Masterpieces of Medieval Art

At the weekend, I visited the British Museum’s newly opened Paul and Jill Ruddock Gallery of Medieval Europe. Regular visitors to the BM won’t see anything new on display, but they will see a coherent and informative collection of medieval artefacts put together by curator James Robinson (whose Masterpieces of Medieval Art, published by the BM, is a superb commentary on the display). The Lewis Chessmen finally gain the prominence they deserve, but my own personal favourite from the gallery is the Dunstable Swan Jewel. This exquisite white enamelled livery badge dates from about 1400. The swan was associated with the House of Lancaster. It has a delicacy and fragile beauty that mirrors the National Gallery’s Wilton Diptych from the same period and reminds us that the Middle Ages were not all tenebrous gloom.

"The permanent collections are the great strength of the British Museum"

What was most encouraging was the number of children at the gallery, seemingly enraptured by the array of fascinating material, from great broadswords to medieval tiled floors, all clearly explained in language that was anything but patronising. In many ways, the permanent collections, with which one develops a strong relationship over time, are the great strength of the BM; the blockbuster exhibitions are often expensive and cramped. There has been much concern about the neglect of medieval history in schools. The Paul and Jill Ruddock Gallery (he’s chairman of the V & A and an ex-Goldman Sachs banker) offers a riposte to those who would marginalise this fascinating period.

There’s another excellent exhibition on around the corner from the BM, at the Foundling Hospital, Brunswick Square. 'Handel the Philanthropist', a small exhibition which details the benevolence shown by the great composer towards destitute musicians and abandoned children during the time of his greatest commercial success. As the permanent display at the Foundling Museum also demonstrates, the 18th century, though often brutal in its social attitudes, saw the birth of modern charitable giving, of which Handel along with Hogarth and the Foundling Hospital’s founder Thomas Coram, were prime exemplars. The exhibition, commemorating 250 years since the composer’s death, is a valuable insight into a musical genius and his time, housed in a wonderful building which deserves more visitors.

Back in 2001, Daniel Snowman compared Handel's two homes in England and Germany for History Today. We're reprinted the article in full here to mark 2009 for London's adopted Hanoverian composer.

Don't Tell Oslo!

There is an excellent piece by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today, inspired by the opening of the British Museum’s new medieval gallery. In it, Jenkins, winner earlier this year of our Trustees’ Award, tackles the scandal of our museum’s hidden treasures, locked away in basements and storerooms, as well as the complexities of loaning items out to museums in countries that have a claim on a particular item; most famously, the Elgin Marbles. Following in the footsteps of Melina Mercouri, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond is seeking the return of the Lewis Chessmen, inspiration of Noggin the Nog and centrepiece of the new gallery. Jenkins points out that they are in fact Norwegian. Don’t tell Oslo or they might stop sending us the Christmas tree.

Jenkins, nuanced, original and provocative, is plainly the product of a very good education. In his case, Mill Hill School and St John’s College, Oxford. His erudition has been placed in the service of the public, through his books, columns, and now as chairman of the National Trust, with its 3 miilion plus members. Ed Balls also received an outstanding education – Nottingham High School, Keble College, Oxford and a Kennedy scholarship at Harvard – but one wishes his mother and father (who once taught at Eton) had saved their money. The Education Minister, sorry, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, seems determined to reduce our children to blithering idiots with attention spans of goldfish. That is unless their parents can afford private education, tutors to get their children into one of the few remaining grammar schools or, often the most expensive option of all, buy a house in the catchment area of a comprehensive school that works. He appears to think that our children are more in need of lessons in technological fads, of which Twitter is the latest and soon to be outmoded by necessity, than in history (or science, maths, English, foreign languages etc). In the immortal words of another clown, Eric Morecambe, the man’s a fool. I personally couldn’t care less whether our children study Churchill or not. I would prefer them to tackle classical or medieval history, or the history of south-east Asia. But without a knowledge of history, one becomes a very passive citizen. Perhaps that is the plan. It is not one we can afford.

Binging on History

Monday saw another interesting article by Tristram Hunt on an issue of contemporary concern here. This time the topic is that of binge drinking Brits. It’s a fine example of the way in which history can inform contemporary debate for the benefit of all. The key point is that Britons have always liked to consume a lot of drink; no lingering over a thimbleful of pastis here.

