Review: Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East

Below is the review I left on Amazon.com 

Very impressive. There is far more learning here than you will be able to absorb in one reading.The introductory and concluding chapters are the best, describing Hitler's grand plans and the calculations that went into his decisions. These early and late chapters give a broad sweep to the war on the eastern front, describing its connections with Nazi racial theories and anti-semitism, the search for Lebensraum (living space), Hitler's geopolitical vision, his attempt to create an empire that could equal the United States in power and self-sufficiency (which came as a great surprise to me), and so on. For the average reader, with an amateur's interest in World War II, much of the discussion comes as a revelation
.Given the topics, the writing in these chapters tends to the abstract. While not obscure in the least and not overly dense, it does demand a certain level of concentration.

The very large middle section of the book, narrating the events of the war itself, is a different thing. The good part is the discussion of the goals and thinking of both sides as events unfold. Hitler's decisions, even those sometimes dismissed as bizarre or irrational, are shown to make sense, at least from his point of view. Following the battles themselves, however, is difficult. The tactics are given in considerable detail. There is much along these lines:

Leading off the attack on 25 October, the Third Panzer Corps forced its way across the river, punched a hole in Soviet defenses, and cut off enemy forces at Nalchik. The panzer divisions now wheeled to the southeast and over the next few days crossed numerous swiftly flowing rivers as they skirted the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. By the twenty-ninth, they had reached the Ardon River, at the head of the Ossetian Military Road. The Twenty-third Panzer Division seized Alagir, thus closing the road, on 1 November, while that evening spearheads of the Thirteenth Panzer were only ten miles from Ordzhonikidze on the Georgian Military Road.

Even with a map of Russia beside you, you probably cannot follow what is happening except in the most general sort of way, since the references are often to rather small rivers and towns that are not on the maps in most atlases. What this central section of the book really cries out for is a series of hundreds of video animations showing the movements of troops, the thrusts and retreats, pincer movements, encirclements and break-outs. Describing these movement in mere words is less than satisfying. This is not the book, either, that will give you a sense of what it was like to be on the ground. While you get quotations from the memoirs of generals discussing their strategies, there is very little from the memoirs of the fighting men. You do not get a mental picture of the battles. The Battle of Stalingrad comes and goes almost before you know it. However, in the middle of it all, the author's discussions are highly illuminating.

So long as you come to this book looking for what it has to offer, an intelligent discussion of Hitler's war on the Soviet Union, rather than a narrative, page-turning potboiler, you will be more than pleased with it.

Correction: I was reading an ebook version of the book and was essentially unable to consult the maps while I was reading. With a print edition it will not be quite so hard to follow the battles, so long as you keep your thumb in the page near the front of the book with the appropriate map.

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Review: Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Pantheon (March 4 2014)

ISBN-10: 0307378195

ISBN-13: 978-0307378194

Is there any value in philosophy for us today? Science answers our age-old questions about matter, time, and the origin of the universe. For guidance in living we turn to religious faith and newspaper columnists. Plato at the Googleplex is an attempt by philosophy professor Rebecca Goldstein to plead the case for philosophy using a novel approach, imagining Plato resurrected from ancient Athens, plunked down in our world, and participating in five dialogues on contemporary issues. The result is both entertaining and stimulating, and shows that many of the issues taken up by Plato three thousand years ago even today require philosophical solutions.

While touring the Google campus, Plato draws one of the techies into conversation. At first the philosopher is thrilled to learn of the vast amount of information gathered on the Google servers—virtually all the world’s knowledge in one place. How odd, he says, to find all knowledge so localized, but how wonderful that it resides “in the cloud,” just where he always said it must be! And surely, with their privileged access to all the world’s knowledge, the Google staff must be the modern equivalents of the philosopher-kings of his Republic. His excitement fades, however, when he asks whether the giant database includes knowledge of what makes life worth living. Yet the question itself opens a lively Socratic question-and-answer session about how one might determine what makes the best life. One suggestion is that perhaps each person knows what’s best for them. Or maybe not—people like Lindsay Lohan and Michael Jackson do not seem to know. Perhaps there’s no “knowledge” of what’s best, no truth involved at all, just personal preference; everyone makes up their own mind. But do we really believe that Ghandi merely preferred to live the way he did, and there’s no qualitative difference between his life and Rasputin’s? Finally the techie proposes a crowd-sourcing solution. Everyone’s opinion could be recorded and weights could be assigned to each opinion, with the final answer extracted by a Google-like algorithm, the way top results are produced for a search query. A few pointed questions from Plato makes it clear that any weighting system has to be biased with its own presuppositions about what makes the best life. Plato’s role in these dialogues is not to reveal ancient solutions that modern people have forgotten. In fact, what he argues for here is the entirely unconvincing idea of letting a coterie of high-minded philosophers decide the issue for everyone else. Like the original Socrates, Plato’s purpose is to expand the thinking, not bring it to a stop, to demand clarity, challenge easy answers, draw inferences, offer illuminating analogies. Politely but doggedly he works to tug the conversation into deeper waters. If philosophy is conceived of that way, as a tool kit for sharpening the reasoning process, it’s hard to deny its usefulness.

In a second dialogue we see that careful thinking about what makes the best life is no armchair exercise, as Plato joins a public debate at the 92^nd Street Y on the topic of child-rearing. On one side is a psychiatrist, for whom childhood is a crime scene with the young as traumatized victims of the narcissistic expectations of their parents; on the other a tiger mom, for whom childhood is a boot camp preparing the young to battle for the world’s prizes. The two enter a lengthy, heated exchange, with Plato commenting mildly from the sidelines, until finally he details how in his idea of the best society  the state will identify his specialist-philosphers in early childhood and train them for their high calling. The others denounce him, of course, as an antidemocratic elitist, a stooge for tyranny, etc. His theory gets no credit. Yet in the dialogue’s interplay of ideas we see that in the raising of our children we do take a position on the philosophical question of what makes the best life and that, by uncovering our assumptions and holding them up to the light, as philosophy tries to do, we can only improve our understanding.

In another dialogue, moments before he is to undergo a brain scan, Plato engages a neuroscientist in conversation about how persons are related to neuron behaviour. The scientist vigorously expounds the proposition that mental life is simply brain activity, no more. Plato responds with key questions: When you have described all the firing of neurons that underlie, for example, Socrates’s decision to drink the hemlock, have you really given a full explanation of why he did it? Is neuroscience just a repeat of  the old mechanistic view of life in which choices, intentions, and free will are nullified?

Despite its subtitle, only half the book consists of dialogues illustrating the relevance of philosophy. The result is a rather curious hybrid work. Preceding each chapter of dialogue is a chapter at least equal in length providing extensive historical background about how Plato developed his views. There are  detailed, scholarly commentaries on the complex relationship between Plato and Socrates, on Greek pre-history, the cultural effects of the Persian wars, the Athenian weltanschauung at various points in the city’s history, and much more. While highly interesting on its own, much of this material seems at odds with the main thesis about the usefulness of philosophy today. Learning more about the purpose of Socrates’s relentless buttonholing of his contemporaries and how his withering logic exposed the shallowness of their beliefs does seem to help establish the enduring value of philosophical analysis, but an etiology of Plato’s fanciful notions and discredited theories does not.

The dialogues of Plato at the Googleplex are entertaining and thought-provoking, the historical chapters are enlightening; both are well worth reading. As a whole, however, they make for book that is like a door slightly off its hinges.

Review: The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood

by Irving Finkel

Before 1872 everyone believed that the story of Noah and the Ark was unique to the Bible, a distinctive part of the story of the Jewish nation. That assumption crumbled one day when an assistant in the British Museum discovered a Babylonian version of the story from the city of Nineveh written on a clay tablet in wedge-shaped cuneiform, a full one thousand years older than the Bible version. It contained all the elements of the Genesis story: displeased by humans, the gods decide to drown everyone, acquiting only one man and his family from the deluge, enjoining him to build a mega-boat and fill it with plant seeds and a breeding pair of every species of animal. The museum assistant, overcome in his eureka moment, astonished his colleagues by running around the room and tearing off his clothes. During the next 113 years more small fragments of the Babylonian flood story were unearthed, and scholars peered at them, compared versions of the story, argued, and published their papers. In 1985 the world of ark studies was rocked again when a collector showed a cuneiform tablet to curator Irving Finkel at the British Museum. Not only did this tablet contain another thrilling version of the earliest Flood Story, but it also included detailed instructions for building an ark. Finkel dubbed it the Ark Tablet.

Rather than announcing his discovery modestly to the likes of Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie, Finkel wrote The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood for the general public as well as Assyriologists. It is written in such a pleasant, conversational style, always on the verge of humour or an outbreak boyish enthusiasm, that the sometimes arcane subject matter digests easily. The opening chapters on the rigors of learning cuneiform are so engaging (“Fellow students reading history or physics seemed to me frankly to be on a cushy ride”), and the pleasures of Babylonian scholarship are made so vivid that you wonder why you didn’t spend your life, too, squinting at clay tablets rather than doing other things.

Every possible implication is squeezed out of the Ark Tablet in The Ark Before Noah. All the cuneiform flood stories are scrutinized and compared, the subtlest contexts are unearthed, and words are held up to the light like diamonds. For each version of the story Finkel examines the shape and size of the ark, how it would have been built, what creatures were believed to have gone in to it, where it was thought to have landed. The boat in the earliest Sumerian story, for example, was shaped like a oversized reed boat from the marshes of southern Iraq, long and narrow, while in the later Ark Tablet the boat of Old Babylonian times was described as circular, a gigantic, basket-like coracle made of coiled rope smeared with bitumen for waterproofing. The ark in the Epic of Gilgamesh was cubic, it became oblong in the Bible and built of planks and nails in the Koran.

After proving that the Hebrew Bible story must have derived from its cuneiform predecessors, Finkel offers a fresh narrative of how the borrowing must have occurred. It happened, he says, during the Babylonian Exile, after Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem, capital of the kingdom of Judah, in 587 B.C. and carried off every important or skilled Judaean to Babylon. For about 70 years the deportees  lived in the new land not as slaves but as foreign workers, some of them assimilating. With the loss of Jerusalem and the temple, and with all the best people living within a much more powerful civilization, Judaean identity was in danger of disappearing. There was even the threat of rivalry in Babylonian religion, which was moving toward a kind of monotheism. One way to help save Judaean  identity would be to compile a book of sacred texts. Part of that project would include a national history, which could be traced back through existing Judaean and Israelite annals; and, indeed, passages in Kings and Chronicles list several such sources. But what if there was a desire to go back even further? Then it would only be natural, argues Finkel, for the compilers to consult Babylonian texts. The  Book of Daniel tells us that a number of the best and brightest of the Judaeans were taken into the king’s palace and trained in Babylonian language and literature. From the many surviving tablets left behind by Babylonian students we know that the Flood Story was a standard part of the cuneiform curriculum, so there was an easy path of transmission from Babylonian texts to the Hebrew Bible. Incidentally, the  cuneiform curriculum also included the story of an infant named Sargon whose mother set him adrift on the river in a basket from which he was rescued and adopted, as well as the idea that humans in the era before the great flood lived wonderfully long lives, like Bible figures such as Methuselah, Mahalaleel, et al.

The Flood Story was undoubtedly part of an oral tradition long before the invention of writing; however, once cuneiform was developed in Mesopotamia, three separate versions appeared, the oldest, from about 1600 BC, in the Sumerian language, the later two in Akkadian. In the Akkadian Atrahasis Epic junior gods went on strike over their workload, so humans were created as substitute labourers. Unfortunately, they were created without mortality, and their penchant for reproduction increased their numbers inconveniently. This got on the nerves of some senior gods, especially the prickly Enlil, who decided to wipe them out, saying, “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me. With their uproar I am deprived of sleep.” Later Genesis replaced Enlil’s aural sensitivity with moral outrage as God decided to destroy humans because they were wicked, not merely noisy. When the story was taken up by the Koran, another motivation was added, Allah being incensed by unbelief as much as by bad behaviour.

