Statistics - and Edward ll by Mary Hoffman

Happy 2018 to all our Followers and readers!

At the beginning of a new year we thought you'd like to know some statistics. There are 1,183 official Followers on this site - who are eligible to enter our competitions if they live in the UK. But there are many more of you who read the blog without being Followers.

In July 2018 we will have been History Girls for eight years!

We've had over three million hits, a third of them from the United States of America. But we've also had nearly 36K from Ukraine and over 21K from China.

Our most popular post ever was Leslie Wilson's on Maria von Maltzan, 23rd July 2012. It has had nearly 96K hits!

The third most visited post was written only last month. Michelle Lovric's Suicide by Greed about the way Venice is succumbing to the effects of huge tourist cruise liners, was published on December 10th 2017. It has had over 17.5K hits already in three weeks.

I hope you find all this as fascinating as I do.

In case you are new to the site, this is our pattern:

1st - 28th of every month: a daily post by on of our 29 members (we have a job share on 15th).
29th: a guest post from a writer of history or historical fiction.
30th of months with 31 days: Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wigtwick, about an object or objects from history.
Last day of month: competition to win the latest book by the guest on 29th.

But the daily work of the site is to provide a different post every day of the year on a historical topic. So I must get on and give you a review of Edward ll the Man: a Doomed Inheritance by Stephen Spinks.


For many people, all that they know about England's second king of that name (after his father, Edward Longshanks), is that he died from a red hot poker up his backside. And this was a punishment for being a homosexual. He was deposed for his unnatural instincts and then cruelly murdered.

Hmn.

Well, for that you have to thank Christopher Marlowe, whose play, published posthumously in 1594, was first given the title The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer.

It portrays  Edward's fascination with his "favourite" Piers Gaveston, who is executed not far into the play and then his successor "Spenser" (Hugh Despenser the Younger historically). At the end of the drama, the regicide referred to above is carried out by the villainous Lightborn, whom many have identified with Lucifer (though surely he'd be called Lightbearer in that case?)

Stephen Spinks quickly deals with Marlowe's version at the beginning of his new biography and then proceeds to demolish what the play tells us. He makes it clear that his subject suffered terribly from being the middle Edward of a three generation kingship of that name. His father was known as The Hammer of the Scots, while this king suffered the ignominious defeat by Robert Bruce at Bannockburn.

His son, Edward lll, reigned for fifty years, produced thirteen children in his long marriage to Philippa of Hainault, was immensely popular with his subjects and, through his oldest son Edward the Black Prince, won victories in France, even taking the French king prisoner.

So the second King Edward is an early example of the "squeezed middle," and his reputation has consequently suffered. That he did have homosexual relationships is indisputable but he also had four children with his wife, Isabella of France. He was cultured, educated, refined and took pleasure in all sorts of athletic and aesthetic activities.

But his relationship with his father was stormy and the old king was increasingly irascible at the end of his reign. At his death Edward l left his son a burden of debts and of administrative chaos. The young Edward had a cohort of young knights with whom he had grown up and who formed a tight loyal band. Men like Roger Mortimer the Younger, who would eventually become Queen Isabella's companion in arms and lover.

Roger Mortimer, who would depose his friend and be executed by that friend's son after three years when he had effectively become the ruler of England.

Stephen Spinks has been fascinated and obsessed by Edward ll from boyhood, writing his PhD thesis on him and now this book, the culmination of many years of study.

So what does he think about Edward's end? Well, he adopts the thesis of historian Ian Mortimer in his book The Greatest Traitor: the Life of Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. Both Spinks and Mortimer believe that Edward the Second was not in fact killed at Berkeley Castle in 1327 at all  and that his funeral was faked. They rely on a letter written by Manuele de Fieschi, a Papal notary in 1336.

According to the Fieschi letter, Edward survived, escaping first to Ireland and then to the continent where, after many travels, he became a monk in Lombardy and made his confession to Fieschi in 1335.

