Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the “epidemic” of depression, which began in the seventeeth century and has continued, unabated, to the present day.

We do not have to rely on psychological inference to draw a link between Calvinism and depression. There is one clear marker for depression—suicide—and suicide rates have been recorded, with varying degrees of diligence, for centuries. In his classic study, [Émile] Durkheim found that Protestants in the nineteenth century—not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion—were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late sixteenth century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold. Some sort of general breakdown of social mores cannot be invoked as an explanation, since homicides fell as suicides rose.

So if we are looking for a common source of depression on the one hand, and the suppression of festivities on the other, it is not hard to find. Urbanization and the rise of a competitive, market-based economy favored a more anxious and isolated sort of person—potentially both prone to depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalizing depression as a stage in the quest for salvation. At the level of “deep, underlying psychological change,” both depression and the destruction of festivities could be described as seemingly inevitable consequences of the broad process known as modernization. But could there also be a more straightforward link, a way in which the death of carnival contributed directly to the epidemic of depression?

It may be that in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. [Robert] Burton suggested many cures for melancholy—study and exercise, for example—but he returned again and again to the same prescription: “Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company … a cup of good drink now and then, hear musick, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted; merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth.” He acknowledged the ongoing attack on “Dancing, Singing, Masking, Mumming, Stage-plays” by “some severe Gatos,” referring to the Calvinists, but heartily endorsed the traditional forms of festivity: “Let them freely feast, sing and dance, have their Puppet-plays, Hobby-horses, Tabers, Crowds, Bagpipes, &c, play at Ball, and Barley-breaks, and what sports and recreations they like best.” In his ideal world, “none shall be over-tired, but have their set times of recreations and holidays, to indulge their humour, feasts and merry meetings …” His views accorded with treatments of melancholy already in use in the sixteenth century. While the disruptively “mad” were confined and cruelly treated, melancholics were, at least in theory, to be “refreshed & comforted” and “gladded with instruments of musick.”

As ninety-six-year-old Harry Bernstein, author of the new book The Invisible Wall, shows, it’s never too late to write that book.

“I didn’t know what the heck to do with myself. … You know when you get into your nineties like I am, there’s nowhere else to think except the past. There’s no future to think about. There’s very little present,” says Bernstein, who gets around his New Jersey house slowly, with the aid of a cane, and is the sole survivor in his family.

“So you think of the past, particularly at nighttime when you’re lying in bed. And it all came back. So I began to write, and I was occupied, and it was really the best therapy I could have had.”

Bernstein first sent the finished manuscript to New York publishers but, having no luck, he sent it to the London office of Random House. There the book sat for about a year until it came across the desk of editor Kate Elton, who described it as “unputdownable.”

“I think he’s a most fantastic writer,” Elton said. “He creates the characters of his family so vividly and tells such a moving story.”

The book’s title refers to the barrier that divides Bernstein’s side of the street—the Jewish side—from the Christian side in his hometown of Stockport, near Manchester, a separation he likens to two enemy camps that have an uneasy truce. About the only thing that united the two sides of the street was poverty, with most people working in the mills on salaries that only allowed them to get by week to week.

“We understood we were not to involve ourselves with them, and they likewise with us. The Jewish boys and girls had their games on their side. They [the Christians] played their games on their side. It was two separate worlds,” Bernstein says.

Writing a biography of William Shakespeare would seem to be an exercise in futility, not least because, aside from the plays and sonnets themselves, there’s very little written record of the Bard himself. His name, spelled in a variety of ways—ranging from “Shakspere” to “Shaxspeare” to “Shackespere”—comes up from time to time in the Elizabethan record, but the documents are often trivial and, at worst, unreliable. But, amidst all the speculation, the question remains: who was he?

To his credit, in writing Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt avoids the controversy surrounding Shakespeare and instead focuses on the plays and sonnets themselves to contruct a biography that paints the Bard as an ordinary man with acute observation skills. And that’s really what makes Shakespeare such a fascinating study: how did an ordinary man, with a rudimentary (by Elizabethan standards) education come to write some of the most beautiful and haunting poetry in the English language?

Will in the World is largely speculative, with Greenblatt imagining—not unreasonably—how Shakespeare might’ve lived his life. The book is several things at once: a love letter to the greatest poet in the English language, an analysis of Shakespeare’s works, and a crash-course on the workings of Elizabethan society. Things get dull at times, especially during the first two chapters—even Greenblatt doesn’t seem particularly interested in Shakespeare’s life prior to his arrival in London, England—but all that’s forgotten when Shakespeare begins writing. Using passages from plays and sonnets, as well as the political and religious strife that swept England during Shakespeare’s lifetime, Greenblatt traces the Bard’s rise in theater (which was a relatively new phenomenon when Shakespeare entered the stage), which climaxed when Hamlet was written—the play by which Shakespeare, after much experimentation, mastered the soliloquy.

