Challenging 'good war' with a blitzkrieg of data

By Duane Davis, Special to the Rocky

Published March 21, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Photo by Hal Grossman / Special to the Rocky

A photo of President Franklin Roosevelt hangs in New York City's Times Square on May 8, 1945. Roosevelt is one of many leaders examined in Nicholson Baker's new book.

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Nicholson Baker is the generally well-regarded author of seven novels and three works of nonfiction. I say "generally" because there's little doubt that, as a writer, Baker is a decidedly odd duck.

His first novel, The Mezzanine, is a 135-page stream-of-consciousness rumination in the narrator's mind as he rides an escalator from the lobby to the mezzanine of the building where he works. Oddly enough for fiction, it has lots of footnotes but almost no action.

In 1992, Baker brought out Vox, a novel detailing a phone-sex conversation. It gained notoriety not only for salacious content but because it was rumored that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy to Bill Clinton.

More recently, in 2004, Baker issued a novel, Checkpoint, that consists entirely of a dialogue between two old high school friends. On the second page, one of the characters announces that he has decided to assassinate President George W. Bush. Not surprisingly, this scenario was, ummm, controversial with members of the current administration and its supporters.

Now comes Human Smoke, a nonfiction look at the causes and conduct of World War II that will undoubtedly stir up another wasp's nest of controversy, for it is, really, a poke in the eye of the Greatest Generation, bringing into question some of our most cherished notions and myths about what many of us consider to be the last "good" war: a war honorably fought by our side, for honorable reasons.

In Human Smoke (which refers to the smoke from the death camp ovens in which corpses were burned), Baker makes his argument by what we might call a "pointillist" method: the accumulation of hundreds of "dots" of information retrieved from libraries and archives with extraordinary diligence and then placed in chronological order with virtually no editorial comment. The book's impact is gradual and, like a painting by Georges Seurat, only becomes a coherent whole when you reach the end and take a few steps back from it.

The book's first entry is from 1892, a quote from Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Nobel states that "On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops."

Baker then moves quickly to the mid- and late-1930s, where the entries become an almost daily diary of death, dread and destruction. Here the pace comes close to a standstill as Baker takes us day-by- day through the many things he wants to point out about how the world ended up at war and how that war was executed.

Among the many eyebrow- raising tidbits Baker offers:

* On Nov. 18, 1938, eight days after Kristallnacht, FDR once again refused to increase the quota of Jewish refugees allowed into the U.S. from Nazi Germany.

* On May 15, 1940, five days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill called for the roundup of "enemy aliens and suspect persons." But, Baker notes, "the war-cabinet minutes record no mention that the majority of the aliens were Jewish refugees of recent arrival." Within days, 11,000 people had been placed in detention camps, most of them Jews.

* On Aug. 11, 1940, former President Herbert Hoover wrote that there would be "wholesale starvation" in Belgium, Holland, Poland and Norway and requested that Churchill allow civilian relief through the blockade of those countries. Churchill would not relent. Hoover later wrote that Churchill "was a militarist of the extreme school who held that the incidental starvation of women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory."

* In a rare bit of editorial commentary, Baker writes apropos of Churchill's desire to bomb civilians that "Bombing was, to Churchill, a form of pedagogy - a way of enlightening city dwellers as to the hellishness of remote battlefields by killing them."

While much of this calls into question the purity of our side's actions, Baker is not so naive as to ignore the obvious evil of Hitler's pathological hatred of Jews and his ability to involve almost the whole of his nation in that sickness.

Baker unearthed, for example, the story of the Rev. Bernhard Lichtenberg, a Catholic priest who was arrested by the Gestapo for "offering daily prayers for the Jews." When the Gestapo threatened to send him to a camp in Lodz "to join his 'dear Jews,' " this incredibly brave, forgotten man replied, "That is the very thing I was going to ask." He was imprisoned and two years later died on his way to Dachau.

But Baker highlights just how morally complex all this can get by including a 1939 letter sent to Gandhi, which noted that "in Germany, a Jewish Gandhi would last about five minutes before he was executed." Gandhi wrote back that he still held to a policy of non-violence: "I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators. . . . Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime."

Baker, elsewhere, has said that he has "always had a tendency toward pacifism" but that "the great counterexample everyone uses is the Second World War. So I asked the question, was it in fact a necessary war?"

While the author doesn't tell readers how he would answer that question, I suspect that those who read this book (and I strongly recommend that you do) will put it down, step back, mentally, a few paces and then say to themselves, "Yes, now more than ever I believe this was a necessary war."

This book's importance is not that it will change minds - I don't believe it will. Its importance lies in its revelation that no war, however necessary, should be idealized and glorified as completely "right" and "honorable." War requires not just courage, endurance and intelligence but a vigilant and relentless self-awareness as well.

Human Smoke reminds us of that on its every page.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

* By Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster, 624 pages, $30.

* Grade: A

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