Stuart Pigott's Planet Wine

“Those who deny history are condemned to repeat it,” George Santanaya

This is the fourth and final installment of the talk on my Life and Riesling I gave at the Riesling Fellowship evening on Thursday, January 29^th at Vintners Hall in the City of London. My apologies that a mere 15 minutes had to be broken up into four chunks, but I was anxious not to overwhelm readers with too much uncomfortable truth in one go. I think this is all much more difficult to take when read on the computer screen than when spoken. Some will say that by publicizing this I have done myself a disservice, but I owe a debt to wine merchant Philip Eyres (1926 – 2012) and continue pursuing what we discussed and corresponded about at the end of his life. It was he who helped me onto the Riesling trail that I’ve followed for more than 30 years.

I have to start by reading you a short section of Philip Eyres’ letter to me of 16^th January 2012, written just a few months before his death: “On the subject of bombing during the last war, I always felt moral repulsion of the way that civilians in Japan and Germany were targeted and the fact that this was largely concealed from public knowledge… While “Bomber” Harris is generally assumed to be the architect of the attempt to win the war by killing civilians, Churchill must take the blame.”

This is an unpopular view even 50 years after the death of Winston Churchill. He is now the central figure in the mythical WWII in British minds and hearts, at once super-human and super-British, his weaknesses (for example, his well-documented white supremacism) are still rarely discussed, and then usually only superficially. The reason for this is the key part that he plays in the mythical WWII, the purpose of which is to create a patriotic sense of national identity. That’s another subject though, that this blog posting can only touch upon. Let me give you a few quotes from Winston Churchill from 1940-41 that show how early he had set his mind upon the so-called “Area Bombing” (i.e. carpet bombing of residential urban areas) campaign against German civilian targets that began in 1942 and reach its climax during the spring of 1945.

“We will make Germany a desert, yes a desert!”

On the subject of Adolf Hitler: “But there is one thing that will bring him back, and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

“There are less than 70 million malignant Huns, some of who are curable and others are killable.”

It is perhaps important to point out that it was clear to all the leading members of the British government and the Royal Air Force that the policy of bombing German civilians targets during WWII was in contravention of international law, specifically the 1907 Hague Convention to which Britain was a signatory. It explicitly banned all attacks from the air on civilian population centers far from front lines. Of course, there is the argument that the Nazi atrocities, particularly the obscenity of the Holocaust, were so terrible that anything was acceptable in the struggle against them. I obviously don’t agree with that, for the simple reason, because it is based on the idea that a great wrong on one side justifies a smaller one on the other side, that an orgy of killing demands more killing a revenge for it.

Philip Eyres was very struck by the following quote from the physicist Freeman Dyson (born 1923). In it he describes his work in the office of Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris during the last years of WWII: I sat in my office until the end, carefully calculating how to murder most economically another 100,000 people. Dyson then turns to the organizers of the Holocaust and observes, They sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free.

Today, the assumption is often made that WWII was fought by the Allies against the organizers of the Holocaust with the aim of stopping them. While it is true that when the Allies found out about the extermination of the Jews the British and American governments made statements in parliament and congress condemning this, they didn’t follow through after that. Those statements were made in December 1942, but not only did no significant action follow those fine words, no serious attempt was made to determine what action could have been necessary to obstruct the Holocaust. Instead, the Allied leadership stood by while the Jews were exterminated by the German Nazis and like-minded citizens belonging to many of the nations Germany had occupied.

What was the attitude of the British government to the fate of the Jews? In early 1943 the Bulgarian government requested that Britain allow part of its Jewish population to be transported to Palestine. Britain refused. Shortly after this the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden wrote in a memorandum: There is a possibility that the Germans or their satellites may change over the policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with alien immigrants. For extrusion  read deportation, and for alien immigrants read Jews. The Bulgarian Jews, though sadly not those in Bulgarian occupied Thrace and Macedonia, were lucky to be saved by their government’s repeated refusal to follow the German instructions to deport them to the death camps in what is now Poland.

