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History book thread

Started by Nice Relaxing Poo, October 14, 2017, 04:12:38 PM

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Just finished this:



An eye opening history of the part that vodka has played in shaping Russian history for the last 6 centuries. I'd always thought that they drank so much simply as a matter of culture but the truth of the matter is that for hundreds of years the tax revenue of the government/tsars absolutely relied on the take from a vodka monopoly to sustain them. Every time a leader has tried to crack down on drinking they've had to plug a 30% gap in their finances and then been forced to relax any vodka controls. A lot of the statistics in this book are crazy too, like when Putin came to power 50,000 Russians were dying of alcohol poisoning every year compared to about 500 in the USA which has twice the population.


Highly recommended.

Serge

I bought a book last year called 'Hammer & Tickle', which was an exploration of the role humour played in keeping people going during the Soviet era. Though like so many books I buy, it's still waiting to be read.

One book I read earlier in the year which I enjoyed was 'Hiding The Elephant' by Jim Steinmeyer, which is a history of the Golden Age of Magic, which, despite hating most magicians with a passion, I really enjoyed. I have to admit that I bought it because it had a quote from Glen David Gold, author of the magnificent 'Carter Beats The Devil', on the front, but Charles Carter is only mentioned once, in passing, in a derogatory remark! But the stories of how this bunch of maniacs kept coming up with ever more impressive illusions, and the lengths they'd go to to keep them secret, was highly entertaining.


Some samizdat zingers from "Hammer and Tickle"

1) (About the East German cops, the Volkspolizei)
Why do Vopos always travel in threes?
One who can read, one who can write, and one to keep an eye on the intellectuals.

2) Child: Hey, Grandma, why are you wearing a rucksack?
Grandma: In order to save energy, pacemakers have been converted to run on coal.

Serge



"First rule of comedy, Spike: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation."

Much like the music of The Plastic People of the Universe, I guess you had to be there.

Howj Begg

My most recent history reads:

- 1968 by Mark Kurlansky. Good if relatively unsophisticated account of the revolutionary movements across Europe and the Americas. Whilst Vietnam, Black Power, Berkely etc is all there, you'll find out everything you didn't know about Poland, Czechaslovakia (my favourite chapters. Ducek is a fascinating figure), and France.

- The Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawm. Yes I know I'm late. It's still worth reading in 2017 as far as I can see. I found the history of the aftermath of 1848 and the waning and waxing of its afterglow in the subsequent movements and revolutions really interesting. 1848 is the most important event of the 19c, and its barely taught now. I wonder why?


Bhazor

Just working through Love at Goon Park by Deborah Blum. About the 1950s Harlow experiments into parental bonding most famous for the wire monkey experiment. But the real focus is on the team themselves and Harlow's own problems and a society that seemed to be in collective shell shock after WW2. Its not for the squeamish animal lovers. Those monkeys get *fucked*.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1027539.Love_at_Goon_Park


Another plug for Yakuza
http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,62784.0/topicseen.html

studpuppet

Quote from: Serge on October 14, 2017, 10:07:49 PM
I bought a book last year called 'Hammer & Tickle'...

In the interests of balance (this is by Werner's son, by the way):


Serge

That reminds me that I've also got Blitzed, the book that came out last year on drugs in Nazi Germany, on my to-read pile.

studpuppet

Quote from: Serge on October 16, 2017, 11:35:33 AM
That reminds me that I've also got Blitzed, the book that came out last year on drugs in Nazi Germany, on my to-read pile.

I have Dead Funny, Blitzed and this together on my shelf as a 'drugs, comedy and porn' trilogy:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Private-Pornography-Third-Reich-Bockhain/dp/3936709645

manticore

Quote from: Serge on October 16, 2017, 11:35:33 AM
That reminds me that I've also got Blitzed, the book that came out last year on drugs in Nazi Germany, on my to-read pile.

Blitzed is interesting, though I was disappointed that it didn't really talk much about the civilian use of drugs in the Third Reich. I suppose there isn't enough documentation.

I'm reading Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler at the moment. He was such an uninteresting man in many ways, barely a human being at all. But obviously his effect on the world is fascinating. We seem to rely on Goebbel's diariesa lot to know what he thought about particular events, and God knows how reliable they are. Kershaw doesn't seem to use the Table Talk much, for reasons that I can't quite gather.

Mr Banlon



A company that is actually worse than you thought they were already.

studpuppet

Quote from: manticore on October 16, 2017, 04:45:57 PM
Blitzed is interesting, though I was disappointed that it didn't really talk much about the civilian use of drugs in the Third Reich. I suppose there isn't enough documentation.

