Book Reviews

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Book Reviews

Judith C. Brown and Robert R. Davis, eds, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, London and New York, Longman, 1998; ISBN 0– 582–29326–X; xii + 255 pp.; £40 (hbk), £13.99 (pbk) Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996; ISBN 0–19–512292–5; xii + 371 pp.; £30 (hbk), £15 (pbk) Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi, translated and introduced by Heather Gregory; Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1997; ISBN 0–520–20390–9; x + 252; £32 (hbk), £12.95 (pbk)

Writing to her exiled eldest son Filippo on 7 April 1464, Alessandra Strozzi demonstrated appreciation of the care lavished on him by his slave Marina and the implications of this for perpetuating the illustrious Strozzi name by legitimate means: ‘Hearing such things I find it easy to understand why you want to put off getting married for a year and why they’re so slow in finding you a wife.’ Fifty-nine years later another Florentine patrician, Francesco Vettori, wrote to his friend Niccolò Machiavelli about the latter’s son, whose youthful indulgence was clearly causing his father concern: ‘So Lodovico has a boy with him, with whom he amuses himself, jests, takes walks, growls in his ear, goes to bed together. What then? Even in these things perhaps there is nothing bad.’ In both cases the implication is that the young men will settle down in due course, so why waste time and effort browbeating them now? Questions of morality are overlooked. This tolerance features in the latest outbreak of ‘Florentinitis’ to spread across the library shelves, an outbreak which proves that there is still much mileage in studies of Renaissance Florence, in spite of the healthy and very welcome competition coming from historians of other Italian cities and states. The Strozzi, apparently humiliated in 1434 when exiled by the Medici faction, turned the tables on their political opponents by amassing a vast fortune outside Florence and marking their eventual return to the city by the construction of an exceptionally monumental palazzo. Their story and that of the matriarch Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, who held the fort in Florence in the enforced absence of her sons, is already well known, but Heather Gregory’s bilingual edition of thirty-five of Alessandra’s letters is nevertheless extremely valuable, most particularly for teaching purposes, pro-

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viding as it does insights into various family relationships but also such oblique references to Florentine politics as might not attract the censor’s attention. Filippo Strozzi did indeed marry and Alessandra writes with great affection and familial pride of his eldest son, Alfonso. The adult Alfonso has a walk-on part, as an opponent of Savonarola’s crusade against sexual licence, in Forbidden Friend- ships, Michael Rocke’s greatly anticipated and genuinely ground- breaking analysis of Florentine homosexuality. From the records of the Ufficiali di notte e conservatori dei monasteri (Officers of the Night), a magistracy which operated between 1432 and 1502 and was without parallel anywhere in Renaissance Italy, Rocke has reconstructed in immense detail a city-wide culture based on sodomy which linked men from every level of society. Florentines and sodomites were traditionally equated and the 1305 denunciation of male Florentines by the preacher Giordano da Rivalto may well strike the reader as remarkably similar to the comments of Mme Edith Cresson on the subject of Englishmen. The very existence of the Office of the Night was an embarrassing admission that Florence had a problem, one which Rocke subjects to thorough statistical analysis. During the last four decades of the fifteenth century 15,000 Florentines were incriminated in investigations of sodomy, of whom 2,500 were subsequently convicted. Behind the figures a fascinating picture emerges of sodomy as an activity associated with the city’s large adolescent population, tolerance of which in the decades either side of the Savonarolan 1490s is reflected in the attitude of Francesco Vettori, quoted earlier. Its prevalence was such that the authorities sought, by means of the Night Officers, to make money out of that which they could not eradicate. Only ‘inveterate’ sodomites were consistently pursued and seriously punished. Those who denounced themselves to the Officers not only escaped con- viction but, by confessing the names of their various partners, have allowed Rocke to piece together particular networks of sodomites, active and passive. For those who prefer their Florentine history to be political, there is evidence of anti-Mediceans being targeted by the Night Officers in the wake of Cosimo’s return in 1434, and of illustrious names being blotted at various dates out to hide their sodomitical activities. Forbidden Friendships amply proves that there is life in the historical monograph yet. Michael Rocke is also one of the contributors to Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, a volume of essays which endeavours to explain the wealth of recent studies devoted to gender-related issues in the Italian states and to bring them together in something approaching a coherent whole. Any volume which seeks to overcome the ‘local particularism’ of Italian history must be welcomed, though 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 119

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it is equally true that any such collection is prey to charges of unevenness. Major debates are introduced by a distinguished group of scholars, including Daniel Bornstein on spiritual kinship, Stanley Chojnacki on gender and the state, Robert C. Davis on gendered space, most particularly in Venice, Thomas Kuehn on gender and the law, and Katherine Park on gendered forms of healing. While the principal purpose is to synthesize and make a wide range of scholar- ship more accessible to the student, originality occasionally breaks through, Sam Cohn’s work on mountain dwellers in central Italy providing a case in point.

S.R. Fletcher King Alfred’s College, Winchester

Rudolph M. Bell, How To Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1999; ISBN 0–226–04210–3; xiv + 375 pp.; £19.95

The author of Holy Anorexia has again indulged his whim for draw- ing parallels between the society of early modern Italy and that of the contemporary West, this time exploring the contents of sixteenth- century popular advice manuals designed to assist an increasingly literate and generally urban population through the problems and traumas of conception, pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing, adolescence, courtship, married life and, finally, widowhood, in the process of which the unsuspecting reader is also introduced to the advice literature currently on offer in American shopping malls. When Rudolph M. Bell speculates about the original readership of the sixteenth-century manuals, the reviewer is bound to entertain curious thoughts about the intended readers of How To Do It, repeatedly addressed as they are with a degree of familiarity surprising in a scholarly tome, given snippets of information about the private life of the Bell family, invited to browse an internet site devoted to the issues raised in the volume, and finally bid farewell with a friendly ‘ciao!’. In view of the fact that the bodies of these menstruat- ing, copulating, lactating Renaissance Italians were apparently being smeared with such a variety of oils and unguents, Bell’s latest offering may well be particularly welcomed by enthusiasts for aroma- therapy and alternative medicine, perhaps the same audience as greeted Holy anorexia with such excitement. The original manuals were generally written by men and presumably read by women: visit www.amazon.com and see whether this parallel persists. 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 120

