What I’m reading: tunneling into the past
It’s been a while since I’ve done a roundup of “what I’m reading.” (After the newsletter went to weekly, it got harder to fit it in.) But today I’m wondering if you feel the same way I do, worried about the state of the world and eager to find answers—or at least a way to escape the search for them—in books.
Part of that means reading work that is new to me, including “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro.
Covering the war in Gaza has inevitably brought back memories of other conflicts, including the US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If, as the saying goes, history rhymes rather than repeats itself, the battles for control of Mosul and Helmand feel like earlier stanzas in a long, grim poem that now includes Gaza City and Rafah. I picked up this book to gain a more grounded perspective on those earlier conflicts and others.
One paragraph from an early chapter of the book seems particularly relevant. (For context: “asymmetric” wars are wars fought between groups that differ greatly in size and capabilities, often involving guerrilla warfare against a more traditional state army):
In asymmetric wars the battle is fundamentally not about territory, but about people, because the people have crucial information, which is true to a greater extent than in symmetric conflicts because the ability of the stronger side to take advantage of a given piece of information is always limited. very high, and because holding territory is not enough to secure victory. The stronger party in asymmetric conflicts can conquer physical territory for a short time if it chooses. But owning and managing that territory is something else entirely – as so many would-be conquerors have learned.
I’m also drawn to reread a book I first opened long ago. Not, I think, because I long to rediscover familiar prose, but because I feel compelled to go back and interrogate the now unfamiliar version of myself that turned its pages long ago.
I first read “The Berlin Novels”, by Christopher Isherwood, the book that inspired the musical “Cabaret” in college after seeing a particularly riveting production of the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Oddly, when I looked it up, I realized it was the precursor to the show currently playing on Broadway, and starring a young Eddie Redmayne, but I had no idea – at the time he was just a guy, not an internationally renowned star.)
That Fringe production’s staging of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a sweet-sounding folk song that is eventually revealed to be a Nazi anthem, was one of the most intensely memorable experiences I’ve ever had at a play. At first the song was performed as a delicate melody sung by smiling young people, and I remember smiling and wanting to hum along, not realizing the twist that was coming. In a later act, cast members embedded in the audience delivered it in a much uglier, martial tone.
In my memory they gave a Hitler salute and encouraged the audience to sing along, but I’m not sure if that was the choreography or just the general atmosphere. What I do remember clearly is seeing another audience member mindlessly pick up the small flag placed on a table in front of her and start waving it in time to the music, before suddenly realizing it had a swastika on it and dropped it in disgust.
It was such a striking emotional experience that I purchased “Berlin Stories” to further immerse myself in Isherwood’s stories of Weimar Berlin. When I read it at the time, I remember thinking it was an interesting exploration of the self-deception and complicity of ordinary people in the rise of the Nazis. But I saw no specific parallels with, or warnings about, my own world. I thought the Germans of the 1930s might have absentmindedly let the Nazis in, but that wouldn’t happen today.
Reading it again today feels a bit like using a time machine to confront that past self who was so certain that the arc of history bent toward justice. That doesn’t mean I see an imminent return of the Nazis to power. But I no longer have the unconditional confidence of my younger years that such risks are a thing of the past.
Read further
Sometimes I just want to read to escape. On my bedside table currently sits a copy of the script for “Matt & Ben”, a very funny play by Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers that launched Kaling’s career in 2003.
And then there’s Plum Sykes’s “Wives Like Us,” which sweetly teases out the foibles of England’s wealthy and fashionable Cotswolds set, much as her previous novels, “Bergdorf Blondes” and “The Debutante Divorcée,” did for New York society. Sykes, who also recently wrote this lovely piece for the Times Style section on the rise of “executive butlers,” has a Nancy Mitfordesque gift for sifting through a scene like an outsider while still offering the details that only an insider, or at least near-insider, can provide.
What are you reading?
It’s been a while, so I’m curious to see what you’ve been reading!
I’d love to hear what you’ve read (or watched or listened to) that you recommend to the broader community of Interpreter readers.
