Peter Longerich’s Hitler: A Life demonstrates a mastery of a vast mass of primary and secondary research (the bibliography alone runs to 70 pages) that is remarkable even for a German professor. The resulting synthesis has enabled the author to move beyond the antithetical “intentionalist” and “structuralist” interpretations that still dominated the academic scene when Sir Ian Kershaw’s standard work appeared two decades ago. As an expert on the Holocaust, as well as the biographer of Himmler and Goebbels, Longerich is uniquely equipped to explore the enigma of a Führer who manipulated and ultimately ruined not only his lieutenants but an entire continent, in order to annihilate an imaginary enemy. He sees Hitler as a “nobody” whose insatiable demand for recognition drove him to create a dictatorship over which he eventually assumed total control, enabling him to unleash war and genocide on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

Longerich’s biography appeared in German four years ago. This means that its scholarship has informed that of the eminent Peterhouse historian Brendan Simms. His Hitler: Only the World was Enough offers a fresh, indeed brilliantly original study of the subject. In his introduction, Simms states frankly that, while he “cannot provide the ‘whole’ Hitler himself, he hopes to show that our picture of him has hitherto been seriously incomplete”. His argument is threefold. First, Hitler’s lifelong preoccupation was not primarily with “Bolshevism”, as has been assumed, but with “Anglo-America and global capitalism”. Second, he saw the Germans as inferior to the British and the Americans. Third, the focus on the “negative eugenics” against the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has led us to ignore his “positive eugenics”, aimed at raising the Germans to the Anglo-American level. “All this means we have missed the extent to which Hitler was locked in a worldwide struggle not just with ‘world Jewry’ but with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.”

While Longerich places the main emphasis of his book on a comprehensive account of how Hitler exercised power, Simms is more interested in the question of why. Both agree that he saw the war as an existential struggle against “the Jews”, especially from 1941 onwards. Longerich shows that Hitler himself was responsible for the radicalisation of the war against the Soviet Union into one of racial extermination. But this process was part of Hitler’s need to implicate an often reluctant German nation, not only in his pitiless bid to reverse the unexpected defeat of 1918—“the Second World War was Hitler’s War”—but also in his genocidal project, above all the annihilation of European Jewry, thereby deliberately incriminating his compatriots and allies. At heart a control freak, unable to admit mistakes, let alone failure, he took ever more aggressive and repressive measures to ward off the inevitable collapse. Longerich’s Hitler shows how the move from charisma to control led to catastrophe.

Simms would not disagree with Longerich’s narrative, but he supplies an overarching rationale that makes sense, not merely in psychopathological but also in political terms. His Hitler is a grand strategist, whose global ambitions are driven by an inferiority complex vis à vis “Anglo-America”. The clue is in the subtitle: “Only the world was enough.” Only by dominating the European mainland could Germany compete on equal terms with the British Empire and the United States. It was this imperative that led him to destroy the old system by which Britain had maintained a balance of power on the Continent, in order to allow the Germans their rightful Lebensraum, “living space”.

Not only the Nazi leader’s nationalism but also his socialism came into play: the Anglo-Saxon powers were the representatives of capitalism, or “plutocracy”, and at times Hitlerian ideology echoed the language of international class struggle, between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. During the first two years of the war, Stalin was only too happy to carve up Eastern Europe with Hitler and to supply him with the raw materials he needed to prosecute the war in the West. When Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally in 1941, his primary aim, Simms argues, was not to create a Nazi utopia on Russian soil, but to deprive the British of any hope of victory, thereby forcing them to sue for peace.

Simms suggests that Hitler’s strategy was not mad, indeed might even have succeeded. He plays down the cliché of Hitler as a ranting megalomaniac, pointing to the only surviving recording of him in a private setting, during negotiations with the Finnish leader Marshal Mannerheim, in which the Führer speaks calmly and rationally. It’s true that in his last days in the bunker, Hitler did lose touch with reality, rather as he is depicted by Bruno Ganz in Downfall. But both biographies demonstrate that there is no denying his ubiquitous presence. He was the producer, director and star performer of the Nazi show, dominating the extreme Right in Germany long before the brief span that the Thousand Year Reich actually lasted.

Why was Hitler so consumed with envy of the Anglo-Saxon powers that he was ready to risk the total destruction of Europe in order to assert German parity? He was deadly serious about the racial theories that for him explained the success of the British and Americans: the best Germans had migrated to England (in the dark ages) and the United States (in the 18th and 19th centuries), leaving behind the less enterprising dross. But he also believed that Jewish influence was even stronger among his enemies than in Germany and his native Austria. Hence the corruption of capitalism into “plutocracy” and of socialism into Marxism. Nazi ideology was, of course, a rationale for anti-Semitism, “the socialism of fools”. But it was also a vulgarisation of the theory of the Austrian social democratic theoretician Rudolf Hilferding, whose book Das Finanzkapital (“financial capitalism”) described the ascendancy of the global capital markets, the banks and stock exchanges, which collaborated or merged with state institutions to create monopolies. This critique of capitalism provided ammunition to target mythical “Jewish speculators”, who provided Hitler with a convenient scapegoat for the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

The threat of Soviet communism might be a useful rabble-rousing device. But in Hitler’s eyes, the City of London and Wall Street were far more powerful than the Kremlin. His own genocidal policies convinced him that his Jewish enemies in the West would seek revenge. In 1941, while America was still neutral, the Nazis made much of Germany Must Perish, a self-published booklet by a Jewish businessman, Theodore N. Kaufman, advocating the mass sterilisation of the German people. Hitler personally ordered a propaganda campaign, claiming that Kaufman had “a close relationship” to Roosevelt. In reality, Kaufman was an obscure isolationist, with no influence at all.

When Hitler declared war on the US, in one of the last of his Reichstag speeches on December 11, 1941, he claimed that Roosevelt, like Woodrow Wilson before him, was “mentally disturbed” and that his long tenure in office could only be explained by the sinister “power” behind him of “the eternal Jew”. Simms gives this speech prominence in his account: there Hitler set out in detail his claim that “the American President and his plutocratic clique” intended to establish “an unlimited economic dictatorship” over the world. The world was now, he declared, at war—a war between the German Reich and the “Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-capitalist world”. For him, Soviet Russia played a minor role.

The very next day, December 12, Hitler told a private gathering of his Gauleiter that the bloodcurdling “prophecy” he had made in 1939, that he would hold the Jews responsible for the war, was now coming to pass: “The world war is here [and] the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” For Simms, “the principal motivation for and context to Hitler’s war of annihilation against European Jewry was his relationship with the United States.” He also argues that before Barbarossa, just six months before, Hitler had intended to starve Soviet prisoners and up to 30 million Slav civilians to death, shoot the Soviet Jews, but keep the Jews of Western and Central Europe alive as hostages. Now he needed the Slavs alive, to work as slave labour to increase war production to fight the global crusade he had unleashed against Germany. But Europe’s Jews—all of them—would die. Weeks later, at the Wannsee Conference, the orders were given to carry out Hitler’s death sentence on the Jews. It didn’t stop until he was stopped. By then it was too late.

The main objection to the interpretation of Simms is implied by the caustic reminder from Vladimir Putin during last month’s D-Day commemoration (to which he, unlike Angela Merkel, was not invited): some 80 per cent of German military losses were on the Eastern Front. It was at the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated. Yet I am persuaded by Simms that Hitler always saw the West as the main enemy. He consistently underestimated the strength of the Soviet Union and starved his armies there of resources, especially aircraft, that might have turned the tide, preferring to build costly “revenge weapons” to bombard England. Even in December 1944, when the Red Army was about to invade the Reich, he threw all his reserves into one final, suicidal offensive in the Ardennes, the scene of his victory in 1940. Hitler told his generals that the hoped to show “Aryan” Americans the futility of the war. The death of Roosevelt in April 1945 prompted fantasies of dividing the Allies, who would come to their senses now that “the greatest war criminal of all times” was no longer holding them together. Once he conceded that the war was lost, he ordered Ribbentrop, his oleaginous foreign minister, to offer the British a union of the German Reich and the British Empire, with its capital in London. This was a sick man’s fantasy, but he was not wrong to suggest that the Anglo-American alliance would need the Germans to maintain the balance of power in a Europe where Stalin would be calling the shots. Within a decade of the war, West Germany was rearmed and a member of Nato.

Apart from Roosevelt, it was Churchill whom Hitler saw as his arch-enemy. Nazi propaganda perpetuated the canard of an alcoholic Prime Minister. Privately, though, Hitler envied his more gifted foe. Otto Dietrich, his press secretary, testified that Hitler read all Churchill’s speeches during the Battle of Britain, adding that “measured by his outwardly irrational reaction . . . he secretly admired them”.

Hitler’s secret admiration for Churchill was shared by other Nazis. In a massive two-volume propaganda work, Die Englische Kulturideologie (“The English Cultural Ideology”) published in 1941, Hildegard Gauger, a Tübingen academic, writes about Churchill as a rhetorician. Conceding his “masterly command of his mother tongue”, she denied that such eloquence was the same as real leadership. But she could not deny the truth: “England has never had a Prime Minister who was a greater artist of the language than Winston Churchill.” Did Churchill study Hitler’s speeches as Hitler studied Churchill’s? No: the true orator despises the demagogue.

Simms wisely eschews any didactic purpose. But there is profound contemporary significance in his recasting Hitler as a politician fighting what Aurel Kolnai in 1938 already called “the war against the West”. To this day, here in Britain, there are politicians who combine anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism. They peddle the politics of resentment, of the “have-nots” against the “haves”. They call themselves socialists and their enemies Nazis, but they often turn a blind eye to mass murder and they like to make scapegoats of the “Zionists”. We all know who they are. And we British, of all people, ought to know better than to lend them our votes.

Hitler: A Life
By Peter Longerich
Oxford, 1344pp, £30.00

Hitler: Only the World was Enough
By Brendan Simms
Allen Lane, 704pp, £30.00

The post Charisma and catastrophe appeared first on Standpoint.

Only a handful of great composers of music, however, are also gifted writers. Most set the poetry or prose of others to music; some write their own lyrics or libretti. Few write books, even fewer books that have endured. Here, with apologies for the inevitable omissions, are some of those who happen to have a place of honour in my library.

The first major writer-composer in the West was a medieval nun—a fact that ought to make us think twice before using “medieval” as a synonym for “barbarous”. The music of Hildegard of Bingen is now far better known to the world than it was in her lifetime, during the 12th century, when it can only have been heard by those who sang it: the white-clad “virgins” of her hilltop priory at Rupertsberg, above the Rhine. Her melodies are as mysterious as the process by which she composed them, but no less cryptic than her visions, or as original as her botany and herbal medicines, on all of which she wrote treatises. Some of the words that appear in the Latin texts of her sacred hymns seem to be her own inventions; she even created a language of her own, Lingua Ignota. She was canonised by her countryman, Pope Benedict XVI, just seven years ago, but St Hildegard is unlike any other female saint in history. Having been enclosed in a cell for eight years, she became an itinerant preacher, maintained a vast correspondence that included popes and emperors, and refused to defer to any male cleric—not even the most famous man in Christendom, St Bernard of Clairvaux.

Her sacred drama, the Ordo Virtutum, precedes the morality plays of the later Middle Ages by more than a century. It has more in common with the secular dramas of Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, who died more than a century before Hildegard’s birth, and who was steeped in classical Roman literature. But Hildegard’s is a music drama: it anticipates the emergence of opera in the Venice of Monteverdi a full five centuries later. She can also claim to be the first to have composed a “symphony” (symphonia) in Western music, although hers was a sequence of sacred songs, the Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. The best introduction to Hildegard’s extraordinary oeuvre is the Penguin Classics volume of Selected Writings, translated and edited by Mark Atherton.

