Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by Joel | 10 October 2009 · 11:00 am

Salonica’s Polyglot Boot-blacks

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 12-13:

IN THE 1930s, the spirit of the Sufi holy man Mousa Baba was occasionally seen wandering near his tomb in the upper town. Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropoles. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists and proved themselves too strong for Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.

But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and plague. Travellers—drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city’s antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by business, art or sheer love of adventure—penned their impressions of a magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climbing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century—though no earlier—there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands—maps. As for the archives, they are endless—Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Austrian, French, English, American—compiled conscientiously by generations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I begin with the city’s conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineate its daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multiconfessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world—as late as the First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages—to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in which by 1950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.

The old empires collapsed and nations fought their way into being, identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. Although in Salonica it was the Greeks who eventually got their state, and Bulgarians, Muslims and Jews who in different ways lost out, it is worth remembering that elsewhere Greeks too lost out—in Istanbul, for example, or Trabzon, Alexandria and Izmir, where thousands died during the expulsions of 1922. Cities, after all, are places of both eviction and sanctuary, and many of the Greek refugees who made a new home for themselves in Salonica had been forced from their old ones elsewhere.

Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of the globe—in Lviv, for instance, Wroslaw, Vilna and Tiflis, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Lahore. Each of these endured its own moments of trauma caused by the intense violence that has accompanied the emergence of nation-states. Was the function of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property after 1948, for example, handing out Arab properties to new Jewish owners, very different from that of the Greek Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property founded in Salonica five years earlier? Both systematized the violence of dispossession and sought to give it a more lasting bureaucratic form. Thanks to their activities, the remnants of former cities may also be traced through the trajectories of the refugees who left them. A retiree clipping her roses in a Sussex country garden an elderly merchant in an Istanbul suburb and an Auschwitz survivor in Indianapolis are among those who helped me by reviving their memories of a city that is long gone.

By 1950, when this book concludes, Salonica’s Muslims had been resettled in Turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the triumph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for the rapid and entirely unexpected pell-mell postwar expansion which saw its population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of densely packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stonemasons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street pedlars are entering Salonica’s bloodstream. Many of them quickly learn to speak fluent Greek, for the city’s position within the modem nation-state is unquestioned: the story of its passage from Ottoman to Greek hands has become ancient history.

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Filed under Balkans, economics, Greece, labor, language, migration, religion, Turkey

by Joel | 3 October 2009 · 11:25 am

Salonica: National vs. Personal Histories

From Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Vintage, 2006), pp. 10-11:

I found Joseph Nehama’s magisterial Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, and began to see what an extraordinary story it had been. The arrival of the Iberian Jews after their expulsion from Spain, Salonica’s emergence as a renowned centre of rabbinical learning, the disruption caused by the most famous False Messiah of the seventeenth century, Sabbetai Zevi, and the persistent faith of his followers, who followed him even after his conversion to Islam, formed part of a fascinating and little-known history unparalleled in Europe. Enjoying the favour of the sultans, the Jews, as the Ottoman traveller Eviiya Chelebi noted, called the city “our Salonica”—a place where, in addition to Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian, most of the inhabitants “know the Jewish tongue because day and night they are in contact with, and conduct business with Jews.”

Yet as I supplemented my knowledge of the Greek metropolis with books and articles on its Jewish past, and tried to reconcile what I knew of the home of Saint Dimitrios—”the Orthodox city”—with the Sefardic “Mother of Israel,” it seemed to me that these two histories—the Greek and the Jewish—did not so much complement one another as pass each other by. I had noticed how seldom standard Greek accounts of the city referred to the Jews. An official tome from 1962 which had been published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its capture from the Turks contained almost no mention of them at all; the subject had been regarded as taboo by the politicians masterminding the celebrations. This reticence reflected what the author Elias Petropoulos excoriated as “the ideology of the barbarian neo-Greek bourgeoisie,” for whom the city “has always been Greek.” But at the same time, most Jewish scholars were just as exclusive as their Greek counterparts: their imagined city was as empty of Christians as the other was of Jews.

As for the Muslims, who had ruled Salonica from 1430 to 1912, they were more or less absent from both. Centuries of European antipathy to the Ottomans had left their mark. Their presence on the wrong side of the Dardanelles had for so long been seen as an accident, misfortune or tragedy that in an act of belated historical wishful thinking they had been expunged from the record of European history. Turkish scholars and writers, and professional Ottomanists, had not done much to rectify things. It suited everyone, it seemed, to ignore the fact that there had once existed in this corner of Europe an Ottoman and an Islamic city atop the Greek and Jewish ones.

How striking then it is that memoirs often describe the place very differently from such scholarly or official accounts and depict a society of almost kaleidoscopic interaction. Leon Sciaky’s evocative Farewell to Salonica,the autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up under Abdul Hamid, begins with the sound of the muezzin’s cry at dusk. In Sciaky’s city, Albanian householders protected their Bulgarian grocer from the fury of the Ottoman gendarmerie, while well-to-do Muslim parents employed Christian wet-nurses for their children and Greek gardeners for their fruit trees. Outside the Yalman family home the well was used by “the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, and Albanians of the neighbourhood.” And in Nikos Kokantzis’s moving novella Gioconda, a Greek teenage boy falls in love with the Jewish girl next door in the midst of the Nazi occupation; at the moment of deportation, her parents trust his with their most precious belongings.