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The best known piece of cinquecento Italian advice literature must surely be Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano. This is precisely the sort of elite work which Bell chooses to ignore, though the elite/popular divide can be hard to identify when dealing with works, whether weighty volumes or mere ephemera, written by or cribbed from distinguished physicians and clerics but, perhaps with the encourage- ment of printer-publishers, directed at as large an audience as possible. As a genre, popular advice manuals are identified as works written in the vernacular, problem-oriented and scrupulously indexed, offering practical quick-fixes for commonplace predica- ments, often popularizing Latin, Greek and Arabic wisdom in the process, though Bell also becomes distracted by confessors’ manuals and the Catechism of the Council of Trent but is astute enough to acknowledge the looseness of his self-imposed definition. Bizarre though some of the remedies may appear to the modern reader, the practical solutions for quotidian problems are often free from moral- izing: if a child contracts chicken pox it is not attributed to his innate sinfulness, but is simply a challenge to be met by the parents, most particularly his mother. Authors whose works form the backbone of the study include the physicians Giovanni Marinello and Girolamo Mercurio, the latter a Dominican and ‘self-appointed public health officer’, both of whom wrote authoritatively on midwifery, together with another physician, Michele Savonarola, and the latter’s better known grandson Fra Girolamo, advising the women of Ferrara and the widows of Florence respectively. The works of female authors, including the Venetian Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella, daughter of Giovanni Marinello, are highlighted whenever possible. Bell repeatedly reminds the reader that he is allowing the advice manuals to speak for themselves, and this they do at some consider- able length, thereby providing the social historian with a fascinating miscellany of information ranging from gambling on the gender of an unborn child and the construction of birthing chairs to hostels for battered wives in Rome and a 1553 guide to the best forty prostitutes in Florence. Bell’s devotion to the texts is perhaps taken a little too far in his insistence on referring to the renowned Montpellier physician Laurent Joubert as Lorenzo Gioberti and the learned bishop of Verona Agostino Valier as Valerio, simply because these are the versions found on the covers of certain publications. It is hoped that this does not cause any unnecessary confusion, though that is precisely what could be generated by the identification of the long-lived prophetess Anna (Luke 2: 36–38) as St Anne (273). Letting the manuals speak for themselves is one way to avoid entering into potentially controversial scholarly debates. However, as often as Bell tries to distance himself from such discussions, he 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 121

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nevertheless succeeds in making small contributions to the same, even if only to confirm the findings of others with regard to the prevalence or otherwise of sending urban babies out to rural wet nurses, or to substantiate assertions that early modern children were genuinely loved by their parents. How To Do It attracted the immediate attention of the national press and, complete with its jacket illustration of Venus and Cupid by Bronzino, could easily become a collectors’ item among voyeurs. Between the covers, so to speak, there are nuggets of information of genuine value to scholars and perhaps even of sound advice for modern courting couples, frustrated spouses and anxious parents, but the copious topical allusions may only succeed in making a per- fectly respectable study prematurely dated.

S.R. Fletcher King Alfred’s College, Winchester

Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; ISBN 0–521– 59959–8; 393 pp.

It is an interesting fact that this is the first modern work to use the gardens of Versailles as a source of evidence for the political, social and cultural history of France. Chandra Mukerji argues that the gardens, constructed at the behest of Louis XIV at the start of his personal rule, did not exist simply to provide the king with aesthetic pleasure (although that was a part of their meaning), but were created in order to assist in the forging of a national consciousness in ancien regime France, a kingdom held together solely by the cen- tralizing power of the absolute monarchy. The gardens expressed the military might of the nation through groundworks and canals that owed more to Vauban’s new scientific approach to the building of fortifications than to older garden traditions. The French aristocracy and visiting foreign ambassadors would easily recognize the gradients, ramparts and bastions of the gardens as reflections of the fortresses of the pré carré that defended and, as a consequence, defined the physical limits of the French nation. Just as the delights of the country were protected by fortresses and armies, so the gardens’ pleasures were defined by borders of walls and topiary cut to resemble soldiers. Versailles was used to promote an image of the kingdom as a complete nation–state. The château and its gardens were designed to 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 122

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promote the scientific and artistic leadership of France among its European rivals. For example, the plant-collecting necessary to fulfil the plans of the gardener, Le Nôtre, stood as testament to France’s position as a trading nation. This was seen in the wide variety of exotic plants that gave evidence to the kingdom’s geopolitical influence and its international links. The furniture and decorations of the château were chosen to highlight the expertise of the nation’s artisans. Perhaps most importantly to Mukerji’s argument, the gardens were used as a theatrical backdrop in the drama of politics. The festi- val held by the king in the still developing gardens on 5 May 1664 disciplined his errant nobility after the Frondes and instructed them in proper conduct befitting the new political order. The whole garden project rooted the new total absolutism of Louis XIV in the natural order of things. The elaborate and artificial patterns of the gardens drew a deliberate link between nature tamed and made perfect by the king’s command and a society ordered by God. They made the king’s absolute power over his people seem an inescapable consequence of nature. Although the work under review is thought-provoking, Mukerji unfortunately weakens much of her argument by relying on the rather hackneyed concept of the rise of the bureaucratic absolutist state in the age of Louis XIV. She ignores a more nuanced and balanced understanding of the reign, overlooking the co-operation and mutual interests of both king and the country’s aristocracy. A related flaw of the book is the commitment of Mukerji’s whole argument to the interpretation of the gardens at Versailles alone. Surprisingly for a professor of communication and sociology, she forgets that government, even at its most autocratic, is seldom a one-way dialogue. It would have been very interesting to examine what the other participants involved in the political theatre of the Versailles court thought of the gardens’ message. What were the ideas to be found in the gardens created at the châteaux of the aristocracy and how did these other non-absolutist messages relate to those of the crown? It is a bit suspect that the only other French garden mentioned is that of the minister Nicolas Fouquet at the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte. A more useful contrast might have been made with the gardens of a member of the noblesse d’épée. The main problem with this sort of theory-driven history is that it eliminates the role of the individual. In this concept of court society, derived from the ideas of Norbert Elias, only the king and his agents seem capable of independent action. The court nobility, on the other hand, is reduced to aping the fashions and manners of the king. In many respects, this school of cultural history simply retells an older 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 123

