BOOKS

Ambiguity of a good German

A. L. Rowse

A NOBLE COMBAT: THE LETTERS OF SHEILA GRANT DUFF AND ADAM VON TROTT, 1932-1939 edited by K. von Klemperer

Clarendon Press, Oxford, £19.50, pp. 372

Half a century ago — and yet it is all as vivid as if it were yesterday, to those of us who lived through that experience. I doubt if they who did not can appreciate what a nightmare it all was. Some of those who lived through it still dream about Hitler, as I do. This book was worth publishing for the light it throws on the inwardness of those years and events and how they affected two distinguished and representa- tive young figures at the time. As such it is a telling contribution to history, and espec- ially to what led to the renewal of war.

At the time of the Nazi annexation of Austria Sheila Grant Duff was shocked by a German diplomat in Prague telling her, 'We cannot expect England and France to be pleased to discover that they did not, after all, win the war.' That was it; that was the background to it all: the determination in Germany to reverse the decision of 1918 and put Germany on top in Europe.

And what a Germany! Hitler's Ger- many, its criminal character already well in view. After all, in July 1934 Hitler had had murdered at least 1,250 former comrades and opponents, and received the public thanks of President Hindenburg for so doing. That should have told people clearly enough what they were dealing with. There is no reaction to that revealing event in Trott's letters, the leitmotiv of which all through is the necessity of Anglo-German co-operation. He was passionately in- volved in trying to bring that about, through his contacts in England. Lothian, the Astors, Halifax. But it was not possible to co-operate with Hitler's Germany, except on his terms. That moment of truth came home to Trott after this book closes, when Germany was well on her way to defeat that had not been complete enough in 1918, and Trott was one of the upper- class victims of the Generals' Conspiracy in 1944. He died heroically and nobly — the book is properly entitled; but in the course of it one sees that he had not been right.

Sheila Grant Duff comes much better out of the prolonged encounter of these minds and hearts; one is astonished at the clarity of this young woman's insights, in spite of the fog of idealism they both were afflicted with. She had the advantage of her journalist's contacts with facts at the nerve centres of Europe. Trott wanted to give Sheila 'protection and a sense of purpose which my clumsy Germanic soul has always wanted to give you'! I find this supercilious, especially since he was floundering himself. As for sense of pur- pose. the prospect of Germany's defeat concentrated the German Generals' minds wonderfully at the end. However, their

conspiracy had no support whatever among the German people at large.

It is only just to Trott to allow that he belonged to the internal.. bpposition to Hitler well before that, though serving all the same in the Foreign Office. That was characteristic of Adam's ambiguity, soused as he was in the appalling ambiguity of Hegelianism. Nothing ambiguous about Sheila, sheer Scotch common sense. 'Who threatens war today?' This was just before Munich. 'Who started it in 1914? I deny we drove Ger- many to accept a regime which meant war.' Adam does not seem to have realised that Hitler's Germany meant war all along. Had he never read Mein Kampf ?

Trott was not so much concerned with facts as ideas, up in the air in the manner of Germany philosophy:

I still think that Anglo-German co-operation in some shape or other is the only key. As peoples we will certainly never love each other — even as individuals I sometimes doubt how near we really get to understand- ing. But I think we might have those close and subtle relations that one has to an opponent in fencing.

(He bore on that handsome face a large scar from fencing, a customary mark of German virility.) Sheila told him to get rid of Hegel once and for ever, go to America and get his ideas clearer. Adam was critical of America in the German manner, though he had a descent from John Jay, first Chief Justice. He was an aristocrat; his father had been a Minis- ter under the Kaiser, his mother's family, von Schweinitz, diplomats under Bis- marck. Sheila's family, the Grant Duffs, were no less aristos with a tradition of service to the state, her father and several others of her family killed in the first German war.

Trott hated her career as a journalist, which gave her such a grasp of the situa- tion. Hitler himself said that he was afraid that his constant protestations of peaceful intentions might undermine his people's will to war.

Sheila puts the crucial question: 'What has been done to show there is a distinction between government and people? No- thing. 1914-18 with all its suffering taught you nothing — not even not to make a new war.' How to meet such a situation, deal with such a people? 'I believe we must make your explosion an internal one by building a Chinese wall, or we will have war.' She was absolutely right. The one and only chance of avoiding Germany's renewed threat was that of a Grand Alliance holding firm, so that when the abscess burst it should burst internally, instead of involving all Europe in disaster.

That meant coming to terms with Rus- sia, and that the British governing class would not have. Sheila reports with disgust the attitude of the upper classes, 'City chaPs' and family friends:

They most sincerely believe that the only aim of our foreign policy should be to keep stocks and shares high.

Adam replies with an Englishman's observation from Peking, that so far from keeping a cordon sanitaire around Nazi Germany they were more concerned to keep a cordon sanitaire around Russia. The view was that 'class interest with you is overruling national interest.' Trott's view was that 'any bluff from the English side of using Russia as a lever against Germany would always be called.'

Fundamentally he was a German pat- riot. Sheila's residual warning was clear: 'We have to make up our minds what we can allow you, and what not. If you want what we cannot allow there will be war.' This does not seem to have registered with Adam any more than with other Germans. 'I cannot see what substantial appeasement can grow out of the mere fact of your having completed your re-armament.' He thought this 'unsound Machiavellianism'. Later his idea of a compromise peace was to leave Hitler in possession of his con- quests.

His very last visit to Halifax put forward the most dangerous idea of all — namely to trade concessions by Hitler over Czecho- slovakia in return for letting him have Danzig. That would have castrated Poland. If Hitler had been a man of moderation, as even Bismarck was, that would have won him the game. It would have let Chamber- lain off the hook, given him something to go on — to continue his disastrous course of appeasement. Anglo-German Co- operation!

From the perspective of the Far East Trott could at last realise something of the detestation Germany's conduct had aroused for her in the outside world — he does not seem to have realised that before. He wrote, after Munich, that the sharpen- ing of the conflict came to him 'as a complete surprise. I confess that I failed to realise the intrinsic turning-point which came about with the Anschluss [with Au- stria], which opened up the path for a coercive settlement to the Central Euro- pean problem.' He had not thought that Great Britain and France would give way. Sheila's reply was that her people 'could not think straight.' This applied to their Whole course since Hitler came to power.

How much importance really had Trott? What gave him the entrée to such high Political society? Granted they were the appeasers — significantly enough he would not meet Churchill: `isn't he a war- monger? He repeats the wicked cliche the appeasers put about just because Chur- chill kept warning them of the danger of their course. Keeping `the lid' on Nazi Germany so that the explosion came inter- nally was the only way of avoiding the war Hitler always meant.

Adam disagreed: in his high-minded, Philosophic way he considered that cynic- ism, when it was just realism. And he told Sheila to keep out of it: 'you're a brave and a good and extremely lovable woman, don't get bitterly involved in a conflict Which must — if you are to remain yourself — be outside your reach.' I call that pretty superior from someone whose mind was muddled by it all — even allowing for the awful dilemma of his position as a civilised German in Hitler's Germany.

He wanted to marry her — and there is a great deal of waffle about love and friendship in the book, mostly on his part. He is always demanding 'understanding' from her, sympathy with his complexities and fumblings, those half-baked ideas. And yet — and yet — Sheila cannot imagine him dead, any more than I can. It IS very strange — some extraordinary gift of personality that keeps him alive for us, though we were in a way his victims: I think now, emotionally exploited by him, for he was a colossal egoist.

Whence was it that he could play the role he did? He says that he had this way of `Involving himself in other people's lives' and that this gave him no rest. I know from experience, and others can attest it, that it was quite as upsetting for them: I used to think that he had a gift for making others unhappy. Of course he had extreme charm; but what I found so disturbing was the uncanny sensibility with which he responded to what was going on inside oneself. I had never met anything like it, and it was not simply, or mainly, intellec- tual. Sheila speaks at one point of 'the sort of intensity which Germans have: it is almost as if they feel rather than think with their minds.' That gets something of it: used as the English are to reticence, this made for a welcome release of the spirit, an unexpected mutuality. However, there were limits, as this book brings home with touching truth and fidelity.

Of course there was his appearance and personality. Andre Siegfried's daughter said that Adam's was the most beautiful head she had ever encountered. It is said that Hitler was impressed by a photograph of that head — hanged in Plotzensee — so as to say, if only he had been on my side!. .

Mine is another repository of his letters; I do not think that they have the quality of these to Sheila, for they are earlier, and his English is less good in them. Moreover, he was in the full flight, or depth, of that Hegelianism we both deplored in him. The editor describes it as muddle-headed. It was more damaging than that: white was always in process of becoming black, and black becoming white; everything shaded off into every- thing else, there was no firm foundation, either for thought or practical life.

We met when Adam came first to Oxford at 18 and it fell to me to suggest that he put in for a Rhodes scholarship and to back him for it. Hence the fatal link-up with Lothian, another charmer who was so wrong (Lionel Curtis on his friend: 'Philip died in the knowledge that he had been wrong.' Well, of course, anyone of sense could have seen that all along; but they wouldn't, and didn't.) Isaiah Berlin had an understandable way of putting without illusions Adam's penetration of that circle: according to him, 'worming my way in with all the crook-humanists of the world.'

Of course he was above wicked anti- Semitism — he only once made a slightly off-hand remark about that to me. And he did urge on me that Germany was 'res- tricted' — what did that come to but Hitler's demand for Lebensraum? What about other peoples' existence in the lands the Herrenvolk were to annex — according to the Treaty of Brest Litovsk imposed on Russia in 1917 — right up to the threshold of Leningrad.

My concern with Adam antedated Sheila's, though it overlapped a bit, and had not the same interest for others. Still it had great significance for me: it gave me a private window into the German soul. He was only a youth, but already more soph- isticated in the ways of the heart than I was. In those days I was a good deal of a proselytiser for socialism, and used to wonder whether I was to blame for pushing him to the Left. Now I think not; after all, his elder brother, who had much influence with him, was for a time a Communist, and all our little circle at Oxford was socialist then. The whole book is filled with nostal- gia for Oxford, those idyllic, idealist days when we were young, before the future closed in on us when Hitler came to power in 1933.

I knew what that meant: the end of all our hopes. I said then to Adam: 'You can roll up the map of Europe.' I knew it was the end of politics in Germany, and recom- mended that he give himself up to re- search, as I was doing. I even thought of a subject of research for him for the next ten years, a parallel to Burckhardt's Renaiss- ance in Italy: there could be a wonderful book on the Renaissance in Germany and the Netherlands, with its extension to England. Adam would not consider it — not his line: he was essentially a contacts man. Nor would he leave Germany — when I would have left the country to its deserts.

The trouble with Adam von Trott was just that he was a German.