Have scholars, then, simply been blinkered by nationalism and the narrowed sympathies of ethnic politics? If they have the fault is not theirs alone. The basic problem—common to historians and their public alike—has been the attribution of sharply opposing, even contradictory, meanings to the same key events. Both have seen history as a zero-sum game, in which opportunities for some came through the sufferings of others, and one group’s loss was another’s gain: 1430—when the Byzantine city fell to Sultan Murad II—was a catastrophe for the Christians but a triumph for the Turks. Nearly five centuries later, the Greek-victory in 1912 reversed the equation. The Jews, having settled there at the invitation of the Ottoman sultans, identified their interests with those of the empire, something the Greeks found hard to forgive.

It follows that the real challenge is not merely to tell the story of this remarkable place as one of cultural and religious co-existence—in the early twenty-first century such long-forgotten stories are eagerly awaited and sought out—but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative. National histories generally have clearly defined heroes and villains, but what would a history look like where these roles were blurred and confused? Can one shape an account of this city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities—the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements and genocide—which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local historian attempted this: at a rime when Salonica’s ultimate fate was uncertain, the city struck him as a “museum of idioms, of disparate cultures and religions.” Since then what he called its “hybrid spirit” has been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought with them. I think it is worth trying again.

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Filed under Balkans, Greece, migration, nationalism, religion, scholarship, Turkey

by Joel | 26 September 2009 · 6:42 pm

Ukraine’s Sure Got Talent in Sand Animation

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Filed under art, Ukraine

by Joel | 18 September 2009 · 12:50 pm

Balkans & Papua New Guinea: Sprachbund issues

The following draft of a paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (FoCAL), in Suva, Fiji, in August 1984, under the title “The Balkans and Papua New Guinea: Language Contact Issues.” It briefly touches on some of the new (and disturbing) ideas about Sprachbund issues that I encountered during my Fulbright year in Romania in 1983–84. It was a frustrating year for linguistic research, but a wonderful year for language learning—and for travel, it being my first trip to Europe.

Introduction

To many who limit themselves to the study of European languages, “the Balkan languages represent a unique case of evolution from genealogical divergence toward typological convergence” (Saramandu 1979:177). It is likely, however, that any large language family has some members who have to some extent forsaken their relatives for their neighbors. One such group in the Austronesian (AN) language family comprises the New Guinea Oceanic languages. (I continue to use “New Guinea Oceanic” as a typological, not a genetic, label.)

The Balkan Sprachbund may receive more publicity than its counterpart in Papua New Guinea, but in neither area are the issues anywhere near resolved. I intend here to outline some of these issues and to compare the progress being made toward resolving them in each of the two areas of study. The Balkans will receive greater attention because I assume that most Austronesianists are less familiar with that area.

Composition

The core of the Balkan Sprachbund is composed of five languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Modern Greek, and Romanian. Compared to the hundreds of languages involved in New Guinea, the number seems quite manageable. Moreover, Bulgarian and Macedonian are sufficiently close that they can be considered together for most purposes. More peripherally involved in the Balkan Sprachbund are Serbocroatian and Turkish. Turkish is usually considered only as an outside donor language, but it would be interesting to compare Balkan or western Turkish with eastern dialects or with other Turkic languages to see to what extent it may also have acquired Balkan, or at least European features.

In order to determine what is specifically “Balkan” about the core languages, one can compare Bulgarian with the other Slavonic languages and with Old Bulgarian (that is, Old Church Slavonic) dating from the 9th to 11th centuries A.D. (Rosetti 1978:480). One can compare Romanian with the other Romance languages and with Latin. The earliest documents in Romanian itself date from the 16th century (Rosetti 1978:482). Records of Greek go back millennia, so it is perhaps the most tractable of the Balkan languages. Albanian, being an isolate with only a brief written history, is harder to deal with, but at least there are two dialects to compare. The southern (or Tosc) dialect shares more features with Bulgarian, Greek, and Romanian than does the northern (or Gheg) dialect. (Comrie 1981:198.)

The surviving languages of the Balkan Sprachbund, then, all belong to different branches of Indo-European. For most of these branches, there is some documentary or comparative basis for sorting out areal features from genetic features. (Comrie 1981:198.) Matters are considerably complicated, however, by the knowledge that the original Balkan substratum did not survive. The most common terms used to refer to this substratum are “Thracian”, “Dacian”, and “Illyrian”. No one is sure whether these are different names for the same language, different dialects of the same language, or three different languages, each with separate dialects. Assumptions vary from linguist to linguist. So does the importance assigned to the role of the substratum in accounting for the similarities shared by the present-day Balkan languages. I shall discuss the substratum issue in greater detail shortly.

Intertranslatability

Early studies of the Balkan languages taken as a unit perhaps tended to overstate the similarities among them. Sandfeld, in his classic synthesis on the subject (1930), says that, “in going from one of these languages to another … one is struck by the fact that the manner in which things are expressed remains essentially the same throughout the entire territory covered by these languages” (1930:6-7; Grace’s [1981:27] translation).

First, let me illustrate the kinds of explanations I had hoped to find, by briefly summarizing the loss of the infinitive.

