Christmas Every Day

St Germanus

Those readers who were unfortunate enough to see the 2005 Antoine Fuqua film King Arthur might think they have seen a glimpse of the real St Germanus in the guise of the character “Bishop Germanius”. In this wretched movie, Germanius (like the real Germanus) is an opponent of Pelagianism which is presented as a form of political democracy (which it most assuredly was not). He, like all other Christians in the film, is a Bad Guy. The real Germanus was much more interesting than this cartoon villain.

Germanus, also known as St. Germain, (380-448) was born into a wealthy and well-connected family at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West. As a brilliant lawyer he came to the attention of the imperial court and was named a Duke (a post combining military and administrative responsibilities) in charge of provinces in Gaul. He was based at Auxerre in what is now central France and would have dealt with the invading Germanic barbarians as well as trying to keep civilization going in a time of chaos. Like many Roman administrators of the time he left the civil service and joined the Church where he was made bishop of Auxerre. Around 429 he was sent across the Channel into Britain, a province abandoned by the Roman army and beset by raiders from all sides. The island was also the home of the dangerous Pelagian heresy which denied Original Sin and insisted on the ability of the free human will to perfect itself. Germanus was sent to Britain to confront the supporters of this idea and reassert orthodoxy, which he seems to have done successfully. A 20th-century poem by Hilaire Belloc says:

And then with his stout Episcopal staff
So thoroughly whacked and banged
The heretics all, both short and tall,
They rather had been hanged.

While in Britain he learned of a combined attack by northern tribes known as Picts, and  German raiders. He led an ambush of the invaders known as the “Alleluia Victory” after the Christian battle cry. Germanus also seems to have played a role in the establishment of the cult of St Alban, British Christianity’s first martyr. Back in Gaul he continued his battles against barbarians. He died at Ravenna, the imperial capital  where he had gone to try and convince the worthless emperor Honorius to call off his barbarian mercenaries, but he is buried in Auxerre where his relics were venerated until his tomb was destroyed by Protestants in the 16th century.

1718 The death of William Penn

William Penn, born in London in 1644, was the son of a prominent English admiral. He became a convert to Quakerism, a sect which in the 17th century was infamous for its threats to conventional society and theology. Chambers’ Book of Days gives an account of his life and accomplishments.

His father had bequeathed him a claim on the government of £16,000 for arrears of pay and cash advanced to the navy. Penn very well knew that such a sum was irrecoverable from Charles II; he had long dreamed of founding a colony where peace and righteousness might dwell together; and he decided to compound his debt for a tract of country in North America. The block of land he selected lay to the north of the Catholic province of Maryland, owned by Lord Baltimore; its length was nearly 300 miles, its width about 160, and its area little less than the whole of England. Objections were raised; but Charles was only too glad to get rid of a debt on such easy terms. At the council, where the charter was granted, Penn stood in the royal presence, it is said, with his hat on. The king thereupon took off his; at which Penn observed, ‘Friend Charles, why dost thou not keep on thy hat?’ to which his majesty replied, laughing: ‘It is the custom of this place for only one person to remain covered at a time.’ The name which Penn had fixed on for his province was New Wales; but Secretary Blathwayte, a Welshman, objected to have the Quaker-country called after his land. He then proposed Sylvania, and to this the king added Penn, in honour of the admiral.

The fine country thus secured became the resort of large numbers of Quakers, who, to their desire for the free profession of their faith, united a spirit of enterprise; and very quickly Pennsylvania rose to high importance among the American plantations. Its political constitution was drawn up by Penn, aided by Algernon Sidney, on extreme democratic principles. Perfect toleration to all sects was accorded. ‘Whoever is right,’ Penn used to say, ‘the persecutor must be wrong.’ The world thought him a visionary; but his resolution to treat the Indians as friends, and not as vermin to be extirpated, seemed that of a madman. So far as he could prevent, no instrument of war was allowed to appear in Pennsylvania. He met the Indians, spoke kindly to them, promised to pay a fair price for whatever land he and his friends might occupy, and assured them of his good-will. If offences should unhappily arise, a jury of six Indians and six Englishmen should decide upon them.

