Issue 175 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published May 1994 Copyright © Socialist Review
John Steinbeck, a biography
Jay Parini
Heinemann £20.00
'The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.'
What kind of man could write passages like this and then court US presidents and support America's war in Vietnam?
John Steinbeck was born in 1902 to moderately prosperous parents. Their hopes for him were dashed when he repeatedly failed at university. He wanted to be a writer, so in 1922 he hit the road to pursue his vocation and earn his keep.
He found himself among the swelling army of unemployed, a 'muddy river of "hobos" washing from ranch to ranch, from town to town, in search of wages'. In the evenings, after the grinding, blistering work, he would sit listening to their tales, always asking questions and probing for information.
Their stories formed the basis of Steinbeck's famous Depression fiction: Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938) and, finest of them all, what he called his 'big book'--The Grapes of Wrath (1939)--the story of the uprooted families of Oklahoma as they made their way to the festering refugee camps of the 'Garden of Eden', California.
These are wonderful books about ordinary people--their aspirations and disappointments, their selfishness and altruism, their disasters and triumphs. Steinbeck leaves none of his readers in any doubt about what the American dream meant for the masses in the 1930s.
'Political' fiction was booming. There was great demand--from the left and in literary circles--for 'author-fighters' and 'worker-correspondents'. Writers like Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright were all immensely popular. So was the John Reed Club, with its slogan: 'Art Is a Class Weapon'.
Steinbeck rode on this wave, although he was hostile to Communism. He saw his books as a record of and protest against the injustices he saw--and as a warning to the establishment of the revolutionary violence that would erupt if they did not act.
The background to In Dubious Battle, for instance, is a bitter battle of migrant apple pickers for better pay. The novel was based on a strike by lettuce workers in 1936 near Steinbeck's home in Salinas, California. That strike was defeated in an orgy of violence by the authorities.
Steinbeck's sympathies are clearly with the workers, and his novel is a powerful testimony to the way people blossom during collective struggle. Yet Mac, the Communist organiser who stirs the workers into action, is presented as a heartless manipulator. In a key scene he delivers a baby in order to win the trust of one of the migrants' leaders. He tells his protege, 'We've got to use whatever material comes to us. That was a lucky break. We simply had to take it. Course it was nice to help the girl, but hell, even if it killed her--we've got to use anything...'
In Dubious Battle was slammed by the right and by the (Stalinist) left. But by this time Steinbeck was already an enormously popular writer. Each new book was bought and read by hundreds of thousands (for example, the first edition of The Wayward Bus, a rather odd allegorical tale published in 1947, sold 750,000 copies). Hollywood and Broadway clamoured for adaptations and scripts. And the money poured in.
Fame and fortune distanced Steinbeck from the people who had filled his early books. He lived in luxury and travelled in style. He wined and dined with the famous, and enjoyed the Hollywood glitter.
It filled him with dismay when the papers and the establishment labelled him a Red. He supported Roosevelt and the New Deal. He sought and won audiences with successive US presidents and was close friends with the liberal economist J K Galbraith. He did nothing to stop MacCarthy's witch hunts and even opposed the release of Ezra Pound from imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital. He ended up best mates with President Lyndon Johnson, and a supporter of the war in Vietnam.
Much of his later fiction was mythological and obscure. Only East of Eden (1952) came anywhere near the standard set by The Grapes of Wrath.
The biography's 600 hero worshipping pages are utterly readable despite being littered with unnecessary detail. The detail does, however, reveal the enormous volume of journalism that Steinbeck produced. His war correspondence during the Second World War is fascinating, as is his collaboration with the photographer Robert Capa and his research into the Mexican revolution while writing the film script of Viva Zapata!
Jay Parini attacks Steinbeck's critics--and even blames them for the gradual removal of his works from the American education system. He misses the point. Steinbeck's Depression novels capture the spirit of a period of immense upheaval and radicalism. They are angry books about a system that ought to be destroyed. That is why the American establishment would like them to disappear and why everyone else ought to read them.
Clare Fermont
Michael Foot
Mervyn Jones
Victor Gollancz £20.00
How did Michael Foot, once champion of parliamentary socialism, become the anti-left bungler ridiculed in the right wing tabloids and denounced by the left as a compromiser?
This book does not really give the answer, because it never asks the question. Jones, a lifelong friend of Foot, seems to have travelled much the same political road, and defends each new twist and turn of Foot's politics as if there is no serious contradiction involved.
