Frederic Raphael
Two books, each horrifying in its own way, rest in my memory, Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (HarperCollins, £7.99) recounts in laconic detail the activi- ties of Reserve Police Battalion 101 during the Final Solution. Politicians' cant about the innate decency of the common man can never be heard with the same complacency after reading what ordinary Germans (not Nazis') could be persuaded to do. We are reminded that contrary to the standard them-or-us excuse, not a single man was ever punished, let alone executed, for refusing to murder Jews: it was simply a sociable option. The connection with Hugo Ott's Heidegger. A Political Life (Harper- Collins, £20) will be hard to see for those who can discern no connection between the treason of intellectuals and the cowardice of foot-soldiers. Ott lacks literary resource, but his documented indictment has a thud- ding force.
On a lighter note, Peter Collett's Foreign Bodies (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) acknowledges an honest debt to Desmond Morris and offers a skittish antidote to the mass-trickery of those who maintain that We are all indistinguishable Europeans now.
Previous page