But to counter that British propensity to neck things back, two developments occurred, largely as a reaction to the debauchery and squalor of 18th century urban life depicted in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. The first is suggested by that cartoon’s much less well-known companion piece, Beer Alley, in which the virtues of good old British Ale – weak in alcohol, rich in taste – is espoused. A contemporary analogy would be to campaign for the replacement of full-strength ‘continental’ lagers with bitters and milds (by taxing them less?).

The other requirement, one of the great civilising missions of the Victorians, is the licensed public house, ‘the pub’, four of which now close every day. The foolish attempt to make Mediterraneans of Britons – with the onset of all day drinking, the widespread availability of very strong New World wines, and the virtual elimination of the professional publican – has not brought the civilities of Siena to our high streets, but it has all but destroyed one of Britain’s great and democratic institutions. More pubs = less drink.

The Hobsbawm Debate Continues

Perhaps the sanest conrtibution to the great Hobsbawm debate came from Tristram Hunt in Saturday's Guardian. Hunt, whose article on Friedrich Engels is one of the highlights of our forthcoming May edition, states the bald truth that 'the reason Hobsbawm is worthy of respect is that he is one of our greatest historians', his works masterpieces of narrative history, insightful in analysis and of vast breadth.

Though I still feel uneasy about Hobsbawm's Soviet-supporting past, to condemn him as a historian is a little like dismissing Milton's poetry because one dislikes the author's religious views, or condemning Wagner's music because of its composer's bizarre beliefs. As for Hunt's assertion that his critics at the Mail should read his books; we all should. One cannot understand the long 19th century (Hobsbawm's own phrase) without doing so.

Cambridge conference resorts to anachronism

Today’s newspapers report on a Cambridge University conference, Between the Islands, taking place over the weekend. It aims to illustrate how the Vikings engaged constructively with Celts, Anglo-Saxons and other peoples, behaviour far removed from the ‘rape and pillage’ of stereotype. Dr Fiona Edmonds of the university’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic said:

‘Within a relatively short space of time – and with lasting effect – the various cultures in Britain and Ireland started to intermingle. Investigating that process provides us with a historical model of how political groups can be absorbed into complex societies, contributing much to those societies in the process. There are important lessons that can be gained from this about cultural assimilation in the modern era.’

This silly headline masks the very real scholarship on display at the conference

I wonder what they are. That sometimes different peoples fight one another, yet are just as likely to rub along together, engage in trade and technological and cultural innovation? The conference press release is headed ‘Vikings offered early lessons in effective immigration’. Again, one wonders what they are? This silly headline, picked up on by the newspapers, masks the very real scholarship on display at the conference and is grossly anachronistic. Is it really so difficult for a great university like Cambridge to engage the wider public in a fascinating topic that it has to butter them up with false promises and absurd parallels?

Interview with Adolf Burger

Adolf Burger was in London recently to publicise the English edition of his memoir: The Devil's Workshop (published by Frontline Books). Burger is a Slovakian Jew, who survived Auschwitz before being transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1944. There, he was involved in Operation Bernhard - the top secret Nazi plan to forge millions of pounds worth of sterling and US dollars.

Now 91-years old, Burger is one of the very few survivors of the forgery operation, and - as a former inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau - is also an eyewitness to the Holocaust.

In Roger Moorhouse's interview - which is transcribed below - the historian begins by asking Mr Burger his reasons for writing the book:
Interview with Adolf Burger

RM Mr Burger, you have come to London for the publication of the English edition of your memoir – The Devil’s Workshop. What was you reason for writing the book?

AB I have written quite a few books; the first one appeared in August 1945 in Prague, it was very thin, with only six photos that I had taken myself after the liberation in Ebensee. Then, later, I was working as a journalist and had collected over 200 documents and photos on this subject from across Europe, so I decided to write this book. When one reads a book, I think one must also see the images and documents from the time. Otherwise, if one reads, and one doesn’t see the pictures and documents then one does not believe that it is true.

RM So was the book written, in some way, as proof of your story?

AB No. I don’t have to prove anything. I wanted to show people what the Nazis were capable of, and what the [Slovak fascist] Hlinka Guard was capable of. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I have achieved.

