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For The Critic

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In the early- to mid-1930s my grandmother (Irish, South African, later Australian) lived for a few years in the east of Germany, as a language assistant/housemistress in a boarding school. Her one recorded comment about Hitler’s accession to power was that he put an end to the suffering of an awful lot of German people.

I strongly doubt she hated Jews, or that she was a reckless war-monger (a decade on, her husband would be sent to Abyssinia). She simply recognised that the country was in an absolute mess – politically incontinent, almost bankrupt, starvation looming in the rural areas (for the remaining 60-odd years of her life she drank her tea black, a habit inculcated during those times of acute shortages). Strong solutions were called for – by both left wing and right – and Adolf Hitler seemed to be providing them.

She was not alone in these straightforward views.

The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 (part one of Frank McDonough’s two-book project on the disgruntled former corporal’s time as Führer) makes it abundantly clear that ‘even if Hitler had never come to power Germany would probably have had a right-wing nationalist coalition during this period.’ This would have had the backing of the humiliated German military, would almost certainly have demanded to renegotiate the Versailles Treaty, and would probably have gained the sympathy of the political classes in England and France, particularly when they were threatened with the alternative (purportedly) of Communism.

Hitler did not create the conditions that enabled his rise, and he fed, however cynically, on genuine – even legitimate – national grievances. He was appointed to the Chancellorship quite constitutionally (pundits both local and foreign not seeing this as any kind of fundamental moment), and his rule began as, and for a long while remained, a necessary and supportive coalition of the Nazi party, upper-class politicos, the army, the civil service and big business.

The reality is that he successfully won over most of the German population to his major public plans, so while all the now-familiar hallmarks of Nazi rule (book-burning, purges, camps, violent anti-Semitism) emerged in some form almost immediately, the German people had – at best – already capitulated. As Hitler himself said in a 1937 interview: “A government like ours could never stay in power without the will of the people to support it.”

But Triumph is the more interesting for pushing back against the cartoon of Hitler as all-conquering monster/supermensch, instead demonstrating the slow creep of the Nazi state takeover, the caution with which Hitler had to move, the resistance that he often faced, and his surprising and instinctive flexibility.

Challenges to his outright authority came from his own ranks (Ernst Röhm), political superiors (von Papen), economic circumstances, and the church (Lutheran as well as Catholic). Criticism was neither unheard of nor unheard. In 1935 the party was complaining that Hitler seemed to have relaxed his persecution of the Jews (he had, for diplomatic reasons), and his generals were outspoken about the country’s unpreparedness for war. As late as 1939 some of the high command were even plotting to arrest him (though, y’know… they didn’t).

So Hitler was also simply lucky. In any case – one must grimly conclude – from the German/Nazi/Hitlerian viewpoint, from 1933 to 1939, almost nothing went wrong. (The rest is volume two: Catastrophe).

All well and good (non sic); but did we really need another book about the Nazis?

With its no-nonsense chronological account, ‘immense readability’ (see press release), and, of course, parade of fascinating details, Triumph is essentially an undergrad primer on pre-war Germany, albeit a handsome one, decked out in appropriately-ominous black and red, and nicely illustrated (look: some ‘ordinary Germans’ pointing and laughing in the aftermath of Kristallnacht).

Avowedly for the ‘general reader’, however, the book has just a six-page introduction to cover all things relevant pre-1933, whereafter McDonough cannot seem to decide whether this is the first book that his reader will have read on Nazi Germany (‘Hitler, who had been an artist in his youth…’ [p311]) or if he should already know the details of the Locarno Pact.

The text is not flawless, either technically or stylistically (Hindenburg’s son Oskar is mentioned, by name, six times in half a paragraph), and McDonough’s ‘blow-by-blow’ approach inclines towards stolidity and repetition. There are also strange anachronisms (someone described as Göring’s ‘line-manager’, for heaven’s sake).

Finally, the book makes no important claims to access/info/revelations we’ve not heard before, and yet announces (press release again) that the completed, two-vol. publication will constitute ‘a definitive history of the Third Reich’. At this point, frankly, that seems optimistic.

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For The Oldie

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Wednesday, April 10 1907
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All the best people are born in October.

In Moldova (and Czechoslovakia), ‘carp’ is spelled ‘crap’.

In 1492 Native Americans discovered Columbus lost at sea.

Exultant language is reserved for the mountains.

Ye cannae shove yer granny off the bus.

You can get syphilis through wooden spoons.

Real men wear real clothes.

Termite baiting is currently in progress.

Max Hastings is the author of 27 books, most about conflict.

Not all of Mozart’s paintings were perfect.

Scotland have been knocked out of the Rugby World Cup.

One of the known properties of honey is that it drips.