So, no red hot poker. No murder in fact and the king left to die of natural causes in a religious house in Italy. It's a quite different story. By contrast his former friend, then traitor Roger Mortimer was executed after three years of tyranny and his former queen, Isabella, was imprisoned by their son. Edward's half brother, the Earl of Kent was executed for plotting to restore Edward to the throne - something possible only if the deposed king had still been alive.

The author's enthusiasm for his subject ensures that this book is extremely readable and that Edward's reputation is at least partly rehabilitated. A good read for anyone who, like me, is fascinated by the Plantagenets.

(I'm afraid that Blogger absolutely refuses to upload any of my images, which has been a problem for a while now.)

Why weren't all the Germans like Maria von Maltzan? By Leslie Wilson

Nazi boycott of Jewish shops. Photo: German Federal Archive

One month after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag building went up in flames. The arson was blamed on Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, and he was executed for it a year later. It seems that most historians agree that van der Lubbe did set the building on fire - but what is beyond doubt is that it was a great opportunity for Hitler, who persuaded the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, to suspend civil liberties. In the aftermath, Communists and Social Democrats were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Some of them never emerged from the 'wild' concentration camps the SA (Brownshirts) set up. Some of them never got so far. The Social Democrat Minister-President of Mecklenburg, Johannes Stelling, was tortured to death and his body was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river. Twelve other Social Democrats were thrown in the same night. Paul Löbe, the former President of the Reichstag, was kidnapped, arrested, and put into a camp. Social Democratic councillor and officials in Braunschweig resigned their posts when they were threatened with violence; one refused and was beaten to death, and this pattern was repeated across Germany. Trades Unions and other 'Marxist' organisations (like the Schrader League that my grandfather had belonged to) were dissolved, often after the premises had been trashed and the administrators beaten or murdered.

And of course, the Nazis began to attack the Jews. Maria von Maltzan, a young German aristocrat, reponded to the boycott of Jewish businesses (which happened in April 1933), in characteristic fashion: 'Posters were fixed to Jewish shops with the words: 'Germans, don't buy from Jews!' I couldn't resist just going into such a little shop, with uniformed boycott supervisors standing in front of it. They stopped me at once and asked what I wanted to buy.' She told them she wanted to pay a bill. Once she was inside, the shopkeeper, an elderly Jewish woman, said to her: ''For God's sake, you're putting yourself in pointless danger!' Maltzan's response was: 'I hadn't thought of that for a moment.'

Maria von Maltzan, from book jacket

Maria von Maltzan was an exceptional person, stubborn, and if not fearless, a risk-taker. One can imagine how easily other people would be deterred by the heavies standing outside the Jewish business, particularly since they probably knew exactly what they were capable of. However, even Maltzan quickly realised that she did need to be careful. The Gestapo interrogated her as a communist sympathiser and a friend of Jews. Possibly she was saved from the worst by her aristocratic status and her father's reputation as a German war hero. Nevertheless, she soon learned that as a person involved in resistance, she couldn't be cautious enough.

And once she had achieved her doctorate in natural history, in Munich, she couldn't apply for any posts in research establishments or biological institutes, because such posts were reserved for Nazi party members, and she wouldn't join the Party.

I have been reading a book which I can't praise enough: Richard J Evans's 'The Third Reich in History and Memory.' It is a collection of essays, elegantly and accessibly written, and in the essay entitled: 'Coercion and Consent', he considers and rebuts the contention of historians that the vast majority of the German people supported Hitler and that an extensive apparatus of terror wasn't necessary.

This is based on the observation that the Gestapo, as an organisation, was far smaller than the Stasi in the so-called 'German Democratic Republic', and that after 1933 the concentration camps (as opposed to the death camps in the East) were used for criminals and 'anti-social elements.' However, these historians are ignoring the role of the courts in prosecuting anyone who stepped out of line, and many of these people ended up in prisons and penitentiaries.

This struck an immediate chord with me, having sat one afternoon in the German historical Institute reading reports from a German court (I think it was Hamburg). The example that stuck in my mind was the man who had joked in an air-raid shelter that Hitler had invaded France to get back his ball, which had been shot off in the First World War. The story about Hitler's missing ball was of course commonplace in Britain, and perhaps the man had got it from secretly listening to the BBC. In any case, he got a hefty prison sentence, and there were many other such cases.

In 1935, 23,000 inmates of state prisons and penitentiaries were classified as political offenders. Others were just guillotined. Contrary to what David Cesarani claimed in the Letters Page of the Guardian when 'Alone in Berlin' was published, the judicial murder of the elderly couple in Fallada's book was far from exceptional.

Ploetzensee prison Berlin: photo ThoKay

When, shortly before her death, I asked my grandmother what it was like to live under the Nazis, she glanced over her shoulder before she answered; so I saw the 'German glance', which her contemporaries in the West had been able to abandon. My grandmother's ongoing mental illness, her hours of brooding and inner anguish, had preserved it intact. What she remembered, first and foremost, from living under the Nazis, was fear. She told me then about Nazi women coming to the house and inspecting everything and then saying: 'You're scum. You'll end up in concentration camp.' That must have been in 1933, when my grandfather was fighting for his job. However, the 'German glance' was necessary, if you were going to say anything incautious, in a world where the Nazi surveillance apparatus extended to the lowest level officials, the 'Blockwart' whose job it was to collect and transfer information about everyone living in his small area. Nazi womens' organisations, schools, and the Hitler Youth, all kept tabs on the population. Bruno Bettelheim undoubtedly had this in mind when he remarked that the whole of Germany was a concentration camp.

Maria von Maltzan couldn't take up the career she wanted because of her political views; other people were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they stepped out of line. My grandfather was one of millions controlled by their jobs (he also had a mentally-ill wife and I would think her safety, every time she was taken into mental hospital, was guaranteed by his being a senior police officer. If he had been a dissident, she might have been murdered as so many patients were.) Nazism was no different from any other totalitarian state; people were controlled through their jobs.

Of course there were people who were enthusiastic about the Nazi state. The unpleasant refugee Czekalla in my novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf,' talks big about killing people in Russia, and finally mutters that he was meant to be a big landlord out there. Some people will go along with all kinds of abuses for personal benefit - and the Nazi system made it its business to bring out the worst that the human race is capable of. Brutality, racial hatred, callousness, were promoted as virtues in Nazi Germany. Sebastian Haffner, in his 'Defying Hitler' describes how he and his fellow lawyers were taken off to a kind of boot camp and given military training. (this seems to have been standard practice, with professionals) 'It was remarkable,' he observed, 'how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilisation.' We all know that soldiers commit horrific crimes, both off their own bat, or because they are told to. In his study of German police units who were taken off to murder Jews, Christopher Browning shows how powerful the sense of peer pressure was, in persuading the policemen not to step out, where the option of doing so was given them. ''Who would have dared,' one policeman declared emphatically, to 'lose face' before the assembled troops.' It's a situation I explored in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' where the lad Hanno tells the girl Effi how his friends were tormenting an old Jewish man, and he walked away from it - and felt guilty afterwards.

photo: Wikimedia Commons

I once gave a talk to a group of schoolchildren about how people could be brought to participate in mass murders, and when I told them about this, the boys, in particular, all nodded reluctantly, and understood exactly what I was talking about. It's what happens in the playground when children are bullied, and I don't think I'm trivialising it when one considers that bullied children often kill themselves.

However, one must also remember that one motive for establishing the 'controlled' situation of the extermination camps and the gas chambers was that the troops who had been carrying out killings were getting post-traumatic stress disorder, which suggests that they did have some kind of conscience about committing murder. And also, the men who stepped out of murder duty were often self-employed, and didn't feel they needed to worry about their future work prospects after the war.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying: 'Oh, yes, but you're fuzzing ethical issues. People are always responsible for their actions.'

