by Mark Mazower
In April 1947 he finally learned he had been assigned to the British Army on the Rhine, and after a visit to Paris with his seventy-three-year-old father—Max was in poor health, which he would never really escape from this point on—he returned to his regiment at Thirsk and sailed across the North Sea to Germany, or what was left of it. They landed at Cuxhaven, the main port for the British Zone.
Hamburg might have been a city in ruins but in the officers’ mess the conditions were far better than back home, and on their first evening Dad and the other new arrivals were greeted with champagne, apricot brandy, and ice cream. The extravagance of it bothered him. That sweltering summer of 1947, after work they would take their armchairs and sit out on the grass under the birch trees. In one of his photos from those afternoons, a couple of members of his unit have stripped to the waist and are making themselves at home with their legs outstretched. Dad is with them but he is not lounging: wearing shirtsleeves, braces, and sunshades, he sits a little apart. He looks thoughtful. Some weekends were spent with friends boating on the lake at Plön, others on the beach. He shot deer, visited the small Baltic fishing ports around Lübeck, and went riding on the country roads outside Bielefeld. But it was not a happy time. The work—monitoring telephone conversations across the city’s exchanges—was uninteresting, the office dull. He wrote letters, dreamed of trips to France and London, and buried himself in the German grammar that Megan had given him. Books piled up on his mattress.
It was not only that he felt slightly alienated from many of his English messmates, abroad for the first time, ignorant of the language, and now enjoying the kind of access to girls and foods and comforts they had never known before. There were also the locals, burying a recent past that seemed all too close. In later life, I don’t remember him singling out the Germans for particular hostility. But feelings were running higher after the war, even his: On landing at the docks, he once told my brother, the immediate impulse of this least violent of men had been to take a machine gun and shoot the first Germans he saw. After less than a month, he wrote to his uncle: “Life here does not agree with me: it is too luxurious on our side and sets a bad example to the Germans. I don’t feel comfortable when I am surrounded by them. I can never chat with one of them without feeling a tinge of suspicion that I am talking to a former SS man and the certainty that at some point or another they applauded Hitler. They entirely lack the ability to laugh and always look so down that I have a great desire to see the French again with their air of vivacity … Work is boring. Unfortunately most of the officers here are not pleasant and life could certainly be more amusing. Write me in French or Russian, it is all the same. If you’ve read Les Grandes Vacances or the book by Rémy or something similar please send me them because I am desperate for something to read.” Worst of all, he was cooped up indoors. “It is the first time in my life that I have to sit down in an office all day and I really don’t like it,” he wrote, little knowing that was how he would spend much of the next forty years. He would go on hikes when he could, a walk of a few miles of an evening was the least of it. Even out under the pines he noticed the marks of the war. Walking alone in the Teutoburg Forest one hot evening in May, with the thickly wooded slopes below him, the very slopes where just two years earlier there had been fierce fighting in one of the last battles before the German surrender, he lay down in the grass at the top of a hill and slept.
“March 27, 1948: Went with Tripp, Bill, Adams, Evans to Russian border at Besenhausen by lift in Dutch lorry. Talked to guards. Then walked & hitched to Witzenhausen in US Zone. Train back to Gottingen from Eichenberg.” The border with the Soviet Zone was a tourist attraction for many British servicemen in those years, but for him it had much more than merely the allure of the forbidden. Drawing him on more than one visit, it was the closest he had ever gotten to Russia, the country of his parents’ birth, the country he had never entered and would not for many years.