In the Balkan languages, finite verbs are used where other European languages would use the infinitive. The loss of the infinitive in Greek can be explained on language-internal grounds. Loss of word-final [n] in Greek made the infinitive formally identical to the 3d person present indicative form of the verb. Distributional evidence suggests that this innovation spread north from Greece. Bulgarian lacks an infinitive entirely. Citation forms of verbs are usually 1st person present indicative. The infinitive exists in Albanian but is used more in the northern dialect than in the southern one. In Serbo-Croation, Serbians prefer to use subordinate finite verbs where Croatians use the infinitive. In Romanian, too, more northern dialects use the infinitive more than the southern ones. I believe there is general agreement on this question.

Unfortunately, not many other issues are as well resolved.

One can say almost the same thing about some areas of Papua New Guinea, but only where the languages involved are all from the same family. The convergence between AN and Papuan languages is on a much grosser level, at least in most cases.

More recent work on Balkan languages, especially that by scholars from the Balkan countries themselves, seems to pay more attention to the differences among the various languages. One reason may be that the Balkan scholars have a greater concern for questions of their own national identity than did the outsiders who originally popularized the concept of the Sprachbund. In fact, Dumitru Macrea, a Romanian scholar, has expressed the view that the whole concept of a Balkan linguistic union being somehow comparable to a language family had its origin in the desire of Germany and Austria to propagate the idea of a unitary Balkan area which those powers then planned to dominate politically, economically, and culturally (Macrea 1982:284).

Another reason more recent scholarship may emphasize the differences among the languages is that there is simply much more data available than there used to be. Finer differences have become more salient. The same thing is happening with regard to Papua New Guinea languages too, as more data becomes available. I suspect that detailed study of the Kupwar village languages would also turn up many, many cases in which those languages are not as perfectly intertranslatable as they are often assumed to be. Even if many texts are morpheme-for-morpheme translatable, I suspect comparable morphemes are never full synonyms.

This raises an important issue. Is absolute convergence necessary? Is it desirable? Is it even possible? What kinds of differences are most tolerable? If fluently bilingual speakers maintain one of their languages solely for emblematic purposes, that is, solely to mark themselves off from speakers of other languages, what portion of their language will serve that emblematic function? Will they be content to say, “You say tomayto and we say tomahto,”, or “You call it eggplant and we call it aubergine”? Or might they also focus on larger differences, like “You put object complements before the verb and we put them after,” or “You have all those heart idioms and we have all those liver ones”? Virtually any recognizable difference would seem sufficient to be emblematic.

Unifying factors

What is it that accounts for the unity that does exist among the Balkan languages? It is significant that no mention at all is made of the possibility of a common Balkan substratum in two recent general works in English that devote some attention to Balkan areal features. These two works are Comrie’s (1981) introduction to typology and universals and Bynon’s (1977) textbook in historical linguistics. Bynon mentions the Byzantine Empire and Greek Orthodox church as unifying factors, while Comrie emphasizes the mutual bilingualism that enabled innovations to spread across language boundaries. Schaller’s (1975) introduction to Balkan linguistics (in German) also tends to discount the role of the substratum and appeal more to the Greek and Latin adstrata as unifying factors. The over dependence on substratum by earlier linguists to explain language change seems to have made many western linguists shy of using the term.

Substratum is generally given a more prominent role, however, by those linguists for whom it is not just an academic issue but also a question of national ethnogenesis. Romanian linguists, for instance, often talk of the history of their language in geological terms. Romanian is said to consist of an autochthonous (pre-Roman Dacian) substratum, a core stratum from Latin, and a superstratum of Slavic. To some, the central problem in Balkan linguistics is the identification of pre-Roman, pre-Slavic, autochthonous elements in the Balkan languages (see Brancus 1978). In spite of much effort, not much progress has been made in this direction (Brancus 1978:374). The only records we have of the Dacian language are a handful of proper names and between 10 and 20 Dacian glosses in two Greek lists of medicinal plants (Academia R.S.R. 1969:314-316).

Al. Rosetti, the Romanian linguist who has concerned himself most with Balkan linguistics in the broader sense—that is, the study of the Sprachbund as a whole, not just the attempt to reconstruct the pre-Roman substratum—nevertheless uses the term “substrate influence”, rather loosely to designate any sort of interference between two languages (Rosetti 1978:205). This perhaps parallels the use of loaded terms like “mixed language” or “language mixture” to describe any sort of contamination between AN and Papuan languages in the New Guinea area.

Gheorghe Ivanescu, one of the principal Romanian Indo-Europeanists, holds a fascinatingly particular view that requires a substrate motivation for each and every sound change. He attacks the “neolinguist” view that phonetic changes are imitative and therefore transferable across language boundaries (1980:735). He asserts instead that a phonetic change is realized only by a change in the “base of articulation”, that is, by a change in the characteristic shape of the oral cavity at rest within a given population (1980:8). He attacks the structuralists for failing to recognize the innateness of certain articulatory tendencies, and suggests that phonetic similarities between some Caucasian languages and Romanian (such as the presence of phonemic schwa) “are to be explained by the anthropological relationship between the peoples of the Caucasus and those of the Carpathians” (1980:733).

