Heavy losses on the cultural front

The start of this book is extremely annoying. On page three there is an inept echo of Gibbon, which has the effect of making us observe that Elon’s style is greatly inferior to the high culture which he sets out to describe. On page four there is a patronising remark about Moses Mendelssohn, the first great German Jewish man of letters, who, we are told, was passionate about social justice ‘for a man of his time and place’. None of those benighted men of the Enlightenment could be expected, of course, to attain the degree of passion about social justice that moves us now. We begin to fear we are in the hands of a liberal so complacent that he does not even know he is complacent.

On page seven, we get our first snatch of Heine. Elon quotes Heine often, but ruins the effect of this great German Jewish poet by quoting him only in English. ‘The ironist Heine’s memorable lines come to mind,’ Elon writes, followed by:

I think of Germany at night.The thought keeps me awake till light.

How trite, how banal. Maybe the publisher, rather than the author, thought to save space by leaving out the original German, but for the reader it is an infuriating decision. The worse one’s knowledge of a foreign language, the more one values – as in the Loeb Classical Library or indeed the Penguin Book of German Verse – the printing of poems in the original with adjacent prose translation. Heine called the German language his true fatherland, yet Elon denies the English reader so much as a glimpse of the lucid, luminous wit with which Heine used that language. As written by Heine, the famous couplet reads:

Denk ich an Deutschland in der NachDan bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht.