by Clive James
Solzhenitskin.
—MARGARET THATCHER, IN A CONSERVATIVE PARTY POLITICAL BROADCAST, APRIL 1978
SHE MUST HAVE got Solzhenitsyn mixed up with Rumpelstiltskin, and the result was a composite character of a kind unseen since that unjustly forgotten 1950s Hollywood musical The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T., whose fans will remember two roller-skating old men joined by the one beard. Most things that Prime Minster Thatcher is remembered for saying were not said very memorably. They are remembered because she said them. One of the Conservative party’s tame writers, probably Robin Douglas-Home, later handed her the catchphrase “The lady’s not for turning,” which she delivered to the waiting television cameras with typical over-emphasis. She might or might not have realized that the line was a variation of Christopher Fry’s ringing title The Lady’s Not for Burning. Probably not: on her own proud insistence, her literary tastes ran mainly to the novels of Frederick Forsyth, read more than once so that she could savour their vigorous prose. A quasi-biblical phrase “Let us rejoice at this news”—she delivered it to the surrounding press at a key moment in the Falklands war—probably came to her from memories of the Book of Common Prayer. But this single word, “Solzhenitskin,” was a truly original coinage, so startling and resonant that I have employed it ever since, and think of it every time I see her picture. As she charges forward into her bustling, interfering dotage, an old party still haunting her old party, she has even become, in her appearance, a fitting companion for Solzhenitskin—whose Russian component, Solzhenitsyn, also lived to see the day when his intransigence began to erode his legend. In my mind’s eye I can see the helpless Solzhenitskin with this untiring crone yammering in his ear, telling him what he already knows, interrupting him in mid-sentence even as he struggles to agree. When I was in the press party that trailed her through China in 1982, I never heard a man in her company get six words out in succession, except perhaps for Zhao Ziyang, and even with him it was only because she had to wait for the translation. So she had to interrupt the translator.
It would be a mistake to think that Thatcher got her basic ideas from her entourage. The same assumption is made about Tony Blair today, and it is equally untrue. What Thatcher got from her attendant spirits, when she was wise, was mainly her vocabulary. Somebody must have told her that the works of the Russian dissident Solzhenitsyn provided powerful backing for her dislike of collectivism, so Solzhenitsyn would be a good name to bring in. She tried, and invented Solzhenitskin. (The fact that whoever was in charge of the Tory party political broadcast could not bring himself to correct her pronunciation is a sign of either his ignorance or the blue funk she induced in her support group even at that early stage.) Admittedly, the Russian sage’s real name is hard to handle without practice. Solzhenitsyn probably had the same sort of trouble when he tried to say “Thatcher.” It was remarkable, however, that when the prime minister mentioned Solzhenitskin on television, it did not get a laugh. Normally all too ready to pounce on any slip she might make, the liberal press held back on that one: perhaps they didn’t realize she had made a mistake. The liberal press at the time was already showing signs of a contracting frame of reference. When the Duke of Edinburgh mentioned that he had been reading Leszek Kolakowski, his mere citation of the Polish philosopher’s name was regarded by the Private Eye school of political commentators as conclusive evidence of pretentiousness. Obviously they found Kolakowski’s name funny in itself, because it sounded so foreign. Equally obviously, they had no idea who Kolakowski was; that the critique of Marxism in his monumental three-volume Main Currents of Marxism was a standard item for anyone working in the field: and that its pertinence had long before spread his name to most readers who read seriously about politics at all. Viewed from Pseuds Corner, anyone who refers to a big book by a foreign author must be a fake. (One of the signs of the marvellous self-confidence that has always reigned in the Private Eye prefects’ room is the unquestioned assumption that someone like the Duke of Edinburgh might be trying to impress them.) The view is limited, but has the large advantage of being easily expressed. All it takes is the written equivalent of an impatient snort and a wrinkled nose. Strangely enough, however, “Solzhenitskin” was greeted with a respectful silence. In my television column for the Observer, I was the only journalist of any kind who welcomed his advent, and I have to confess that I myself got Rumplestiltskin mixed up with Rip van Winkle, and ran around making cheap cracks about Thatcher’s having suggested that Solzhenitsyn had been asleep for a hundred years.