To reach an answer requires understanding the party he dedicated most of his life to. Foot joined the Labour Party at the age of 22 in 1935. He came from a family of radical Liberals and had been in the Liberal Party at Oxford University.
The horrors of 1930s capitalism had a profound impact upon him. In a letter to his mother he defended his break with Liberalism:
'I have come to the conclusion that in the present circumstances Liberalism offers absolutely no contribution to the problem of poverty which with peace is far and away the most important problem and that socialism is the only solution... I realise of course that the Labour Party possesses a rotten set of leaders, but as I believe in socialism and still believe in democracy and parliamentary methods I do not think there is any other course but to support the Labour Party in the hope it will improve.'
He threw himself into trying to 'improve' Labour and fight its 'rotten' leaders immediately, aligning himself with the left.
Foot became one of the left's most vocal and witty champions. He became editor of Tribune, the paper that was to be the voice of his mentor, Nye Bevan.
Entering parliament in 1945 Foot railed against the dreadful Cold War foreign policy of the Attlee government and stood firmly behind Bevan when he resigned over prescription charges.
On Labour's fall from power in 1951, Foot fought Attlee's successor, Hugh Gaitskell, a man on the hard right of the party, a witch hunter and consensus politician every inch of the way.
When Bevan ultimately betrayed the left by opposing unilateral disarmament, Foot stood his ground and stuck to his unilateralist principles.
During Harold Wilson's government in the 1960s Foot rejected overtures to join the cabinet. He opposed the Vietnam War, the arms race, supported workers' struggles and was a champion of nationalisation.
All this was an unlikely background for a man who was to become a cabinet minister, leader of the House of Commons, and eventually Labour Party leader.
Foot would become one of the chief architects of the social contract, which would knock the stuffing out of a combative working class, leaving it vulnerable to the future Thatcher onslaught. He remained in a government which introduced the monetarist measures which were taken up with gusto by the Thatcherites. As leader he would lead anti-left witch hunts of the sort he had opposed all his political life, devoting his energies to smashing Tony Benn and his supporters, and paving the way for Kinnock's massive swing to the right.
Crucial to understanding these incredible shifts is Foot's ultimate belief in Labour, and perhaps more importantly, his slavish devotion to parliament, in particular the British parliament, which he continues to believe is the finest democratic institution in the world.
In the early 1960s, when he fought Gaitskell, Foot pleaded with those beginning to look to extra-parliamentary action not to desert the fight. He pleaded to those in CND who were seeing Labour as a dead end and tearing up their party cards that 'every resignation from the Labour Party is a victory for Mr Gaitskell, soldier on... [despite being] sick of the leadership's arrogant cynicism'.
This politics of necessity doesn't just wear down principles, it begins to transform them altogether. So Foot, the life long CNDer and 'inveterate and incurable peacemonger', ended up making one of the most bellicose and nasty speeches in the initial debate on the Falklands War.
The trappings of parliamentary politics became more powerful than any principle. Foot loved parliament and the cut and thrust of debate among the country's elite. He respected its ludicrous traditions, its pompous smug public school atmosphere. He gained much of his reputation as an orator by his biting witty parliamentary forays which were full of clever literary and historical allusions. He admired others who could play the game with equal panache.
Hence his attitude towards Enoch Powell. Powell was also noted for the brilliance of his debating style.
But for socialists Powell is much better known as an odious racist who inspired every hardened racist and fascist and gave them the veneer of respectability.
Following his infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech Powell was ostracised by many Labour MPs, but not Foot who very publicly put his arm around him in the Commons tearoom and asked him how he was.
Of course Foot deplored the speech, but just as easily could separate the great parliamentarian from the wretched racist.
Indeed even in his better days the life Foot led brought him into strange company, for example his friendship with, and willingness to accept patronage from, the right wing press baron Lord Beaverbrook or his friendship with Indira Gandhi.
Foot's major legacy, however, is the current Labour Party. He began the witch hunt against Militant, which Kinnock followed with such gusto. He began the process of discrediting Tony Benn.
Today's party of Smith, Brown, and the other grey professional politicians, may not have been the party Foot dreamed of when he joined it aged 22, but it is certainly the party he has helped to create.
Pat Stack
Wishing on the Moon: the Life and Times of Billie Holiday
Donald Clarke
Viking £16.99
Billie Holiday is one of the great voices of the 20th century. She has profoundly influenced popular song and was the first person to take advantage of the microphone. Carelessly described as a blues singer, whose later life of drug addiction and disastrous sexual relationships has been well chronicled, she was in fact a great musician who used her voice like an instrument.
Yet, like the music she played, her achievements have never been fully recognised. Her life is best known through the film Lady Sings The Blues based on a ghosted and sensationalised autobiography which she is reputed never to have read. Donald Clarke wants to set the record straight.
One of the great strengths of the book is the author's deep love and knowledge of the music. This is combined with a clear understanding of its origins in the African American experience. As a result he can firmly point the finger at a racist American music industry as responsible for Billie Holiday's life without insulting her by presenting her as a passive victim.
The book begins by explaining the uniqueness of African American culture, its origins in slavery and its maintenance by near segregationist racism. Racism is present every minute of every day, and through interviews and documentation, appears on every page of the book. Thus, although Billie Holiday was not a 'political person', life as a black American forced her to make political decisions. 'To be black in America is like having shoes that are too tight. Whether you are militant or want to keep your head down, your feet hurt.'
The indignities of Billie's life included darkening her skin colour because she looked too white to sing with a black band. As a result Billie felt safer with the people she knew, the circle of musicians and hustlers that worked the jazz clubs of New York.
Moreover Billie did not keep her head down. As one interviewee said, 'Billie was living "black is beautiful" before it was fashionable. Her stature showed the pride in being black.'
Clarke also shows how racism was combined with constant interference and suppression by the music industry. Song writers refused to let her record their songs because she 'didn't sing them properly.'
The pressures on Billie were vastly increased by the fact that she was a woman. She rejected the traditional models of female performers, insisting on presenting herself on stage with dignity, and demanding respect from her customers for what she knew she was good at, singing.
Clarke shows how Billie's later life was a product of a viciously racist society and a music industry narrowly pursuing what it thought was profitable music.
After being convicted of drug possession, the state stepped in with the most cruel blow of all. They withdrew Billie's cabaret card, thus preventing her from working in the only place she felt at home in, the New York jazz scene. They would not leave her alone even as she was dying. The police literally waited by her bedside to re-arrest her should she pull out of a coma.
There are some reservations with the book. Some of his opinions, for example on welfare dependency, are decidedly dodgy. There are a lot of personal and personnel details, which are inevitable in a book of this kind. But the book achieves its purpose. It sets the record straight, and reading it filled me with a deep anger.
America provided the circumstances which produced one of the greatest female vocal artists of the 20th century, then systematically tried to destroy her.
That they could only destroy the person is Billie Holiday's personal victory, and why her musical legacy is an inspiration to us all.
Mike Hobart
The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa
Robert Weinberg
Indiana University Press £25.00
In 1905 Odessa was Russia's largest port and fourth largest city--a commercial, trading and manufacturing centre with a population of some 500,000 people. Over a quarter of the city's inhabitants were Jews, the great majority of them working class, many casual labourers living in great poverty. About half of the city's dockers were Jews.
Socialist activity had begun in Odessa in the mid-1880s but the various socialist organisations--Bolshevik, Menshevik and the Jewish Bund--all had difficulty rooting themselves in the working class. The labour movement in the city was dominated by the 25,000 engineering workers. Unrest and discontent were widespread but none of the socialist organisations was strong enough to give a decisive lead.
The Bloody Sunday massacre in St Petersburg on 9 January 1905 precipitated strikes and street clashes throughout much of Russia but not in Odessa. Here there was no spontaneous eruption, but instead a gradual build up of anger and militancy.
Growing numbers of workers became involved in strikes on economic issues, but it was to be the authorities' refusal to allow a general assembly of the city's workers, what would in effect have been a soviet, that became the issue around which the working class united.
By May, the city was in the grip of a strike wave that saw many workers walking out without even making any demands. The authorities at last resorted to repression. On 8 June worker representatives were invited to discuss the situation with the authorities and were promptly imprisoned. The next few days saw more arrests. Then on 13 June troops opened fire on a mass picket outside the Henn engineering factory, one of the best organised and most militant in the city. Dozens of workers were killed or wounded.
This shooting provoked an explosion of anger. Thousands of workers took to the streets and large crowds, sometimes 2,000 strong, fought with the police and occupied the municipal gas and electricity stations. By the next day barricades had been erected throughout working class districts and the police had been driven off the streets. This outbreak took the socialists, including the Bolsheviks, by surprise.
