RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert Holub’s topic arises from an historical accident: the triumph of the Nazis in the early 1930s meant all competing German readings of Nietzsche (then the preeminent figure in German culture) were suppressed and he was enlisted in the service of National Socialism, which has tainted him ever since with anti-semitism. In one respect, Holub is admirably clear: “[T]here is no question that [Nietzsche] was unequivocally antagnostic toward what he understood as anti-Semitism and anti-Semites” (125; cf. xiv, 208). Yet, Holub argues, Nietzsche is still guilty of “Judeophobia,” that is, of displaying a “negative bias towards Jews and Judaism” (xiv; cf. 209). Curiously, the book tries to make the case largely through letters and unpublished material—as well as a good deal of innuendo and speculation—rather than systematic engagement with Nietzsche’s actual philosophical work, until the final chapter. We consider, below, the evidence adduced and the sometimes astonishing inferences Holub draws from it.

In an illuminating first chapter, Holub documents the different receptions of Nietzsche prior to the Nazi era, noting that leftists were attracted to Nietzsche because of his “rather vivid expressions of contempt toward the institutions of middle-class society, which they also rejected” (3). As Nietzsche’s fame grew, those on the German right faced the dilemma that “his many deprecatory statements about Germans and Germany” made it “problematic” to appropriate his stature for their cause (8). Early German commentators, like Adolf Bartles, even acknowledge “that Nietzsche is no anti-semite” (8). The crucial interpreter for Nazi purposes, however, was Alfred Baeumler, who argued in the 1930s that “Nietzsche’s anti-German remarks must be understood in the context of Bismarck’s rule” (13) and that the praise Nietzsche lavishes on the Jews must be understood “rhetorically…as a foil to the Germans in order to goad them to greatness” (13). In other words, even though Nietzsche hated German militarism and nationalism, it was only Bismarck’s version; and even though he lavished praise on Jews, it was only to inspire good Germans to do better. Backed by the Nazi state, in which Baeumler served as principal Nazi liason to the universities, these tortured hermeneutics prevailed and sullied Nietzsche’s reputation.

The Hateful Eight, billed as “the 8th film by Quentin Tarantino”, has opened in selected cities in 70mm format. I’d thought by this stage that some new young hungry film critics would have emerged who’d like to make their names by having a go at the aging enfant terrible. But, judging from the reviews, that does not seem to be the case. On the other hand, I gather there’s some sort of boycott being mounted by those offended by Tarantino’s recent remarks re black men who get shot by cops. It would be, as they say, ironic were the director to be damaged by a political stance he took off-screen, since as James Wood wrote in The Guardian two decades ago:

Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies… Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest.

James Wood made his observation with regard to Pulp Fiction, but it has held up pretty reliably over the years. “Pulp fiction” used to mean a lurid style of American serial writing so-called because of the cheap quality of paper used. But I would imagine today that far more people recognize it as the name of a famous Tarantino movie than the genre he was riffing off. As a helpful dictionary entry at the start of the movie reminds us, “pulp” has two meanings: aside from the fiction style, it’s also a “soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter”. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a trio of gangster storylines told in mashed-up chronology, is not pulp in the first sense: writers at, say, The Black Mask (the hardboiled crime magazine, whose name Tarantino intended to borrow for his movie’s title) favored heightened, pacey prose, tense plotting, surprise twists, cliffhanger endings. Quentin Tarantino inclines more towards that second definition: a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter, its constituent parts smoothly mixed and puréed until the whole is as consistent as a light, fluffy scrambled egg — or, as French cinéastes would say, a scrambled oeuvre. Most fiction is a question of weighting : this moment of high drama is more important than that moment of domestic banality. But, once Tarantino’s pulped it, it all comes out the same: tense trigger-cocked stand-offs or long, querulous conversations about what’s in a five-dollar milk shake. In 1994 the latter sequences passed instantly into the language as the acme of cool.