Because the story of Noah, the flood, the ark, and the animals is so important in Judaeo-Christian-Islamic cultures, what is exciting in the world of clay tablets can be exciting to the person in the street. Luckily, the Ark Tablet was discovered by a scholar inclined to reach out past museum walls, someone capable of writing clearly, accessibly and with panache.

Review: Shattered Sword

Shattered Sword
By Jonathan Parshall and
Anthony Tully
Potomac Books, Inc., Washington, D.C.
ISBN-10: 1574889230 ISBN-13: 978-1574889239


Few events in the Pacific War were more dramatic than the Battle of Midway. Within a few hours, the seemingly unstoppable wave of Japanese victories after Pearl Harbor was turned back once and for all, ending Japanese expansion in the Pacific and removing the threat of attack or invasion against Hawaii and the US west coast. It was certainly the most important naval battle of World War II, and perhaps deserves military historian John Keegan’s description of it as “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.”

The Midway story tells how the Americans fought a vastly superior naval force, yet not only won the battle but dealt a catastrophic blow to the enemy, sinking four of six Japanese aircraft carriers. The U.S. victory, as startling to the Americans as to the Japanese, was partly achieved by American ingenuity, which broke Japanese naval codes, so that the attack was anticipated, a good guess was made as to its approach, and American carriers were able to position themselves in ambush. Equally important was a remarkable series of incidents in which sheer good luck stayed so consistently on the American side as to appear miraculous. The American dive bombers that devastated three Japanese carriers in a single attack arrived overhead at the most critical moment, in a miraculous five-minute window, when the Japanese were supremely vulnerable, their decks packed with fully fueled aircraft readying for take-off, fuel hoses scattered everywhere, the below-decks areas strewn with bombs and torpedoes because of a hasty refitting of aircraft caused by a sudden change in plans. In another five minutes, Admiral Nagumo would have been able to launch his planes and fend off the American attackers. Furthermore, the Japanese were caught off guard because, of the six scout planes they had sent out on a search pattern, the very one that would have discovered the Americans on time had had mechanical difficulties and had been delayed in taking off. Who can be blamed for suspecting the hand of Providence in such fantastic coincidences?

Over the past seventy years this Midway story has achieved legendary status, has been repeated countless times, officially and unofficially. The U.S. Navy’s history of World War II records it, it was re-told in the memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, coordinator and leader of both the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor and the Midway operations (who, interestingly, became a Methodist bishop after the war, touring the U.S. as a speaker and settling there), and it has been at the heart of every book written on the battle. After the 1976 Hollywood blockbuster, Midway, it became a staple of popular culture.

It’s a shame that so much of the beloved story is not true. The authors of Shattered Sword re-tell the Midway story, but this time from the point of view of the Japanese aircraft carriers, and a new picture emerges of what really happened on June 4, 1942. Basing their account on a careful study of Japanese sources, operational records, logbooks, naval manuals, writings on military doctrine — many of them newly translated and never before used in Midway studies — they show that a number of supposedly key facts about the battle need to be revised, some of them drastically.

One part of the miracle of Midway involves the huge imbalance between the adversaries, creating the image of a brave and plucky American David defeating a Japanese Goliath. It is true that, in June 1942, the Japanese had the greatest navy in the world, and that the Japanese armada sent out to attack and occupy Midway vastly outnumbered the American fleet. But the Japanese ships were so widely dispersed that many of them were hundreds of miles from the battle and took no part in it. Counting only the ships and planes participating in the fight, the battle was fairly evenly matched, with four Japanese carriers and its 248 aircraft pitted against 353 American aircraft, some from three American carriers, others land-based bombers from Midway.

What about that scout plane? Did the gods delay it to give an advantage to the Americans? Not really. A careful analysis of times and flight plans reveals that, in fact, the scout plane that should have discovered the Americans was a different one, and it missed them, probably because it flew too high, above the clouds. It’s truer to say that luck was with the Japanese in this incident, because it was the famously delayed scout plane that stumbled on the American task force, and that, only after going off its assigned search route. Without its lucky mistake, the American carrier group would have gone undetected until later, when its aircraft were even closer to pouncing on their Japanese targets.

