Category Archives: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

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

It seems that in 21^st century Britain the truth is a very dangerous substance and those who deal in it like myself represent a danger to social order and will be treated accordingly by the self-appointed defenders of that order. Let me explain.

I was supposed to be going to London shortly to speak about the wines from a rather remote place that I know very well. For me and the organizers of this event that was certainly PR, but also something genuinely positive and educational. Then somebody who was invited to the event threatened them with drastic consequences if I was involved in it. I have just withdrawn in order not to cause the organizers any unnecessary problems, but am also making this statement about the background to this naked act of intimidation.

The problem for the intimidators was a short talk I gave to a very small audience at Vintners Hall in London on the evening of Thursday, 29^th January, 2015. Along with Jancis Robinson and Hugh Johnson I had been asked to speak on the subject on my life and Riesling. My talk was very different to theirs, although like them, all I did was to honestly explained how and why I became involved with the wines of this grape and its homeland in Germany.

The British wine merchant Philip Eyres (1926 – 2012) played a decisive role in that process and his motivation for taking me with him on a buying trip to the Mosel, Nahe and Rhine in the spring of 1984 was not only a love for those wines, but also reconciliation for the area bombing campaign of the RAF against German civilians during World War II. In 1946 as a conscript in the British occupation forces he saw what area bombing had done to Hamburg and this shock haunted him for the rest of his life. It was clearly a great comfort to Philip that towards the end of his life he was able to speak about all this and clearly express his compassion for the victims.

Nobody except a few revisionists dispute the historical facts of the area bombing of Germany, nonetheless they have often been suppressed because they don’t fit comfortably with the national myth of Britain as the great moral victor of World War II. That suppression is the reason that I only found out these truths, and realized the role they had played in shaping my life, when Philip’s son Harry Eyres wrote a column on the subject in the Financial Times in March 2005 (pictured above). I remember how after its publication he experienced a wave of fury for daring to state those historical facts.

My attitude was and is that the truth will out. As a trained historian (I have an MA in cultural history from the Royal College of Art) I have a commitment to the truth, even if confronting the past and seeking the truth there is painful. Doing that helps us prevent history from repeating itself. This is an important lesson I learned from the example of Germany sincerely confronting the deeply painful truth of the Shoa or Holocaust and the wider historical context of the persecution of Jews in their country and beyond.

I am pretty sure that the person who has taken such exception to what I said that day regards me as unpatriotic and probably thinks that I was being pro-Germany and/or pro-Europe at the expense of Britain. That’s absurd and it would mean that patriotism ought to be built upon selective cognition and censorship. I am happy to be a citizen of Britain and (since a short time) of Germany. Anyone who doubts that please take a close look at the above photograph of me at the celebration of the royal wedding at the British Embassy on Saturday, 19th May.

I find the attempt to intimidate the organizers of this harmless wine event in London completely contrary to the democratic traditions of Britain that have valued frees speech for more than 350 years. It strikes me that this action was clearly influenced by the current political climate in my home country. When I was growing up in London during the 1960s and ‘70s political disputes were often heated, but both parties usually retained a basic respect for the other side. Since the campaign for the Brexit vote the language of national politics and the media has become brutal and sometimes sadistic. I find it deeply shocking that this poison should have spread to the beautiful world of wine.

The text of my short talk can be found as a four part series of postings by clicking on the button Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right and scrolling down.

Some people have suggested that because I recently gained German Citizenship I’m now no longer British and that I will therefore lose my British humour, if I haven’t already done so. This deserves an answer and a satirical one at that! You see, satire isn’t just the heart of British humour, but also an essential element of British character. So let’s start with the official announcement I have not given up my British citizenship nor do I intend to do so unless forced by the machinations of so-called politicians on the Island of Great Brexit. As far as my British humour goes judge for yourself from the following.

We all have a more or less clear idea of what satire is and realize that it in its full-blown, no-holds-barred form it is always scathing. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that even on the Island of Great Brexit it  leaves a few poor souls (including many of those so-called politicians, stone cold while many others only warm to its charms on occasion. I always found it astonishing that scathing satire could sometimes fail to ignite the fuse of laughter, but clearly it’s possible to have a temperament ill-adjusted to this type of humour, or one that which easily mistakes incendiary satire for poisoned malice mercilessly directed at the innocent.

