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  • Anne Berest. 2023. The Postcard. A Novel. New York Europa Editions.  

    475 pp.  The original French publication appeared in 2021, entitled La card postale, at the Editions Grasset & Fasquelle. It was translated by Tina Kover.

    Though the book is called a “A Novel,” the four names on the postcard—Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie (it is her picture on the dust cover) and Jacques—are not fictional characters. Rather, the first names refer to the author’s great-grandparents, while Noémie and Jacques (Itzak, Isaac) were two of their three children. All of them died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in the autumn of 1942. The children were rounded up in July 1942 (this round targeted foreign Jews living in France) by French police and German soldiers and sent to the Pithiviers internment camp. This was a transit camp before the prisoners were sent to Auschwitz. Noémie and Jacques were put on convoy no. 14 that left on 3 August 1942 and arrived on 5 or 6 August 1942. Jacques, being only 16 years old, was murdered in the gas chambers on arrival (as were 482 other people of the 1023 people on the convoy). During the “selection” (to me personally, the German “Selektion” has become to symbolize the Holocaust, and to this day, I feel very uncomfortable when this word is spoken) on the ramp of the extermination camp, 19-year-old Noémie was seen as being fit enough to serve the Germans as slave laborer, as were 541 other women and 22 men. Yet, she died on 6 September 1942 of typhus (as the author mentions on page 189). Around that time, a typhus epidemic had existed in Auschwitz for some time. For the day of Noémie’s death, the Sterbebücher (Books of Death, kept as records by the German authorities for those who were registered inmates; her brother is undocumented because he was murdered right away) record the death of altogether 266 inmates.

    Noémie’s name on the deportation list from Pithiviers to Auschwitz.

    Source: https://www.memorialdelashoah.org/

    Sources for the pictures and documents can be found in the links listed at the end.

    As an aside, I wondered about why the dates of death for Noémie’s and Jaques (as well as for other Jews who had lived in France) often had the remark (in French) “and not on the 2 of August 1942 in Pithiviers (Loiret).” Had it been assumed that they had died in the transit camp? No. Rather, the French government at the time did not accept their death in Auschwitz. Accordingly, to the civil courts issuing the death certificates after the war and Nazi occupation the “official death dates were the days the deportation convoys left France” (p. 256). Ephraïm (born 1890 in Penza, Russia) and his wife Emma (born 1892 in Lodz, Poland) were sent in convoy no. 40 from the internment camp in Drancy to Auschwitz on 4 November and died in the gas chambers on 9 November 1942. At their age, they were of no use to the Germans.

    Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques Rabinovitch

    After the war and the Nazi regime had ended, Myriam (born in 1920), the eldest daughter of Ephraïm and Emma, and the only surviving member of this family, filled in the form of the French authorities searching for missing members of one’s family (at that time, she had been married already, and thus referred to herself as Madam Picalia; after her second marriage, her name was Myriam Rabinovitch-Bouveris). This is the form for Noémie:

    In 1989, the uncle of Noémie and Jacques, Jacques Bouveris (the son Myriam had with Yves; he does not play any role in this novel), submitted testimonies to Yad Vashem about the four family members who were murdered by the Nazis. In facsimile, this is the testimony about Noémie:

    This concludes the brief description of the historical/biographical excursus. I will now turn to give a description of the novel.

    The novel is divided into four “Books.” Characteristically, the first one (pp. 11-196) is called “Promised Lands). It tells the story of the Rabinovitch family, mostly the part headed by Ephraïm, of trying to find a country in which they could live, develop roots, and fulfill their dreams of belonging, only to end up being murdered in the Nazi’s extermination camp of Auschwitz (apart from the eldest daughter, Myriam).

                Anne Berest starts the narrative with her being with her mother, Lélia, in early January of 2003. The postman brought the mail, mostly from people wishing them a Happy New Year. But there was also something strange—a postcard with an outdated picture of the Opéra Garnier. It had no signature and no text, only a list of four names in an unknown handwriting: Ephraïm, Emma, Noemie, Jacques. The posts stamp showed that the card was mailed at the Paris Louvre post office on 4 January 2003. Anne was pregnant with her daughter at that time. What follows is a mix of information that her mother tells her about their ancestors (she had done a great deal of research of happened to them during and after World War II and the Nazi occupation) and a more extensive part of descriptions and dialogues that provides the fictional backbone of this chapter.

    At a family meeting in a Russian dacha on 18 April 1918, the father of Ephraïm informed his children that he would move to Palestine, and he urged them to move out of Russia too. Nachman Rabinovitch saw the signs of post-revolutionary danger: “The evening had been so pleasant, the siblings uniting in gentle mockery of their father. The Rabinovitches had no way of knowing that these were the last hours they would all spend together as a family” (p. 27).

    Shortly after Myriam was born in Moscow on 7 August 1919, Ephraïm’s small family fled the Bolshevik’s crackdown on former allies to Riga. He started trade in caviar. “But Ephraïm the engineer, the progressivist, the cosmopolitan, had forgotten that an outsider will always be an outsider. He’d made the terrible mistake of believing that he could rely on happiness in any one place … These immigrants arriving in their wagon had become too successful, too quickly” (p. 37). His business went bankrupt, possibly through foul play of his competitors. The family had to flee again, ending up in Palestine, where is father, Nachman, operated an orange farm that was in financial trouble. Itzhak/Isaac/Jacques was born in Haifa in 1925. Ephraïm could not stand the hot weather and leading a life with no real purpose. After five years in Palestine, the family moved to Paris in 1929.

    Soon enough, news became worrisome again, because, in 1933, the Nazis came to power in neighboring Germany, and Ephraïm’s dream of achieving French citizenship for his family remained unfulfilled. To the French, they remained stateless Jewish immigrants (that is, that category of Jews targeted in the first round-up of Jews in 1942). Nevertheless, their daughters excelled at school with Myriam moving on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. On 23 June 1940, Hitler paraded his troops in Paris. Jews had to register with the French authorities. In mid-June, the sisters learned that a numerus clausus would be enacted to limit the number of Jews at French universities. Meanwhile, Emma’s parents in Lodz, Poland, became prisoners when the Nazi occupation forces turned their district of the city into a Jewish ghetto in April 1940. Myriam married Vicente Picabia in November 1941. When the situation became too dangerous, in a daring move, his mother and sister smuggled her into the “free” zone of France. Noemie and Jacques (but not their parents) were arrested in July 1942 and, first, sent to Vél d’Hiv, a sports stadium, and then, on 17 July, to the Pithiviers transit camp. On 2 August, they were put on a train of cattle wagons. They had to stay in it for the night, because the trip would only start on the following day. On 8 October 1942, police came to arrest Emma and Ephraïm. “Emma and Ephraïm were gassed immediately after arriving at Auschwitz, during the night of November 6-7, because of their ages: fifty and fifty-two” (p. 193). Thus, by this time, this branch of the Rabinovitch family had almost entirely died by state-organized mass murder. Only Myriam survived (on her, see below).

    Admittedly, I have emphasized the historical account in these lines, although the text is written mostly in the form of a novel. Anne Berest does so in such a captivating and moving way that I was hard-pressed to interrupt my reading when bedtime had come during the evenings that I spent with this book. Looking at Noémie’s picture on the dust cover has become painful given to what happened to her young and promising life, and to the life of her family.