It seems that the U.S., without a Minuteman missile force, would make it easy — in fact tempting — for an adversary such as Russia to take out the entire U.S. strategic nuclear force in one or a series of very limited first strikes.

Under Secretary Perry’s proposal, the U.S. “target set” of nuclear submarines and bombers would consist of five military bases: three for bombers and two for submarines, and a handful of submarines at sea. From over 500 targets today, to fewer than 10. It would be as if the U.S. declared to its enemies, “Come and get us.”

The elimination of the Minuteman missile force, recommended by Dr. Perry, would leave Russia with an alarming ratio — nearly 200:1 — of Russian warheads to American nuclear assets. This disparity could push the strategic nuclear balance toward heightened instabilities.

Another way to look at it is that the Minuteman would cost only 1/3 of 1% of the total current budget of the Department of Defense.

Former Secretary of Defense William Perry calls for the nuclear land based force of 450 Minuteman missiles to be eliminated. He says that the United States does not need the missiles for nuclear deterrence. He also says that, because of Russia’s current reckless and cavalier attitude about the early use of Russian nuclear weapons, he worries that in a crisis, an American President might launch Minuteman missiles out of fear that Russia might preemptively launch a first strike against America’s “vulnerable” missile silos.

A new screen version of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard reminds us that cinematic refractions of the Bard’s most famous plays are never entirely out of fashion. Though Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh (two actor-directors especially associated with adapting Shakespeare to the big screen) never made movies of the “Scottish play,” other eminent filmmakers have. In 1948, Orson Welles gave us a brogue-heavy, noir-inflected version, with himself in the title role. And in 1971, Roman Polanski opted for a highly naturalistic, often graphically violent approach, emphasizing youthful ambition taken to extremes.

But the most nuanced and unsettling screen version of “Macbeth” strays far from Shakespeare’s text, though not its spirit. Directed by Akira Kurosawa— and performed in Japanese—“Throne of Blood” (1957) is frequently cited by cinéastes and scholars as the medium’s finest rendering of any Shakespeare play. Kurosawa has been described as the “least Japanese” of his country’s great film directors, and several of his movies draw on Western source material: Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, even the American crime writer Ed McBain—in addition to Shakespeare, to whom he would return late in life when adapting “King Lear” as “Ran” (1985).

Just after midnight on Oct. 1, 1966, Albert Speer, the former armaments minister of the Third Reich, walked free from Spandau jail. Barely acknowledging Margarete, his long-suffering wife, the mother of his six children and the once-proud bearer of a Nazi award for fertility, Speer faced the flashbulbs and cameras of the world’s media from the back seat of a luxurious black Mercedes provided for the occasion by an old industrialist friend. Condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Speer was saved from the death penalty by an artful defense that separated him from the other Nazi ogres in the dock. He would spend the last 15 years of his life burnishing his image as “the good Nazi.” After three best-selling books and lucrative interviews with Der Spiegel and Playboy, among others, he died in London on Sept. 1, 1981, attended rather conspicuously by a beautiful young mistress, after a long morning of interviews with the BBC and dinner with the historian Norman Stone. Hitler’s closest companion, the architect of Germany’s wartime “armaments miracle,” had seized his time in the spotlight. He had refashioned himself as a postmodern celebrity.
Speer: Hitler’s Architect

By Martin Kitchen
Yale, 442 pages, $37.50

Already at Nuremberg, Speer had presented himself as a penitent prophet of a new age of technocracy. He used his closing statement in the dock to warn the world that the only forces that could “prevent unconfined engineering and science from completing the work of destroying human beings” were “individual freedom and self-confidence.” In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the conjunction of technology and power had become an obsessive theme of cultural commentary, one that offered Speer two advantages. It put Allied strategic bombing alongside him in the dock while distracting attention from more specific questions about his personal responsibility for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from Berlin and the murderous exploitation of concentration-camp labor.

There are strong parallels between “45 Years” and “Away From Her,” a movie starring Julie Christie, written and directed by Sarah Polley and based on a short story by Alice Munro (”The Bear Came Over the Mountain”). “45Years” stars two other well-known actors from the 60’s – Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, was written and directed by Andrew Haigh and adapted from a short story by David Constantine (”In Another Country”). Furthering the link, viewers of a certain age will remember an exuberant Tom Courtenay and an exhilarating Julie Christie in a breakout performance in “Billy Liar.” Both “45 Years” and “Away From Her” deal with the dissolving threads of a long marriage; one triggered by the unexpected imposition of a tragic past love and one by the torments of dementia as it robs its victim of her very identity.

“45 Years” centers on the quiet intimacy between Kate and Geoff Mercer, a retired couple whose lives consist of walks with their dog, shared meals and time spent at home listening to music and reading. When a letter written in German arrives, we see the power of a withheld secret begin to erode the bond between husband and wife and eat away at each of them differently. All the action and revelations take place within one week that is scheduled to culminate in a party for their 45th wedding anniversary. These two are portrayed as very low-keyed, unpretentious people who don’t like to socialize much and who, at their own wedding, resented the notion of a special table for the bride and groom. One of the changes made in the screen adaption was framing a story about internal emotions around a too-large, too-festive party. These characters wouldn’t have wanted to even attend such an event, much less host it. It becomes difficult to reconcile the cranky personality of the scruffy husband with the tuxedo-clad bon vivant willing to make public proclamations about his feelings for his wife. Similarly one wonders who created the invitation list for this party – surely not the solitary, introverted Kate who eschewed the demands of raising children because her life consisted of a very tiny bond of two.

Ron Chernow is a superb biographer. I read his book on Washington as well as his biography of Hamilton. I saw “Hamilton” on Broadway and loved every second….rsk

Author Ron Chernow is seasoned at the art of signing books, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of George Washington to his best-selling, legacy-reviving portrait of Alexander Hamilton.

But in 2015, he scribbled his signature on something new.

“I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills,” he said.

Mr. Chernow, 66 years old, has been signing theater programs in his capacity as historical adviser to “Hamilton,” the Broadway musical about America’s first Treasury Secretary. The show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, read Mr. Chernow’s book and found inspiration, interpreting the founding father’s rags-to-riches story as a hip-hop narrative: An ambitious talent writes his way out of poverty but dies young, at the hands of a rival.

In 2008, Mr. Miranda invited Mr. Chernow to be a consultant, as a way to maintain historical accuracy while telling the story with contemporary music and stage technique.

The gig took Mr. Chernow out of his art-filled Brooklyn Heights home-office, where he is meticulously arranging his next book on about 25,000 4-by-6 index cards, and thrust him into the collaborative, sweaty process of creating a musical.

Thomas Hardy, in “Poems of War and Patriotism,” described an appalling refugee crisis in the heart of Europe a century ago. They were “pale and full of fear,” and came by the thousands to England’s shores: “From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, / No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood / Had shattered these to shards amid the gear / Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.” They were families, mostly from Belgium, caught up in the German advance during the First World War.

As with the Syrian refugee crisis today, their plight touched the conscience of the West. Two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian authors, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, encountered firsthand the human suffering of the Great War and enlisted their literary imagination to confront it. Their epic works — tales of valor and sacrifice in a great conflict between Good and Evil — do not evade society’s moral obligations to the victims of war.

In October 1914, the German army entered the Belgian port of Ostend, bringing most of Belgium under German occupation. Soon tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing for Great Britain, which had entered the war to defend Belgian neutrality. Many arrived in the village of Great Bookham, where Lewis was being tutored in the classics before being sent to France to fight for king and country. He wrote to his father: “Everyone at Bookham is engaged in a conspiracy for ‘getting up’ a cottage for Belgian refugees.”

Currently, the United States has military personnel deployed in about 150 Countries… This song was written in 1943 by the lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent. Walter Kent was a Jewish American composer who also wrote the music for the wartime hit ” The White Cliffs of Dover.”

I’LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS

I’ll be home for Christmas
You can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents under the tree

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light beams
I’ll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams