Theodor Adorno's confession that Jews are the 'secret gypsies of history' brought many pieces together for me from unrelated studies like analyses of Max Weber's social theory, the sad German history of the 20^th century or the importance of nomadism in ancient Greek life. The last seems the strangest one in this combination. Yet nomadism is not confined to gypsies in their caravans, the deserts and their age-old political fata morgana's so well-known since Ibn Khaldûn (1332-1406) or the orientalisms of the 19^th century. Today, one can find genuine nomadism in large parts of Asia and Africa, while a nomadic way of life can be found in the poorest corners of the world's megalopoleis and in a typical quality of the (richest) globalizing elites as well. Nomadism was and will be a phenomenon of all times from which we sedentarians still know too little as is shown so bitterly in the present Asian, Near Eastern and African adventures of USA, European or Soviet governments.

Whereas the basis of the following texts is formed by analyses of the relationship between 'nomads' and 'sedentarians', the main aim of the book is the reflection on Theodor Adorno's confession by means of this basic antagonism. I hope in this way to contribute to the present debate about the identity of the relationship between Jews, 'non-Jewish Jews', non-Jews and anti-Jews in their historical and present settings. The debate about this relationship is of the utmost importance not only for Jews as Shoah and Holocaust victims which receives most of the publicity, but also for the highly necessary emancipation of Germans and other Europeans as perpetrators and for the serious difficulties national minorities suffer in a globalizing world in which new perpetrators exercise the old power play.

We all know that for many reasons this relationship is now caught in the deepest crisis since 1945 and that it seems as if several separate, long-standing discussions have become entangled in an unexpected and unpleasant way. This cannot lead to a loud silence but only to an open debate in which political propaganda like, for instance, the blatant identifications of 'Israel' and 'Holocaust' or 'Palestine' and 'Liberation' should be excluded. It is also inevitable that the debate about these matters cannot be done in a hypocritical value-free way but in a sharp and intellectual way. That is also the case in this book and its essays, given that here we can deal with (counter)arguments and proofs better than in direct media debates. What are the general contours of our discussions?

Adorno did not disclose the sources of his knowledge about the (ancient) Jews, which were - in all probability - Max Weber and/ or Werner Sombart. Hannah Arendt, however, had a specific relationship with Max Weber and with 'the Jew' through her extensive reflections on what was called the pariah status of Jews. Through her writings the complicated background of Weber's world historical and theological thoughts can be combined with her own political, historical and other analyses. Moreover, she stands anew in the limelight of international scientific publicity, not the least because she drove many intelligent people mad with her controversial opinions about Zionism, Jewry or the Holocaust. Or seriously disappointed people with her Heidegger relationship, as recently George Steiner was: 'It is in a Jacob's bout with the dark angel of Sein und Zeit that Jewish thinkers from Hermann Cohen to Derrida and beyond hammer out their own identity and are, sometimes, left lame. The case of Hannah Arendt is only the saddest.' (TLS, 27-2-2004). However, till now her “nomadic view” or the “nomadic view” in general are not considered as in this book, although it will be shown how they serve to re-stimulate deadlockeddebates.

Whoever wants to uncover the fundamental characteristics of the nomad-sedentarian relationship as circumscribed in the four leitmotifs of this book is confronted with a 'Holocaust framework' and a series of specific debates. Today, these are pretty rough, as shown in Peter Novick's The Holocaust and Collective Memory; Tim Cole's Images of the Holocaust. The myth of the 'Shoah Business'; and in particular, Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning or the recent Dutch controversial study of Hajo Meyer Het Einde van het Jodendom (The End of Judaism). Also controversies between Jewish groups about the division of the money received from European banks or governments open many old wounds and demonstrate the serious difficulties of defining a Jew, a Shoah or even a Holocaust victim. Last but not least there is the case of Israel. The ascent of Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon and the outbreak of the next 'Intifadah', have not only resulted in the deepest Israeli crisis ever, but also in mixing up a terrorism and anti-Americanism debate with all possible old and future world problems.

Only in a few notes and passages will some of these problems be discussed. Through the various analyses of 'Jews as nomads and/or pariah', however, I hope to contribute to a genuine European alternative for the serious difficulty of 'being Jew in this world' relative to 'being a minority in this world'. It is, therefore, a highly sensitive discussion in which I will not support any theological position. I am a historian and sociologist, which is also a relevant statement vis-à-vis my criticism of Weber's theological stand. Another a priori confession is equally important here.

Inherent in much American-Jewish anxiety is the real fear that strong assimilating tendencies are detrimental for the religious and Israeli support among American Jewry. Because of the peculiar course of this study (see, for exemple, Hannah Arendt's quotation above), it is right to state here that I personally respect the individual's decision to assimilate with all consequences. It is also this American-Jewish anxiety which was a major drive to use "The Holocaust" in support of a religious battle for Israel as, for instance, Goldhagen is raging anew in his recent assault on Roman Catholicism. Indeed, in my book much can be found in support of such a battle and much against it, and not only because my heroine, Hannah Arendt, is one of Goldhagen's or radical Zionists' bêtes noires. The main point here is that I am not writing a political pamphlet about Roman Catholic guilt and desire to pay its debt. Although I sympathize with this aim and acknowledge how incontestable much of what he writes about the dubious Catholic hierarchy is, it seems to me not the best strategy to send a lightweight like Goldhagen into this old Roman arena full of professional gladiators, whatever his mediamatic value.

Anyway, new questions and answers on the Holocaust phenomenon (in the first and last resort an European matter!) are urgently needed, but can be given here in a limited sense only. My much debated last book, Deutsche Westforschung. Ideologie und Praxis im 20.Jahrhundert, opened up a whole new field of research related to these questions. The present book analyses preconditions of the 20^th century Holocaust, reactions on this disaster with its world-wide impact, and understanding (definitions) of the many kinds of victims during the Holocaust and Shoah.

