The Bigger Picture
James Heartfield, Unpatriotic History of the Second World War
Zero Books, 556pp, £23.99, ISBN 978178099378
reviewed by John Newsinger
James Heartfield has written one of the essential books on the Second World War. It is a relentless, uncompromising account of the conflict as a great clash of Empires. The war consumed millions of lives as the great powers battled for supremacy. It was fought in the interests of and for the benefit of the ruling classes with ordinary people in every country making the necessary sacrifices. Without any doubt, this is how the ruling classes themselves regarded the conflict; but, of course, in order to get people to fight the war had to be disguised as something else. Most histories written in Britain and the United States never penetrate the disguise. Heartfield has provided us with a welcome antidote to this propagandist version of history, to ‘the myth of the Good War’.
Unpatriotic History is divided into two parts: the first, on ‘The Meaning of the War’, looks at the politics of the conflagration at both the international and the domestic level. The second section, ‘The Course of the War’, examines both the course of the conflict and at its aftermath. And The book covers an immense amount of ground. Not only are Heartfield’s arguments challenging, but just about everyone will learn things they did not know from this book. This reader certainly did. Inevitably, however, even at 472 pages, the book is too short to do full justice to the case that Heartfield advances. On numerous occasions one finds oneself wishing an argument had been expanded or that more evidence had been provided. Arguably, however, this is a mark of the book’s success, rather than a mark of failure.
On occasions, Heartfield’s judgements are too crude and one-sided. He argues, for example, that the Second Front ‘was finally opened up … because of the fear that the people would liberate themselves’. This is just not true. Certainly Britain and the United States were very concerned about the politics of the European resistance, but there is no evidence that they ever thought it capable of defeating the Nazis on its own or that this belief led to the decision to invade the European mainland. This sort of misjudgement is doubly unfortunate because it plays into the hands of those who will want to discredit Heartfield’s wider argument. More generally, given its importance, more discussion of the Eastern Front would also have been useful. And, for my money, he does not bring out the differences at the domestic level between the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, two of the most brutal dictatorships in human history, and the British and American regimes which, whatever their excesses, remained liberal democracies. The differences were more important than he allows for.
More serious though is the weakness of his account of the Holocaust: it is much too short and leans much too heavily on Arno Mayer’s flawed Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? The 'Final Solution' in History (Pantheon, 1998). The mass murder of East European Jewry was not just a horrific massacre of men, women and children, but also the physical erasure of communities that had existed for centuries, as if they had never been. I am, at the moment reading Omer Bartov’s recently published Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007), which certainly brings out this dimension of the crime. And, of course, mass murder was not just the fate of East European Jews. Seven pages does not do this terrible episode justice. The occupation of Germany actually gets a more extended discussion than the Holocaust! There has been a tremendous amount of outstanding historical work done in this area over recent years and Heartfield really needed to take more of this on board.
His justification for this neglect in his historiographical chapter, where it gets another six pages, is not very convincing. He complains of ‘the current reduction of all suffering in the war to the suffering of European Jewry’, a wildly exaggerated complaint. Certainly, one does not wish to get into an argument over who suffered most during the war: was it the Russians, the Poles, the Chinese or European Jewry? Or Europe’s gypsy population, whose suffering is still largely unchronicled and uncommemorated? Nevertheless, the Holocaust was a unique event, that is to say, it has enough unique features to mark it out as an historically unprecedented massacre. And genocidal anti-Semitism did become absolutely central to Nazi thinking during the course of the war. Indeed, the war was actually portrayed on the German Home Front as a war with the Jews. If the Nazis had won the war then the likelihood is that the Holocaust would be seen as the dreadful prelude to even larger-scale massacres of Poles and Russians, but this was not to be.
What of ‘Holocaust denial’? Heartfield seems to see the deniers’ main role as strengthening the ‘official’ version of the history of the war. This is just perverse. He is scathing about those countries that have made Holocaust denial illegal, made it a ‘thought crime’, quite missing the point. In Germany, for example, it was surely absolutely right that the actual perpetrators of these crimes and their apologists should not have been able to deny that the crimes took place in the very faces of surviving victims who had seen their families murdered. If Britain had been occupied or allied with the Nazis, and British Jews had been rounded up by British police and shipped off for extermination then such a law would be justified here as well.
These criticisms aside, Heartfield’s book provides a welcome corrective to the standard on-message accounts of the Second World War. Some chapters stand out as particularly impressive: on ‘The Arab Revolt’, ‘Quit India’, ‘The European Resistance’ and others. Most impressive of all is his discussion of ‘The Revolt Against the War’, a chapter that could be usefully expanded into a full-length study in its own right. Here he ranges from the Baum group in Germany through to the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, from strikes in Occupied Europe to strikes in the United States and Britain and so on. As Heartfield insists, the war was a fight for domination between Great Powers and with the Axis Powers overthrown, the victors promptly fell out among themselves.