On 15 June the battleship Potemkin arrived in the port. Mutineers had taken over the vessel. Huge crowds of workers assembled on the docks to welcome them. The scene was set for a successful revolutionary attempt. The sailors could have provided armed backing for a workers' takeover of the city. But it was not to be. There was no political leadership to bring workers and sailors together. Instead it was the army that acted. As evening approached, troops cordoned off the docks and then opened fire on the crowds. Much of the dock area was set on fire and in the confusion perhaps as many as 1,000 people were either burned or shot to death. This horrific massacre broke the movement for the time being. The city was occupied by 20,000 troops and the Potemkin sailed for asylum in Romania.
But while the workers' movement had been defeated, it had not been destroyed. In early October Russia was once against gripped by a strike wave that reached Odessa. The city was paralysed by a general strike.
The authorities tried a new tactic. Right wing agitators, many of them policemen, set about stirring up anti-Semitism, exploiting the tensions caused by the competition for work between Russian and Jewish casual labourers.
On 18 October large crowds, often led by police and soldiers, carried out a savage pogrom that was to last for five days.
Even this disaster did not destroy the Odessa workers' movement. Indeed, the pogrom stirred the socialists to greater efforts so as to prevent its recurrence. At the end of November a soviet was established and an uneasy situation of dual power prevailed in the city. The soviet campaigned against any fresh attempt at unleashing a pogrom.
In early December the Tsarist regime began its final crackdown on the revolutionary movement. On 7 December a general strike was called in Moscow and quickly spread throughout the empire. The Odessa soviet called a general strike, effectively closing the city down. Following the armed suppression of the Moscow workers, on 18 December the Odessa soviet called the strike off. The movement was in retreat. Early in January 1906 the soviet was banned and its leaders were arrested.
Weinberg has provided an outstanding account of events in Odessa, an account that gets right down to street and factory gate level. He has written a tremendous history of class struggle in a multi-ethnic city where the authorities made full use of both force and racism in their attempts to defeat the workers' movement.
The only weakness is in his discussion of the role of the various socialist parties. He celebrates working class spontaneity but does not recognise the role that socialist politics could have played in avoiding the June defeat and the October pogrom. Nevertheless a superb book.
John Newsinger
In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland
Fionnuala O'Connor
Blackstaff Press £8.95
In Search of a State is a powerful argument for class politics as the only way to end sectarian division and violence in Northern Ireland. it doesn't set out to offer a class analysis. Its author, Fionnuala O'Connor, leans to the left but dismisses the idea of working class unity as a dream that 'a few cling to'. In spite of this, she presents powerful evidence of class as the main divide in Northern Ireland today.
While Catholics are still under-represented in many high status, well paid jobs, O'Connor shows how, since direct rule by Britain was introduced in 1972, there has been a steady rise in the number of Catholics holding these jobs.
About 30 percent of managers and administrators in both private and public sectors are Catholics. The civil service, the North's biggest employer and once a byword for discrimination, is now 35 percent Catholic at management level.
This new Catholic middle class likes to flaunt its new found prosperity.
For these people, the argument about the Northern state is largely over. They are happy with the status quo economically and socially. Culturally and politically they still have some problems. They don't like the continuing Britishness of formal occasions and their implied second class citizenship at such times. And they're very clear that they're not going to accept a return to Stormont--the pre civil rights days when Unionist domination was secured by gerrymandering and discrimination.
But these problems are not seen as insurmountable. There is a strong consensus among middle and ruling class people of all religions that the future lies in some kind of Joint Authority or federal Ireland within the European Community.
Sir George Quigley, chairman of the Ulster Bank, the Northern Ireland Economic Council and many top civil servants have already argued the need for 'an island economy' which ignores the border. John Hume insists that a 'Europe of the Regions' will solve the problem of partition without too much pain. Even Sinn Fein, who used to be implacable opponents of the EC, recently opened a permanent office in Brussels.
But for the overwhelming majority of working class Catholics, there has been little change apart from improved housing. What worries them is grinding poverty, the prospect of seeing their children join them on the dole queues and continuing harassment by the British army and the RUC. They still support the Provos and look to a united Ireland.
Some of those O'Connor talked to said they were struck by the similarity with the growth of the black middle class in the US and the growing gulf among Northern Catholics between the new rich and those left in the ghetto, 'who now see themselves as victims twice over--in Northern Ireland first, discriminated against by the Unionist state, and next abandoned and then criticised by people whose rise they believe is largely a result of a campaign of protest about disadvantage they themselves still suffer.'