An interesting corollary of Ivanescu’s view is that languages do not change at a constant rate. Instead, language change depends on external changes in the speaker population. The “base of articulation”, for instance, changes over time “through changes in the quantitative relationships between the component human types [of a population], as well as through mixtures with other populations, maybe even through biological mutations between one generation and the next” (1980:9).

However, according to Ivanescu (1980:11), the “articulatory basis” of a language can be suppressed. “It does not manifest itself in those eras in which there exists an intense traffic of goods and people” (1980:11). It “cannot manifest itself either in the capitalist era or in the socialist era, except in popular speech … [It] only shows itself in eras in which there is a natural economy, thus in the primitive-commune and feudal eras” (1980:11). For instance, “the adaptation of Latin to the articulatory and psychological bases of the romanized populations, thus the birth of the Romance languages, was not possible except with the change from a trade economy during the slavery era to a natural economy during the medieval era” (1980; 11). (This “natural” economy was organized on a feudal basis in the West and on the basis of village collectives in the East [1980:11].)

A “natural” economy, however, does not allow languages to attain their “natural” condition. In a “natural” economy, divergent local bases of articulation are free to influence phonology, while divergent local temperaments are free to influence morphosyntax (1980:13). These influences are “completely avoided only in eras of intense circulation” of people and goods, thus in eras of higher technological development when unitary literary languages are born (1980:13). “[O]nly in such eras can languages completely attain their natural condition: that of relative stability” (1980: 13).

I’ve lingered over Ivanescu’s views somewhat more than might be necessary for two reasons. In the first place, we often tend to take our shared assumptions for granted. It is healthy sometimes to bring some of them into sharp relief by considering radically different viewpoints. Second, the divergence of assumptions among those of us working on New Guinea language history is relatively narrow compared to that encountered among those working on Balkan language history. Let me give a few more illustrations:

I have already mentioned Macrea’s opinion that Germanic imperialism is responsible for propagating the Sprachbund idea. Macrea (1982:285) and Ivanescu (1980:48 ff.) see similar forces at work in an early hypothesis that attempted to explain the particularly close similarities between Romanian and Albanian. The hypothesis was that the Romanian language and people originally took shape south of the Danube close to where the Albanians are now. A corollary assumption is that when the armies of the Roman Empire retreated south of the Danube in A.D. 275, the whole Romanized population came with them. One can see why this hypothesis would weaken the historical argument for Romanian territorial claims. Although this hypothesis is still kept alive by some Hungarian irredentists (see Du Nay 1977), it is no longer considered seriously by any present-day Romanian linguists. Instead, Romanian linguists are inclined to attribute the similarities between Romanian and Albanian to a common Thraco-Dacian substrate, on the theory that the Romanians continue that portion of the substrate population that adopted Latin as its mother-tongue, while the Albanians continue that portion that borrowed a lot from Latin but did not switch over to Latin (Ivanescu 1980:57).

Romanian linguists, then, are far less reticent than their Western counterparts about appealing to a common substratum as a unifying factor in the Balkan Sprachbund. I believe that part of the appeal to substratum as an explanatory factor is motivated by the desire to establish prior territorial claim to present Romanian-speaking areas. So far, historical linguistics in the New Guinea area has been relatively free from involvement in territorial claims. I hope that situation continues.

Other unifying factors mentioned in the Romanian literature are:

(1) similar conditions of life among the Balkan peoples, particularly the relative mobility their livestock-centered economy afforded them;
(2) exposure to Byzantine civilization, especially the Eastern Church;
(3) subjugation to the Ottoman Empire, a condition which actually reinforced the church as a unifying factor;
(4) widespread bilingualism (Saramandu 1979).

Saramandu (1979), a younger Romanian Balkanologist, distinguishes what he calls “passive” and “active” bilingualism. The distinction is not unfamiliar, but I would use the terms “restricted” and “unrestricted” to describe the two types. By “passive” bilingualism, Saramandu means bilingualism restricted to certain social occasions (religious services, for instance) or certain social strata (priests, administrators, itinerant merchants or craftsmen). The mass of the population would presumably recognize but not use another tongue. By “active” bilingualism, Saramandu means the bilingualism of a person who masters and uses two or more languages in more or less equal measure.

I’m not sure that, for a given population, the end result of either of these types of bilingualism would be very different, except that the second permits the possibility of complete language shift. On an a priori basis, one might suppose that the foreign languages in which a population is passively bilingual might contribute more loanwords or loan translations, and have less effect on phonology, morphology, or syntax; while the foreign languages controlled actively by the mass of a population would influence the phonology and phraseology as much as the lexicon. But French, for instance, seems to have penetrated into every corner of English (except perhaps phonology) even though the great mass of Anglo-Saxons after 1066 were certainly no more than passively bilingual. If sufficiently influential, active bilinguals can spread foreignisms among their own passively bilingual kith and kin at least as efficiently as foreigners can.

Here ends the draft of the paper I presented but never submitted for the conference proceedings. The only record I preserved was a hand-annotated printout from the Wang word processor at the accounting firm where I was working (the Honolulu office of Deloitte). Unfortunately, the bibliography seems to have gone missing. I scanned, OCRed, and then cleaned up those pages to get the text above.

