4

Calendars, Defeat, and the End of Time

Many of the longer units of time sanctioned by tradition were questioned or abandoned during the years 1939–45. It was clear that the world had changed. Almost everything had become unpredictable, security was nowhere to be found. In the journal he kept throughout the war, Harold Nicolson wrote in early June 1940: “How strange it is to have no knowledge of what is about to befall us. In ordinary times one seldom thinks how odd it is to have no knowledge of what may happen even within the next hour, but now the consciousness of this ignorance becomes acute. I see the future only in terms of color”:24

The calendar—the Gregorian calendar—was the normal device in Europe and America for counting years ever since the Renaissance. But accelerating events required new ways for measuring the passage of time. Older time schemes and calendars were inadequate. During the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill adopted a new shorthand calendar for events. For example, in his notation “Z + 18,” “Z” meant the beginning of the war—September 12, 1939—plus eighteen months. It was a convenient method for calculating production for defense, and the dates when products and supplies were planned to come on stream. Churchill often called the future after the war “the after-time.”25

Earlier, in the 1920s and 30s, new methods of counting years suited the new conceptions of time and ideology. In Fascist Italy, all official pronouncements carried a date in Roman numerals indicating years elapsed since 1922 when the Fascist party seized power. 1922 was counted as “Anno 0.” Only when Mussolini resigned—in “Anno XXI”—did official dates in Italy return to the old system, 1943.

The German “Third Reich” began in 1933, and some organizations in Germany dated events from that year. The Third Reich was also the “Thousand Year Reich”; time was adapted to ideology that had its own calendar, benchmark dates, and luxuriant mythology. The millennial claims of National Socialism went back to the Middle Ages. In Oswald Spengler’s description the Third Reich “was the Germanic ideal, an eternal tomorrow to which all great men from Joachim de Floris to Nietzsche tied their lives—arrows of yearning for the other side of the river, as Zarathustra says.”26

Japan adopted a special calendar during the war. In the year 1940, the Japanese wartime calendar celebrated the 2,600th anniversary of the beginning of Japan’s history. This mythological calendar dated the imperial lineage back to the Sun Goddess, Amnaterasu Omikama. According to the Japanese national anthem “Kimigayo,”

The Emperor’s reign will last

For a thousand then eight thousand generations

Until pebbles become mighty rocks

With moss.27

William Owens, author of a fine book about the liberation of the Philippines Eye-deep in Hell, criticized the widespread American view that the Japanese were “inscrutable” Orientals: “The few who had read the Tanaka Memorial—with its boast that the invasion of Manchuria was the beginning of a hundred years’ religious war with the aim of bringing the eight corners of the earth under one roof, with the emperor-god at the roof pole—ignored or refused to believe what they read.”28

In the USSR the Second World War, called “The Great Patriotic War,” was said to begin on June 22, 1941. The preceding years were supposedly a period of friendship treaties and peace. But the 1930s were far from a period of “peace” in the USSR. Roy Medvedev quoted a writer: “In the thirties we felt as if we were at war with the entire old world . . . While the conflict was on, a conflict to the death, it was necessary to maintain iron discipline no matter what. That’s always how it is in a war.”29 An international consensus on the importance of specific dates rarely exists. Time, its benchmarks and inflection points, is measured differently in different places. In a study of time in history, the philosopher Raymond Aron concluded that time is, above all, the expression of human nature.30

Few countries during the years 1939–45 did not experience military defeat. Millions of Europeans and Asians fell under the occupation of foreign regimes that promoted their national versions of history, and had their own calendars to measure it. Conquest was enforced with arms, and required adaptation for survival. People often worked side by side with others who lived according to entirely different concepts of time and different calendars.

The violent invasions and occupations of 1939–41 seemed to be outside comparable events and outside any calendar. The question arose with increasing urgency: in what kind of world were they living?

The historian Marc Bloch reacted to the defeat of France in 1940:

The privations resulting from . . . defeat have had upon Europe the repercussions of a Time Machine in reverse. We have been plunged suddenly into a way of life which, only quite recently, we thought had disappeared forever. I am writing these lines in my house in the country . . . We have gone back thirty or forty years! It was as though the two opposed forces belonged, each of them, to an entirely different period of history. We interpreted war in terms of the spear (assagai) versus the rifle, made familiar to us by long years of colonial expansion. But this time it was we who were cast in the role of the savage!31

Bloch, a professor, author of several books on the Middle Ages and editor of the distinguished Annales Historiques, had fled Nazi-occupied Paris. He wrote these words in 1942, and knew nothing of the camps. He was killed by Germans in 1943.