Composers of the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical eras were for the most part professional musicians, not scholars or men of letters. Most were also teachers and a few wrote books about their specialisms. A good example is On Playing the Flute by Johann Joachim Quantz, Frederick the Great’s music master. Far more than a manual for flautists, this treatise covers everything from musicianship to taste and criticism. It is a mine of information about how baroque music was actually played—for example, the measurement of tempo by “the pulse beat at the hand of a healthy person”, a method widely used before the invention of the metronome. As one of the last to see and hear Johann Sebastian Bach perform, Quantz was wise enough to describe precisely how he used his fingers to strike the keys and brought the organ “to its greatest perfection”.

Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven left few literary remains, apart from letters, notebooks and other documents. Like his predecessors, Beethoven might have considered “the dry letters of the alphabet” to be far inferior to music, but he certainly knew how to express himself to tragic and comic effect. His so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, in which he expressed his despair at the inevitability of total deafness, reveals him as a verbal as well as musical virtuoso. For example, in his correspondence with his friend Nanette Streicher, née Stein, Beethoven alternates in the same letter between puns on her married name (Streich means “trick”) and maiden name (Stein means “Stone”), but then rhapsodises like a true romantic: “If you go to the old ruins, think that Beethoven lingered there; if you wander through the mysterious fir-forests, think that it was there Beethoven often poetised (dichtete), or, as it is called, composed (komponierte).”

As this quotation illustrates, the composer thought of himself as a Tondichter (“tone poet”). He certainly understood poetry better than the poets of his acquaintance, such as Goethe, understood music. Among his last utterances was a literary reference to the Commedia dell’arte, according to his highly unreliable amanuensis and biographer, Anton Schindler: “Plaudite amici, comedia finita est!” (“Applaud, friends, the comedy is over.”) More typical of Beethoven’s humour, though, was his expostulation on being presented with good Rüdesheimer wine as he lay dying: “Too late!”

‘Only a handful of great composers of music are also gifted writers. Few write books, even fewer books that have endured’

Beginning with the Romantic era of the early 19th century, literary composers come thick and fast. One who is better remembered as a writer is E.T.A. Hoffmann, who was for several years a professional musician, conductor, composer and critic. His works are typical of early Romanticism; one, the opera Undine, is still occasionally performed. It was Hoffmann who first recognised the revolutionary significance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “that leads the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite”. It was Hoffmann who championed music as “the most romantic of the arts”. And it was Hoffmann who supplied subsequent composers with the stories—weird, sinister, even macabre—that they set to music in ballets (Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Delibes’s Coppélia), piano pieces (Schumann’s Kreisleriana) and The Tales of Hoffmann, Offenbach’s opéra fantastique. The latter’s eponymous hero bears little resemblance to the original: rather than a raffish, bibulous poet, the real Hoffmann became a Prussian judge, dispensing harsh justice to revolutionaries.

Hoffmann is, of course, a great literary figure but a minor composer. Robert Schumann is a great composer who was also a great critic. He fearlessly championed pioneers such as Chopin or Berlioz, at a time when the French were seen elsewhere as dangerous revolutionaries: “In Vienna they laugh at [Berlioz]. But Vienna is also the city where Beethoven lived—and there is no place on earth where Beethoven is so little played or spoken of . . . In music, too, they don’t want a revolution.” Most of Schumann’s reviews and essays appeared in the journal he founded, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. After he relinquished the editorship in 1843, the Neue Zeitschrift drifted away from his cosmopolitan outlook—with, as we shall see, dire consequences.

Schumann’s writings on music were translated into English soon after his death by perhaps the first feminist in music. Fanny Raymond Ritter, the author of Woman as Musician (1877), boldly argued that composing was not a matter of instinct, but a “science” which women could master as well as men: “There is surely a feminine side of composition, as of every other art.” Ritter’s hero did not agree. Clara Schumann (née Wieck), one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century and a talented composer, was discouraged by her husband Robert, who claimed that “to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of the imagination, does not go together with composing”. Clara simply gave up: “A woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?”

Berlioz is the only great composer of whom it could be said that his writing is as enjoyable as his music. Like the latter, his Mémoires is a classic of romantic introspection—as searingly self-critical as his younger contemporary Wagner’s autobiography, Mein Leben, is slyly self-serving. One of my treasures is a first edition of Berlioz’s Voyage Musical en Allemagne et Italie, which recounts his travels in a series of letters to friends, such as Liszt and Heine—as wittily irreverent about his German and Italian hosts as his studies of Beethoven or Carl Maria von Weber are serious.

When Berlioz visited Germany, Wagner’s vast music dramas did not yet exist. Nor did the ten volumes of his writings and many more of letters. That he was a fluent, even gifted writer is undeniable; his verse epic Der Ring des Nibelungen was admired, not least by his hero Schopenhauer, long before it was set to music. But his voluminous critical writings, like everything else in his life, served his insatiable will to power. More than any previous composer, he was determined to maintain posthumous control of the interpretation of his works. Wagner’s hold over our imagination is greater than ever. Sir Roger Scruton, for example, has devoted two books to Tristan und Isolde and the Ring cycle; next is Parsifal.

One of the few writings by Wagner that is still widely read, however, is his polemic against “Jewishness” in music: Das Judenthum in der Musik. It is not merely a vicious assault on his rivals Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, but a foundational text of anti-Semitism—as malign in its influence as Marx’s slightly earlier tract Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question). It was originally published in 1850, under the pseudonym K. Freidenk (“free thought”), in the Neue Zeitschrift. Among those who protested was Ignaz Moscheles, the Jewish friend of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as impressive a man as he was a composer. (I have a score of his studies for piano Op 70, signed by Moscheles himself.)

The original essay was soon forgotten.  But nearly two decades later, in 1869,  Wagner reissued a second, revised edition in book form under his own name. By then among the most famous men in Europe, he knew exactly what he was doing. Why Wagner, who had received nothing but generosity and support from his Jewish acquaintances and colleagues, chose to prostitute his ability and his celebrity to the vilest legacy of his era, is as unfathomable as it is evil.

Among the generation who followed Wagner, Ferruccio Busoni alone is as remarkable for his writings as his music. In 1906, his Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Aesthetics of Music) appeared. It was seen in retrospect as the manifesto of the “New Music” that was emerging before the Great War and flowered after it. Of the two leading composers of the new wave, however, Arnold Schoenberg was highly critical of Busoni’s treatise, while Igor Stravinsky was dismissive of his devotion to the German classics, especially Bach. “If Stravinsky knew their works as well as I do,” Busoni responded, “he would love them as much as I.”

The New Music of the early 20th century is now as classical as Mozart—and even the avant garde of the 1960s is half a century old. This month, some of the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen are receiving rare performances on London’s South Bank. I own two volumes signed by Stockhausen: a study of the composer by Karl Wörner and a volume of miscellaneous texts: Texte zur Musik, 1963-1970—a presentation copy, with a dedication in German: “To Tim, looking forward to working together, regards Karlheinz St.” It is dated: “31 Oct. 1971, on the day of your arrival”. (I surmise that both books belonged to his translator, Tim Nevill.) One of his texts is a plaidoyer for homosexuality, illegal in West Germany until 1969. At least homosexuals don’t cause overpopulation, he writes. Stockhausen himself was a married father of four.

Stockhausen’s “cosmic” works are conceived on the largest possible scale, dwarfing anything else, before or since; and his collected writings now run to 17 volumes, making him even more prolific than Wagner. Born in 1928, he was too young to fight but served as a stretcher-bearer. His depressed and institutionalised mother was murdered under the euthanasia programme; his father, a teacher, was killed fighting for Hitler. The Nazi past was thus very much present in his life, yet his oeuvre is too abstract to address it directly. As the last practitioner of the Gesamtkunstwerk (as Wagner called his “total works of art”), a line that begins with St Hildegard, Stockhausen deserves to be revisited. But he does not deserve to be forgiven for describing 9/11 as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”. That effusion was worthy of Wagner at his worst.

To create from nothing is the prerogative of God, what theologians call creatio ex nihilo. There is something divine about those who can compose words and music, or even combine both. But the only word for those who deliberately abuse their gifts is: satanic.

er the pseudonym K. Freidenk (“free thought”), in the Neue Zeitschrift. Among those who protested was Ignaz Moscheles, the Jewish friend of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as impressive a man as he was a composer. (I have a score of his studies for piano Op 70, signed by Moscheles himself.)

The original essay was soon forgotten, but nearly two decades later Wagner reissued a second, revised edition in book form under his own name in 1869. By then among the most famous men in Europe, he knew exactly what he was doing. Why Wagner, who had received nothing but generosity and support from his Jewish acquaintances and colleagues, chose to prostitute his ability and his celebrity to the vilest legacy of his era, is as unfathomable as it is evil.

Among the generation who followed Wagner, Ferruccio Busoni alone is as remarkable for his writings as his music. In 1906, his Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Aesthetics of Music) appeared. It was seen in retrospect as the manifesto of the “New Music” that was emerging before the Great War and flowered after it. Of the two leading composers of the new wave, however, Arnold Schoenberg was highly critical of Busoni’s treatise, while Igor Stravinsky was dismissive of his devotion to the German classics, especially Bach. “If Stravinsky knew their works as well as I do,” Busoni responded, “he would love them as much as I.”

The New Music of the early 20th century is now as classical as Mozart—and even the avant garde of the 1960s is half a century old. This month, some of the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen are receiving rare performances on London’s South Bank. I own two volumes signed by Stockhausen: a study of the composer by Karl Wörner and a volume of miscellaneous texts: Texte zur Musik, 1963-1970—a presentation copy, with a dedication in German: “To Tim, looking forward to working together, regards Karlheinz St.” It is dated: “31 Oct. 1971, on the day of your arrival”. (I surmise that both books belonged to his translator, Tim Nevill.) One of his texts is a plaidoyer for homosexuality, illegal in West Germany until 1969. At least homosexuals don’t cause overpopulation, he writes. Stockhausen himself was a married father of four.

Stockhausen’s “cosmic” works are conceived on the largest possible scale, dwarfing anything else, before or since; and his collected writings now run to 17 volumes, making him even more prolific than Wagner. Born in 1928, he was too young to fight but served as a stretcher-bearer. His depressed and institutionalised mother was murdered under the euthanasia programme; his father, a teacher, was killed fighting for Hitler. The Nazi past was thus very much present in his life, yet his oeuvre is too abstract to address it directly. As the last practitioner of the Gesamtkunstwerk (as Wagner called his “total works of art”), a line that begins with St Hildegard, Stockhausen deserves to be revisited. But he does not deserve to be forgiven for describing 9/11 as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”. That effusion was worthy of Wagner at his worst.

To create from nothing is the prerogative of God, what theologians call creatio ex nihilo. There is something divine about those who can compose words and music, or even combine both. But the only word for those who deliberately abuse their gifts is: satanic.

The post Virtuosos of the written word appeared first on Standpoint.

Just as Kafka’s nightmares still haunt Prague, so Kierkegaard is the soul in torment whose remains lie in Copenhagen but whose pseudonymous spirit has never been laid to rest. He is the philosopher of angst and dread: our inconsolable Doppelgänger, the conscience-stricken companion of modern consciousness, who, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, implores us: “List, list, O list!”

We live in an age of introspection. For old guides for the perplexed, this means a new lease of life. But if the majority of these gurus are male, their readers and interpretersare increasingly likely to be female — and this gives rise to a different hermeneutic perspective. Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard is one of the best biographies of modern masters by a new generation of women scholars. Another outstanding example, which appeared a few months ago, is Sue Prideaux’s I am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (Faber, £25). She has already written lives of Strindberg and Munch.