The Indians met Penn in his own spirit. No oaths, no seals, no official mummeries were used; the treaty was ratified on both sides with a yea, yea—the only one, says Voltaire, “that the world has known, never sworn to, and never broken.” A strong evidence of Penn’s sagacity is the fact, that not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian; and forty years elapsed from the date of the treaty, ere a red man was slain by a white in Pennsylvania. The murder was an atrocious one, but the Indians themselves prayed that the murderer’s life might be spared. It was spared; but he died in a very short time, and they then said, the Great Spirit had avenged their brother.

It will be thought that Penn made a capital bargain, in the purchase of Pennsylvania for £16,000; but in his lifetime, he drew little but trouble from his investment. The settlers withheld his dues, disobeyed his orders, and invaded his rights; and he was kept in constant disquiet by intrigues for the nullification of his charter. Distracted by these cares, he left his English property to the care of a steward, who plundered him mercilessly; and his later years were saddened with severe pecuniary distress. He was twice married, and in both cases to admirable women. His eldest son, a promising youth, he lost just as he verged on manhood; and a second son, by riotous living, brought himself to an early grave, trying Penn’s fatherly heart with many sorrows. Multiplied afflictions did not, however, sour his noble nature, nor weaken his settled faith in truth and goodness.

Penn’s intimacy with James II exposed him, in his own day, to much suspicion, which yet survives. It ought to be remembered, that Admiral Penn and James were friends; that the admiral, at death, consigned his son William to his guardianship; and that between James and his ward there sprung up feelings apparently amounting to affection. While James was king, Penn sometimes visited him daily, and persuaded him to acts of clemency, otherwise unattainable. Penn scorned as a Quaker, James hated as a Catholic, could sympathise as brothers in adversity. Penn, by nature, was kindly, and abounding in that charity which thinketh no evil; and taking the worst view of James’s character, it is in nowise surprising that Penn should have been the victim of his duplicity. It is well known that rogues could do little mischief, if it were not so easy to make good men their tools.

There was very little of that asceticism about Penn which is thought to belong to—at least early —Quakerism. The furniture of his houses was equal in ornament and comfort to that of any gentleman of his time. His table abounded in every real luxury. He was fond of fine horses, and had a passion for boating. The ladies of his household dressed like gentlewomen—wore caps and buckles, silk gowns and golden ornaments. Penn had no less than four wigs in America, all purchased the same year, at a cost of nearly £20. To innocent dances and country fairs he not only made no objection, but patronised them with his own and his family’s presence.

William Penn, after a lingering illness of three or four years, in which his mind suffered, but not painfully, died at Ruscombe on the 30th July 1718, and was buried at the secluded village of Jordans, in Buckinghamshire. No stone marks the spot, although many a pilgrim visits the grave.

1890

Vincent van Gogh shoots himself

If there were a contest for the world’s best-loved artist, it would probably be won by Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). His universally appealing art, his lack of success in his lifetime, and his self-destructive final years add up to a romantic and tragic tale of an unjustly-neglected genius.

Van Gogh was born into a well-to-do Dutch family who arranged for Vincent to be trained as an art dealer but after initial success in that field, he grew disenchanted and left the art world to become, first, a teacher, and then a Protestant minister. Neither profession suited Vincent whose bouts of depression and instability made him unemployable and caused his family worry. At the suggestion of his brother Theo, he took up art and spent the last ten years of his life exploring various techniques before settling on the bold post-Impressionist style that he made his own.

Though Van Gogh was attracting admiration from his fellow artists, his work was not commercially successful; his poverty would have prevented his painting had he not been supported by Theo. His greatest pieces came out of his last two years, after a move to Arles in the south of France. He worked quickly producing over 200 paintings and over 100 drawings and pastels. During this time he associated with Paul Gauguin and in the turbulence of this relationship, in December 1889, van Gogh cut his ear off and sent it to a prostitute. This was followed by a stay in a mental asylum which allowed him studio space and there he produced his gorgeous Starry Night. In May 1890 he left the asylum and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be treated by a homeopath, Dr Paul Gachet. His deep-seated mental illness, however, never left him and on July 27 he shot himself in the chest. It took him two days to die; he succumbed in the presence of his brother Theo who recorded Vincent’s last words as “The sadness will last forever”.

1888 Birth of Raymond Chandler

The English language owes much to American wordsmith Raymond Chandler who elevated the private eye into a cultural icon. Chandler was born in Nebraska to Maurice Chandler, an alcoholic father who soon abandoned his family, and Florence Dart, a devoted mother who had young Raymond educated at ritzy Dulwich College in England.