    Book II covers pages 197 to 317. Anne consults a private detective about the card and a graphologist too. Neither can help her very much. The “Books’s” title, in fact, is “Memoirs of a Jewish Child Without a Synagogue.” The question of Anne’s Jewishness comes up when her daughter returns home from school and tells her mother, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.” This leads to a reflection about Anne’s own Jewishness. She had told her new love interest, George, who is Jewish, that she is also Jewish. So, he invites her to celebrate Pesach with family and friends. It is only when she attends that gathering that George realizes that Anne does not know anything about Jewish religious customs and can neither speak, read, or understand Hebrew. To her, being in that gathering is like being in an entirely foreign cultural environment. She also admits never in her live having been in a Synagogue because she was brought up in an entirely secular, socialist-progressive-humanistic environment. She is Jewish in name only, although she did, over the years, have a few experiences with being Jewish. But since her looks, name, and surname are as French as it could get, people with whom she interacted never really could put her into this ethno-religious category and thus had no occasion to activate their respective prejudices and their verbal reflections towards her. In turn, not being exposed to such reactions prevented her from developing a distinctly Jewish identity. To George, Anne says (on p. 253; italics in the original):

    You know … all my life, I’ve had trouble actually saying the words ‘I’m Jewish.’ I never felt like I had the right to say it. And … its weird, but it’s almost like I’d taken on my grandmother’s fears. In a way, the secret Jewish part of me was glad to be hidden by the goy part. Made invisible. No one would ever suspect me. I’m my great-grandfather Ephraïm’s dream come true. I’ve got a perfectly French face.

    The detective part of the story continues with Lélia and Anne visiting the village in which the Rabinovitches had a house before their deportation. Myriam sold it soon after the war. The current owner tells them that many things were stolen by fellow villagers before she moved in. While still driving in the village, Lélia’s phone rings. It is an anonymous caller who informs them in which house they can find Emma Rabinovitch’s piano. Under a pretext, the owner lets them in. Right in the living room: Emma’s piano! Without knowing who his visitors are, the owner gives them a shoebox with old photographs (they had told them that they looked for old photographs from the 1930s), mostly showing the house of the Rabinovitch family. After having seen the piano, Lélia and Anne are already in emotional distress. This becomes much worse when, among the photographs, they discover a picture showing Jacques with Nachman, standing next to their newly dug well. Lélia starts crying, and their host cannot comprehend what is going on, though he had become a bit suspicious when mother and daughter showed their interest in the piano. After they left the house (not without Lélia having stuffed several of the photographs into her handbag) and returned from the village bakery, they found a manila envelope placed under the windscreen wiper of Lélia’s car. It contained four postcards written in 1939 in Russian to Ephraïm’s address in Paris. They were sent from Prague by his brother, Boris. He was shot in the back of his head in 1942, lined up in front of the pits at the extermination camp of Maly Trostenets near Minks in Belorussia.  

    “Book III – First Names” is only eight pages long. In them, the sisters Anne and Claire reflect about the influence of their second names (Myriam for Anne, and Noémie for Claire) on their lives and their relationship.

    Book IV (pp. 329-475) is headlined “Myriam.” This section is about Myriam’s life after she was smuggled into the “free” area of France, her life afterwards, her ill-fated marriage to Vicente Picabia (the father of Anne’s mother, Lélia), and what led to her second marriage to Yves Bouveris, after Vicente had died of a drug overdose. Until her death at 75 in 1995, Myriam strictly avoided speaking about her experiences, her thoughts, and her memories, though Anne spent many summer holidays in her house in a small village. Once, her mother asked Myriam, in the presence of Yves, whose daughter she actually was, that of Vicente or Yves. Myriam was very upset. However, after a few days, a letter from her arrived explaining what had happened. Lélia also receives a letter with a thick envelope from the staff in the town hall of the village where the Rabinovitch family lived before their deportation. They had found it in the office’s archive. She does not dare open it but allows Anne to do so. It contains one notebook written by Noémie and the beginning of her novel.

    When Anne and George visit the village where she stayed so often in her grandmother’s house, the mystery of the postcard is finally solved in an undramatic, but touching, way. She also relates to three events, the latest concerning her daughter (mentioned above), in 1925, 1950, and 2019, when the family’s children were confronted by their Jewishness. When this happened,

    For the children of Céreste, like the children of Lodz—and the children of Paris in 2019, for that matter—it was nothing more than a joke, a schoolyard taunt like any other. But for Myriam, and Lélia, and Clara, it was an interrogation. … What does it mean to be Jewish? Maybe the answer was contained within another question: What does it mean to wonder what it means to be Jewish? (p. 455 f.; italics in the original)

    Links:

    DEPORTED DEATHS BORN IN FRANCE (lesmortsdanslescamps.com)

    https://www.lesmortsdanslescamps.com/general.html
    https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000199798
    https://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&advancedSearch=true&sln_value=Bouveris&sln_type=synonyms&sfn_value=Jacques&sfn_type=synonyms
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_deportations_of_French_Jews_to_death_camps

    Isaac-Jacques RABINOVITCH was born on December 14, 1925, in Haifa. His older sister, Noémie, age 19, was born in Riga, Latvia. They were deported on convoy 14 of August 3, 1942, after having been arrested in Les Ventes (Eure), west of Paris. Jacques is shown in this picture, taken around 1930, with Myriam, his oldest sister, who escaped deportation.

    https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/French%20Children/html&graphics/T1124.shtml

    Sterbebuecher Excel file

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tGFHHICtguU5_S_QuCBpW0awQIGF-X7gY30j0URRlok/edit#gid=864982580
    https://yvng.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=fr&advancedSearch=true&sln_value=Bouveris&sln_type=synonyms&sfn_value=Jacques&sfn_type=synonyms

    Transport 16 from Pithiviers, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 07/08/1942

    Home

    Link to data from the camp where Noemie and Jacques were interned in France.

    https://ressources.memorialdelashoah.org/zoom.php?code=189025&q=id:p_244079&marginMin=0&marginMax=0&curPage=0

  • Celeste Ng. 2017. Little Fires Everywhere. A Novel. New York: Penguin Press. 338 pp.

    Maybe, it is not necessary to recommend this novel. After all, it appeared in 2017 already, and it was even turned into a TV mini-series. But I happen to have read it only now, some time after I finished and summarized the author’s subsequent book, Our Missing Hearts (2022). Perhaps there are some other readers who were too young or too busy to turn to Little Fires Everywhere. So, I think a brief description might benefit them.

    Although the title speaks of “little fires,” the book culminates in a huge fire, when the six-bedroom luxurious house of the Richardson family goes up in flames. The house is in Shakers Heights, a planned community, city, and suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. This is where most of the action takes place, which includes its High School (in fact, Celeste Ng had lived in Shakers Heights and attended its High School).

                Mia Warren, a very talented artistic photographer who, years earlier, had to drop out of the New York School of Arts when her first-year scholarship could for financial reasons not been extended, and her intellectually gifted teenage daughter, Pearl, arrived at Shakers Heights in the 1990s. Renting part of a Duplex from the Richardson family was supposed to end their itinerant lives, travelling from place to place, depending on Mia’s photography projects. Mia financed those projects by often working in two part-time jobs and occasionally selling her photographs through a New York art gallery.