What is refreshing about these female critics is their ability to empathise with solitary, depressive, even suicidal men such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, while avoiding the trap of making them larger than life. Male biographers of these pioneers often succumb to the temptation to turn their subjects into heroic, if tragic, supermen; but one only has to peer fleetingly into their tortured lives to realise that the quotidian reality must have been very different. Myopia and misogyny, hypochondria and hypersensitivity, neuralgia and neurosis: both were borderline sociopaths, preachers and conversationalists of genius but almost insufferable as colleagues, friends or lovers. Both used writing as therapy to relieve their loneliness and suffering, but also to sublimate their frustrations and aggressions. To modern eyes there is something irresistibly comical about these intellectual Übermenschen, right down to their eccentric hairstyles: Kierkegaard with his six-inch-high quiff, Nietzsche with his trademark tea-strainer moustache.

Yet these men turned their physical frailty into something positive, even dynamic, which the women who knew them well were the first to appreciate. Lou Andreas-Salomé — the young woman to whom Nietzsche proposed, whom he designated as his beloved disciple, and who later became one of Freud’s — diagnosed him thus: “He is the cause of his own self-induced illness.”

Bizarrely, these two modern monks identified with Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard rarely missed a performance of Mozart’s opera, and perhaps his best-known work remains the “Seducer’s Diary” section of Either/Or, which made the book a succès de scandale. As for Nietzsche, he saw the Don as a fearless seeker of forbidden knowledge, ready to risk eternal damnation for the sake of proclaiming the terrible truth about existence.

Yet intelligence is an aphrodisiac: despite their unprepossessing appearance, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche displayed such intellectual confidence that plenty of clever, self-educated female contemporaries were drawn to them. Carlisle depicts the young Søren entrancing both girls and older ladies; they flocked to his funeral.

Perhaps the best friend Nietzsche ever had was Malwida von Meysenbug, an aristocratic revolutionary who was also an acolyte of Garibaldi and tutor to the daughters of Alexander Herzen. Prideaux points out that “all his life [Nietzsche] valued intelligent women, making close and enduring friendships with them.” Even his deeply sinister sister Elisabeth — the literary executor from hell, whose machinations sabotaged his posthumous reputation — began, Prideaux reminds us, as an intelligent girl. She alienated her devoted brother by adopting the role of a shallow, snobbish anti-Semite, later to exploit his helpless, psychotic husk.

Yet Nietzsche was also capable of the notorious passage in Also Sprach Zarathustra: “You go to women? Do not forget the whip.” This crass remark (uttered by “an old woman”) has become associated with a photograph of Lou brandishing a whip over Nietzsche and his friend Paul Rée (who was also in love with her). Long afterwards people asked her if she and Nietzsche had ever kissed. “I no longer remember,” she would reply. Lou had many lovers in her long life; Nietzsche perhaps none, apart from a couple of prostitutes from whom he contracted gonorrhoea (not syphilis, as diagnosed by his doctors and fictionalised by Thomas Mann).

Kierkegaard had likewise made his own religious melancholia into the Archimedean point from which he would move the earth. Late in life, Regine — who outlived her fiancé by half a century — gave interviews about their engagement which suggest that she bore no grudge, but perhaps preferred Kierkegaard as a writer rather than a husband.

At the time she did not let him go lightly, however. As Carlisle observes, her own beloved father, a distinguished councillor of state, was also plagued by a depressive temperament and Regine believed that she could cope with the challenges that Kierkegaard’s affliction posed. Carlisle’s evidence implies that the underlying reason why he broke the engagement — with all the opprobrium that this was bound to arouse among the haute bourgeoisie of Copenhagen — was not his religious scruples, but his resolve to be a man of letters rather than a pastor in the established church.

Like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard never accepted the responsibilities of a husband or father, nor those of office, refusing to become one of Ibsen’s “pillars of society”. Kierkegaard was born wealthy (though his father was a parvenu peasant and his mother illiterate) and his inheritance lasted just long enough. Nietzsche was the son of a poor pastor’s widow, but a wunderkind, just 24 when offered a professorial chair. It was his good fortune that, having taken early retirement on health grounds aged 32, his university generously paid him a modest pension for the rest of his life. The life of a rentier, a novelty of their prosperous capitalist era, made such subversive existences possible.

Both these philosophers had short, intense writing careers, lasting less than two decades: Kierkegaard died at 42; Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse at 44, from which he never recovered. Their lives followed a similar arc, the ideas bursting forth in a crescendo of intense creativity. Much of their best work appeared posthumously. It is a curiosity in the history of ideas that the same person, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes, was the first to put Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the map of modern thought. Yet there was no cross-fertilisation: despite the fact that German translations of Kierkegaard’s works were already appearing in Nietzsche’s lifetime, it seems that the latter never read the former.

Would the German have seen his Danish counterpart, not as a precursor but as a foe?The two nations had just fought a war in 1864 over the notorious Schleswig-Holstein question. Nietzsche twice volunteered for military service. But he was no German nationalist, any more than Kierkegaard was a Danish one. They both saw themselves as Europeans, long before “Europe” became an ideology.

Both these iconoclasts were products of the great efflorescence of German philosophy that began with Kant in the mid-18th century and included Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Hegel. But both also reacted violently against these idols of idealism. In 1841 Kierkegaard travelled to Berlin to hear public lectures given by the aged Schelling, whose audiences included Engels, Bakunin and Alexander von Humboldt. Kierkegaard later wrote to his brother: “I am too old to attend lectures, just as Schelling is too old to give them. His whole doctrine of potencies displays the highest degree of impotence.” Carlisle notes that Kierkegaard saw German academic philosophy as a flight from existence, a mere commerce in ideas. Nietzsche was no less dismissive, ultimately rejecting even his early hero Schopenhauer as inimical to life.

The fact that both grasped with unprecedented clarity was that Christianity, as they encountered it in the liberal theology of their day, had been hollowed out. The authority of scripture had been undermined by German textual scholarship, especially The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss; the authority of the Church had been undermined by secularism; and God had become remote and inaccessible. Each individual must endure existence unconsoled, unjustified and alone.

On Christianity, though, the Norsemen of the Apocalypse disagree. The presence of God is as palpable on every page of Kierkegaard as is His absence from every page of Nietzsche. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard identifies with Abraham, ordered to sacrifice his only son, to show that “only the one who is in anxiety finds rest, only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac”. The choice is between two kinds of courage: that of the knight of resignation, who must live without hope, and the knight of faith, who leaps like a ballet dancer and lands safely by divine grace. “What matters,” Kierkegaard wrote a few days before he died, “is to get as close to God as possible.”

For Nietzsche — a classicist who had been persuaded by Strauss’s dissection of the New Testament texts that Jesus was “human, all too human” — the only choice possible was to live without faith. He identified with Dürer’s knight errant, who rides on regardless of Death and the Devil in the quest for truth. And in The Gay Science he proclaims his most important insight: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him.”

It is significant that Nietzsche puts this passage into the mouth of a madman: significant not just because of his own later madness, but because he had always adopted different personae, constantly reinventing himself even in the twilight of his sanity. As a young man he wrote: “I am always having to impersonate someone — the teacher, the philologist, the human being.” In 1889, just before he collapsed in a Turin piazza at the sight of a horse being flogged, he dispatched megalomaniacal missives to everyone from his mother to the King of Italy, including one to his old colleague Jacob Burckhardt, beginning: “Actually I would much rather be a Basel professor than God . . . Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismarck and all anti-Semites done away with.” Euphoria aside, it was a cry for help. Burckhardt showed another of their circle in Basel, Franz Overbeck, who informed Nietzsche that he was coming to the rescue. The reply, signed “Dionysus”, declared: “I am just having all anti-Semites shot . . .” We still do not know quite what precipitated Nietzsche’s breakdown; only that he never recovered.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Kierkegaard’s posthumous repute fared better than Nietzsche’s mainly because the Dane remained a Christian — albeit an unorthodox one, whose writings were deemed too scandalous to mention at his funeral — whereas the German saw Judaeo-Christian morality as the root of all evil. As we have seen, even the psychotic Nietzsche wanted no truck with anti-Semites. But his assault on the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus lent itself to the Nazis’ nefarious purposes. Prideaux tells that grimly fascinating story very well. That there has been a Nietzsche renaissance since 1945 is of course to be welcomed, but his influence has been ambivalent. The seer of Sils-Maria, who taught that there are no facts, only interpretations, remains as hard to interpret as ever.

Of these two Norsemen of the Apocalypse, Kierkegaard had the less troubling afterlife. He became the inspiration, not merely for schools of radical theology and existentialist philosophy, but for “mindfulness”. His beautiful prayer, which serves as the envoi to Clare Carlisle’s book, ends with a plea to the Almighty that “we might from the lily and the bird learn silence, obedience, joy!”

Philosopher of the Heart:
The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
By Clare Carlisle
Allen Lane, 339pp, £25

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Dementia, though, is much more than a metaphor: it is a disease, the disease of our time. In Britain, it is easily the most common cause of death for women; for men, too, it will soon overtake heart disease. If it were infectious, dementia would long since have been declared an pandemic. According to figures cited in Nicci Gerrard’s new book, nearly a million people are now known to be living with some form of dementia in the UK — three times as many as in the 1970s. There are likely to be as many again who are undiagnosed. In the US, the figure is 5.5 million; in the world, according to the WHO, about 47 million. These numbers will multiply many times as the global population ages; a third of all Japanese are now over 60.

The cost of caring for people with dementia is astronomical: in the UK, some £26 billion (more than the combined cost of treating cancer, heart disease and stroke); worldwide, about a trillion US dollars. But these are only the quantifiable costs. They do not take account of the toll on the army of carers, often the spouses, partners and children of the afflicted. A third of them will have been performing that role for at least five years; a fifth of them for more than ten years. Most carers toil away unpaid, unseen and unrecognised.

There is little consolation to be gleaned from the bare facts. But Nicci Gerrard has found much to cheer us by delving beneath and beyond the grim statistics to find meaning in misery. Above all, she tells stories: of human courage in the face of insupportable loss; of human kindness in the face of despair and desolation; of humanity shining through the indignities of a dehumanising disease. What Dementia Teaches Us about Love is a beautifully written treatise that more than lives up to its promise — but it might also have been titled What Love Teaches Us about Dementia. For this book is, at its heart, a daughter’s memorial to her father: a man who by the end might have lost his memory but whom she is determined shall not be forgotten.

At this point, I should declare an interest. I have been a friend of the author and of her husband and co-writer of the “Nicci French” thrillers, Sean French, for many years. I respect Nicci’s integrity as a journalist for the Observer, but I learned many things about her from her book. For example, she has trained to be a celebrant at the funerals of the unchurched. It is a noble calling which has given her many insights into death: how we do or do not prepare for it, endure it and mourn it, especially in the case of those whose lives may seem to have been extinguished long before they have departed.

Her father John, by her account a gentle man and a true gentleman, died some five years ago. After a decade of living with dementia, he had been treated in hospital for ulcers, but due to rigidly enforced visiting rules was left alone for much of his five-week stay. Deprived of family, he returned a ghost and died soon after. Since then, Nicci has mounted a campaign to persuade hospitals to allow carers the right to stay with patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. These patients’ mental vulnerability renders the dislocation of finding themselves isolated from loved ones acutely distressing, damaging and not infrequently fatal. John’s Campaign has helped to change the attitude of hospital staff towards dementia carers into a humane presence to be embraced and a human resource to be welcomed.

For the men and women in white coats, Nicci is evidently a force to be reckoned with. She tells the story of how, after her father died, she was in France when her widowed mother suddenly collapsed. In hospital, she was denied access to the unconscious, possibly dying patient, protested, saw her briefly and was told to return next day. She stood her ground; more senior staff were called to eject her, but she kept saying, “Non.” Having acquiesced in medical authority in her father’s case, with lethal results, she wouldn’t leave her mother this time, no matter what the doctor ordered:

There was a French shrug, a long frown of disapproval. I could see myself through his eyes, a dishevelled, hyperbolic, out-of-place woman with a chipped tooth and bags under her eyes. I stayed the night . . .

