Dear Mr James,
I am at the moment reading your “Cultural Amnesia”, which I picked up at the “Strand” bookshop in New York City, and please let me start by saying that I admire your enyclopedia immensely. I do not really know what I enjoy more—is it the fine moral sentiment that informs every paragraph you write (your apt description of Leon Trotsky, for instance)? Or is it the fact that finally someone in the English speaking world recognizes the greatness of my major heroes, namely the Viennese-Jewish boheme of the 1920ies? (Your piece on Alfred Polgar is full of sharp insights, and you are right of course—he did hate every minute of the Nazi disaster.) I definitely salute your courage to digress from your subject matter without the remotest sense of awkwardness. (A case in point is your essay on Rilke, which is mostly about Brecht—and about the curious fact that we forgive artists and composers their totalitarian flirtations more easily than we forgive poets.)
However—there always is a “however” lurking in the background, isn’t there?—your great and wonderful book is marred by quite a few flaws. For starters, you manage to misspell almost every German word; sometimes, you choose the wrong word altogether. (Freud was dealing with “Versprecher” not with “Sprachfehler”, which means “speech impediments”.) Perhaps the most serious mistake is the one you make with regard to Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who, by the way, is simply abbreviated thus: MRR, without a slash). Nobody ever accused MRR of spying for the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi. However, he did work for the Polish secret service in London at a time when the communist government in Warsaw was doing away with its opponents, and London, as you well know, was one of the battle grounds—so the allegations are a bit more serious than you make them out to be.
No matter. I have no wish to come across as one of those obnoxious people who write letters to the editor only because they love to point out factual errors (this brand of bores flourishes in the German climate, which should not come as a particular surprise). However, the problem remains that in such a fine book as yours these mistakes appear disproportionally large: in a sense, you yourself have put the magnifying glass in the reader’s hand, and now he can’t help but use it against you. Would it be asking too much to have someone skim through your encyclopedia before the second edition goes into print?
Yours most sincerely,
H.S.
PS And another thing. You write beautifully about the German resistance to Hitler: about Sophie Scholl and Henning von Tresckow, among others, and provide valuable insights into the warped moral universe of Ernst Juenger. But it seems you have never heard of Johann Georg Elser, the lone Schwabian tinkerer who, as far as I am concerned, is more of a hero than most of the other resistance fighters lumped together—partly because he was such a loveable character. Far too few streets in Germany are named after him, and he should be included in your hall of fame.