                Mrs. Elena Richardson, her landlady, lives in the house mentioned above. She shares it with her lawyer husband and four teen age children: Lexie, Trip, Moody, and the unconventional and rebellious Izzy, the youngest at 15 years. Elena is entirely conventional. Her big dream to become a great journalist ended by being a reporter at a local newspaper writing stories on local affairs. Her life is centered around rules, norms, and regulations, good and bad, and on creating social capital with all sorts of locally influential people. All her four kids attend Shaker Heights High School, where they are soon joined by Pearl. Moody and Pearl become close friends. They do many things together, but Moody soon feels that he is running out of ideas to satisfy Pearl’s curiosity. “This was how Moody made a decision he would question for the rest of his life” (p. 32)—he decided to introduce her to his family. From that point onwards, Pearl spends much time at the Richardson’s house with the other three teenagers. And Mrs. Richardson persuades Mia to take up cleaning and cooking tasks in her house. Pearl doesn’t like this because she wanted to escape the supervision of her mom. Mia, on the other hand, learns a great deal about the members of the family, for example, from what she finds in their garbage bins.

                One day, with their modern European history class, Moody and Pearl visit the local art museum, Pearl gets bored and starts wondering around to other rooms. She ends up in front of a photograph called Virgin and Child #1 (1982). Moody comes to look where Pearl was. Both are stunned of what they see: The woman in the picture is no one else than Pearls mother, Mia, holding her in her arms. When Lexie comes to pick them up, “her mouth fell open. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Pearl—that’s your mom. … That’s so crazy, Lexi said at last. ‘God, that’s so crazy. What’s your mom doing in a photo in an art museum? Is she secretly famous?’” (p. 95).

                At some point, Izzy, tired of her mom’s constant criticism, adopts Mia as her role model, learning the basics of photography from her. Pearl starts a sexual relationship with Trip. Lexie has an abortion and breaks up with her long-time boyfriend. Mia gets involved in a custody battle for a baby, because one of her colleagues at work, a Chinese woman with little knowledge of English, had abandoned her child at a fire station, placed in a cardboard box, but later changed her mind. Unfortunately, at that time, the authorities had already started an adoption procedure and placed the baby in the family of one of Mrs. Richardson’s oldest friends. Mr. Richardson becomes that family’s lawyer. Eventually, the judge decides against the mother. Izzy finds her crying her heart out in Mia’s kitchen. Izzy asks Mia how the mother can survive the loss of her baby. Mia’s answer is, “I don’t know, honestly. But she will. Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way. … Like after a prairie fire. I saw one, years ago, when we were in Nebraska. It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow” (p. 295).

                Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Richardson kicks Mia and Pearl out of their apartment. She gives them one day to pack up. Izzy, given her close relationship with Mia, is shocked when she arrives at Mia’s apartment for their joint photography work as usual only to find that the place is empty. She “turned Mia’s words over and over in her head. Sometimes you need to start over from scratch” (p. 316). “Scorched earth, she had said, and at that moment Izzy decided what she was going to do” (p. 323). While the Richardson’s house was burning, Izzy boarded a Greyhound bus headed for Pittsburgh. Among the things she had taken with her were the address of Mia’s parents and the name of the art gallery in New York through which Mia sold some of her work.

    MHN

    Nonthaburi, Thailand

    18 January 2024

  • Celeste Ng. 2022. Our Missing Hearts. London: Abacus Books. 335 pp.

    This is a political novel embedded in a story of love between a mother and her son, placed in the context of resistance to an authoritarian regime. This regime is a fictionalized United States of America whose people are under strict surveillance based on the “Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT).” The core enemy is China. This act has three pillars:

    “Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior.

    Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society.

    Protects children from environments espousing harmful views.” (p. 21)

    The third pillar enables the authorities forcefully to remove children from families suspected of sympathies for China, while the first pillar includes the power and practice of removing books suspected of endangering “national security” from public libraries.

                In roughly the first half of the book, the story is told through the struggle of Bird, a twelve-year-old boy. His mother, Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet, had left him with his white American father three years prior to prevent Bird from being taken from his parents and sent to live with foster parents. In a protest against the PACT regime, a line from one of her poems—“Bring back our missing hearts”—had been used as the rallying cry. Thus, Bird’s mother was suspected of being a sympathizer. The boy’s best friend, Sadie, in fact, was living in a foster family after having been removed from her parents.

                Three years after her disappearance, Bird receives a letter from his mother, though without a sender’s address, and without any written message. Instead, the envelope contains a piece of paper with drawings of all sorts of cats. Bird wonders about the meaning of all these drawings of cats. Eventually, with the help of a sympathetic librarian, he finds the book, The Boy Who Drew Cats: A Japanese Folktale. “A Japanese folktale, but his Chinese mother had heard it or read it somewhere, had remembered it and told it to him. … It’s coming back to him, the way his mother told it…” (p. 73). All the while, his father, moved down from being a professor to working in a library, tries to stop his son from pursuing his search any further, knowing that they are under surveillance by the PACT authorities.

                One day, Bird visits their unoccupied former house, in which the family had lived together before his mother disappeared. He looks around and finally comes to his old room. In it, there is a panel that actually is a door. This used to be his secret hiding place when he was still a small child. It was like a cave for him. Now, he can hardly manage to squeeze himself in. But he finds a scrap of paper. In the handwriting of his mother, the text says: “DUCHESS, New York City, Park Avenue.” This is on page 104. As it turns out much later in the book, Bird had found the contact address of the person who could take him to his mother. Meanwhile, his visits to the library reveal the existence of a clandestine network aiming at discovering where displaced children had been sent: “All our missing hearts, scattered, to sprout elsewhere” (p. 112).

                On p. 121, Bird leaves a brief note for his father, saying that he is off to New York and that he will be back in a few days. “Don’t worry.” After his arrival in New York, he goes to the address found on the scrap of paper. After undergoing a test to show whether he is who he claims to be, he is sent to the backdoor of a neglected house, where he must key in a code for it to open. Footsteps: “His mother, astonished. Holding out her arms. Throwing them around him. Her warmth. Her scent. The shock and wonder and delight on her face. Bird, she cries. Oh Bird. You found me.”

                This happens on p. 142. The remaining pages until the end on p. 325 switch to tell her story of the past three years from her perspective, by way of explaining the situation to her son. But the grand finale for which his mother had tirelessly worked for the past almost three years by identifying disappeared children and talking to their grieving parents still has not taken place. When Bird is picked up by the Duchess in preparation of Margret Miu’s great finale, she says,

    “Bird. Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.

    …

    But in the end every story I want to tell you is the same. Once upon a time, there was a boy. Once upon a time there was a mother. Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his mother loved him very much.” (p. 301f.)

    There is a triumphal ending to her efforts, but it is not a happy one.

    See also the notes on her earlier book at

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377471212_Celeste_Ng_2017_Little_Fires_Everywhere_A_Novel_New_York_Penguin_Press

    MHN

    Nonthaburi/Thailand

    7 December 2023

  • Charlotte Wood. 2019. The Weekend. A Novel. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

    262 pp.