Given the Coalition government’s determination to celebrate the First World War as a ‘Good War’, Heartfield is hopefully already at work on a companion volume dealing with that conflict. For the moment, buy a copy of his Unpatriotic History for yourself and order it at your local library if you still have one.
Unpatriotic History is divided into two parts: the first, on ‘The Meaning of the War’, looks at the politics of the conflagration at both the international and the domestic level. The second section, ‘The Course of the War’, examines both the course of the conflict and at its aftermath. And The book covers an immense amount of ground. Not only are Heartfield’s arguments challenging, but just about everyone will learn things they did not know from this book. This reader certainly did. Inevitably, however, even at 472 pages, the book is too short to do full justice to the case that Heartfield advances. On numerous occasions one finds oneself wishing an argument had been expanded or that more evidence had been provided. Arguably, however, this is a mark of the book’s success, rather than a mark of failure.
On occasions, Heartfield’s judgements are too crude and one-sided. He argues, for example, that the Second Front ‘was finally opened up … because of the fear that the people would liberate themselves’. This is just not true. Certainly Britain and the United States were very concerned about the politics of the European resistance, but there is no evidence that they ever thought it capable of defeating the Nazis on its own or that this belief led to the decision to invade the European mainland. This sort of misjudgement is doubly unfortunate because it plays into the hands of those who will want to discredit Heartfield’s wider argument. More generally, given its importance, more discussion of the Eastern Front would also have been useful. And, for my money, he does not bring out the differences at the domestic level between the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, two of the most brutal dictatorships in human history, and the British and American regimes which, whatever their excesses, remained liberal democracies. The differences were more important than he allows for.
More serious though is the weakness of his account of the Holocaust: it is much too short and leans much too heavily on Arno Mayer’s flawed Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? The 'Final Solution' in History (Pantheon, 1998). The mass murder of East European Jewry was not just a horrific massacre of men, women and children, but also the physical erasure of communities that had existed for centuries, as if they had never been. I am, at the moment reading Omer Bartov’s recently published Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007), which certainly brings out this dimension of the crime. And, of course, mass murder was not just the fate of East European Jews. Seven pages does not do this terrible episode justice. The occupation of Germany actually gets a more extended discussion than the Holocaust! There has been a tremendous amount of outstanding historical work done in this area over recent years and Heartfield really needed to take more of this on board.
His justification for this neglect in his historiographical chapter, where it gets another six pages, is not very convincing. He complains of ‘the current reduction of all suffering in the war to the suffering of European Jewry’, a wildly exaggerated complaint. Certainly, one does not wish to get into an argument over who suffered most during the war: was it the Russians, the Poles, the Chinese or European Jewry? Or Europe’s gypsy population, whose suffering is still largely unchronicled and uncommemorated? Nevertheless, the Holocaust was a unique event, that is to say, it has enough unique features to mark it out as an historically unprecedented massacre. And genocidal anti-Semitism did become absolutely central to Nazi thinking during the course of the war. Indeed, the war was actually portrayed on the German Home Front as a war with the Jews. If the Nazis had won the war then the likelihood is that the Holocaust would be seen as the dreadful prelude to even larger-scale massacres of Poles and Russians, but this was not to be.
What of ‘Holocaust denial’? Heartfield seems to see the deniers’ main role as strengthening the ‘official’ version of the history of the war. This is just perverse. He is scathing about those countries that have made Holocaust denial illegal, made it a ‘thought crime’, quite missing the point. In Germany, for example, it was surely absolutely right that the actual perpetrators of these crimes and their apologists should not have been able to deny that the crimes took place in the very faces of surviving victims who had seen their families murdered. If Britain had been occupied or allied with the Nazis, and British Jews had been rounded up by British police and shipped off for extermination then such a law would be justified here as well.
These criticisms aside, Heartfield’s book provides a welcome corrective to the standard on-message accounts of the Second World War. Some chapters stand out as particularly impressive: on ‘The Arab Revolt’, ‘Quit India’, ‘The European Resistance’ and others. Most impressive of all is his discussion of ‘The Revolt Against the War’, a chapter that could be usefully expanded into a full-length study in its own right. Here he ranges from the Baum group in Germany through to the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, from strikes in Occupied Europe to strikes in the United States and Britain and so on. As Heartfield insists, the war was a fight for domination between Great Powers and with the Axis Powers overthrown, the victors promptly fell out among themselves.
Given the Coalition government’s determination to celebrate the First World War as a ‘Good War’, Heartfield is hopefully already at work on a companion volume dealing with that conflict. For the moment, buy a copy of his Unpatriotic History for yourself and order it at your local library if you still have one.