Was there just a five-minute window of opportunity for the dive bombers, after which Nagumo would have launched his fighters and successfully defended his carriers? A clear understanding of operational processes and procedures aboard Japanese carriers buries that notion. The five-minute window was, in fact, a forty-five minute window. Far from arriving just in the nick of time, the Americans had more than enough time to attack without being harried by swarms of Zeros.

The simultaneous attack on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, long viewed as a feint to draw American forces away from Midway, turns out to have been a genuine invasion attempt. And so on. The authors list eight significant misunderstandings that they have uncovered, and many more small corrections are made in the 613 pages of the book.

However, Shattered Sword is not focused on revising history. It is an important work of research, readable and compelling for the layman, detailed and well documented for the scholar. The careful depiction of life on a Japanese carrier, the extensive background and analysis, the maps, diagrams, and appendices, the naming of individual pilots, the granular description of events, sometimes minute-by-minute, make this book stand out from all the others on the Battle of Midway and make it a compelling read.

Review: Hypatia of Alexandria

Hypatia of Alexandria

by Maria Dzielska

A few women are known to have been scholars and philosophers in the ancient world, but none is even remotely as famous as the extraordinary Hypatia of Alexandria. Around the opening of the fifth century A.D., just before barbarians overwhelmed the western part of the Roman Empire, Alexandria was a leading centre of culture and learning, the third city after Rome and Constantinople, and Hypatia was a key figure in the civic and intellectual life of Alexandria. Her writings and lectures on Greek literature, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy were so brilliant, and her charisma was so powerful, that bright aristocratic young men came from long distances to listen to her. Some stayed for years; most hoped to be invited to the special meetings she held in her home where students often became disciples of “the most holy and revered philosopher.” Her renown was such that it became protocol for newly arrived imperial officials, or those merely passing through the area, to pay a courtesy call on her. Her advice was sought by officials at all levels of government. Her terrible death at the hands of religious rioters in 415, so violent and so entangled with the larger conflicts of her time, has kept her name alive through the centuries, even after all her writings were lost.

The story of Hypatia’s life and death has been told many times by major writers such as Gibbon and Voltaire, by minor novelists and poets, and recently in the 2007 film Agora starring Rachel Weisz (yes, Hypatia was not only gifted but also beautiful—“the spirit of Plato in the body of Aphrodite”). Most re-tellings aim to score points against the Church, to serve as an object lesson in the cause of feminism, or to bemoan the loss of a great scientist. Yet, despite the various uses to which her story has been put, the original sources are scarce. The layers of special pleading added onto the scanty facts  have created a need for a volume like Maria Dzielska’s Hypatia of Alexandria, whose aim is to separate fact from fiction. This is not another rendering of the Hypatia story; rather, it is an academic’s careful examination of the sources in order to clarify exactly what is known, what may be fairly inferred, and what is not known, about history’s most famous woman philospher.

To understand the profound effect Hypatia had on her disciples Dzielska examines the letters of Synesius, a Christian, later bishop of the Libyan city of Cyrene, who attended her meetings in his younger years. For Synesius, Hypatia is “a blessed lady who radiates knowledge and wisdom from divine Plato himself and his successor Plotinus.” His 159 surviving letters, addressed to Hypatia and fellow disciples after he returned to Cyrene, reveal much about the meetings Hypatia held with her closest followers. Hypatia was a philosopher solidly in the Neoplatonic tradition for whom the purpose of life is the cultivation of a virtuous soul and the rigorous exercise of reason. She taught philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. Her mathematics focused on the algebra of Diophantus, geometry from Euclid and Apollonius of Perge, and the writings of Pythagorus. Her astronomy was that of Ptolemy. In fact, it is likely that Ptolemy’s Almagest, his important work on mathematics and the motions of the heavenly bodies,  survives today only because of Hypatia’s work as editor and publisher.