He served with a Canadian regiment during World War I but had difficulty finding his way in peacetime. Chandler had problems with alcohol, mommy issues, and holding a steady job. It was not until he was in his 40s that Chandler found his true métier, writing hard-boiled detective novels, a genre which he raised from pulp fiction to literary art. Gems like The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye were turned into films. [By all means revel in the cinematic delights of the first two mentioned, graced by Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart — but, at all costs, avoid Robert Altman’s unforgivable 1973 desecration of the latter.]

Here are some great Chandler lines:

1899 Birth of Hart Crane

What is it about poets? Their lives seem so much more troubled and eventful than ordinary mortals. Ovid dies in exile; François Villon is tortured and banished; Christopher Marlowe is stabbed to death in a bar fight; Milton goes blind; adulterous, incestuous Byron dies in a civil war; Shelley dies at sea; Thomas Chatterton and John Keats die poor and young; Christopher Smart and Ezra Pound spend years in an insane asylum; Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and John  McCrae perish in the trenches of World War I; Anne Sexton, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sylvia Plath commit suicide; Garcia Lorca is murdered; Dylan Thomas drinks himself to death. And then there is Hart Crane.

Born into a prosperous family, the son of the inventor of Life-Saver candy, Crane dropped out of high school to become a writer. He soon attracted a supportive readership — his unhappiness was not caused by an unfeeling world. Since few poets have ever managed to feed and clothe themselves from the financial rewards of their art (Rod McKuen is a dishonourable exception), he relied on handouts, generous patrons, and long-suffering friends as he laboured to complete The Bridge, his attempt at The Great American Poem, his answer to Virgil’s Aeniad or Eliot’s The Waste Land.

His homosexuality, which sought relief at the hands of sailors and other rough trade, brought him beatings rather than joy. His alcoholism and belligerence as a drunk earned him a spell in a Parisian jail. Crane’s one heterosexual excursion with painter Peggy Cowley ended unhappily and soon after that period, in April 1932, clothed in his pyjamas and a top coat, he threw himself off the railing of a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. His last words were “Goodbye, everybody!”

My favourite poem of this unhappy fellow is “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”.

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

In the loose girdle of soft rain.


There is even room enough

For the letters of my mother’s mother,

Elizabeth,

That have been pressed so long

Into a corner of the roof

That they are brown and soft,

And liable to melt as snow.


Over the greatness of such space

Steps must be gentle.

It is all hung by an invisible white hair.

It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.


And I ask myself:


"Are your fingers long enough to play

Old keys that are but echoes:

Is the silence strong enough

To carry back the music to its source

And back to you again

As though to her?"


Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand

Through much of what she would not understand;

And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof

With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Operation Valkyrie fails

By the summer of 1944 it was evident to all but Adolf Hitler that Germany was soon going to lose the war. The western Allies were ashore in great numbers in Normandy and were headed for Paris. In Italy, Rome  had fallen. At sea, the Atlantic had been scoured of U-boats and Germany’s few remaining capital ships dared not leave port. The Vaterland’s cities were being incinerated night (RAF) and day (USAAF) while the relentless push of the Red Army was driving the Wehrmacht and its allies back toward Berlin. 

The doom that awaited those who bore responsibility for starting the war and the revenge that would be wrought on Germany was clear to the officer elite. Some hoped that a new government, cleansed of Nazis, might be able to get better terms than Unconditional Surrender and some may even have thought of an Anglo-American-German alliance against the Soviet Union. A group of officers, dominated by those with aristocratic or Christian connections, planned to kill Hitler in his Prussian Wolf’s Lair (as close as he ever got to the Eastern Front) on July 20. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, head of the Home Army, was to place a bomb in the conference room near the Führer, and then radio his fellow plotters in Berlin when the assassination had been successfully carried out. 

Unfortunately, Stauffenberg had suffered the loss of an eye, one hand and fingers on he other and from a war injury and he was unable to prime all the explosives in the case. Moreover, an aide had nudged the bomb farther under a thick oak table which shielded Hitler from the blast. Worse yet, Stauffenberg thought that Hitler had been killed in the explosion and told the Berlin cabal to carry out their coup. Within hours the truth was known, and the conspirators were either dead (the lucky ones) or arrested to await torture and execution. The war would continue.

The best short book on the subject is “Countdown to Valkyrie by Nigel Jones. Ben Pastor’s Night of Falling Stars is an entertaining fictional account. Of Tom Cruise’s portrayal of Stauffenberg in Valkyrie, it is best not to speak.