In the long run, Thatcher’s mistake, whose consequences we have all inherited, was to listen to her intellectuals not only on the level of slogans and smart remarks but on the level of their convictions. Her own fundamental notions would have seen her through. Her electoral base, for example, expanded into the working class as a natural result of her inbred conviction that people would look after council houses better if they were given the chance to buy them. With her widely admired passion for good housekeeping, she could have opened Britain to the free market without dismantling its civilized institutions, and so won kudos all round. The institutions had their representatives in her cabinet, but it turned out that they might as well have been speaking from the Moon. Her free market ideologists, on the other hand, could approach her in private, where they had access to her ear as her cabinet colleagues never did. The free marketeers convinced her that some of the institutions were a hobble for commerce. By herself, she would never have thought of removing the quality requirements for the Independent Television franchise bids. When she did, the predictable result was a stampede of the big money to secure the franchises through pre-emptive cost cutting, and a plunge down market once the franchises had been secured. The BBC, eager to placate the government, and afraid that it could not justify the television licence fee unless it kept its audience share, duly followed ITV in its swallow dive off the cliff. The long-term result was a ruined broadcasting system. By the time Mrs. Thatcher was remaking the state, Solzhenitsyn was preaching spiritual renewal: to the disappointment of his liberal admirers, he no longer seemed to believe that the West’s free institutions were very much preferable to the Eastern authoritarianism he had helped to dismantle. But if the young Solzhenitsyn had been present, and could have got a word in edgeways, he might have told Mrs. Thatcher that the opinions of intellectuals might be an adjunct to sound government but are no substitute for it. The Russian Revolution was prepared by theorists who were able to persuade themselves, in a period of chaos, that their theories would be put into action. But the only political theories worthy of the name are descriptive, not prescriptive. If prescriptive theories have plausible hopes of filling a gap left by a decayed or undeveloped institution, the game is already lost.
She should have trusted her instincts and shut out the smart voices, which—as often happens when they at last get a hearing—turned out to be not smart enough. Her best instinct was to stick to a simple course of action once it had been chosen. That instinct became her enemy, and the enemy of the country, on those occasions when a simple course of action was not appropriate. In domestic policy it hardly ever is. But her instinct paid off in foreign policy, with far-reaching results. When she chose not to be faced down by the Argentinian junta, she followed through with the necessary consequence: war. There were yells of protest from the far left, which would have preferred to give a green light to the Argentinian fascists rather than resort to gunboat diplomacy. The far left preferred love-boat diplomacy: an interesting reprise of the Labour party’s position in the late thirties, when the menace of Hitler was admitted but the menace of rearmament seemed greater. Over the Falklands, the parliamentary Labour party had no choice but to go with her—nobody pranced for war like the Labour party’s leader, Michael Foot—but the first disaster would have put her on the block. There wasn’t one; the British carried the day; and the junta fell as a direct result.
There was another long-term effect of her courage which is seldom considered. Later in the same
year, 1982, she went to Beijing to face the Chinese leaders in the matter of the upcoming Hong Kong handover. Typically, the bonzes of Beijing announced their conclusions before the talks: Hong Kong would become part of China. But she had never thought any other result was possible. What was really in the balance was what would happen to Hong Kong after it became part of China. The Chinese might have reduced it to the condition of Tibet. They didn’t do so, and have still not done so. It seems fair to conclude that Mrs. Thatcher obviated the possibility by her prestige. She had won in the Falklands, and had done so partly because of the firmness of Britain’s alliance with the United States. (An important factor, in that regard, was undoubtedly the diplomatic effort of the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson.) Thus she was able to suggest to the Chinese leaders that the consequences of extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedoms might be drastic. She probably didn’t have to suggest it out loud: she had a way of glaring at the right moment that went through the language barrier like a bullet through butter. With the Americans behind her, Mrs. Thatcher was presenting the Chinese leaders with the possibility of atomic war. The freedoms of the Hong Kong citizens were not up to much, but they were better than nothing, and the colony’s last governor, Chris Patten, in the final few years before the handover, did a lot to reinforce them. Beijing vilified him for his pains, even going so far as to call him a tango dancer: but such withering invective left him unshaken. He kept on reminding Beijing that the citizens of Hong Kong had rights and that the rights were inviolate. He did what the Foreign Office had never done. So did Mrs. Thatcher. Beijing sent in the soldiers but they never fired a shot. Nobody was arrested. The Trojan War did not take place. Since that blessedly uneventful day, a flourishing Hong Kong’s influence on mainland China has already been huge. If the eventual consequence is an irreversible erosion of China’s monolithic state, the transformation will have to be traced back to the same extraordinary year, 1982, in which the Red Army’s tanks did not come to Poland. What didn’t happen in Warsaw eventually influenced everything that did happen in Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It could well be that what didn’t happen in Hong Kong started the same sort of process in the Far East. It was the year that Thatcher flew to China to be faced with a fait accompli, but in fact accomplished everything by dictating what would not be allowed to occur. She couldn’t pronounce “Solzhenitsyn,” but in most other respects she knew how to say what she meant.
