Newton Age of Assassins

A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29046-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 1427 Seiten

These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did. The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American 'robber baron'. Taking in Malcolm X and Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol, Charles Manson and Emma Goldman, Tsars, Presidents, and pop stars, Age of Assassins traces the process that turned thought into action and murder into an icon. In tackling the history of political violence, the book is unique in its range and attention to detail, summoning up an age of assassination that is far from over.

Michael Newton is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children and of a book on Kind Hearts and Coronets for the BFI Film Classics Series. He has also edited Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent (Penguin Classics), Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (Oxford World Classics) and The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories. He has taught at UCL, Central St Martin's College of Art, and Princeton University; he works at the University of Leiden. He has written articles and reviews for the Guardian, TLS, THES and London Review of Books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Newton, Michael

Leseproben

A Justifiable Killing
And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? ROMANS, 3: 8 He begged Nina not to go. Couldn’t she postpone for just a short while her holiday with their children? But then what reasons could Stauffenberg give her? There were none. So Nina bought her train tickets for Lautlingen, and left on 18 July 1944.1 The next night, perhaps his last night, he tried to ring her, but the lines were down; there had been bombs dropped on Ebingen. He didn’t know if he would ever speak to her again. In the morning, Schweizer came in his car to pick up Stauffenberg and his brother. In an early morning fog, they met Werner von Haeften at Rangsdorf airfield. The brothers parted. And so, around eight o’clock, Haeften and Stauffenberg flew out of Berlin, with a bomb concealed in a briefcase. In July 1944 Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was in his late thirties, the epitome of the handsome and courageous German military man. Indeed he had, some twelve years earlier, twice served literally as a model for the German soldier, posing for a sculptor’s SA monument and for another heroic statue of a German pioneer to adorn the bridge across the Elbe at Magdeburg. Stauffenberg represented all that the Nazis were fighting for, the apotheosis of Teutonic manhood. There was the enchantedly privileged childhood: the velvet suits and long pre-pubescent ringlets; the fearless skiing with his older twin brothers, Berthold and Alexander; the summer house at Lautlingen; the little cart for the brothers led by their very own donkey; the music lessons; the harvests; the unbearable excitement of reading Hölderlin.2 And then, the long trauma of the Great War, his cousin dying at Verdun, the visits of wounded heroes from the Western Front. Claus too had been a twin – but his little brother, Konrad, had died a day after their birth. He was a soldier, scholar, horseman. He played the cello feelingly; read Homer in Greek; learnt Russian; became fluent in English; was charming, frank, punctiliously careless in conversation: in short, a Swabian aristocrat. With such a background, it may not be surprising that Stauffenberg should have been drawn at first to the National Socialists, sharing as he did their sense of a heroic Germany and feeling, too, the wounding indignities of Versailles. In this he resembled many who would later become prominent in the resistance against Hitler; for countless Germans in the early 1930s, Nazism meant the repudiation of Versailles and a return to stability and community after what they perceived as the democratic chaos of the Weimar years.3 Yet there was always something in the Stauffenbergs that drew back from the abyss of total commitment to Nazism.4 There were, for instance, the snobberies of his caste; the Jewish friends; the exemplary influence of Catholicism; even the mystical Germanism of Stefan George that so enthralled the three brothers, longing to share in the old poet’s Reich des Geistes (kingdom of the spirit).5 Significantly for Stauffenberg’s later direction, George never gave his blessing to the Nazi regime, deeming its vulgarities an inadequate embodiment of the true Germany of which he had dreamed.6 Once war had broken out, Stauffenberg considered Germany’s victory the most important thing; no move could be made against the Nazis while the war was yet to be won.7 However, by the early 1940s, he was disillusioned with the Nazi Party, and long perturbed by their anti-Semitic measures. It was not just the defeats on the Eastern Front but the massacres and atrocities committed against the civilian population there that finally pushed Stauffenberg into the fold of the resistance.8 Such evil had to be stopped. With his soldier’s pragmatism Stauffenberg was unlikely to join in passively with the subtleties of ‘inner emigration’. He would simply do something about it. He would kill Hitler.9 He was an unlikely assassin. His military code of honour meant that he