In fact, satire never attacks the common man as an individual, rather it burns those who, in one way or another, have pushed themselves into positions of importance and/or the limelight, who’s faces, words and actions are part of public life and somewhere between well exposed to over-exposed in the media. The movers and shakers of this world are the natural targets of satire, also because they’re easily recognizable to the audience. Their characteristics features, typical gestures and favourite phrases must be exaggerated by the satirist to achieve his goal of igniting laughter, but never so far that the likeness gets lost and he fails as a result of that.

Satire cannot burn The Plain Man who lives quietly next door, because nobody would recognize him except his neighbours resulting in a gaping chasm of silence where there should be ecstatic laughter. At the most he can serve as an anonymous model for a satire of a group, e.g. social class, political party, etc. to which he belongs, but then his identity is lost in that crowd. Satire cannot hit him anywhere near as it easily does the leaders of such groups.

The whole point of satire is that it should unmask the true character and intentions of the powerful, wealthy, self-important and would-be saints who don’t measure up to their own standards. It’s enemies are greed, arrogance, vanity and all other gross forms of human weakness in public life. For its targets satire is always a double-edged sword, for although it exposes them for what they are at the same time it flatters them with its attention, thereby increasing their fame and/or infamy.

However, all this only functions if the satirist’s words, images, gestures, etc. connect directly with an audience. If the incendiary which the satirist has carefully prepared and ignited sets their minds on fire, then he succeeds. Some of them may feel rudely ripped out of their normal state of mind by the satirical work and laugh hesitantly, but others will see their own thoughts confirmed and magnified by the satirical work and laugh boldly. If those reactions are contagious, then a wildfire of laughter results and all hell is let loose!

That kind of laughter has a cleansing effect upon our minds in the way a big gust of wind does that blows away all the dust that’s built up in the back yard. It helps us overcome the adverse effect those movers and shakers have on us, and through the laughter it unleashes it enables to at least temporarily throw off some of the general fear and loathing that the work-a-day-world induces in us.  Thankfully, realizing all this won’t defuse the effect of the next piece of satire you encounter, just as an explanation of why something is sexually exciting doesn’t undermine that reaction next time around.

The final essential quality of satire is that although in the strictest and most literal sense of the word the story it tells is not true, in a more fundamental sense it is totally true. That’s one reason why the illustration to these lines is one of the most famous satirical cartoons by James Gilray (1756/7–1815). It shows William Pitt, the British prime minister of the time, sitting at the dinner table with Napoleon Bonaparte of France where they are carving up the world as if it was a plum (Christmas) pudding. Of course, this pair never actually did that, but what the cartoon says to us about the two leaders is brutally true. No wonder this cartoon unleashed a wild fire of laughter when it appeared in 1805, even if some laughed behind raised hands, while others denounced it as disrespectful to one or both leaders. Of course, they were right that the cartoon was totally disrespectful and outrageous!

The other reason for using this image is that it belongs to the great tradition of British satire. That began in its modern form with the writer Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and the engraver and painter William Hogarth (1697–1764, his A Drunken Party is pictured above), however, it’s backstory begins with the explosion of political and other pamphlets published during the Civil War of the 1640s when royal censorship was effectively suspended. British satire went on to reach it’s next high point in the cartoons and caricatures of Gilray and his colleagues Thomas Rowlandson (1750–1827) and George Cruikshank (1792–1878).

I hope those illustrious and notorious gentlemen would appreciate these thoughts if they could read them, although mine is no pure form of British satire. Both Berlin and New York have influenced the way I write in this vein. If you wish to call the result a hybrid, then you are welcome to do so. Satire, including my own, invites and revels in satirical responses!