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Marxist argument about the rise of the state and the development of a productive bourgeois bureaucracy. Mukerji presents a French state at the start of Louis XIV’s reign where all political and social protests against absolutism had been stifled by the crown. There seems to be no place in this world for a faction which might use the structure of the central government to further its own ends. The difficulty with this sort of abstract historical sociology is that it dismisses the politics of day-to-day life as irrelevant. History becomes a force that individuals cannot change. Following the path Mukerji has chosen, historians seem destined to rehash the same arguments as previous generations only now with more jargon at their disposal.

Tim McHugh Queen Mary and Westﬁeld College, University of London

Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes, eds, Charity, Philanthropy and Reform: From the 1690s to 1850, Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1998. 262 pp.

The editors of this collection announce, in their introduction, two leading objectives: to explore the degree of continuity in the history of charity from the early-modern to the modern period; and to compare the process of change within this field across European and Atlantic boundaries. In these days of unremitting commercialism and competition even books about virtuous benevolence must be promoted in resounding tones. The contributions to this volume are wide-ranging, scholarly and often stimulating. But they do not justify either of the above claims. Of the ten papers three are exclusively concerned with Britain and one with Ireland; two examine the intel- lectual exchanges between the USA and Britain; and only three can be said to discuss, rather sketchily, charitable enterprise before the mid-eighteenth century. This is not a complaint I wish to make fortissimo, both because the elements within this collection are indi- vidually meritorious and — more quixotically — because the idea of a comparative and chronologically extended treatment of this subject is commendable. But it is clearly no good readers going to this volume in the hope that they will emerge with a large interpretative hypotheses as opposed to limited and fairly specific insights. Four contributions are likely to be of particular interest to readers of this review. Joanna Innes considers the varying relations of church and state, in a study whose coverage comes closest (naturally enough) to fulfilling the editorial terms of reference. On the whole, 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 124

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although the author sees some continuing validity in the old distinc- tion between Catholic and Protestant Europe, she finds it easier to detect shifts in charitable ideas and practice which were international and, so to speak, oecumenical. From the late eighteenth century, for instance, opinion moved in favour of a preventive treatment of poverty, advancing beyond the mere relief of destitution but also turning against certain kinds of residential institutions. In almost every country, moreover, the wealth at the disposal of ecclesiastical organizations was in decline relative to that available to government in a broad sense and to private individuals mobilized in lay associa- tions. One result was a vast proliferation of charitable and philanthropic enterprises which, by and large, sought a more sustained and informed connection with the poor, to promote self-help and mutual aid among them. These generalizations are not quite borne out by the more special- ist papers. Sandra Cavallo, in discussing the long-run trends in family relief in the Italian states, lays more stress on the transition from a relatively informal charity based on local and occupational communities to a more interventionist institutional or domiciliary charity dependent on the contributions of wealthy and bourgeois patrons. By the early nineteenth century benevolence underwrote a stricter moral and social discipline. Jeroen Dekker’s article relates primarily to the emergence of a new conception of philanthropy in northern Europe in the late eighteenth century. Placing its faith in the possibility of improving, rehabilitating and ultimately removing social misfits, this kind of enterprise spread out from France (and to some extent from Britain) to small countries like the Netherlands and Belgium by virtue of military conquest and ‘philanthropic tourism’. But though at first rationalist in outlook, it upheld a type of improving, preventive activity which could without much difficulty be embraced by religious organizations, both evangelical and Catholic. Hazel Mills picks out a theme touched on in some other contributions: the growing involvement of women in charitable enterprises from the late eighteenth century. In the case of France, she notes that such activity can be traced back to the parochial organizations formed by St Vincent de Paul in the early sixteenth century. Catholic women remained prominent in charity, institutional and other, throughout the nineteenth century, working both through confessional circles for the laity and through religious orders, and owing their influence partly to their ability to co-operate with a secular state that was otherwise more or less mistrusting of organized Catholicism. It would take a good deal of ingenuity to extract grand hypotheses from these studies. Charitable undertakings multiplied in and 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 125

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beyond Europe at the outset of the modern era. Examples can be found, not surprisingly, of continuities with the past and of conscious innovations. Equally unsurprising are the variable relationships established between voluntary bodies, local authorities and state institutions. To identify dominant patterns within this increasing complexity would be a formidable task. And it must be admitted that the essays found here do not embark on methodological adventures. Donna Andrew’s research on begging advertisements in the London press is the only example to be found of a study grounded on statistical measurement. For most of the time the reader meets with a historical compound of motives, ideas and activities whose scale is fairly indeterminate. It is, of course, worth knowing about what charitable people wanted to do, or tried to do, or decided to do differently. But Joanna Innes astutely observes that these matters do not necessarily have a decisive effect on the delivery of charity — on what was actually transferred to its recipients and how. For this purpose we need more specific studies of charitable practice within defined and comparable spheres. But co-ordinating historians of charity is just as difficult as was the effort of harmonizing charity itself.