could not disguise from himself the fact that assassination meant treason; only a few days before the attempt, he declared that if he undertook the killing he would go down in German history as a traitor; but if he didn’t kill Hitler, he would be a traitor to his conscience.10 Either way, the notion of duplicity clung to the deed. After all, Germany was a nation at war; for that reason, back in the winter of 1941, he had refused an offer to join the resistance.11 Aside from such moral concerns, there were practical problems in claiming the role of assassin. During service in North Africa Stauffenberg had suffered terrible injuries from a bomb blast, losing his right hand, two fingers from his left hand, his right eye, a kneecap, and enduring other head injuries. Despite these handicaps, Stauffenberg enviously longed to be the one to act. By the time the German resistance came together for one last attempt on Hitler’s life, in many respects it was already too late.12 On 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg acted out of a stoic despair. The killing was bound to be useless: the Allies were uninterested in German internal resistance, and their war aims (unconditional surrender) were such that they were bound to smear the conspirators with the same stab-in-the-back myth that had blemished the image of the 1920s Weimar government. Even succeeding in killing Hitler might not solve the problem of the worst kind of Nazi rule, and the best possible result for the conspirators would be to hasten defeat and so bring disaster to Germany. Yet either they acted and incurred national shame; or they did not act and incurred national shame. Standing against Hitler was already to endure, or be comforted by, a unique kind of loneliness; Stauffenberg had accepted long ago the isolation of moral refusal. When Stauffenberg walked into the Wolf’s Lair, he was already certain that the outcome of his actions, if he succeeded or failed, would gain the approval of very few. It would have to be a leap of faith, choosing dishonour to save honour. Given the situation in Nazi Germany, treachery had become true patriotism.13 Their crime would be an act of expiation for their nation’s greater crimes.14 Events would realise their foreboding: the plotters would indeed be misunderstood. As might be expected, the immediate reaction to the attempt would be horror at the betrayal of the Führer. Yet this hostile response to the assassins did not vanish with the end of the fighting. Stauffenberg’s attempt triggered bitter post-war debates as to whether the conspiracy exemplified heroism or treason. Even after the war many, including churchmen such as Bishop Wurm and Cardinal Faulhaber, condemned the conspirators as traitors.15 To most people assassination was still just disloyalty. When Stauffenberg returned to Germany from North Africa, he desired to join the resistance against Hitler. He could have had a number of conspiracies to choose among; there were several interconnected but distinct resistance groups, from those working with Ernst von Weizsäcker and the Auswärtiges Amt, to Helmuth James von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle, or the Christian resistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Freiburg Circle, the Stuttgart Circle joined around the industrialist Robert Bosch, or a resistance cell working within German military intelligence (the Abwehr) overseen by the wily Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. From among the options, Stauffenberg joined those led by General Ludwig Beck and Carl Goerdeler; the young soldier’s energy meant that he was soon in a position of authority within this group. In pressing so strongly for assassination, Stauffenberg clashed with Goerdeler, who for a long time had disdained any thought of such a move.16 Goerdeler is an equivocal hero, a man suspicious of democracy, a nationalist and a conservative who in the 1930s had worked, with more or less enthusiasm, for the Nazis. He disliked assassination, and retained for a long time the implausible belief that Hitler might be persuaded to resign for the sake of the country.17 Despite his antipathy to the deed, by the summer of 1943, Goerdeler, Beck, Fellgiebel and others among the resistance were persuaded as to the necessity of a coup.18 While Goerdeler might have felt that tyrannicide was a dubious tactic, others in the wider movement plainly disagreed. The attempt to kill the Führer in the summer of 1944 was by no means the first such endeavour. Yet Hitler had proved provokingly lucky in avoiding death. Several attempts before the war had all ended in failure and retribution. On 9 November 1938 in Munich, during an SA parade commemorating the failed 1923 Putsch, a Swiss student named Maurice Bavaud muffed an attempt on Hitler’s life. The night before Bavaud’s attempt a cabinetmaker named Georg Elser had planted a bomb at the beer hall where Hitler would address the crowd. But Hitler’s speech was briefer than usual, and the bomb exploded after he had left the building, killing a few Nazis in the process. Both Bavaud and Elser were caught, tried and killed (in Elser’s case right at the end of the war in Dachau).19 Thwarted plans and botched attempts proliferated. With shades of Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (1939), the British military...