    This novel is about three women of my age, the early seventies. Originally, it was a clique of friends comprising four women who had come to know each other when they were in their thirties: Sylvie, Jude, Wendy, and Adele. An important role is assigned to a dog, Finn, who was given to Wendy by Sylvie when the former’s male partner, Lance, had died. Finn is very unlike the clever Six-Thirty in Bonnie Garmus’ thoroughly entertaining and charming bestselling novel Lessons in Chemistry (2022). Finn is very old, frail, deaf, and probably blind and demented. Wendy’s friends think that he should be put to death to release him from his misery. His unintended triumph comes near the end of the book when he jumps on the silk sofa Jude had given to Sylvie, and that Jude still considers as near sacred. On top of this, the dog also vomits on this sofa what he had eaten from the chicken that Jude had prepared for dinner. Without Finn, there would be a great many blank pages in this novel. Its narrative style seems to have been designed to mirror the protagonists’ advanced age, except for the dramatic finale.

                The novel’s story is triggered by the death of Sylvie. When the group was still complete, it had spent many holydays at Sylvie’s seaside retreat. After her death, her female partner, Gail, disappeared abroad asking the remaining three friends to clear the house out, keeping for themselves whatever they liked. They did so on a Christmas weekend. So, the story tells what happened in this context among the three women, including their individual reflections. The cast of characters is as follows.

    • Jude is a former restaurant manager, here cast in the role as the practical and bossy element of the three. She has a long-standing part-time affair with a man who spends most of his time with his official family. However, the relationship is emotionally of central importance to Jude, and it pays well since he is rich. When news of his impending death reaches her, she is deeply disturbed, but also sufficiently practical to wonder whether she can still stay in the apartment that had obviously been paid for him.
    • Wendy is an acclaimed public intellectual with several well-received books to her credit. Until about p. 112, readers could well get the impression that Wendy’s main characterization relied on her struggle with Finn. At the end of the novel, readers are told that she published one more book after all that happened on that weekend.
    • Adele used to be—and still thinks of herself as—a successful actress. Financially, she is basically broke. Homelessness is a real possibility since Liz, her latest female partner, had kicked her out, and Adele cannot serve the mortgage of her apartment. She has felt hurt many times by being at the fringe of this group of friends. For lack of money, she could never afford their lifestyles and thus missed their meetings in New York, Paris, and elsewhere. She also suffered from being ignored by the members of her profession: “She had important things to say about craft, about honesty, about impulse, about precision. Sometimes the frustration of never being asked pierced Adele so painfully she felt she’d been burned inside” (p. 71).

    The story of this novel, then, relies on contrasting the four very different characters, their different approaches to fulfilling their assigned task, their group dynamics after an important part was removed by death, and the different approaches of the protagonists in dealing with their past, present, and future. This includes a painful insight, formulated by Wendy: “my life has not been what I believed it to be” (p. 247; italics in the original). Finally, Jude, Wendy, and Adele must also deal with the question of whether—after all the experiences on this weekend—they could still continue their friendship without the important presence of Sylvie.

  • Charlotte Wood. 2023. Stone Yard Devotional. London: Sceptre. 297 pp.

    Some time ago I read the author’s The Weekend (see my related note). Since I was less than impressed by that text, I did not expect to read another of her novels until the Booker Prize committee not only longlisted her Stone Yard Devotional, but also shortlisted it in 2024. In this novel, an unnamed female first-person narrator describes her everyday life in a small isolated Catholic convent in Australia. At first, she spent a few days there several times, before she decided to live there for good. On page 283, she recounts how her dying mother’s doctor—the author alternates stories about the protagonist’s life in the convent with events from her earlier life, including a running self-conversation with her mother—prescribed her a tranquillizer. She adds, “Thinking of this now, I find it remarkable that I never took any of the pills myself.” In fact, her life in the convent seems to be an exercise in self-tranquillization. She wanted to leave the rat race in which she was involved for a quiet and peaceful alternative.

                Even in such a place, however, the world cannot be kept out entirely, either physically (some food and other items have to be bought in the town shops) or in terms of one’s memories, regrets or unfulfilled opportunities for forgiveness. Much of the book is then taken up by two intrusions. One is a severe plague of mice. I could not help feeling that the mice played a similar role to that of the dog, Finn, in the earlier novel. Without the mice, as with Finn, many pages would have remained blank. The second is the intrusion of a famous activist nun called Helen Parry. She used to be in the same class at school as the narrator, who got together with her schoolmates to give her a beating, and she is still very embarrassed about her behaviour at the time. Helen will be visiting the convent to return the remains of Sister Jenny to the place where she used to live, to give her a proper burial. She had disappeared, probably murdered, many years ago while doing social work in Bangkok. But her remains had only recently been found. The sisters and the narrator are not looking forward to Helen spending time with them. But they are glad that Sister Jenny is finally being laid to rest as she should be. 

    Since the novel is about everyday life in a tiny mostly quiet and peaceful Catholic convent, it will come as no surprise that the narrative flows leisurely through the pages like a small shallow stream in the countryside. Obviously, Charlotte Wood wanted her text to reflect the routine boredom of the slow-paced lives of people who have decided that what they need is peace, quiet, and prayer rather than the hustle and bustle of a modern lifestyle.

    MHN

    Nonthaburi, Thailand

    7 October 2024

  • Christopher R. Browning. 2005. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939—March 1942. With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus. Published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. London: Arrow Books. 615 pp.

    When Nazi Germany started its war by invading Poland in September 1939, the Holocaust of European Jews did not yet exist as a unified murderous policy approach. Rather, the content of this policy and its administrative and technical implementation were gradually devised in the two years after this invasion in reaction to the changed context of the Nazis’ policy-making process. Therefore, the core of this book is dedicated to the period from September 1939 through to March 1942. The infamous “Wannsee Conference” about the “Final Solution” (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) took place on 20 January 1942 (for the German original, see https://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/PDF/Konferenz/protokoll-januar1942_barrierefrei.pdf, an English-language translation is at https://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/PDF/Konferenz/texte/English_translation_wannsee_protocol_2020.pdf ).

                During the initial phase of the war, the “Jewish Question” was supposed to be solved through various ideas concerning deportations. This included the “Madagascar Plan,” according to which four to six million European Jews were envisaged to be sent to that island, implying that they would die there of starvation. Meanwhile, however, the occupation of Poland presented the Nazis with the urgent question of how to handle the Jewish population in that country, especially those living in big cities, such as Warsaw or Lodz. In reaction, the Germans turned to the means of forced Ghettoization. This led to a follow-up question, namely what the purpose of these Ghettos was to be. Should they serve to exploit the labor of the imprisoned Jews to support the German war economy or should the Ghettos serve the purpose of mass murder by means of overpopulation, lack of sanitation, food, and health care? Such questions were vigorously debated among policymakers and the managers of the Ghettos.

                In the meantime, the persecution of Germany’s Jews intensified between 1939 and 1941. While a policy of forced emigration had been pursued since after the pogroms of November 1938, this option, as well as the Madagascar Plan, became increasingly less viable after Germany started the war. “On October 17, 1939, … Hitler met with Keitel and emphasized that Reich territory was to be cleared of ‘Jews, Polacks, and riffraff,’” the latter including “Gypsies” (p. 181). During the same period, the killing of the handicapped (“euthanasia”) was increasingly pursued. With the war against Poland, Polish handicapped became “an additional group of undesired Poles that fell victim to the mass killings that engulfed West Prussia in the fall of 1939” (p. 186). In the forest of Szpegawski, some 7,000 victims were shot and buried; in the Piasnitzer forest near Gdynia, the number of killed was about 10,000 (p. 187).

                 A turning point in the Nazi’s view of how to handle the Jewish population was reached with the attack on Russia (“Unternehmen Barbarossa”) on 22 June 1941.

