non-fiction – Page 5 – Books & Music

Where Recep Tayyip Erdogan Comes From

turks today

Andrew Mango: The Turks Today. ISBN 978-0-7195-6595-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Reading Andrew Mango’s biography of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, was already a great intellectual pleasure, and the follow-up “The Turks Today” was just as fascinating. The first half of the book deal with history as you would expect it. A chronicle of important political developments from 1938, the year Atatürk died, up to the year 2003 when Turkey seemed ready to align itself on the policies of the European Union and to join it finally, after having waited for this moment for decades.

The second half of the book deals with a range of subjects not strictly political, but closely related to politics: the question of identity, of culture, education and Muslim faith, the leaps and setbacks Turkey witnessed in economic affairs, the differences between city and rural life and the desperate wish to be recognized as European country with a European tradition and a European future.

Even more than the biography of Atatürk this book helped me understand what conflicts dominate Turkish politics and the attitude towards the European Union. The book was published in 2003 and of course it does not cover more recent events like the failed military putsch, the demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul, the repression by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. It however explains where Erdogan comes from – politically speaking – and how he managed to turn Turkey into a state that seems to discards more and more of Atatürks liberal and open-minded legacy.

A synthesis of cultural ideas drawn from Turkey’s tradition and the avant-garde of French classical music can be found in Ahmed Adnan Saygun’s String Quartet No. 1 (Op. 27):

French avant-garde meets Sufi Mystics

Anti-intellectualism and the Burning of Books

Sven Hanuschek: “Keiner blickt dir hinter das Gesicht” – Das Leben Erich Kästners ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ISBN 978-3-423-30871-7 Erich Kästner: Über das Verbrennen von Büchern ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ISBN 978-3-85535-389-7 Erich Kästner was besides Enid Blyton one of the writers that marked my childhood reading. I have read “Emil and the Detectives” and “Emil and the Three Twins” countless times and admired the author for his ability to “sell” a moral lesson or two wrapped in attractive gift paper. The easy-going language, the slightly old-fashioned touch – both books were written before World War II – made reading an adventure and a wonderful pastime.

A legend in shatters

I held Kästner in unreserved esteem until I was about 15. By chance I borrowed Kästner’s own attempt at a biography “Als ich ein kleiner Junge war” (When I was a young boy) from the school library, and I was struck by the the way how Kästner sanctified and adulated his mother. His overly nostalgic look back upon his childhood in Dresden, his exclusive relationship to his mother, the total absence of his father and any friends from his peer group disconcerted me. I was for the first time confronted with the Kästner’s exceptional gift to showcase himself.

Sven Hanuschek paints a highly critical picture of the young boy’s family and Kästner’s fixation on his mother for several decades, he destroys the legends that Kästner and his later girl friend Luiselotte Enderle built around the writer’s person – hence the title of Hanuschek’s book: Nobody looks behind your face. Kästner was an enigmatic and complex person and the polished surface of his literary works may be misleading. “All is not well. I doubt some foul play”, Hamlet would say.

Witnessing the Nazis’ rise

Kästner’s world-wide success as a childbook author obscures his political thinking, reflected in innumerable cabaret pieces, poems and his adult novel “Fabian – The Story of a Moralist”. Kästner was a keen observer of his time, abhorred the militarism firmly rooted in German society and feared for the survival of the Weimar Republic. “Fabian” served its purpose – from its publication on, Kästner was branded as an enemy by the conservative political parties and foremost by the National Socialists.

In 1933, Kästner’s books and those of many others were burned in public by university students that had succumbed to Joseph Goebbels anti-intellectual propaganda. While many German writers, researchers, actors and musicians fled Germany after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Kästner decided to stay on and continue to observe the rise and fall of the “Third Reich”.

Moral choices

Hanuschek’s biography recounts in a detailed way the personal evolution of Kästner as a writer, as a womanizer, as a colleague eager to help whenever he could. He also sheds a light on Kästner’s difficult moral choices during the Nazi time. He was an eye-witness of the burning of his books, but he did not speak out. Hanuschek has analysed Kästner’s letters and diaries and says that Kästner did not see any purpose of speaking out at the time. It was already too late. The Nazis had grabbed the power and a single opposing voice would have led him into a concentration camp and changed nothing.