My training as a cultural historian (Royal College of Art, 1984-86) taught me that the most fundamental question concerning history is what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. Systematic forgetting is a form of active denial, and it is possible to be in denial for a very long time. Keeping the great majority of the population in ignorance is a very effective method of preventing them breaking such a cycle of denial. Philip Eyres and I came to the conclusion that the British establishment has been very good at denying chunks of the nation’s history, of which the bombing of Germany civilians during WWII is a prominent example. The problem is that, as the Spanish philosopher George Santanaya (1863 – 1952) famously wrote, those who deny history are condemned to repeat it.

I’m pretty sure that today RAF Tornados took off from air bases in Cyprus to bomb targets in Iraq. It is a little-known fact that the first RAF raids against targets in Iraq were in 1922 as part of a policy called “air policing”. The attack on Samawah in Iraq of November 30^th/December 1^st 1923 left the town in ruins with an unknown death toll. This happened 14 years before the destruction of Guernica by the German Lufwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. The architect of the “air policing” policy was Winston Churchill during his short period as Colonial Secretary 1921-22. A certain Arthur Harris was one of the RAF squadron leaders in Iraq.

It was Philip Eyres and German Riesling that lead me to these painful conclusions.

POSTSCRIPT

How did I succeed in upsetting some of my countrymen with the above words?

In ‚A Room of One’s Own’ Virginia Woolf (1928) talks about how male self-confidence and self-assurance are generated through “looking-glass” games involving women who accept looking smaller than the men they “reflect” in order that the latter feel bigger, more important. Of course, the smallness of women in such games is no less illusory than the size of the men which they serve to magnify.

Racism and nationalism do much the same. By thinking down and talking down the natives of a distant land or the inhabitants of a nearby country the members of the dominant group build themselves up in their own minds. There’s no reason why such games can’t be played retrospectively.

I think that the myth of Britain’s absolute moral victory over Germany in WWII that many of my countrymen frequently replay is just such a retrospective game. Like the sexist looking-glass game it too depends upon  selective cognition, in this case the quiet ignorance or the forceful denial of historical facts.

This is the third installment of the talk I gave at the Riesling Fellowship evening on Thursday, January 29^th at Vintners Hall in the City of London. I was invited to speak for 15 minutes about my life and Riesling while a wine I had selected was served. The wine was the 2012 Kupfergrube GG, one of the most racy and exciting dry Rieslings of that vintage in Germany. Please read the first two installments of this story before moving onto this one if you aren’t already familiar with them. My discussions and correspondence with wine merchant Philip Eyres (1926 – 2012) during the last years of his life left me with an intense feeling of obligation to tell this story as straight as I could. I have added a few lines where it strikes me that I skimmed over an important point due to the time limit that evening. My talk was very controversial, and these blog postings will be too, but all of the following is true and for me as a trained historian that is an argument which it is very hard to reject.

The photograph above shows the new exhibit about the RAF “Area Bombing” campaign of 1942-45 in the Imperial War Museum, which uses the example of the raids on Hamburg. The stick-like objects top right are 4 lb incendiary bombs (manufactured by ICI), the main weapon used to make that city burn like no city had ever burnt before; it was the first man-made firestorm. Seeing the ruins left by this raid while he was an officer of the Scotts Guards in the army of occupation in 1946 inspired Philip Eyres’ commitment to the Rieslings of Germany as much as his love of their smell and taste. 

When, in 2005, I realized why Philip Eyers had taken so much trouble to help me connect with the leading Riesling producers of the Mosel, Nahe and Pfalz I felt there was lost time to make up, so I got back in touch with him. I found that he was still working as an independent wine merchant, although he was 80 years old! We began tandem research into the air war against Germany, each adopting a different approach, but regularly exchanging our discoveries. Philip Eyres focused very directly upon the events of 1942-45 and on the perception of them in Britain today, while I explored both the backstory to those events, and what the consequences of not facing up to them after the end of WWII were for Britain and the rest of the world. Both of us experienced intellectual excitement when we were able to follow how one historical development lead to another, combined with horror at what had been considered acceptable by a country that perceived, and continues to perceive itself as fair and humane. There was no element of “Britain bashing” about this alternative history of our own country we pieced together, but we both certainly felt intense regret for every mass slaughter of civilians during WWII regardless of nationality, race or religion.

