Julia Boyd: Travellers in the Third Reich / A Village in the Third Reich
Earlier this year, in February I was making a trip to my dentists in Edinburgh, well Ferry Road in Leith, actually -, they’ve been great companions to me & my chompers for twenty years. Anyways, I had a bit of time to wait, & Leith Library wass only two minutes away, so I bobbl’d along & one book in particular leapt out from the shelves – ‘Travellers in the Third Reich,’ by Julia Boyd. I hadn’t heard of the book or the author, but spending only a few minutes with them both encourag’d me enough to order the book online.
It duly came, & then subsequently gather’d dust until early July, when finally opening it to read properly upon Brodick beach on Arran, where I live, little did I know that within, what, a day, I had decided to pick up my epic poem once more. We’re talking another 30,000 lines or so, fpr what became completely apparent to me on reading Boyd’s brilliant bringing-to-life prose, is that there is so much more I needed to cover, especially about the rise of the Nazi regime.
I spent a week or two with ‘Travellers,’ assiduously underlining everything I will be using as materielle for when I return to my epic, Axis & Allies, sometime next spring. Boyd’s book basically tells the story of the rise of the Third Reich thro’ visitors to Germany between the wars. Hate’s possibly too strong a word, but Boyd has no sympathy for the Nazis whatsoever, & good on her. Chapter by chapter we slowly feel the authoritarian walls of total tyranny taking over German society lock, stock & barrel, while the ever approaching horizon of complete catastrophe approaches page by page. Hindsight is a wonderful thing – but none of these accounts could really even barely imagine the horrors & suffering & paranoia that would soon consume all facets & spheres of existence.
As a fellow historian I really appreciate her work. The future needs to know how the human race is potentially as gullible as the Germans were for Hitler’s demonically seductive character, entwin’d with Goebell’s genius for propaganda. Lest we forget. A fine example of Boy’d’s approach & technique – mixing overarching narrative with on the spot contemporary accounts – can be seen thro’ the visit to Germany of British feminist and Conservative Party politician, Thelma Cazalet;
While King Alfonso took the waters at Mareienbad, Thelma Cazalet was visiting empty factories & youth unemployment camps in the Rhineland. The latter aimed to provide short-term, low paid work for those aged between eighteen & twenty-five. Thelma, like her brother Victor, a Tory MP, was in Germany on a fact-finding tour with a group of fellow parliamentarians. In a few pencil-scribbled lines, she summed up her impressions.
Germans loathe the Poles – mainly because they are Asiatic. They tackle for granted we are on their side against the French & feel we could & should take a firmer stand with them. They have no idea about conditions in England. They imagine we have hardly suffered & have forgotten the war. Very insensitive as a nation. No doubt Hitler’s party has saved Germany from a Socialist/Communist government by splitting the people up. Nearly all the young are Hitlerites. Germans all assume we shall be on their side in the next war.
As I came to the end of this brilliant book, this magnificent compendium of professionally curated travelogues, I became aware of a follow-up call’d ‘A Village in the Third Reich. ’A bloody sequel – brilliant! On obtaining the book I was suddenly thrust into the other side of the Nazi cancer – that which rotted the innards of Germany, with Hitler’s rise & fall now being told from the standpoint of a single German mountain village, the most southern in the country actually, & it’s interesting panoply of inhabitants – Oberstdorf. This book’s kernel is an attempt made by the Oberstdorfers themselves to record their ‘awkward’ history of the Nazi period, a task completed in the main by Angelika Patel, who gets credited as a co-author. Out of Patel’s mission prosper’d an incredible amount of detail’d tales, accounts, anecdotes, etc., were obtain’d for posterity. Of her evolution, Boyd says;
I would aim not merely to present a factual account of how one German community had fared under Hitler, but to make these people – with all their problems, dreams, hopes & foibles, their compromises & contradictions – come alive on the page.
From Oberstdorf, Boyd then widens the scope of the book, following the village’s inhabitants across the war’s diasporic scatterings. I really enjoy’d, for example, the account of certain of Oberstdorf’s mountain regiment soldiers, harden’d by life in the Alps back home, taking over a hotel at Mount Elbrus, in the Caucasus, while the Battle of Stalingrad was raging. Here’s an extract from that section;
After several days on the road they reached the Ullu-Kam valley. The trucks were sent back & the man started to climb. Having survived so much death & annihilation in recent months, they now found themselves tramping through deciduous forest along a path lined with exquisite Alpine flowers. Groth later recalled how, once they started climbing, the men were unusually quiet;
But it was not their loads (which grew ever more oppressive as the path steepened) that caused their silence, but rather the sheer loveliness of the landscape. When we reached the end of the valley, we were rewarded with a broad vista of astonishing tranquility… soon we reached the Chotju-Tau Pass & were again thrilled by a magnificent view. Ahead of us stood the massive ice-covered mountains with the bizarrely striking shapes. Above them all soared our objective – Elbrus. We knew there would be no turning back until our flag was flying on its summit.
The flag, of course, is the Swastika – & the book is full of them, descriptions of anyway, & all the other despicable trappings of Nazi nonsense· Boyd is a really evocative writer – she completely sucks you in, like. Over both of these astoundingly, meticulously research’d books, her wordsmithery is engaging & addictive, & her ability to ressurrect long dead individuals is positively bardic. She is a true visionary, a poet perhaps, & this is what makes this book all the more special. She is communing with our ancestors, finding in their accumulated & shar’d experiences a severe message of warning for us all & all to come, not to fall for nob-head tyrants.
If Boyd was solely a poet, the epic vision she possess would have created some sublime works for the slopes of Parnassus. Telling a gigantic story using only a few characters, avatars let’s say, is a key component of epic, & the way Boyd hande’s her evolving narrative thro individual responses to events at large is masterful. A true story teller, she would have been worship’d as some kind of Snorri Sturlsson among the Icelandic bards & saga writers. One of her greatest abilities is showing how, altho’ World War Two was a polarised period all about paragons of goodness & evil demons – most people bounced between the two opposites, if only to merely survive those desperate days .All the nuances of this spectrum were magnificently handl’d.
Julia, I cannot praise these two books highly enough, & you have given my epic poem new life, new purpose, new materielle & most of all, new vigor – thank you!
Damo
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