Captives tried to improvise their own personal calendars for the longer periods. In a camp in the Soviet Union, Elinor Lipper found a solution with a simple matchbox: she calculated that five years were sixty months, or sixty matches. Each month she removed a match from the box. One day, however, she threw away her last match—it was 1942—and nothing happened. She had become an “overtimer.” That was all.32

A partial substitute for a calendar was the passing seasons. Celebrations of Christmas produced a large number of writings by Christians; Christmas commemorated the passage of one more year. The Norwegian poet Arnulf Overland, sent to Sachsenhausen, fell silent for most of the war, but mustered enough energy to write a poem each Christmas, reading it aloud to his assembled compatriots on Christmas Eve.33 For Jewish prisoners the secret observation of holidays had particularly great significance.34

Defeat became a common experience that was shared by many, either earlier or later in the war. Writers who were captives, or in occupied countries, were often struck by the sense of regression to a more primitive state. This required a new “calendar” to date the present, a new concept of time and history. As the first ghettoes were formed, many thought of the Middle Ages. In his book The Pianist, Władysław Szpilman described reactions in late November 1939 to the first barricades and barbed wire of what would become the Warsaw ghetto, and the demand that Jews wear armbands: “Not in our most secret thoughts would we ever have suspected that such a thing could happen . . . So we were to be branded publicly as outcasts. Several centuries of humanitarian progress were to be cancelled out, and we were back in the Middle Ages.”35

With increasing frequency writers came to believe that the Germans’ “New Europe” was an abrupt regression in time and history. It was technologically advanced and primitive at the same time. Andre Malraux also believed he was living in a period similar to the Middle Ages; in his last narrative, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, he describes how he found himself imprisoned in a camp near the Cathedral at Chartres, its stained glass windows and ancient statues looming over the ragged captives. “In the earliest days of the war, as soon as his uniform had blotted out a man’s profession, I began to see these Gothic faces. And what now emerges from the wild crowd that can no longer shave is not the penal settlement, but the Middle Ages . . . Perhaps because the Middle Ages undertook to represent men, and we are not in the sort of place that yields gods.”36

Malraux imagined that the present, and France under occupation, were transported back in time when the statues of Chartres Cathedral were first created. The physiognomies of living, captive Frenchmen were the same faces he saw on the sculptures.

In Germany, Eugen Kogon, author of The Theory and Practice of Hell, noted “the predilection of the National Socialists and the SS for early Teutonic history, reenacted in castles and cathedrals to torchlight by night.” He thought the SS were basically illiterate; their psychology “differs little from that of the Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome, the followers of Mohammed’s immediate successors, the Mongol shock troops of Genghis Khan, the dervishes of Mahdi . . . Only in the matter of social origins did the S.S. bring a modern note into the picture.”37

Many who were imprisoned in the USSR also thought they were living in a version of the Middle Ages. One writer, arrested by the NKVD in Eastern Poland after the Soviet invasion of September 17, 1939, thought he was transported back in time. “While in jail, I frequently asked myself whether my entire life was not merely a dream, whereas in reality we dwelt in the Middle Ages except with modern techniques of torture.” At about the same time, the writer Alexander Wat described the Zamarstynow Prison in Lvov: “In this prison we always had a feeling of a return to the Middle Ages: the way we were treated, the prison itself. This is how medieval prisons, mental asylums or leprosaria must have looked.”38

The Russian writer Vasili Grossman thought of the Mongols. The only valid concept of history, he wrote, was “the law of the conservation of violence.” “Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It will not disappear and will not diminish but will only be transformed. It once took the form of slavery. Then of the Mongol invasion. It moves from continent to continent, and sometimes it takes a class form and then is transformed into a racial form.”39

In Asia the captive John Coast evoked an earlier past as he worked on the Burmese railroad: “The two thousand pre-dynastic slaves of Wan Po built the entire railroad in 17 days!” The sense of reverting to an ancient past was widespread. Also working on the Burmese railway, Ray Parkin wrote: “It is humid and we are hurling rocks down the hillside. Scraping them out with our hands, crowbars, picks and shovels. We strain on great ropes, for all the world like the slave pyramid-builders of Egypt.”40

They seemed to be plunged into the past and chaos. The whole sweep of time had no distinguishing benchmarks. The “pack of cards” series of bridges at Hintok collapsed three times before they were finally made to stand in September 1943—and they were never strong enough to support rail traffic. The bridges required no European engineering (pace Pierre Boule), and the immense project had no metal parts except wire binding and staples. The labor of the prisoners was lost in waste, chaos, and a mounting crescendo of violence.

