[Marxism] Edward Rothstein on E.H. Gombrich

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(A week or so ago I referred to the NY Times's Edward Rothstein as a
neoconservative worth reading. His positive review of E.H. Gombrich's newly
translated history of the world in one volume is a case in point, despite
the obligatory swipe against socialism.)

NY Times, October 3, 2005
A History for Kids That Isn't Child's Play
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

There are still single-volume histories of the world being written, which
is somewhat reassuring. It means that there is still a conviction that
despite the destruction spread across millenniums and despite the battering
of historical truths on the shoals of postmodernity, a coherent order can
still be made, interpretations formed, a narrative constructed.

But histories of the world for children are another story. Here, judging
from textbooks I have seen, every effort is made to make sure there is no
personal voice or coherent vision. Instead, there is an uncertainty about
how much to include, an anxiety about which groups might object and an
inability to show that the project has any great purpose.

The problem is that a history for children would have to begin with what
children most care about: themselves. It would have to be a kind of
mythological enterprise. "Here is how you came to be," it would effectively
say. And step by step it would bring children to understand that their own
experience might help them understand not just themselves, but also others.
Such a history would provide a home.

Think of the confidence that writing such a history would require! Imagine
writing such a history, too, when the world seems on the brink of
apocalypse, when one has been denied employment because of one's religion,
when on one's borders there are ominous military drumbeats, when one's
university is the scene of beatings of coreligionists, when other alert
scholars have issued warnings or emigrated.

Those were the circumstances under which a 26-year-old art historian, E. H.
Gombrich, wrote "A Little History of the World" (Yale). In 1935, with a
doctorate from Vienna University, he was unable to work because of
anti-Semitism at the university (where, he recalled, he had also witnessed
Jews being beaten by Nazi brownshirts), but a job came his way: to write a
brief history of the world for young readers. He had six weeks. It was
published in German after Gombrich went to England. It led to his writing
his classic textbook, "The Story of Art," and thus helped shape his career.
Over the decade, the history was translated into 17 languages, but it has
not appeared in English until now, in this translation by Caroline Mustill
begun under the guidance of Gombrich, who died in 2001.

It is a remarkable book, written in an amiable, conversational style,
effortlessly explaining, without condescension, difficult matters like the
achievements of Charlemagne, the monetary system of medieval Europe and the
ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet nowhere - at least before the last chapter
added in the 1980's - is there an explicit sign of the troubled world in
which it was written. An unwavering faith helps give the book its voice;
the problem is that it is not fully warranted.

Its virtues are evident. "All stories begin with 'Once upon a time,' "
Gombrich begins, and he immediately is in the child's world, trying to
evoke great expanses of time for the child, invoking grandfathers and
grandmothers and their grandfathers and grandmothers, each 'Once upon a
time' giving way to another. "Have you ever tried standing between two
mirrors?" he asks, and describes the long line of mirrors stretching away
into the distance - which is the way we must envision the past stretching
out behind us.

Gombrich doesn't slight history's horrors. "The history of the world is,
sadly, not a pretty poem," he writes. "It offers little variety, and it is
nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over
again." The destruction of Montezuma and the Aztecs by the Spaniards, he
notes, "is so appalling and so shameful to us Europeans that I would rather
not say anything more about it."

There are also episodes that must have seemed a little provocative at the
time and place of their writing: an empathetic portrait of the Jews in
European history, a discussion of the late arrival of modern culture in the
Germanic countries, a paean to the Enlightenment with its ideals of
"tolerance, reason and humanity." (It is difficult to accept the assertion
cited by Gombrich's granddaughter, Leonie Gombrich, in the preface that the
Nazis banned this book not because of its author's background or for these
genteel jabs, but for being "too pacifist.") Some attitudes also display
the limits of their cultural context: for a Viennese scholar of the 1930's,
democratic government would not have seemed worthy of much detailed
understanding; to Gombrich, for instance, Benjamin Franklin is the premiere
figure in the American Revolution.

But the persistent and growing achievements of the Enlightenment and its
belief in the perfectability of human life shape the last portion of the
book. The problem is that Gombrich doesn't always see its vulnerabilities
or the dangers that threatened it. For example, he expresses a sympathy for
socialist ideals that may have prevented him from fully acknowledging that
the failures of the Bolshevik Revolution had some source other than the
fact that "the outside world intervened." Gombrich knows that history keeps
repeating itself, but in this respect he is almost a progressive. So, he
confesses in his added chapter, in 1936 it seemed "unthinkable" to him that
after the Enlightenment an era of intolerance and torture could arise again
- unthinkable enough, perhaps, that he could not fully take into account
what must have been right before his eyes.

This faith, though, ultimately provided the confidence to make this book
work as it does; it really does provide a sense of home. That this was an
illusion may have been one reason that this book never appeared in English.
Gombrich may have had an inkling of this. In his writings about art, he
argued that we make sense of images because of our presuppositions. Art,
though, can demonstrate how those presuppositions are mistaken; it teaches
new ways of seeing. Could there have been an element of that here - a sense
that despite all he did see, he didn't see well enough because of his
presuppositions? This resurrected history deserves reading for all its
delights, but its optimistic illusions may help explain why histories for
children are now so hard to write.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other
Monday.


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