The ability to see herself through others’ eyes is one of Nicci’s most striking qualities as a writer.

Immersion in her father’s condition — and caring for dementia is an immersive experience — leads Nicci to wonder whether she too is suffering its early onset: “When does forgetfulness that is natural and part of getting older become something more sinister?” For an answer, she goes to the Kensington and Westminster memory clinic run by Dr Claudia Wald, a consultant psychiatrist. There Nicci has her memory tested, thoroughly and scientifically. She gets quite a few answers wrong; even as she remembers the name of the Prime Minister, “I am talking in an oddly jocose, self-conscious manner that I don’t like at all.” At the end, the doctor delivers her verdict: “You’re fine.”

“She feels a kind place to be,” Nicci says of Dr Wald, whose wise remarks glitter throughout her book. I can endorse that judgment: she is also my parents’ psychiatrist. Nearly three years ago, my father, Paul Johnson, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia by that same Dr Wald. As a family, we had lived with his gradual decline into this terminal and incurable illness for longer than that, but it is only when the sentence is delivered that its finality sinks in.

He was — still is — a historian, among other things. There is a particular poignancy in a man who has lived all his life in, by and from his memory being deprived of it in old age. Nicci quotes St Augustine’s Confessions, at the dawning of introspection in Western civilisation: “All this goes on inside me, in the vast cloisters of my memory. In it are the sky, the earth and the sea, ready at my summons . . . In it I meet myself as well.” My father’s cloisters of memory were once among the most capacious of his generation. Now his world has contracted to his home, his carers, his family.

And his self? Is it still him? Yes, of course it is, but what is the irreducible essence of personal identity? What is left when one facet after another of a personality is stripped away? Much of Nicci’s book is devoted to exploring the answers to such questions. She tells dozens of dementia stories; she visits residential homes, hospitals and clinics; she talks to patients and professionals, carers and companions, artists and musicians who bring the seemingly lifeless back to life. Though its subject matter may seem the most depressing one possible, this is by no means a depressing book.

Those with a genetic disposition to dementia — and for most of us, there will be at least one member of the extended family — will shudder at the thought of it. With advancing years, it becomes the shadow that is just beyond the field of vision, a spectral presence at our feast of worldly pleasures.

Not long ago, I was on a London bus with a suitcase packed for a trip to Manchester. I told myself that I would not forget it, that to leave it on the bus would be disastrous. Having had this conversation with myself, I saw my bus stop at a Tube station approach. And then, as I rose, a text appeared on my phone that completely distracted my attention. It was not until I had traversed the capital by Underground, that I realised: I had indeed left my case on the bus. It was a nightmare, but fortunately for me I eventually located the suitcase many miles away, at the Metroline bus garage in Uxbridge. There a kindly young member of staff, Mathilda, was waiting for me to collect it.

As I rode through Betjeman’s Metroland, past RAF Nissen huts into the landscape of my childhood, I could not banish the thought: was this egregious lapse of memory the first warning sign of impending dementia? Had I, who as a teenager had once given a simultaneous display of 15 blindfold games of chess, now found my memory so unfit for purpose that I was incapable even of travelling from A to B without losing a suitcase?

Like Nicci Gerrard, I was probably succumbing to “worried-wellness”, a characteristic of the children or grandchildren of the afflicted. As a society, we should be worried about dementia, but in a constructive way that accepts its ubiquity, if not its normality. We cannot cure Alzheimer’s or the other forms of dementia — yet. But we can treat them and ameliorate their symptoms; with the best care, people can slow down their own deterioration for years.

When I first met Iris Murdoch in the mid-1980s, she was already eccentric but still writing some of her best novels and philosophical works. By the time I saw her last, a decade later, she was clearly in the grip of Alzheimer’s, though she was not diagnosed until 1997, two years before she died. Her husband John Bayley’s memoir, later made into the film Iris, did much to remove the taboo surrounding dementia. They were followed by the late Terry Pratchett, Prunella Scales and hundreds more.

To conclude, two images of dementia. The first is recounted by Nicci Gerrard: an old man standing at a busy junction in North London, waving a fork at the passing traffic. Assuming he was demented, people ignored him, but he had in fact been a psychoanalyst and later a musicologist. She does not name him, but he was evidently the late Alan Tyson, a leading expert on Mozart and Beethoven. Almost certainly, in his own world, he was hearing and perhaps conducting their music.

The second image is my own: a frail Margaret Thatcher being helped to a seat in Westminster Hall by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It was 2010 and she had come to hear a lecture by Pope Benedict. Her mind was failing but her spirit was undaunted.

So, yes, I’m afraid we do need to talk about dementia — much more honestly than we have done so far. About the financial cost (there already is a dementia tax, disguised as spending on the NHS and social care) and about the human cost. What does dementia teach us about love? Above all, this: most of us will need our wives, husbands, children and grandchildren to look after us one day. So we had better love them now as we hope they will love us — unconditionally.

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His subject is actually neither time nor power, but something even more evanescent: how those who wielded power were influenced by their sense of history. More specifically, Clark investigates four case studies: Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich II of Prussia, known to posterity as the Great Elector and Frederick the Great respectively; Otto von Bismarck, who re-founded the Reich; and Adolf Hitler, who left it in ruins. Here these historical protagonists are not primarily seen from a political but from a temporal perspective — as it were, through an hourglass darkly.

If you find not only the subject matter but the style of Time and Power hard to grasp, you are unlikely to be alone. Though Clark is a master of narrative, as his highly acclaimed histories of Prussia (Iron Kingdom) and the origins of the First World War (The Sleepwalkers) demonstrate, here he is addressing (and impressing) his academic peers. At times, the prose gets bogged down in jargon (“diachronic”, “palimpsestic”, “chronopolitics” and “chronoscape”). At others, it bristles with polemical asides on Brexit, Trump, climate change and “the current wave of temporal uncertainty and disorientation”.

Yet the broad thrust of the argument is sustained with a scholarship so dense and an eye for analogies so acute as almost to disarm criticism. For the small number of academic specialists and the doubtless even smaller number of amateurs (among whom I count myself) who relish keeping up with “the temporal turn” in contemporary historiography, this book will be a feast for the gods. For those who like their history served plain, Clark’s treatise may be less ambrosial, perhaps even indigestible.

For my own addiction to what might look to non-historians like self-indulgence, I blame Hugh Trevor-Roper. When I was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the 1970s, a degree in Modern History required one to sit a Preliminary examination at the end of the first term. This course, the brainchild of the then Regius Professor Trevor-Roper, was intended to inspire us with a love of history by acquainting us with the greatest practitioners of the craft. It was a baptism of fire even for privately schooled students; for a state school swot like me, it was an ordeal — but also a revelation.

Apart from Gibbon and Macaulay, we were expected to read at least two historians in other languages; for me, with no Latin and less Greek, that meant, in their entirety, Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution and Jacob Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (“Reflections on World History”). Looking back, mastering all this was a lot to expect even geeks to master in eight weeks. Today, Oxford allows three terms for Prelims and historiography has been demoted. Foreign languages are optional and set texts are far shorter; Burckhardt has been quietly dropped.

You do not need to have lived under Trevor-Roper’s ancien régime to enjoy reflecting on History with a capital H. Nor do you have to share the present Regius Professor’s politics. “This book,” he tells us, “was written during the crescendo and triumph of the Brexit campaign in Britain . . . [a campaign] animated by the appeal to an idealised past in which the ‘English-speaking peoples’ had effortlessly dominated the world.” On both sides of the Atlantic, Clark claims, “new pasts are being fabricated to replace old futures”. This book, he concedes, will “do little to diminish the contemporary allure of such manipulations, but it may at least help us to read them more attentively”.

The background to Time and Power is the rise of Prussia from a remote backwater to great power status. Clark begins with “the History Machine”: Friedrich Wilhelm, the “Great Elector” — so-called because he belonged to the smallest electorate in history, the four temporal and three spiritual princes who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. He shows how the Elector mobilised “the future against the past” by confronting the libertas of the estates with the necessitas of the state — in other words, raison d’état. In mid-17th-century England, Parliament was humbling the Stuart monarchy by defending liberties hallowed by tradition. In Prussia, meanwhile, the estates’ appeal to the past was trumped by the permanent state of emergency dictated by an embattled present. Friedrich Wilhelm’s military prowess conferred on him the nimbus not of the hapless Charles I, but of the formidable Cromwell.

In his concluding tour d’horizon of the present day, Clark draws an analogy between the Great Elector and Emmanuel Macron — a juxtaposition that would, I suspect, have surprised both men. The French president would doubtless prefer to be compared to Frederick the Great, Voltaire’s patron, friend and foe — an intellectual who wrote, conversed and made love in French.

But Macron’s record so far does not remotely stand comparison with old Fritz. His 2017 speech at the Sorbonne (where else?) urged Europe to end its “civil war” in order to “construct . . . genuine sovereignty”. Clark sees parallels here with the Great Elector’s subjection of his estates. Macron warned that “for too long we were sure in our belief that the past would not come back”. This sense of foreboding about the return of a terrible past is comparable to the Elector’s use of the Thirty Years’ War, which had ravaged Germany early in his reign, as a warning of what might happen if his subjects defied him. Macron’s deployment of the past to justify the aggrandisement of power — in this case the power of the Europe at the expense of the nation states — is surely no less of a “fabrication” or “manipulation” than Boris Johnson’s or Trump’s. The only difference is that Clark’s sympathies lie with the EU.

Friedrich Wilhelm also anticipated present-day leaders by employing one of the leading scholars of his day, Samuel Pufendorf, to write an official history of his “life and deeds”, which chronicled his conflicts with and triumph over the estates — and incidentally established the sobriquet “Great Elector” (Grosser Kurfürst) by which he is still known to posterity. No doubt Macron would be glad of a similarly versatile and obliging court historiographer — step forward Bernard-Henri Lévy — but any attempt to attach “great” to his name risks the same fate as that of the Great Elector’s contemporary, Louis XIV: despite all the efforts of royalist historians, “Louis le Grand” has never stuck.

“The Historian King”, on Frederick the Great, astonishes by the virtuosity of an author worthy of a subject who was himself a virtuoso in the use of power. From his unpromising origins as history’s mostly notorious case of paternal abuse — the young Fritz’s ogre of a father had his best friend executed in front of his eyes — he became the very model of an Enlightenment despot. Clark shows how Frederick was indebted for his “politics of stasis”, governed by immutable, timeless laws, to the Newtonian physics of his day. His brilliant historical writings enabled him to exercise absolute control over his posthumous reputation.

Frederick’s determination to escape from his father overshadowed his life; only in this context does the full significance of his homosexuality become clear. The ambiguous legacy of a figure simultaneously apostrophised as “the soldier king” and “the philosopher king” extends even into the Third Reich, with its camp cult of masculinity and paranoid persecution of “perversion”. Just how far Frederick’s expression of his gay identity could go becomes clear in an extraordinary poem in French, “La Jouissance” (“Lust”), fleetingly referred to here and mistakenly described as “lost” in Iron Kingdom. Dedicated to “Monsieur Algarotti, the swan of Padua”, the poem fantasises about his lover in the arms of “Cloris” and culminates in an untranslatable description of orgasm that is too good not to quote: Baiser, jouir, sentir, soupirer et mourir,/Ressusciter, baiser, revoler au plaisir.

Clark’s chapter on Bismarck, “Boatman on the River of Time” is, if possible, even better. He reproduces an 1875 cartoon of the Iron Chancellor playing chess with “Pio Nono”, Pope Pius IX, at the height of the Kulturkampf between Bismarck and the Catholic Church. This leads to a marvellous digression on chess and the accelerating tempo of modern politics, applying the profound theories of Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world chess champion, to Bismarck’s Realpolitik. Chess metaphors are ubiquitous in history, but never more revealing than during the era of “blood and iron”.

