Great way to binge through the lockdown

Unorthodox. Shira Haas in Berlin’s Wannsee lake

Even at the best of times, Danielle and I enjoy binging on TV series.

Obviously, it helps if they’re good. Or at least that we like them. But I have to admit that there have been occasions when, watching episode four of the third season of a series, one of us will turn to the other and point out:

“This really isn’t very good, is it?”

“No,” replies the other, “I can’t relate to any of the characters and I don’t care what happens to them next.”

Quite a discovery after 28 episodes.

This isn’t the best of times. During a Coronavirus lockdown, binge watching isn’t just an indulgence (OK, OK, if you prefer, an over-indulgence), it’s also an excellent way of spending evenings when you’re obliged to stay in.

For the moment, we’re still being fairly discriminating. If the lockdown goes on long enough, we may well be forced, as we start season 3 of something mediocre, to say, “well, we may not relate to any of the characters or care what happens next but, hey, there’s nothing else on that we haven’t already seen”. But recently, we’ve seen some pretty great things.

Billions was gripping, even if at times I couldn’t bear any of the characters. That, actually, was something the writers pulled off pretty cleverly, making one character or another off-putting for a while, and then making him or her sympathetic again. A smart trick if you can make it work. Which they did.

Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis in Billions
A near-deadly rivalry. Except when it isn’t

For those who don’t know the series, it’s about a successful hedge fund manager (Damian Lewis) whose activities sail close to the illegal, if not right over the edge into the downright criminal, as claimed by a US attorney (Paul Giamatti) intent on bringing him down.

Just like our sympathies for the characters, the show’s writers keep changing the direction of the two men’s antipathies. Now they’re intent on destroying each other, then they turn their animosity onto someone else. Around them, in a first-class cast, stand some extraordinary characters, including an outstanding non-binary figure (“my pronouns are 'they, theirs, and them’”) played by a non-binary actor, Asia Kate Dillon. Just as good is Maggie Siff as the psychiatrist and wife of the US Attorney. All in all, it’s pretty enthralling.

Equally worth seeing is For All Mankind. This is an alternative-reality story, where the space race between the US and the Soviet Union goes on far longer, and extends far further, than actually happened. Again, there are plenty of excellent performances, as well as plenty of fine shots of rockets taking off or of explorers working on the moon, alongside plenty of tense sequences, mostly in space but sometimes also in the homes of the astronauts and other NASA staff we follow.

It’s gripping with its tension, and all the more watchable for the sense of plausibility it manages to create.

Working on the Moon, in For All Mankind

Far better than anything else, however, is Unorthdox. Based in part on Debora Feldman’s autobiography Unorthodox, the Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots, it’s a four-episode mini-series, about a young woman, Esty, brilliantly played by Israeli actor Shira Haas, from an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

The central concern is whether she’ll be able to get away.

This is the first Netlfix series filmed predominantly in Yiddish, the language spoken by that community rather than Hebrew. Haas had to come over a month early to Berlin, where the series was filmed, to learn the language.

The series shows both the community, with its everyday existence and its rituals back in Brooklyn, in the form of flashbacks to Esty’s life there, spliced into scenes of the life she is now working to build for herself in Berlin. The flashbacks include her marriage and, in some poignant but intensely comic moments, the difficulties she has consummating it, difficulties considerably worsened by the fact that her husband tells his mother everything, and she insists on tutoring Esty on how to steel herself to have sex.

Sex is key because her fundamental obligation is to produce children. To her too, this is a sacred duty. “We’re rebuilding the six million lost,” she declares, “Jews killed in the Holocaust.” But that doesn’t make sex with the husband she married by arrangement any less painful.

Esty (Shira Haas) at the Wannsee, still dressed as a Hasid (left)
and as she begins to forge a new life for herself

In a key scene from the first episode, a group of student friends she has just made takes Esty down to the beautiful Berlin lake, the Wannsee. It’s a place where people go to walk or relax or swim. But in 1942, it was the venue for the Wannsee Conference which took the decision to wipe out the Jewish population of Europe.

When Esty first sees the lake, she’s left speechless. But then Robert, one of the students, says:

“It’s nice, right? But you see that villa? The conference where the Nazis decided to kill the Jews in the concentration camps took place in 1942. In that villa.”

She looks at the villa.

“And you swim in this lake?” she replies.

He laughs. “The lake is just a lake,” he says.

Esty water into the water, still wearing her skirt and one of her two long-sleeved shirts. She takes off the wig that orthodox Jewish women wear after marriage. Under the wig, her head is practically shaved. She drops the wig in the water.

That gesture reminds me of a Jewish friend of ours who told us of a moment when her children were playing with others in a local park. Another Jewish woman came over to remonstrate with her for letting them play with non-Jewish kids.