    From the beginning, Germany adopted a policy of terror that, though foreshadowed in earlier plans for this was of destruction, gathered momentum over time. Already by the end of 1941, the death toll among noncombatants was devastating: Between 500,000 and 800,000 Jews, including women and children, had been murdered—on average 2,700 to 4,200 per day—and entire regions were reported ‘free of Jews.’ While many Jewish communities, especially in rural areas, were targeted later, the murder of Soviet POWS reached its climax in this early period. In the fall of 1941, Red Army soldiers were dying in German camps at a rate of 6,000 per day; by the spring of 1942, more than 2 million of the 3.5 million Soviet soldiers captured by the Wehrmacht had perished. (p. 244)

    At the same time, the Nazis also considered the fate of the Jewish populations in the European territories occupied by the Wehrmacht. Eichmann’s Gestapo Office for Jewish Affairs was expanded, and Heydrich obtained Göring’s approval to work out the “Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage” (total solution of the Jewish question). Part of this was the “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (final solution of the Jewish question). This extension of Heydrich’s scope of tasks built on a previous order issued on 24 January 1939. Göring’s approval, which was signed on 31 July 1941, was an important step on the path to the “Wannsee Konferenz” in January 1942. However, it did not yet include systematic mass murder, and one could ask whether Heydrich still thought in terms of mass deportation, or, at this point already, had moved the policy frame in a way that included the mass extermination of all Jews.

    These pathfinders to the Final Solution, these inventors of a bureaucratically organized assembly-line mass murder, groped their way along a trail filled with contingencies and uncertainties. These uncertainties, however, must not disguise the fact that the perpetrators sensed what was expected of them and what they were looking for. The extermination camp was not an accident. It did not result from some mysterious process of spontaneous generation. It was a horrific monument to the perpetrators’ problem-solving abilities, but they needed lead time to invent and construct it. (p. 316)

    As mentioned above, this invention was preceded by mass shootings of victims. This not only needed many people to carry out the shootings. It also placed a heavy “psychological burden on the killers” (p. 353). After all, shooting, day-in-day-out, men, women, and children was not something that had existed as part of those killers’ given mind sets. Those were ordinary people with usually ordinary minds regarding murder, and many of them had themselves wives and children in Germany. To the Nazis, it was also problematic that the killings were done almost in the open. Knowledge of these actions spread widely among soldiers at the front and families at home. “By October [1941] Nazi innovators had conceptualized one potential, though as yet untried, solution to their problems: the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp” (p. 353; original italics). Concentration camps as such, though, had existed in Nazi Germany almost from the beginning of their rule, and the use of gas vans had already existed too.

                Using Zyklon B poison was tested in Auschwitz in late summer 1941. More extensive testing was carried out in the Auschwitz Stammlager in September 1941. In “the fall of 1941, Jews no longer capable of work were regularly selected and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz” (p. 357). In October, the design of the crematoria was revised in talks with the contractor, Topf & Sons, to deal with the increased workload. By the last week of October 1941, the alternative policy options of letting the Jews live or to kill them all was resolved with a decision to the latter.

                At the end of their book, the author asks, “What was Hitler’s role in this fateful decision?” (p. 424). He points to Hitler’s “obsession with the Jewish question,” and the impact this had in the Nazi-style political system. “No leading Nazi could prosper who did not appear to take the Jewish question as seriously as Hitler did himself. Thus, Hitler, simply by his existence, exerted a continuing pressure on the political system, which induced a competition among the faithful and ambitious to advance ever more radical proposals and to carry out Jewish policy in an ever more brutal and comprehensive manner … The commitment to some kind of final solution permeated the entire regime, and acceptance of such a priority on the part of the regime characterized much of the German population at large” (p. 425). Moreover, from September 1939 to October 1941, Hitler was also “an active and continuing participant in the decision-making process. Indeed, not a single significant change in the Nazi Jewish policy occurred without his intervention and approval” (ibid.).

    MHN

    Nonthaburi/Thailand 22 November 2023

  • Filip Müller. 1979. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Literary collaboration by Helmut Freitag. Edited and translated by Susanne Flatauer. New York: Stein and Day. New German edition 2022, Sonderbehandlung: Meine Jahre in den Krematorien und Gaskammern von Auschwitz. Deutsche Bearbeitung von Helmut Freitag. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 320 pp.

    English version published as Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Literary collaboration by Helmut Freitag. Edited and translated by Susanne Flatauer. New York: Stein and Day, 1979.

    The German original edition was published by Verlag Steinhausen, München, 1979.

    Filip Müller, a Jewish Slovak, was born on 3 January 1922. He died on 9 November 2013. The title of his book translates as “special treatment.” In the euphemistic language of Nazi bureaucratic, this expression denoted the mass murder of, especially, the European Jews, mainly committed in the gas chambers of the extermination camps, such as Auschwitz. The English-language title refers to the time Müller spent in that camp, after his deportation on 13 April 1942, forced to work as a member of the Jewish “Sonderkommandos,” which had the task of preparing the deported Jews for their death in the gas chambers, to empty the chambers after all had been killed, and then incinerate them in the crematoria. Müller’s report is the only one of a surviving member of such a “Sonderkommando,” because most members would eventually be killed by the guards to prevent the existence of any eyewitnesses. This was one of Müller’s main fears during all the time he spent at Auschwitz. His report covers the time between May 1942 and January 1945 (thus, he was there when the Rabinovitch family was killed; see the text on Anne Berest’s book The Postcard), when the extermination camp was evacuated.

    Here is a brief extract from the English-language version of Müller’s account. This extract is about the very beginning of his work at the gas chambers (pp. 15-15).

    Source: https://archive.org/

    The words “undressing corpses” does not appear in the German-language text. It would also not make sense, because the victims had to undress before they were led into the gas chambers.

    MHN

    Nonthaburi, Thailand,

    12 November 2023

  • Heather Cox Richardson. 2023. Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. London: WH Allen. xvii+286 pp.

    The author’s starting point is found right in the first two sentences of her foreword to the book: “America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism.” Of course, this danger has a name as well as a date: Donald Trump’s possible reelection as the US president in November 2024. At the time of writing this brief book description (8 January 2024), opinion polls indicate that Trump leads a handful of other Republicans by a large margin. However, the problem is not limited to Trump. Rather, it includes the Republican Party, which has changed from merely being conservative to being more of a radicalized right-wing political party (like populist right-wing parties in other countries, but with American characteristics). The reason seems to be that many voters—affected by economic, social, political, or religious changes—have become frustrated by the feeling left behind. This “makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power” (p. xii). This leader’s propaganda becomes “central to their identity” (ibid.).

                However, Richardson, being a historian, digs deeper. She goes back to the Declaration of Independence and its statement that all people are created equal, and that government must be based on the consent of the governed. Thus, her approach is broader: “This is a book about how a small group of people have tried to make us believe that our fundamental principles aren’t true” (p. xvii). Yet, for some reason, the author starts describing the ideational fundamentals of US representative democracy only with chapter 21 on p. 163. In this chapter, on. p. 164, she points to a problem that had led to a long list of struggles, including the US Civil War:

    The same men who put their lives on the line to establish that all men are created equal literally owned other human beings. They considered Indigenous people ‘savages’ and women subordinate to men by definition. Neither Black men nor Indians nor women fell into their definition of people who were ‘equal’ or who needed to consent to the government under which they lived.