G.A. Phillips University of Lancaster

Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779– 1850, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998; xii + 242 pp; ISBN 0–333– 60199–8

This new volume in Macmillan’s ‘European History in Perspective’ series covers a period of approximately seventy years of German history, a period which has rarely been seen as a whole so far. It bridges at least three major historical caesurae (1789, 1815, 1848), whereas 1779 as well as 1850 stand for individual diplomatic events (the treaties of Teschen and Olmütz, respectively) usually over- shadowed by the broader developments of history. While the author has to admit that his story did not begin in 1779, neither did it end in 1850. Obviously, all major developments — political, social, and economic — that were to produce modern Germany unfolded very rapidly after 1850, so the end of this book is pretty much up in the air. In choosing the aforementioned diplomatic events as margins for his narrative, the author also indicates his methodological approach: in a very traditional way, the volume focuses on the state, on diplo- 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 126

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matic processes, and on the actions of princes and of governments in general. The book is also, though, a product of the late 1990s, so that neither socio-economic developments nor the history of everyday rural life are neglected, even if, where they briefly surface, they remain strangely unconnected with the general narrative of political events. Even Simms’ narrative is not entirely comprehensive: the approach of dealing with the diplomatic problems faced by several German States during each consecutive phase can sometimes be a little confusing for the reader. The state-centred approach also tends to conceal the intra-state actors and conflicts, although this is probably a result simply of the lack of space inevitable when trying to cover so much history in only some 200 pages. Despite these problems, Simms’ book is still an impressive effort. The amount of, mostly very recent, literature used is highly unusual in so short a volume, which encapsulates the present state of research in so many areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German history, and comes up with fascinating comparisons. The author’s remarks on the contradictory complex of ‘modernity’ particularly deserve the reader’s interest. Even so, while the inherent problems of the normative Western model of ‘modernization’ are explicitly discussed, the author is not always able to follow through these con- siderations. In other words, if nineteenth-century Germany was able to be both ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ at the same time, the problem may lie not in the ‘ambiguities of modernization’ (178) but in the approach. The major defect of this book lies in the insistence of the author on interpreting almost all processes as results of foreign policy consider- ations. Factors and conflicts obviously of domestic nature are either ignored or presented as caused solely by external problems. Thus, even the repressive character of the German Confederation in the restoration period after 1815 is explained in terms of the primacy of foreign relations (123). Even worse, the author shows an obsession with geopolitics and the problem of Germany’s ‘Mittellage’ (central location), which for him serves to explain even the Prussian state’s opposition to infanticide. Generally, he makes his views on this matter clearly apparent, for example by claiming (181) that all of Germany’s problems in 1848 were ‘an inevitable consequence of her central location.’ To sum up, then, the present volume on the one hand ingests an impressive amount of work, and will certainly be well worth reading for every student not yet familiar with German history in the period. On the other hand, Simms brings little really new for the professional researcher. An anachronistic and revisionist approach also limits the 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 127

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book’s value. This might even be considered dangerous; however, the author’s attempt to rewrite history along his own lines is made so obvious that no great harm can be done.

Dierk Walter University of Berne

Richard J. Evans, Rereading German History. From Uniﬁcation to Reuniﬁcation 1800–1996, London and New York, Routledge, 1997; ISBN 0–415–15900–8

This is an unusual book. While it is of course quite common to pub- lish a volume of important articles, for me this was the first time that I encountered a collection of reviews and review articles. At first I was sceptical (after all, there are more than enough publications as it is!), but I soon changed my mind and was drawn in by the book. The reviews not only give a quick and reliable overview of works one has not read; they not only reveal what one of the ‘big wigs’ of German history thinks about major works of his time; but Richard Evans also succeeds in revealing new perspectives and underlying agendas in books I already knew. Many different books and areas of research are reviewed in this book. Evans deals with, to list just a selection, major general works about nineteenth-century Germany, David Blackbourn’s Marpingen. Apparations of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany, Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, Heinrich August Winkler’s labour history of the Weimar Republic and Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners; he reviews the literature on police since 1800 in Germany, on Social Darwinism and on worker’s co- operatives; and he addresses some current questions concerning unification and its effects. Instead of trying to cover all these issues, I will concentrate on the first part, for me one of the highlights, to illustrate the book’s merits. Here Richard Evans deals with grand synthetic narratives by well- established historians of nineteenth-century German history, showing how all these equally ambitious, but very different, works can be very impressive, yet run into typical difficulties. In particular, James Sheehan’s book on German History 1770–1866 (1989), Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s third volume of Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte from 1849 to 1914 (1995) and Thomas Nipperdey’s three volumes on Deutsche Geschichte in the nineteenth century (1983, 1990 and 1992) show the contradictions one encounters in these kinds of synthesis. Sheehan 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 128