Infuriated, she went straight over to a bridge across a stream at the edge of the park and threw her wig in it. She never wore one again.

Throwing a wig into water speaks to me powerfully about bids for freedom.

Haas says that the story is “about the right to have your voice”. It certainly is. Indeed, if you watch it to the end, you’ll discover why that’s a particularly apt summing up.

Unorthodox is an excellent way of spending an evening. A great break from the lockdown. You might even manage to spread it to two, though we went through all four episodes in just one sitting.

It was that compelling.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years on

Authoritarianism seems fashionable these days, and liberalism rather on the back foot. So it’s good to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of a moment which seemed to offer real grounds for optimism: the fall of the Berlin wall.

The Berlin Wall with the death strip

Some years before, I travelled for the first time to Berlin, and spent most of the time in the East, which was then in a different country from the West. I kept a diary for the trip, and here’s what I wrote on my arrival on 3 July 1982.

I was in Tegel by about 7:00 and took the U-Bahn [the underground] through to Friedrichstrasse: there are 3 unused stops before Friedrichstrasse after one has passed under the border… the stations are dimly lit, deserted apart from a single armed guard who nods to the U-Bahn driver as he passes through.

East Germany felt far more foreign than anywhere else I’d visited. Even the Western half of Germany seemed much more like home. It was more silent, with streets more deserted, and more heavily policed than I’d ever seen elsewhere.

I felt alien and depressed in East Berlin… The buildings are imposing, rather too imposing – cold, unwelcoming, inhuman… I wandered down Unter den Linden: it’s magnificent… but the whole is empty at night, forlorn, lifeless. At the end is the Brandenburg Gate, flying the East German flag, while over to the right the West German banner flies above the old Reichstag. The wall runs along in between, and I didn’t dare approach too closely… the place was swarming with guards.

The visit became less painful when I had got to know a few people. On 17 July, a new friend, Friedrich, took me on a trip out of East Berlin to a concert in an old monastery in the countryside.

Off to Kloster Chorin in the morning – the S-Bahn [overground train] … passes at one point between the inner and outer walls, and one has a clear view of the Grenzgebiet [border zone] with the watch towers, tank traps and barbed wire.

As a Westerner myself, I was allowed out to West Berlin whenever I chose, a privilege only available to East Germans once they drew their pensions. On the far side of that wall, I saw the crosses to the people who’d made the attempt, and failed, to cross that death strip.

In the evening after the concert, Friedrich took me around to a flat where a group were enjoying a pleasant evening. The advantage of being in someone’s flat is that everyone could speak openly. One of the older people told me that he felt the lack of personal incentive in the East German economy was doing it terrible damage.

He also told me about a Russian friend who had served in the Soviet army in Berln at the end of the Second World War. It took a lot of effort with the bureaucracy, but in the end he was able to invite him to his place. But throughout his visit, the Russian and his wife spent their time glued to the TV, watching the western news, which Berliners could receive.

It’s fashionable today to decry the ‘mainstream media’ or ‘MSM’ in the West, but when you’ve had to live in a regime where nothing is broadcast other than propaganda, the ‘MSM’ is like a drink to a man dying of thirst.

There’s no doubt that the regime went in for some serious torturing and executing, but I naturally saw none of that. To me, what it seemed mostly to be was stultifying, stifling every creative or individualistic urge of its citizens. They had food, they had shelter, they had healthcare, they had education, but they longed for the freedom their TVs showed their fellow Germans just a few hundred metres away enjoying.

As I travelled home, I wrote up my general impressions of the country:

… if someone like Friedrich is at all typical, then the East German is learning to live with the regime, getting on as best he can within the rules, bending or twisting them as far as possible – ‘Trick’ is a catchword in the DDR. This, in a sense, is a form of reconciliation to the regime, but in another sense it shows that there is also no love of it, that the people distance themselves from it morally. There is no support for it. As Sprössig [a doctor I met] points out, if a free election could be held tomorrow, 80% would vote the SED [the ruling party] out of power. When asked, he reckoned much the same majority would vote for reunion with West Germany.

Neither of us could see it coming, but the process that would lead to reunification was just over seven years away. That was the fall of the ugliest symptom of the regime that I saw while I was there: the Berlin Wall. On 9 November 1989, 30 years ago today, it was finally breached. It had only lasted a little over 28. It’s been gone longer than it was in place.

That’s a matter for celebration. A reminder that we can put the autocrats back in their boxes. Something we badly need to do again today.

Why? Because no achievement for freedom is ever secure for all time. To protect it requires sustained, repeated effort.