HENNING VON TRESCKOW
Henning von Tresckow (1901–1945) was the heart, the soul and the brain of the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler’s life. After the plot failed, Claus von Stauffenberg, who delivered the bomb to Hitler’s forward headquarters, was the name popularly associated with the attempt; but really Henning, the mastermind in the background, was the man who mattered. Nor had he always been in the background. In March 1943 he personally got a bomb on Hitler’s plane. The bomb should have gone off. Had it done so, Henning would have changed history. Superfically, he had all the characteristics of the ideal hero. On the revisionist left to this day, efforts continue to denigrate the July plotters as aristocratic right-wing romantics who wanted the war against the Soviet Union to continue, with better leadership than the Nazis could provide. With regard to how the Nazis are viewed in retrospect, the contest between the old aristocracy and the far left is a perennial stand-off, mainly because both sides were guilty, and therefore each had a permanent interest in passing the buck to the other. Hitler would scarcely have risen to power if the Weimar Republic had not been sabotaged by the aristocracy. On the other hand the Communists sabotaged it as well, and in the crucial period between the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 and the launching of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 they gave Hitler aid and comfort by denouncing any attempts to resist him as “imperialist.” The July plotters undoubtedly had questionable credentials as democrats. But a full twenty among them, when interrogated by the Gestapo after the plot failed, insisted that they had been motivated by revulsion at what happened to the Jews. Henning, had he lived, would have said the same. There can be no doubt that he despised the Nazis. There can, however, be a doubt about his views on the German army and its career of conquest. Like most of the career officers he enjoyed the idea of the army becoming strong again. Because only Hitler could make it so, Henning was in a dilemma. He finally resolved it by turning against Hitler. Henning’s key role in the conspiracy depended on his ability to persuade senior officers that they should do the same, so that there would be some hope of taking Germany back from the grip of the SS after a successful attempt. He probably knew, before the critical day, that not enough of the senior officers had been persuaded. He then said the thing that mattered: the attempt should go ahead, at whatever cost. In other words, he was proposing a religious sacrifice. If modern Germany, as a liberal democracy, now recognizes the word “July” in that sacrificial spirit, it has a lot to do with Henning von Tresckow.
Now the whole world will fall upon us and mock us. But I remain, as before, firmly convinced that we did the right thing. I regard Hitler not only as the arch-enemy of Germany, but as the arch-enemy of the world. If, a few hours from now, I stand before the judgement seat of God, and am asked for a reckoning of what I did or failed to do, I believe with a good conscience that I can represent myself by what I have done in the battle against Hitler.