For balance, here's a less than complimentary review (basically the reviewer contends that Ohler has formulated an excuse for the German people's actions before and during WW2, from the speculation that the vast majority were perpetually high on Pervitin):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-in-nazi-germany-by-norman-ohler-review

Glebe

Quote from: Serge on October 15, 2017, 08:47:37 PM"First rule of comedy, Spike...

Fantastic, lots of Imaginary Karma, Serge! Follow that advice and you'll get belters, won't even have to resort to the 'Famous People on the Toilet' routine!

E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World is a well worth a read... originally published in German in the 1930s, eventually got published in an English translation in 1995. It was actually intended for kids, but it's intelligently written, clear and concise.


slapasoldier

Forgive the fact that it's not a book, but this site has taught me more about real history than anything else:

http://realhistoryww.com

nedthemumbler

A bit Mark Corrigan ( well precisely so in the case of Stalingrad) but Anthony Beevor's ww2 books are definitely worth a look if you're that way inclined. Particularly Ardennes, Stalingrad and the one about the whole shebang.  Plenty of human colour and empathy within the numbers and geopolitics.

manticore

Quote from: studpuppet on October 16, 2017, 04:53:41 PM
For balance, here's a less than complimentary review (basically the reviewer contends that Ohler has formulated an excuse for the German people's actions before and during WW2, from the speculation that the vast majority were perpetually high on Pervitin):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-in-nazi-germany-by-norman-ohler-review

That piece is terribly skewed. Ohler doesn't make any attempt to excuse the actions of the German people or Hitler on the grounds of their drug use. He just documents it matter-of-factly. Evans imputes a whole lot of exaggerated claims to Ohler that Ohler just doesn't make. And Evans seems to get opiates and methamphetamines mixed up, which is bizarre.

Very odd article.

The Evans Ohler argument has gone further since then, with slightly more specific criticisms than the ones made in that article.

Ohler responded to Evans in a Guardian article in May: 'I had an intimate knowledge of Hitler's drug habit that no one else possessed'

QuoteThen came trouble. I had poked into a hornets' nest, mistaken a shark pool for a bathtub. I had little anticipated just how diligently historians guard Hitler's image! I was put on trial by none other than the British historian Richard J Evans, who reviewed Blitzed in the Guardian. While chasing me away from the fortress of official Hitler interpretation, he also said something dangerous: that I "excused Hitler and the Germans for their terrible crimes". That, according to Evans, was why the book was successful in Germany.

But I don't say that anywhere in Blitzed – that would be a truly disgusting thing to assert. And why, then, is the book also so successful in countries that suffered so much under Nazi terror: Estonia, France, Russia, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Poland, the Czech Republic, or any of the other 20 countries, including Israel, where the book is translated? And what about the UK? Is the whole world into whitewashing Hitler? I don't think so.

I don't know if Evans is oversensitive about this topic, or whether he did not understand how drugs can affect a person. Did he misunderstand my book, or does he really believe that it is irrelevant to our understanding of the war that, for example, 35m methamphetamine tablets were issued to boost the Wehrmacht's performance during the invasion of France? Perhaps what made him so angry was that a non-historian dared to rewrite history.

Evans replied later that month in this article: Hitler and the Nazis Were High on Drugs – a Theory for the Age of 'Alternative Facts'

QuoteTake for instance Norman Ohler's book Blitzed!, which I reviewed in The Guardian on 19 November 2016. This is a book that uses a small amount of detailed research on amphetamines, opiates and other drugs in Nazi Germany to advance large claims about the Third Reich, including the assertion that all Germans were literally drugged into acquiescing in the regime's crimes all the way from 1933 to 1945, and the identification of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as a drug addict. These claims won Ohler massive sales for his book, and huge publicity for his views. Finally, the mystery of Nazi Germany, of why Hitler was so evil, and why Germans supported him, has been explained! It's an argument that fits in well to the age of populism, where simplistic explanations for complex phenomena are grasped with alacrity by a confused and bewildered public that has become tired of the complicated analyses offered by competing groups of experts.

Ohler says explicitly in the German edition of his book that history is 'always fiction', and indeed in his case, it certainly is. So it's surprising that in responding to my review, he tried to argue that his book was purely factual. Of course I don't mind anyone writing about Hitler and the Nazis: everyone's welcome. But if you do so, you have to get your facts right. Ohler has indeed done some excellent research and uncovered fresh details from the archives about concentration camp experiments with drugs and a few other things. What's at issue, however, is the fact that on the basis of this research he makes sweeping generalizations that the evidence doesn't support.

