Spectator, The: Letters

Germans and anti-Semitism

From Mr David Kernek

Sir: If George Szamuely (`The evil of banality', 4 September) is right, my mother and uncle were forced to leave their home and family in Austria simply because of the 'accident' of Hitler's personality. In their case it meant lives turned upside down. For millions more, it was fatal. Some accident!

Anti-Semitism has tainted the histories of most European nations, but there are no grounds for pointing to pre-1914 Germany as `one of the most philo-Semitic countries in the world'. Of what world can Mr Szamuely be thinking? Violent anti-Semitism surfaced there with trainee Crusaders in 1096 and continued with varying degrees of severity for seven centuries. The Enlightenment - during which married Austrian Jews were no longer compelled to wear beards -- brought great relief, but normality returned in 1873 when Jews were blamed for the stock market collapse which followed the Franco-Prussian war.

Far from being a 'dying' creed in the l9th century, anti-Semitism was enjoying a strong revival in the mountains and valleys of Germany and Austria, if not in the salons of Berlin and Vienna. If Hitler was the sole, accidental agent of the Holocaust, he couldn't have happened at an icier bend in the road.

As for my mother and uncle, they were baptised as Roman Catholics at birth and never set foot in their town's synagogue. Their problem was that they had three Jewish grandparents - another of life's unforeseeable accidents.

David Kernek

1 Coburg Villas,

Camden Road,

Bath

From Mr CA. Latimer

Sir: George Szamuely says in his article that `no one could have predicted the rise of Hitler'. Giles MacDonogh (`Don't let's be beastly to the Germans', 4 September) suggests that `crude Vansittart propaganda' could be responsible for anti-German feeling. I think they are both wrong. Certainly Germans can be attractive - I grew to like the working-class Berliners when I worked with them during the airlift in 1948-49. They were good Germans, the bedrock of the old Social Democratic party. But when I read Friedrich von Hugel's book, The German Soul, published in 1916, I recognised something which Szamuely and MacDonogh both ignored. Von Hugel, a distinguished Catholic theologian who died in 1925, saw Hitler coming. He referred to `fundamental peculiarities of the German soul: an imperious need . . . of theory, system, completeness at every turn and in every subject matter; an immense capacity for auto-suggestion, and an ever proximate danger, as well as power, of becoming so dominated by such vivid projection of the racial imaginings and ideals as to lose all compelling sense of the limits between such dreams and reality, and especially all awareness, or at least alertness, as to the competing rights and differing gifts, indeed as to the very existence, of other souls and other races. . . '. He emphasised `the high pitch, strain and cost, and hence danger, of the German's psychic life'.

I feel he would hardly have been surprised at anything that happened after his death.

CA. Latimer

3 The Street, Melton,

Woodbridge, Suffolk

Churchill's big mistake

From Mr Richard Lamb

Sir: With all respect to Lady Maclean (Letters, 28 August), James Klugmann did `doctor' the reports from British liaison officers with Mihailovic. This occurred in the autumn of 1943 in the SOE office in Cairo, which the communist Klugmann dominated. He handled all reports, editing them and writing policy memorandums from them for the Foreign Office. He delayed decoding reports from Mihailovic's HQ, giving priority to those from Tito's, and tampered with the reports of sabotage by Mihailovic's troops.

As a result, when Churchill came to Cairo in December 1943 he was given a completely misleading view of Mihailovic's activities and a far too rosy one of Tito's. Accepting the Klugmann version, Churchill sacked Mihailovic despite strong opposition from the US and Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. I went through all the reports from the Mihailovic BLO's in the Public Record Office for my book Churchill as War Leader (1991). I was helped by a surviving BLO, the late Michael Lees, whose book The Rape of Serbia (1990) is completely authoritative and shows that Mihailovic's troops were carrying out sabotage with the co-operation of the British officers to a greater extent than Tito's.

After the war, Churchill said, 'I thought I could trust Tito . . . but now I am aware I committed one of the biggest mistakes of the war,' while Eden stated, `My biggest regret of the war was abandoning Mihailovic.'

Richard Lamb

Knighton Manor,

Broadchalke, Salisbury, Wilts

An old man's libido

From Mr Sidney Viness

Sir: It is impossible nowadays to read a review (Books, 28 August) about Hardy without the reputed remark by Hardy to Edmund Blunden that he was capable of full sexual intercourse until the age of 84. I do not believe it - either that he said it or, if he did, that it was true. It is much more likely, given the way that Emma went off the rails, that he was impotent. Hardy was, like most Dorset peasants, excessively reserved. He went to the same Dorchester barber for over 30 years. After ten years he unbent sufficiently to talk about the weather, but if another customer came in, he would clam up completely.

Hardy may have told Edmund Blunden that sexual desire was a great problem for an old man, for he expressed this in one of his finest poems:

But Time, to make me grieve,

Part steals, lets part abide;

And shakes this fragile frame at eve

With throbbings of noontide.