In “Time of the Nazis”, Clark investigates museums and monuments to contrast the Third Reich’s technocratic, even futuristic, modernity with its leaders’ atavistic regression into an “ahistorical, racial continuum” that made the Holocaust seem like an imperative. Clark lets the German historical profession off lightly: he argues that the Nazis were too obsessed with the prehistoric past to focus on rewriting the historical one: “Oddly enough, the books and articles produced by the professional historians of the Nazi era are the last place we should look for traces of [ideological] manipulations.” Yet history obviously mattered hugely to the Nazis: why, otherwise, would they saturate a highly educated society with propaganda based on the idea that the Germans had a uniquely tragic yet noble past, as a prelude to their uniquely glorious destiny? Indeed, that view of German history outlived the regime for at least a generation, not least among many historians. The abysmal depravity of the Third Reich eludes Clark’s study of its historicity — perhaps because, unlike Frederick and Bismarck, Hitler never really comes into focus here. Radical evil defies abstract analysis.

I hope Professor Clark’s Time and Power will find readers outside the guild of his peers. Alerting us to a scholarly Meisterwerk such as this is what a magazine like Standpoint is for. And there is much to be learned from these erudite studies of “the warping of temporality by power, the appropriation of historicity by the claimers of sovereignty”. I only wish that academics would broaden their minds sufficiently to examine their own political prejudices with the same mordant alacrity that they devote to others. Even Regius Professors.

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But it was an era when outlandish ideas somehow became reality. When on November 9, 1989, the Communist Party spokesman Günter Schabowski said at a press conference that East Germans would be allowed to travel to the West, I was the awkward Englishman who asked the question: “What will happen now with the Berlin Wall?” He had no answer, but his people gave him one: they tore it down.

Fast forward 16 years: in 2005, after doing everything from Literary Editor at The Times to Associate Editor at the Telegraph, I found myself suddenly once again a freelance. If I were ever to realise my ambition of founding a magazine, now was the time. My assets were few: an unusual mix of transatlantic contacts and European experience, a scholarly hinterland and an equal passion for politics and culture. I fondly imagined that these modest credentials equipped me to defend Western civilisation.

I did have role models. My lifelong obsession with Continental thought meant that I had spent countless hours steeped in such journals as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, Raymond Aron’s La France Libre, German expressionist magazines such as Der Sturm and Die Aktion, or more recent ones such as Merkur, edited by that grand old man of letters Karl Heinz Bohrer, and Commentaire, founded by Aron and edited by Jean-Claude Casanova. Then there is Die Fackel: financed, edited and written in Vienna by Karl Kraus from 1899 to 1936. Though his eviscerating satire of all things Jewish resembles a charismatic kind of cannibalism, Kraus is an irresistibly magnetic figure, and the little red booklets of Die Fackel (“The Torch”) remain peerless among periodicals.

Among the great English-language magazines of the past were T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and above all Encounter, to which I had been just in time to contribute before Mel Lasky, its last editor, closed it down at the end of the Cold War. I had also admired and contributed to many American magazines and newspapers. Their editors and columnists — Norman and John Podhoretz, Neal Kozodoy, Seth Lipsky, Roger Kimball, John O’Sullivan, Rusty Reno, Bret Stephens, George Weigel, the late Charles Krauthammer and many others — were and are my friends and mentors.

Magazines are defined by two factors: people and events. I was blessed to find a group of outstanding people who gathered together to help me create Standpoint. Its distinctive “look” was established by the graphic designer Simon Esterson and a succession of artists, above all Michael Daley, who succeeded André Carrillo as our cover artist early on and has remained ever since. Among the original team who have stayed involved, honourable mentions go to Michael Mosbacher, our Managing Editor, Miriam Gross and Emily Read, all of whose contributions went far beyond the purely journalistic. Soon after the launch in June 2008, Bob Low joined us, bringing his wisdom and experience to the task of ensuring that every article was edited to the highest standard. We had a succession of younger recruits, too, taking charge of production, among whom I would single out Oliver Wiseman, now editor of CapX, and Boadicea Meath Baker, who has also developed a unique style of food column. A special mention goes to Alan Bekhor, who came to me soon after I left the Telegraph, proposed to fund the magazine I had dreamt of for so long and invited me to edit it. Without his loyal financial support and commitment to editorial independence, Standpoint would never have taken off.

I was fortunate with the people I was able to gather together; but what about events? Standpoint was defined by two great world-historical upheavals: 9/11 and the Great Recession. The global jihad had already long since thrown down its challenge to the West by the time we picked up the gauntlet, but no other magazine had emerged in Britain, at least, to address the moral vacuum that had by then manifested itself. As for the financial crisis: it blew up a few weeks after our first issue in June 2008. We had, it turned out, picked a hell of time to launch a business.

Standpoint was no ordinary business: we had charitable status, courtesy of our publisher, the Social Affairs Unit. But this arrangement did not insulate us against the economic storms that eviscerated entire economies. The adverse environment made even the wealthiest philanthropists think twice about supporting a not-for-profit enterprise that in their view ought to stand on its own feet. Throughout its existence, Standpoint has struggled to keep afloat — and pointing out that highbrow periodicals never make money cut no ice with potential donors. Contributors occasionally had to wait for months to be paid; for them it was no consolation that the Editor and Managing Editor often had to wait for years. Editing a magazine is (or ought to be) a 24/7 job, but it sometimes felt as if far too much of the time that should have been devoted to writing, commissioning and editing was actually spent on fundraising.

The cover of the first edition of “Standpoint” , June 2008

Despite all these impediments, Standpoint got off the ground with a splendid party at the Wallace Collection. Speakers included Sir Tom Stoppard, Michael Gove and Frank Field, while the great and good turned out in force, including some legends who are no longer among the living, such as the late V.S. Naipaul and Robert Conquest, who flew in from California in his mid-nineties. Other Standpoint contributors whose memory I cherish include Hugh Thomas, Geza Vermes, John Gross, Geoffrey Hill, Chris Woodhead, Robert Wistrich, Helen Szamuely, Alexander Chancellor, Anthony Howard, J.W.M. Thompson, Martin Gilbert, Simon Gray, Dan Jacobson, Walter Laqueur, Bryan Lask, Nicholas Mosley, Raymond Carr, Pam Neville-Sington, Michael Novak, Berenika Stefanska, Rodney Leach, Ken Minogue, George Weidenfeld, David Watkin and Philip French. This is an impressive list, by any standard. These names are of course far outnumbered by writers who are still with us, too numerous to mention here, to all of whom I owe profound gratitude.

From the very first issue, Standpoint set itself the task of raising the level of intellectual life in a country that was already suffering from what Clive James, one of our regulars, called “cultural amnesia”. For that issue David Hockney, another member of the editorial advisory board, and Matthew Carr gave us new artwork. Jung Chang and Simon Sebag Montefiore explained to me in a Dialogue why Mao and Stalin still matter. (When I bumped into Jung Chang recently, she said that her warning a decade ago that Mao’s Communist Party had not changed its character was now even more relevant, in the era of Xi Jinping: “They destroyed Chinese civilisation. Now they are coming for the West.”) Some of our first columnists are still with us a decade later (Douglas Murray, Tim Congdon, Nick Cohen), as are several feature writers (Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, Alasdair Palmer, Andrew Roberts). Guest writers included Craig Brown, Julie Burchill, Andrew Marr, Antonia Fraser. In the Civilisation section, Jonathan Bate lamented the decline of universities, while Bob Conquest contributed unpublished verse, not all of it bawdy. The books pages featured Charles Moore, John Gross, Raymond Seitz and Noel Malcolm.

The late V.S. Naipaul (left) and Alan Bekhor (right) at the magazine’s launch party at the Wallace Collection

Early issues established our abiding, idiosyncratic and nonconformist themes. Resistance to Putin and Islamism, wariness of China and the EU, scepticism of political correctness and climate alarmism. On the latter, Oliver Letwin and Nigel Lawson had a wager which caused much amusement; Oliver paid up with a good grace. The playwright Simon Gray made positively his last — highly entertaining — appearance in dialogue with Charles Spencer and me; he died shortly afterwards. We broke a taboo as well as a big story by running Julie Bindel’s exposure of grooming gangs in Rotherham, later followed up by The Times. Robert Skidelsky debated the relevance of Keynes to the financial crisis with our columnist Tim Congdon, whose sustained critique of the role of Gordon Brown and the Bank of England has stood the test of time. Charles Murray, Chris Woodhead and Katharine Birbalsingh demolished the shibboleths of the “educational romantics”. Our sometime columnist Lionel Shriver and the demographer David Coleman debated mass migration in 2009, long before it upended the politics of Europe and America.

We published a galaxy of transatlantic talent: literary criticism by Cynthia Ozick, intellectual history by Gertrude Himmelfarb and short stories by Joseph Epstein; Conquest on Solzhenitsyn and Niall Ferguson on “Chimerica”; Midge Decter on Sarah Palin and Paul Wolfowitz on Robert Kagan; George Weigel on Benedict XVI, as well as John Bolton on Obama’s “post-American presidency” — those who wish to understand Trump’s foreign policy would do well to read his National Security Advisor’s articles for Standpoint. The same applies to those by Myron Ebell, who set the direction of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement.

The question of values, what it is to be civilised, has always been at the heart of our mission. Music, for example, has always figured prominently, from the early columns of the singer Ian Bostridge to the more recent ones of the composer James MacMillan. In Michael Prodger’s columns, in features by art historians such as David Ekserdjian, in illustrations throughout, art illuminates our pages. Theatre found its chronicler in Anne McElvoy, while Nick Cohen and David Herman have dissected television. Standpointy heads have unlocked scientific realms as recondite as consciousness (Adam Zeman), anorexia (Bryan Lask) and mathematics (Mark Ronan). Nor have we neglected the erotica of restaurants (Lisa Hilton), the esoterica of wine (Saintsbury) and the arcana of chess (Dominic Lawson). It would be otiose to mention the many writers whom we have published on philosophy and religion: we have fought a rearguard action against the disenchantment of the world. Instead, we have sought to cultivate what Oakeshott called the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind: over the years dozens of poets have graced our pages, among them the late Geoffrey Hill, Clive James, Anthony Thwaite, John Fuller and Fiona Pitt-Kethley.

The most satisfying part of being an editor is discovering new talent. Among the many outstanding young writers that Standpoint has nurtured are Laura Freeman, Louis Amis, Ben Judah, Alexander Woolfson, Mara Delius (now literary editor of Die Welt), Daniel Hitchens and Jonathan Neumann, several of whom have gone on to write well-received books.

Standpoint has never tried to exclude anyone who subscribes to the values of Western civilisation. Our hugely popular Overrated and Underrated profiles have always been fair and measured. The magazine has provided a platform for thinkers across the political spectrum. There is no conservative monopoly: how could ideas passed down from Biblical times belong to any party or faction? Luminaries of the Left, from R.W. Johnson to Geoffrey Robertson and Julie Bindel, have avoided the danger of becoming a coterie or cabal. One of the most important stories we ever broke came when Maureen Lipman, a lifelong Labour voter, denounced Ed Miliband for allowing the metastasis of anti-Semitism within his party, two years before Jeremy Corbyn replaced him as leader. On Brexit, on Trump, we have eschewed one-sided advocacy; but we have never compromised on the fundamentals of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

I step aside now to make way for a new Editor, confident that Standpoint will continue to make its mark as an antidote to cultural amnesia and to survive as a distinctive melody in the melodrama of our time. Taking Irving Kristol at his word, I have a new idea and so am launching the first post-Brexit online magazine, TheArticle.com, but I shall continue to write for Standpoint for as long as I have anything useful to contribute.