Yet it is wrong to think of her as a scholar in a university lecture hall. All the intellectual work and nurturing of one’s soul was a means to an end, mere preparation for the ultimate goal, which was to achieve a contemplative, mystical union with the divine, the One, “the most ineffable of ineffable things.” Synesius’s letters speak of experiences deeper than mere intellectual excitement. “It was granted to you and me,” he writes to a friend, “to experience marvelous things, the bare recital of which had seemed to be incredible.” However, Hypatia had no interest in divination, magic, rituals, or sacrifices, even though accusations of witchcraft were later used to whip up the frenzy against her which led to her murder.

The source documents do not agree in every detail about her death in March of 415, but they all agree that it was hideous. In the most oft-cited version, a gang of Christian thugs, followers of Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, after accusing her of witchcraft, seized her, dragged her into a church, stripped her naked, tore the flesh off her bones with pottery shards, and burned the remains. No one was ever held to account for it. Cyril was later named a saint.

The significance of her death has been cast in many lights. It has been said that her death was a result of the clash of great historical forces, the final remnants of paganism submerged in the rising tide of Christianity, that her death was a Christ-like sacrifice on the altar of history enabling the ushering in of Christianity, that she was murdered out of misogyny, that her death put an end to Greek learning and marked the end of Classical antiquity, that the murder of “the most eminent woman scientist before Marie Curie” extinguished freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry, and natural reason in the West for a thousand years, that she was the innocent victim of religious fanaticism and the Church’s cruel and relentless quest for earthly dominance.

Dzielska argues that Hypatia was murdered for a simple reason, not because she was pagan or a woman, but because she was caught up in a power struggle between two men, Bishop Cyril and the imperial governor, Orestes, who opposed Cyril’s aggressive encroachments on civil authority. To break the influence Hypatia and her powerful friends had over Orestes, Cyril unleashed his strong-arm squad of parabolans (Christian brothers) on her. Defenders of Cyril say he did it inadvertently, but  Cyril had resorted to using his thugs before, first to defeat those he called heretics, then to expel all the Jews from Alexandria.

Hypatia of Alexandria is a fascinating read, not only for what it reveals about Hypatia and her times, but also as a case study in the methods scholars use to reconstruct our knowledge of the distant past.

Incidentally, when Hypatia was murdered, her age was probably a dignified fifty or sixty, not the ravishing  thirtyishness of Rachel Weisz in the otherwise quite authentic Agora.

Review: Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard

Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard

Laura Bates

Sourcebooks (March 26 2013)

ISBN-10: 1402273142

ISBN-13: 978-1402273148

The teacher sat on an overturned milk crate in an empty corridor. One by one the murderers shuffled to the seminar on Shakespeare, a guard on each side, shackled, handcuffed, on a leash, then locked in their cells. Kneeling on the concrete floor, they peered out through the handcuff ports, apertures the size of a large mail slot. Thus bizarrely did English professor Laura Bates of Indiana State University take Shakespeare to inmates at a maximum security prison in Indiana.

Shakespeare Saved My Life is no Oprah tale of a missionary from academia transforming the lives of depraved criminals through a love of high art. Rather than sentimentality, the story has dignity and gravitas  because of a central character of extraordinary abilities and motivation. With very little education Larry Newton began the Shakespeare program not quite knowing who Shakespeare was. Convicted of murder at age seventeen, sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole, categorized as extremely dangerous, locked up in “supermax” solitary confinement for over ten years, Newton immediately seized upon the  400-year-old texts with a frightening eagerness and a razor-sharp intelligence. At first he was all white-hot, if misdirected, intellectual excitement. Scrutinizing the witches’ scene in Macbeth, for example (Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the caldron boil and bake; / Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog), he strained to know whether Shakespeare could have intended a single creature comprised of all the individual animal parts and agonized over the culinary question of whether boiling and baking are possible simultaneously. Soon, however, he began to see pieces of his own life in the Shakespeare plays and was drawn into digging deeper. A microscopic reading of the prison soliloquy from Richard II turned up tiny phrases that to him signalled an understanding of solitary confinement so authentic it seemed preternatural, as if Shakespeare had himself lived what Newton had lived. And the mind of the murderer Macbeth he judged to be chillingly real, meeting the terrible touchstone of reality that he and his fellow murderers knew too well. Macbeth’s hallucination of the bloody dagger, he thought, was simply an externalization of his own experience as he had mentally rehearsed his crime, repeating it, obsessing over it, until the visualization grew more and more real, eclipsing everything else and drawing him almost hypnotically into the crime itself.

In a conventional classroom the deep issues of Shakespeare’s plays—ambition, honour, love, vengeance, violence, suicide—often appear as mere topics for discussion, themes for essays, intellectual toys. But for Newton they were living issues critical to the lives of convicts, fundamental ideas that set many of them on the path to prison. In Shakespeare he saw portrayals of the bravado of the streets, of neighbourhood turf wars, of fighting over women, and he asked the questions whose answers reach far beyond the plays. Why did Romeo attack and kill Tybalt? Would he have done it if not for his friends? Could Othello claim to be a victim because of Iago’s trickery, somehow less guilty of murdering his wife? Can the actions of other people ever relieve us from our own responsibility? What was honourable about Hamlet seeking vengeance for his father? What is honour, anyway?

Newton grappled with such questions so fearlessly and with such intense introspection that his own long-held views quickly came under scrutiny. “I was trying to figure out what motivated Macbeth,” he told Bates, “why his wife was able to make him do a deed that he said he didn’t want to do. As a consequence of that, I had to ask myself what was motivating me in my deeds.” And he discovered that Newton the  criminal was a mask. “I came face-to-face with the realization that I was fake, that I was motivated by this need to impress those around me, that none of my choices were truly my own.” Relentless questioning, sharpened by the Shakespeare texts, continued to erode his old personality, until he reached a truly astonishing conclusion. “I like my life,” he says.

I like being alive, I like my life, but what makes me the happiest is that I just really feel like I can go anywhere and do anything ... I have control of my life. I can be anybody I want to be. I don’t have to be some fake guy that my buddies wanted me to be ... I make decisions now ’cause I want to. Just the liberty in it, the freedom in it, that’s what makes me the happiest.

Larry Newton is a character you will not soon forget.

With his own demons exorcised, Newton went on to collaborate with Dr. Bates. He became the leader of the Shakespeare program and wrote workbooks for all thirty-eight of Shakespeare’s plays, tailored for inmates like himself but also used in some college classrooms. Hundreds of inmates enroled in the prison program. It was written up in academic journals and featured in countless media reports, including a documentary on Discovery Channel. Hollywood considered producing a feature film with Newton as the main character.

Then one day Newton was accused—falsely, he said—of illegally possessing a cellphone. He was removed from the program and transferred to another prison, where he was put into solitary confinement and subjected to constant, random searches that played havoc with his study routines. After a year of good behaviour, his solitary confinement ended, but for some unknown reason he was not allowed to return to the Shakespeare program. When the Indiana state legislature revoked funding for higher education in prison in 2010, he also lost his dream of getting a university education. Dr. Bates, however, plans to publish his writings as The Prisoner’s Guide to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Review: Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany

by Frederick Taylor

Bloomsbury Press

ISBN-10: 1608195031

ISBN-13: 978-1608195039

The sanitized story goes like this: After surrendering unconditionally in May of 1945, the German armies put down their arms, the country was occupied by the Allied forces, and the worst of the Nazi leaders were put on trial. Then Britain and the U.S. showed the Germans how to create a democratic government and, through the admirable Marshall Plan, the U.S. bankrolled an “economic miracle” for the defeated nation We victors really were jolly good-hearted. It’s a story that warm the cockles of one’s heart.

However, what really happened in Germany in 1944-46, as told in Frederick Taylor’s Exorcising Hitler, the picture that emerges is not quite so inspiring. We often forget the fury of the armies that fought their way into Germany, how enraged they were, at the years of war, but also at the stubbornness of the final resistance, with so much unnecessary blood spilled after D-Day. Then there were the revelations of the concentration camps. For the French, vengeance was the  goal after their brutal occupation by the Nazis. On the eastern front vengeance was, if possible, an even deeper driving force, all-consuming, a reflection of Hitler’s truly hideous “war of annihilation” against Russia. Spurred on by their commanders, the Soviet armies committed murder, rape and unspeakable atrocities on a vast scale along the entire trail from Stalingrad to Berlin and beyond, upon all Germans, both soldiers and civilians. Rape was hardly unknown among American and British soldiers. During the spring and summer of 1945, even after the surrender, on both eastern and western fronts, looting, robbery and rape were everyday occurrences.