This stretch of time, full of unease, loneliness, and boredom, brought one encounter he never forgot. There was a German family in Bielefeld—the Roeperts—whom Frouma had told him to visit. They were relatives. Ida Berlinraut, Frouma’s cousin, had left Russia to marry a German called Edouard Roepert before the First World War and had been living in Germany since then. She was Jewish; he was not: They had a son. To their good fortune, the Gestapo had somehow overlooked her background and so despite everything she had spent the war a housewife inside the Third Reich, avoiding the bombers and listening to Joseph Goebbels denouncing Judeo-Bolshevism on the radio. What was more, her son had been called up and had served on the eastern front. Once the war was over, she had written to Frouma, so Dad hitched a ride to Bielefeld to see them and spent several days in their company. He told me later that his cousin had seemed traumatized by his experiences. To Dad the meeting must have brought home the element of sheer chance and good fortune that had led him to end up as a Sandhurst-trained second lieutenant in the British Army. He might have been feeling bored but his cousins, Max’s nephews, had suffered much worse fates—Zachar’s daughter had died in the Vilna ghetto; Semyon’s son, Ilya, had frozen and starved to death in the siege of Leningrad. Now, it turned out, Ida’s son had endured the war in the east in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Did he need any further demonstration of the debt he owed his parents? Within the ambit of his family alone, the entire spectrum of the war’s European destinies was contained.
For the remainder of his time there, he kept to himself, writing letters and counting the days. The Princess Royal, the future Queen Elizabeth, recently married, paid a visit to Hamburg and he was among the men presented to her, but the event counted for nothing in his recollection. It is as though afterwards he wanted to put the whole period out of his mind. He was happy to forget the drinking, the machismo, the boredom, and the fräuleins who did not interest him. In the photos of time off with men in his unit, he stands apart, as if he is waiting for life to begin again. In his album, Germany looks pretty enough away from the wartime devastation, but there was nothing for him there and never would be. In late May 1948 he took the ferry from the Hook of Holland and went straight to the barracks at York to be demobbed and came home to London the same night. He carefully packed away his army boots with hobnails so thick they are today almost unwearable. His suit went to the tailor to be altered, and he ordered a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers. He was ready to get on with things.
“You realize, Mark, this was all fifty years ago.” It was more, actually, but that scarcely mattered. I had rung Mike Walker out of the blue, and although he had never met me, we were on first-name terms from the start. “I remember Bill of course, a singularly nice chap, he really was.”
WALKER, Michael Herbert—b. May 15, 1928; o.s. of R. H. Walker, cotton merchant, Littleborough Lancs. Educ. Giggleswick [praep., capt. cricket]. Served in the Army Sept. 1946–Feb. 1949; R.A. Educ.; Egypt Nov 1947–Feb. 1949. Balliol 1949—(E.T.W., P.P.S.); 3rd Phil., Pol., Econ. 1952.
I had come across his name in Dad’s diary and then in the Balliol College Register, and I thought he might remember Dad because another Balliol man had sent me a photo of the two of them kitted out for squash. They are standing outside Holywell Manor, where Mike had rooms: Dad has cycled over and with his socks rolled down, his collar open, and the racket under his arm, he looks at ease, the clouds lifted.
Mike couldn’t remember much beyond that they had been good friends, and that Dad was an “exceedingly nice guy.” Other Balliol men—he singled out William Rees-Mogg, the future editor of The Times, as an example—were a “loud noise in the JCR.” He and Dad were not like that: “A lot of us were very ordinary chaps.” But squash turned out to have been more important than I had thought. There was a college team and Balliol had an annual fixture with one of the women’s colleges, which was how Mike had met his wife, at a college tea party. She was with him in the room when I called. And he did remember Dad as a squash player: “a very fit guy, extremely competitive.”