In the large political and ideological discussions which started to rage after 1945, the writings of Hannah Arendt and Max Weber played a pivotal role. They disclose here how their 'mutual concept', Jew as nomad and pariah, stand at the very centre of their controversial thoughts and how reflections on it can contribute to necessary political solutions. Therefore, this book is addressed not only to a readership interested in a critical reception of Arendt's and Weber's work or in broadly historical information about the relationship between nomads and sedentarians but also to a readership involved in some 'Jewish case' if one is tolerant enough to discuss challenging perspectives.

This book went through a long gestation, and, therefore, many people should be thanked for encouraging me during the thinking and writing or for reading the whole or parts of it. I mention here only the following. I thank the editors of Archive européenne de sociologie/ European Journal of Sociology for refusing according to them 'a very important,... rich' article just because Max Weber was criticized sharply for his antisemitic or anti-Judaistic thoughts. It is published here as the third chapter. Ezra and Sascha Talmor (Haifa) are thanked for demonstrating their intellectual independence by publishing this text in a slightly revised form as 'Nomads, Jews and Pariahs' in their famous journal The European Legacy, 4 (1999), p. 24-48.

Furthermore, I was also pleased by the highly inspired 'answer' of bestseller author Harry Mulisch after sending him the draft of the eighth chapter in which he appears as the controversial author of among others a book on the Eichmann trial; as a possible reaction on my analysis he immediately published the essay Het zevende Land/ The Seventh Country, an evocation of his living in and wandering through seven earthly and spiritual 'spaces'.

It was a consolation that my nearly 100 year old friend, the sociologist Wim Wertheim (died November 1998), could still be inspired by our discussions to alter some of his lifelong and strongly defended theses. We specifically discussed my analysis of Max Weber's controversial views on China which appears here in a revised form as chapter two. It was published as 'Nomads in Chinese and Central Asian History' in: Oriens Extremus, 41 (1999), p. 7-34. The historian Gabriel Kolko was so kind to discuss an earlier draft of the whole manuscript in a highly stimulating temper. I also thank Marti Huetink for his confidence in this project, Kim Hershorn and, in particular, Alison Fisher who helped with editing and correcting the English.

Some neologisms are used and explained as they are introduced (see, for instance, Introduction, note 4). First is 'antisemitism', which I prefer to 'anti-Semitism' because 99% of the anti-Jewish attitudes and thoughts do not refer to 'Semites' and I do not want to constantly repeat this typical nonsensical racist concept: in 'antisemitism' I strike a balance between a historical phenomenon and actual practice. 'Holocaust' is taken as an overall concept incorporating the attempts to destroy and the destruction of all humans deemed by the Nazis and their supporters as 'inferior' or 'sub-human' (Minderwertig; Untermensch); consequently, the Shoah is seen as the destruction of Jews, whatever the definition of these peoples, while it would be worthwhile to make comparable concepts for the fate of the Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, etc. Confusion around the 'Holocaust' could be avoided in this way.

Amsterdam, July 2004

INTRODUCTION

A radio programⁱ broadcast on the 50^th anniversary of the Second World War testified to children yelling in the streets of the Dutch government seat, The Hague, where Jews were rounded up in 1943. The children shouted: 'Woestijnnomaden! Woestijnnomaden!' ('Desert nomads! Desert nomads!'). Strangely enough, it was also a common Dutch practice to talk about the invading Germans as 'The Huns', one of the most famous examples of the alleged (Mongolian) nomadic menace. Here, in a most dramatic context, the interrelations looked for in this book can be felt, and a bewildering number of questions arise immediately. Two of the least strange ones are: How is it possible that both perpetrators and victims were abused as 'nomads'? Why on earth is 'nomad' abusive at all? Is "The East" the home of all menaces for Westerners?

During the second World War the Germans tried and failed to erect the only Jewish ghetto in Dutch history; apparently they needed a ghetto in Amsterdam to facilitate the capture of their victims. Of course, that was a very different constellation to the former Jewish quarter in this city which was in 1941 only for 50 per cent populated by 'Israelites'.

The German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), among others discoverer of the 'pariah/ guest' concept, knew all about it. During a holiday trip to Holland (August 1907), he, like every tourist, visited the fisher tribe of Marken Island in the Zuiderzee not very far from Amsterdam. Here, the blond people, clothed in strange costumes, lived in humble houses concentrated on sandbanks. From Amsterdam Weber wrote the following postcard to his wife about another visit: 'Yesterday I was in the library, and then, in the evening, I went into the Jewish quarter [Judenviertel] - fantastic faces [tolle Physiognomien] and a horrible screaming and market mess, till at about six o'clock the sabbath [Schabbes] starts and silence descends.'ⁱⁱ

Elsewhere in the Netherlands about 30 per cent of the Jews did not live in some quarter, which meant that all of them had to be caught as neighbours. Thus, the yelling playmates and the adults who indoctrinated these kids said good bye to their disappearing neighbours wholeheartedly. What does this mean subjectively? In a German Jewish paper Joachim Prinz related the following impression (17 April 1935):

'Now we become conscious of the fact that we live in a ghetto. This ghetto, however, differs in many things from what we understood till this moment about its meaning and reality ... it has a sign. This sign is: neighbourless. The fate of the Jews is to be without neighbours. Probably, this shall happen only once in the world and, who knows, how long one can bear this: life without neighbours ...'ⁱⁱⁱ

The image of Holland is of a place that had always shown the highest degree of hospitality to foreigners. However, - relatively speaking - almost nowhere else in Europe were more Jews caught and transported to concentration camps. In the dangerously hypocritical country that Holland still is today, practically no-one wishes to address the background of this remarkable contradiction, let alone initiate measures to avoid a recurrence. Now, against all possible international agreements and without any principal necessity, the Christian government decided in 2004 to expel no fewer than 20,000 foreigners and introduced vignettes to mark those who can remain for a while! Relatively few people protested.