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tries to write a grand narrative challenging grand narratives. Arguing against a strong historiographical tradition, which stresses the inevitability of German unification under Prussian leadership, he points out the contingency and uncertainty of the unification process: economic unification could have been realised in many different ways, national identity was not fixed on this particular kind of Germany, and the Prussian victory over Austria in 1866 was, to a large extent, good fortune. But the strength of this attack on any kind of determinism creates problems for Sheehan himself: as he does not follow another grand narrative, his books lack coherence and an overall interpretation. In contrast, Wehler tries to hold on to his old idea of a peculiar German development. His present mammoth work is much more evenly balanced than his short and provocative 1973 book on Imperial Germany, but he still argues in favour of a long- term German Sonderweg, without which, he believes, it is impossible fully to explain why fascism gained power in Germany but not in other Western nations such as France, Great Britain or the United States. While it shows an impressive openness that Wehler has learnt from major criticism provoked by his original theory and has modified his ideas, the interpretative framework thereby loses a lot of its logic. What remains ‘peculiar’ to Germany is no longer one coherently framed problem of dealing adequately with modernization, but a number of oddities, which appear rather arbitrarily picked to explain a later difference. But if one believes that these weaknesses of a German Sonderweg could help Wehler’s chief opponent Thomas Nipperdey to write a truly convincing synthesis, one’s hopes are again frustrated. Nipperdey always argued for a fair-minded and detached historicist approach, which allows for the openness of historical developments and simply narrates, as objectively as possible, how it has actually been, but in the end he writes a nationalist account of the inevitability of German unification. Evans is very fair and even laudatory towards these books, rightly praising their achievements as much as highlighting the problems they contain. But it is precisely the exemplary quality of the historians undertaking the task that inevitably leads to the wider question (which Evans does not raise) of whether such grand narratives are still possible. If they are nothing more than an immense summary of facts and interpretations, they lack coherence and purpose, but, on the other hand, it is difficult to imagine one all- embracing interpretative framework which could do justice to the range of our understanding of history. In an age where more and more aspects of the past become necessary parts of a total history and where we are faced with an unresolvable pluralism concerning 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 129

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values, ideologies and approaches, attempts to write a general history which is more than a text book might well be anachronistic. What, then, is the benefit of this book? It can serve students without a knowledge of German to get a taster of major untranslated publications, it can be used as a short-cut to gain an impression of rather lengthy works or controverisal research areas and it raises important issues about historians one already knows. On all accounts, a useful book.

Thomas Rohkramer University of Lancaster

Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, London, Penguin, 1998; ISBN 0–713–990473; 845 pp.

With his decision to write a biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw faced an immensely difficult task: he not only picked a subject which has occupied some of the best historians for more than fifty years, but he had also already contributed to this research through a number of excellent publications. His well-established reputation as a leading expert on Hitler and the Third Reich in general raised enormous expectations, while his previous books with their wide impact made it hard to be once again original. On top of all this, Kershaw attempts to overcome a deep division in the field: despite his origins as a social and ‘structuralist’ historian, he tries to write a biography without neglecting the wider political, social and cultural factors. His aim is to transcend the long-lasting debate between ‘intentionalists’ and ‘structuralists’ by giving Hitler his due without exaggerating the power of his personality. Kershaw is therefore less concerned with personal details than with ‘the character of his power — the power of the Führer’. The first part of the biography certainly lives up to expectations. Its style is not catching, but the cool tone keeps a healthy distance from any kind of sensationalism and makes the work very clear and readable. The competent handling of vast amounts of primary and secondary material is truly impressive. Kershaw’s knowledge of the primary sources and the secondary literature on Hitler and National Socialism is unique, but even more so is the way he has digested it. Although the text is longer and much more detailed than his previous ‘Hitler — A Profile in Power’, Kershaw still has the gift of giving the reader an overview of the range of opinions, of addressing the crucial points and of moving quickly to the core of issues. This reliability 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 130

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and clarity combined with all the details one could wish for will certainly make it the standard biography for years to come. Ian Kershaw does not show his skills in a spectacular way. There are no surprising turns, no strikingly new ideas, no complex concepts one has to wrestle with. On the contrary, Kershaw has the enviable ability to make his immense task look surprisingly easy and straightforward. This also applies to his main theoretical concepts: ‘charismatic authority’, the ‘Hitler myth’ and ‘working towards the Führer’. I have most problems with the idea of charismatic authority, a concept Kershaw, like many other historians, gets from Max Weber. While it is undoubtedly true that Hitler is a perfect example of charismatic leadership — an authority resting on one person rather than on the person’s position within a power structure — I do not find the concept particularly helpful. It rather seems as if structuralist historians have problems openly admitting that a person can occasionally make history. To distance themselves from a mystifica- tion of personal genius often found in traditional biographies, they try to turn the power of personality into a theory by finding an impressive term from the even more impressive social theorist Max Weber, but I do not see what it actually explains. Charisma remains as much a mystery as the power of personality. But the other two concepts, which Kershaw has already developed in previous publications, are very useful indeed. As soon as one encounters the ideas of the ‘Hitler myth’ and ‘working towards the Führer’, they appear so strikingly obvious and full of common sense that one cannot help but wonder, why nobody thought of them before. The two concepts taken together go a long way to explain the main problem in trying to understand Hitler: how a person without spectacular skills apart from his ability to speak to the masses could have such a great impact on his time. At the beginning of his political career, Hitler’s followers at least knew him from personal experi- ence, maybe a speech or even a conversation. But with time a third of the German electorate voted for him, many of them in areas where Hitler had never been. The ‘Hitler Myth’, whose main plot line was the story of the little nobody, who — in Germany’s darkest moment — realized his mission to become the Führer and achieved this goal against all odds, gradually became more important than his personality, both within the party and among the German people as a whole. Kershaw now connects this idea with more detail than ever before, and it still proves to be a very convincing explanation. It is not the person that is of prime importance, but the image he and his followers cultivated. It is not that Hitler had such an overwhelming personal aura, but that the widespread desire for a Führer found an object, which could be stylized into such a superhuman figure. And 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 131