Greenblatt’s tone, considering his obvious knowledge of Shakespeare’s works, is surprisingly restrained—he’s in awe of what Shakespeare managed to accomplish, but he doesn’t come off as a groupie seeking only to heap praise on his literary hero. Instead, Shakespeare comes off, not as a genius, but as an everyday man who, like all artists, took bits and pieces of his own life experiences to shape his plays. And therein lies Shakespeare’s true genius: the man who mastered the English language, who invented new words, and forever changed theater was sly, observant, and witty—but perfectly ordinary.

(Be sure to check out J.S. Peyton’s post on Will in the World.)

(What follows is the third part of my series on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Parts one and two can be found here and here, respectively.)

Mein Kampf is quite possibly the scariest book I’ve ever read. It’s giving me nightmares.

In reading the book, it’s easy to see why it was dismissed upon publication in the mid-twenties: aside from the unintelligible self-aggrandizing, Hitler’s agenda was so radical that it’s absurd. But it’s this absurdity, coupled with historical perspective, that makes the author and his book so chilling. Hitler didn’t make up his policies as he went along; as Mein Kampf shows, in exhaustively muddled detail, everything about them was premeditated. It’s frightening, especially in our age, to imagine someone with Hitler’s arrogance and bigotry rising in politics, and the fact that it actually happened in a learned, cultured nation like Germany makes Mein Kampf more important: genocide and brutal dictatorship isn’t something reserved for poor nations. Indeed, as history shows, even the most horrifying state brutality can arise out of democracy.

Chapter III: Political Reflections Arising Out of My Sojourn in Vienna

Up to now, Mein Kampf has been tolerable, despite Hitler’s venomous racism, but chapter three really tested my endurance. In sixty pages of unbroken text, tangled prose, and condescending tones, Hitler essentially gives readers a mind-numbing lesson in history and political theory as he sees it. There’s just no pleasing him: he hates everyone—from “cowardly” politicians to stupid intellectuals and writers to Slavs, Jews (of course), communists, German pacifists, and the bourgeoisie—and everything—from Parliament to “Western” democracy (which he believes to be the forerunner of Marxism, which, in his eyes, is strictly a Jewish phenomenon) to the Pan-German movement to the press. I could go on, but suffice it to say that he hates anyone who doesn’t agree with his twisted idealism.

And it all comes down to nationalism: the only solution to fixing a broken political system is to unite Germany and Austria under a single epoch and to remind Germans that, despite the workings of sly Marxist—which is to say, Jewish—propaganda and political ineptitude, they’re intelligent people whom Fate as irrationally decided to place at the bottom of the barrel. All they need is someone with fully-realized ideals and an unshakable outlook to wake them from a long, national nightmare. If Fate has deemed that Jews, Slavs, and communists should be determining Germany’s place in the world, that’s because Germans, blinded by abstract concepts like “democracy,” “international socialism,” and “pacifism,” have refused to stand up for themselves and assert their own dominance.

Yet, out of the wreckage of his prose, one sees more of Hitler’s paranoia. To be sure, his paranoia was simmering in previous chapters, but now it’s palpable: this is a man who, under all the exhortations and bitter anger, is afraid that everyone is working against Germany, keeping her from gaining her rightful place on the international stage. And, given Hitler’s incessant self-congratulatory cleverness, one realizes that, though he seems to be warning Germans of the forces working against them, he’s also railing against those he believes are keeping him from achieving his goals.

Two writers debate the merits of Jane Austen’s novels. It’s nothing you haven’t heard or read before, so there’s the inevitable “yawn” factor, but one paragraph, from the “Loathing Jane” half, made me chuckle.

But those who hate Jane are in good company: as Toby Young admits, Charlotte Brontë thought her depictions of love cold, unconvincing, and lifeless. Brontë acknowledged the “heresy” of her position because she was, as I am, that rare thing: a woman who is irritated by Austen. Mark Twain was also unable to see the point of her: “Why, I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.”

Ouch.

Last spring, while many people were outraged over Günter Grass’s admission that he had served in Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS during World War II, Austrian author Peter Handke was attending former Bosnian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s mock state funeral. What Handke had said at the funeral is debateable, but one thing is clear: Handke was a supporter of Milosevic, saying that, during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Milosevic was “defend[ing] his country’s territory” and that “anyone in his position” would have done as he had done. But the larger, more difficult question is whether or not writers with questionable political leanings should be forgiven or, in Handke’s case, awarded.

As the 1990s began, it seemed as though Handke would soon he capping his career with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Indeed, when his compatriot [Elfriede] Jelinek won her Nobel in 2004, she said that Handke deserved it much more than she did—and she may have been right. The Swedish Academy had cited Jelinek for “her extraordinary linguistic zeal” for revealing “the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.” If that was the standard the Nobel jurors sought, Handke should indeed have been their man. But by 2004, Handke had for more than a decade been involved with Slobodan Milosevic and the breakup of Yugoslavia. Those political engagements were to prove his literary undoing.