Thus for example he thinks that because 35 million amphetamine tablets were given to German soldiers in the invasion of France (a fact that has long been well known to historians), they must all have been high. Given that well over three million troops took part in one capacity or another, this makes just over 10 per soldier for the entire six weeks; the drug was in fact mostly given to tank crews, so that the majority of troops were not supplied with them at all. And contrary to Ohler's assertion, I don't say the tank crews' reliance on amphetamines to get them through the Ardennes in three days and nights of non-stop driving was irrelevant to the war; in fact I point out this fact in my book The Third Reich at War. But we need to keep a sense of proportion here. Just because the German army used amphetamines on specific occasions such as this, for specific groups of soldiers, it doesn't mean they were used for everyone, all the time.

But this is exactly Ohler's claim, extended to civilians as well. It can be read in the extract from his book appended to his 2 May 2017 article in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/02/i-had-an-intimate-knowledge-of-hitler-norman-ohler-blitzed. He does indeed assert that the entire German population of 60 to 70 million people was kept going throughout the Third Reich by 'Pervitin', or what we would call 'speed', which became a 'grocery item' that 'allowed the individual to function in the dictatorship'. There is absolutely no evidence for this bizarre claim, nor does Ohler supply any. It's an 'alternative fact', designed to win attention through its brazen simplicity.

The same can be said of Ohler's assertion that Hitler was a drug addict. At various points in his book, he argues that drug abuse clouded Hitler's judgment, until towards the end he was turned into a physical and mental wreck by having to go 'cold turkey'. Serious and medically qualified writers have already been through the evidence here, which includes the casebooks of his personal physician Theo Morell, but because they conclude that the Nazi leader was not a drug addict, Ohler simply ignores them. For anyone who wants a serious study of Hitler's medication, I would recommend Was Hitler Ill? by Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann. Perhaps Ohler should read it too.

Blitzed is a highly readable book, thanks to Ohler's skill as a novelist, and it's received widespread attention, as well as commercial success, thanks to his skill at self-promotion. A few historians who should know better have endorsed it, but mine is far from being the only critical review: if you want a really devastating assessment of its value, you should read Nikolaus Wachsmann's demolition job in the Financial Times on 14 October 2016, not to mention (if you read German) the reviews by Anna Gnausch and other medically qualified historians of the German edition. As Gnausch says, Ohler tries to row back more than once from the obvious conclusion that will be drawn from his arguments, that neither the Germans nor Hitler were responsible for their actions, it was drugs that drove them, but that's the overwhelming impression his book conveys. And that's where the danger lies – in absolving Hitler and the Germans from responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.

In the end, Blitzed belongs not in the world of serious history, but in the new landscape of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts', and its commercial success is on a par with that of similar productions such as the books and television series that claim Hitler escaped from his Berlin bunker in 1945 and lived out his days in exile in Argentina. These too have been widely circulated and have met with widespread endorsement from viewers and readers, though not, it has to be said, from serious historians. It's important in today's climate not to ignore such claims, just as it's important not to ignore Holocaust denial, but to confront them with real evidence. Only in this way can the 'reality-based community' prevail.

Here is the passage Evans accuses of misleading the reader in the fourth paragraph above:

QuotePervitin made it easier for the individual to have access to the great excitement and 'self-treatment' that had supposedly gripped the German people. The powerful stuff became a sort of grocery item, which even its manufacturer didn't want to keep stuck just in the medical section. 'Germany, awake!' the Nazis had ordered. Methamphetamine made sure that the country stayed awake. Spurred on by a disastrous cocktail of propaganda and pharmaceutical substances, people became more and more dependent.

The utopian ideal of a socially harmonised, conviction-based society, like the one preached by National Socialism, proved to be a delusion in terms of the competition of real economical interests in a modern high-performance society. Methamphetamine bridged the gaps, and the doping mentality spread into every corner of the Reich. Pervitin allowed the individual to function in the dictatorship. National Socialism in pill form.

I can understand Evans's feeling that this exaggerates by suggestion, but I don't think it's fair to say that Ohler's 'claim' here is 'exactly' that 'amphetamines... were used for everyone, all the time'.

Here is Nikolaus Waschmann's critical review for the Financial Times, also cited by Evans: Was Nazi Germany a 'land of drugs'? — Blitzed by Norman Ohler review

QuoteSo far, so interesting. But Ohler has a habit of pushing things too far, eschewing nuance for headlines. He proclaims Pervitin the "favourite drug" of Germans ("as much of a fixture as a cup of coffee"), when it was only briefly available over the counter. He proclaims Germany a "land of drugs", when hard drugs were endemic elsewhere, too. The amphetamine Benzedrine, for example, which barely features in his German-centric account, was popular in the US, praised by the New York Times as brain fuel, and used by Allied soldiers to fight combat fatigue. As for the Wehrmacht, its use of Pervitin was not as significant as Ohler suggests, and not just because of its potentially serious side-effects (such as heart-attacks and psychosis). If any substance really fuelled Nazi violence — on the killing fields and inside camps — then it was not Pervitin but alcohol, which Ohler discounts altogether.