Competitiv
e. That was not what I had been expecting and it got me thinking—about my father’s body, about his physicality and his mental outlook, and more generally about all those ways in which a child forms a picture of their parent and in doing so misses so much. Recovering Dad’s world has meant tracing back deep into the past of what I already knew about him, finding in the child the elements of him that were familiar to me. But it has also revealed parts of him to me that were forgotten, erased, and often just plain surprising. We always knew, for instance, that he had a sweet tooth. Frouma lovingly but accurately described him as “morally serious” and it was true; sweets were probably the closest he came to allowing himself to give in to impulse. This was why he could always be tempted by ice cream, and why when we grew up it was a kind of family joke that he would keep the chocolate hidden away in a locked cupboard, only to be brought out occasionally after a particularly delicious meal. The very first time he remembered his mother shouting at him—he had been about three—was when they were on Hampstead Heath and he had put a sheep’s dropping in his mouth, thinking it was a sweet. Then there was the boy who delighted in being useful about the house, in making and mending; he too was instantly recognizable in the man. And so was the streak of stubbornness in those things, the few, he had really set his heart on, that balanced his capacity to accommodate and help. But I was discovering other sides of him, aspects that I simply could not have guessed had once been there. There was the intense sociability of his early twenties, hosting lunches and dinners and parties. There were the movies and unbelievably frequent trips to the newly built Forum, its great gaudy art deco columns gracing busy Kentish Town, where he went so often with his mother and father. There was Pchelka, his aunt and uncle’s dog in Beauchamp: I started to notice how many photos he had taken of it in the late 1930s, the more striking to me because we had not grown up in a household with animals.
Now from what Mike told me, there was something more. Evidently there had been a time when, however briefly and if only on the squash court, he had wanted to win. Not that it was difficult to imagine that he had been very fit in those days (military training would have seen to that, along with his naturally muscular physique and the mountain hikes), but in later life it was hard to have envisaged anyone less competitive, and he always seemed to have conquered as successfully as anyone else I knew the impulse to show off or to get ahead of others. Working as a middle manager in one sector of a vast multinational company, he had shown no interest at all in climbing the greasy pole to executive glory. Competitiveness is often the fuel of ambition, and Dad was, or so he seemed to me, the least ambitious of men. So this was a conundrum. But it was a welcome one because it made what I can only call his tranquillity of mind, at least as we saw it in the larger things of life, the product of an inward struggle or deliberation rather than merely a gift. This energy had not dissipated later on—he was never lacking in energy—but it had been diffused into other things, and lost its competitive dimension, though how this had happened was a mystery.
I was grateful to Mike Walker for our conversation because it reminded me of much that I valued in Dad. Was it perhaps something inherent in their generation, that surface diffidence and modesty and courtesy that masked, in the right circumstances, a real underlying warmth and slight melancholy and the desire to help and be useful? At least in Dad’s case, being useful was almost the leitmotif of his existence. His diaries noted meticulously not only the few days he marked out as “lazy” but the far more numerous occasions when he repaired a lamp, or put up shelves in a landlady’s bedroom, or fixed the wiring, or mended the radio. If the diary was any judge, these were the things worth recording, more important than dreams or love affairs.
His first experience of Oxford had come as a seventeen-year-old in 1943. His second was six years later with the army behind him. The first time round, he had sailed in, wanting to enjoy everything. By the late 1940s, the Cold War was in full swing and the passage to adulthood and independence seemed less certain than he had imagined. A lot less certain. As the clock wound down on his time in Germany, he got a nasty shock when he learned that he did not have an automatic right to return to Oxford. In the spring and summer of 1948, he tried to get back into Balliol and applied to several London colleges too, but the universities were inundated with returning ex-servicemen and he was rebuffed each time. It started to seem he might not go back at all. He earned some money as a research engineer in an electrical factory, a long commute each day out to unglamorous Enfield, but these were unhappy months for him, perhaps the unhappiest of his life. Already frustrated by the time he had wasted in the army, he was back in London and at home, living on his nerves in a kind of limbo. His health suffered.