My wife and I began that fascinating year teaching summer extension courses in Yap, Micronesia, during a severe drought that had us bathing out of buckets in our air-conditioned hotel room. Little did we realize at the time what types of shortages we would face during our long, cold, dark winter in Romania. We both made the trip to Fiji, where we stayed in a village near the conference hotel, along with several other participants from far corners of the globe. For the two of us, especially after Romania, that Pacific Island village made us feel we were back home again.

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Filed under Balkans, language, nationalism, Papua New Guinea, scholarship

by Joel | 16 June 2009 · 6:29 am

Civil Wars on the Eastern Front, 1940s

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 455-457:

Collaborators could be found not only in countries that allied themselves with Germany – Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria – but also in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union, countries the Germans invaded and occupied. Some were undoubtedly motivated by a hatred of the Jews as violent as that felt by the Nazi leadership. Others were actuated by envy or base greed, seizing the opportunity afforded by German rule to steal their neighbours’ property. Self-preservation also played its part. There were even Jewish collaborators, like the uniformed men of the Office to Combat Usury and Profiteering who policed the Warsaw ghetto, or the leaders of the various Jews’ Councils who helped organize the liquidation of the ghettos, or the concentration camp prisoners who accepted a measure of delegated authority in the (usually vain) hope of saving themselves.

The experience of Jedwabne typifies the way German rule also fomented civil war. It was as if even the approach of German troops encouraged conflict to erupt in multi-ethnic communities. Poles were not the only killers, Jews not the only victims. Germans themselves could fall victim to this kind of violence. Between four and five thousand ethnic Germans were murdered in Poland in September 1939 as Poles took revenge for their country’s invasion. They then retaliated by forming ‘self-protection’ groups, which were ultimately subordinated to SS leadership. By the time that had happened, however, these groups had already massacred more than four thousand Poles. As a philologist, Victor Klemperer was struck by the way the Nazis delighted in euphemistic neologisms like Volkstumskampf (ethnic conflict) and Flurbereinigung (fundamental cleansing). This daily subversion of the German language, he believed, was far more effective than the more overt kinds of propaganda. Sanitized language also made the cycle of ethnic violence easier to live with.

The Ukraine was perhaps the most blood-soaked place of all. In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), egged on by the Germans, massacred between 60,000 and 80,000 Poles. Whole villages were wiped out, men beaten to death, women raped and mutilated, babies bayoneted….

Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish teenager who escaped from a German labour camp and joined a Polish ‘Peasant Battalion’, was just about to rape a girl when he realized he knew her family and remembered her as a child. As another Pole recalled, ‘Stories abounded of Polish mothers being held by the Ukrainian Nationalists and forced to watch as their families were dismembered piece by piece; of pregnant women being eviscerated; of vivisected pregnant women having cats sewn into their bleeding abdomens; of Ukrainian husbands murdering their own Polish wives; of Ukrainian wives murdering their own Polish husbands; of Ukrainian fathers murdering their own sons in order to prevent them from murdering their own Polish mothers; of sons of Polish-Ukrainian heritage being sawn in half because, the Nationalists said, they were half Polish; of children being strung up on household fences; of helpless infants being dashed against buildings or hurled into burning houses.’ Here was ethnic conflict not merely between neighbours, but within families. The internecine war in the Ukraine only grew more ferocious as the war progressed, with some Ukrainians fighting for the Axis, some for the Allies and others for an independent Ukraine.

In the Balkans, too, there were multiple civil wars along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. Yugoslavia had fallen apart in the wake of the German invasion of April 1941. Seizing the moment, the Croatian leader Ante Pavelic had pledged to side with Hitler. In the ensuing chaos, his Ustašas waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against their Serbian neighbours in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of them. The populations of entire villages were packed into their churches and burned to death, or were transported to be murdered at camps like Jasenovac.

Serbian Četniks and Partisans repaid these crimes in kind. Of the million or so people who died in Yugoslavia during the war, most were killed by other Yugoslavs. This included nearly all of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews. In Greece the German occupation was the cue for bitter conflict. There, as in Yugoslavia, a three-cornered war raged – between the foreign invaders and nationalists, but also between nationalists and indigenous Communists. When Bulgaria annexed southern Dobruja from Romania, tens of thousands of people were expelled from their homes on either side of the new border.

Most empires purport to bring peace and order. They may divide in order to rule, but they generally rule in pursuit of stability. The Nazi empire divided the peoples of Europe as it ruled them – though, ironically, the divisions that opened up in Central and Eastern Europe generally had as much to do with religion as with race (most obviously in the conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians or between Croats and Serbs). But the ‘skilful utilization of inter-ethnic rivalry’ the Germans consciously practised did not lead (in the words of one German officer) to the ‘total political and economic pacification’ of occupied territory. On the contrary, in many places their rule soon degenerated into little more than the sponsorship of local feuds; the institutionalization of civil war as a mode of governance.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, nationalism, religion, war

by Joel | 12 June 2009 · 8:46 pm

Kim Jong Un: Apollo of the Amnok, Titan of the Tumen, …

Whenever I wonder what Romania might be like now if Nicolae Ceauşescu had somehow managed to survive long enough to pass his kingdom on to his son, Nicu (alas, poor Nicu!), I just turn my gaze to the royal succession in the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea, which fits Tony Judt‘s characterization of Ceauşescu’s Romania only too well.

