Came across a reference to this book, published in 1948, in one of Christopher Hitchens’ articles, and tracked it down. It was difficult to find and literally took two months to arrive. Written by the British historian Lewis Namier, directly following the Nuremberg Trials, where a lot of previously unknown/classified/secret documents came to light, on the Allied and Axis side. I didn’t know anything about Namier, and came across this interesting personal reflection from a colleague who had known him. I’ve been reading this book over the last couple of months, in the spare snatches of time I could find. It’s fascinating reading, and extremely chilling. It feels very valuable because 1948 is so close in time to the events Namier is writing about. The book details the activity of the diplomatic corps from multiple nations – England, Poland, France, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia – in between the catastrophic Munich Agreement in 1938 and the Soviet-German “non-aggression pact” and the concurrent invasion of Poland in August/September 1939. A year that shook the world.
Again, since these events were of recent memory when Namier wrote his book, Diplomatic Prelude has a special immediacy to its tone and perspective. The book is mainly made up of quotes and excerpts from all of the dispatches written by the diplomats, the go-betweens, with additional text from ambassadors, world leaders, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, etc. That year-long period is sickening reading, since the threat was (in retrospect) so obvious, and yet even by 1938 it was way too late. The time to avert all of these events was back in the early 30s. Only then was there even a sliver of a chance of keeping things in check. Even by 1938, diplomats – supposedly sophisticated people – refused to recognize the threat, still kept a doomed hope alive (or, even more sinisterly, welcomed the tyrannical swing of things). Neville Chamberlain is, perhaps, the most hard to understand figure – you squint at the pages of history, trying to get into his head. He will be remembered for one thing only, choosing “appeasement”, and allowing Czechoslovakia to be erased from the face of the earth. (Other European leaders helped in this.)
Namier’s research is so in-depth and presented with such breaking-news immediacy you can practially see the ink on his fingers from poring through all of the files. His work was a big part of at least starting to piece together what had actually happened, at a time when Europe was still in ruins. It’s helpful to be in those rooms where it happened, where those decisions were made (or not made), to get a front row seat for how people responded to the threat, and how – understandably, although misguidedly in many ways – these countries (except Germany) wanted to avoid another cataclysm. They were barely on their feet again since the FIRST World War.
It’s a helpful reminder, too, to ignore people who call certain controversies or struggles a “distraction”. You hear people scolding all the time: “Don’t get distracted from this OTHER thing we should focus on!” But sometimes, something, whatever it is, is NOT a distraction from some other thing. It is, actually, the Thing itself.