And this, according to Richard Evans, is a key issue. 'Anything that implies constraints on the free will of historical actors puts a potentially serious obstacle in the way of establishing their culpability.' In other words, if one questions the validity of the 'consent' of ordinary Germans to Hitler, one provides perpetrators with the excuse that they acted under duress, which could get them off in the courtroom.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can see the ethical problem. It seems to me, though, that those men who took part in the murders of Jews in eastern Europe definitely did commit murder. And if you have done such a thing, it cannot be changed, even if you acted through fear, or, in the case of the younger men, were so conditioned by propaganda and bad teaching that you had no ethical equipment to stop you doing this. You've still done something bad and it cannot be undone. But I think the greater responsibility lies with the people who planned for this to happen.

The idea of willing Nazi supporters, about a nation who were eager to invade other countries (in fact the initial response to the outbreak of war was largely fear and gloom) has been a part of the story the British have been telling themselves about the war for the whole of my life. A few years ago, I went with a Jewish friend to watch the documentary about Belsen which appalled the British when it was shown after the war (it's not easy to watch now, either). The commentator said: 'If you hadn't fought the war, this might have been you.' (It wasn't at any stage stated that the poor people in the camp and the mass graves were mainly Jewish.)

mass grave, Bergen-Belsen. Photo Lieutenant Alan Moore

The fact that the Germans were deemed to be particularly monstrous, peculiarly inhumane and cruel, gave extra lustre to the war that had been fought against them, and undoubtedly made people feel their sufferings had been worth while.

There's something else, though. If you discount the fact that Nazism was a terror state - and I still hear people and read people doing so, even nowadays - it may be a reassurance. 'They' were different, 'they' came from a corrupt culture. If you assert that Nazism could have been fought by simple acts of refusal (there were quite a few, and many of them ended in the deaths of the dissidents), then naturally, it couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, like here. I think that's a very dangerous illusion. If we are convinced, for example, that British people wouldn't stand for that kind of thing, we may ignore the fact that similar structures of surveillance and criminalisation of dissent are being set up, not hypothetically, but now, as I am typing these words.

I think the danger in Britain is not of a sudden slashing clampdown, as in 1933 in Germany, but a slow creeping paralysis that makes it harder and harder for anyone to dissent. Where that may lead is hard to tell because no more than Germans in 1933 are we capable of looking at history from the other end and seeing what is going to happen. However, just consider that people who oppose fracking have recently been described by Tory politicians as 'extremists.' I will say no more.

Maria von Maltzan - a German resistance heroine, by Leslie Wilson



Maria and Hans



In 1943, Maria von Maltzan, a German aristocrat, took Hans Hirschel, her Jewish lover into her Berlin apartment to hide him from the Nazis. It was the time when the last Jews were supposed to be 'cleansed' out of Berlin. Since Hans had ingeniously faked his own suicide, he was registered as dead, and for a long while, no suspicion fell on Maria; but one day a neighbour handed her a yellow card, which she said a gentleman who'd come calling for her had dropped. It said: Jews are living at Maltzan's.

Hans had brought a sofa with a hollow base with him, when he came to her,  and when she was out during the daytime (she was a veterinary surgeon) Hans hid in there, with a bottle of liquid codeine to keep his troublesome chronic cough at bay. Maria had thoughtfully drilled breathiGng holes in the base.

(That makes me think of hamsters or mice in a box, which I realise now is why Raf, in Saving Rafael, accuses Jenny and her mother of keeping him like a little animal in a cage. I didn't think about that when I was writing it, though.)

Now she went back to her apartment, and told Hans to get into the sofa base, because the Gestapo were coming. Two men duly arrived at half past two and ransacked the apartment for three and a half hours. While they did this, she threw a ball for her two dogs, and when the Gestapo asked her if she could stop because it was getting on their nerves, she said, calmly, that her dogs were missing their walk because of the search and had to have some exercise.

She could get away with this because she was an aristocrat, and her father had been a high-ranking Army officer, and his portrait was watching them intimidatingly from the wall.

