"We Cannot Pretend to Be Deaf and Blind": Three Memories of the 20th Century | 2017 Book Recommendations, Part 2

Three memories of the 20th century. We recommend three new books — Memoirs by Raymond Aron (expanded edition), Auschwitz Testimonies, 1945–1986, and Tumult — plus a few older ones.

Strictly speaking, these are not offered to readers with the rigor of a "Best Books of the Year" list. We went through a great deal this year, and these books, published in 2017, happen to help us think it through.

We recommend across four categories: humanities and social sciences (fiction excluded), business and technology, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction.

**The candidates in the first three categories came from two sources: recommendations by more than 20 professional publishing houses, and recommendations by QDaily's editors, reporters, and contributing writers.****For the fiction section, we gathered the views of writers, translators, scholars, book reviewers, book editors, and literary critics, and commissioned the essays from them.**The rest was written by QDaily's editors and contributing writers.

We did our best to read these books through, and "sincerely believe they really are good" — as last year, that is the least we owe readers before recommending anything.

This is the second installment of our humanities and social sciences recommendations for the year.

It covers three new books — Memoirs by Raymond Aron (expanded edition), Auschwitz Testimonies, 1945–1986, and Tumult. The review of Aron's memoirs was written by Wang Qian, a project associate professor at the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo. His main works include 《中国が読んだ現代思想》 (How Did China Read Modern Western Thought?, 2011), the co-authored 《近代日本政治思想史》 (A History of Modern Japanese Political Thought, 2014), and 《現代中国と市民社会》 (Contemporary China and Civil Society, 2017).

Memoirs by Raymond Aron (Expanded Edition)

The one book you must read to understand the 20th century

Wang Qian, University of Tokyo

If you want to learn from books what kind of century the 20th century was, but have neither the time nor the energy to read widely, I would recommend without hesitation the autobiography of one French philosopher. Among the heavyweight thinkers of the 20th century, he was arguably the one who got the least wrong, and far more reliable in his political judgment than his old classmate from the École Normale Supérieure, Jean-Paul Sartre. His name was Raymond Aron (1905–1983).

Tony Judt, the great contemporary historian who admired Aron enormously, called Aron's cohort a "golden generation." And so it was: an age when great minds and geniuses arrived in droves, with Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sartre among its finest. Aron lacked his old classmate's literary flair, but he wrote as much, was as active outside the ivory tower as inside it, and had astonishing connections in Western political circles — even a diplomatic talent like Henry Kissinger treated him as a teacher. Aron lived through the century's main events: World War II, which marked him deeply, and nearly the whole of the Cold War, and he had ample experience of the polemics intellectuals wage among themselves. François Furet, the great French historian known for his work on the French Revolution, called Aron the greatest professor in the French university, a man at home with the currents of thought in Europe's major cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. How could a thinker like that fail to write a brilliant autobiography? Reading it is close to reading a condensed history of the 20th century — political and diplomatic on one side, cultural and intellectual on the other. How much you take from it is up to you, the reader.

The Chinese translation of Aron's memoirs runs to more than a thousand pages (the latest French edition passes a thousand as well), but I will say this: once you start, you will not put it down. The first time I read it, what fascinated me was his account of how he grew into a philosopher. He describes how badly he handled the balance between reading and writing, and how much he gained from reading Kant, so that we seem to watch a philosopher's mind take shape. He writes, of course, about his dealings with many first-rate figures — Charles de Gaulle, Sartre, Kissinger. You can also read his assessments of contemporaries such as the German public-law scholar Carl Schmitt, now well known in China, and the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, along with his reading and judgment of Marx, whom he studied all his life. Insight after insight. Unlike his old classmate Sartre, who could never pull himself out of his infatuation with utopia, Aron was a philosopher who took experience seriously. To work out what industrial society actually was, he taught himself sociology, economics and several other fields, so that what he said would rest on something, rather than holding forth on the state of the world like a philosophical prodigy or a literary star — because he knew that kind of talk leads people astray too easily, that it is the opium of the intellectuals. Precisely because he went his own way, he was shut out for years in a homeland thick with left-wing intellectuals, where some said, cruelly, "Better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron." Whoever said it must in the end have seen that Aron was the one who stood on the right side of history; in his last years, French intellectuals finally worked out who had been right and who wrong. A case, truly, of turning your head at last to find him standing there in the fading lamplight.