Indeed, one comment I made on my visit has proved completely mistaken

… what an effect [German reunification] would have: Strauss [then leader of the CDU’s sister party, the CSU] and the CDU [Christian Democrats, the German Conservatives] in general would have nothing to cheer about, the newly absorbed people would vote very solidly for the SPD [the Social Democrats]

It seemed to me that a people that had got used to free comprehensive healthcare and education and the basic necessities of existence, would never line up with the right. How wrong I was. It’s in the old East Germany that the far right today is strongest. It seems that being a victim of oppression doesn’t necessarily mean that you refuse to join the oppressors yourself later.

We can enjoy the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the wall. But there are no laurels to rest on. Above all, we need to discover its spirit again.

Uneasy but necessary bedfellows: history and politics

A book I read in the old East Germany, by a dissident called Heinz Knobloch, had a catch phrase running through it, ‘mistrust the green spaces’. A green space was often a spot where once a building stood that represented something the regime would rather not publicise, but which was too important to be built over completely. A major office of the Nazi regime, or of the Weimar Republic it overthrew, or even of the German Empire that preceded both.

Perhaps the best example of this fiddling with historical monuments concerned not a building but a statue. The imposing equestrian statue of Frederick the Great of Prussia, with its frieze of significant people of his time around the plinth, originally stood on the grand boulevard of Berlin, Unter den Linden.

The Frederick the Great statue in 1920

The Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled East Germany weren’t going to have that symbol of royalist and aristocratic elitism standing in the capital’s most prestigious avenue. For a time it vanished altogether. But, hey, Berlin was the capital of Prussia, and Prussia was the heartland of East Germany. After a while, the statue reappeared, but not in the capital, instead in the Charlottenhof Palace in Potsdam. On display, but not in too public a way.

Then came another rethink. In the 1980s, the SED changes its historical memory policy. East Germany was a state but not a nation. To make it a nation, it needed cultural roots and therefore a history. Frederick II was one of the greatest figures of its past, and the SED decided that, after mature reflection, and taking all things into consideration, it was important to bring him out of his relative obscurity and set him back up somewhere with a bit of class about it.

So the statue reappeared on the Unter den Linden. Where it stands to this day.

Politics makes history. And history matters to politics.

That’s as true in Spain as it is in Eastern Germany. Around the corner from where we’re living in Valencia is a thoroughfare that proclaims itself to be ‘Democracy Street’. However, the sign also tells us that it was formerly ‘Castán Tobeñas Street’.

Democracy Street. Formerly Castán Tobeñas

‘Aha,’ I thought when I saw it, ‘might this be a leading figure of the Fascist period deemed better forgotten than commemorated?’

So it seems. He was a jurist who rose to the position of President of the Spanish Supreme Court, a post he held for nearly 25 years under Franco, until just before his death. Seems open and shut. A major figure of Franco’s regime, far better consigned to the dustbin of history than commemorated by a street in Spain’s third city.

The reality is far more complex. But when is reality anything but complex? Why else does Donald Trump avoid it altogether?

Pascual Marzal is a Professor of the History of Law at Valencia University, and served as a member of the City Commission on the application of the Historical Memory law under which the street name was changed. He says he’s fully on board with the law, but opposes its application to Castán Tobeñas.

He points out that Tobeñas was also a leading judge under the second Republic, the one that Franco overthrew. He was, indeed, tried by a court martial of the Fascist regime, which acquitted him on the grounds that the previous government had appointed him exclusively for his legal skills, not for any particular political position. Such were those skills, indeed, that they decided to make use of them too. Hence his promotion to the Supreme Court.

Apparently, Tobeñas wrote some seminal texts on civil law and is regarded to this day as a major scholar in the field.

As Marzal asks, who can say with certainty that they would have behaved better under an autocratic regime? Would we resist? Or would we, like Tobeñas, come to terms with the regime and accommodate with it in order to make a living?

It’s an excellent question.

My wife comes from Alsace, in Eastern France. With the adjoining department of the Moselle, it is the region of the country that lost most men during the Second World War. The problem is that, because Germany regarded Alsace not as occupied France but recovered national territory, young men were subject to German conscription. So those Alsatian dead were above all wearing German grey not French blue. Few wanted to serve, but the consequences of a refusal were dire, not just for the individuals but for their families too.

These were the ‘despite ourselves’ (malgré nous) and a lot of them died in Russia. France has little reason to be proud of what they did, but Alsace has every reason to mourn their loss. So the region has its war memorials, though they say little about what uniform the men they commemorate were wearing when they died.

Tobeñas seems similar. He was unfortunate to live under a regime he could not serve with honour.

