, torture, and finally the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, the elderly, mothers and their children, doctors, professors, lawyers, and peasants, I could not read on, so this review is incomplete.)

While I've tried to remain apolitical in my monthly updates, reading about Germany's descent into authoritarian rule in the 1930's makes it impossible to ignore the striking parallels between Hitler's rise to power and the first eight months of trump's presidency. With Federalized, armed troops patrolling the nation's capital today and threats to do the same in Chicago, daily kidnappings by masked ICE personnel and deportation without due process of individuals alleged to be criminals and undocumented, the creation of a detention camp in Florida, the intimidation of elected officials and former prosecutors by the DOJ and FBI (e.g. John Bolton, Adam Schiff, Jack Smith), and the attempts to hijack the Congress by illegal redistricting, it all feels eerily like the prelude to an authoritarian state ala Germany in 1933-34. The books I read highlight the questions we will all be facing in the coming year(s)---Do I speak out and act when I see wrongdoing by powerful forces or do I look the other way and stay safe? Do I stay or do I leave? Do I act now or wait? My hope is that the experience in Germany in the coming days may help clarify some answers for me.

The Poetry on the Charles this month features poems that had their origin in the 20th Century's wars and barbarism. Wilfred Owen, killed in the final week of WWI at 25, is the classic example of Britain's 'lost generation'. His poems provided Britten, a confirmed pacifist, with the ability to honor the dead while quietly subverting war and violence in his 'War Requiem'. Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'Babi Yar' provided Shostakovich with material for his music and broke the Stalinist-imposed silence about the murder squads in Ukraine and Russia. Auden's poem titled with the date on which Germany invaded Poland and Yeats famous line that 'the centre cannot hold' have been widely quoted in recent years and round out this quartet of somber poetry.

In order to end on a more pleasant note, here are two quotes linking two of my favorite places in the world---gardens and libraries.

Cicero wrote: " If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need" and

Jorge Luis Borges wrote: "I have always imagined that paradise would be a kind of library."

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