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The European project was always a perpetual motion machine for the insatiable accumulation of powers, whose engineers jealously watch over the acquis communautaire like dragons guarding their hoard. In the absence of British influence, the stage is set for a display of full-scale Euro-triumphalism in the Valhalla of Brussels — followed in due course by Götterdämmerung, as the euro goes up in flames and they are overwhelmed by a flood of migration.

Lest such Wagnerian metaphors seem extravagant, consider the case of Angela Merkel. Not only are the German Chancellor and her husband votaries of the Master, but she has lately begun making repeated references to Schicksal (“Fate” or “Destiny”) in her speeches about Europe. Most recently, in her address to the European Parliament, she implicitly warned against dependence on the United States in defence and security: “The times when we could rely on others without reservation are over.” She went on, in more mystical vein: “That means we Europeans have to take our destiny in our own hands if we want to survive as a community.”

What exactly “destiny” signifies here is still obscure, but Mrs Merkel has reiterated this sentiment so many times that it clearly means a great deal to her. Europe, for those who love its history and culture, really does have a cosmic importance that goes far beyond politics.

In some profound sense, the cityscapes and landscapes of this continent belong to all of us who adhere to the civilisation of the West. A cultural memory is embodied in the stones of Venice, the ruins of Athens, the boulevards of Paris that is not exclusively the property of those who happen to live here and now, but rather connects past and future generations too. It has become more fashionable to denounce the legacy that we may bequeath than to reflect at what cost our forebears fought to preserve our civilisation. When we ponder the plight of posterity, we ignore at our peril the ordeals of our ancestry.

Respect, then, is due to the keepers of the European flame, in so far as they are the authentic heirs of the Classics so eloquently evoked by David Butterfield. And yet there are grave doubts about the basis on which they are proceeding, having refused to address our concerns — the concerns that have driven the British to become the first country ever to leave their institutions. We have no certainty that, once we have left the formal structures of the European Union, the leaders of the latter will adhere to the values that underpin our common civilisation. The same applies, of course, to us and to our cousins in the Anglosphere. But the history of the last century suggests that the English-speaking peoples are more firmly rooted in the soil of Western civilisation than our Continental partners. That is why it is perplexing that the custodians of the EU rebuffed the British. Their ingratitude towards their former liberators leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

The future of Western civilisation is bright nevertheless. A great reward awaits those who seize the day in order to unleash the energies of nation states that languished for too long under the tutelage of others. We have seen how the former satellites of the Soviet Union have flourished, even if their governments, like others, are fallible. We do not endorse any government, but the Orban regime in Hungary deserves a fair hearing rather than the vilification that is usually its lot. Hence we have given space to George Schöpflin, an Anglo-Hungarian conservative intellectual and Fidesz MEP, to explain why the move of the Central European University from Budapest to Vienna does not necessarily imply that Hungary is turning its back on the West.

One of the greatest interpreters of Western civilisation was the late René Girard, whose key concept of mimetic desire is outlined in his radio dialogue with Robert Pogue Harrison, published for the first time, with an introduction by Cynthia Haven. It is indeed by mimesis that, as Erich Auerbach demonstrated in his eponymous work more than 60 years ago, that civilisation progresses. But as numerous other articles and reviews in this double issue imply, in the process of imitating our predecessors we frequently transform their ideas into new ones. For that mimetic miracle to take place, however, our cultural palimpsest must be freely interpreted. The modern Marcuseans who seek to impose a new form of censorship or, worse, self-censorship on universities and ultimately all institutions must be resisted, as we discuss in the context of Jonathan Haidt’s new book.

I make no apology for reverting to October’s cover theme of the Left’s anti-Semitism. Never before in British history has a figure such as Jeremy Corbyn come close to accomplishing his utopian ambitions, adumbrated by Laszlo Solymar. Brexit may yet make the realisation of such a nightmare easier to imagine.

This is not the hour of Europe’s triumph. The advocates of an ever more grandiose Europe and of the nation state must ultimately be reconciled. The only plausible context in which that can happen is a Western civilisation that embraces both. To defend that civilisation is and always has been the proud mission of this magazine.       

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Europe’s architectural simulacrum is the Arc de Triomphe: magnificent in conception, monumental in scale — and monstrous in practice. It was built to celebrate Napoleon’s victories; it was the high point of Hitler’s triumphal tour of Paris. Our continent has witnessed the cruelest spectacles in human history, from religious persecution to world war and genocide. Now its most ambitious political organisation so far, the European Union, claims to set an example to the world, undertaking the greatest political experiment of all time by banishing not merely violence itself but the intellectual causes of violence, above all nationalism. In practice, though, these pacific claims are belied by the quasi-imperial tendency to centralisation that is in constant tension with the centrifugal forces of national, religious or cultural identity.

All these conflicting emotions swirled around last month’s centenary of Armistice Day, the end of the Great War. In London, the annual ceremony took place at the Cenotaph, with the Queen (now 92 and the only head of state to have actively participated in one of the world wars) watching from a balcony and the Prince of Wales laying a wreath on her behalf, and the German President also present — an unprecedented gesture that yet aroused no controversy. The Prime Minister of course attended too, giving her a good excuse to be the only absentee among the Allies from the commemoration in Paris.

This was a much grander affair, with 60 leaders including the presidents of Russia and the United States. It took place in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, surely the world’s most ostentatiously martial monument, even though the tomb of the unknown soldier lies beneath it. The highlight was neither prayers of reconciliation nor wreath-laying nor the two-minute silence, but a speech by Emmanuel Macron. It was a rare opportunity for the Président de la République quite literally to look down on the global elite, and he delivered an oration intended to remind the world that in France, at least, presidents still know the value of eloquence.

For Macron is, indeed, a fine orator in the florid, allusive, declamatory manner to which French statesmen, alone among those of the great powers, still adhere. It is a long speech, delivered in bad weather, and Donald Trump, to whom some of his most pointed remarks seem to be directed, looks as if he would probably rather be enduring the torments of Tartarus — which is after all the destination to which he believes Europe is headed. Macron, for his part, sees those who summon up Europe’s nationalist past as diabolical: “The old demons are resurgent, ready to accomplish their work of chaos and death.” The Great War, fought largely on French soil and from which France has never fully recovered, is deployed to maximum effect in support of Macron’s argument that the grand project of European Union must be protected at all costs against the demonic forces now ranged against it. For Macron, there is no contradiction between the destiny of France and that of Europe: “For patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of it.” Here he echoes his hero de Gaulle, who famously distinguished patriotism (“when love of your own people comes first”) from nationalism (“when hatred for people other than your own comes first”).

Our predecessors a century ago, Macron insists with only slight exaggeration, “already dreamed of a political Europe . . . the European Union, a union of free consent, never seen before in history, delivering us from our civil wars.” Alluding to Julien Benda’s 1927 polemic against the anti-Semitic and ultranationalist intellectuals of the Action Francaise, Macron declares war on “the new ‘trahison des clercs’ [treason of the intellectuals] which is at work”, accusing these latter-day traitors of feeding lies, injustice and obscurantism. His target here may include the American “alt-Right”, but perhaps also conservative French intellectuals such as Michel Houellebecq, Pascal Bruckner and Alain Finkielkraut, who have been less than enthusiastic about the European Union and indeed Macron himself. Invoking the prospect of a “new epoch”, he denounces those who “ruin this hope by their fascination with withdrawal (“le repli”), violence and domination”. This is his only allusion to Brexit, but the implicit hostility towards an ally to whom the French perhaps owe more than to any other is quite shocking. The president concludes his speech in the traditional way: “Vive la France!” For him there is no contradiction between a revival of French patriotism, expressed in a new form of conscription, and his vision of a new European civilisation that will exorcise the “demons” of nationalism once and for all.

Yet what are the chances of Macron’s vision coming to pass? Let us turn to Simon Jenkins, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals, who reiterates his rejection of a hard Brexit at every opportunity. For the launch of his excellent new book, A Short History of Europe:  From Pericles to Putin (Viking, £25), Sir Simon chose the Locarno Room of the Foreign Office, a grandiose hall so named after the 1925 treaties that marked the high water mark of European reconciliation after the Great War. By his count, Sir Simon observed, Britain had “left” Europe nine times over the last 2,000 years; but it had rejoined the Continent eight times. So the chances of this ninth Brexit being permanent were small.

Yet in his book, Jenkins delivers a devastating verdict on the leadership of the European Union and, by implication, on President Macron.

The EU’s political structure, fashioned by the Cold War, has become cumbersome and retrospective, gripped by a democratic deficit which no one has been able to bridge. It lacks a constitution to which its multitudinous subjects can give wholehearted assent. Europe’s leaders have been unable to achieve the balance so vital to regional stability, between state and superstate, locality and centre, the citizenship of a nation and the citizenship of Europe. Fifty years of centripetalism have given way to centrifugalism.

After surveying more than four millennia of European history, Jenkins concludes that

. . . since the fall of Rome, no power has come close to ruling this continent. Charlemagne did not do so, nor did the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors, nor France’s Napoleon, nor Germany’s Hitler, nor yet the commissioners of the European Union. If history teaches anything, it is that all attempts to straighten Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity” will fail. Europe’s peoples will not be put on bondage to a superior state, however liberal its intentions.

That last clause should resonate in the Élysée Palace. Macron may see himself as liberal in the classical sense of the word, which is neither the American meaning of “centre-Left”, nor the French one of “centre-Right”, but rather a wider commitment to economic, social and cultural freedom. Nobody doubts Macron’s intelligence, least of all Macron himself. But his mind is not open or broad or subtle enough to grasp the point that Jenkins presses home:

The EU has sought ever more power without consent. It can now only decay if it does not repatriate that power to its members. This currently includes control of borders and immigration, and thus a role, as members see it, in the evolving character of their societies.

The postwar European order aspired to emulate the United States. Unlike the American model, however, the European partners were unable to agree on a grand constitutional settlement that could be adjusted to suit new circumstances. Instead, like the United Nations they began with the end on which they did agree — Kant’s dream of perpetual peace. Unlike either the US or the UN, they fixed on a means to achieve their end: “ever closer union”. This process has become the raison d’être of the EU. For the opinion-formers of the Continent — who came close to committing civilisational suicide during the first half of the 20th century — in this case the end justifies the means. That is, the pursuit of peace justifies the inevitable sacrifice of sovereignty, liberty and democracy required by a process that concentrates power in the central institutions of the union. It is a pursuit that lacks any extrinsic validation: its legitimacy is intrinsic to the process. But as the threat of war receded, the pursuit of peace was superseded by that of power and prosperity. The EU became the bureaucracy we know today: the self-perpetuating machinery of a means unaware that it is no longer advancing the end for which it was created.

There is no doubt that Macron’s conception of Europe has been profoundly influenced by Charles de Gaulle. But in the 1950s and ’60s, de Gaulle could still claim, with some plausibility, that there was no contradiction between French patriotism and European idealism — as long as it was a confederal, not a federal, Europe. Not that the serious European federalists were having any of it. Altiero Spinelli, in his 1972 tract The European Alternative, praised the Brussels Commission for having enabled the European Community (as it then was) to survive “the long winter of de Gaulle”. “No other statesman, apart from him, believed in the effective possibility of European unification under the hegemony of the French state” — not the Commission and other European institutions. After de Gaulle fell in 1969, the path to a federal Europe was clear.