Did Dutch Jews have (and still do) the status of foreigners in a social or juridical sense? Certainly not! They were (and are) more or less integrated in Dutch society, and at the time, most of them had a Dutch passport and had almost nothing to do with a Jewish religion. Why, then, 'desert nomads'? What were the similarities and differences between those strange fishermen and Jews, except that they were both touristic attractions? Were these people similar to Weber's 'guests/pariahs' notwithstanding their citizenship?

Whoever tries to answer these questions, inevitably, will be confronted with the intriguing work of the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). In her life she made a specific choice in order to jump over history, the history of The Jew as Pariah, the title of one of her many books. The leading theme running through the third and last part of the present book will be the character, motives and consequences of her choice in order to fulfil the aims described in the preface. Seeking for an understanding of Hannah's choice confronts us in the preceding chapters with a specific history from Adam to Adolf which Arendt wanted to negate.

Certainly, at a purely emotional level, her choice originates from the conclusion given in the Varnhagen citation above and finds a definite formulation in Adorno's dictum: a man who is accused by Arendt of attempted cooperation with the Nazis in 1933. Both of them were also highly skilled in incorporating subjective elements into broad historical or sociological argumentations, and it is these which will concern us here, in particular because the substance of both citations form our main thesis: the decision not to assimilate into a (sedentary) society has to be followed by the acceptance of a nomadic way of social life in which an individual intellectual and material fulfilment has the better chance. In my view, Hannah Arendt made this specific choice, which is of paramount intellectual and political importance.

Whatever study of historical experiences in remote or contemporary times I am obliged to provide below, we cannot forget that Hannah's choice shall always remain an existential one forced in this case by experiences subsumed under the heading Auschwitz. Another of Adorno's dictums, that writing poems 'after Auschwitz' is barbaric, is well known but receives a curious significance through Hannah's almost mysterious other choice to exchange poems even after 1945 with her former lover, the highly compromised word - conjurer and dubious philosopher Martin Heidegger. It is again Adorno who is one of the main antagonists of this man, who displays behaviour typical of those who do not want to take any responsibility for crimes they (in)directly supported or, in more general terms, for those who deny the intimate relationship between their social and thinking behaviour and consider themselves as gods.

The fundamental historical and socio-anthropological contradictions signalled here in passing (Täter versus Opfer, perpetrator versus victim; sedentarians versus nomads; barbarism versus civilization) as well as the conspiracy-like relationships, interdependencies or love - hate connections between these antipodes and the often strong animosities between the victims (Adorno versus Arendt, vice versa) foreshadow the complexities we have to master in this book. Reliable guides in this exploratory activity are difficult to find, which is also true for the much studied heroine of the study, Hannah Arendt. It is another thesis of this study, that she borrowed a pariah/guest theory from Max Weber which she expanded without knowing what Weber really wanted to express. In her search for a way out of the many dilemmas of her life and times, this was not the least of the reasons why she could not see the dark in which she walked for so long.

A statement like this presupposes that Max Weber and his pariah theory must receive important attention. However, Weber in his turn develops this theory in his sociology of religion as an offshoot of or closely related to his more general views of the role of nomads in world history. This makes it necessary that the fundamental elements of a nomadic way of life have to be shown once in their historical and present, sociological or political contexts.

In the battlefield of this book is the division of labour of a traditional simplicity: the man Max Weber acts as the arch-perpetrator and defender of the oikoidal^iv stronghold; the woman Hannah Arendt, very unsatisfied with the predetermined role of women, has chosen not even to act as a kind of Florence Nightingale but as a fully armed Jeanne d'Arc without a nation. My role could be circumscribed as her unarmed adviser showing in the end a way out of this battle.

Because this book has to tell a complicated and highly problematic story in only a few pages, I have chosen a prudent strategy. In A First Round a short exposé of pariah definitions leads to two sketches of situations or contexts in which the main elements of the pariah complex are revealed. Together they serve as the problem-definition of the following study from which sequence and subject of the argumentation can be derived in a reasonable way.

The first sketch is related to the famous biblical story of Ishmael, first son of the nomad Abraham; the other tells the story of a traditional Jewish intellectual - in this case the historian Arnaldo Momigliano - who is objectively as a scholar and subjectively as an Italian Jew confronted with Weber's pariah concept and the practice of a pariah. Chapter 1 opens up a specific, vast, world historical panorama and at the same time provides an impression of the complicated individual reactions to the European drama of the Holocaust and Shoah. The former is detailed in the next two chapters, and the latter are placed in perspective in chapters 4, 5 and 6.

The steppes, lowlands or highlands of China, Mongolia and Central Asia form such a vast panorama; certainly, here can be found the longest and most profound nomadic traditions of all sorts. If one wants to know something about nomads, one has to study their history, economy, ecology, anthropology, etc. Herodotos had already discovered this and provided extensive descriptions of the Scythians, after which he turned to stories about the North African nomads.

Chapter 2 has the same aim: it informs the reader about the main elements of the complex and controversial relations between nomadic and sedentary societies from past to present. We shall be looking at these relations through the eyes of Max Weber. This scholar with his vast and encyclopaedic knowledge about the non-Western world was strangely ignorant about this Asian nomadism. Therefore, the chapter provides the most important elements of 'theory and practice of anti-nomadism in sedentary societies' as well. Apart from this, it introduces Weber's world historical theory.

In the most profound way this theory is exploited in his in-depth analysis of the Near Eastern nomadic scene of the Old Testament, Das antike Judentum. Here, Weber demonstrates also more practical knowledge about his subject. From time immemorial (Adam - Eve and Cain - Abel onwards), nomads and pastoralists combined the valuable production and professional marketing of labour, basic foodstuffs and animal products with commercial and money transactions. Their market behaviour, anti - governmentism and way of life became a pretext and starting point for many metaphoric and real contradictions. The Bible, however, is first and foremost a battleground of highly contradictory theories and belief systems. Weber informs us about them and takes sides.

