The Economist - USA (2019-07-13)

The EconomistJuly 13th 2019 Books & arts 77

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(poisoning, shooting, drowning), one

striking feature of this suicide wave was

that it was often based on a family deci-

sion. People who did not want to survive

generally did not want their loved ones to

live either. The book’s title comes from an

incident in Berlin, when a middle-aged

man gave a pistol to his 21-year-old daugh-

ter and implored: “Promise me you’ll shoot

yourself when the Russians come, other-

wise I won’t have a moment’s peace.” In the

event, she threw the gun away.

Mr Huber uses many such vignettes to

portray the atmosphere of a nationwide

epidemic that seems to have claimed at

least 20,000 lives (and perhaps many

more). An officer on leave from serving in a

concentration camp burbled drunkenly

about inmates who were electrocuting

themselves: “I’ll end up running into those

wires myself.” In smouldering Demmin, a

doctor presented his maid with a parcel she

assumed was poison; in fact it was a part-

ing gift of two wedding rings, offered hours

before he and his wife and daughter ended

their lives. The maid was left to write to the

couple’s son, a prisoner of the British, re-

counting his family’s extinction.

Dreams and nightmares

In the second half of his book, Mr Huber

switches tack to give a broad sweep of the

Nazi era, tracing the dark exhilaration that

overtook previously sane individuals as

they came to feel that Hitler could solve all

their problems. He describes the denial or

glib justifications with which people react-

ed to the persecution of Jews; some readers

may feel he should have dwelled more on

that subject. Closer to his main theme, he

pinpoints reactions to the assault on the

Soviet Union in June 1941. Some had a bleak

sense the invasion might fail, others still

believed devoutly in the military and moral

superiority of the Reich. As news emerged

of the atrocities the invaders were commit-

ting, and the titanic reverses they began to

suffer, some Germans experienced cogni-

tive dissonance. Their faith in Nazism’s ul-

timate triumph grew all the more fervent.

Thus the book hints at a deep truth

about war at its dirtiest. When people sense

crimes are being committed in their name,

they can become even more fanatical in

their devotion to the cause, so that an all-

out drive for victory, or else martyrdom,

seem the only ways these sins can be re-

deemed. Although he does not make the

links explicit, the background Mr Huber

sketches provides some important context

for the suicides. They were not simply dri-

ven by fear of the Red Army’s depredations.

They reflected the implosion of a Nazi fan-

tasy which had grown even more zealous as

its evil became more obvious. Self-destruc-

tion did not signify a search for honour or

redemption, but rather the collapse of a

twisted idea of what honour meant. 7

F

ora kayakercaughtinheavyswells,

theworldisallsea.Wavestower.Landis

lost.Thecoastlinevanishestoa thinstrip,

glimpsed for a moment before it veers

drunkenlybehindthenextwave.

Ifthisseemsanunusualenvironment

forahistorian,DavidGange’s booksug-

gestsotherwise.“TheFrayedAtlanticEdge”

isanaccountofa year-longkayakvoyage

thathemadedownthewesternseaboardof

theBritishIsles,fromthenorthernmosttip

ofShetlandtothemostsoutherlypointof

Cornwall.It isalsoanargumentfora differ-

ent, more personal sort of history. Mr

Gange’ssubjectisthe“archipelagicworld”

ofBritain:aninterlinkedconstellationof

Atlantic-facing settlements, which are

scattered geographically but bound by

sharedcultures and language. He turns

conventionalrecordsoftheBritishIslesin-

sideout.Insteadofrootinghisstoryinme-

tropolisessuchasLondon,hetellsitfrom

the“tatteredocean-gougedfringe”.

Thisisanappositemomentforhispro-

ject.Overthepastfewdecades,therehas

beenarevivalofGaeliccultureandlan-

guage—ledlargelybythekindofcoastal

communities thatwere previouslyover-

looked.InstitutionssuchastheUniversity

oftheHighlandsandIslands,whichhasa

campusintheOuterHebrides,haveover-

seena surgeofvigourandconfidence.The

depopulationsthatinthe18thand19thcen-

turiesafflictedtheouterislandsofthear-

chipelago—suchasFairIsleandFoulain

Shetland—arebeingreversed.Youngpeo-

ple are staying, Mr Gange observes, and

newcomers arriving. There and elsewhere,

localism has become a point of pride.

The strength of Mr Gange’s account is

his generosity. His own wry persona never

overshadows the voices of past and present

inhabitants. Artists and writers are his

principal guides: Rob Donn, an 18th-cen-

tury crofter-chronicler, sits companion-

ably alongside the modern Scottish poet

Robin Robertson, their writing harmonis-

ing across time. The references are demo-

cratic, familiar names such as Virginia

Woolf and Walter Scott keeping company

with lesser-known figures, who are none-

theless noteworthy in their own ways. Mr

Gange considers a meditation on Bardsey

Island, off the coast of Wales, by the poet

Christine Evans, and the eerie seascapes of

Peter Lanyon, a Cornish painter.

In this way he presents the landscapes

that he traverses anew—not just as beauti-

ful wildernesses, but as the by-product of

human history, an occasionally troubled

braiding of people and place. The craft of

the historian, he thinks, lies in “interpret-

ing the intertwining”.

It helps that Mr Gange’s prose is itself

poeticandprecise.Thehillsandlochsof

Assynt,forinstance,tessellateinshapes

“likeEuclidianart”.Heconveystheexperi-

ence of kayaking through mountainous

“scarpsofsea”;hisenthusiasmforsnooz-

inginsoggysleepingbagsisinfectious.By

theend,hisbookmakesa persuasivecase

for chronicling the history of regions

throughtheexperiencesandvoicesofthe

peoplewhocallthemhome.Adunkingin

thefreezingsea,offthecoastof County

Mayo,leavestheauthorshiveringbut“ig-

nited,elated”.Surfacingfromhisbook,the

readerisinvigorated,too. 7

Alternative histories

A sea change

The Frayed Atlantic Edge. By David Gange.

William Collins; 400 pages; £18.99

M

uchwasridingonElvisPresley’sre-

turn to Las Vegas in 1969. It had been

nearly a decade since he had played to a live

audience, and Vegas offered a chance to re-

vive a career mired in middling movies and

synthetic songs. The timing was right for

the city, too, which had lost some of the

glamour of its early-1960s heyday, when

the crooning of cool cats such as Frank Si-

natra and Dean Martin packed the lounges.

The rise of the counterculture had made it

He found a new place to dwell

Love me sweet

Elvis in Vegas.By Richard Zoglin. Simon &

Schuster; 304 pages; $28 and £18.99

Itchin’ like a man in a fuzzy tree