Josh > Books: modern-history‎ (68)

There is no "I" in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only "one" and "we," as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.

And inside ourselves, we had a great, vague memory of the world. Of almost everything we retained little beyond a word, detail, or name that would later make us say, like Georges Perec, "I remember," whether it concerned Baron Empain’s kidnapping, Picorette candies, Bérégovoy’s socks, Devaquet, the Falklands War, or the Benco breakfast. But these were not real memories. That was the name we gave them, but in fact they were something quite different: time markers.

And so she will never forget the date of the insurrection in Algeria, nor that All Saints’ afternoon, of which she will retain one clear image, a kind of pure fact: a young woman squatting over the grass, as if to lay an egg, [micturating], and standing again, pushing her skirts down. To this storehouse of illegitimate memory she consigns things too unthinkable, shameful, or crazy to put into words — a brown stain on a sheet of her mother’s that had once belonged to her grandmother, dead for three years — an indelible spot that violently attracts and repels her, as if it were alive — the scene between her parents on the Sunday before her sixth-grade entrance exam, when her father tried to kill her mother, dragging her to the cellar next to the block where they kept the sickle planted

"The bastard’s gone!" the count yelled in Hungarian. But everyone understood him as if he had spoken German.

Herr von Trotta seemed like some character from a province that was historically rather than geographically remote, like a ghost from the Fatherland’s past, the embodied pang of a patriotic conscience."

How, in particular, can I write as a historian about events in which I played a public, albeit minor, role, including testifying as an expert witness before the House Judiciary Committee during Clinton's impeachment and supporting Al Gore's candidacy in the election of 2000?

During the Republican primaries of 1980, Reagan scored points by scorning Bush's membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission - viewed by hard-right ideologues as two East Coast, internationalist bogeys. Bush, by now an expert hint-taker, swiftly resigned from both groups, for which he had always had the highest respect. Reagan gibed, "He just melts under pressure," before acquiescing in the political necessity of uniting the Republican Party and naming Bush to the ticket.

After the off-year elections a mere two years later, conservatives so dominated Congress that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t even get up a majority to appropriate money for rodent control in the slums. The House Republican Caucus elected as chair of its Policy Committee John Rhodes, one of Barry Goldwater’s Arizona protégés. In 1962 there were sixteen Republican governors, all but two of them moderates; in 1966 ten new conservative Republican governors were voted in. In 1980 Americans elected one of them, Ronald Reagan, as their President.

They drove directly to Rockefeller’s apartment in the fading summer light. Nixon was led up the stairs of 810 Fifth Avenue, whose two upper apartments Nelson had purchased as his private home in 1934 upon receiving his $12 million trust - around the time Nixon was cranking a mimeograph machine in a sweltering basement to earn his keep at Duke Law. The bottom third of the building Rockefeller bought in 1938, around the same time Nixon married Patricia Ryan - for her money, he would joke: she had saved up for the honeymoon out of her teacher’s salary.

Rockefeller might have been wearing the open-necked shirts and soft-soled shoes he favoured; Nixon’s dress shoes would have click-clacked his presence as he traversed the eighteenth-century parquet floors Nelson had imported from France to match the rococo mouldings his decorator had chosen to evoke Louis XIV’s Versailles. Rockefeller honoured his guest with dinner, during which he refused Nixon’s entreaties to become his running mate. Rockefeller led Nixon up to the penthouse, his study. They would have swept first through the apartment’s showpiece, the living room. Rockefeller’s passion was modern art. The centrepiece of the living room was twin fireplaces, the andirons custom-designed by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, their mantels stretching nearly to the ceiling and painted with specially commissioned murals by Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse...Ascending the circular marble staircase, the eye of the nation’s premiere tribune of middle-class morality might have been drawn by paintings by Picasso and Braque, glass cases filled with primitive carvings collected on their owner’s journeys to the four corners of the globe, sculptures by Alexander Calder, one of Gaston Lachaise’s over-endowed bronze Amazons. Then to the penthouse. Nixon was given a seat at Rockefeller’s desk; Rockefeller lounged on a nearby bed. Nixon spied the glorious floodlit expanse of Central Park; when Rockefeller had bought the place, a stone balustrade blocked the view, so he had the floor raised several inches. Nixon was handed a draft of fourteen points that Rockefeller wanted to see in the platform...

