Tales of the City

Return of the Dark Invader, Franz von Rintelen
Rintelen had so much fun writing his wartime memoirs that he decided to write a sequel too. This is not as successful or as entertaining as the first volume, partly because he doesn't have nearly the interesting material of wartime sabotage and capture to discuss, but mostly because in peacetime Rintelen has become an obsessed monomaniac about Franz von Papen and the evilness of the postwar German government. All honour, chivalry, goodness and truth are gone from Berlin and Rintelen is here with his green ink to tell you all about it, with lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. One thing that was less apparent in the first book but which is very apparent here is that Rintelen is very rich, rich enough that even the hyperinflation years don't seem to hurt him that much, and more than rich enough to keep bringing lawsuits against everyone. But there were some interesting moments mixed in to a lot of somewhat unhinged ranting and stories of the 'and then everyone applauded' variety that do not convince. There was a rather sad, sparse account of Rintelen returning home once he was released from the American prison, and discovering that he and his wife didn't know each other any more and couldn't make it work - and also later there was the deeply hilarious excursion into Rintelen's winter sports adventure which ended up with him going for a rather tipsy walk around a frozen lake and falling in and having to be rescued by his date - he was separated from his wife, but had plenty of lady friends. And, inevitably, more of his profound love affair with various English officers - who, unlike his fellow Germans, were in his mind still capable of honour and chivalry - and his moving to England around about the time the Nazis took power. Though he doesn't seem to have that much insight into his reactions, he very much gives the impression of someone who thrived in wartime but then couldn't find a way to function in peacetime.


Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin
A popular history of the events leading up to the start of WW1, with a focus on the final weeks before the fighting started and also on identifying and exploring exactly why it started, whose decisions drove it and whether anything could have prevented it. This was very readable and summarises a lot of information very concisely and clearly. Fromkin's conclusion is interesting: he divides things up into two separate wars, a local Balkan conflict where Austria-Hungary was determined to invade and conquer Serbia but with no interest or intention towards any kind of wider conflict, and a much bigger Great Powers war started by Germany to maintain and increase her position of pre-eminence in Europe. Fromkin argues that Germany encouraged and pushed Austria-Hungary to be more aggressive towards Serbia in order to create the pretext needed to go to war with Russia and France, because Germany thought that if they waited any longer for their war they would have a greater chance of losing it, and they needed Austria-Hungary to be prepared to fight alongside them. The problem Germany faced was that while they had an alliance with Austria-Hungary, they did not think Austria-Hungary would back them up in a conflict that Germany started. But once Austria-Hungary had an actual reason why they really wanted to fight, because they believed Serbia was an existential threat, and a pretext in the Serb-backed assassination of their crown prince, Germany could co-opt their aggression for its own ends which were that of a pan-European war.

Fromkin also takes issue with the popular idea that WW1 came out of nowhere, pointing out the massive military build-ups that had been happening over the previous decade in all the Great Powers involved, the many smaller wars and proxy wars and colonial wars in which the Great Powers had been embroiled in from the very start of the twentieth century, the naval arms race between Germany and the UK and the general belief in all of these countries that a major war was inevitable and the only question was when. So then he tackles the question of why this war, why August 1914, why not earlier or later, and unpicks the various diplomatic efforts that had prevented previous crises from turning into war and argues that in this particular crisis, many key players both in Germany and in Austria-Hungary were actively pushing for their two wars.

And as for why Germany wanted a war at all, a large chunk of that was because the Prussian military aristocracy that had been running the country were seeing their traditional backing start to fade, and they needed a reason to justify their maintaining of power at home, and they had all been very much indoctrinated in the belief that war was one of the pinnacles of human achievement. And they had convinced themselves that the French and the Russians were just itching to invade them, and so it was their job to invade first to prevent this from happening. So having a war, in their view, was a good thing and a necessary thing, and their key question was, how could they arrange this war so that they would have the maximum chance of winning. By harnessing their war to the Austrian response to an assassination, they were able to make it appear as if the wider war was started by someone else, whereas in actuality Germany was encouraging and supporting Austria-Hungary to respond very aggressively to the assassination rather than accept a political or legal restitution (which Serbia was willing to make; in prior potential conflicts Germany had largely reined Austria-Hungary in). And, tragically, Franz Ferdinand had been the key person on the Austrian side who had been very inclined to keep going with diplomacy and peace-making rather than war, and was also a close friend of the Kaiser, who had also been key on the German side to preventing previous crises from flaring up into wars but who now, with his friend assassinated, was in a much more belligerent mood.

I plan to read some other books on the origins of the first world war next for other viewpoints, but the interesting thing about this book is the way it explores and interrogates the connection that's otherwise a little baffling: how you make the step between the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian terrorist, and German, French and British troops slaughtering each other in the mud of Flanders.


The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson
Absolutely first class, an utterly delightful romance novel which takes the 'marriage of convenience' trope and does fantastic things with it. Twenty-year-old Ruth Berger, due to a complicated mix-up, is left behind in Vienna in 1938 when her partly-Jewish family flees the Nazis. Quinton Somerville, a family friend and English professor of paleology, is also in Vienna and the only way he can think of to rescue her is to marry her, so that as a British subject she can safely reunite with her family in London and then, hopefully, quickly get the marriage annulled. Things rapidly get more complicated for them both. This was a joy to read, I inhaled it all in one evening and loved every page, Ibbotson is incredibly funny in her prose, her characters all live and breathe and have such wonderful inner and outer lives, and she writes with gorgeously vivid and realistic experience of living in Vienna and of being a refugee in London, since Eva Ibbotson also fled Vienna for London at the outset of WW2. I loved it absolutely to pieces.

Also I enjoyed it so much that I went straight out and got two more by the same author.

A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson
This was equally delightful, though a trifle more romance-tropey and fairytale in nature: the young Countess Anna Grazinsky, having fled St Petersburg in 1919 with her family and lost their family jewels along the way, takes up a job as a housemaid at a romantic English country house and rapidly goes through the entire household befriending everyone and everything in sight, and especially the young lord, wounded in the RFC and engaged to an extremely unpleasant but very rich young woman. This one is more romantic fairytale and less realistic and funny, but again, the descriptions of all the characters are sheer delight, the settings are beautifully done and I adored it too. I especially liked the depiction of disabled characters in this, who are both a significant part of the plot and also very well realised as characters.

Madensky Square, Eva Ibbotson
This is the account of a year in the life of Susannah, a fashionable dressmaker in the eponymous square in Vienna, pre-WW1. It was a bit different from the other two, it wasn't a coming-of-age story or a get-together romance, Susannah is 36 and already in a settled relationship. But I absolutely adored it, maybe most of all of these three, it was so immersive and so full of beautifully vivid characters living their lives. It's told in the first person and Susannah slowly reveals all her secrets as the book goes on, I loved how in a story that doesn't have a lot of surface plot, Ibbotson maintains the tension and interest by gradually letting Susannah unfold so that we find out how she got to be who she is and why. And also we explore the lives of her friends, neigbours, employees and clients, through Susannah's interest in them all. There are lots of romances, of course, including Susannah's own, but it's not a romance novel the way the other two are. Absolutely gorgeous.

And I have several more Eva Ibbotons waiting for me now...