The American scholar Stanley Hoffmann said: "The Memoirs are the greatest legacy Aron left his students and readers; they teach them how to think about history, how to think about politics, how to think about society. To me, Aron is the salt of the earth." I agree entirely. Living in a complicated and unstable world demands a high degree of insight and judgment to begin with. Aron was a philosopher who lived through the most extreme century in human history, and in that tangled world he still managed to reach clear, precise judgments about the present and about the past. How did he do it? The answer, I think, is all in this memoir. The book's subtitle is "Fifty Years of Political Reflection," and it touches on nearly every major event of the 20th century. Aron's account and his arguments can help us understand that extreme century, so recently behind us.

There are plenty of intellectuals in today's world walking the road to Syracuse, and a little Aron would do them good as an antidote. For ordinary readers like us, this book is the best way into Aron's mind; in it he also explains his own major works. The post-Cold War world is far from quiet, populism has come back today in new clothes, and Aron has a good deal to offer as we think these problems through. When you finish, you will understand the 20th century better and see today's world with new eyes. Judt said: "Reading Aron now can remind us what exactly was at stake in the great conflicts of the 20th century, and why it mattered so much." Finish this memoir and you will see why he said it — and that he was not exaggerating in the least.

Auschwitz Testimonies, 1945–1986

"It failed to conquer the human conscience, but it succeeded in numbing it"

QDaily

Every few years, on the anniversary, Primo Levi would publish an essay: remembering, reminding the public not to forget Auschwitz.

As the most famous chronicler of Auschwitz, Levi lived to remember it at all only through a chain of coincidences:

First, he had always eaten little, so the rationed food in the camp, while still not enough for him, was not as catastrophically short as it was for many others, whose bodies needed far more than they got;

He had also been hardened earlier by life in the mountains, so he could better stand the cold;

He knew a little German — "it is very hard to work out what people are saying by guesswork alone; a sudden hail of punches and kicks might knock you to the ground simply because your jacket had four buttons or six instead of five, or because in the dead of winter they saw you lying in bed with your hat on";

German also spared him the harshest labor during the coldest winter, that of 1944;

It was a coincidence, too, that he went almost a full year without falling ill, and then on January 10, 1945, just as the rumble of Soviet artillery became audible, came down with scarlet fever and was admitted to the camp infirmary;

At that moment the surviving prisoners of Auschwitz — as many as 150,000 — were forced to evacuate on foot, and fewer than one in ten lived;

The patients left behind were all to be executed, but a Soviet air raid drove the SS off;

In the last ten days they found a few potatoes;

Even so, half of them starved or died of illness before the Soviets arrived;

And Levi pulled through.

For there to be no memory of Auschwitz at all would be the normal outcome.

Levi said the Monowitz camp where he was held was a lucky one: average survival there could stretch to three months, because it was a labor camp supplying workers to IG Farben, whereas average survival in Auschwitz's other camps might be one or two weeks. Which is to say, the people who could have remembered were all dead.

The camp's administrators, of course, would never remember. Slavoj Žižek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real that "bearing witness to Auschwitz was simply impossible." The Nazis had a famous, cynical argument: "Whatever we did to the Jews was so appalling, so beyond words, that even if someone survived the camps, those who had not been there would not believe what he said. They would flatly declare that he was lying, or that he was insane!"

What a precious thing memory is.

We are often rough with memory. I have met people who lived through the events of the late 1980s and could never get past them, and my own question was: is it worth it, spending a whole life telling that story to others, sunk in it, unable to stop? To be tethered for life to a single event?

Levi feared exactly that kind of life. "Nowadays, talking about the camps is thought vulgar. At best you are accused of glorifying sacrifice, or of being fixated on gruesome, horrifying subject matter; at worst, of telling nothing but lies, even of profaning decency."