Of course, satire can hurt those who are its targets, but mostly it does that because it is the bringer of painful truths. Who has never been shocked by unexpectedly seeing themselves in the mirror? One such moment forms the climax of  Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (first published in the June 1970 issue of Scanlan’s). It is one of the great works of satire in the American language. What makes this story innovative is that there’s a lot of precise factual reporting in it, but in the end you can’t tell where reality ends and satirical exaggeration begins. Remarkably those real things don’t prevent the satirical incendiary from igniting a wildfire of laughter. In fact, at the end the joke literally blows up in Thompson’s face! That inspired my own recent satirical writings.

Satire is always a wake up call, even if the satirist knows in his heart that their work isn’t going to change the world. I think that acceptance of this is part of the mature satirical state of mind. It doesn’t alter the fact that we urgently need to laugh at the “great” of this world in order to be free of their noxious influence upon our hearts and minds. That’s when scathing satire is at its best, be it British, another nationality or a hybrid of two or more nationalities as my own is.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

There is a theory which has not been accurately formulated or given a name, but which is very widely accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary to justify some action which conflicts with the decency of the average human being. It might be called, until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever achieved without bloodshed, lies, tyranny and injustice, but on the other hand no considerable change for the better is to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval. History necessarily proceeds by calamities…

George Orwell wrote those words lines for the in November 1945, and in spite of the timing he was not thinking particularly of the atomic bombings of Japan just three months before. However, his words also well describe that situation. I took the above photograph of the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima, Japan on April 15^th, 2007 during the month I spent researching wine, sake and Japanese culture. It was the only one of my photographs that didn’t turn these ruins into just another historical landmark, but showed them as one of few surviving reminders of the almost five square miles of complete destruction caused by the atomic bomb dropped by the USAAF on the city 70 years ago today.

On August 6^th, 1945 about 70,000 of the city’s 340,000 citizens were killed by the direct effects of the bomb’s explosion, a figure which had doubled by the end of the year mainly due to radiation sickness; more than 40% of the entire population! The great majority of the dead were civilians, and in Nagasaki (the target of the second atomic bombing three days later) where the corresponding figures were almost 40,000 dead on the day of the atomic bombing and close to 80,000 by the end of the year more than 99% of the victims were civilians. But what do numbers really tell us? They are necessary to give a sense of scale to the most terrible events from the atomic bombings of Japan to the Holocaust, but they also mask the identities of the individual victims. For a detailed description of what those number meant in terms of human suffering I recommend John Hersey’s book Hiroshima first published in the August 31^st, 1946 issue of The New Yorker, which it almost entirely filled. It describes in a matter of fact way what 6 survivors experienced, but I warn you that in spite of that and the distance in time it’s not an easy read.

Of course, it is important not to forget the wider contexts of the Pacific War and the Second World War as a whole. Almost all of Japan’s major cities were destroyed by USAAF firebombing during the last six months of the Second World War, most terribly in the raid on residential Tokyo of March 9^th, 1945 that killed about 100,000 civilians. Of course, the Japanese also conducted air raids on urban centers in China and committed many other war crimes, of which the Nanking massacre was the worst. And then there are the 6 million Jews and 5 million Slavic people murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe, plus smaller (but still very large numbers) of European civilians of many nationalities killed by all sides in that conflict. This isn’t the place to try and catalogue all the genocidal horrors of the global conflagration. Professional historians are better equipped for this task. There is extensive literature about all of these events for anyone who is interested. I just read Elie Wiesel’s Night, his autobiographical description of the Holocaust, which spells out what that enormous genocidal crime meant for the victims. It only confirmed my feeling of compassion for all victims of war and genocide.

The first reason for covering this subject is my personal connection to Hiroshima, where in 2007 the Yoshinaga family, including one Hibakusha (survivor of the A bomb), showed me great hospitality and generosity. Then there are the results of my research over almost a decade that leads me to the conclusion that the first atomic bombing was unquestionably a deliberate attack on a civilian target and no warning was given precisely in order to better study the effects upon the, “Hiroshima urban industrial area”. Already that wording in Order Nr. 13 of August 2^nd, 1945 signed by Acting Chief of Staff General Thomas T. Hardy make the non-military nature of the bombing’s target rather clear.