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while National Socialism had always been a criminal political movement, it turned into a wholly destructive and self-destructive regime when even Hitler and the people around him started to believe un- reservedly in the Hitler myth. The interrelated concept of ‘working towards the Führer’ has a similarily impressive explanatory value. It gives a very plausible answer to the question posed by functionalist historians: how such a lazy, often indecisive person with mediocre intelligence and delu- sions of grandeur could have had such a strong effect on the history of the Third Reich. It was not that he was always personally involved in political activities (even a much more talented and diligent person would have failed dismally at such a task), but that millions of Nazis all tried to fulfil the ideas of their Führer at their place in society. National Socialist policies were set in motion which seemed to corre- spond to Hitler’s will, but which he did not need to initiate or direct himself. His power rested mainly in other people trying to work towards the Führer. As the closeness to the Führer’s will was the main source of personal power within the Third Reich, his authority was not challenged by these initiatives. He could sanction or stop political activities, but he was often not involved in getting them off the ground. These ideas are not new: Kershaw has developed them more concisely in previous publications. Readers wanting to know about these concepts are still better advised to turn to previous publications, because the chronological structure of the biography makes systematical thoughts difficult to find. As ‘working towards the Führer’ and the ‘Hitler myth’ played their part at different times, they are also presented — with changing emphasis and perspective, but also with some redundancy — at different places. But this is the unavoidable price of a chronological structure and is certainly justified by the end result. By fleshing out his original concepts with full details in a lengthy biography, Kershaw proves those concepts to be a suitable framework for integrating Hitler’s whole political life into one convincing narrative. Thus the book is not only reliable and up-to-date, it also puts forward a highly original and convincing narrative of Hitler’s life with particular emphasis on his political role in the Third Reich. While Kershaw is clearly an expert on Hitler and the Third Reich, his approach of studying the person in his time also forces him to position himself in the controversial field of Imperial and Weimar German history. While still very knowledgeable, Kershaw’s touch in these areas is not always as certain. With regard to the alleged peculiarities of German history, for example, he takes a rather uncertain and imprecise in-between position. One can certainly argue that 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 132

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Germany’s ‘problems, by and large, were those of a modern, highly developed, culturally advanced, industrial society’ (74), while simul- taneously believing in ‘a specifically German political culture that had emerged in the Wilhelmine era’ providing ‘the soil in which the seeds of the ideas that National Socialism would later harvest could germinate and then sprout rapidly’ (75), but such a position would have to be more clearly defined, showing the weight of the different factors as well as their interrelatedness. One could also wish for a more thorough account of the origins of a widespread preparedness for a leadership cult or a more careful discussion of the extreme right in the Weimar Republic and its relation to National Socialism. But those are minor points. All in all one must say that the first part of this biography sets new standards. While it might be premature to judge an only half-finished work, it seems a safe bet that the com- pleted mammoth project will become one of the great biographies of Hitler’s life. While its thorough grounding in current research makes it useful, its original interpretative framework should make it a classic.

Thomas Rohkramer University of Lancaster

Roman Solchanyk, ed., Ukraine: From Chernobyl to Sovereignty. A Collection of Interviews, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1992; ISBN 0– 333–57220–3, 174 pp.

This makes for an interesting historical document. It is a set of interviews held in 1989 and 1990 with Ukrainians who were variously involved in the Ukrainian independence movement. This includes Ivan Drach. Secretary of the Ukrainian Writer’s Union, head of the Kiev Writers’ organization and member of the Communist Party of the Ukraine of 30 years standing, he was elected chairman of the Popular Movement of the Ukraine for Perestroika at its meeting in September 1989. This organization was better known as ‘Rukh’, the core of the nationalist movement within the Ukraine. Drach’s interview strikes an almost statesmanlike note. At one point he is challenged about what the growth of Ukrainian national awareness means for the minorities in the area. His reply is that Russians living in the Ukraine should come to live there better than Russians anywhere else, Jews too, and, naturally, Ukrainians the same. Ukrainian nationalism, it appears, is good news for everyone. This emphasis on the benign character of burgeoning Ukrainian 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 133

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consciousness is repeated in the interview with Adam Michnik. He is an historian, publicist, human rights activist and former political prisoner. He emphasizes that anyone, regardless of their nationality (Russian, Jewish or whatever) was free to join Rukh. An interesting twist, however, is Michnik’s call for Ukrainians in Poland to be allowed full freedom to develop their own culture and language there, at least on the basis that they remain loyal to the Polish State. In this connection history is remarkably close to Michnik’s heart. He takes time to state that it must be explained to the Poles that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the Second World War was not, pure and simple, a group of butchers. Ukrainians were in a difficult position, being wedged between Germans, Russians and Poles. He adds, furthermore, that Ukrainians died at Auschwitz too, although there is no plaque there commemorating the fact. Such a commemoration would conflict with the popular image of Ukrainians as killers. The importance of history to the Ukrainian nationalist movement is underlined once more in the interview with Stanislav Kul’chyts’ki, from the department of History of Socialist Construction in the Ukrainian Academy of Science. His interest is in the famines of the 1920s and 1930s. His investgation turns on two questions: how many died and did the catastrophe amount to deliberate genocide on the part of the Stalinist state? His answers are uneven. Rather straightforwardly, he notes that the census figures of 1929 to 1937 show a drop in population of 4 million. In more complicated fashion he is uncertain whether the deaths implied here were due to economic chaos or a deliberate, state-backed attempt to get rid of the region’s peasantry. Fudging the issue he concludes simply that, in any event, the underlying state policy was aiming to create a society which could never exist: one in which there would be no free market. The highly ambiguous character of the Rukh movement is raised in a number of entries. Pavolo Movchan, poet and secretary of the Kiev writers’ organization notes that the Party committee actually agreed to the initiative which saw Rukh set up. Even Kravchuk, the head of the ideological department in the Central Committee, supported it. The sense that it is no easy thing to distinguish Party trimmers, Communist reformers and genuine nationalist democrats is underscored in the interview with Dmytro Pavychko. He is a poet and reform activist. He emphasizes that he was raised the son of a poor peasant, that he was educated thanks to the Soviet authorities and that at various times of his life he accepted at face value the Communist ideal. There were even occasions, he adds, when he believed Ukrainian independence could be achieved on the basis of Communist ideology. He favoured a ‘red’ independent Ukraine. He also points out that Rukh was actually formed by Communist party 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 134