    Much of this mindset has survived in the southern states of the USA, and much has been done to keep it alive and dominant. Richardson often refers to the importance of this “hierarchical theme” (p. 167) in the interpretation of US history and political practice. There seems to be a dichotomy of equality and hierarchy, where proponents of the latter insist that the “equality” of the Declaration of Independence was to be understood in hierarchical terms. The claim, then, is that when the Founders declared the value of “equality,” they in fact only referred to the equality of the white male population vis-à-vis their white male counterparts in the United Kingdom. They never intended, or could imagine, that “equality” should apply to all people living in the United States. From this perspective, people advocating a multiracial, multicultural, and multi-gendered America violated the Founders’ vision of this new country. In addition, when combining the values of liberty and the “pursuit of Happiness,” the consent of the governed could be given such a strong individualistic meaning that it included a rejection of active federal government and the location of the heart of American democracy in limited state governments.

                The Declaration of Independence did not stipulate how government should be constructed in the newly formed USA. To fill this gap, a first attempt was made with the “Articles of Confederation” of 1777. They “centered power in the states rather than in national government” (p. 179). Since this construction did not work, the United States Constitution of 1789 turned the previous arrangement around by making the federal government “the heart of the new system. It asserted that the power to govern derived from the people of the nation…” (p. 180). From this time, given that there were no mass media that could reach the widely scattered population, the president was elected not by direct vote, but by an Electoral College comprising electors at the state level. Since there was a persistent worry about the emergence of governmental tyranny, the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. In theory, this document applied to all citizens, “although its practice was almost exclusively limited to white men” (p. 184). This situation provided the basis for narrating US political history as a persistent struggle for “Expanding Democracy” (the headline of chapter 24 on p. 187). This included the Civil War, which was not merely against slavery, but against an ideology of “populist democracy” and “popular sovereignty” that tried to replace the idea of equality with the idea of racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Abraham Lincoln was one of those who moved against those who tried to reinterpret the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, “Lincoln’s Republicans had re-envisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial national government, held back by the Framers through the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white and Black men alike. They had enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality” (p. 205). Again, such a use of the federal government is not a self-evident mechanism to national government. Until today, Republicans are very sceptical when it comes to the policies and budget requirements of their national administration (at the time of writing this summary, Congress and the administration had reached yet another of their many agreements made in the past years concerning the funding of the central government).

                Regarding the rights of Black Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) was fundamental because it declared that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” (p. 208). Thus, the federal government was tasked with enforcing equality, even if this went against the will of individual states. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed Black citizens the right to vote in elections. Regarding this right, resistance in the South was broken only much later, in 1965, with the passing of the Voting Rights Act.

                Richardson often mentions a “liberal consensus.” This is said to have been brought about when Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pursued his “New Deal” policies. Basically, the “New Deal” was about using the federal government “to regulate business; provide a basic social safety net, largely through work programs; and promote infrastructure” (p. 235). In other words, the “liberal consensus” was about an active role for the federal government in promoting the welfare of the American people. It stood against libertarian ideas that stressed the role of individuals, the rich, and their protection from government action, be it in terms of taxing their incomes or be it about regulating their businesses. The “liberal consensus” was expanded under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower (Civil Rights Act of 1957), and especially during Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” policy drive.

                What has been summarized so far covers only pages 163 to 244. So, what are pages 1 to 160 about? These pages deal with the movement that tried to counter what has been characterized above. Accordingly, Richardson writes, “Today’s crisis began in the 1930s, when Republicans who detested the business regulation in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal” started looking for partners in creating an anti-“liberal consensus” alliance, partners who shared the opinion “that a government that answered to the needs of ordinary Americans was a dangerous, radical experiment” (p. 3) that bordered on the introduction of “socialism” (this is one of those people’s favorite accusations against an American government that would look like the governments that are commonly found in the European Union). Such people could not accept what had already been pointed out by Abraham Lincoln in a fragment written in 1854: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate and individual capacities” (p. 9).

                The remaining pages, before the historical part begins on page 163, are filled with an historical overview about how the Republicans became what they are today, and how they moved against the “liberal consensus.” President Richard Nixon makes a brief appearance, while Chapter 7 is about “The Reagan Revolution.” In his inaugural address, mixing populism with neoliberalism, he promised to pay special attention to a supposedly neglected group, “‘We the people,’ this breed called Americans.” And he warned that, “in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” (p. 52). President George W. Bush tried to regain the Republican Party from the radicals but failed. Through their policies, “Republicans had created an underclass of Americans increasingly falling behind economically. And crucially, they had given the underclass someone to hate” (p. 57), that is, all those who were opposed to the “false narrative” that the radically right-wing Republicans, who had managed to capture the party, had invented about what the true values of American culture were. These values included racial hierarchy versus a multiracial social and political order; elite leadership versus popular participation; individualism versus the common good; limited federal government versus an active, policy-oriented federal government; Christian fundamentalism versus secularism; women as mothers at home versus women participating in the public and economic spheres; tax cuts versus taxation; business freedom versus business regulation; economic inequality versus income distribution; individual fate versus government help (for example, Obamacare); traditional gender roles versus LGBTQ; natural conception versus birth control and abortion rights.

                When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, this was not accidental. Rather, it was the logical culmination of four decades of the Republicans undermining of the American constitutional and democratic order. Trump’s “Authoritarian Experiment” is detailed in Part 2 of this book, covering pages 79 to 160. This section ends with Richardson writing, “the MAGA Republicans appeared to be on track to accomplish what the Confederates could not: the rejection of the Declaration of Independence and its replacement with the hierarchical vision of the Confederates” (p. 160).

    Readers who want to go deeper into the economic aspects of the US situation could turn to Angus Deaton. 2023. Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.   271 pp. See the summary at

    https://www.academia.edu/108775519/Angus_Deaton_2023_Economics_in_America_An_Immigrant_Economist_Explores_the_Land_of_Inequality_Princeton_and_Oxford_Princeton_University_Press_271_pp

    or

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375118398_Angus_Deaton_2023_Economics_in_America_An_Immigrant_Economist_Explores_the_Land_of_Inequality_Princeton_and_Oxford_Princeton_University_Press_271_pp

  • Ingeborg Rapoport. 2021. Meine ersten drei Leben: Erinnerungen. [My First Three Lives: Memoirs.] Berlin: Bild und Heimat.  415 pp. First pocketbook edition 2002. Original edition 1997.

    Ingeborg Rapoport was an internationally recognized Pediatrician practicing at the famous Charité Hospital in Berlin, German Democratic Republic. She was born in 1912 and died in 2017. Because she had a Jewish mother, her finished doctoral dissertation in medicine was rejected by the University of Hamburg. At age 102, she became the oldest recipient of a doctoral degree at the same university. She was already more than 80 years old when she decided to write an autobiography in the form of a long report to an unborn child, Joshua. The three lives referred to in the title cover the years 1912 to her emigration to the USA in 1938, her life in the USA from 1938 to 1950, and her return to Europe due to persecution during the McCarthy era. She and her husband, Sam (Mitja) Rapoport, a world-renowned Biochemist, were life-long Communists.