RM You were arrested and sent to Auschwitz in May 1942. Can you briefly describe how you came to Auschwitz, what you did there and what the conditions were like?

AB I was arrested because I was printing forged baptismal certificates for Slovak Jews. The Gestapo then arrested me, and my wife, and we were first sent to Zilina, where about 1,000 Jews were held. Then we were put into a train by the Hlinka Guard and were taken to the German border, where we were handed over to the SS. We ended our journey at Auschwitz.

RM And you had no idea, no suspicion, of what might happen to you there?

AB No, of course not. No-one knew. They didn’t even know about it in Switzerland. My brother in Israel managed to get them to send me a certificate granting me emigration to Israel, and the Swiss sent it to Birkenau! So the organisation in Switzerland didn’t even know what Auschwitz and Birkenau was. No-one did.

RM How was it then that you came to leave Birkenau?

AB Birkenau was hell. I worked on the ramp there, and had seen every day how 3,000 people would arrive by train and would disappear into the gas chambers.

But one day at roll call, they called out six names – all typographers. They had a card index of the prisoners and so they knew what we had done before arriving in the camp. So, then I had to go and see the camp commandant, an SS-Sturmbannführer. He confirmed my name and that I had been a typographer, and then told me that I would travel to Berlin as a free man and work in a library. All lies. So, the next day, they called the six names again, six printers, and we were put into quarantine for four weeks as they were so afraid of typhus. After that, six SS officers came down from Berlin, from the Sicherheitsdienst, and they accompanied us to the train – but it was not a freight car, it was a passenger train – and they took us to Berlin and then to Sachsenhausen.

RM So, from your time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, you knew full-well what was going on there. And then you were sent to Sachsenhausen. Was that not some sort of miracle for you?

AB No. I didn’t see it as a miracle at all. People were moved around the camps – transferred here and there all the time. And I didn’t believe them anyway – they said I would go as a free man, and would work in Berlin in a library; it was all lies. I arrived in Sachsenhausen and was put into blocks 18 and 19 [the forgery workshops] – all separated off with barbed wire, windows whitewashed, top secret, no-one knew what went on in there. The other 100,000 prisoners in Sachsenhausen were not allowed to even set eyes on us. When we went to the shower block on Sundays, for example, the whole camp was shut down – strict curfew, everybody confined to barracks – no prisoners, no SS-men, nobody was allowed to see us. And if anyone did see us they would be shot.

RM So, your two blocks were completely isolated within the camp, but did you nonetheless hear about what was going on elsewhere – outside in the camp itself, or the general progress of the war?

AB We had a radio in our two blocks, so we listened to the radio in the evening – the news, reports from the front and so on – but we were completely cut off from the camp, we did not even see the faces of the other prisoners, so we heard nothing from them.

RM What were conditions like for you in the camp?

I printed £132 million!

AB I always said I was a dead man on holiday – a dead man on holiday. We never believed that we would get out of there. But in the block we had everything – food, white sheets on the beds – each one of us had his own bed; not like in Birkenau, where six of us slept under a single louse-ridden blanket. Also, the SS guards never shouted at us, I used to play table-tennis with them.
But we knew that we were dead men on holiday. We knew that there was no way out when we knew a secret such as this – that the Nazis were printing millions in forgeries – and we were sealed away inside a concentration camp, where no-one could see us. We knew that we would not get out alive.

RM And what was your role within the forgery operation?

AB I was a printer, and I printed £132 million!

RM And what did you think about your work there?

AB I didn’t think. I was in a concentration camp and I was ordered to do it. Print the money, so I printed it. If I hadn’t done it they would have shot me. We had no “feelings”, we didn’t think about it.

RM In the film that is based on your memoir, The Counterfeiters, there are a number of scenes where there is conflict between the prisoners about the morality of forging money for the Nazis. What was the reality?

AB It’s just a film. There were no discussions of morality. We were in a concentration camp – we were scarcely in a position to sabotage anything. Sure you could sabotage, if you wanted to get killed! Jacobson [one of the prisoners] tried to delay the dollar production, but he managed for only 4 weeks, then [SS-Sturmbannführer] Kruger came and said ‘make the dollars within 3 weeks or we will have you shot’, and that was the end of it. Two weeks later, we had made the dollar. You have to understand that we were in a concentration camp – we had one foot already in the grave.