1942

The Vel’ d’Hiv’ Roundup

Early in 1942, the German government decided on a policy of exterminating Jews in the territories under their control by shipping them to death camps in eastern Europe. To do so in  France required the permission of the puppet French government in Vichy, which agreed that the German occupying forces could arrest foreign Jews, while French Jews would be scooped up by local police. After securing the agreement of the Vichy government, German officials and French police conducted roundups of Jews in both the occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. The Vél d’Hiv was part of a series of roundups codenamed Opération Vent printanier (Operation Spring Wind) that took place across the country in spring and summer of 1942.

Preparations for the Roundup

Planning for the Vél d’Hiv roundup took place among René Bousquet, secretary general of the French national police; Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Commissioner for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy Régime; SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, head of Adolf Eichmann’s Judenreferat [Jewish Section] in France; and SS-Oberstürmführer Helmut Knochen, head of the German Security Police in France.

The Director of the local Paris Municipal Police, Emile Hennequin, sent precise expectations for the roundup to the police prefecture three days before the event. The roundup was originally set to take place from July 13–15, which included Bastille Day, the French national holiday. The holiday was not celebrated in the occupied zones of France, and in order to preclude local rioting, Nazi officials allowed French officials to delay the operation until July 16–17.

The German goal was that French police would round up 28,000 foreign and stateless Jews in the greater Paris area. They were to exempt “sensitive cases” such as British or American Jews. Although German authorities had originally agreed to exempt children under the age of 16, French Prime Minister Pierre Laval suggested for “humanitarian” reasons that children be arrested with their parents, unless a family member remained behind to care for them. Four thousand children were among those arrested in Paris.

In order to maintain a detailed record of the roundup, the police were to report the number of people they arrested each hour to their local prefecture.

July 16–17

Beginning in the early hours of July 16, French police rounded up thousands of men, women, and children throughout Paris. By the end of the day, the police had taken 2,573 men, 5,165 women, and 3,625 children from their homes. The roundup continued the following day, but with a much smaller number of arrests.

Approximately 6,000 of those rounded up were immediately transported to Drancy, in the northern suburbs of Paris. Drancy was at that point a transit camp for Jews being deported from France. The rest of the arrestees were detained at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (Winter Cycling Track), an indoor sporting arena in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement.

Officials could have held few illusions of the unsuitability of the “Vél d’Hiv” for holding such a large population indefinitely. Early in the war, it had been used to intern German nationals, mainly refugees. In 1940 it housed interned foreign women. In both instances, conditions were deplorable.

Following the roundup of Jews in greater Paris, some 7,000 Jews, among them almost 4,000 children, were crowded together in the sports arena. There was scarcely space to lie down and the incarcerated Jews faced appalling circumstances. No arrangements had been made for food, water, or sanitary facilities. Only two physicians a shift were allowed in to treat the internees. The glass ceiling of the arena contributed to a stifling environment by day, as all ventilation had been sealed to prevent escape, and led to chilly temperatures at night. Parisian Quakers came to bring food and water.

Aftermath

After five days, Jews incarcerated at the Vél d’Hiv were transferred to other transit camps outside Paris. At Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande, French police guarded these men, women, and children until transport to concentration camps and killing centers in the east. At the end of July, the remaining adults were separated from their children and deported to Auschwitz. Over 3,000 children remained interned without their parents until they were deported, among adult strangers, to Auschwitz as well.

German authorities continued the deportations of Jews from French soil until August 1944. In all, some 77,000 Jews living on French territory perished, the overwhelming majority of them at Auschwitz.

Postwar Trials

For his prominent role in the deportation of Jews from France, Pierre Laval, formerly the French Prime Minister, was arrested and tried after the liberation of France. He was shot by firing squad on 15 October 1945.

The fate of two German officials most involved in the Vél d’Hiv mirrored the common fates of high-ranking SS administrators. Theodor Dannecker was arrested by American officials in Bad Tölz, Bavaria, in December 1945, and committed suicide while in custody. Helmut Knochen, sentenced by a British court to 21 years in prison for a separate offense, was sentenced to death by a French court in 1954. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Knochen was released on orders of French President Charles de Gaulle in November 1962.