                They settled in the German Democratic Republic, becoming members of the privileged elite there. The demise of that country thus hit her hard. She grapples with the dissonant assessments between West German and East German viewpoints about that former state. It prompts her to ask, “War ich ein ‘Täter’?”, meaning whether she had been part of the repressive state apparatus governing Communist Germany. She is particularly scathing of former Lutheran pastor Joachim Gauck, a civil rights activist in the GDR, who later became the Federal Republic’s president (2012-2017). Rapoport calls him the “Grand Inquisitor of the GDR.” She describes a meeting at the Charité where Gauck was the keynote speaker. According to her, he spoke full of hatred about the renewal of the hospital, demanding that all its professorial staff had to be removed, because they had gained their positions based on the promotion by the Communist Party, thereby preventing better qualified people to assume those positions (p. 351). Calling him a “Grand Inquisitor” might stem from the fact that he also used to be the head of the West German office hunting down members of the Stasi, the GDR’s much-hated secret police.

                Rapoport ends her account with a section headlined “Confession to Nostalgia” (p. 402). In leading to this section, she writes, “A revolution without victims surely is unrealistic, and the creation of a new order necessarily includes injustice. … History will preserve the true and pure seeds of our ideas, and sometime in the future they will germinate again” (p. 401). The final section, then, starts with, “It is like this, my Joshua, I confess to a much reviled and despised nostalgia, to a painful feeling about the perished GDR, which had just begun to become my third home” (p. 402).

                Rapoport’s insistence on the superior value of the GDR’s socio-political system, compared to the Federal Republic’s democracy, can be irritating. However, she does try to reflect on her views. In any case, this autobiography spanning the years 1912 to 1997 and three countries, reflecting the course of time from the pre-Nazi period, through McCarthy’s Communist paranoia in the USA, to her life in the German Democratic Republic, and finally in the Federal Republic of Germany is a valuable personal reflection of the course of (not only) German history in the twentieth century.

    MHN

    Nonthaburi/Thailand

    8 December 2023

  • Jan-Werner Müller. 2022. Democracy Rules. Penguin Books. xvi+236 pp.

    Müller’s book is kind of a primer for readers who would like to refresh their knowledge of the fundamentals of democratic political systems. For readers who are up to date about these fundamentals, Müller’s text can be boring at times. Patience might be needed most with chapter 4 “Reopening” (pp. 139-178), in which Müller recounts four requirements that must be fulfilled by “intermediary institutions” (political parties and the mass media): They must be accessible by citizens, they must support their judgements and opinions by facts, be autonomous (without hidden sources of influence), and thereby be accountable. Accessibility is of particular importance because any democracy “must be open to new claims of representation” (p. 140). Autonomy is closely related to political finance. Political parties or the mass media must not be dominated by a single person or group of people. Müller mentions several measures, such as the public funding of parties, tax deductions, and vouchers or “democracy coupons” that the state could give to the people, who could then distribute them to parties of their choice. Such measures are said to potentially have positive effects on political participation. However, Müller also notes that, “None of this promises better political outcomes as such, but it holds the possibility of opening up democracy to new representatives.” Such measures are aimed against what is called “the donor class” (p. 150). Something similar could also be applied to mass media organizations that do not operate to gain profit. Yet, their capture by influential financiers must be prevented, just as the case regarding political parties. Both regarding political parties and people-supported nonprofit mass media organizations, one might wonder how many citizens could develop an interest in becoming engaged in these fields. In any case, besides the participatory element, citizens must also be able to assess these two components of “democratic infrastructure,” that is, they must be transparent regarding their internal operations.

                The second-last section of this text is headlined, “Closing Democracy to Save Democracy” (p. 158ff.). The question is, “What about bad actors bent on undermining democracy, on playing the democratic game in bad faith?” (p. 159). Of course, this leads to the consideration what is generally called “militant democracy,” made famous regarding the defeat of Germany’s Weimar Republic by the Nazis, and the subsequent inclusion of “militant democracy” in the post-Nazi Basis Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. In practice, this mostly is about the banning of parties that openly declare that they would abolish the democratic order once in power. Two other ways of fending off threats to democracy are constitutional courts (presuming that they are impartial, which can hardly be said for countries such as, say, Poland, Hungary, or Thailand). The second option, if all other means fail (this is the last section of the main text, though there is still a “Coda”), could be measures of civil disobedience. Based on Rawls, this entails “overt lawbreaking,” which must be nonviolent and aimed at persuading fellow citizens that their democracy faces dire problems. Yet, this last condition might not work when the national public has already been distorted by the capture of the mass media. Should oppositional forces declare defeat when they realize “that their criticism of the democratic process fails to resonate with other citizens?” (p. 176). Another tricky part here is that lawbreakers must be prepared to suffer the respective legal punishments that, however, would only work if the legal system is, by and large, fair. But this might not be the case when anti-democratic forces have already undermined, or even captured, the judiciary. Maybe, “uncivil” actions of confrontational social sanctions could be used. But they must directly target the concerned person and strictly avoid “collateral damage” (such as scaring children when actions are taken in front of the house of the targeted person).

    I will now turn to the beginning of the book. Müller assesses democratic declines in several countries (obviously, the USA, Trump, and right-wing populism are favorite references since he teaches at Princeton, but Poland, Hungary, India, Israel, and Brazil are also mentioned). One important issue that is mentioned variously in the text is stated on page xi, “…it is not the people who decide to be done with democracy; it is elites.” So far, there have not been examples of citizens living in democratic systems declaring that they, from now on, would prefer living under an authoritarian regime.

                The first chapter is about “fake democracy,” beginning with populism. Populists are not only nationalists. Above all, “they do something else, and that is crucial: in one way or another, they claim that they, and only they, represent what they often refer to as the ‘real people’ of also the ‘silent majority.’” (p. 6, original italics). In other words, they claim to have a “distinctly moral monopoly of representation” (ibid.). Populism thus thrives on polarization of the “real people” and those who do not belong into this category, but rather present a threat to the former (refugees, migrants, Muslims). Thus, the question remains who, in fact, belongs to the people of a political order, to its demos. In this respect, Müller talks about what he calls the “double secession” (p. 23). The first secession is that of the wealthy who do not really depend for their reproduction on nationally organized political, social, or economic structures. As for the USA, “this de facto secession relies not on any kind of conspiracy but on controlling one of the two major political parties” (p. 29f.). The second secession is that “an increasing number of citizens at the lower end of the income spectrum (to put it very neutrally) no longer vote or participate in any other form in politics” (p. 31). This can become reinforcing because “political parties have no reason to care for those who don’t care to vote” (ibid.). This way, the national political order becomes deeply divided: “At the top, the nation features citizens highly engaged in politics but who have everywhere else to go; the separate nation at the bottom consists of men and women highly disengaged who have pretty much nowhere to go,” while the middle class comes increasingly under stress (p. 33). The second and the third strata might become disenchanted with democracy, not the least because they cannot see that their children will have a better living standard in the future. Thereby, there is a reservoir of citizens who feel neglected, and this reservoir can be exploited by populists. However, against them, one must insist that democracy has two “hard borders.” “First, a distinctly democratic people cannot expel or disenfranchise citizens…” (p. 39). “Second, in struggles over boundaries, one cannot simply assert a supposedly self-evident conception of the people. That is what defenders of a particular ethnic conception of the nation ten to do…” (p. 40).