RM Can you describe some of the characters within the forger group – Smolianoff for example?

AB Smolianoff was my best friend. He was a professional forger, the only professional forger in the group, by the way. He had already been imprisoned for four years for forging. And he wanted to prove to Kruger that we could do it.

RM Can you also describe SS-Sturmbann Kruger, who headed the operation?

AB He was an SS officer. He wanted the job to be done, nothing else.

RM After the war, some of the forgers from your group testified for Kruger at his trial. How do you explain that?

AB Some of them. The German prisoners. The German prisoners said that he was a good man. They didn’t invite me to the court. In the two trials in which I participated, the defendants got life. If they had asked me I would have told them that he was a murderer, that he had six people shot. Of course, he let us play cards and table tennis, but that was all only in his interest, so that the printing machines would run and that the job would be done.

RM You survived both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sachsenhausen. Did you have a particular survival-strategy, or was it just pure chance?

AB No. You could not have any sort of strategy in those places. It was impossible. What saved me was that I was needed as a typographer, and then that the Nazis decided to move everything – the machinery and the personnel – to Austria at the end of the war, where I was then liberated by the Americans, who arrived so quickly that the Nazis all ran away. The thing [that saved me] was that I was a printer. If I had not been a printer then I would never have got out of Auschwitz-Birkenau and I would not have survived.

RM What would you say – as a survivor of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen – to those who still deny that the Holocaust took place?

AB They are fascists. They are Nazis. Could be an Englishman, an American, whatever, but if they say that then they are Nazis. That ideology is a Nazi ideology.

RM When you think back on that terrible time, is there one particular memory, person or image that springs to mind first of all?

AB No. Every day was the same. From the day that I was arrested, nothing was better or worse, it was always the same. Always the SS behind me, the ever-present threat of being shot, you had to work – that was my existence.

© Roger Moorhouse 2009

Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm is the subject of much criticism in the light of his attempt to see his MI5 files. Michael Burleigh, Stephen Glover and Geoffrey Levy have offered caustic appraisals of 'Britain's Greatest Living Historian' in the Mail. Seumas Milne in the Guardian offers a robust defence of Hobsbawm's lifelong support for Soviet Communism.

Unlike EP Thompson and many other British Marxists, Hobsbawm did not resign his membership of the Communist Party after the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, nor did he do so after Soviet tanks rolled into the Czechoslovak capital to end the Prague Spring.

After all, as he points out, without a trace of irony, in his collection of essays On History (1997): ‘Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even minimal, use of force was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989’.

‘Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even minimal, use of force was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989’.

Hobsbawm stayed with the party until it simply withered away. Curiously, he went on to accept the offer of a Companion of Honour made by Tony Blair. The honour has been awarded to just 45 living individuals, whose motto is In Action Faithful and in Honour Clear. It does seem an anomaly. But I think Hobsbawm's ambiguities can be explained.

He is, like many intellectuals of the European tradition - and anyone who has read his autobiography will appreciate that he identifies totally with the European tradition, displaying an evident loathing towards the USA and a studied indifference to Britain - immersed in abstraction. Hobsbawm has lived the privileged life of a gifted intellectual for whom real life barely exists at all, hence his strange indifference to the suffering of people under the Soviet regimes.

That Hobsbawm is a brilliant historian is evident to anyone who had read his great trilogy on the long 19^th century (a judgement echoed by such disparate figures as Niall Ferguson and Tristram Hunt). But he doesn't do people. He is unashamedly a ‘Tory Communist’, above and beyond the concerns of ordinary folk. As such, that he can be an unrepentant marxist and accept a companion of honour should come as no surprise at all.

Britain's Greatest Living Historian?

Eric Hobsbawm is often declared 'Britain's Greatest Living Historian', but is that really the case? Are there others more worthy of that title? What about Peter Burke, Christopher Bayly, Chris Wickham, Judith Herrin or Robert Bartlett among many, many others? Or do only modernists count?

The Viability of Pakistan

The attempted murder of the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore reminds us once again of the instability of Pakistan, a nuclear state. It's worth asking (though few do) whether the creation of Pakistan – the result of a particularly cynical example divide and rule - is the greatest mistake ever made by the British imperial class?