The poet Yannis Ritsos rejected any concept of linear time, and in a poem written under occupation in Greece in 1942, he noted the date simply as “Before Man.”41 These writers were not indulging in intellectual exercises; their beliefs about present and past grew out of their concrete experiences. Defeat and surrender, brought an acceptance of the end of historical time as they had known it.

Tadeusz Borowski was well-read in history and Western literature, and the experience of captivity led him to question them in their entirety:

We are laying the foundation for some new monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples, and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of free men against slaves! . . . It is we who pulled the oars in galleys and dragged wooden ploughs, while they wrote dialogues and dramas . . . We were filthy and died real deaths. They were ‘aesthetic’ and carried on subtle debates.42

This was the experience of “slavery” that Camus and Solzhenitsyn believed had become the main characteristic of the twentieth century. Borowski’s reaction was outrage. He thought the so-called “classical” traditions, complacently accepted and taught before the war, were hollow. A forced laborer like Borowski was not predisposed to think the Roman patrician, or slave-owning citizen, was a model to be followed. Borowski adopted the plural pronoun “we” for all slaves, in the present and past, as a gesture of solidarity.

Few wartime writers—Weichert, Kogon, Primo Levi, or Borowski—thought the contemporary world owed a common debt to Rome or “stood on its shoulders.” The Oxford historian Ronald Syme reinterpreted Rome on the eve of the war in his most famous book, The Roman Revolution, and instead of focusing on the ideals or constitutional structure of the empire, Syme stressed the lust of the emperors for power and money, comparing them to the European dictators of the 1930s.

The most systematic attack on the Latin and Greek classics, and the historians who used them as models for an idealized past, was probably made by Simone Weil. She fled from France to England in the early years of the war, and died there in 1943. Weil had visited Germany in the 1930s; she observed how Rome served as a model for National Socialism and an imperial Germany. She sharply criticized the stereotyped role of Rome as a model in her own French culture. As a scholar she knew the Roman historians well, and had a modern awareness of propaganda. She distrusted most Roman historians as insincere, servile, venal, directly supported by imperial patrons. Ennius, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Livy, even Tacitus “wrote always with political bias and, whatever their policy, it was always imperial. They have had their deserts.” Neither history nor literature were neutral accumulations of documents; they were characterized, rather, by the destruction of documents and texts, and the creation of new ones. “Documents”—she wrote in The Need for Roots—“originate with the conquerors.”43

Simone Weil had a special interest in the destroyed civilizations of the past. She thought free Europe was about to be similarly destroyed. “No compassion,” she wrote, “is felt for things that have been utterly destroyed. Who is there who accords any to Jericho, Gaza, Tyre, Sidon; to Carthage, Numantia, Sicily under the Greeks, or Peru before the time of Columbus? . . . We know nothing about them because they have disappeared. No attention is paid to the defeated. They disappear. They become naught.”

Weil’s 1939–40 essay “The Great Beast” was a study of the imperial and predatory state. Her most moving pages are devoted to these destroyed civilizations. Her description of Carthage—“a civilization that must have been at least as brilliant as the Latin”—is well-informed, vivid, the deportation and enslavement of the city’s inhabitants described from the Carthaginian point of view. After deputies pleaded with the Romans against deportation, “the scene that followed, as related by Appian, is tragic on a Shakespearian level and resembles a far more atrocious version of Hacha’s visit to Hitler.” Hacha, President of Czechoslovakia in 1938–39, had been forced to surrender to Germany.

Weil analyzed slavery as an institution that derived from war. In a brilliant essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” she showed how armed force transformed human beings, turning both those who use it and those who submit to it into objects or things. As for her native France, defeated as completely as Carthage, she thought it would suffer a similar fate and disappear from the map.

