Through The Past, Darkly

Without going back as far as Herodotus (who gave us the word “history” from the Greek for “enquiry”), and leaving aside Caesar and Churchill, who first made history and then wrote it, or Gibbon and Macaulay, who both sat as members of Parliament, the “engaged historian” belongs to a long and often honorable tradition. It was on display 20 years ago when The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement rebuking President Reagan, “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” signed by 63 public intellectuals (for want of a less irritating name) who included such eminent historians as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fritz Stern.

Mount Bental, the Golan Heights. A former Zionist, Tony Judt now opposes Israeli policy.

REAPPRAISALS

Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.

By Tony Judt.

448 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95.

That ad is mentioned by Tony Judt in “Reappraisals,” his exhilarating new collection of essays, by way of another rebuke, this time to liberals who “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy,” but then he is himself one of the latest adornments of that engaged tradition. A Londoner by origin and a New Yorker by adoption, Judt was educated at Cambridge, and is now a professor at New York University and director of its Remarque Institute. N.Y.U. is no ivory tower, as it turns out: in a memorable article not included here, he described looking downtown from his office window on 9/11, to see the 21st century begin.

His original scholarly subject was modern France, which led Judt from studies of the French left to the excellent recent “Postwar,” a panoramic history of Europe since 1945, by way of his acidulated “Past Imperfect” on the Parisian intelligentsia in the postwar decade and, perhaps my favorite among his books, “The Burden of Responsibility,” essays on Léon Blum, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron. Like those heroes, Judt has increasingly spread his wings as a commentator on contemporary politics.

In “Reappraisals,” he looks back at the tragedy of Europe in the 20th century — although one should really say the four decades from the outbreak of World War I until the death of Stalin — and in particular at the Jewish tragedy. Judt writes informatively about Manès Sperber, tenderly about Primo Levi, enthusiastically about Hannah Arendt: an enthusiasm I wish I could share. Even apart from the fact that her supposed magnum opus, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is, as Judt admits, “not a perfect book,” nor “particularly original,” that gifted writer had something missing. Arendt is clever and she is formidable, but her heart’s in the wrong place.

Another survivor from the wreckage of Jewish Europe was Arthur Koestler, whom Judt defends from his detractors and who leads Judt on to the riveting question of Communism and its foes. He is generous toward Eric Hobsbawm, a fine historian to be sure, but someone whose own engagement has been not so much perverse as grotesque. In reply to Hobsbawm’s sneering words that “there are certain clubs,” meaning ex-Communists, “of which I would not wish to be a member,” Judt points out that it is precisely the members of those clubs — Jorge Semprún and Margarete Buber-Neumann as well as Silone, Camus, Sperber and Koestler — who have written some of the best accounts of their age.

Although Judt rightly says that Hobsbawm is an excellent writer, he curiously adds that so are E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Christopher Hill, “his erstwhile companions in the British Communist Historians’ Group.” But Thompson, at any rate at his worst, was not only patronizing and insular but bombastic and garrulous, while Williams was a dreadful writer. The judgment is the odder coming from Judt, who writes admirably himself.

In one judicious examination of this subject, Judt observes that European progressives have been better than their American counterparts at allowing “that there might really have existed a secret Communist underground” — and a real mortal, moral conflict, one could add. The Communist-turned-anti-Communist Ignazio Silone once told Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, that “the last battle” of the 20th century would be waged between the two camps they personified, and there is a great book to be written on this subject one day. If Judt doesn’t write it, one of the rest of us will have to.

While gazing about contemporary Europe, Judt encounters a very striking recent phenomenon, a confection of nostalgia, commemoration, invented tradition, “heritage industry” and la mode rétro. He praises the marvelous seven volumes of “Les Lieux de Mémoire,” a collaborative work on national memory edited by the historian Pierre Nora, while perceptively seeing that this absorption with the “world we have lost” is a reaction to the breathtaking changes that have overtaken France since 1945, not to mention the fact that there is nothing very glorious or confident about French history since 1918, despite de Gaulle’s heroic efforts to prove otherwise.

Then after crossing the Channel to the country where he grew up, Judt finds England awash with whimsical “heritage” — as opposed to things that actually work — epitomized by former mining villages Disneyfied into theme parks. Sharp-eyed as he is, political prejudice colors his account here. There is a long riff on the decayed state of British railways (à qui le dîtes-vous; tell me about it: some of us have to use them regularly), compared with French railways, so good that riding them is a pleasure in itself. But then Judt and I don’t pay French taxes, and he might have addressed the plausible argument that, at least in the British context, state subsidy of public transport — as of higher education and the arts — represents a net transfer of wealth from poor to rich.

He displays an understandable contempt for Tony Blair (à qui le dîtes-vous again: some of us had to live under his government), although from the perspective of an impenitent social democrat. While Judt says that “Communism defiled and despoiled the radical heritage,” he could have added that the cause of even moderate British socialism was completely discredited by the failures of Labor governments in the 1960s and ’70s. And while Judt has few good words for Margaret Thatcher, he might try to see that she compares favorably with her epigone Blair at every point, not least in her far less servile attitude toward Washington.

An essay on the “strange death of liberal America” wonders, perhaps with some exaggeration, why the liberal intelligentsia has had so little to say “about Iraq, about Lebanon or about recent reports of a planned attack on Iran.” He has in mind particularly the dread “liberal hawks,” whom he has also attacked on the New York Times Op-Ed page for the rhetorical cover they gave the Bush administration and its court (“In today’s America neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf”).

Geoffrey Wheatcrofts books include The Controversy of Zion and The Strange Death of Tory England. He is writing a book about Churchills reputation in his lifetime and since.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?