His anti - Judaism (if not antisemitism) is matched by his oikoidal ideology and anti - nomadism. This work can be seen as a traite d'union within the learned German generation of people like Wellhausen, Harnack, Sombart, Troeltsch or Eduard Meyer. They belong to the high-priests who are mostly left out of all Holocaust or Shoah discussions except to deliver an obligatory quotation. Not only is their work highly influential in the European intellectual traditions, it supported a strong state-power, expansionism and stringent nationalism as well. Their contribution to the ascent of Nazism is still in need of an explanation. In any case, after this analysis of an always topical Biblical theme, we perceive the tricky concept on which Hannah Arendt based her political theories.

In the next part the perspective is narrowed to the European scene 'where it all happened'. Three main characteristics come to the fore in the following chapters. One aspect of the pariah complex concerns the guest-position of the stranger; for Weber 'guest' and 'pariah' sometimes seem to be identical. Question: If such a guest is put into a ghetto as happened only with 'Jewish guests' in Europe, what does it mean except that you have to replace the world historical scene directly with an European one if you seek an explanation? Is a ghetto an unorthodox means to sedentarize nomads? Or place to control the exploitation of a useful labour force? In any respects, central elements of the Jewish Question as related to the Nomadic Question can be discovered in the theory and practice of the European ghettos. What did it mean before the war to be a 'Jewish guest' in a country? Prinz showed how in Nazi Germany the binding to a ghetto became the logo of the Jew in a spiritual as well as a practical and historical sense.

Max Weber firmly roots the ghetto elements in Jewish nature itself and transcends time and place as if he supported current racial theories. His famous colleague, Werner Sombart, was the first who connected the Jewish and the Nomadic Questions in a controversial theory about the place and influence of Jews in European economic life. Weber and Sombart and their unexpected supporters will be confronted in chapter 4 with ghetto practices past and present.

Chapter 5 is concerned with the astonishing focus in European history on seeing Jews as scapegoats. Another thesis of this book is, that it would be a great mistake to see anti - Judaism as the only reason for the Shoah, let alone the Holocaust. Therefore, priority must be given in the debate to making fundamental distinctions between this anti -Judaism, antisemitism and the actions of states (governments) against Jews as one of the many non-conformist elements in society. These three distinctions have their own history in Europe and coalesce only in the beginning of the violent 20^th century with disastrous effects unforeseen by any of the 'parts'.

This chapter retells the story of what is erroneously called 'The First Holocaust' (the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492) to demonstrate the validity of this threefold distinction. With this information we have not yet discovered enough basic elements of the relationship at stake to start the discussion about the present (post- 1945) situation. After 'the Jew as guest' and as 'scapegoat', the most dramatic element consists of the 'Jew as victim', as usual in this study 'related to the Nomadic Question'. As a mass-phenomenon it is typical of the first part of the 20^th century: why and how people could become 'Jewish victims'. In chapter 6 we have to discuss a most painful problem: what does it mean if your identity is defined by your worst enemy, a fate followed, certainly for the proletarians among these subjects, by a terrible death. In the past there had mostly been a realistic opportunity to choose. Now, in the 20^th century this chance was too small or too often non-existent. A quite new analysis of the fate of the Dutch Jews (1900-1940) will not provide us with all the answers we are looking for, but it will give us a solid basis with which to understand the very different situation after 1945 and to judge the theories produced by Arendt, Weber and so on.

The analysis of Arnaldo Momigliano's criticism of Weber's pariah concept enabled us to see how a high degree of assimilation blocks understanding of the (alleged) pariah position. In this light it is an intriguing question as to why so many Jewish intellectuals and scholars, including Hannah Arendt, accepted the pariah concept as politically correct. In The Present Context we, first, have to cope with the ever increasing uneasiness with the concept 'Jew' as the object of inquiry 'Jew as pariah, guest, nomad'. Therefore, the first chapter of this part of the study is devoted to this question: who or what is a Jew? The strange fact remains that even nowadays there is no satisfactory answer. Different authorities come up with their conflicting definitions. This is not as disturbing as the fact that the Nazis introduced a definition which soon after led to the murder of about 6 million people who had specific qualities mentioned in their definition. Long ago the Christians created their own 'Jew' which sometimes led to serious persecution as well.

Unsatisfied with the results of this chapter, one of the aims of the subsequent chapters is to provide a sound answer with the help of Hannah Arendt, herself a staunch defender of Weber's pariah concept, her former husband, Günther Anders, 'secret gypsies' like Harry Mulisch or Alan Bloom (Saul Bellow's new hero, Ravelstein) as an ambiguous user of the pariah concept. Together they produce in fact the arguments to liberate us of the concept and its consequences.

i. VPRO radio 4-5-1995.

ii. Max Weber, Briefe 1906-1908 Ed. M. Rainer Lepsius, W. Mommsen (Tübingen : Mohr, 1990), p. 371.

iii. Cited in G.Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager (Frankfurt a/M. : Fischer, 1996), p. 41.

iv. The meaning of 'oikoidal' which will be used throughout this book can be explained as follows. The Aristotelian use of the Greek oikos (house, family, household), which stresses, among other things, the absolute power of the pater familias over the life and death of wives and children or the virtues of an autarkic, agricultural-based economy, became the model for the monarchical or aristocratic household and state from the early modern period. The political as well as the economic aspects of this oikos were the subject of the most powerful European theories of society (from Bodin to Roman Catholicism, from mercantilism to nineteenth-century cameralism). In some way or other, they all stressed princely autocracy or paternalism, strong state influence over the economy, etc. Political and economic freedoms, as they developed in urban commercial and industrial centres, were always viewed with great suspicion by this state-centred thinking. In the 19^th century a real and effective bourgeois counter-concept developed, the market with its 'laws' of supply and demand. The real battle of Oikos gegen Markt, as Max Weber would say, started with the rise of industrial and financial capitalism, a specific way of manipulating the market. Therefore, below I use the adjective oikoidal to refer not only to its literal meaning ('of or representing the oikos, house, etc.') but first and foremost to an autocratic state-centred concept with a long European tradition. A good introduction to the relevant 'oikoidal theory' has recently been given by D. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination. The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago/London : University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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HOW TO MANAGE A TOTAL WAR AND PERISH

Germany and the Second World War. Vol.5. Organization and Mobilization of the German Sphere of Power. Part 2. Wartime administration, economy, and manpower resources, 1942-1944/45. Ed. By Bernhard R. Kroener, Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hans Umbreit (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003), xl1 + 1142 pp. £175.- hardback.