And so, not long after Dr. Benedetti — who had entered Auschwitz with him and been rescued with him — died, Levi fell to his death, apparently by his own hand.

That doctor, Leonardo De Benedetti, was Levi's co-author on Auschwitz Testimonies. The latest Levi book to be published in China, it collects the testimony the two of them gave across 40 years, from 1945 to 1986. What sets it apart from Levi's earlier work is that this book is mostly about bearing witness — and bearing witness over and over: on anniversaries, when a fascist's daughter raised doubts, when Nazis were about to stand trial, when people were on the point of forgetting.

So the same string of numbers comes back again and again:

6 million Jews died in the Holocaust;

3.5 million people died at Auschwitz;

There were 650 people on the train that carried Levi to Auschwitz; apart from 96 men and 29 women assigned to the Monowitz labor camp, all the rest went straight to the gas chambers;

Of the 96 men, 15 survived; of the 29 women, 8. Twenty-three survivors in all, a survival rate of 3.5%.

...

The good of memory — or rather the value of refusing to forget — lies not only in making people remember the evil that exists in humanity, but still more in how that evil arose and spread. How did humanity come to this?

The blame cannot even be laid entirely on Nazi Germany. Writing as a victim in 1961, 16 years after his rescue, Levi examined the position he and Italy's Jews had been in: "It was an atmosphere in which everyone pretended to be deaf and blind" — an atmosphere that dragged all of humanity into a tragic fate, rather than the simpler story of "evil men" doing evil and good people suffering.

When the racial laws were promulgated I was 19, a first-year chemistry student at the University of Turin. ...I have to admit that in the suffocating atmosphere of the university at the time, I got by well enough. Radical fascists among the students were few, and generally not dangerous. Even they were fairly bewildered by the new laws, which looked foolish from the day they took effect, nothing but an imitation of Germany's far more brutal statutes; but at the time a mood of skepticism prevailed, and I was infected by it too: it was an atmosphere in which everyone pretended to be deaf and blind, and everyone fell in with it — students and professors alike, fascists and anti-fascists alike, and the victims of fascism as well.

People sensed that war was coming, and it came; yet for us not much actually changed. I carried on with my studies under the bullying and trampling of laws large and small, though it was not hard to find ways around them.

One thing I must admit: in those years, neither I nor young people in my position ever had the thought of active resistance cross our minds. On this point fascism was highly effective: it failed to conquer the human conscience, but it succeeded in numbing it. Fascism boasted that it had shaped social mores and personal conduct in a profound way, but what it actually produced in people was a serious lethargy, a widespread, hidden emptiness of spirit. We called ourselves anti-fascists then, but our link to the previous generation, the one that had sought democracy, had already been cut. We muddled through our studies, our work, our political discussions — scholastic, academic discussions, thin and full of fantasy.

On the other side — the side of Nazi Germany, which did the harm, and of the ordinary Germans who were to some degree its accomplices — an even larger human tragedy comes into sharper view. In another of his books, The Reawakening, Levi indicts the part Germans played:

Although the information was available in one form or another, most Germans did not know because they did not want to know. In fact, they wished not to find out. State terrorism was certainly a very powerful weapon, very hard to resist. But it is equally undeniable that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. A particular code prevailed throughout Hitler's Germany: those who knew did not speak, those who did not know did not ask, and those who asked got no answer. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his own ignorance. And his ignorance seemed to give him ample justification for supporting Nazism. By shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears tight, he built himself the illusion of "not knowing," and used it to wash himself clean of complicity in the crimes committed on his doorstep.

Without memory, not only will the atrocities of more than 70 years ago fade away, but the tragic roots that produced them will go unseen too. Much of the time we are exactly where Levi was as the great tragedy was gathering: we sensed something bad would happen, we only failed to imagine how bad.

That is the whole point of insisting on the value of memory and of truth.

Memory is of course painful, and quite possibly unwelcome, but as Levi said on the tenth anniversary: "Forgetting is not permitted, silence is not permitted. If we all fall silent, who will speak? Certainly not the guilty and their accomplices. Without our testimony, the sheer extraordinariness of the Nazis' brutal atrocities will, before long, be left to the realm of legend. That is why we must speak."