Both Simone Weil and Borowski identified with the victims of Rome, not with Rome itself. The shift was significant. It meant defeat and the end of meaningful history, of time. Weil knew that the more powerful victors, whether Germany or Rome, wrote the history of the nations they defeated. It always happened that way. The written records of the defeated would effectively vanish. No longer would they have their own history, in a version written by themselves. Others would write it in a condescending, jeering manner, and they would become “naught.” History was not cumulative. A new “history” of lies and repression would supplant the old.

In defeat, the linear narrative for one nation after another broke down. Old historical sequences and tenets of belief collapsed, becoming meaningless. All the countries at war during the period 1939–45 experienced defeat, without exception. This would be obscured only later, with the arrival of postwar national pride. American and British armies suffered defeats too numerous to list. There were error-filled periods of “lethargy, myopia, order, counter-order and disorder,” of bad generalship and defeatism.44

A writer described the attempt to pick up soldiers after the tragic failure of the Allies—Canadian, American, British—at Dieppe in August 1942:

The men we took aboard Garth looked as if they had learned some terrible lesson that was still too vivid to them to express it clearly either to themselves or anyone else; but that was because they had learned it so thoroughly. “Never glad, confident morning again”; many were badly wounded, all were suffering from shock and exhaustion. They had the gray, lifeless faces of men whose vitality had been drained out of them; each could have modeled a death mask. They were bitter and resentful at having been flung into a battle far more horrible than anything for which they had been prepared, and as they came aboard one heard the oaths and blasphemies, the cursings and revilings, with which men speak of leaders by whom they feel that they have been betrayed and deceived. I thought that this is what a beaten army looks like.45

The defeat seemed irreversible, and had a strong effect on subsequent Allied strategy. The description is a warning, as if to say: This is what defeat is. This is the end of illusions, of rhetorical self-deception. A whole army has been decisively defeated. “Beaten.” A coda.

One of the worst periods for the Allies was when Rommel, repeatedly dominating the battlefield, was poised to enter Cairo. British headquarters burned official papers during what was ironically known as “Ash Wednesday.” Mussolini had prepared for a grand entry into the Egyptian capital; he flew a white stallion in a transport plane to the North African coast, intending to ride it into the city.46

In his novel Stalingrad, Theodore Plievier described the German Army in prehistorical terms. Their technology was modern, but the contemporary events in which it was used could have been occurring thousands of years ago:

This thing in the night was not some beast pursued by primitive man, not some mammoth stung by stone axes and mad with pain; it was a DaimlerBenz truck powered by a ninety-horsepower diesel engine, with three axles, front- and rear-wheel drive. Howling it fled through the night, sagged into holes, bounced over bumps. All this took place not three hundred thousand years before our era, but on the night of January 12, 1943.47

Technology is consigned to unimportance and prehistory. The traditional calendar, with its myths and notions of progress, its accumulation of linear time—what has been called “time’s arrow”48—is mocked and held up to ridicule.

One of the finest evocations of defeat and the end of time is by the Japanese novelist Yoshida Mitsuru. If most nations experienced defeat at one time or another between 1939 and 1945, few expressed it as well as Yoshida, author of Requiem for the Battleship Yamato. The Yamato had the distinction of being the largest battleship in the world. Its cannons were capable of hurling a shell thirty statute miles, further than any other existing ship.

During the Battle of Okinawa in April 1945, the Yamato was struck by torpedoes from American aircraft. It listed to one side, shaken by a series of explosions. The author, on the battleship, was thrown into the water.

Around me it becomes quieter and quieter.

Though there is no letup in the sounds of destruction hastening the end of the fighting, I am oblivious; only a gentle silence touches my ears.

Everything I see shines with a white light. I gaze in wonder, as if my eyes were seeing things for the first time.

Have my eyes become crystal clear to their very depths?

Space comes to a stop before me; time freezes around me.

I am I and yet not I.

Barely a few instants, this interval.

Again, the voice from inside my chest presses me, virtually out loud.

“You, I pity you. Finally given in to death?”

The voice, with a derisive laugh: “You fool. Judging yourself even as you are being engulfed in the stench of death! Still deceiving yourself even at this late hour?”

“Leave me alone. Don’t take this last brief moment of ease too from me.

I’m sinking: where am I going?”

“Please kill me. Rescue me from this fathomless terror.”

“Kill me.”49

Under the force of shock, time comes to a complete stop. The speaker sheds his identity, he is no longer “I.” The defeat is total, the name, the individual, time, history, calendars—time anywhere—all reference points are abandoned and lost.