Before I will come to talk about the publication at issue, it is unavoidable to discuss first the contextual characteristics of this book. It is part of a (translation of a) handbook written and published from 1974 onwards by members of the German Research Institute of Military History (MGFA) in Potsdam. The title of the project is Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg. From 1974 until today nine of ten volumes, together ca. ten thousand pages, are published.

It concerns, in fact, the official West-German history of the Second World War describing and analysing the modern military aspects of nearly everything: from war ideologies and preparations to the global military operations (with main attention to the attacks on the Soviet Union), from the occupation of foreign territories to the intricacies of the war economy, from the aggressive foreign policy to the production of weapons and whatever other aspect related to the military expansion of the Third Reich from 1933 onwards. As such it is simply the best historiography of modern warfare. I think, therefore, it is, in the end, a wise decision to translate this most thorough, most detailed, most extensive and very German handbook. To qualify this praise immediately, it is in my view this volume five (with its two parts and immense amounts of data) which is the most important, because only this really learns why victories and defeats of the Third Reich and, consequently (?), why respectively defeats and victories of the allies could happen. However, many critical remarks about this mega-project and the fifth volume of it must be taken into consideration.

First, we have to face the regrettable fact that from the Western allies at the time no comparable venture was/is undertaken. Of course, there are numerous good websites and libraries of interesting and relevant books in all languages available in ¨the West¨ (but not, for instance, in the ¨Far East¨) as well as excellent source publications. The United States Army in World War II project which started already in 1946 is with its ca. 80 volumes the largest pile of strictly military data. It refrains, however, to give the consumer any further understanding of this war beyond the amounts of aircraft, tanks, soldiers, casualties, bullets, etc., the colours of the uniforms, flags, etc. made/used successfully/heroically by every crew or bataillon.

In the Anglo-Saxon world armies form nearly fully closed circuits in which writings about their deeds are severely restricted: historians are nearly only confined to victories and heroic acts serving the ego of mega-macho´s; from the large amount of blunders and miscalculations of their generals, secret services, etc. with their serious consequences one can only experience something in another kind of writings.

But also on the European continent were armies are much more perceived as ¨part of society¨ and as instruments of politicians and militaries alike, the writing of war-histories is not a simple civilian-scholarly job. Whatever their merits, they cannot compete with the project at issue as reliable scholarly ventures. Only in the former GDR a not uninteresting twin edition of this series (Deutschland im Zweiten Welkrieg, 1974-84) was published in five or six volumes which, however, could or should be compiled in the shadow of a victorious Soviet army. So, the West-German project is also so well, because there is no serious competitor but, as we will see, it is not advisable that the authors of it get grow too big for their boots.

Next, it must be stressed what this project is not. Thanks to the remarkable EngIish title one could think that it concerned the GDR publication and not the continuation of the FRG project! Anyway, apart from this, the English title is for several reasons historically incorrect and should be the translation of the original FRG one: something like The German Reich and the Second World War.

One word in the GDR project-title seems unimportant but makes a great difference: ¨in¨ in stead of ¨and¨. Where ¨and¨ is used the many relationships between the internal and external happenings and developments can and should be stressed.

Whatever its aim, to be a ¨history of a society in war¨, it is clearly not a political, social, economic or whatever history of Germany (like the one´s written by the Germans Nipperdey, Wehler or Winkler), nor a similar history of the ¨Third Reich¨ (like the one´s written by the English Burleigh, Evans or Kershaw), but a modern military history of the Second World War written by soldier-historians (better in German: ¨Bürger-Historiker in Uniform’’ ) and by those who lost the battle (see Colonel Hackl and Messerschmidt in the prefaces of the first volume).

Furthermore, it is a very eurocentric project: it remains strange that after so many years the German looser did not cooperated with the Italian, Austrian and Japanese loosers to come up with a proper reconstruction. Therefore, ¨Germany¨ has been taken too limited as if it was a national and not a (second) world war.

We are also confronted with a birds-eye view and a rather impersonal analytical narrative of everything what happened with, within and around that enormous German warmachine operating in Europe and a few adjacent territories and partly how others reacted on its belligerent, murderous and occupational activities. It remains perpetrators history (who lost); victims and victors history is told in so far it is deemed necessary to explain the loss.

It took thirty years after its start, in its ninth volume, and after many criticisms before in this project the destruction of Jews, Roma and Sinti is covered on a relevant scale; about the many other victims the project nearly silences.

In the volume at issue the main data about the fate of Jews and Gypsies in its period are told in eighteen pages (like in its preceding volume). The exploitation of the so-called General Gouvernement (a large part of Poland) is told in three pages from the point of view of the German war organization, how the German Governor Hans Frank managed his ¨total war¨ and perished. Apparently it was impossible for the military historians to provide the reader with the much more realistic narrative that here was the most distressing place on earth and even in world history thanks to a large amount of vast starvation camps, human destruction factories, lethal ghetto´s, genocidal mass killings of all kinds of people from all over Europe, millions who had to suffer from severe hard labour and endless population transfers; its the land in which at the very beginning and again at the end of the war highly destructive wars (Warsaw!) were fought between the German, Polish and Soviet armies with miliions of refugees suffering until about 1948! Seen from the aim of this historiography the data which are given about the victims are probably sufficient, but not from a victims and not from a civilian point of view.