Today, however, President Macron has returned to the Gaullist theme of a Europe united under French leadership, but without the General’s caveat. His latest initiative is to revive the project of a European army, an old idea given new significance by the fact that he has won over Angela Merkel, who enthused about it in her recent address to the European Parliament. But Macron went further in justifying “a true European army”. In a speech delivered in Verdun, the Great War battlefield most laden with tragic significance for the French, the president justified his call to arms with a stark warning: “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America.” Donald Trump was outraged. “Very insulting,” he tweeted, “but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of Nato, which the US subsidises greatly!” The French were quick to clarify that Macron had not meant to suggest that he saw the US as an enemy, but his remarks, on the eve of a visit to France by the US president, were deliberately provocative: “When I see President Trump announcing that he’s quitting a major disarmament treaty which was formed after the 1980s euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security.” Macron had a point here, but his protest fell on deaf ears in Washington because Europe had ignored Russia’s treaty violations.

After these opening shots, the relationship between the two presidents plunged still further into bitterness after Macron’s speech at the Arc de Triomphe. Trump tweeted: “It was Germany in World Wars One & Two — How did that work out for France? They were starting to learn German in Paris before the US came along. Pay for Nato or not!” He then hit back at Macron’s contrast between patriotism and nationalism. “By the way, there is no country more Nationalist than France,” adding just for good measure: “MAKE FRANCE GREAT AGAIN!” Macron responded in a television interview: “Allies owe one another respect.” Stung by Trump’s “inelegant” reference to the defeat and occupation of France in 1940-44, Macron pointed out that the French had been the first to aid the United States, “our historic ally”, during its revolutionary war with Britain. “But being an ally doesn’t mean being a vassal.” No, but it does mean showing loyalty and solidarity. In 1966, at the height of the Cold War, de Gaulle abandoned Nato’s military command structures; France only rejoined under Sarkozy in 2009. Less than a decade later, Macron is emulating the General: evidently impatient with an unpredictable American administration, he has decided to replace an Atlanticist with a European structure. He seems more afraid of “demons” within the West than of any external threats.

Macron has described nationalism as the “leprosy” of Europe. The French president believes that we are recapitulating the errors of the post-World War l era, ignoring the lessons that were learned after World War II. The more that opponents of the European Union voice their opposition to its authority in the traditional idiom of national identity, the more angrily its defenders dismiss these objections as a mere smokescreen for regression to the evils of a barbaric past: populism, fascism, Nazism. Demagogues on both sides resort to biological metaphors to express their revulsion: immigrants are compared to vermin, elites to parasites, nationalists to diseases.

Am I a nationalist? I never even knew that I was a patriot until Britain found itself at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982. But the anguish of seeing young men (nowadays it would be women too) sacrificing their lives for their country was both shattering and sobering for me. Dying for a cause is not invariably noble: witness the jihadis who delude themselves that they are dying for Islam. The British servicemen who laid down their lives in that and subsequent wars, however, were under no illusions. They were my contemporaries; they could have been me. They died, like countless others before and after them, for Queen and country.

So why is it inconceivable that they would die for Europe?  Not because the cause is ignoble: many of my nearest and dearest feel passionately about the European cause. I wish I could share their passion. But human beings do not give up their lives lightly. Ideas, even good ideas, are not worth dying for. The European Union, to be sure, is far more than an idea: it is a vast political structure, so vast indeed that escaping from its gravitational attraction is proving to be as difficult for the UK as it would be for Earth to leave her orbit round the Sun. Yet what the European Union does not and will never provide is something we could call home. A homeland, a motherland, a fatherland: these are more than ideas. People will die for the country in which they have grown up, or which has given them home, in much the same way that they would sacrifice everything for their family. Yet they will not die for Europe. For this reason alone, Macron’s talk of a European army is destined to remain just that — talk. Russia and its allies aside, Nato, and Nato alone, has a monopoly of force on our continent. Nato is a multinational alliance, not a supranational federation that claims to be more than the sum of its parts. Nato soldiers serve alongside their allies, but they fight for their homelands, not for a latter-day Grande Armée. Indeed, for Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Grande Armée counted 20 different nationalities in its ranks, more than half its total complement. This formidable host was perhaps the only precursor of Macron’s European army.

Yet Napoleon’s was an imperial army, united only by loyalty to the Emperor. Hence, at a subliminal level, the French alone still like to think of Europe as an empire. This emerged in remarks made by Macron’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire. In an interview last month, he explained why a European army and other manifestations of a federal government were necessary: “It’s about Europe having to become a kind of empire, as China is. And how the US is.” He added: “Do not get me wrong. I’m talking about a peaceful empire that’s a constitutional state. I use the term to raise awareness that the world of tomorrow will be about power.”

Le Maire’s imperial designs are a reminder of the long-term goal of the European Union, which has never changed. Back in 1972, Spinelli was frank that “a true [European] government in the fullest sense of the word will not exist until the day when the Community [now EU] also possesses the power of coercion over anybody who does not wish to obey its laws.” If that day dawns, it will be the realisation of the vision of Macron and his movement, with its martial name En Marche (“Forwards”). They see the future of the EU as a new, enlightened, Macronian France writ large. After the 19th-century empires of Napoleon I and Napoleon III we may live to see the 21st-century Third Empire of Emmanuel Macron. It is true that Troisième Empire sounds better than Third Reich, which means exactly the same.

Nationalism in de Gaulle’s sense, of hatred for other peoples, is clearly wrong, but it is not wrong to love one’s country — which means loving other countries less. This seems to apply to the French too, especially where the British are concerned. I love Europe, but I love England more, and I do hate those who would set us against each other. Macron’s close ally Le Maire asks: “What does Brexit demonstrate? It shows that leaving the common European market has an exorbitant economic cost.” Brexit means “economic disaster” and those who advocate Brexit are “lying and irresponsible politicians”. This seems to be a new kind of European triumphalism. What kind of triumph is it, though, for the EU to lose one of its most important members? Isn’t Europe wracked with one crisis after another — France included?

Macron may demonise nationalists as lepers, but Jesus taught us to embrace the leper; according to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, indeed, we human beings are all lepers. Humility is not a characteristic we associate with the Jupiter of the Élysée. Better a latter-day leper than a born-again Bonaparte.

The post You can love Europe and oppose the EU appeared first on Standpoint.

Jews in Britain, and more widely across Europe, are confronted by a new mutation of the oldest hatred: the anti-Semitic alliance of the Left and radical Islam. As Dave Rich argues in his new book The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism (Biteback, £12.99), the impact of the Leftist and Islamist nexus on the Labour Party during the three years of Corbyn’s leadership has been toxic.

It was Standpoint, the magazine of which I am the founding editor, that brought the Labour Party’s “Jewish problem” to wider attention in 2014, when the well-known actress Maureen Lipman, a lifelong Labour supporter, declared that she could no longer vote for the party because of its extreme hostility to Israel and its intolerance of any other views. She castigated the then leader of the party, Ed Miliband, as a secular Jew for ignoring the problem and, indeed, being part of it. Her protest had a wide resonance, but the scale of the Left’s Jewish problem emerged only after Corbyn came to office in 2015 following Miliband’s defeat in the general election.

I too come from a family for whom this problem is personal. My father, Paul Johnson, was the editor of the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970 and one of the Left’s strongest voices in support of Israel. I still recall our jubilation at the outcome of the Six Day War and the boxes of Jaffa oranges that would arrive from the Israeli embassy when my father had written a particularly trenchant essay in Israel’s defence. (I suppose those oranges would be enough to land us in trouble under a future Prime Minister Corbyn, or even be used as evidence of the imaginary Israeli conspiracy to control British politics that he regularly demands should be investigated.) My father left the Labour Party to join Margaret Thatcher in 1977 while I was in Israel; I vividly remember the front-page news item about him in The Times and wondering where this bold move, fraught with professional risk, would lead.

Forty years later, as we celebrate my father’s 90th birthday, he has been vindicated. There are still decent people in the Labour Party, but many of them have despaired of reforming it. The long march though the institutions that began in the 1970s has brought the enemies of society, as my father called them back then, to the brink of power. If Brexit goes badly — as it may well do, given the malice of Brussels and the muddle of Westminster — then the public will blame the Conservatives. Britain could elect a Labour prime minister who is not only unfit to lead his country, but who hates it so much that he has refused to sing the national anthem.

So I shall start with the flags. Some of you may be familiar with the British tradition of the Last Night of the Proms, when the Royal Albert Hall resounds to patriotic music, with a great deal of singing, swaying, stamping and waving of flags. The flags in question are of course mainly the Union Jack, though since the vote for Brexit they have almost been outnumbered by great variety of European flags and especially the EU flag. There is much disapproval of any public display of national symbols in Europe, in stark contrast to the United States; indeed, the main thing that unites otherwise disparate European elites is fear of and hostility to populism and nationalism. So those who wave the Union Jack at the Last Night of the Proms are the target of condescension and disdain or worse, even from the BBC, which actually sponsors the event.

Yet no such animosity greeted the unprecedented (though by no means spontaneous) flag waving that erupted at the Labour Party Conference last month. Not that any member of what was once the party of Clement Attlee and Tony Blair would be seen dead waving a Union Jack. No, the eruption of flags brandished by the far-left delegates who now dominate the largest “progressive” party in Europe elicited no censure. That’s because they were Palestinian flags.

The flags alone were disturbing enough. But the context made them even more provocative. The Labour Party has been embroiled in the burgeoning scandal of left-wing anti-Semitism ever since Jeremy Corbyn became its leader in 2015. Last summer new revelations of institutional prejudice against Jews or extreme attitudes to Israel, together with attempts by the leadership to suppress criticism or to purge the critics, made the front pages almost daily. So it was striking that Labour was so indifferent to the pain of the Jewish community, not to mention the damage done to its own reputation, that it could mount a pro-Palestinian demonstration at its annual gathering.

It wasn’t just the flags. In his speech to the conference, Corbyn announced that his first act on becoming prime minister, on day one, would be to unilaterally recognise Palestine as a sovereign state. This was to add injury to insult. For he gave no indication of where the borders of this Palestinian state would be. Many Palestinians would prefer a one-state to a two-state solution. While some genuinely envisage a binational state, many more dream of erasing Israel and its Jewish inhabitants from the map. Corbyn identifies not just with the Palestinians, whom he sees as the great cause of our time, but with the most radical elements within their leadership.

One indication of how far he might go is the row over Raed Salah, a prominent Palestinian who in 2011 was leader of the Islamic Movement, an extremist organisation in Israel close to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. This man was deemed so dangerous by the then Home Secretary, now Prime Minister, Theresa May, that she banned him from entering the UK. One example of Saleh’s repertoire must suffice: in 2007 he gave a speech in Jerusalem in which he endorsed the medieval blood libel, accusing Jews of mixing the blood of “the children of Europe” in their “holy bread”. Yet such a man was invited by Corbyn to “take tea on the terrace” of Parliament. He and his friends mounted an ultimately successful campaign to have the ban on Saleh lifted, accusing Theresa May of prejudice and suggesting that her decision could have been influenced by Jewish donors to the Conservative Party. So those who object to the public propagation of the most ghoulish fiction in the whole demonology of anti-Semitism are themselves targeted as sinister manipulators of the political system.

Another example of Corbyn’s pathological refusal to face the truth was his reaction to the suspension from the Labour Party of his old ally Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, for repeating the outrageous lie that Hitler was a Zionist — implying that Zionists were therefore in some sense accomplices and successors of the Nazis. According to a reporter for the left-wing Vice magazine, Corbyn’s only reaction was to ask: “Can anyone tell me what Ken’s done wrong?”

Corbyn saw nothing anti-Semitic in a mural painted in London’s East End by the American graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, also known as Mear One. It depicted hideous hook-nosed capitalists playing Monopoly on the backs of the oppressed. When Jews protested and even the borough mayor, a notorious Islamist, ordered the mural to be removed, Corbyn protested.