Sidney Viness

1 Willow Close,

Laverstock,

Salisbury, Wilts

Ruritanian revolution

From Dr Ian Olson

Sir: Paul Johnson should not assume that his proposed countryside rebellion would have found much sympathy in Ruritania (And another thing, 4 September). With her old and famous royal house, she was clearly a typical component of the AustroHungarian Empire. The archbishop in splendid Strelsau with its ancient university was a cardinal, and Britain and the other great powers were represented there by ambassadors (as only in major capitals) and not merely by ministers. Ruritania was certainly no old-fashioned rural backwater (nor chocolate-soldier-land).

It is true that royalty and the upper nobility followed the hunt, but that was in pursuit of the boar (this being considered the only manly sport, as the quarry had a good chance of killing the pursuer); farmers and peasantry were expected to know and keep their place. I fear a descent of '100,000 angry folk on horseback' on the capital would have been severely dealt with by an ultra-loyal and extremely ferocious army.

Ian Olson

20 Burns Road,

Aberdeen

Deconstructing Willam

From Christina M. Brodie

Sir: I would advise anyone to read The Water Babies or Just William for themselves and ignore Philip Hensher's comments about 'coprophilia' and `sexual obsession' - which are, among other things, terribly passe (Books, 28 August). For those to whom, after following the above advice, the 'meaning' of the books is still obscure, let me explain it thus: The Water Babies is a serious tale about a boy who grows up and his changing personal philosophy. The William books are, by contrast, a series of comic tales about a boy who never grows up, and his relatively static personal philosophy. This explanation, admittedly succinct, is the long and the short of it. I would not wish to spoil the reader's enjoyment of the books by over-analysis.

Christina M. Brodie

Vine Cottage,

Nortons Wood Lane,

Clevedon,

Somerset

Two types of robber baron

From Mr Claus von Bulow

Sir: Your leading article on 4 September, `Russian roulette', expresses the hope that Russian robber barons will one day give way `as happened in the history of Western capitalism to a new generation of entrepreneurs'. The term `robber barons' was, of course, a term invented by journalists to describe a particular group of American entrepreneurs in the second half of the last century. It may be of interest that a Harvard economic study has concluded that the purchase (and subsequent loss through fraud) of American securities by gullible European rentiers during those years constituted such a vital infusion of capital into the USA as to exceed substantially the total value of all Marshall aid after the second world war. The American robber barons, while often defrauding their investors, kept the lubricating funds within the American economy, while Russian and Third World robbers siphon such funds into secret offshore bank accounts.

Claus von Bulow

109 Onslow Square,

London SW7

Bile from a Stone

From Mr J.H. Carr

Sir: Any person reading Norman Stone's review of The Vices of Integrity, a biography of E.H. Carr by Jonathan Haslam, must be left marvelling at how proudly the reviewer displays his odious character (Books, 4 September). Two months after the death of my father, in the guise of a review published in the London Review of Books, Stone wrote a lengthy and vitriolic article, a wildly spiced attack on the personal and private life of the deceased, which he now impudently describes as an obituary.

The family gave Haslam authority and support. This was not to be an anodyne biography, the only limitation being that the facts must be true. Yes, my father believed that the harshness of Versailles sowed some seeds that contributed to later developments in Germany. He wrote history in a way to stimulate people to think and discuss. Like so many single-minded people, his personal life was unbalanced, bright spells but with such sad consequences in his relationships.

From Cambridge, Stone moved on to Oxford where, no doubt, he planned to achieve greater popularity and distinction. But even this fell apart, so he finds himself settled in Turkey, from where he feels free to indulge his unwholesome spite on those who cannot sue him.

John Carr

Chippers Copse,

Aldworth Road,

Upper Basildon,

Reading

Confident in their ignorance

From Mr Tom Burkard, Secretary, The Promethean Trust

Sir: Yet another complacent teacher (Letters, 4 September) writes to defend a school system which leaves more than a quarter of its pupils functionally illiterate after 12 years of full-time attendance. While inspecting three of East Anglia's top comprehensives for the latest Telegraph schools guide, I was escorted by dozens of the brightest and best pupils these schools had to offer. If appearances were anything to go by, they were enough to restore one's faith in state education: every one was confident, courteous and articulate.

Yet when I asked each of them if they could calculate 30 per cent of 150, only one seemed to understand that finding a percentage is a multiplicative function. The rest either stood there dumbstruck, or hazarded that 30 per cent was 'about' a third, so the answer was `about 50'.

No doubt future pensions salesmen will have it made.

Tom Burkard

Riverside Farm,

Easton,

Norwich

Ever so common

From Mr Philip E. Roe

Sir: Taki writes (High life, 28 August) that the behaviour of Neil Kinnock and his wife would have made his female friend `die of shame if she had been English'. The Kinnocks are Welsh.

Philip E. Roe

157 Verulam Road,

St Albans, Herts

From Brigadier (Retd) N.H. Cocking

Sir: Regrettably I have never enjoyed the hospitality of the Hambros, but I am confident that none of their guests, however well behaved, would say, `Oh, thank you ever so much.' More common than he knew! Perhaps Taki should spend some time with

Dear Mary.

Nick Cocking

Gaines House,

Kington Magna,

Nr Gillingham, Dorset