Thirty years after the events, an exhausted and lonely Primo Levi still had not given up: "Now we have been reduced to a few dozen people. Perhaps there are too few of us for anyone to listen to what we say; besides, we often feel we have become tiresome storytellers. Sometimes a symbolic dream appears before my eyes — strange, it is the same dream we often had at night during our imprisonment: the listener stops hearing what we are saying, does not understand, grows distracted, and then walks away, leaving us alone."

What more is there to say?

A tragedy that large has already happened, paid for with 6 million lives; we cannot pretend to be deaf and blind to it.

It happened in other places too — the Soviet Great Purge, China's Great Leap Forward — memory bought with tens of millions of other lives. We cannot pretend to be deaf and blind to that either.

Tumult

My dear, what on earth were you thinking when you did all this?

QDaily

In the basement of his house, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his eighties, found a number of notebooks. In them the people he had once met had turned into strangers, and he himself looked like somebody else. "I decided there was only one way to get close to him": a dialogue with his own double. "He is like a younger brother I had not thought about for a long time. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. But I did not want to interrogate him, and I did not want a confession either. I do not care whether this man of nearly 40 felt guilty or embarrassed at the time, or whether what he did was right or wrong. That is something he has to work out for himself. The only thing that interests me is his answer to the question I am putting to him: my dear, what on earth were you thinking when you did all this?"

I have always rather liked the way leftists write, even though I remain baffled about why they made the life choices they did. I should explain that by "leftists" I mean that group of left-wing intellectuals living in Europe and America who were, for at least a stretch of their lives, infatuated with Soviet Russia and communism — some went full of enthusiasm and came back speechless, others went and came back unchanged, leftists still.

The main reason I enjoy reading them is that their lives are dramatic enough, their language is full-bodied, they settle scores with gusto, and there is an innocence in them about how the world works that keeps producing surprises. They are often drama queens too. In the words of another British historian labeled a Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, they are plenty "interesting." The Chinese edition rendered the title of Hobsbawm's memoir, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, as "The Wonderfully Interesting 20th Century," which is not a bad choice — though a leftist's idea of "interesting" is worth thinking over again.

Enzensberger's question is probably not an octogenarian rebuking a man in his forties. To take the sentence apart, you first have to understand what "all this that you did" means.

"All this" is a good deal richer than anything in our own lives.

Any story Enzensberger mentions in passing in this slim book seems to have a whole history behind it: breaking with Castro in Cuba; falling in love with Fadeyev's daughter (it became the most sensational cross-border romance of the Cold War; Fadeyev wrote The Young Guard, chaired the Union of Soviet Writers, and killed himself in 1956); watching Pablo Neruda faint from despair after missing out on the Nobel Prize; watching how cynical and full of complaints Prince Sihanouk could be (he told him: "I may be head of state, but what does that mean? All I want is to save a country with no friends"); listening to Anna Akhmatova read her poems.

Here is a passage that shows what makes leftist writing so appealing:

...It was nothing beside Anna Akhmatova's appearance on the same platform a few years earlier. I have not forgotten how she came on. At 75, with what bearing she stepped onto that stage — a proud, dignified beauty whose poems, after decades of hardship, had defeated her enemy Stalin! She had once learned those poems by heart and then burned them: "Hands, matches, an ashtray — a beautiful and painful ritual." For once, the Italians, with their old-fashioned pomp, made the right decision. Two years later, this unapproachable, never-dethroned queen of Russian poetry died at Domodedovo.

There is a saying that everyone should spend a few years as a leftist while young. Without his leftist identity Enzensberger probably would not have had such a long, stirring youth: Havana, Berlin, Moscow, and of course the United States, Britain. If there are places in this world full of struggle, and the sheer joy of struggle pulls you toward them, and you despise the mediocre bourgeois world from the bottom of your heart, then if you are not going to be a leftist, are you going to be a tour guide?

As for Hobsbawm, he caught every piece of luck a leftist could ask for. The place and time of his birth coincided with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; then he went to Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was collapsing too, and witnessed a brief slice of the "Thousand-Year Reich's" 12 years.