More than one of O'Connor's interviewees made the point that the Catholic middle class had 'made it on the shoulders of the poor' and now criticise those left in the ghetto because they continue to support Sinn Fein and the IRA.
Yet all the evidence points to unemployment and poverty as the main causes of support for the IRA.
O'Connor points out that the 80 local government areas where unemployment is lowest are exclusively or predominantly Protestant. Of the 50 wards where unemployment is highest, 45 are Catholic, including the top eight. Catholic men remain 2.2 times more likely to be unemployed than Protestant men and 67 percent of the long term male unemployed are Catholics.
But more and more Protestant workers are being dragged into poverty as the economic crisis cuts deep.
The traditional areas of employment for Protestant workers have all but disappeared. And when Protestant workers look for an explanation of the changes that have happened over the last 20 years, what they see is the conspicuous wealth of a new Catholic middle class.
In the absence of any other--socialist--explanation, many Protestant workers accept that their growing poverty is caused by growing Catholic prosperity. So they continue to support the Unionist parties and to look to the United Kingdom.
It isn't that Protestant workers are the dupes of Loyalism or Catholic workers are the dupes of nationalism.
There is a growing realisation among Catholic and Protestant workers alike that going back--to a capitalist united Ireland, or to the days when Britain wanted the Union--is no longer an option. What is clear from In Search of a State is that, whatever the settlement reached over the coming year or two, it could work for the middle class but will do nothing to end the sectarianism which causes the violence.
Giving equal recognition to the two 'traditions' or identities will solve the cultural and political grievances of the Catholic middle class. But it would put Protestant and Catholic working class communities in competition with each other for ever scarcer resources. And that is a recipe for festering sectarianism and continuing violence.
What the book doesn't contain is a hint of the deep anger felt by workers on all sides at the continuing attack on their living standards. If that anger is channelled into a fight against the Tories instead of against fellow workers, things could be very different. It could allow another 'identity' to emerge--a working class identity that cuts across the two communities and unites workers in defence of their interests as a class.
Goretti Horgan
For Richer, For Poorer. Shaping US-Mexican Integration
Harry Browne
Latin American Bureau £7.99
There may still be some people somewhere who believe that the market can bring benefits. The last and latest attempt to re-establish the illusion was the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on 1 January this year. Unfortunately for Clinton, his assurances to Congress that his version of the agreement would be more socially responsible than earlier drafts were exposed by 20,000 armed peasants in southern Mexico who showed that it would bring only hunger and poverty.
NAFTA has only one purpose--to integrate the world market for the benefit of powerful capitalist interests. The consequences will be immediate. Populations expelled from their land will become wage labourers producing crops for export or will drift to the factories that are moving from the US or Canada to Mexico because this disposable army of workers is cheaper and less able to defend its working conditions.
These new factories will produce goods for a wider market, but most of them will be beyond the reach of those who produce them. In the very short term 500,000 jobs will be lost in Mexico. Once the ruling classes of the so called 'Third World' tried to set up their own protected areas of economic activity, now they are rushing to become part of great international conglomerates.
NAFTA is a model of what free trade and global integration mean. The British and Mexican ruling classes not only share a common ideology--they are competing for resources in exactly the same way. Each claim that the economy as a whole will benefit from any new investment. The reality in the long recession of the 1990s is that some economic sectors will grow, but the benefits will be accumulated in the heart of a corporation that will seek to spread its investments across the world for its own profit.
The authors of this book offer plenty of evidence and detailed statistics to reinforce the point. They underline the dangers and the brutal consequences of this 'corporate bill of rights'. At the heart of their critique is a hope that new international institutions will arise to oversee and control the international order.
It is a futile hope. GATT and NAFTA are the economic arms of a system whose military and political expressions, like the UN, have made it brutally clear on whose behalf they are prepared to act. Change will come only when power shifts towards the producers. All the guarantees offered by the Mexican government to the people of Chiapas were meaningless until they fought back.
The alternative of creating an independent state able to protect itself from the system has been exposed in Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico itself. Such states may offer the opportunity of resistance--but they cannot offer an alternative. The sane world the authors of this book so clearly wish to see can never be created by members of a capitalist class whose survival depends on the successful exploitation of workers.
Politically, only the international organisation of workers offers an alternative future. The great illusion that a global economy will bring a general improvement is exposed from Chiapas to the sweatshops of China. The only improvements in the lives of workers have been won by workers themselves.