That’s exactly what I, so to speak, mean, he replied...These keys, for instance, they’re, how should I say, black and white...I believe you’re trying not to, so to speak, love me...Rather than take a step backward I shall take a step, so to speak, forward...The nightmares you’ve caused my friends, especially, how should I say, Elena...

The ‘serious’ prose literature of the time has found and kept its place, though not always its contemporary popularity. If the reputation of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust has (rightly) risen, the fortunes of Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard, Theodore Dreiser and Selma Lagerlöf, have been more chequered.

As an academic discipline, it still suffers from endless and inconclusive debates about social class and status, due to the fondness of its practitioners for reclassifying the population in a manner most suitable to their ideological convictions

It was a century which transformed the world – not more than our own century has done, but more strikingly, inasmuch as such revolutionary and continuous transformation was then new. Looking back, we can see this century of the bourgeoisie and of revolution suddenly heaving into view, like Nelson’s battle-fleet getting ready for action, like it even in what we do not see: the kidnapped crews who manned them, short, poor, whipped and drunk, living on worm-eaten rusks. Looking back we can recognize that those who made it, and increasingly those growing masses who participated in it in the ‘developed’ west, knew that it was destined for extraordinary achievements, and thought that it was destined to solve all the major problems of humanity, to remove all the obstacles in the path of their solution. In no century before or since have practical men and women had such high, such utopian, expectations for life on this earth: universal peace, universal culture by means of a single world language, science which would not merely probe but actually answer the most fundamental questions of the universe, the emancipation of women from all their past history, the emancipation of all humanity through the emancipation of the workers, sexual liberation, a society of plenty, a world in which each contributed according to their abilities and received what they needed. These were not only dreams of revolutionaries. Utopia through progress was in fundamental ways built into the century.

Ordoliberals promoted the concept of the social market economy, and this concept promotes a strong role for the state with respect to the market, which is in many ways different from the ideas connected to the term neoliberalism. Oddly the term neoliberalism was originally coined by ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow.

Der Ordoliberalismus gehört zu einer heterogenen wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Strömung, die unter dem Oberbegriff Neoliberalismus zusammengefasst wird...Die Begriffe Ordoliberalismus und Neoliberalismus werden in der Literatur teilweise aber auch synonym verwendet.

the generation which in its youth saw the sunset glow of that long and glorious sunny day of the western world, which lasted from the Congress of Vienna until August 1914, and of which those who have only lived in the present arctic night of history can have no adequate conception.

The Ruhr Valley would become unbelievably crowded, and the Alps would empty out entirely...One need not be a nationalist for such things to be undesirable...free trade is beneficial for all even when there is no freedom of migration and the peoples remain firmly rooted in their countries.

Independence or death...let these sacred words unite us...anathema to the French name, eternal hatred to France: that is our cry.

In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.

While increasing preoccupation with natural science had opened up a new philosophy to the educated world, the tragic results of applied religion had discredited the Churches as the directors of the State. It was not that faith had grown less among the masses; even among the educated and the speculative it still maintained a rigid hold, but it had grown more personal, had become essentially a matter between the individual and his Creator

Inevitably the spiritual force went out of public life, while religion ran to seed amid private conjecture, and priests and pastors, gradually abandoned by the State, fought a losing battle against philosophy and science. While Germany suffered in sterility, the new dawn rose over Europe, irradiating from Italy over France, England, and the North. Descartes and Hobbes were already writing, the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, had taken their places as part of the accepted stock of common knowledge. Everywhere lip-service to reason replaced the blind impulses of the spirit.

A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill the gap.The absolutist and the representative principle were losing the support of religion; they gained that of nationalism. That is the key to the development of the war in its latter period. The terms Protestant and Catholic gradually lose their vigour, the terms German, Frenchman, Swede, assume a gathering menace. The struggle between the Hapsburg dynasty and its opponents ceased to be the conflict of two religions and became the struggle of nations for a balance of power. A new standard of right and wrong came into the political world. The old morality cracked when the Pope set himself up in opposition to the Hapsburg Crusade, and when Catholic France, under the guidance of her great Cardinal, gave subsidies to Protestant Sweden. Insensibly and rapidly after that, the Cross gave place to the flag, and the ‘Sancta Maria’ cry of the White Hill to the ‘Viva España’ of Nördlingen.