Unfortunate indeed. But though he couldn’t serve it with honour, he chose to serve it anyway. Why then should he be honoured today with a street name? After all, he was a judge. An authority of the law. And he served a regime that came to power illegally and ruled with little legal restraint. A jurist, above all others, must have found that particularly lamentable.

I’m glad the malgré nous have their monuments in Alsace. But I’m equally glad that the law on historical memory has deprived Tobeñas of his street. And I love the fact that it’s become Democracy Street instead, a lovely dig at Fascism.

History is complex. Sometimes it makes judgements that are perhaps too black and white. But they have to be made.

This one strikes me as have got more right than wrong.

Nostalgia: it just ain't what it used to be

It was a pleasure to discover that my youngest son was visiting the family of our daughter-out-law this weekend. That took him to Belfast. And that took me back to some old memories, with feelings a little like nostalgia.

I say “a little like” because the word “nostalgia” suggests more attractive memories than those that came to my mind.

The first time I travelled to Belfast, I stayed in the Europa Hotel, reputed to be the most bombed in Europe. Indeed, when I arrived, one side of the hotel had all its windows boarded up after a bomb attack. To get in, I had to walk through a corridor with a chicane leading to a security area where luggage could be searched. Ironically, the whole cumbersome structure was unmanned, which was convenient since it saved me time, but also unnerving because it didn’t inspire much confidence in the security measures.

My room overlooked the headquarters of the Ulster Unionist Party with its sign, “Keep Ulster British”. That struck me as ironic since I was a Brit and little about the place struck me British.

Normally, alone in a new city, I’d wander out to get the feel of the place and find someone pleasant for a meal. I felt so afraid of those eerily empty streets that I found it hard to take the plunge on my first evening in Belfast. In the end, in order not to give way to simple cowardice, I walked quickly around the block opposite the hotel, saw nowhere that attracted me for dinner, and went back to order room service instead.

Later I got to know the city rather better, and had many of the classic experiences: driving without knowing it within a few hundred of metres of a major attack (the Ulster Defence Association’s shooting of Catholic civilians in a betting shop, leaving five dead and nine injured), asking directions of a flak-jacketed, machine-gun-toting policeman and being surprised by the cordiality of the answer, walking with other civilians through the middle of an army patrol…

A scene from 1971:
how civilians and soldiers mixed in Northern Ireland

I also learned to appreciate many of the ironies of the Northern Irish existence. For instance, the Ulster Defence Association that carried out the betting shop murders, was officially “loyalist”. Loyalty, it seemed, did not require respect for the law or traditions of the country, Britain, to which these gentlemen saw themselves as loyal. But then, outside the Northern Ireland Assembly building there still stands a larger-than-life statue of Sir Edward Carson, the man who raised an illegal army to fight the British government’s moves towards a timid measure of home rule in Ireland. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, he proclaimed, and though a lawyer and a Member of Parliament, he mustered forces to support his claim. However, his treason was met not by imprisonment or the rope but by a statue to his memory.

Some years earlier, I had travelled to East Berlin. I landed in the West and took the Underground into the Eastern sector, seeing for the first time the dimly lit ghost stations of the East, closed to passengers and patrolled by armed policemen. When I emerged at Friedrichstrasse, the only station left open in East Berlin on that line, I also had to walk through a corridor with a chicane, but this one was far from unmanned, as I came around a corner nearly into the arms of a young policeman with a machine gun clutched to his chest.

Armed police in a Berlin ghost station

As in Belfast some years later, I was nervous about wandering out into the streets of East Berlin. I quickly realised, however, that East Berlin fulfilled a positively Thatcherite vision of urban peace (Maggie was firmly enthroned back then, made secure by Labour’s decision to equip itself with a leader no one was going to elect Prime Minister – oh, how we learn the lessons of experience): the streets were safe, with more police on view than anyone else. Only near the Brandenburg Gate did I feel nervous again: there was the wall, suddenly blocking off the great boulevard of Unter den Linden, with a small opening guarded by armed men, and the glare of the searchlights in the death strip beyond them.

Thinking back today to those two experiences, of Belfast in the Troubles and Berlin in the Cold War, made me realise that nostalgia will soon not be what it once was. The nastiness of those days had a quality of drama, inspiring many a novel or film: how often have you seen floodlights on barbed wire in spy films based in Berlin, or blacked-up British troops patrolling past IRA murals in films about Belfast?

Whereas today’s ghastliness has replaced drama by farce. People who don’t know what they’re wishing for have elected an unstable moron to the White House or voted to take Britain out of the European Union, without understanding the wound they’re inflicting on themselves.

On the other hand, the farce is a dangerous one. An unstable moron with his fingers on the nuclear button? Sheer slapstick, for sure – but hardly a laughing matter. 

I preferred the old nostalgia.