Volume 25, Number 12 · July 20, 1978
Witnesses to Calamity
By Henry Gifford
Dans le carnaval de I'histoire: mémoires Carnival in the spring of 1979)
by Léonide Pliouchtch, translated by Simone Vincent
Editions du Seuil (Paris), 448 pp., 59F (to be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as History's
The Challenge of the Spirit
by Boris Shragin, translated by P.S. Falla
Knopf, 262 pp., $10.00
Notes of a Non-Conspirator
by Efim Etkind, translated by Peter France
Oxford University Press, 265 pp., $10.00
In 1942 Lionel Trilling wrote an essay for The Nation called 'Tacitus Now,' in which he remarked that 'our political education of the last decades fits us to understand the historian of imperial Rome.' By 'us' he meant, of course, Americans, whose tradition had excluded the atrocious things that Tacitus spoke of as a recent witness—'dictatorship and repression, spies and political informers, blood purges and treacherous dissension.' Trilling had in mind the events that shook the Soviet Union during the 1930s; and equally, no doubt, the Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany, the activities of the Gestapo, the attrition of the Jews. But, as Boris Shragin explains in the note 'To the Western Reader' which introduces his book, the spiritual crisis of Germany is no longer actual and indefinitely continuing like that of Russia. The German people, in the shock of defeat, were ready to acknowledge their guilt, and for many of them that chapter is now closed.
Review, 3602 words
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