It is also symptomatic that the many volumes of this project received their costly translation and not, for instance, the very civilian many volume history from Hans-Ulrich Wehler in which the Second World War was properly embedded into the course of the socio-economic, i.e. the ¨normal¨ civil history. Thanks to this publishing power the members of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (MGFA) became automatically experts concerning ¨everything¨ of the Second World War, which had all kinds of unpleasant effects including stigmatizing critics of being left-wing, making many publishers dependent on their money/publications, trying to monopolize its typical military outlook, etc. Exaggerating, one could say: the MGFA tried to wage a total war of opinion but in the end perished, because this overestimation of the military historiography had to transform itself in a much more civilian direction.

At the start (1974) its perspective was holding upright the image and honour of the Wehrmacht : it lost but did, in military respects, a good and professional outstanding job; the bad guys were the SS, irregular troops of Ukrainers, Romanians or Lithuanians, etc. Apart from this the message was send: Hitler is the idiot while the generals could have won also the ¨total war¨ if they had got the ¨total power¨ as in the First World War!ⁱ The guerilla warfare of the partisans from the North until Greece was systematically perceived by the historians as human derailment and as excuse for the Wehrmacht atrocities in accordance with the opinion of the leading Nazi generals.ⁱⁱ For everybody else, then and now, except for the Wehrmacht- historians, the SS and similar organizations were part of the military apparatus. Notwithstanding this, the history of the SS, etc. including its institutions, destruction policies of all Untermenschen, concentrationcamp-system, etc. was/is as such not covered in this megaproject. But also total different but very important elements i.e. the large contribution of all kinds of scholars and universities and the very strong support of the churches, did not got a proper or no treatment at all.

Twenty years later, however, thanks to publications of ¨civilians¨ like Jörg Friedrich (Das Gesetz des Krieges, 1993) and a much publicized exhibition about the atrocities of the Wehrmacht itself during the Operation Barbarossa in the Soviet Union, several things changed.ⁱⁱⁱ But it was only in 2004 in the ninth volume that this could be testified.

The authors of this volume, largely from a new generation, now tried to be as ¨civilian¨ as possible. It now was much more victim-oriented and one tried to analyse a ¨society in war¨, but by doing this the differences with ¨normal¨ scholarly work directly could be seen.^iv

One conclusion was clear: ´the military is as object of research too important to leave to military historians, including the so-called ¨new military historians¨ !´

The criticism in Germany could have been avoided if (critical) civilians were invited from the beginning to do the work and if this work was not only a historical one or one of historians, but also of sociologists, economists etc. In short: a history of such an enormous, complicated and dramatic period asks for an interdisciplinary approach. It is a gross underestimation of the work to be done and an overestimation of whatever historian may achieve. It must be clear anyway, that although we are dealing here with the best books available in its kind, there is much work to be done in this field. When the tenth volume of this series is published one must abandon the MGFA and give its potentialties (from archives to money) ´back´ to the normal civilian research institutions and public discussions with many thanks for its good services so far.

*

Much more could be written about the whole project but I have to review here only a part of it. First question: What about the translation of volume V, part 2? The differences between the German (1999) and this English ediition do not concern the price alone: the English edition is five times as costly! In the German edition many maps and diagrams are coloured while most maps/diagrams are unfold, so that it is not necessary to divide one map over two pages with often disastrous effects (see the fate of, for instance, the map ¨France under German occupation¨, p. 32/33 or ¨War economy manpower ..¨, p. 914 ff. in the German edition).

One may hope that the translations are correct (in the end a responsibility of the authors). It is, of course, impossible to control this properly, but the moments I did there were difficulties.^v I did not count it, but several tables from the original are missing: at least the overview of the persecution of the Jews in Europe, p. 258 German edition. It is not replaced by a better one, which must have been difficult: there is not referred to Raul Hilberg´s monumental Shoah handbook from which the relevant information had to come; only some Paul Hilberg with a 1961 edition is mentioned, while there are brand new one´s from 1990 and 2003! The translators promised that they should add all kinds of new things apparently to up-date the edition. From, for example, Richard Overy they came up with old stuff and not with his most relevant book (from the same publisher!), his War and Economy in the Third Reich (1992, 2002).

But there are also things the same (!), like the reproduction of twice the same table with a different source (in the English edition on p. 244 and 529; in the German p. 226 and 491). It is also strange that in this translation the same irrelevant cold-war remarks are reproduced as in the original.^vi

The many studies of Karl-Heinz Roth, one of the best experts in armaments-industrial questions (Daimler-Benz, etc.), the main subject of this fifth volume, are still not used, because Roth is too civilian for the military historians.

I will refrain with this kind of controling a two thousand pages, leaving it to the reader to choose between paying five times the necessary price and learning German.

Something must also be said about the first part of the fifth volume. As said, for me at least the whole volume provides the most profound insight into modern warfare accompanied with an occupation of large foreign territories. If the Bush administration had swallowed this and discussed the experiences reported in this fifth volume in advance, it never had started a Near Eastern adventure or had prepared itself much better in order to perish a bit later.

The first part describes and analyses in 1062 pages more or less the same developments as the second one but during the years 1939 to 1941. This part was published in Germany eleven years (!) earlier than the second and translated in the year 2000. The authors are the same; some statistics concerning the German edition are similar as well: apart from preface and conclusions, the three authors wrote together in both cases exactly 1000 pages, which seems to be a bit too compulsive. Hans Umbreit and Bernhard Kroener both provided about a third of both volumes and Rolf-Dieter Müller about 40%.

The subject of Umbreit is clear: the occupation and exploitation of all European (non-German) countries to which in 1941 about 180 million people belonged. Müller describes here the transformation of the German economy into a ¨Kriegswirtschaft¨, an economy fit to wage a (total) war, and the one economic crisis after the other which occurred from 1939 onwards until about December 1941. The subject of Kroener could be circumscribed as the personnel management of the war in the air, at sea and on land and consequently the labour management at home in agriculture, industry, etc. which had to support that whole vast army. The situation at the end of 1941 can be summarized like: ¨ .. not only the military set-back at the end of 1941 [the fully unexpected massiv and successful counterattacks of the Red Army around Moscou. H.D.], but also the alarming developments in the occupied territories [in due time Germans were hated everywhere thanks to their deportations, bloody Jew-hunt or compulsory labour triggering in many countries a guerilla warfare. H.D.) and, in particular, the own economic and employment problems could have urged to reconsider the hybrid conquerings program.¨^vii

December 1941 was, indeed, the very turningpoint in the war and not only in hindsight. The Germans lost in the Soviet Union around Moscou and the USA entered the war now after being attacked by Japan in Pearl Harbor, while the Germans decided to start an impossible, suicidal and chaotic but most frightful flight forwards trying to destroy everything and all. This turning point is also the start of vol. 5 part 2.