Romanian Communism in its last years sat uneasily athwart the intersection of brutality and parody. Portraits of the Party leader and his wife were everywhere; his praise was sung in dithyrambic terms that might have embarrassed even Stalin himself (though not perhaps North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, with whom the Romanian leader was sometimes compared). A short list of the epithets officially-approved by Ceauşescu for use in accounts of his achievements would include: The Architect; The Creed-shaper; The Wise Helmsman; The Tallest Mast; The Nimbus of Victory; The Visionary; The Titan; The Son of the Sun; A Danube of Thought; and The Genius of the Carpathians.

But now it looks as if the heralds of the Kim dynasty are preparing for another royal succession by echoing the epithets of the Genius of the Carpathians in describing a Brilliant Comrade, the Grandson of the Sun, the Dauphin of Dokdo, the Titan of the Tumen (or Dionysus of the Duman), the Apollo of the Amnok, the Priapus of Paektusan, the East Sea of Ecstasy, the Yorik of the Yalu, the Need-shaper, the Wisen Heimer, the Un, etc.

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by Joel | 12 June 2009 · 5:17 pm

Blitzkrieg: British Theory, German Practice

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 386-387:

Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart’s view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more ‘indirect approach’, he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike. Liddell Hart defined the secret as lying

partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly in the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time, but above all in the ‘follow-through’ – the way that a break-through is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independently.

The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany, With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,* senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that ‘the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars’, dismissing motorized weapons as mere ‘accessories to the man and horse’. Haig’s brother concurred: the cavalry would ‘never be scrapped to make room for the tanks’. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart’s work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of ‘a new type of warfare on the largest scale’ that he learned the importance of ‘the concentration of armour’. Moreover,

it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and [who] also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas, I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army … I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

Guderian – who was happy to describe himself as Liddell Hart’s disciple and pupil and even translated his works into German – had learned his lessons well. In September 1939 his panzers were unstoppable. The Poles did not, as legend has it, attempt cavalry charges against them, though mounted troops were deployed against German infantry, but they lacked adequate motor transport and their tanks were fewer and technically inferior to the Germans’. Moreover, like the Czechs before them, the Poles found Anglo-French guarantees to be militarily worthless. At the Battle of Bzura they mounted a desperate counteroffensive to hold up the German assault on Warsaw, but by September 16 their resistance was crumbling. By the 17th the Germans had reached the fortress at Bresc (Brest) on the River Bug. On September 28 Warsaw itself fell. Eight days later the last Polish troops laid down their arms. The entire campaign had lasted barely five weeks.

The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite was true. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign.

* Fuller had been the mastermind behind the British tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917. His frustration with the British Establishment led him to support Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

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by Joel | 30 May 2009 · 10:01 am

Poland’s Double Decapitation, 1939

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 417-419:

Central Europe had a mirror-image quality after September 1939. For it had not only been Hitler who had ordered his troops to invade Poland. Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in Moscow that August, Josef Stalin had done the same, on September 17. To conservatives like Duff Cooper or Evelyn Waugh, it seemed a moment of revelation, laying bare the essential identity of the two totalitarian systems, National Socialism and ‘socialism in one country’. The signatories themselves appreciated the irony of their partnership. When he flew to Moscow to sign the pact, Ribbentrop had joked that Stalin would ‘yet join the Anti-Comintern Pact’, Hitler and Mussolini’s anti-Communist alliance. Nevertheless, the partition of Poland did not produce exactly identical totalitarian twins. The Soviet zone of occupation was in many respects a mirror image of the German zone but, as with a true mirror image, right and left were transposed.

On September 15, several days after the Germans had taken the town, the 29th Light Tank Brigade of the Red Army rolled into Brest. They had seen little action since crossing the frontier, for the Poles had concentrated their efforts on resisting the invasion from the West. Indeed, most of the fighting was over by the time the Soviets arrived on the scene. The demarcation line between the two occupation zones was, under the terms of the Boundary and Friendship Treaty signed ten days later, to pass just to the west of the fortress. After an amicable joint parade, the Germans therefore withdrew back across the River Bug and the Russians took over. On the Soviet side of the line, thirteen million Poles – including 250,000 prisoners of war – were about to discover for themselves the distinctive charms of life in the workers’ paradise.

The Germans and Soviets had pledged in their latest treaty ‘to assure to the peoples living … in the former Polish state … a peaceful life in keeping with their national character’. Actions on the German side of the new border had already given the lie to those fine words. The Soviet approach was slightly different. At first, attempts were made to woo a sceptical local populace, many of whom remembered all too clearly the last Soviet invasion of 1920, when the Red Army had advanced as far as the Vistula. Soviet soldiers received as much as three months’ salary in advance, with orders to spend it liberally in Polish villages. This honeymoon did not last long, however. Soviet officials lost no time in throwing Poles out of choice apartments in Brest and elsewhere, commandeering them without compensation. Meanwhile, Soviet promises of plentiful jobs in the Donbas region proved to be illusory. Worst of all, Poles soon came to know the Stalinist system of organized terror. ‘There are three categories of people in the Soviet Union,’ people were told: ‘Those who have been in jail, those who are in jail, and those who will be in jail.’ Soon Poles began to joke bleakly that the initials NKVD stood for Nie wiadomo Kiedy Wroce do Domu (‘Impossible to tell when I will return home’). Incredibly, a substantial number of Polish Jews who had fled East at the outbreak of war sought to be repatriated to the German zone of occupation, not realizing that it was only Volksdeutsche who were wanted. This speaks volumes for their experience of nine months of Russian rule.