For the first time, I think, he was in some measure defying his parents’ wishes. Max was now ailing and unable to work—and his parents wanted him to go back and finish training as an engineer so as to get into regular employment as soon as possible. He resisted, not wanting to give up the thought of further studies. Only in the summer of 1949 did he learn, to his enormous relief, that Balliol would take him. But the sense of uncertainty did not immediately dissipate. Perhaps in deference to his parents’ wishes he went up to read mathematics, but a day into the course he realized it was not what he wanted at all, and he did something very uncharacteristic: He changed his mind and, with Ira’s encouragement, announced that he was going to study politics, philosophy, and economics instead. The dons gave no resistance. His parents wondered what had gotten into him and hoped it would all be of some use in the end.
Balliol in 1949 was a very different place from six years earlier. It was no less democratic—one of his friends was Tommy Ward, a man in his thirties, a carpenter’s son out of a Liverpool council school and married, a species of undergraduate all but unknown in most Oxford colleges in those days. But the college was now full of older men who were coming out of the army and in a hurry to be done. I had asked Mike Walker what they had thought about the war after they went up: “Most of us wanted to raze it from our minds.” Getting on with it—their outlook was practical, experienced, with an eye already turned finally to making a life of one’s own. There were decisions to be made and one looked forward not back; the untoward was an irritation to be surmounted not a trauma to be scrutinized. Introspection could easily be written off as feeling sorry for yourself, which was not a habit of mind the war had fostered. Having had enough of being ordered around in the ranks, and in many cases seen active service and been decorated for it, these were not men to take easily to being treated as if they were fresh out of school. There was another striking difference with 1943: Americans had arrived at the college in force. There was a sizable cohort of them, mostly older men, the spearhead of the new Cold War alliance. Dad’s year included at least one future CIA operative, a future Librarian of Congress, and a distinguished philosopher of history alongside the inevitable diplomats, lawyers, and journalists. Greece to the new Rome, England’s place in the universe was changing.
The switch to politics, philosophy, and economics was—in retrospect—a kind of last sign of his political commitment, at least in the intense form it had taken on since the Spanish Civil War, an effort, subconscious I think, to resist the pull of the vocational and the practical. Yet it was, in its own way, a very practical choice. The Mazowers were not, on the whole, a speculative family, and if it is not clear why Dad chose to study philosophy, it is also true that the subject as it was taught in postwar Oxford was proudly down-to-earth.
There were exceptions, mostly imported. “March 7, 1950: Heard Brock on ‘Existentialism’—incomprehensible!” he wrote during his second term. The somewhat forlorn figure of Werner Brock, a former assistant to Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, had fled to England in 1934 and became a leading popularizer of the great man’s ideas there. Brock had been battling against the current for more than a decade to spread a vision that was completely at odds with the increasingly powerful British analytic tradition. Its proponents valued clarity an
d precision whereas Brock and Heidegger sought to use language to probe its own limits. In self-assured Oxford—anti-metaphysical and intellectually complacent—this was not likely to prosper: People didn’t want obscurity, however profound. The year before Dad heard him, Brock had published the first translation in English of Heidegger’s thought under the title Existence and Being, a book now eagerly studied by historians of the spread of philosophical ideas. It was a brave venture at a time when Heidegger’s reputation was at its nadir because of his flirtation with Nazism. Dad’s main philosophy tutor at Balliol, Patrick Corbett, could not have been more different: He was a brilliant teacher who basically combined the commonsense approach that was sweeping the philosophy of language in Oxford with a liberalism that valued reason above all things. Commonsense philosophy was, in a way, a kind of reasoning for the age of Labour, anti-elitist and problem-solving rather than problem-creating, premised on getting things done through what could be understood in common. As philosophy it now seems antiquated next to Brock and Heidegger, but as a training for linguistic precision, a kind of supercharged version of the values of clarity and saying what you mean of the kind that had been dear to Max, it had no peer. Some found the Oxonian manner—the inevitable pipe, the crisp articulation inflected only by the equally inevitable slight fake stammer—intimidating; Dad didn’t. It came naturally to him to respect words as tools. What could not be said straightforwardly could be left unsaid or figured out later. His Oxford training helped reinforce this attitude.