It is divided into three large parts. The first, written by Hans Umbreit, deals with the German rule in the occupied territories during the years 1942-1945. Rolf-Dieter Müller tells in the longest contribution (ca. 540 pp.) in a highly detailed way the attempts of Albert Speer and his administration to boost the armaments production, Speer´s fall and the take-over of the SS, the production of consumer goods for the German population in the war economy after July 1944 (some 60 per cent of all bombs of the Allies were dropped after Juli 1944). Bernhard Kroener tells the story how all possible kinds of manpower (from the own ¨free¨ German population to the armies of foreign workers, compulsory laborers, concentration camp inmates, etc.) was organized for the several departments of the Wehrmacht, for the industry, for agriculture, etc.

The basic theme of these three contributions is the radicalization of the Nazi-regime in all its elements; this was not only the take-over of the SS which happened after all gradually in the occupied countries (much more radical in the East as in the West) and concentration camp-system, but much less or not on the proper battlefields or the ¨homefront¨.

These occupied countries had to deliver all possible resources helpful for the continuation of the war and to pay dearly for the loss on labour power, so that the German heros themselves could fight all day long. Masses of very useful data are collected and given by the authors from all over Europe to demonstrate both developments and their radicalization. Below I will give only one table which is not derived from the book^viii, but the comments can be found there and are inspired by writings of Hannes Heer.

The table is used here not so much to show something from this famous airplane factory, but as an image of what happened in this war and as an image of the relationships between the Reich, the occupied territories, the available labour resources and the first aim of the Reich, the conquering of the Soviet Union. This table is also used to summarize what is not summarized in these volumes. Whatever necessary data the authors bring us in their skilled way, it is the crux of the matter to combine these in order to discover their explanatory relationships for the defeat of the strongest army ever in combat. For many reasons the German generals and the Nazi bureaucrats were stubborn and unable to make this combination, and their later historians had too many difficulties with it as well. What does this image/table learn?

Development of the workforce of Heinkel-Oranienburg (%)

groups	Jan.40	Dec.40	Mar.41	Mar.42	Jun.42	Sep.42	Dec.42	Mar.43	Jul.43	Mar.44
German	100	98	97	76	63	55	47	37	34	31
Russian	-	-	-	-	6	10	12	10	7	5 (?)
Foreign	-	-	-	16	24	19	15	14	10	7 (?)
POW	-	2 (?)	3	8	7	5	5	4	4	4
Camp inmates	-	-	-	-	-	11	21	35	45	53
Sum %	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100
Sum total abs.	5719	6777	7401	9347	10249	10456	10792	11799	12579	11706

The second line shows, in fact, the disappearance of the (older)Germans from work and home. Consequently this was the rapid ¨take over¨ by foreign labour. In March ´44 there were nearly half as much Germans as in January ´40 in absolute terms, while there was only a third left from the total personnel. In detail: this German source for – in this case – industrial labour dried up and is reduced to (younger, less experienced) leading personnel and supervisors only, because most German men had to fight and to replace the severe losses in the east or in the south to counter the allied landing in North Africa. In August 1942, for example, the eastern army alone lost 200,000 men; in the beginning of 1944 the monthly losses of the army in the field amounted to over a quarter-million men; a very quick disappearance of all age-groups from the earth as well !

The Wehrmacht intended to call up ca. 2,000,000 men in 1943, a plan which must be reduced soon to 1,2 million from which 500,000 could not be found except by taking men out of the war industry. ¨Berlin¨ and the Wehrmacht understood a simple truth much too late: if everywhere disappear German workers and fighters, than replacements by Germans are impossible or similar to bringing water to the sea!

These impossible replacements, which should be made possible anyhow, triggered fierce conflicts between industry (Speer-Ministery)+ agriculture and the army: what is more important weapons or fighters, food for the German population at home or for the Wehrmacht ?? Besides this the mutual competition between Wehrmacht departments aggravated seriously: what is more important weapons for the tough SS-men or the weak conscriptors? More airplanes or tanks?? At the moment the Airforce stole all available lorries, thousands of too young infantrists had to go by bike 3500 kilometres through an inimical and destroyed Soviet Union. And last but not least: this total crisis made in December 1942 the machinery of state subordinate to the Party apparatus; the old elite was largely replaced by a new inexperienced one.

Together this resulted in a situation in which all decision making levels were paralized (whether a Hitler was there or not did not matter anymore, if it had mattered anyway since the war really began after Juni 1941); more serious was that the fighting-machine itself, the Wehrmacht from her first defeat in December 1941 onwards disappeared after Stalingrad from the power centres in favour (!) of non-fighters and foreigners. Apparently the largest, most modern and invincible army always was a dinosaur on clay feet: at the very moment it stept into the Russian clay it lost its feet within six months. In this perspective history is not told or written.

A centralized and global ¨German Sphere of Power¨ was replaced by local party bosses (type Bormann, the Gauleiter, Goebbels, etc.), local bureaucratic powers (type Lammers, Speer, Sauckel, etc.) and local war-lords (type Rommel, Von Rundstedt, Himmler, etc.). They all became involved into an apocalyptic hunt for foreigners. As shown in the table, in October/November 1942 it was already fifty-fifty and one month later (Stalingrad) Germans became a minority!