What did we discover? Firstly, that Pit Falkenstein was far from being the only German civilian refugee that had been deliberately strafed by British fighter pilots. For German refugees in the last months of the war that was a common experience. Tiefflieger was their word for those Allied fighter planes that were flying so low for only one reason. Certainly German pilots also strafed civilians during WWII, but I suggest that two wrongs don’t make a right.

When it came to Hamburg the facts were very clear. On the night of 27^th/28^th July 1943 a massive force of 787 British bombers, mostly Lancasters, dropped an enormous quantity of bombs, most of which were 4 Lb incendiaries, upon Hamburg. The weather was hot and had been so for a while, so everything was tinder-dry. This raid was codenamed Operation Gomorrah, which says almost everything. Let me quote the official Bomber Command Diary, which is part of the British National Archives: The concentrated bombing caused a large number of fires in the densely-built up working-class districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfelde…The firestorm raged for 3 hours. The burnt out area was almost entirely residential. There were few survivors from the firestorm area…40,000 people died.

What these lines also don’t tell you is that the firestorm generated winds of up to 170mph that sucked people into the firestorm where they spontaneously combusted. Although some sources give other figures for the death toll (not all of which are lower), none gives a more precise figure than the one above, and I find that inexactitude also telling. You can count the bodies of asphyxiated victims, but how do you count the dead when all that is left of them are incinerated body parts, or small heaps of ash? For comparison, 40,000 is the number of British civilians who died during the entire Blitz, a period of 267 days. I mention this not to diminish in any way the suffering of Londoners during 1940-41.

Philip Eyres and I found that this scale of death and destruction was not collateral damage, much less a mistake or an accident. The bombs had hit their target and this was the intended result. Internally, RAF Bomber Command celebrated Operation Gamorrah as their greatest success to date. Soon it was no longer an exception, rather just one in a long series of massive raids that targeted the urban civilian population of Germany, their homes and much of the cultural fabric of that country. “Dresden” is the name most British people give to their misgivings about what was done in WWII. The Dresden raid became infamous because the American newspapers reported it, unlike many others before it (e.g. Hamburg) or after it (e.g. Pforzheim). There is no exact figure for the number of victims of the RAF “Area Bombing” campaign against Germany. 600,000 is the best estimate that Philip Eyres and I could find. Of course, this far less than the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust – mostly in an industrial manner that continues to disgust anyone with a sense of compassion  – or the roughly 5 million Slavs killed in a less organized, but no less brutal manner during the same years. However, it’s still an awful lot of dead civilians to sweep under the carpet, and this is what was done by the british Establishment for a long time. The past cannot be changed, but Philip and I believed that it is far better to be honest about it, than to live in denial.

In Riesling there is peace and that’s one reason I’m glad to have Riesling in my glass!

TO BE CONTINUED VERY SOON!

This is the second installment of the talk I gave at the Riesling Fellowship evening in the Vintners Hall in London on January 29th. To fully grasp the context of the below it would help to read my previous posting (Part 1) before this one. Philip Eyres (1926 – 2012) was not only a great wine merchant, he was also a man with a strong sense of justice and great compassion. I spoke about these things the last time I saw him, and I promised him that I wouldn’t let the subject of this talk drop. Whether the Vintners Hall was the right place to say these things is debatable  It seemed to be so to me, because it is the home of the Establishment of the British wine trade.

Then something Philip Eyres did 10 years ago changed everything. Harry Eyres describes this so well in his Slow Lane column in the (London) Financial Times of March 12^th/13^th 2005 (pictured above) that I will read the first half of his column (I pick up newspaper clipping and begin to read).