He spent most of his life in Britain, watching that colonial empire disappear.

He believed in communism all his life, and the Soviet empire disappeared as well.

Writing his memoir in old age, he was sure enough to try to bet that the American Century would end within the lifetimes of his readers of the day.

(He may well have been right.

Here is how he liked to boast about it:

"Most of the situations I faced in my life looked like this: branded with a label for being born in Egypt, though Egypt has no real connection to the history of my life — I was like someone from somewhere else. I attached myself to certain countries and felt at home in them, and I saw a great deal firsthand in many others. And yet in every place I have been, even in the country whose nationality I was born with, I may not have been an outsider, but I was never a true local either: an Englishman among Central Europeans, a continental European immigrant in England, a Jew everywhere I went (and especially so in Israel), an anti-expert in a world of experts, a cosmopolitan who spoke several languages, an academic who gave his political writing and his scholarship to non-intellectuals. What is more, for most of my life I was an anomaly among Communist Party members, and Communist Party members were always a political minority in the countries I knew. All of this complicated my private life, but it was a precious asset for a historian's trade."

Next comes the second half of that sentence: "what on earth were you thinking."

The heedless love those leftists had for Soviet Russia and communism — and it took in many fine minds, never mind Sartre, but even someone as clear-sighted as Hobsbawm — what on earth were they thinking?

Enzensberger, at least, does not dodge: "Under the present constitution, the left depends utterly on its basic theories; it would rather deny the evidence than throw its settled ideas and habits into the wastebasket. Sometimes 'liberation' arrives wearing a corset."

That line seems to settle a lot of questions. Put plainly, it is stubbornness. Crude as the explanation is, it may well be true. And of course leftists, as idealists, watched you democracy-and-freedom people make this mess of the world — you had your try, after all, and you proved yourselves wrong, so what is the harm in our trying it the leftist way? The liberals' failure was bound to make the left restless — and the left was born out of three centuries of Enlightenment currents, which is simply true. (One more thing worth adding: to those French left-wing intellectuals, America's utilitarian brand of capitalism violated the spirit of the Enlightenment, drifted further and further from Europe's traditional values, and was not worth a snicker; the Soviet communist experiment, on the other hand, was the true heir of our own Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau.)

Idealists also tend to be in a hurry — how do you make the ideal arrive faster? Hobsbawm gave an answer on the left's methodology: the secret of a Leninist party's success lies neither in the dream of fighting from behind a street barricade nor even in Marxist doctrine. It can be summed up in two phrases: "decisions must be carried out," and "party discipline above all." Hobsbawm said: "What made the Communist Party attractive was that it could get done what others could not."

I have to say, when the Soviet Union's Potemkin fronts fooled the entire world, or when China switches from coal to gas in no time at all and the sky turns blue, that is no ordinary temptation for a great many people.

As for the negative output of all this — sometimes the leftists simply never saw it, sometimes they "would rather deny" it — but whenever they voiced their approval, they all seem to have consciously chosen a safe place from which to voice it. Even Bertolt Brecht was no exception.

In Tumult, Enzensberger invents a dialogue between himself and his younger self:

— (

Enzensberger, the 80-year-old version

) Do you have nothing more to tell me?

— (Enzensberger at 40) No. 1968 is now just a fictional number, a jumble of confused memories, self-deception, summed-up experience, and the projection somewhere of what happened in those years. Those experiences lie buried under a dungheap of media coverage, archives, symposia, and the by-now-unimaginable stock formulas of old veterans.

— (80) You would rather not supply a résumé, then?

— (40) My dear old fellow, you know as well as I do that the tumult never ended. It simply carries on elsewhere — in Mogadishu, in Damascus, in Lagos, in Kyiv. Luckily we do not live there. It is only a matter of perspective.

— (80) It seems you do not hold grudges.

— (40) I hope not. I have no wish to be like you. Luckily, the two of us have nothing in common at all.

— (80) On that point, at least, we can agree.

Tumult

The cover image is a still from the film 《劫后余生》 (The Truce) and a photograph of Raymond Aron, from: Douban, paginaindomita