Ethical questions of another nature – linked to the women he had attracted into his orbit and the son he would not officially recognize as such – troubled Kästner after World War II. Germany’s enthusiastic moralist was confronted with moral choices he was afraid to make. This slowed his literary production and encourage him to drink. Kästner died in 1974 from a combination of alcoholism, cancer and desperation. No happy end here.

Productive – undercover

As Kästner stayed in Germany during World War II, he witnessed the catastrophic consequences of Hitler’s politics. He did not write anything political. However he wrote movie scenarios, inoffensive poems often under an assumed name as the Nazis’ cultural bureaucracy had forbidden him to publish anything in the German Reich or Switzerland. Kästner’s earlier works continued to be printed abroad and circulated inside Germany despite the official ban. But Kästner didn’t engage in any rebellious act. He waited until the end of the war and then he told his story: What he had seen, what he had experienced – the abyss of human depravation.

And a few years after World War II, his books were again burned – this time by overzealous Christian students who saw some of his works as opposed to Christian morality. The book “Über das Verbrennen von Büchern” is a collection of speeches Kästner gave in 1947, 1953, 1958 and 1965 about what the burning of books stands for – the negation of culture, of rationalism, of human intelligence.

Diatribes and autocratic rule

Kästner’s biography and his idea about the burning of books – you cannot destroy the influence of a book as long as someone is willing to read it – is a highly fascinating read in a time when in democratic societies a growing part of the population is cheering at populist politicians and rejecting the deemed elites, in a time when violent emotions and foul language in public triumph over rationalism and civility. I found striking parallels between the climate in Germany in the 20s and 30s and today’s voices in social networks and the diatribes of the US president. Erich Kästner has seen how such a climate may encourage violence and lead to the destruction of societies. He has also seen that it might be too late to act once populist leaders with autocratic tendencies are at the helm of governments. Will we learn from him?

Kästner’s favourite piece of music was a march composed for the movie adaption of Richard Strauss’ opera “Der Rosenkavalier”, but György Kurtag’s set of 19 movements called “Signs, Games and Messages” seems much more appropriate to illustrate this book review – a meditation and a warning:

On terror, fear, symbols and music

From the Cradle of Bolshevism to the Ghetto of Lvov

albert londres

Pierre Assouline: Albert Londres. Vie et mort d’un grand reporter 1884-1932 ISBN 978-2-07-038236-2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Superbe en français, outstanding English. Having worked as a journalist myself I make a point of avoiding books about a journalist. I have already read too many bad memoirs. This book is an exception. The biography of the French special envoy Albert Londres deserves the highest praise.

A thrilling story, the story of a thrilling life. A tour de force through the history of World War I, the birth of Bolshevism, the upheavals in the Balkans after the retreat of the Ottoman Empire. A discovery tour to the dark side of the French colonial empire with its prison camps and construction sites where French colonial officers supervise African foremen exploiting African slaves. A descent into the hell of French lunatic asylums, Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe and Brazilian brothels were French prostitutes, bought and sold by unscrupulous businessman, satisfy their customers.

Londres didn’t spare his readers in Paris in the 1920s and his growing audience – by 1929 he was a journalistic celebrity unable to cope with fan mail – witnessed how his job transformed his view on the world. He started as an observer and recorder of facts to report and inform, but by experiencing the personal misery of man and chosing the individual experience – the men and women who either made or suffered from the making of history – as the focal point of his stories, he became a fighter against social and racial injustice making enemies left, right and center in France and its colonies.

Pierre Assouline, a successful editor and a gifted writer, does a brilliant job in retracing the path that Londres took and the personal development that the journalist underwent. What captivated me most was Assouline’s style in the tradition of the great French romanciers, mimicking Londres’s sense of irony, descriptive precision and expressive excellence. Reading a French book has not often given me so much joy only for its style.

While Albert Londres fought against corruption, abuse of power and social injustice, the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg persued his own way to democracy and equality – in the realm of chamber music – inspired by the generally progressive ideas that were in the air all over Europe. His String Quartet No. 3 picked up the mood of the time:

A democratic revolution – all notes are equal

Changing Shape in Order to Shape Change

4th revolution copy

John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge: The Fourth Revolution – The Global Race to Reinvent the State. ISBN 978-1-846-14733-3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Changing the shape of government and shaping the change of government – that’s the challenge for any Western public service. Good governance, a solid financial base, lean decision-making structures and satisfied customer-citizens – who wouldn’t like to subscribe to such a model, be it in Europe, Brazil, the United States or Japan? Micklethwait and Wooldridge provide a useful recapitulation of the past: Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice Webb and Milton Friedman are the names of the thinkers whose ideas contributed to the creation of the modern welfare state.

However, that model is about to break down because of over-extension, as the authors rightly observe. Demographics are at work here. We are getting older and become an expensive liability for the younger generations, far less numerous than our generation. Public service has grown into a seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable monster, pervading and regulating every aspect of our lives with great inefficiency.

The authors describe in a fascinating way the challenges ahead, and relish in enumerating the many failings of present governments in almost all the fields where it should succeed: health, transport, assistance to the weak, affordable housing, security. The list of what went wrong is endless, despite the efforts of many courageous public servants to reverse the trend. However when it comes to sketch possible solutions, the ideas the authors advance are at best naive, at worst misleading. I will just list a few, significant shortcomings in Micklethwait’s and Wooldridge’s arguments.

Efficient governments as in Singapore – the Asian model – come at the price of unacceptable restrictions on human rights and high risk of corruption among the elites-in-charge. I understand the authors fascination by the fast transformation from backward, inert to avant-garde, fast-paced policy-making, but the simple fact that China’s president Xi Jinping has suggested to lift the constitutional provision restricting the number of presidential terms indicates how tempting it is for a self-declared elite of “wise men” – women do not figure anywhere in the part of this book dealing with the future – to extend their power in the name of the people’s will.

This leads me to the next point: the absence of women. They are not part of the equation. More women are better educated, more women want to work, more women want to take over responsibilities in the private sector as much as in the public sector – this totally escapes Micklethwait and Wooldridge despite the fact that it changes any model of social mobility they may use in explaining part of the evolution of the public sector. Women adopt a different management style – different as in relying more on cooperation and creativity in finding solutions – and may well be the key to change the way governmental agencies operate, but the book doesn’t say an iota about it. Boooooh!

Much admired public health systems as they have been put in place in Sweden may be cost-saving, but quick discharges from hospitals are not the only scale to measure their performance since the aspect of the quality of the treatment and the well-being of the patient is neglected. Customer satisfaction does not seem to weigh heavy in the minds of the authors since their emphasis lies on budget efficiency exclusively. The same could be said about the much less admired UK railway systems. After privatization it is still running late, the seats have not become more comfortable, the cost-per-mile-track has remained about the same and the blame-game about what went wrong isn’t even funny anymore.

My personal experience in the public service is that the information age does not automatically lead to a lean and more efficient government. The authors put exaggerated hope into technology. Quite often incompatible IT-solutions are put in place and prioritization of who buys what becomes a drama in multiple acts. In-house software development addressing specific public service issues is hampered by a lack of available IT engineers, willing to leave the private sector, and supervisors prefer to decide small issues since they quite often do not understand the bigger picture – an issue shared with the private sector where thousands of badly trained managers fail when the time has come to assume responsibility. The human factor cannot be emphasized enough and will always neutralize efficiency gains through technology. This is less ironic than it may appear.

Making government agencies more responsive is always a lovely idea. Giving citizen the option to share with government agencies pictures of problems (pot holes, graffiti, missing road signs etc.) along with GPS data through mobile phones sounds like a cheap and democracy-friendly idea but it will lead government to fund additional posts. It will feed the monster, not put it on a diet. Someone will have to process and prioritize the data, generate specific orders for work crews and provide a feedback to senders. And write reports about efficiency gains neutralized.

Finally raising pension age is not a solution per se as burn-outs are a common issue in the higher echelons of public service, partly because leaner structures – smart government is the key word here – have increased the workload for decision makers. Posts have been cut, but the work has remained the same. The resulting costs – increasing hours of sick-leave – do not show up on the authors’ balance sheet. Sure we can work longer. But will we work better at age 70 than at age 65? I have my doubts. The solution will rather lie in a reduction and a better distribution of essential tasks among public servants.

It is a pity that these two respected journalists have not managed to really understand some of the inherent problems of “big government” that make changing its shape and shaping its change so difficult. Their idea – streamline everything and cost-efficiency is our new God – is far too shortsighted as an approach. Micklethwait and Wooldridge should know better. They worked for “The Economist”.