HUMANITY’S VEIL OF DARKNESS

On the 60^th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden last month my father quietly brought out a black and white photograph. It showed a long street reduced to rubble, with no building standing higher than the first story, and most completely flattened. As he made no comment, my sister remarked that it looked like Hiroshima. No, it wasn’t Hiroshima, my father informed us, it was Hamburg in 1946. He had taken the photograph while serving in the Allied army of occupation. The RAF bombing raids on Hamburg in July 1943 practically demolished Germany’s second-largest city. More than 40,000 people died (probably more than were killed in Dresden) during the three nights in July 1943 when the firestorms reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. Three years later the city was still a wasteland.

Seeing the almost unimaginable destruction wrought on Hamburg as a young man of 20 had a profound effect upon my father. He is no supporter (unlike many British people of his generation I have spoken to) of Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. He does not agree with the sentiment expressed by the present British ambassador to Germany that in the context of the war the raids on German cities were justified. Nothing, for him and for Slaughterhouse Five author Kurt Vonnegut, can “justify” dropping incendiary bombs on people and turning them to sticks of carbon, a view I share.

One good thing that came out of my father’s posting in Germany at the end of the war was an enduring love of German wines. Later, as a wine merchant, my father made a specialty of the beautiful, delicate Riesling wines of the Mosel, Saar, Ruwer, and Nahe rivers. For a number of years I used to go out with him, in the cool Rhineland-Palatinate spring, to taste the young wines at estates such as Maximin Grünhaus on the Ruwer, the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Trier (Karl Marx’s old school, which has a priceless dowry of vineyards) and the State Wine Domain at Niedershausen on the Nahe. I share his affection for these green-glinting wines, for the valleys with their gravity-defying vineyards and for the German wine growers and makes who approach their craft with the unselfish devotion of orchestral musicians. But I also realized that for my father were not simply about wine. They were a kind of reparation, a way of restoring Anglo-German amity through a cultural exchange based on the shared pleasure of wine.   

Suddenly, I realized that for 20 years I had unknowingly been involved in Philip Eyres personal campaign of reconciliation, and his work of reparation. I was immediately reminded of a conversation with a German wine journalist colleague, Pit Falkenstein, back in the summer of 1998. I had already known Pit for some years, but knew little about his life. On a walk through the vineyards of Assmannshausen in the Rheingau he told me his life story. (I put down newspaper clipping and pick up an email). Pit was born in Berlin in 1935. After the family home bas bombed out during the war they moved to a safe place, the Salzkammergut area of the Austrian Alps. Pit was sent to Stift Admont, a monastic boarding school. At Easter 1945 the food ran out and the monks sent the younger children home. Here is the story in his words:

There were many groups of four or five boys. A 13 year old lead our group…The trains were not running any more. I therefore marched the 60 kilometers to the Salzkammergut with my group in two and a half days. The two sandwiches each we were given at Admont were quickly eaten, because we were hungry. We slept in barns on hay and friendly farmers gave us plenty to eat. On the second day as we had almost made it to Tauplitz we were surprised in open fields by Spitfires. We were making our way up a hillside meadow between large rocks. We tried to reach the nearest piece of woodland, but didn’t make it. The British pilots shot mercilessly at us with their machineguns. We lay flat on the ground and were very lucky. Almost nothing happened to us. One friend of mine was grazed by a bullet on his right shoulder. The heel of my right shoe was blown off. Only some minutes later did I realize that my left hand was bleeding. A tiny piece of shrapnel from a bullet that had hit one of the rocks next to me and flown into my middle finger. To this day I carry this “trophy” around with me.

Stuart, why did those pilots do that?

I was very shocked by that story when Pit Falkenstein told it to me, but I also felt terribly confused. What did it have to do with me? I was born in 1960 and my parents were children during the Second World War. Only much later did I realize that my maternal grandfather had been an electrician in the RAF and worked on fighter planes. Quite possibly, he had serviced the planes that shot at Pit Falkenstein and his school chums.

TO BE CONTINUED VERY SOON!