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members. Still, Pavlychko experienced a turning point after which he could no longer remain within the Party himself. It came as Gorbachev tried by brutal means to keep Lithuania within the Soviet Union. Nothing could be the same after that, Pavlychko decided. In this light it is interesting to note the much more modest expectations of novelist Yurii Pokal’chuk. Also an active member of Rukh, he emphasizes the impossibility of considering the full independence for the Ukraine since it is said to lack all the necessary economic, cultural and political prerequisites: ‘It’s absurd’ (p.33). He emphasizes that Rukh’s aim should only have been economic sovereignty for the Ukraine within the Soviet Union. All in all, these interviews contain much provocative material. In highlighting the contradictions within Rukh, they give the sense of a vital, youthful movement striving to define itself in the face of beckoning political chaos. The interviews hint frequently at the difficulties entailed when it comes to achieving a proper understanding of the reform processes which were attempted under Gorbachev, as the unwieldy totalitarian state, staffed by ideologues and chancers alike tried to accommodate all the challenges to it at once. But it is only to be expected that a book such as this has its drawbacks. The interviews are reproduced pretty much unprocessed which means that the text can be rather ‘bitty’. What is more, at times it makes for an uncompromising read, since substantial assumptions are made about background knowledge of the political situation in the Ukraine during 1989 and 1990 as well as about the precise political place each interviewee held in the developing maelstrom. Nonetheless, as a documentary reader giving a direct insight into the minds of the Ukrainian political players of the day, it is a worthy contribution to the literature.

Martyn Housden University of Bradford

Taras Kuzio and Andrew Wilson, Ukraine: Perestroika to Independ- ence, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994; ISBN 0–333–57999–2; 260 pp.

In the foreword to this overview of recent Ukrainian political history, Norman Stone states that the Ukrainians have been the last major European nationality to acquire national independence (xi). In the 1920s there was a Ukrainian cultural renaissance of sorts, but it was quashed in the 1930s, during which time leading Ukrainian figures were imprisoned or killed. During the same years a ‘state 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 135

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enforced famine’ accounted for about 8 million people. Given these most extreme of circumstances we can understand why the Ukraine had to remain part of the Soviet Union. Equally we begin to understand why an eventual declaration of independence had to await the final demise of that structure. When it came, the declaration followed the anti-Gorbachev coup of August 1991 and was ratified by popular referendum on 1 December 1991. At this point, nationalistically-inclined former Communists led by the onetime ideological secretary to the Communist Party, Leonid Kravchuk, took power and a new nation of 52 million people came into being. The story of this emergence of independence is told in nine chapters. It begins with a focus on the development of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Kuzio and Wilson explain how the pro-democratic cultural intelligentsia initiated nationalist, pro- democratic protest in the period 1987–90, and why the national Communist elites managed to ride the crest of the popularist wave which resulted. There follows an apposite, highly relevant investiga- tion into the weaknesses of the Ukrainian nationalist opposition movement which determined it could not take power on its own. Some time is also given to a discussion of the general growth in political dissent from 1945 onwards, if not before. It is an easy move from this topic to a discussion of the accelerated rise of opposition politics under, specifically, Gorbachev. Further chapters chart events surrounding the 1990 elections through which the opposition forces got a foothold in power, the attempts at bridge-building between Communists and nationalists which followed this and finally there is a discussion of the fateful referendum which saw 90.3 per cent of people vote for independence. Kuzio and Wilson have certainly given us a worthy introductory text well suited to the needs of most people seeking an initial understanding of the events which have shaken the Ukraine over the last ten to twenty years. It lays bare an often complicated topic in a way which should be appreciated by readers wanting to grapple with Europe’s new borderland. Kuzio and Wilson manage to pose good questions about the Byzantine political complexion of the area, in particular about the nature of Communism as it was incarnated in this nationally aware region of the Soviet Union. They are successful in showing how lines could become blurred between Communists and non-Communists as each tried to ride the tiger of nationalism at the time when Gorbachev’s state was entering its death throes. Indeed Kuzio and Wilson make a good case that the Soviet system was actually structured so as to create advocates of nationalism within its own framework. Soviet officials appointed to administer power downwards inevitably found themselves representing interests which 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 136

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slowly percolated up the political and administrative structures from the grass-roots. In this context the authors also manage to argue quite successfully that nationalism was much more an unintended product of Perestroika than a problem it was seeking to address and contain. Their discussion of the opposition nationalist movement is interesting too. It emerges as a force fatefully compromised by the multi-ethnicity of the whole of the Ukrainian area. If anything, the book just leaves us wanting more — especially more history. We hear tantalizingly little about the Central Rada, or Ukrainian parliament, of 1917–20. Likewise, regarding developments in the 1920s, we want to know more about the way Ukrainian nationalist sensibilities could have been mobilized in an hierarchical society in which Ukrainians were overrepresented in lower status jobs and Russians in higher ones. More would have been interesting too about the history of the highly diverse ethnic composition of the area. In 1989 there were still almost 40,000 Germans in the Ukraine (a figure much reduced from the 400,000 in 1926), 130,000 Tartars, 37,000 Bulgarians an even 99,000 Greeks. In fact we want to know more still about the way the national opposition movement, or Rukh, began a project to re-write the history of the Ukraine from 1989. All of this only goes to show how much Kuzio and Wilson have managed to compress into a brief study, and just how provocative this turns out to be. They deserve to be congratulated.

