These upper bedrooms looked down on the opposite pavement on the park side of the street, and on the tiny people who moved along in neat looking singles and couples, pushing little prams loaded with pin-head babies and provisions, or carrying little dots of shopping bags.
Everyone carried a shopping bag in case they should be lucky enough to pass a shop that had a sudden stock of something off the rations.
"Arendt did not strive for consensus – in her view, politics had to be antagonistic and, if needed, controversial. What mattered most was the act in itself. Her whole body of work could be summarised as a call to democratic action. Speak, criticise, engage with others – do anything you can to avoid the peril of silence, and the temptation of violence." Marc Le Chevallier elucidates Hannah Arendt's belief that open dialogue and debate are vital to the health of democracy.
Justin Kadi explains why Vienna has been described as "a renters' utopia".
"He took inspiration from the deluge of countercultural books in the 1960s concerning earth mysteries, typically trying to decode the neolithic constructs of Silbury Hill, Avebury, and the stones of Cornwall. With a Blakean grandness fuelled by a quasi-Situationist eye, he sought to establish a sacred geometry to link the Hawksmoor churches together." Robert Davidson talks to Iain Sinclair to mark the 50th anniversary of his influential book of poems Lud Heat.
Colin Burrow reviews a biography of Muriel Spark and the first volume of her collected letters: "By 1963 she had arrived. She was rich enough to buy green and blue Hermès suede gloves in Paris. She was also suave enough to conceal beneath those gloves (most of the time at least) the knuckle-duster with which she had established herself as a Famous Author."
Modernism in Metroland on Maxwell Fry and the rise of the high-street electricity showroom.
This review appears in the new issue of Liberator. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.
Peter Pomerantsev
Faber, 2025; £10.99
In September 1941 German civilians began to pick up enticing new radio broadcasts. In the salty language of an army veteran from Berlin, ‘Der Chef’ complained bitterly about food rationing and excoriated leading Nazis as inefficient and sexually corrupt. “It’s a pity we can’t cut our meat from the buttocks of the SS.”
But Der Chef was not a disaffected insider: he was in reality Peter Hans Seckelmann, a German political exile broadcasting from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire under the control of the British black propagandist Sefton Delmer.
It is Delmer’s story that Pomerantsev tells – his boyhood in Germany during the First World War; his time as a journalist there during the Thirties when he became close to the Nazi leadership; his difficulties in proving to the British authorities that he was loyal and that his skills should be used.
Though Der Chef was a crude character, he was used in subtle ways. When he complained, for instance, that some German civilians were getting round rationing by buying clothes on the black market, his broadcast was designed to normalise this behaviour, encourage more people to take it up and speed the breakdown of the rationing system.
As the war went on, Delmer invented more characters and radio stations. Father Elmar – a real priest, though Austrian not German as claimed – broadcast religious programmes about the sins of the Nazi regime, emboldening believers with their own doubts about Hitler. And Delmer devised a whole station that combined subtle propaganda with a supply of genuine news about the home front and the welfare of troops that no German station could match. Ian Fleming, for instance, then working in Naval intelligence, fed him the results of the U-boat football league. Another writer, Muriel Spark, was on Delmer’s staff and later drew on this experience for her novel The Hothouse by the East River.
Pomerantsev shares Delmer’s experience of growing up in both liberal and authoritarian cultures. He is the son of political dissidents from Kyiv, was born in Ukraine and grew up in London. Early in this century, he lived in Moscow and worked as a TV producer. He sometimes draws parallels between Putin’s propaganda and that deployed by the Nazis or Delmer. His readers may be left wondering if some of Delmer’s tactics could be adopted by those seeking to counter the far right today.
Jonathan Calder