Now, one thing the two authors got right is a fact from the world of music. While musing over labour-intensive services provided by government, Micklethwait and Wooldridge correctly state that it took four players to perform a Beethoven quartet in the 19th century and that today it still takes four players to play a piece like Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 in C minor by which Beethoven provided an early proof of his revolutionary mind:

Radically innovative – now and then

Putin’s World or the Battle for Influence in Europe

Hubert Seipel: Putin. Innenansichten der Macht. ISBN 978-3-455-50303-6 ⭐️⭐️⭐️ It is hard to find a biography about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, and it is even harder to find a balanced one. It quickly becomes apparent that the author of this book, a German journalist, had and probably still has privileged access to Putin, and the great value of the book is to oppose Putin’s personal view on issues ranging from the dissolution of the USSR, the rise of Russian oligarchs under Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin, the expansion of NATO and the Ukraine crisis to the openly hostile attitude of many US and European politicians and media.

A multi-polar world

Putin gets a chance to present his point and, which I deem more important, to explain his vision of a multipolar world, of Russia’s place in world affairs and the historic context that shapes this vision. A recurrent argument is: The break-up of the Soviet Union was a traumatic experience for Russia’s population. The US and the European Union took advantage of Russia’s weak position in the 90s to expand their influence simply because they could get away with it and did not care to acknowledge Russia’s national interests. The West’s cardinal sin was the expansion of NATO and the EU to the east, as he sees it. The selling-out of the most valuable parts of the Soviet economy – the mining industry and the petrochemical sector – to western companies added to the humiliation.

One of Putin’s goal is to redress these historical errors, to give Russia a new self-confidence and to restore Russia’s political influence vis-à-vis the European Union and the United States. A multipolar world where the US predominance is balanced by the BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the European Union. His personal ratings seem to justify this approach. Putin in popular in Russia, no matter what Western pundits say, and coercion from abroad i.e. sanctions tends to boost his popularity rather the to diminish it. Russian nationalism is not to be underrated.

“Don’t push us around!”

The Russian president has a central message: Stop trying to push us around! His wish to play an active and constructive part in European affairs seems genuine and his motive – mutual economic benefit – makes sense. However, his argument fails at a crucial point. If he wants the US and the European Union to consider Russia’s national interests, Moscow must also acknowledge the national interests of Eastern European countries that wished to join the EU and NATO. They made a sovereign choice, it is not something they were lured into by devious US generals or EU bureaucrats in Brussel. The Russian concept of “spheres of influence” belongs to the 19th century and makes no sense whatsoever in a globalized world with multiple political, economical and social interdependencies.

No doubt, mistakes were made in Brussel and the European Union’s foreign policy is always a difficult compromise and often contradicted by national foreign policies of its member states. And yes, the US poured millions of US dollars in lobbying efforts to support opposition groups in Russia, in Georgia, in the Ukraine – if not a provocation, at least a deliberate challenge for Russia. However this can be no excuse for the occupation of the Crimean peninsula. A central tenet of the European order after World War II – the respect of national borders – has been violated by Moscow in the name of national interests, once more. Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, the Crimea in 2014. I see a certain pattern there: Russia uses force, where policy failed. You can do that, but you cannot complain about Western meddling in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence at the same time.

About taking sides

How could a journalist miss these contradictions? I don’t know. Privileged access obviously has made Seipel loose his objectivity and the last chapters of the book are nothing less than an apology for Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula and its support for rebellious armed groups. The bashing of other journalists for their “Russia bashing” doesn’t really add to Seipel’s credibility.

The only useful and interesting parts of the book are the chapters about Russia’s oligarchs. The author provides interesting details about the total failure of the government under president Yeltsin and the reaction of alternative power centers formed by corrupt politicians and government officials on the one side and unscrupulous businessman on the other side. The conflict of interests of US president Donald Trump make the later appear like an absolute beginner in comparison.

This said, it is now my turn to come up with a deliberate provocation of Russia and it takes the shape of a Lithuanian composer of the name of Mikalojus Ciurlionis who has written at the end of the 19th century symphonic poems, organ and piano works often inspired by the national awakening of Lithuanians living under Russian rule until 1917:

Lithuania masterpieces on cassette tapes