Martyn Housden University of Bradford

Raymond Hutchings, Historical Dictionary of Albania, Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. (European Historical Dictionaries, No. 12), 1996. xvi + 275 pp. (hbk)

Compared with several other volumes in this series, Hutchings’s Albanian dictionary is somewhat inferior, which, given the difficulty in getting information on Albania, might not be entirely the fault of the author/compiler. In his introduction he provides a good overview of Albanian history up to the collapse of Communist rule in 1992, but the single paragraph devoted to post-Communist Albania paints far too rosy a picture and fails to acknowledge the chaos and virtual anarchy that have characterized life there since 1992. Nor is there any commentary on the massive movements of Albanians to Greece and Italy that were precipitated by the demise of the Communist government. 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 137

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My principal complaint about this book, however, is the dearth of statistical material. Of course, it is difficult to get accurate statistics on Albania, but something is better than nothing, even if it carries a caveat regarding accuracy. A case in point are the entries on the armed services. Under ‘Air Force’, ‘Army’ and ‘Navy’ we are given almost nothing in the way of statistics. Surely there are available somewhere estimates on the size of the army and numbers of combat aircraft in Albania? Other statistics are woefully out of date. Under the heading ‘Literacy’ there are no data more recent than 1950. There are also some problems with entry categories. There is an entry for ‘Economic System’ which rather vaguely discusses the ‘command’ and/or ‘mobilization’ economy that characterized the period of Communist rule, but there is no attempt to describe the present economic system. Moreover, there is no entry for ‘Eco- nomy’, nor do any economic statistics appear elsewhere, so the reader will not be able to determine the size of the economy histori- cally or contemporarily. There is, however, an entry for ‘Cuisine’. Other inconsistencies abound. For example, Rose Wilder Lane, who never published anything of serious import on Albania, is given coverage equal to that of (Mary) Edith Durham whose several books on Albania remain important even today, decades after they were published. And Carlton Coon, whose important work on blood feud in Albania and the mountain Gheg tribe, The Mountains of Giants: A Racial and Cultural Study of the North Albanian Mountain Ghegs (Cambridge, MA: Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1950), is absent altogether as are the Ghegs themselves. The ‘Orthodox Church in Albania’ gets 3+ pages, yet there is no entry for either ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslims’. An entry on ‘Dogs’ is longer than the scant dozen lines devoted to ‘Literature, Albanian’. Finally, there is some misinformation. In an entry for ‘Pigs’ (also longer than ‘Literature’), the reader is informed that ‘Albania is the only Balkan country where pork is not the meat chiefly eaten . . . ’. Such is not the case, nor has it ever been, in neighbouring Greece where beef is probably dominant today, but traditionally lamb ruled the spit and roasting oven. With the situation in the Balkans changing so rapidly, a reference of this sort is quickly out of date. It is nice, however, to have the 3½ pages of historical background on Kosovo as an aid in understanding recent and current developments there, several of which are anticipated by the author. Ultimately, of course, this is a reference book and should not be seen as a substitute for a narrative history. Its principal utility is for the identification of individuals and places of importance in 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 138

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Albanian history. Although many descriptions are too cursory to be of much assistance to a serious student, others provide information sufficient for scholarly purposes. There are also three useful maps: a general map, an ethnographic map, and a map showing the shifting boundaries of the country in the twentieth century. Also valuable is the chronology which runs from the Illyrian period of 2000+ BC to AD 1993.

Peter S. Allen Rhode Island College

R.J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Concise Histories Series), 1997. xv + 259 pp. (pbk)

This is a straightforward chronological account of Bulgarian history from earliest times to the present, although it is mostly concerned with the modern period. It begins with a note on the prehistoric population and then moves quickly through the classical and later periods: by page 10 we are at AD 681 and the pace begins to slow somewhat. Nevertheless, almost 80 per cent of the book is devoted to events of the nineteenth century and beyond. It adds little to the author’s 1987 work, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); in fact, it is considerably shorter and contains less detail, but it reads better, and the earlier Cambridge work is now out of print. Crampton writes narrative history in a comfortable style without footnotes or references. There is minimal commentary, yet the author’s prejudices surface on occasion, most notably when dealing with the post-World War II period where his anti-Communist senti- ments are clearly in evidence. This enhances the book’s readability, giving it texture and spice. There can be no question that Bulgaria has been neglected by European and other scholars, and, despite Crampton’s best efforts here and elsewhere, it will undoubtedly continue to be neglected unless there is a major conflagration there which has serious reper- cussions for western Europe. Bulgaria has never captured the imagination of the West as say Greece and Italy have done, because it did not have such a glorious and rich past. Nor have great multi- tudes of Bulgarians emigrated to the West, so that without a signifi- cant foreign presence in Europe they lack the advocacy needed to catapult them into the West’s consciousness. Nevertheless, Bulgaria 02_Articles 30/1 19/11/99 3:02 pm Page 139

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is worthy of more than just a footnote in history and Crampton’s book does a fine job of elevating it above its usual lowly status. A few quibbles. There is no bibliography per se, but a list of ‘Suggestions for Further Reading’, which is rather thin and abbre- viated. It lists the work of Charles Jelavich, but not the monumental and far more important work he co-authored with his wife Barbara, The Balkans in Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), nor do we find the seminal work of L.S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1958 and 1965). There is also a small error on p. 143 where the caption of a photograph identifies Bulgarian troops ‘during the first world war, just over a thousand years after their predecessors were defeated . . . by Basil the Bulgar Slayer’. In fact, as noted on p. 21 of this book, the defeat of the Bulgarians at the hands of Basil took place in 1014, approximately 900 years before World War I, not 1000 years. Well organized and well written, A Concise History of Bulgaria deserves the attention of all serious scholars concerned with the Balkans and the Slavic peoples. For others it can serve as a valuable reference for those aspects of Bulgarian history that have had an impact beyond the Balkan peninsula.

Peter S. Allen Rhode Island College