Mike Gonzalez
The Emperor and Shah of Shahs
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Picador £6.99
Ryszard Kapuscinski claims to have witnessed 27 revolutions, which is no mean feat. This book brings together compelling accounts of two of them--the last days of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia and the Shah of Iran. The writing is impressionistic and highly evocative, and for all its limited scope and style there is time and again insight and a piercing clarity.
The Emperor records the fall of Haile Selassie as described in the words of the people closest to him: the likes of 'His Most Virtuous Highness's pillow bearer', his servants, ministers and sycophants. It can make for a nauseating read. How 'His Most Benevolent Majesty' swore publicly to fight the Italian invaders while in fact weathering the storm in the town of Bath; the gluttonous banquets held while hundreds of thousands were starving through poverty, not shortage of food: '...it is not bad for national order and a sense of national humility that the subjects be rendered skinnier, thinned down a bit.'
'It was no accident that the majority of people around the Emperor were mean and servile', Kapuscinski notes. 'Meanness and servility were the conditions of enoblement.' Corruption and self indulgence on a gargantuan scale existed alongside utter disdain for ordinary Ethiopians. But all the time the revolution was coming.
Kapuscinski is brilliant at revealing where these two revolutions evolve from, the events that individually or out of context would seem meaningless but together spark millions to rise up--even Jonathan Dimbleby had a small role to play in the downfall of Haile Selassie by exposing the emperor's hypocrisy to the outside world. It was an American Peace Corps fashion show that allowed students to assemble and attack his palace. In Iran the publication of a newspaper article criticising Khomeini was one of the catalysts for demonstrations against the Shah.
The second book in this collection conveys the history of Iran and the Shi'ites as well as the rise of the Shah's dynasty in a fashion that is almost whimsical.
Yet very effectively he evokes the fear of the Savak, the secret police, the resentment of the 'petro-bourgeoisie' and 'The Great Civilisation' the Shah talks about.
Kapuscinski writes about the moment that determined the fate of the Shah: previously when a policeman raised his truncheon and shouted, the person on the edge of the crowd was seized by fear and ran. But at that moment it was different: 'The policeman shouts, but the man doesn't run. He just stands there looking at the policeman. It's a cautious look still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent... He glances around and sees the same look on other faces... The man has stopped being afraid--and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution.'
Kapuscinski's generalisations in Shah of Shahs are occasionally infuriating, and don't bother to look for mention of the strikes or workers' councils in Iran. They are not there.
These books read like novels and are filled with swirling ideas and images that evoke the emotions of those involved in the last days of the Ethiopian and Iranian dictators in a way no conventional account could. Well worth a read.
Kevin Orr
In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent
Timothy Garton Ash
Jonathan Cape £25.00
The partition of Europe, symbolised by the Berlin Wall, remained the order of things for nearly 45 years after the Second World War. Within a few short months in 1989 and 1990 the wall came crashing down.
Timothy Garton Ash's book follows the path trodden by West Germany's politicians from the division of Europe in 1945 to German Unification.
Seven years of research and access to previously secret documents have gone into the making of this record and its explanation of 'Ostpolitik', the term used to describe West Germany's political, economic and cultural relations with East Germany and Eastern Europe.
In the aftermath of war Germany was in ruins, occupied by the Allies and stripped of state powers.
The early hopes that a prosperous, free and united Western Europe, backed by US might, could force Moscow to concede German unity were soon dashed.
When the Berlin Wall went up, the US cavalry did not arrive. Kennedy didn't even interrupt his sailing holiday. Willy Brandt, then mayor of West Berlin, had to deal with the horror of that event. People died as they leapt from windows to join family and friends on the other side of a divided street.
The Adenauer government, perceived that the key to the East was through the puppet masters in Moscow.
The idea was that change could be brought about from above by developing trust with the rulers of Eastern Europe through trade and cultural links while keeping trust with the West through both the economic role of the EC and membership of NATO.
To maintain the rhythms of this diplomatic dance, Garton Ash argues, became an end in itself. When the tune changed, in Prague in 1968 and in Poland in the early 1980s, West German policy makers found themselves seriously out of step.
They could not be seen to support Solidarity in the early 1980s and they were willing to deal with Jaruzelski. They put stability before liberty.
The irony is that it was change from below which broke the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the supply of credits and hard currency from West Germany in itself destabilised the economies of Eastern Europe and contributed to their collapse.
At 400 pages, with a further 250 pages of notes, this book provides a pretty comprehensive record of the words and actions of West Germany's leaders that many of them may wish to recast in a more heroic mould.
Margot Hill