From Stalin’s point of view, the Nazi vision of a Germanized, western Poland, denuded of its social elites, seemed not menacing but completely familiar. Stalin had, after all, been waging war against the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union for far longer and on a far larger scale than anything thus far attempted by Hitler. And he regarded few minorities with more suspicion than the Poles. Even before the outbreak of war, 10,000 ethnic Polish families living in the western border region of the Soviet Union had been deported. Now the entire Polish population of the Soviet-occupied zone was at Stalin’s mercy. Beginning on the night of February 10, 1940, the NKVD unleashed a campaign of terror against suspected ‘anti-Soviet’ elements. The targets identified in a set of instructions subsequently issued in November of the same year were ‘those frequently travelling abroad, involved in overseas correspondence or coming into contact with representatives of foreign states; Esperantists; philatelists; those working with the Red Cross; refugees; smugglers; those expelled from the Communist Party; priests and active members of religious congregations; the nobility, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel [owners] and restaurant owners’. Like Hitler, in other words, Stalin wished to decapitate Polish society.

Esperantists and philatelists are such a menace to society!

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by Joel | 13 May 2009 · 6:13 am

Ferguson on the Origins of World War II

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 312-314:

For obvious reasons, we tend to think of the years from 1933 to 1939 in terms of the origins of the Second World War. The question we customarily ask is whether or not the Western powers could have done more to avert the war – whether or not the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Japan was a disastrous blunder. Yet this may be to reverse the order of events. Appeasement did not lead to war. It was war that led to appeasement. For the war did not begin, as we tend to think, in Poland in 1939. It began in Asia in 1937, if not in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. It began in Africa in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It began in Western Europe in 1936, when Germany and Italy began helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. It began in Eastern Europe in April 1939, with the Italian invasion of Albania. Contrary to the myth propagated by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that he and his confederates were its only begetter, Hitler was a latecomer to the war. He achieved his foreign policy objectives prior to September 1939 without firing a shot. Nor was it his intention to start a world war at that date. The war that broke out then between Germany, France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler, as A. J. P. Taylor contended forty-five years ago in The Origins of the Second World War.

Yet Taylor’s argument was at best only half-right. He was right about the Western powers: the pusillanimity of the French statesmen, who were defeated in their hearts before a shot had been fired; the hypocrisy of the Americans, with their highfaluting rhetoric and low commercial motives; above all, the muddle-headedness of the British. The British said they wanted to uphold the authority of the League of Nations and the rights of small and weak nations; but when push came to shove in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia, imperial self-interest trumped collective security. They fretted about arms limitation, as though an equality of military capability would suffice to avoid war; but while a military balance might secure the British Isles, it offered no effective security for either Britain’s continental allies or her Asian possessions. With withering irony, Taylor called the Munich agreement a ‘triumph for British policy [and] … for all that was best and most enlightened in British life’. In reality, war with Germany was averted at the price of an unfulfillable guarantee to the rump Czechoslovakia. If handing the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 had been the right decision, why then did the British not hand him Danzig, to which he had in any case a stronger claim, in 1939? The answer was that by then they had given another militarily worthless guarantee, to the Poles. Having done so, they failed to grasp what Churchill saw at once: that without a ‘grand alliance’ with the Soviet Union, Britain and France might find themselves facing Germany alone. As an indictment of British diplomacy, Taylor’s has stood up remarkably well to subsequent scholarship – though it must be said that he offers few clues as to why Britain’s statesmen were so incompetent.

Where Taylor erred profoundly was when he sought to liken Hitler’s foreign policy to ‘that of his predecessors, of the professional diplomats at the foreign ministry, and indeed of virtually all Germans’, and when he argued that the Second World War was ‘a repeat performance of the First’. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. Bismarck had striven mightily to prevent the creation of a Greater Germany encompassing Austria. Yet this was one of Hitler’s stated objectives, albeit one that he had inherited from the Weimar Republic. Bismarck’s principal nightmare had been one of coalitions between the other great powers directed against Germany. Hitler quite deliberately created such an encircling coalition when he invaded the Soviet Union before Britain had been defeated. Not even the Kaiser had been so rash; indeed, he had hoped he could avoid war with Britain. Bismarck had used colonial policy as a tool to maintain the balance of power in Europe; the Kaiser had craved colonies. Hitler was uninterested in overseas acquisitions even as bargaining counters. Throughout the 1920s Germany was consistently hostile to Poland and friendly to the Soviet Union. Hitler reversed these positions within little more than a year of coming to power. It is true, as Taylor contended, that Hitler improvised his way through the diplomatic crises of the mid-1930s with a combination of intuition and luck. He admitted that he was a gambler with a low aversion to risk (‘All my life I have played va banque’). But what was he gambling to win? This is not a difficult question to answer, because he answered it repeatedly. He was not content, like Stresemann or Brüning, merely to dismantle the Versailles Treaty – a task that the Depression had half-done for him even before he became Chancellor. Nor was his ambition to restore Germany to her position in 1914. It is not even correct, as the German historian Fritz Fischer suggested, that Hitler’s aims were similar to those of Germany’s leaders during the First World War, namely to carve out an East European sphere of influence at the expense of Russia.