—HENNING VON TRESCKOW, AS QUOTED BY BODO SCHEURIG, Henning von Tresckow: Ein Preusse gegen Hitler, P. 217
HENNING VON TRESCKOW said this to his fellow conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff at 2nd Army staff headquarters in Ostrów, northeast of Warsaw, in the early morning of July 21, 1944, the day after the plot failed against Hitler’s life. Or anyway, Schlabrendorff said that Henning said all this: all this and more. It really doesn’t matter, because it was undoubtedly what Henning thought. Before the attempt, he had said that it should go ahead coûte que coûte—no matter what the cost. After it failed, he made immediate plans to kill himself, because he knew too much and might, under torture, give everyone away. At one stage I was so struck with Henning’s heroism that I thought of writing an opera libretto about him. The piece would have been written as a long flashback from the moment of his death, which Henning accomplished by walking into the forest and blowing himself up with a grenade. He was trying to make it look like a battle incident, in the hope that the Gestapo would be fooled into thinking he had not been a conspirator, and so lay off his family. It hardly needs saying that the stratagem didn’t work, but Henning should not be seen as a blunderer on that account. Many of the conspirators were blunderers, but he wasn’t. He knew that the coup d’état scheduled to follow the July attempt was so sketchily organized that it would probably come apart even if Hitler was killed, but he thought the attempt should go ahead because the sacrifice would mean something in itself.
He had a right to say so. Of all the long-term conspirators, he had come closest to killing Hitler on a previous occasion. On March 13, 1943, only a month after the Stalingrad defeat, Henning got a bomb on the four-engined Focke-Wulf Condor carrying Hitler back from Smolensk to Rastenburg in East Prussia. The only reason the bomb did not go off was that the Czech-made fuse was of a type sensitive to temperature. It froze at altitude. If the bomb had gone off, the modern history of Europe might have been quite different. Henning had been only a millimetre away from eliminating the arch-enemy. It might have been better if Henning had been in direct charge of all the attempts. Unfortunately he was also the ideal man for arranging the attendant coup: a necessary effort that involved a huge expenditure of time even when it got results. Most of the time it didn’t. One of the lost dialogues of the war was the conversation he had with General Erich von Manstein—the embodiment of the old, pre-Nazi army—in February 1943. Henning paid what was ostensibly a staff visit to von Manstein’s headquarters at Saporoshje in Russia. From Alexander Stahlberg’s book Die verdammte Pflicht we know that Henning and von Manstein were together for at least half an hour. What was said? Whatev
er it was, the canny von Manstein would not bet. Henning kept on plugging away at the senior officers. He had been plugging away at them since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, and had been winning the allegiance of the junior officers since well before that. After July 20, 1944, it was frequently said that the young officers had found reason to rebel only after the reverse at Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943. But Henning was already organizing his network of young rebel officers while Barbarossa was being planned in early 1941. Before the starting whistle blew in June of that year, he had recruited Schlabrendorff, Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff, Hans Graf von Hardenberg and Berndt von Kleist. Most of the names were from the Almanach de Gotha, and some of them had a romantic notion of making peace in the west so that the more dangerous enemy could be fought in the east: but on the eve of the invasion of Russia they were all capable of realizing that the most dangerous enemy was a single German.
For an opera libretto, Henning’s conversations with the young officers would provide tempting opportunities for duets, trios, quartets and so on, with the additional attraction that everyone was in Wehrmacht uniform, with no SS insignia in sight: a stage full of fresh-faced idealism. If a certain element of fresh-faced naivety is hard to ignore, it should be remembered that these really were the flower of their generation, and even the most dense among them had realized that something had gone seriously wrong with Germany’s historic mission. There were thousands of young officers who got all the way through the war—or anyway all the way to an early death—without realizing that the Jewish business was at the very least a mistake. Henning’s conspirators knew better, even when they still believed that Grossdeutsch land, conveniently rid of Hitler, might somehow be allowed to fight on beside the western allies in the battle to save civilization against the threat from the east. After July 20, 1944, the Gestapo included several of the young aristocratic officers on their list of conspirators who had confessed to having rebelled because of Nazi policies towards the Jews. Henning chose his soldiers well. The question of why there were so few like them is largely answered by the fact that there were so few like him. The aristocracy was a network that had been there before the Nazis arrived. The aristocrats had a language they could share in private. They knew how to talk freely to one another. But anyone who wanted to get them organized had to trust them not to talk out of turn. Once there were more than a few involved, the contact man was living on borrowed time. In other words, a hero was required, and that cut the field right down: cut it down, in effect, to Henning von Tresckow.