[...]

But whatever his literary achievement, nothing can minimize the effect on Handke’s legacy of his connection with Milosevic. In commenting on Handke and the Heine Prize controversy, Günter Grass remarked: “What I dislike about the current discussion is the double standard, as if you could grant writers the right to err as a special kind of favor. I have a hard time with granting writers a kind of bonus for genius which excuses their partisanship for the worst and most dangerous nonsense.”

Since I’m making my way through Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, I thought this, which looks at the different ways in which power is depicted in William Shakespeare’s plays, was interesting and thought-provoking. (Coincidentally, the essay is by Greenblatt himself.)

There is one other key principle, which will take us back to … Macbeth. Macbeth dreams of killing his guest, King Duncan, and seizing power. He wants the assassination to be swift, decisive, once-and-for-all: mission accomplished. The lure is strong enough, he says, to make him ignore the threat of divine judgment in the afterlife, but still for a fateful moment he holds back:

We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor.

This is, I think, Shakespeare’s central perception of governance, and it stands in the place of any more high-minded ethical object. The actions of those in power have consequences, long-term, inescapable, and impossible to control. “We still have judgement here”—it is not in some imagined other world that your actions will be judged; it is here and now. Judgment in effect means punishment: whatever violent or dishonest things you do will inevitably serve as a lesson for others to do to you. Shakespeare did not think that one’s good actions are necessarily or even usually rewarded, but he seems to have been convinced that one’s wicked actions always return, with interest.

(What follows is the second part of my series on Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Part one can be found here.)

One of the most striking aspects of Mein Kampf is the way in which Hitler continually evokes Fate as a way of explaining not only the plight of the German people, but also his own political rhetoric. When taken into the context of the time it was written—Germany was still suffering economically after the disaster of World War I and Hitler was languishing in prison after a failed attempt to seize power—Hitler’s bleak cynicism becomes almost understandable: he comes off as a man who is so convinced that his nationality is a race of Nietzschean supermen, who believes that Germany should rightfully be the center of world culture, that anything to the contrary is the result of outside forces—whether Fate, Jews, the Habsburg monarchy, or communists—conspiring to keep Germany from claiming the world throne. There’s an unmistakable air of Shakespearean tragedy running throughout these pages, though the tragedy isn’t so much sympathy for Hitler, but rather the German people.

In reading Mein Kampf, it’s not very difficult to see how Germany became so enamored with Hitler: the book is shameless propaganda, with Hitler appealing to nationalism and ethnic pride to frame his arguments. Unsurprisingly, we’re never given evidence for any of Hitler’s claims; the book is hopelessly one-sided, with anger and cynicism so vile that, given Germany’s economic, cultural, and military status after World War I, it’s understandable (though not reasonable) that the population would accept any scapegoat for its fall from grace. After all, Hitler asserts, it’s not Germany’s fault that she can’t rise from the mire of oppression; it’s the Jews, the communists, the French, the dissidents, the Czechs, the bourgeoisie, and the unfathomable stupidity of bumbling, opportunistic politicans seeking only to pacify the country’s enemies. Hitler’s appeals, made on purely emotional grounds, shed some light on his rise to power—by browbeating his readers with racist and political propaganda, he comes off as someone who’s so exasperating that you’d agree with him simply to get him to stop talking. Indeed, Hitler recounts several instances, in chapter two, in which he browbeat co-workers into agreeing with his views—though he credits their submission with his “oratorical skills.”

But Hitler’s eventual downfall would seem to be a foregone conclusion: like William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, his hunger for power is insatiable and obsessive, with Fate dictating ruin as the only possible outcome. Mein Kampf is one of those books that, once you begin reading it, a lot of parallels become apparent: Hitler, in his own way, is giving readers insight not only into how his own political convictions were formed, but how the political atmosphere was during those times.

Chapter II: Years of Suffering and Study in Vienna

Hitler arrived in Vienna, Austria when he was fifteen years old, shortly after his mother’s death. He describes his Vienna years as being the saddest in his life, but adds:

I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight.

It was during this period that my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.

Chapter two is largely devoted to how Hitler developed such a profound hatred for Jews. The ways in which he arrives at his conclusions are ad hominem: he sympathizes with the working class, believing them to be the backbone of German society (after all, the laboring class makes up the vast majority of any society). He then goes on to describe how the Social Democratic Party—whose policy, in his words, was “to raise the level of the working classes”—failed to uphold its own principles: he accuses the Party of “poisoning the popular mind” with propaganda, of ignoring workers’ rights, and of trying to destroy Germany’s economy. But, he writes, “the features that contributed most to estrange me from the Social Democratic movement was its hostile attitude towards the struggle for the conservation of Germanism in Austria [and] its lamentable concotting with the Slav ‘comrades’ …” Then, after devouring countless newspapers devoted to Social Democratic ideals, and after noticing that many of the articles featured authors with Jewish names, he becomes convinced that Jews are behind the Social Democratic movement. He goes on to accuse Jews of numerous evils, from the dissemination of “smutty literature” to the “social phenomenon of prostitution” to exploitation of the working class.