    The second chapter is about “Real Democracy: Liberty, Equality, Uncertainty.” Simply speaking, in a democracy, people are citizens, that is, they are equal. This does not mainly refer to equal right but rather to social equality, meaning that people “consider one another equal (but not the same)” (p. 43). Such a fundamental standard cannot be achieved in structurally hierarchically societies, which, for that reason, can also not be (fully) democratic. Such a view does not include ideational homogeneity and a dislike for conflicts. Rather, pluralism and conflict are a quasi-natural component of democratic political orders. It thus makes no sense to demand something like “political unity.” For this reason, in a democracy, the occurrence of “unprecedented political association” is nothing to be worried about.

    Often, the elements of “representation” and democracy” come together in the form of “representative democracy.” But are they the same or, more importantly, does representation undermine democracy? “That is obviously what the American founders thought. Thet considered representation a distinct alternative to democracy, which for them meant continuous, direct participation by the people” (p. 57). Since elections are the key mechanism to determine, Müller spends several pages on this issue, especially about the “democratic art of losing.” It needs to be emphasized that “A democratic election is not a one-off aggregation of preferences but the end point of an extended process of citizens’ engaging one another, as a result of which losers can also understand themselves at least somewhat as the authors of the collective outcome” (p. 63). From this follows the losers’ commitment to becoming a “loyal opposition” (p. 64; original italics). “Loyalty” here refers to the “procedures of democracy” (ibid.). In other words, the losers of an election will not support the government, but they will support the democratic political order. “The alternative to a loyal opposition is not consensus but behind-the-scenes intrigue or chaotic issue-by-issue fights” (ibid.). However, it is not only the opposition that must accept the winners, meaning the government. The winners, meaning the government, must also accept the opposition and its persistent criticism of its actions. Such criticism is not just a distraction of governmental work, it is a constitutive part of the democratic process. The opposition provides a “systematic, coherent, but precisely not anti-system alternative” (p. 65). This arrangement can be endangered when anti-system right-wing populist parties gain ground. When they become numerically too strong, it might be necessary that all pro-democratic parties join in creating a government, producing an opposition that is disloyal to the democratic political system. This could play into the populists’ hands because it lends weight to their accusation that the people are up against dominant elite forces that do not care about the people.

    In principle, the outcome of elections must be uncertain. The author quotes Adam Przeworski, who had defined democracy as a kind of “institutionalized uncertainty” (p. 71). Winners and losers must have the opportunity to be turned into their opposites. Perhaps even more important, “new winners and losers [must be able] to enter the game over time” (p. 72). This implies that the electorate will not be fixed in its distribution of opinions. Otherwise, one would need only one single election to settle once and for all who will be the government and who will be the opposition. And one should not fall into the trap of creating too high normative hurdles for the voters’ decision-making process.

    It’s easy enough to demonstrate that individuals lack all kinds of politically relevant knowledge or have inconsistent views. But it does not follow that politics as a whole becomes arbitrary, let alone that political prizes will always go to the greatest demagogue. Citizens do have a good enough sense of their interests; they pick up cues from other individuals and institutions (parties, the media, and organizations that as trade unions); as in so many other areas of life, taking a shortcut is not a sign of irrationality. (p. 76)

    Compared to the voters, the bigger problems are posed by the state of political parties and the mass media. It is also about the unequal distribution of organized interests, and the possibility that influential organized interests might be able to lose in elections. As mentioned above already, especially regarding the issue of representation, “The easier it is to enter the game of offering oneself and particular representations of shared interests to groups in society, the more likely it is that citizens will experience their political system as free and open to change” (p. 84). In this context, Müller touches on alternatives to representation, such as lottocracy and meritocracy. He notes that representation and participation should not be seen as opposites. Rather, “the antithesis of representation is exclusion, and the opposite of participation is abstention or some form of secession from shared political life” (p. 88).

    Chapter 3 turns to the “Critical Infrastructure” of a democratic political system, meaning political parties, movements, and the mass media (he also uses the expression of “public sphere”). The first is about the basic question of, “How can citizens become active and exert any power at all if no organizations exist to help them shape and spread their views?” (p. 91). Apparently, Müller’s conceptual starting point is the opposition of state and society. Thus, he calls the above organizations “intermediary institutions.” Of them, political parties and the mass media are often perceived by observers as being in crisis, while both are seen as being indispensable in providing aggregate opinions on issues and offer their positions, or choices, to society, depending on their respective “value commitments” (p. 102). Since those values are never unitary, both political parties and the mass media must be pluralistic. However, this “external pluralism” must be complemented by “internal pluralism,” that is, what others might call, especially regarding political parties, “internal democracy.” This does not contradict partisanship since partisanship relates to competing units, while a political party’s partisanship can be expressed in different ways without losing its hard core. Yet, debate cannot go on forever; in the end, some kind of “common program” (p. 108) needs to be agreed upon. After all, political parties are supposed to structure the political game, and this is impossible if a broad spectrum of options is not reduced to a program that the electorate, as well as competing parties, can recognize is being clearly different from the programs of its competition.

    There are also some pages about the role of the mass media, the previous connection between political parties and newspapers, public broadcasting channels, and the internet. Regarding the latter, the author emphasizes that one cannot assume that technology as such has an effect. Rather, what kind of use is being made of those new technologies depends on the regulatory framework that is applied to them. Thus, it is a matter of policy decisions, and not an issue of the eigengesetzlichkeit of technological innovation (just as in the earlier cases of radio and cable TV). Insisting on the professionalism of mass media earns its proponents the label of “elitists” by populist critics. Another problem is what Müller calls “news deserts,” meaning areas in the rural US where there are no independent newspapers any longer. The question then arises how local people know what is going on in their wider locality. This also impacts on the degree of national representation because people might not really know much about what their representatives are doing in Washington, or even in their state’s legislature. Consequently, holding them accountable becomes problematic. Moreover, national news channels are more about polarizing conflicts and political-cultural identities. Of course, political parties have always targeted specific groups of voters. In so far, talk about the dominance of “echo chambers” might be exaggerated. On the other hand, if indeed people come to be “trapped in politically homogeneous spaces,” elections could become superfluous. Election commissions only needed to count the self-declared members in those spaces and then declare the winner. In any case, the electoral outcome would become less uncertain because one would have to assume that the boundaries of such spaces can hardly be overcome in election campaigns.

    At the end of this section, Müller asks “Is the Party Really Over.” He lists a number of points (loyalty to strong leaders, rather than to programs, platform parties) from alternative political parties in Europe that seem to indicate that the life of traditional political parties has not become easier in the last few decades.

    At the end of the book is a section headlined “CODA: Five Reasons for Democratic Hope (Not Optimism)” (pp. 179-185). It is clear that “Millions of people around the world are evidently dissatisfied with their democracies. But they are not turning away from democracy as a set of ideas. … This is a reason for hope; it’s also a real difference from the twentieth century, when citizens felt that institutions like parliaments were deeply discredited as such” (p. 179). Consequently, rather than being openly anti-democratic, some parties revert to “faking democracy” (ibid.). That is, even such parties cannot openly attack the democratic fundamentals. One should also be hopeful that what politics has produced can also be revised by politics. Another reason for hope is that some countries have been trying to provide tools to the people so that they might recognize that they have more in common with each other than the emphasis on divisions might suggest. A final reason for hope is that “distinctly democratic form[s] of disobedience” have often remained possible, which means that such systems have retained a degree of openness. In short, democracy cannot be saved by professionals; “ultimately, only mobilized citizens can” (p. 185).

    MHN

    Nonthaburi/Thailand

    11 December 2023