These incidents are no aberration. Corbyn’s offensive conduct towards Jews and anyone else who challenges his complicity in anti-Semitism forms a consistent, lifelong pattern of behaviour. He personifies the pathology of the Left throughout the West, admittedly in an extreme form. For hardline Leftists, Israel is the archetypal enemy of the archetypal victims: Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular. The creation of a Jewish state was the root of all evil, because it has given Western imperialism and capitalism a permanent bridgehead in the world of Islam, a bastion of the global bourgeoisie in the midst of the new proletariat. The existence of Israel is a challenge even to liberal Europeans, because its proud defence of its national identity and independence calls into question the internationalism of the EU. But for the hard Left, Israel is not merely an awkward anomaly, to be alternately chastised or cold-shouldered. For them, Israel is an arch-enemy that must be crushed. Hence Corbyn shares platforms with his “friends” of Hamas and Hezbollah, broadcasts on Iranian TV and lays wreaths to commemorate the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes. We have the extraordinary spectacle of a man with every likelihood of becoming British prime minister who deliberately aligns himself with those who advocate a second Holocaust.

One might suppose that if Corbyn were to find himself in Downing Street, the mandarins of Whitehall would sabotage any attempt by his government to carry out extremist policies. But that assumption does not hold water. The election of a Corbyn government would usher in a period of such chaos that any resistance within the British establishment would struggle to organise itself. The United States and Israel, which have always shared intelligence and much else with Britain on a mutually beneficial basis, would have no choice but to desist from all co-operation with Corbyn’s revolutionary regime. But that would also weaken the opposition. And we know from our experience of Brexit just how much we can rely on our European partners.

One opportunist, though, would scarcely fail to seize his chance. The Kremlin’s offer of an Anglo-Russian reset would be irresistible to Corbyn. We know this because he has never knowingly criticised any policy emanating from Moscow; and because from Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, known as Lenin, to Vladimir Putin, Russian leaders have known exactly how to exploit the useful idiots of the West. From a Jewish point of view there is an ominous continuity in Russian policy, which has always been implicitly or explicitly anti-Semitic, often thinly disguised in campaigns against “cosmopolitanism”, openly hostile towards Zionism or any other assertion of Jewish identity, and generally supportive of Israel’s enemies.

Corbyn is not alone. There are plenty of useful idiots among the elites of the European Union who, given the chance, would follow the example of Gerhard Schröder, the last Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany, who has been a pawn in Putin’s game since the day he left office. And the ideological currents run deep. The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, gave a speech earlier this year in Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx, on the bicentenary of his death. Juncker is no Marxist, but he praised Marx uncritically as a prophet of the European idea. Among his many other lethal legacies, which have cost a hundred million lives and still legitimise the greatest tyrannies on earth, Marx was the most important begetter of left-wing anti-Semitism. His imagery of the Jew as a worshipper of money and his demand for the “emancipation of society from Judaism” still pollutes the mainstream of European thought. Marx is of course not the only source of this poison. Centuries of Christian anti-Judaism prepared the ground for secular anti-Semitism, which has returned to Europe with a vengeance, as the memory of the Shoah fades. And it finds its most fertile ground in the Ummah, those who have inherited the cities of a Europe that imagines itself emancipated from its Judaeo-Christian history. The oldest hatred flourishes, in the late V.S. Naipaul’s phrase, among the believers.

Anti-Semitism has its own tradition in Islam, as we have been all too forcibly reminded in recent decades. The Salafists and other Islamists do not need to borrow ideas from the putrifying ideologies of either Nazis or Communists in order to pose a mortal threat to Jews everywhere. Yet the political Islam that has emerged in the last half-century is, like Nazism and Communism, hostile not only to Jews, but to Western civilisation as such. It has made great strides in marginalising those Muslims who seek integration and view the West positively. For political purposes, it is the Islamists who have mobilised the Muslim masses and made themselves essential to the cause of the Left.

A quick tour d’horizon shows a European Union falling apart at the seams, even as its political doctors prescribe the same medicine that has made the patient worse. Mass immigration, intended to solve the demographic symptoms of a society that had lost faith in itself, is bringing on a political crisis that is sweeping away hitherto dominant parties, policies and politicians.

 In France we have witnessed a populist movement led by a president who defines himself as the anti-populist. Emmanuel Macron is still riding high and faces no opposition, but his support is shallow and the foundations of French civil society are still crumbling. “More Europe” isn’t the solution, nor even the right problem, however often Macron repeats the mantra. More nationalism on the model of De Gaulle might be part of the answer, but although Macron recently made a pilgrimage to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to celebrate 60 years of the Fifth Republic, he increasingly resembles a less auspicious role model: Napoleon III, the first president of France who made himself emperor after a coup d’état but whose reign ended in defeat and humiliation.

In Germany the party system has not collapsed but instead fragmented: six parties vie for the votes of an ageing, anxious and angry electorate. Observers are mesmerised by the sight of new-Nazis on the march, openly defying the law with Hitler salutes in city centres. The Alternative for Germany has broken the taboo on right-wing politics and put Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats under huge pressure. But the malaise runs deeper: the venerable Social Democratic Party is on life support, as more radical parties of the Left replace it with their formula: if you can’t beat the Islamists, join them.

Italy is perhaps the most dramatic example of the havoc wrought by the custodians of a civilisation that has turned against its most ancient traditions. It was no accident that the founding treaty of the EU was signed in Rome more than 60 years ago: it was a conscious attempt to evoke the grandeur of both ancient and medieval Roman empires, with a large admixture of Marxism from the Italian Communist visionary Altiero Spinelli, after whom the European Parliament names its largest building. What actually emerged was a form of federalism that, unlike its American counterpart, rejected the legitimacy of the nation state, which was deemed to have failed in Europe. Yet it is not the nation state but the European superstate that is blamed for the present crisis — and rightly so. Italy has been the first port of call for the most recent wave of migration from the Muslim world, yet is powerless to control its borders, which has made the electorate acutely aware of the loss of sovereignty implied by membership of the eurozone. With the moral architecture of this European experiment in ruins, Italians have abandoned their postwar parties and elected a government that is unashamedly nationalist. The interior minister has promised to deport half a million illegal migrants and spend far beyond the budgetary limits imposed by Brussels, with which Rome is now on a collision course. Italy, hitherto the most fragile of nation states, is uniting against the enemy: the European dream of abolishing nations and borders — a dream that has become a nightmare.

And the migration problem — itself a euphemism for the political and cultural problem of unassimilated Islam — divides the whole of Western and Northern Europe. Swedish politics and society are if anything in worse shape than Germany’s, for example. Only in Central Europe is there something approaching consensus in favour of a nation state based on common values. These values are essentially Judaeo-Christian, despite generations of Communist rule. And even in Western Europe the only values that offer hope of restoring equilibrium are the biblical ones: filtered through enlightenment and modernity, to be sure, but with the God of Israel still discernible amid the chaos, the creator of a rational universe and a moral order, whose commandments serve as the ultima ratio for a humanity formed in the imago Dei.

Islam presents a direct challenge to the survival of this irreducible core of Western civilisation. The Koran posits a different universe from the Bible. Hence Oriental and Occidental civilisations have often clashed. It is as yet impossible to foresee whether the nations of Europe will be able to find a modus vivendi with Islam. Such a modus vivendi would enable Jews, Christians and others to reach a mutually respectful accommodation with a Muslim minority that is fast becoming a majority in many European cities. The alternative scenarios are too unpalatable to contemplate: a segregated society heading for civil war, or the mass conversion and Islamisation of parts of Europe and the disintegration of Western civilisation. Jewish emigration would be one of the first warning signs that Europe has failed to rise to this challenge. That emigration may already have begun. The prospect of a Corbyn government has even prompted talk of emigration among British Jews — a spectre that not even the threat of a Nazi invasion had ever raised before.

This brings me back to flags. It is a bad sign for Jews if Christians abandon their own identity in favour of an Islamic one. To paraphrase Evelyn Waugh: we British need to put out more flags — only not the black, white, red and green of the Palestinians, but the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. From Pittsburgh to Paris, Jews need strong nation states to protect them.

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Jonathan Haidt is hardly a household name on this side of the Atlantic — not yet, anyway. But among those who know his work, he is revered as a social and moral psychologist who follows the evidence, regardless of his own or anybody else’s politics. He is only underrated by those, mainly on the Left, who feel threatened by and hence resist the force of his logic and the wisdom of his insights.

Haidt has set himself three main tasks. He tries to understand the sources of “our natural self-righteousness”, in order to overcome it and teach respect for other points of view. He aims to use science, especially moral psychology, to transcend the culture wars. And he intends to dismantle the culture of “coddling” that he believes is “setting up a generation for failure”. Moreover, his work has only just begun. It’s a racing certainty (if a bad pun) that Haidt will scale even greater heights. He first made headlines six years ago with The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt argued from a coolly scientific, even-handed perspective, demonstrating that our political and religious convictions are deeply rooted in human nature and hence largely impervious to rational analysis. We are ingenious at finding reasons to justify our gut feelings: “Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

It wasn’t just his application of new psychological research to our most cherished attitudes that seemed fresh and exciting, however. Haidt showed that whereas the Left tends to discount religious, familial or patriotic convictions, most people in every time and place have been motivated by authority, loyalty and sanctity — including the workers and minorities on whom the Left relies for its main support. Conservatives instinctively sympathise with these “moral tastes”, but liberals focus more narrowly on compassion, social justice and fairness. The Right shares these concerns too but has what he calls “the conservative advantage” of six rather than three moral “taste buds”.

This analysis feeds into Haidt’s broader critique of the liberal world view, for which he coins the acronym “Weird” because it is shared exclusively by Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic people. He wants Weirds to be tolerant of difference and patient with those who are deeply attached to a traditional way of life. Long before Hillary Clinton made her fatal mistake of sneering at “deplorables”, Haidt was warning liberals against self-righteousness.

His new book, The Coddling of the American Mind (Allen Lane, £20) takes his argument much further. Its title alludes to Allan Bloom’s celebrated blast from the past, The Closing of the American Mind, perhaps the most enduring of all the polemics engendered by America’s culture wars. But since Bloom was writing in the late 1980s, the focus of concern has shifted. Today, cultural relativism and amnesia take entirely new forms, as does the suppression of open debate, while the debasement of intellectual life has been hugely accelerated by the reduction of reading to surfing the web. Bloom could not have conceived the impact of online trivia on the young. It is not so much that their minds are closing as that they have never had a chance to open in the first place.

Haidt tackles these problems head-on. His book (written with the free speech activist Greg Lukianoff) is written as a “social science detective story”: while it compresses a huge quantity of data, it’s highly readable. Haidt and Lukianoff identify three Bad Ideas that have done great damage to iGen or Generation Z, those born since 1995.

The first Untruth concerns overprotection: “paranoid parents” are raising children to believe that what does not kill them will make them weaker, not stronger; the result is a fragile and overanxious generation. The impact of such “coddling”, combined with what they call “antisocial media”, can be measured in the huge increase in teenage depression and other mental illnesses in the West, especially among girls.

The second Untruth is the idea that you should always trust your feelings, which they call “emotional reasoning”. One consequence of this form of irrationalism is an extremely negative view of the self, those around one, and the world. Emotional reasoning also impacts on campus: any speaker who challenges students is likely to be seen as “dangerous” and disinvited.

The third and perhaps most pernicious Untruth concerns Us versus Them, a mindset that divides the world into “good” and “evil” people and exacerbated by identity politics and intersectionality. The dangers of such Manichaean indoctrination for children and young adults should be obvious: violence and intimidation, witchhunts, self-censorship and a constant fear of ostracism. 

Fortunately, the authors offer a range of solutions, from CBT techniques to an emphasis on “common humanity” to escape the polarisation of identity politics. Above all, Haidt stands for the intellectual virtues:  curiosity, open-mindedness and humility. He is rare among liberal intellectuals in eschewing self-indulgent posturing in favour of what Max Weber called “the ethic of responsibility”.

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