Then they demanded that she open the sofa-bed, which was made of heavy mahogany. She said it was stuck; she had bought it four weeks ago and had tried to open it several time.  'If you don't believe me,' she added, while the Gestapo men heaved and grunted in their heavy uniforms, 'you can get your pop-guns out and shoot holes in it - but if you do that, I insist that you give me a coupon for new upholstery material and that you pay for the repairs. And I want that in writing now.'

The Gestapo men decided this was too much for them to handle, and they left. When Maria let Hans out, he was white as chalk and drenched with sweat.




Maria in her youth

 The Gestapo didn't give up, though; they hung around in the courtyard at night, listening for sounds from the apartment. So Maria took Hans to a new, temporary, hiding place and warned the other Jews who came to her home to stay away. Then, one cold night, she poured water on the narrow tiled alleys that led to the courtyard, and then stretched thin wires across the alleys too. Of course, the Gestapo tripped over the wires and then went skidding across the ice. Maria called the police and told them she had burglars; she also called the butcher from over the way, who arrived brandishing his axe. She wrote, in her memoir: 'So now I had everything I wanted. The Gestapo in the courtyard were faced by me, the police, and the axe-wielding butcher. I pretended to be hysterical with fear.' The Gestapo stopped visiting the courtyard at night.

Maria was a Silesian countess, so a countrywoman of my mother's. When the First World War broke out, she and her many brothers and sisters, infected by jingoistic frenzy, tried to burn their French governess - luckily they were found out and the governess rescued. As a child, she also threatened to throw the ex-King of Saxony into a lake, when she'd taken him to see some nesting birds and he wanted to disturb them: 'Unfortunately, I shall have to drown Your Majesty.'

When she was a veterinary student in Breslau (now Wrocław), she was short of money (of course) and the family jeweller paid her to wear his stock of pearls. He said she had just the right kind of skin to help them keep their lustre. She wore these valuable strings under her blouse every day, and nobody ever noticed. 'Nice easy money,' she said.

Later, she became a fervent anti-Nazi and helper of Jews. She was involved with the Swedish Church in Berlin (the organisation who I used to fictionally help Raf and Jenny out of Germany). I don't have room here to go into all her exploits, but she also helped animals escape conscription by giving them drugs that made them temporarily ill. Her view was that the dogs and horses hadn't consented to fight for Hitler, so why should she help force them to?



Maria in later life

 Her autobiography, Schlage die Trommel und Fürchte Dich Nicht (Beat the Drum and Fear Not - which is unfortunately not available in English - is an amazing read, and as it unfolded, I did begin to wonder what this woman was on? She seemed utterly tireless as well as staggeringly courageous. But then she did let out that she had become addicted to amphetamines, which, as a vet, she found it quite easy to get hold of. After the end of the war, Maria was prosecuted, had her licence to practise withdrawn, and taken into a brutal withdrawal centre, run by people who appeared to have got their training in concentration camps. The court didn't appear to care about her heroism, or even consider the stresses she had been under. Sadly, though she married Hans, the marriage didn't last. They remained good friends, though.

She finished her life in the Berlin area of Kreuzberg - where her pet monkey enlivened the place by periodically getting out of the flat and calling on the neighbours. The animal was very well-behaved, they told her. She liked being surrounded by punks and 'alternative' young people, and when she walked her dogs in the evenings, she relished the sight of the Turks who made the area colourful and lively - and the fact that they got on well with their German neighbours. Her parting comment on her life was: 'I wasn't bored for a moment.'



A plaque on the house Maria lived in during the Nazi period, commemorating her resistance work



 I have discovered that there is a chapter about her in a book called: Women Heroes of World War II:  by Kathryn Attwood, published last year. Part of her story is also told in Leonard Gross's book: The Last Jews in Berlin. The quotes from her memoir were translated by me.  The title Schlage die Trommel und Fürchte Dich Nicht is taken from the opening line of a poem by the German Jewish Heinrich Heine.