I first saw a facsimile of that order in the Peace Memorial Museum of Hiroshima, but it was not at the beginning of the exhibit as you might have expected. Instead the museum began by telling the history of Japanese militarism and Hiroshima’s role in that. There was no attempt there to, much less deny, the wider context of the Second World War, or the wars that preceded it. This is did not align with how the international media portray Japan as nation of revisionists determined to play down the crimes of the past, and it is a lesson from which we could learn. For example, although the Manhattan Project was American controlled, it was actually British-American joint venture that enjoyed considerable material support from Canada. The Quebec Agreement of July 1943 gave British Prime Minister Winston Churchill a veto over the use of the atomic bomb. Instead, he approved its use against Japan and consulting with none of his cabinet before taking that decision. Which Churchill biography tells you that though? As George Orwell also wrote in November 1945:

There are always the most excellent, high-minded reasons for concealing the truth, and these reasons are brought forward in almost the same words by supporters of the most diverse causes…So often it seems a positive duty to suppress or color the facts! And yet genuine progress can only happen through increasing enlightenment, which means the continuous destruction of myths.

The second reason for devoting a long posting to a subject so far from this blog’s core theme is to make the observation that if atomic weapons are ever used in anger again, many of them will undoubtedly be dropped on civilian targets. For my entire lifetime this was the genocidal threat of the nuclear arsenals on both sides of the Cold War, and as a child and young person I felt this in a visceral way, particularly in 1983, the second terrifying high point of the Cold War after the so-called Cuba Crisis of 1962. (It was about Russian nuclear missiles on Cuba, but also about American nuclear missiles in Turkey, Italy and Britain). My parents told me all about their fears in October 1962, and I relived them 21 years later.

The thousands of nuclear weapons retained to this day continue this intimidation, even if the chances of them being used have thankfully reduced since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. That doesn’t alter the fact that in August 1945 the principal was established that the use of atomic weapons against cities is legitimate, even if the number of victims is enormous. This was an extension of the legitimacy the Allies gave to their firebombing of entire cities in Germany and Japan, but achieved more quickly and economically. Of course, we were lucky that deterrence worked, and it is worth nothing that no Soviet leader or American President ever seriously considered starting a nuclear conflict, although some generals on both sides were in favor of this at several points.

On my last morning in Hiroshima I went for a run, passing the Hypocenter, the point above which the bomb exploded, the brown stone obelisk next to the apartment building) picture above. As I was returned to my hotel I had to wait for a traffic light to cross the road. Suddenly, on the other side of the busy street from me I saw one of those large clocks decorated with flowering plants that you see in public parks around the world. It had been sponsored by the Japanese watch manufacturer CITIZEN, and at that moment it said the time was 8:15 am. This was exactly the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6^th 1945, and one of the most potent symbols of that day are watches and clocks stopped forever at the moment of the explosion. Of course, it was the citizens of Hiroshima who paid the price for this act the American and British governments still have not properly acknowledged for what it was. The claim that the atomic bombings ended the War in the Pacific has been well refuted by professional historians, so this argument is spurious. Anyone who thinks it is possible to deny such acts with impunity is directed to Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Lifton & Greg Mitchell who describe the psychological consequences of being in denial for decades.

This blog posting does not seek to assign blame though, rather it promotes facing the past, so that we aren’t doomed to repeat it. For if we do repeat it there will be no pleasure in wine, or a thousand other beautiful things we take for granted. With the next posting this blog returns to its core subject: the beauty of wine.