In 1949, René Bousquet, secretary general of the French police, was found guilty for his role in the complicit Vichy government, but his sentence was immediately commuted for “having actively and sustainably participated in the resistance against the occupier.” In 1991, French justice authorities in Paris indicted Bousquet for his participation in the deportation of Jews from France. Christian Didier, a mentally ill individual, assassinated Bousquet in his home in Paris on June 8, 1993, before proceedings could take place.

Acknowledging the Role of the State and Police

On July 16, 1995, on the fifty-third anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv roundup, French President Jacques Chirac acknowledged the role the state and its police had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation. “France,” Chirac said, “land of the Enlightenment and of Human Rights, land of hospitality and asylum, France, on that day, committed an irreparable act. It failed to keep its word and delivered those under its protection to their executioners.”

This post is taken from the Holocaust Museum’s excellent website. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008213

Agitation for a Second Front

When, in August 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, agreeing to a 10-year peace, Communists in the West were startled. They were no longer to say bad things about Hitler and, in the next month, when the invasion of Poland by the armies of both Hitler and Stalin started World War Two, party loyalists were instructed to oppose, sabotage, and obstruct the military efforts of Britain and France. In the United States, leftists such as Peter Seeger and Woody Guthrie, urged America to stay out of the conflict, calling President Roosevelt a war-monger.

Things changed in the summer of 1941 when Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union. Communists in the UK and USA now enthusiastically backed the war effort and soon began to clamour for a “Second Front in Europe” to ease the pressure on the Red Army. When this failed to take shape soon enough, leftists claimed that the capitalist West was happy to see the USSR suffer horrific losses.

The failure of the Dieppe raid in 1942, where the largely Canadian invading force was pinned down and butchered scarcely having got off the beaches, convinced planners that taking a port was not the way to go. Amphibious attacks were undertaken in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, with mixed results and many lessons learned. It was not until June 1944 that the western Allies felt ready to launch Operation Overland and land on five Normandy beaches.

The call for a “Second Front” was always a code phrase for “more help for Russia.” Britain was fighting on a number of fronts in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Asia, and in the air over Germany, and when the USA joined they too waged war from Alaska to New Guinea in the Pacific and in Europe.

A plethora of birthdays

Appearing on Earth for the first time on this day were

1821 Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalryman, war criminal, founder of the Ku Klux, and, apparently, a late convert to racial harmony.

1863 Margaret Murray, English anthropologist and horribly mistaken proponent of the origin of witchcraft.

1940 Patrick Stewart, English actor and Star Trek captain.

1942 Harrison Ford, American actor, starship captain, and archaeologist.

And best of all:

1903 Sir Kenneth Clark, English art historian. Born into a life of aristocratic privilege, be was chosen at a very early age to be director of Britain’s National Gallery and Keeper of the King’s Pictures. He is best known for the greatest documentary series in television history, 1969’s Civilisation: A Personal View. This 13-episode gem could never be made in today’s woke times. Imagine a broadcasting company giving a limitless budget to an elderly white male with a crooked tooth and a comb-over, tailored in 1930s-style suits, sitting still and talking about great art and architecture. Not the slightest nod to diversity, intersectionality, or the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Imagine allowing someone with these sorts of ideas to have a public platform:

I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.

Watch the series or read the book. You will be a better human being for having done so.

1441

Death of Jan van Eyck

The explosion of artistic genius in the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries is often referred to as part of the “Northern Renaissance” but I would categorize it as “Late Gothic”; there is not in the works of painters such as van Eyck, Bosch or Brueghel much of the contemporary Italian fascination with pagan mythology, sexually-charged topics, or obsession with perspective.

Jan van Eyck was born sometime before 1390 and reached the height of his talent in the decade before his death. He was often patronized by the Duke of Burgundy who ruled much of the Netherlands and who offered van Eyck both artistic and diplomatic commissions. Van Eyck was an early master of oil painting, so much so that a century later Giorgio Vasari credited him with inventing the technique.

Some of his masterpieces are:

The Arnolfini Portrait

The Virgin of Chancellor Rollin

The Ghent Altarpiece

A critic has said of van Eyck  that “from the fifteenth century onward, commentators have expressed their awe and astonishment at his ability to mimic reality and, in particular, to re-create the effects of light on different surfaces, from dull reflections on opaque surfaces to luminous, shifting highlights on metal or glass … Through his understanding of the effects of light and rigorous scrutiny of detail, Van Eyck is able to construct a convincingly unified and logical pictorial world, suffusing the absolute stillness of the scene with scintillating energy.”