The occupying powers did not come to liberate the German people or to put Germany on its feet; their clear and stated goal was punishment. All Germans, whatever their activities and attitudes under Hitler,  were going to suffer as others had suffered under them. An early American proposal known as the Morgenthau Plan recommended the total degradation of Germany, breaking the nation into pieces and reducing it to a permanent state of subsistence agriculture. By the time of the actual occupation that plan had been moderated, but its harsh spirit remained. Thousands of German industries were either shut down, destroyed, or dismantled and carted off to Russia and France as reparations. The French marched  740,000 POWs back into France for 2-3 years of forced servitude. The Soviets took hundreds of thousands of POWs back to Russia, most of whom never returned. The Americans, faced with the difficulty of caring for 5 million POWs and utterly fixed on the idea of not releasing a single war criminal, simply strung barbed wire around vast fields next to the Rhine, and left half a million prisoners to face the frosty nights, cold spring rains and disease without protection, some 50,000 of them dying. Because the Geneva Convention required that POWs be fed at the same level as one’s own troops, German POWs were given a newly invented classification, “disarmed enemy forces,” allowing rations to be kept miserably low. In the worst of the “Rhine cages” some prisoners deteriorated into skeletal figures like inmates of Nazi concentration camps. The British set up an interrogation centre at Bad Nenndorf that used Gestapo tactics, complete with thumb screws and shin screws. For civilians, hunger was used as a cudgel. One year after the end of the war the calorie allocation for Germans was less than half of what a person needs for a life of light activity. “Non-productive” adults, such as housewives and the unemployed, were issued a ration card that became known as “the death card.”

It was the Soviets who were quickest to establish democracy—Soviet-style democracy. German communist organizations provided them with ready-made political infrastructure, and as other parties were allowed to form, the Communist Party maintained dominance until finally all parties were merged into one. East Germany was born. Denazification was easy for the Soviets: since Nazism was regarded as an extreme form of capitalism, they simply killed the “class enemies,” such as industrialists and large landowners, or shipped them off to the gulag. As for lower-level Nazis, the Soviets were more tolerant than the British and Americans because, suggests Taylor, they were quite familiar with how little party membership could mean for people who joined just to advance their careers.

In the Western zones, denazification was an enormous problem, especially for the Americans, who took the hardest line. With a population in the tens of millions under their administration, they required every adult, under penalty of prison, to fill out a lengthy form about their activities during the Third Reich, with their answers subjected to cross-checks, investigations, interviews, and tribunals. It was a slow,  impossible task that slowly unraveled under the pressure of numbers, aggravated by inconsistency and incompetence. Denazification was eventually turned over to German courts, partly out of pragmatism, partly to reduce the resentment that might breed communism. But by then everyone had become so cynical about the many injustices, as well as the overall policies of collective guilt and collective punishment, that the German courts allowed the process to degenerate into corruption and farce. Another approach might have cultivated a mood of self-reflection among the Germans, but the opportunity was lost, and the Hitler generation entered a period of denial and “the sleep cure.” It took the next generation to ask probing questions about the past. Denazification was judged an enormous failure on all sides.

Did Germany need to be guided by the Western Allies in creating a functioning democracy? Probably not. Nazism was a spent force, and Germany reverted easily to the democratic system that had preceded the Third Reich. Was the Marshal Plan a major factor in driving Germany’s economic recovery? Scholars are no longer certain about that, either.

After 1945 the transition from war to peace was far more chaotic and ugly than is commonly believed. Mistakes were made, feelings ran high, few saints appeared on the stage, suffering was widespread. Exorcising Hitler shows only too clearly how, once the devils of war are set loose, they are not easily put away.