The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s
Piers Brendon
Jonathan Cape, £25, 880pp
Buy it at BOL
On New Year's Eve 1899 the German Social Democratic Party organised a glittering ball to celebrate the new century. The party had grown in mighty bounds to become the largest democratic political organisation on earth. The ball attracted all sides, the right wing represented by Edward Bernstein and the revolutionary wing by Rosa Luxemburg. The mood of the evening was triumphalist: the party was about to emerge into the century of great hope. Whatever the means of change, whether through parliament or revolution, it seemed obvious to all the guests that nothing could stop the relentless progress of social democracy and the benefits which it would shower on the whole human race.
Less than a decade and a half later, the great hope disintegrated into unimaginable despair. The first world war, supported by the German social democrats and the British Labour Party, consigned millions of the young men of Europe to the charnel house. For a brief moment after the war, some of the optimism of that eve-of-century ball returned, only to be plunged into gloom in the 1930s, "the dark valley". The great hope vanished and in its place came slump, fascism, another war and the Holocaust. The rest of the century was haunted by the howling ghosts of the dark valley: every rise in unemployment, every attack on racial minorities, every slippage on the stock exchange, every censored broadcast sent out tremors of apprehension that what happened in the 30s might be coming again.
Globalisation is usually presented as a modern phenomenon. The outstanding contribution of Piers Brendon's history is his presentation of the 30s as a decade in which each apparently independent part of the world depended on the others. The slump and the depression set off by the Wall Street crash in 1929 quickly enveloped Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Brendon fits the story of what happened in each of these nations into an international pattern. Seasoned democracies such as the US, Britain and France, whose governments had won the war, somehow managed to survive the economic blizzard, but the effect on Germany, Japan and Italy was to replace democracy with a crazed fascist militarism which speedily degenerated into racist terror and imperialist aggression.
In Spain, the elected government was toppled after a long and ferocious civil war set off by a fascist rebellion. As they drowned in what seemed an unstoppable right-wing tide, millions of victims and their sympathisers cast hopeful eyes towards what they were led to believe was a new socialist dawn in Russia. In fact the new dawn was by that stage a grotesque hoax, kept alive by merciless and mendacious propaganda.
A consistent theme in this book is that official mendacity was common to all countries, whether or not their governments depended on votes. Everywhere those in power laid hold of the means of informing people - and informed them in terms opposite to the truth. In this process there was very little to choose between, for instance, the war propaganda of the Japanese government and British ministers' assumption that the purpose of the BBC and almost all the free press was to state and argue the ministers' case.
Brendon tells his story kaleidoscopically, alternating his chapters country by country. Somehow he manages to get through his vast panorama without a moment's dullness; his characters come to life in a flurry of detail about their appearances and habits. He never takes refuge in blandness, the usual retreat of boring historians.
And there is no comfort here for the mass of increasingly fashionable historians who surmise that there may, after all, have been something to be said for Hitler or Franco or Mussolini or Hoover or Chamberlain or Ramsay MacDonald. In Brendon's view, MacDonald's socialism was "like Harris tweed in Bavaria"; his "cut the dole" policy in 1931 was based on "penalising the indigent for the failures of the opulent". Lord Plymouth, who headed the British government's non-intervention committee for Spain, was a "patrician nincompoop", Ward Price of the Daily Mail "an odious toady". The young king Edward VIII "sympathised with the poor but associated with the rich"; the French foreign minister Georges Bonnet had "the courage of his own lack of conviction" and Randolph Churchill was "not fit to be allowed out in private". Although Brendon is the keeper of the Churchill archives at Cambridge, he is by no means sycophantic towards Randolph's celebrated father, Winston, who, he reminds us, was tremendously impressed by Italian fascism and by extremist militarism in Japan.
But the strength of this book does not depend on such insights into its characters, nor on the flashes of literary criticism, for instance of George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and Louis MacNeice. Rather, great chunks of this history rest on unfashionable opinions. The "most fundamental cause" of the great crash in the US, for instance, was "financial inequalities". Republican Spain was smothered "by the poisonous tendrils of Stalinism". And the key to understanding Stalin was not his association with the Russian revolution but his obsession with eradicating every vestige of that revolution in order, as Brendon puts it, "to destroy every shred of left-wing opposition". All these ideas shed new light into the gloomiest recesses of the dark valley.
There are times when the author's obsession with detail distracts him from the central issues. The biggest question of all about the 30s is surely "could Hitler have been stopped?" Brendon explains how much his chancellorship owed to chance and intrigue. In the November 1932 elections only weeks previously, the Nazis lost 2m votes, and even after Hitler became chancellor, the electorate refused him the endorsement he confidently expected. He got the constitutional majority he needed by the subtle device of imprisoning all the elected communist deputies. But what Brendon almost completely ignores is the response of the communists and social democrats to the rise of fascism.
Though their combined vote and their influence in the country was substantially greater than those of the Nazis, both sides - especially the communists - rigidly refused to form a united front against the fascists. The communists, who at one stage were getting 6m votes, renamed the social democrats "social fascists". So great was the sectarian divide in those crucial months before the deluge that the communists preferred even to link up and stage strikes with the fascists rather than campaign in the country and in the factories for a unified force against fascism. "After Hitler, our turn" was the boast of the communist leader Ernst Thalmann.
After Hitler, as it happened, communists and social democrats were at last united - in the concentration camps. Brendon's refusal even to ask the question whether and how Hitler could have been stopped is reflected elsewhere in his book - for instance over the growth of fascism in Italy or the failure of the Popular Front government in France to go to the aid of republican Spain. Brendon might reply that his job is to tell history as it was, not as it might have been. But at least one of the virtues of such an authoritative and moving account is to arm us against any repetition of similar horrors in the future.