Here is the first installment of the talk I gave at the Riesling Fellowship yesterday (Thursday, January 29^th) evening at Vintners Hall in the City of London. Along with Hew Blair and Sebastian Thomas I was made a Riesling Fellow by Wines of Germany, which is kind of them, but not necessary as I don’t do this thing in order to wine prizes. I was also invited to give a 15 minute talk about my life and Riesling while a wine I’d selected was served. I followed Jancis Robinson, David Motion and Hugh Johnson, and what I said caused quite a stink, but that didn’t surprise me. What I said was all true, and I believe it’s far more important to speak an uncomfortable truth that has been swept under the carpet, than to be polite in return for polite applause. These are my opening remarks and they might seem uncontroversial, but were the foundation for all that followed. I think it’s worth noting that three symbols were to be seen all over Vintners Hall. The swan, which an anthropologist would call the totem of the vintners tribe, was almost as ubiquitous as the lion and the unicorn. The latter are of course part of the coat of arms of the House of Windsor (the British royal family), and are essential symbols of the British Establishment. To this episode, like those that follow, I’ve added a few extra words to those I actually said, because I forgot one or two important details.

This evening each of us is telling reminiscences, but mine will be very different from the others. I have to show you my new book (I held up my book),  even though I’m not going to read anything from it, because in it the labels of the first wines – including the first Riesling – I ever drank with pleasure are reproduced.

Call from the audience: “is it in English?”

Yes, it is in English, and I think you should all be able to read the cover. The title, BEST WHITE WINE ON EARTH – The Riesling Story, and it’s in English, American English.

In the book I also tell how I came to drink those wines. (I put down my book). It was April 1975, I was 15 years old and on a language exchange to Germany. I didn’t get on with my exchange partner at all, but that didn’t matter because I got on so well with his family. They lived in a bungalow in a suburb of Ludwigshafen and when I arrived they showed me around. Last stop was the kitchen where the father of the family swung open the refrigerator revealing rows of beer and wine bottles. Then, he said a magical word, “Selbstbedienung”, or self-service. I did so frequently during my stay, enjoyed what I drank and was rarely more than slightly hung-over.

The wine that’s just being poured for you is the 2012 Kupfergrube dry Riesling GG from Gut Hermannsberg, to which I’ll come in a moment. It might seem a banal thing to say, but wine connects us. Most obviously, this wine now connects us all, because we are tasting and drinking it together. Of course, this is the same kind of connection as between a group of people at a dinner table or in a bar who share a bottle. However, beyond that banal level the wine in the glass connects us in a more subtle way with the place where it grew and the people who made it.

In this case, it connects us with Dr. Christine Dinse and Jens Reidel who purchased the ex-Nahe State Domaine in 2009, and with Karsten Peter, the young winemaker from the Pfalz they hired. Of course, he has a team under him and it also links us to them, to the Nahe wine region and to Germany as a whole (both can be found on the label). Beyond that it connects us with the convict laborers who in 1902 started clearing the scrub  around a disused copper mine to build the terraces of this now famous vineyard site and plant it as part of the Prussian Wine Domaine of Niederhausen-Schlossböckelheim, and with those responsible for the first ever vintage of dry Kupfergrube Riesling in 1912. When we choose to drink a wine, we also choose to make those connections, although few people take the trouble to follow them in the kind of detail I just have. Of course, you can also choose not to drink a wine, and that means not to make those connection, for example with Germany.

My direct personal connection with this wine goes back to a sunny day in May 1984 when I first visited the Nahe State Domaine for the first time with British wine merchant Philip Eyres (pictured above, right). He had invited me to join him, his wife Jennifer and his son Harry (pictured above, left) for a week on one of his regular wine buying trips to the Mosel, Nahe and Pfalz. During that trip this tasting which made the greatest impression upon me, and it was the dry and sweet Rieslings from the Kupfergrube vineyard site that etched themselves into my memory.

If there was a single moment that I started on my present course, then that was it. Over the last days I was in the Mosel, Nahe and Rheinhessen visiting wine producers and tasting their wines, much as I did during that week. For more than 20 years I kept on that course in a rather thoughtless way. By this I certainly don’t mean that I didn’t think while I was tasting German wines and talking to the winemakers responsible for them, rather that I didn’t think about why I was doing it. During this time I think it’s fair to say that the success of my articles and books – I mean of each individual work – ranged from negligible to modest. However, there was a cumulative success, without which I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you today. Surely, it masks sense to look back with a critical frame of mind, rather than to idealize the past and in that way to misrepresent it?

TO BE CONTINUED VERY SOON!