Some Russian villages purposely elect the village idiot.
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My great-great-great-aunt, Sarah Purser, portraitist, landscape artist, and leading light (no pun) in the Irish stained glass industry revival, once made a well-known painting of these sisters.

According to John O’Grady’s monograph, The Life and Work of Sarah Purser, this double portrait was commissioned by ‘enlightened resident landlord [and] amateur Arctic explorer’ Sir Henry and his wife Lady Georgina Gore-Booth, of Lissadell, Co. Sligo, in about 1882, when the sisters were roughly 14 (Constance) and 12 (Eva). It is approximately life size, and in its style and setting (a beech grove, apparently) it is thought ‘boldly unconventional’ for the Ireland of the time – and it is credited, writes Elizabeth Coxhead in Daughters of Erin, with being ‘one of the two pictures which put [Purser] on the road to success’.

The original ‘Constance and Eva Gore-Booth’ is displayed at Lissadell House to this day, where it’s available to members of the public in the summer. I must admit I’m not in love with it; if anything, I’d say it’s most remarkable for the fact that it betrays – and fair enough – nothing at all of the hard-line, gun-toting political activist that Constance Gore-Booth/Markievicz was to become. That said, a few years later Constance went to study painting with a friend of Purser’s, and progressed, from there, to the French Académie Julian, where – fatefully? – she met Count Casimir…

No inconsiderable lady in her own right, Sarah Purser (1848-1943) was born into a financially-unstable offshoot of the Guinness-brewing Purser clan. Taking her future in her own hands, she set off to train in Paris (on ‘a pound a week’), and was exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts by the age of 23. Three years later the Royal Dublin Society awarded her a certificate for still lifes, and before long she was elected an Honorary Academician of the RHA, whose first female full member she eventually became in 1924.

She founded the An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) stained glass cooperative in 1903, which she then ran for almost 40 years. She helped establish Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and develop the National Gallery of Ireland, where various of her portraits (and much stained glass produced under her sponsorship) now, quite properly, reside.

Often referred to in the same breath as Markievicz, Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, and other notable women of the era (and indeed Eire), Purser moved in very much the same cultural circles – minus the Catholicism part; she being of Huguenot descent – and went on to paint all of the aforementioned (including Constance several times again), as well as luminaries like WB Yeats, Roger Casement, Douglas Hyde and Brendan Behan’s mother, Kathleen Kearney (‘The blue hat’. (It was Behan’s grandmother, NB, who famously took her bath ‘every year, whether she was dirty or not’)). Her continued friendship with the Gore-Booths was particularly helpful, work-wise. She once remarked that she “went through the British aristocracy like the measles.”

Now and then, the increasingly ‘indomitable’ Purser was herself sketched and painted, among others by John Butler Yeats, WB and Jack’s father. JB’s somewhat beaky portrait especially seems to reflect not some head-in-the-clouds romantic artiste but a professional arts-and-crafts intellectual whose income, for the most part, came through her quite astute investments – in particular, in Guinness. Her large home, Mespil House, on Dublin’s Grand Canal, became, in John O’Grady’s words, ‘a salon frequented by writers, politicians, visionaries and revolutionaries.’

One contemporary describes this scene as ‘full of bubbling gaiety’, and Coxhead claims that Purser’s later portraits were ‘not done for money, but for love of good talk and good company.’ This may be true; but the family remembers her as something of a fierce old stick (‘not notoriously a cuddly creature’ was, I think, my father’s summary), who once threw out a burglar just by talking at him, and who, aged 89, demanded to be taken up by Oliver Gogarty (Buck Mulligan in Ulysses) in his private plane, to inspect the house roof, then wrote complaining to her landlord – to be informed, rather politely, that her lease had actually expired a decade previous.

Artistically, though, she’d become most definitely someone to be reckoned with. She was wont to give her sitters ‘a few scoldings and home-truths’ along with their likenesses; she objected strongly to Catholic bishops having their official portraits done in Rome, not locally; she once gave Yeats an earful for suggesting one of her artists’ windows was derived from an old German print; and in the last week of her life she wrote in fury to the President of Ireland (a former sitter) to excoriate him for the ‘bad art’ on a recent postage stamp.

With her caustic wit and enthusiasm for ‘discussion’ to the fore, and her personal network of poets, painters, politicians, and the occasional heavyweight boxing champion all around her, on the second Tuesday of every month, regular, she hosted, presided over, held forth, and generally tried to bend all aspects of the Irish national culture to her will. For thirty years her soirées were widely considered to be unmissable – if only in the sense that half the guests came primarily out of fear of what might well be said about them in their absence. It was not for nothing these ‘at homes’ became known to Dublin wags as Sarah Purser’s ‘dies irae’.

Still fuming at the business of the ugly stamp, she died on August 7th, 1943. Her funeral, her friends were not too grieved to note, was on the second Tuesday of the month.

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House