Gotham Diary:
The Projected Siege
9 May 2014

While tidying the blue room yesterday, I watched Hannah Arendt for the third time, and now I have to write to my friend Eric and tell him that there are only three scenes in which Arendt is shown on the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (That’s how you got to Jerusalem in those days.) The fourth bus ride, the trip that would have taken her back to Tel Aviv after her rejection by Kurt Blumenfeld, is not shown. The film cuts directly from Arendt’s dejected walk through Jerusalem to the pile of hate mail that has accumulated in her New York apartment in the wake of Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book that many condemned without having read it.

When I saw the movie the first time, I had recently read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and, long before, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The “book by Hannah Arendt” that I really loved was the collection of her correspondence with Mary McCarthy. I knew that there had been an “affair” with Martin Heidegger, a philosopher about whose work I seemed to be incapable of understanding a thing, and that was pretty much it.

Now, I know rather more.

Last night, reading after dinner, I put down Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt and picked up Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, because, really, it was easier to keep track of the Serbian factions that destabilized first the Balkans and then all of Europe in the years before 1914 than it was to follow the competing Zionist interest groups that squabbled in 1940s New York.

Most of what Clark discussed was new to me, or only very vaguely familiar — the 1903 military coup, for example, in which the king and queen of Serbia were murdered in their bedroom. I knew that that had happened, but I had no idea of the context or the consequences. I didn’t know that the new Karadjordjic régime shifted Serbia’s international relations away from Austria-Hungary, making the country a client of France.

But what I did know was something else about Serbia — from much more recent history. Clark’s account of “Serbdom” — the self-righteously opportunistic movement to annex all of the western Balkans, something that really did come about in 1918 with the creation of Yugoslavia — made for vertiginous reading: the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s seems in retrospect to have taken the players right back to the state of play in 1900. Another thing that I had learned about were the Serbian epics that were sung, to the accompaniment of a one-stringed guitar, by bards who, if you squint, look a bit like Homer; for hundreds of years, their performances kept the peasantry viscerally aware of the tribal tragedy of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. I had learned quite a lot about Serbia and the Balkans from current events as they unfolded over a period of roughly fifteen years. So had anybody else who paid attention. Now, for the first time, I was seeing how passions of much the same kind prompted the roiling undercover activities that climaxed in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

Do I think that the Serbians caused World War I? No, but they lighted the fuse that, for once, didn’t squib. It burned all the way to Germany’s paranoia about being vulnerable on two fronts. And that is what turned the war on the Western Front into the weirdest siege in the history of warfare. It was a projected siege that would not have been technologically possible in earlier times. Germany basically projected its perimeters into France and Belgium and dug in, forestalling the enemy “attackers.” The trenches were strangely inverted battlements, sunk into the ground instead of towering over it, but they were more effective than any fortress had ever been. And although the siege went on for years, it ended for a very conventional reason: the besieged (as the Germans saw themselves, even though they had invaded other countries to plant their defenses) ran out of food, and had to sue for peace.

Conventional warfare in World War I was limited to the East, or to Italy at the westernmost. The Russians were dealt with almost immediately, at Tannenberg in East Prussia. Because the Ottomans had made the mistake of aligning with Austria-Hungary and Germany, there was a great deal of confused activity in the Middle East, of which was born another muddle with which we’re all too familiar. But the important part of the war, the part that engendered the senselessly punitive “peace conference” at Versailles, was the projected siege in France and Belgium. Had the German invasion been summarily repulsed at the start, the war would have ended almost as a skirmish. France would have been happy to repossess Alsace and Lorraine. But the Germans would have remained just as paranoid — at least until they learned what their English cousins had been trying to tell them for a hundred years: economies are more powerful than armies.

(Hitler replayed the game in 1939, extending German’s perimeters to the shores of Europe. This time, the enemy prepared its attack for years, doing little or nothing in the mean time. Instead of four years in the trenches, there were four or five days on the beaches. This time, the Russians had not been so easily dealt with.)

The most interesting question about World War I is this: what was it about the conflict itself that prompted the massive reconfiguration of Europe’s postwar frontiers, creating a continent of discontent? This will probably always be the most interesting question.

The most interesting question about the short century of conflict between liberal democracies and dictatorships that began in 1914 and ended in 1989 is this: how does Vladimir Putin’s Russia really differ from that of Nicholas Romanov? That is the most interesting question right now.