To be sure, all this is very tiresome—and it only gets more and more tiring as the book progresses—but one thing that puzzles me is why he titled the book Mein Kampf. Maybe Ihr Kampf—Your Struggle—would’ve been a more apt title.

Adam’s ready. Dorothy’s ready, too. And now I’m ready: my copy of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, translated by Walter Starkie, came in the mail the other day. I’ll be jumping into the book within a day or two.

I finished Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu earlier today. Thematically, the book—which is a collection of eight short stories—isn’t any different from Clarke’s debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. And it stands nicely on its own; it’s not necessary to read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell before reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu. The stories are a bit darker than Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but Ms. Clarke has lost none of her charm or light-heartedness—stylistically, this collection is a worthy successor to J. R. R. Tolkien. The author does a wonderful job evoking an atmosphere of child-like menace—think Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter without the sickeningly funny horror and violence. (Indeed, the entire book, from the cover to the illustrations to the title pages, resembles a nineteenth-century children’s book.) Her stories—particularly the last two stories, “Antickes and Frets” and “John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner”—read like fairy tales, featuring a cast that includes Mary, Queen of Scots, the Duke of Wellington, Jonathan Strange, and a handful of mischievous fairies. Yes, I liked it, and I’m sure you will, too—it adds new dimensions to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell while serving as a great introduction to Ms. Clarke’s world.

(What follows is the first in a series of posts regarding my reading of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.)

Though the second half of the twentieth century discredited the political theories presented in Mein Kampf and left them to the outer fringes of society, the book’s importance cannot be understated: after all, this is the book that started a world war, a book that, by its very mention, can make people uncomfortable. It’s impossible to approach Mein Kampf without some preconceived ideas of what it contains: with over six million Jews, as well as others whom Hitler deemed “undesirable,” left dead in its wake, the book is rightly the most notorious political tract of the last century, filled with hyperbole, hatred, and anger. Inevitably, the question arises: why read Mein Kampf at all?

I’ve been struggling with this question since starting the book. Obviously, Mein Kampf isn’t a book one reads for enjoyment (and, to be sure, its style—dense, tiresome, and grossly overwritten—as well as its reputation, makes any sort of enjoyment impossible). And though one could make the case that Hitler is giving himself the kind of importance he didn’t deserve when the book was written—he wrote the first half of Mein Kampf while in prison and the second half before entering German politics—the book is more than a narcissist’s wet dream. Here, Hitler lays out his political theories with startling clarity and foresight, revealing himself as a man who literally believed everything he wrote, who announced his intentions for Germany long before he became chancellor. The book was largely ignored prior to World War II, but therein lies its importance: its dismissal carried disastrous and tragic consequences. As Elie Wiesel once wrote, “Not being a professional historian, I take on this essay with fear and trembling. That’s because, although defeated, although dead, this man is frightening.”

Chapter I: In the Home of My Parents

From the first page of Mein Kampf, Hitler makes his intentions quite clear, with the second paragraph amounting to a declaration of war:

People of the same blood should be in the same Reich. The German people have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in one State. When the territory of the Reich embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.

The first chapter of Mein Kampf is largely an examination of Hitler’s youth, but there’s a formula here: he doesn’t offer much in the way of what his childhood was like (though he mentions “juvenile disputes” with his father and says his ”oratorical skills” came from singing in the church choir); instead, self-examination—the hallmark of any autobiography—is used to give insight into how his intense nationalism began to form. He describes how he discovered his father’s books on the Franco-German War of 1870-71: “And from that time onwards I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military affairs.” At the age of eleven, Hitler rejected the idea of becoming a civil servant, citing a “profound hatred” for the Austrian state and, in particular, the Habsburg Empire, which he accuses of showing favoritism towards Czechs and allowing the “poison of foreign races” to dilute the blood of the German people.

Hitler makes little mention of his mother and relegates her death to one (almost dismissive) paragraph at the end of the chapter. This is striking, since some historians and teachers (and, in particular, the documentary Portrait of a Tyrant) have long contended that he blamed a Jewish doctor for her death, with this blame ultimately blossoming into the Holocaust. But, as chapter two reveals, this may be an oversimplification of Hitler’s anti-Semitism; the “mother” explanation ignores his burgeoning political convictions, which start taking shape upon his arrival in Vienna, Austria.