Confronting History: A Memoir

12 - Excursus: London as Home

12 Excursus London as Home OF ALL THE many cities I have mentioned and experiences I have thus far recalled, London is missing simply because it is so familiar to me and has been ever since my Bootham days. Except for wartime, no year has passed that I did not stayfor some time in that city. Moreover, the basic research for most of my books was done there, at first in the British Museum, watched over by the ghosts of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, and then in the Wiener Library, which specialized in the history of National Socialism. This library deserves a special mention because it became for all intents and purposes the center of my London experience, an extension of my own private library, so much so that I dedicated my book on the cultural origins of National Socialism not to a friend but to the library and to Ilse Wolff, its longtime librarian. The Wiener Library was a private library founded by Alfred Wiener, a former official of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, the most important association of German Jews. During his exile he began gathering Nazi materials, much of them ephemeral , which previously had been trashed as mere propaganda. I had begun working in its always expanding holdings in the 1950s, and eventually sat on its governing board for eighteen years. The library's colorful and eccentric staff of Central European refugees, all marvelously helpful librarians, could have provided the stuff for a novel. Libraries are the center of any scholar's life, and for me, memories of a foreign city are mostly memories of the libraries where I would spend much of my time. Though I had known Paris extremely well ever since my visits in the 1930s, the Bibliotheque Nationale with its convoluted catalogue, 203 Excursus: London as Home dangerous steps in the reading room, and graceful interior, was Paris at its most familiar-while the walk to the library through the gardens of the Palais Royal seemed to sum up all the charm of that city. But during the early 1960s I also frequented another, smaller library, the Bibliotheque du Centre de DocumentationJuive Contemporaine, whichspecialized in recent Jewish history. This was the time of the Algerian war, and the elderly lady who supervised the library was given a decidedly odd commission , as extraordinary as it was imaginative: to collect the graffiti on the walls of the toilets in several Paris metro stations-vox populi-as the voice of the people. I helped her a little, and these splashes, filled with political prejudice, are now, if I remember correctly, recorded in the library at the University of Paris-Vincennes, raw material for works on racism. But perhaps the most scary venue for my research was the library ofthe Paris Prefecture of Police, the police headquarters, where on the top floor I sat surrounded by instruments of torture and other tools of the trade which in the past had been used by the Paris police to spy and to intimidate. Perhaps not such a bad venue for a work on Les jaunes, the nineteenth-century rightwing and racist French labor union about which I was writing. For oral history there was the Librairie Hebert, a right-wing bookstore where, sitting with its patrons around the potbellied stove, one could in the 1960s still pick up lore about French fascism. Its entrance was shared oddly enough with the Jewish Hillel Foundation, surely a rather bizarre coincidence. But then my pursuit of the history of fascism and National Socialism did lead me into byways, such as research in Paris subway stations or meeting as many Nazis and fascists as I could find. I frequented bookshops like the Librairie Hebert which were the favorite places of retired fascist intellectuals, and which allowed them to continue their propaganda whether in Rome or in Paris. The bookstore which succeeded the Librairie Hebert as specializing in fascist and royalist literature was run by a former fascist man of letters, Maurice Bardeche, and it put out an advisory letter about"books to be read and books not to be read," which I still treasure. The bookstores I knew are all closed now, after the deaths of their usually aged owners. I was just in time. The time I spent in these bookstores fitted in with my efforts to supplement my documentary research by probing the minds of former Nazis or fascists, in order to make it easier...