28/CHRONICLESnA rousing romp with the documentsnhas succeeded in banishing many anphilosopher’s or social scientist’sn—and historian’s —delusion of “irrepressiblenconflict,” “inevitable rise (ornfall),” “overpowering trend,” and “inexorablenmovement.” Historians arenoften as prone as novelists to ascribenmotives to the principals of historynwhen they don’t know any more aboutnsuch motives than they do their nextdoornneighbor’s. A sudden windfall ofndocuments often helps banish thenworst of claimed motives. Then therenis our love, in history and in fiction, ofngreat—if dubious—unities of personagesnand events. I believe firmly that ifnthere is a 21st century, and there arenstill historians writing, a best-seller willncome off the press with the engagingntitle Stalin, Hitler, and Churchill: AnStudy in Twentieth Century Unity.nThere are as bad if not worse titles tonbe found even now in the libraryncatalogs.nAnother idol of the historian’s andnjournalist’s mind is “crisis.” We mustnbe forever indebted to Elizabeth Eisensteinnfor her discovery that everynsingle century from at least the 12th innEuropean history all the way down tonthe 20th has been labeled, in title asnwell as theme, “Century of Crisis.”nNor must I forget “innocence.”nBreathes there the century or halfcenturynor decade that hasn’t beenncharacterized an “Age of Innocence”?nFrom which, naturally, there was anFall. In the end, only the documentsnhelp save us from lasting refuge innthese secularizations of the biblical.nProfessor Carsten, of the Universitynof London, gives us in his illuminatingntreatment of the Weimar Republic andnits relation to the West an importantndistillation of his explorations of documentsnof both the Foreign and the WarnOffices in Britain. As he points out,nBritish officers and officials had anunique excellence of observational positionnwith respect to Germany duringnthe years immediately following thensurrender of November 1918. “Owingnto the occupation of the Rhinelandnand the several Allied Commissionsnworking in Germany—partiy military,npardy supervising the various plebiscites—nBritish officers and officialsnwere in an almost unique position tonobserve the German scene. … Innaddition some German ministers,nabove all Streseman, were in the habitnof talking confidentially to British diplomatsnin Germany, of unburdeningntheir hearts and expressing their secretnworries to them.”nWhat we gain from Professor Carsten’snimmersion in the files is a crisplynwritten, spare, and no-nonsense treatmentnof the history of the WeimarnRepublic as seen through the eyes ofnsome of the top British officials of then1920’s, one and all present on thenscene and alert to what was happening.nFrom the opening chapter, “Defeatnand Reolution in Germany,”nthrough “Bavaria and the HitlernPutsch,” “The Great Crisis of 1923,”nand “The Final Crisis,” down to thenfinal chapter, “The National SocialistnTakeover,” we are treated to a narrativenaccount of that ill-fated governmentnthat is close to exemplary, it seems tonme. The spread of the poisons ofnGerman anti-Semitism within Weimarntogether with frank accounts ofnthe conditions within which the poisonsngained their greatest potency andnof the reactions of all classes of non-nJewish Germans, all this is found innimpressive detail in the varied reportsnof Britons on the scene to their homenoffices. On the whole, while Englandnslept (if indeed it did sleep during a fullndecade of turmoil,. strife, and breakdownnof its own) the diplomatic corpsndid a respectable job.n”Faced by the rise of the NationalnSocialist movement, some of the ForeignnOffice officials took too rosy anview of its ‘youthfulness,’ its ‘vigor,’nand its ‘sincerity,’ and praised its determinationnto restore ‘discipline’ innGerman youth. . . . Yet these illusionsndid not last, and the diplomaticnreports on the ‘seizure of power’ werencompletely realistic and made no effortnto conceal or condone the terror unleashednin Germany.” It is also true, asnCarsten shows beyond question, thatn• at least some of the Foreign Officenpeople in Germany showed a rootednanti-Semitism of their own, a state ofnmind that largely accounted for somenexaggerated or distorted accounts ofnJewish influence in Germany. Butnthese, we find, are the exceptions. Fornthe most part the multitude of documentsnexamined by Professor Carstennreveal laudable perceptiveness andnobjectivity.nFrom Carsten’s account, we are jus­nnntified, I think, in rejecting for oncenand all the recurrent charges that thenBritish official mind, that particulady “nof the Foreign Office, was seized byndefeatism and appeasement prior tonChurchill’s ascendancy to the PrimenMinistership in mid-1940. Chamberlainnmade one, and one only, seriousnmistake at Munich in 1938: that wasnhis egregious phrase “peace withnHonor” when he returned to Britain.nBut aversion of war with Germany wasnan absolute necessity for Britain. It hadna great navy but nothing else, least ofnall anything resembling an air force.nHitier would not have been deceivednon that score, sitting as he was on topnof the greatest air force in the world innthat year. Happily for mankind, a greatndeal got done in Britain, and muchnmore started, in the short period betweennMunich and September 1939nwhen Nazi forces invaded Poland.nJohn Colville’s The Fringes of Powernis, I have to say, somewhat disappointingnas a World War 11 diar-. It can’tncompete either in importance or sheerninterest with the diaries kept by FieldnMarshall Alanbrooke, Chief of thenImperial General Staff for Great Britainnthrough most of the war; by LordnMoran, personal. Parliament-imposednphysician to Churchill throughout; orneven the diary kept by Harry Butcher,nspecial aid and constant companion ofnEisenhower. My strong interest innColville’s work was aroused last September,nbefore the diaries’ publication,nby an article he wrote in Commentary.nThe subject was essentially .nhow we won the war against Nazismnbut lost the peace in 1945 throughnwartime mistakes by America andnGreat Britain in their relation to thenSoviet Union.nColville does not by any meansnexculpate Churchill and Britain, butnhe quite correctly lays the larger sharenof blame upon Roosevelt and some ofnthose closest to him, both civil andnmilitary. From the beginning, as Colvillennotes (in line with the bulk ofnhistorical assessments written sincen1945) a haze of romantic populismninterfered with a clear-eyed view ofnStalin and the Soviets. In the minds ofnthe American principals, starting withnFDR, the British Empire was a greaterndanger to postwar peace and tranquillitynthan the Soviet Union and thensovietized dictatorships it began form-n