The first casualty of war may be truth but the second is history. The writer William Boyd has lost Anglo/American funding for his film on Hitler’s early life because, so he says, “anything that touches on the nature of evil is considered dangerous”.
According to Boyd, Hitler is now too close to al-Qaeda and President Saddam Hussein for comfort. Hitler was “evil” and so is Saddam. Anything that risks yielding an ounce of understanding of the one might do so for the other. Since America and Britain may soon be bombing Baghdad, it is safer to leave Hitler’s Germany and Saddam’s Iraq as simply “evil”. The news from Washington this week is that nuclear weapons may be used on Iraq. This is no time to portray Iraqis as human beings, even by proxy to interwar Germans.
Such fires are not easily controlled. Two Israeli scholars have had their work first rejected, then censored, by a British magazine, Political Geography, as part of a growing academic boycott of Israel. No matter that one of the scholars is Palestinian and the article was critical of Israeli expansionism. In the letters column of The Times this week, writers have been fiercely defending the architectural historian, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, against a charge of “Nazism”. Even the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, has used the word “fascism” of opponents of his asylum policy. Thus are Iraqis, Nazis, Israelis, Fascists, Germans, Zionists all parcelled together in the same lexicon of abuse.
This is the language of paranoia, of a weak and fearful society that is losing its faith in reason. Those who once saw “Commie bastards” on all sides now see “Fascist thugs”. They say the words over and again, beating out the “-shist” and “-ugs”. It makes the finger instinctively tighten on the trigger.
At such moments I long to talk to the little man with the pointed, intelligent face and a perpetual smile. They say he never ran and never lost his temper. He did not pray. To him, the world and its nature were evidence enough of the goodness of mankind. You need only smile, he said, the “smile of reason”. He smiled at jokes. He smiled at intolerance. He smiled at his enemies when they exiled him, and smiled when they called him back to a laurel crown. He wrote the greatest satire on the human condition, Candide. His name was Voltaire.
Voltaire was no pacifist nor enemy of sovereign government. He liked the monarchy of Louis XIV, so much so that his history of the reign had to be censored by its successor for fear of comparison. But Voltaire’s true icon was the Enlightenment, born jointly in Britain and France. Its essence was freedom to demand of authority reasons for its actions. Explain, he demanded, “your cruel wars so lightly undertaken . . . your confused heap of laws often passed haphazardly”.
Explain or be damned. In his Treatise on Tolerance, Voltaire defended the right of “just one man to a different opinion”, for that man too was created by Nature. It was his right to dissent that made justice necessary, “where laws yield only trickery”.
Voltaire would have detested the bandying of the word Fascist. In a recent article, the historian, Stephen Games, has portrayed Pevsner as an enthusiastic Nazi before his arrival in England. As a young man Games quotes Pevsner, anonymously at the time, in support of aspects of the National Socialist programme. Like many bright young Germans, he was excited by Hitler’s eagerness to end the chaos of Weimar and root out corruption. Pevsner would not have been alone in warming to the Nazis’ “overpowering collective energy” as embodying the spirit of a new age. I might have done so too, as briefly as Pevsner allegedly did.
Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were likewise “linked to” Nazism through their architectural Utopianism. Architecture is institutionally authoritarian, otherwise nothing gets built. Ten years ago, Elaine Hochman wrote: “For Hitler no less than for his contemporaries, Mies and Gropius, architecture was an expression of the central spirit of an epoch”. There were “striking similarities,” she wrote, between Mies’s work and “the principles that supported the Third Reich”.
But where does this lead? Anyone can play guilt by association. Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie was enthusiastic about Mussolini’s way with trains. That does not make every fuming commuter delayed at King’s Cross “inclined towards fascism” (or not yet). It is as daft an association as refusing to listen to Wagner or read Nietzsche, because Hitler admired them.
A forthright attack on Pevsner’s early views was put years ago by Professor David Watkin in his Morality and Architecture. The young Pevsner was much influenced by Wilhelm Pinder, his professor in Leipzig. Pinder held that “great architecture is always the face of a superindividual whole . . . it should be the countenance of the Volk”. (Volk is always left untranslated, to sound more menacing.) In his early writings, Pevsner agreed. He saw in the German Bauhaus and Modern Movement the same opportunity which, in England, was adopted by socialism. It had resonances in “national socialism”, but that does not tar it with the brush of “Nazism” and all that now implies.
Pevsner was an ethnic Jew. He lost his university post in 1933, with Hitlerism still in its infancy, and moved to England. The Bauhaus was closed and Hitler’s chosen architect, Albert Speer, was a classicist. Pevsner’s belief in the social purpose of architecture remained unshaken. Into the 1960s he admired glass, steel, concrete and Brutalism. He praised the new St Pauls’s Precinct (now demolished), the South Bank, and the bleak renewals of Portsmouth and Plymouth. His enthusiasm for “comprehensive redevelopment” undoubtedly influenced the mass bulldozing of Britain’s provincial city centres. This was terrible, but not Fascist. Pevsner, the student of Englishness in art, seemed strangely insensitive to English townscape.
I am an ardent “Pevsnerian” — and must declare an interest as chairman of the trust revising his Buildings of England. But I see no problem in watching a man’s outlook evolving from the nightmare context of interwar Germany, through the misguided socialism of postwar England, to the more relaxed and reflective Pevsner of his later years. In his final book, Staffordshire, he conceded regrets and surprises, for instance the brevity of the reign of Brutalism. The account is overwhelmingly in his favour. Pevsner’s Domesday record was a giant intellectual achievement and has, for half a century, been the most potent force in protecting old buildings.
We can admire virtues in any complex person without having to abuse vices or descend to cheap comparisons. Many British socialists were attracted to Oswald Mosley, until repelled by his anti-Semitism. Many were attracted to Stalin and Mao, and regretted it. I might be shocked at the actions of the Sharon Government in Israel, yet be no less shocked at a British university so forgetting its commitment to freedom of thought as to boycott Israeli academics, especially when they most need support.
Nothing is simple. I find the paranoid unilateralism of present-day Washington alarming, yet am impressed and reassured by it being so fiercely questioned by so many ordinary Americans.
We should choose historical parallels with care. The ghost of Senator McCarthy is stalking both sides of the Atlantic. Any dictator who enters a Nato bomb-sight is now dubbed a Hitler: Somalia’s Aideed, Bosnia’s Karadzic, Serbia’s Milosevic, Iraq’s Saddam. The word Hitler soon comes to lose all meaning, and thus its true horror. The bombing of civilian targets was considered unthinkable for 50 years after the Blitz, perhaps because those responsible still knew what it was like. Now a British Government not only finds bombing acceptable but drops bombs itself. Its nervousness shows in the cry of “Hitler” and “Remember Munich”, to stifle objection with a cloak of historical morality. It is the cry of men who cannot stand too much reason, and prefer camouflage.
If we abuse words they lose their ability to argue. “One word in the wrong place,” said Voltaire, “ruins the most precious thought.” I dread to think what Tony Blair and George Bush would make of Voltaire. I imagine they would demand which side he was on, call him a French wimp and refuse him a visa. History is no guide to the future, they would say, and call for another tape of The Longest Day.
sjenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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