The Books I Read In May

This month travelling (by car, train is too expensive) and reading the Goldhagen book (634 pages) meant I only finished two books.

Fiction

'Pompeii' by Robert Harris

Harris is adept at writing historical novels, e.g. ''Imperium' (2006) and Munich' (2017) in which we know the actual historical outcome (though some reviewers believe he writes just counter-factual outcomes) but he manages to maintain the tension all the same. As he shows in 'Imperium' https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2020/06/books-i-read-in-june.html and 'Lustrum' (2009) https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-books-i-read-in-july.html, Harris has a love of and sound knowledge of Roman history. I had expected that this book, published in 2003, would be pretty much like a disaster movie. I was naturally reminded of 'Dante's Peak' (1997) and 'Volcano' (1997), though very sensibly, as in those movies, Harris makes his protagonist a technician.

In this case, it is aquarius Marcus Attilius Primus, responsible for the aqueduct which provided nine towns, including Pompeii, around the Bay of Naples. The book covers a matter of days in which Attilius uncovers problems in the local water supply that eventually signal the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but also how greed and local corruption in the 'good time' town of Pompeii has led to problems already. Harris's approach really shows you the wonders of water civil engineering in 1st Century Roman lands without providing you with a lecture on it. There are excerpts from various volcanology  books at the start of each chapter, but he deftly communicates the scientific and indeed social and economic aspects well through the flow of the story.

There is a little of the hero being in the right place at the right time to see what is happening without being subsumed by it. However, this does not come over as unrealistic. Tensions between him and the staff he has come to manage, as well as local business community and crossing paths with Pliny the Elder, admiral of the fleet in the region and a genuine victim of the eruption. However, overall the artifice when it appears does not intrude greatly and instead you have a book which is really engaging even when featuring the intricacies of pre-industrial water management and fish farming.

Non-Fiction

'Hitler's Willing Executioners' by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

This book is about persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. It says very important things, for example noting how every piece of anti-Semitic legislation was itself cruel, rendering the Jews 'socially dead' even before moving on to the horrors of the extermination camps. He portrays very acutely how the Jews were seen as inherently evil and so rather than simply be exploited in the way 'subhumans' such as Poles and Russians were, they had to suffer all the way to their deaths. This comes out particularly strongly in the sections on the "work" camps which Goldhagen highlights did not produce anything of value, but instead were about making the Jews do painful, useless work as a punishment for their supposed evil. Similarly the death marches, which along with the police battalions, are an aspect he particularly investigates, were simply about inflicting pain before death on the Jews who were marched around. The in-depth analysis of the ideology of German (he eschews the adjective Nazi) anti-Semitism, the "work" camps, the police battalions and the death marches provide valuable insight not always picked up by other historians, even now some 28 years after this book was publisged.

Especially at the beginning this book is more about psychology than history with Goldhagen seeking an explanation for how such vast numbers of Germans felt that Jews were effectively like a bacillus that needed to be eliminated, but also that they were demonic so needed as much punishment before death as possible. While he does take steps to deny he is saying that Germans have always been so cruel, in fact his evidence is very much to the opposite, especially as he sees the Germans as being unique in their hatred, even though he does mention in passing other nations who have carried out genocides. He shows how anti-Semitism morphed from religion to biological, but this happened in numerous countries. He seems to feel that once the war was over, this hatred ebbed from the German population and yet he gives examples from the post-1945 period himself of people still adhering to such vile views. There are occasions in this book in which Goldhagen insists on points that the evidence he provides himself contradict them.

While the book draws needed attention to the extent of the anti-Semitism in Germany and where its power stretched and how particularly virulent and cruel it was, there are grave weaknesses in it. Despite having extensive references, Goldhagen is dismissive of almost everyone who has researched and written in this area (bar his father). He portrays himself as having unique insight. He is also entirely dismissive of research into other aspects of the Nazi regime aside from anti-Semitism, portraying these as easy to explain, even 'transparent'. My reading over the last few years would oppose that portrayal.

The prime difficulty, as often happens with books written on grave subjects or by well-established academics is the lack of editing. Goldhagen repeats the same point again and again even within a single section, let alone across the book. He keeps hammering home his points with italics as if the reader cannot comprehend the importance of what is being said without it being jabbed repeatedly in their faces. No-one is likely to come to this book ignorant of the Holocaust and while he adds to that knowledge, in contrast to his personal view, he is not operating with a blank slate. 

This book could have been cut by 200 pages and he would have made his arguments, even aired his personal gripes with other historians, far more effectively. Instead, the reader is numbed by incessant repetition and being treated as if they are moronic. For all his insistence, his approach gravely weakens the effectiveness of what he aims to communicate and loses the important details in repeated rhetoric. He does savage reviewers as at best misguided, at worst apologists, but I hope that he is too busy to seek me out to attack my view on his book which has good elements but could have been a lot better.