Hitler’s goal was different. Simply stated, it was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by Joel | 23 April 2009 · 8:39 pm

Ferguson on the Appeal of Fascism vs. Nazism

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 230-231, 239-240:

Considering the emphasis the new dictatorships laid on their supposedly distinctive nationalistic traditions, they all looked remarkably alike: the coloured shirts [German Brownshirts, Italian Blackshirts, Irish Blueshirts, Romanian Greenshirts], the shiny boots, the martial music, the strutting leaders, the gangster violence. At first sight, then, there was little to distinguish the German version of dictatorship from all the rest – except perhaps that Hitler was marginally more absurd than his counterparts. As late as 1939, Adolf Hitler could still be portrayed by Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator as an essentially comic figure, bawling incomprehensible speeches, striking preposterous poses and frolicking with a large inflatable globe. Yet there were in reality profound differences between National Socialism and fascism. Nearly all the dictatorships of the inter-war period were at root conservative, if not downright reactionary. The social foundations of their power were what remained of the pre-industrial ancien régime: the monarchy, the aristocracy, the officer corps and the Church, supported to varying degrees by industrialists fearful of socialism and by frivolous intellectuals who were bored of democracy’s messy compromises.* The main function the dictators performed was to crush the Left: to break their strikes, prohibit their parties, deny voice to their voters, arrest and, if it was deemed necessary, kill their leaders. One of the few measures they took that went beyond simple social restoration was to introduce new ‘corporate’ institutions supposed to regiment economic life and protect loyal supporters from the vagaries of the market. In 1924 the French historian Elie Halevy nicely characterized fascist Italy as ‘the land of tyranny … a regime extremely agreeable for travellers, where trains arrive and leave on time, where there is no strike in ports or public transport’. ‘The bourgeois’, he added, ‘are beaming.’ It was, as Renzo De Felice said in his vast and apologetic biography of the Duce, ‘the old regime in a black shirt’….

Contrary to the old claims that it was the party of the countryside, or of the north, or of the middle class, the NSDAP attracted votes right across Germany and right across the social spectrum…. It is true that places with relatively high Nazi votes were more likely to be in central northern and eastern parts, and those with relatively low Nazi votes were more likely to be in the south and west. But the more important point is that the Nazis were able to achieve some electoral success in nearly any kind of local political milieu, covering the German electoral spectrum in a way not seen before or since. The Nazi vote did not vary proportionately with the unemployment rate or the share of workers in the population. As many as two-fifths of the Nazi voters in some districts were working class, to the consternation of the Communist leadership. In response, some local Communists openly made common cause with the Nazis. ‘Oh yes, we admit that we’re in league with the National Socialists,’ said one Communist leader in Saxony. ‘Bolshevism and Fascism share a common goal: the destruction of capitalism and of the Social Democratic Party. To achieve this aim we are justified in using every means.’ It was a mark of Goebbels’ skill in making the party seem all things to all men that, simultaneously, dyed-in-the-wool Prussian Conservatives could regard the Nazis as potential partners in an anti-Marxist coalition. Thus were political rivals lured into what proved to be fatal forms of cooperation. The only significant constraint on the growth of the Nazi vote was the comparatively greater resilience of the Catholic Centre party compared with parties hitherto supported by German Protestants.

Other fascist movements, as we have seen, depended heavily on elite sponsorship to gain power. The Nazis did not need to. For all the attention that has been paid to them, the machinations of the coterie around Hindenburg were not the decisive factor, as those of the Italian elites had been in 1922. If anything, they delayed Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, an office that was rightfully his after the July 1932 election. It was not the traditional elite of landed property that was drawn to Hitler; the real Junker types found him horribly coarse. (When Hitler shook hands with Hindenburg, one conservative was reminded ‘of a headwaiter closing his hand around the tip’.) Nor was it the business elite, who not unreasonably feared that National Socialism would prove a Trojan horse for socialism proper; nor the military elite, who had every reason to dread subordination to an opinionated Austrian corporal. The key to the strength and dynamism of the Third Reich was Hitler’s appeal to the much more numerous intellectual elite; the men with university degrees who are so vital to the smooth running of a modern state and civil society.

For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader.

(*A list of all the treasonous clerics who flirted or did more than flirt with fascism would be a book in its own right. If only to give an illustration of how widespread the phenomenon was, dishonourable mention may be made of the writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who established his own tinpot tyranny in post-war Fiume; the poet T. S. Eliot, who wrote that ‘totalitarianism can retain the terms “freedom” and “democracy” and give them its own meaning’; the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who, as Rector of Freiburg University, lent his enthusiastic support to the Nazi regime; the political theorist Carl Schmitt, who devised pseudo-legal justifications for the illegalities of the Third Reich; the novelist Ignazio Silone, who shopped former Communist comrades to the fascists; and the poet W. B. Yeats, who wrote songs for the Irish Blueshirts. Thomas Mann, who had made his fair share of mistakes during the First World War and only with difficulty broke publicly with the Nazi regime, was not wrong when he spoke of ‘the thoroughly guilty stratum of intellectuals’.)