In the preface to last year's bestselling German edition, Ohler states that he deliberately employs a "distorted perspective" to better expose hidden aspects. Curiously, this explanation is missing from the English translation, together with the rest of the preface. His distortion technique is used to maximum effect when it comes to Adolf Hitler. While the dictator was portrayed by Nazi propaganda as an "anti-drug teetotaller", Ohler aims to show that Hitler — who appears on the cover with bleary eyes and blotchy skin — was actually Germany's "super-junkie".

[...]

There are some memorable passages here, as well as some jarring ones, where Ohler appears to mix fact and fiction: several highly cinematic scenes — complete with close-ups of Hitler's pale face and body — are not fully referenced. "Writing history is never just science", he announces in the German preface, "but always also fiction".

Ohler also "sexes up" Hitler's medical dossier. According to Dr Morell's notes, Hitler received 24 Eukodal injections between summer 1943 and late 1944: hardly the habit of a "super junkie". But this was just the tip of the iceberg, suggests Ohler, who speculates that the letter "x" in the doctor's papers often stood for Eukodal. This makes little sense, since Morell openly recorded the drug's application elsewhere. For instance, in late September 1944, a time when Hitler's drug use was at its highest (following the recent attempt on his life), Morell dutifully noted four Eukodal injections in a single week, even underlining the drug's name: hardly the habit of a duplicitous doctor.

All this leads to the central question: does Hitler's drug consumption matter? Did it have a major impact on Nazi policy? Can "pharmacological preparations", as Ohler puts it, explain "historical events"? He evidently thinks so. Drugs proved "disastrous" for Hitler because they messed with his "natural intuition" and bred senseless plans, such as the 1944 Ardennes offensive. But Hitler needed no drugs to become a self-delusional megalomaniac: he had been one since the early years of his political life. And his most destructive policies, from the attack on the Soviet Union to the Holocaust, came well before hard drugs. Ohler acknowledges as much late in the book, backtracking on earlier claims. Hitler was always "the master of his senses", he now writes. His "goals and motives" did not derive from drugs, and he knew, to the end, "exactly what he was doing". Drugs merely helped him to remain "the true Hitler".

[...]

The story of the "fat doctor" (as Ohler dubs him) is based on some diligent research. But it is buried beneath the breathless prose, like other interesting aspects of the book. Again and again, Ohler's hyperbole stands in the way of sober understanding. He spices up the evidence, throws in pop culture references ("Teutonic Easy Riders"), and garnishes it with snazzy puns ("High Hitler"). It remains to be seen if this recipe will appeal to anglophone readers. To borrow Ohler's style: will they experience a big buzz, or a bad trip?

I hope these are interesting rather than tedious. Do these complaints seem more respectable than the ones in the initial Guardian article? Who do you side with about the mysterious "x" in Dr Morrell's notebooks? I haven't read Blitzed but from the above it seems as though there are some reasonable criticisms about Ohler's suggestive presentation but perhaps also excessive fear of the implications of the book's novelistic prose and some careless misrepresentation and speculation of his own from Evans (whose Third Reich Trilogy is the only history book in this area that I've read). The theory that the book sold well because it might excuse Germans seems especially doubtful.

I've read Blitzed! and got that feeling throughout that the author was stretching things a bit to make his findings more sensational.

I got Blitzed! then gave up on it almost straight away because I found the jaunty style a bit grating, and bit suspicious of the author. Ironically these criticisms have made me want to give it a another go now I've got an angle to read it from.

I think Wachsmann makes a good case that "X" was something other than Eukodol. But in that case, what was it? Has anyone read Wachsmann's KL by the way? I saw him give a talk once, he was very good.

The framing of the issue as "Was Hitler a junkie?" and relating it to his judgement/ free will does obscure the possibility that he was experiencing psychiatric side-effects caused by other, less interesting to write about medication. Given that he had a large range of health problems, it seems possible.

studpuppet

My criticism of Blitzed is that it's extremely slight. The way the text has been set has really padded out a book that would have come in a lot slimmer if using a normal non-fiction setting. It was that that made me more suspicious than the reviews, But you're right about the jaunty and slightly sensational style of the writing - it gives it less gravitas than his research was worth.

Pranet

If ever you've thought you might want to read a history of the American Civil War, do read Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.

Sebastian Cobb

I read these about the GDR a while back.





I found Ash's quite dry, dunno if it's because he's an academic but I just found it very impersonal and a bit of a slog. Funder's conveys a lot more humanity and was much easier to read even though I guess a lot of the accounts were grimmer.