With the disappearance of the centre a centralized discipline was replaced by achieving of local and individual interests with disastrous effects for everybody: not only the SS but many parts of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, Italy or elsewhere started a brutal policy of extermination, in particular towards enemies regarded as racially inferior. And also this last binding factor, the German racism, disappeared to be replaced by naked interests: in the end even the SS started to replace itself by forming military units of so colourful and ¨racial inferior¨ people like the Tartars.

But what about these foreigners? All foreign sources dried up quickly thanks to bad health and high mortality. For instance, a third (about 300,000) of the Soviet prisoners of war in German custody died in only four months during the winter of 1941/42.

Apart from this the Russian POW-source (the third line) dried up after December ´42 (Stalingrad, etc), but the German ¨stock of Russians¨ was in November 1942 still about 1,6 million persons: they must be kept alife to replace the fighters and to disperse over an industrial and agricultural labour market. To guard and feed this amount costed several (potential) divisions of German troops which could not fight. However, the replacement by foreigners resulted in the end (see last columns of the table) in a situation in which about a million of Soviet citizens and troops served in German formations and units. They often hoped on a better future under Nazism in which case the replacement was about 100% !

The label foreign groups concerns here, first, a voluntary workforce: certainly after December ´42 doing work in Germany became too dangerous (allied bombardments, etc.) while services and food lacked behind and Germans themselves became too aggressive. After September 1942, therefore, behind this label more compulsory labour was hidden as a result of countless razzia´s in all occupied countries.

It meant that at a large scale German fighters were confined to this manpower-hunt. It was this hunt more than the occupation which triggered in most occupied countries the resistance which again fixed too many German militaries to fight a civilian resistance in stead of the real important enemies, the regular armies of the allies. The fight against the partizans (mostly civilians), in particular in East Europe and the Balkans (much less in Western countries), was a main source of anger to the German generals (and their later historians) but confined also large amounts of German troops in demoralizing and futile searching- and fighting-operations.

The source Prisoners of war (POW) from the allied soldiers – mostly ¨Western¨ allies and, anyway, non-Russians, were caught less and less because the Germans had to retreat every time more, etc. But in November 1942 there was, for example, still a ¨stock¨ of French POW´s of about one million!

A very sharp increase of foreigners is shown after September 1942 only with the last source, Concentration Camp prisoners; before that date most of them were killed as soon as possible, after that date the policy ¨Vernichtung durch Arbeit¨ (¨killing by doing hard labour¨) was gradually adopted until even the ¨killing idea¨ lacked behind, because the Germans had to depend too much on this source of labour in industry (weapons) and agriculture (food for army and German ¨homefront¨). This latter reason was the ratio behind the many death marches at the end of the war in the direction of Germany: these half dead people from the camps had to be workers in an already fully dead country.

This lethal paradox seems to me the image of the victims-situation: the amount of labourers had to increase as much as possible, but their health was so bad that you needed three or four camp inmates (bad health X mortality rate) to do the same job of one healthy and motivated German; therefore, you had to feed them ¨better¨ than in an earlier situation; but the work to get this ¨better¨ food had to be done by the half-dead themselves; therefore the proper work to which they were arrange could not be done and they only became a new burden, but this was kept alive now.

The same kind of lethal paradox, although relative to the perpetrators, is demonstrated above in the dialectics of disappearance/ replacements and should be combined with the former paradox: the amount of victims had to increase as much as possible, but the territory to capture and hunt these is decreasing quickly; therefore the exploitation of the territories still left was aggravated; but the resistance of the civilians now increases tremendously; therefore the victim-hunters have to extend their efforts to do this job, but than they are losing new territories to the big enemies, therefore they step up the repression to a brutal terror-level, but the resistance start terrorizing now the perpetrators .... and so on: the perpetrators always loose.

Only with the help of vol. 5, part 1 and 2 several other of these paradoxes can be made and combined with the one´s given. They not only learn that modern warfare is something much too complex for militaries (let alone for one kind of militaries like an airforce in, for example, Irak) including their historians, even more for the politicians and bureaucrats who are willing to send these militaries for chimerical political and economic reasons; they learn as well that the revenge of the ¨foreigners¨ and victims - who sooner or later will resist, eventually with civilian terror – is simply lethal. You can better stay at home and start a good aid/trade relation.

HANS DERKS

Spuistraat 247-IV

1012 VP Amsterdam

[for a corrected version see The European Legacy 9 (2004), 239-245]

Medieval Origins of Trade and Commerce in West Europe

Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce, AD. 300-900. By Michael McCormick (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1101 pp. ISBN 0521661021 (hardback), $ 60.00, £ 40,00.

At the moment Michael McCormick's Origins fell with a big bang on the door-mat an adventure started, because - whatever is told below - McCormick managed to make a breakthrough in a most important field of classical and early medieval studies. Before I'll try to explain this result, I have to tell what is told here in, indeed, 1100 pages.

First, the superficial characteristics which, in this case, are important enough. Origins has an impresssive index of more than 50 pages; a bibliography of primary sources of about 20 pages and of secondary literature in all modern languages (too rare in US/UK-literature) of nearly 60 pages. In appendix 4 is given a unique register of all covered long-distance trips of important persons in the period 700-900 (again 120 pages!), which is preceded by three other appendices with lists of coins used in the Mediterranean and the names of travelers (anew 50 pp.). The remaining 800 pages are in their turn spickled with 160 maps, figures, tables and charts. So, one has to read only 640 pages!

This is made much easier by the publisher who produced a beautiful book which should be applauded here specifically. From a typographical point of view, it was a wise decision to give a heavyweight (nearly two kilo's) book like this foot- in stead of endnotes and the page a large margin, which both stimulate a quicker and relaxed reading. The maps, designed by McCormick himself, are normally very informative, except those in which elevations are stressed too strong (like map 3.1.) so that coastlines, which play a crucial role in this book, nearly disappear or those who are wrongly positioned (like map 20.4.).

The last remark about the form of this book is the most related to the content: the five subjects of the book are presented in a very orderly and systematic way. In the introduction they are announced and part after part they are handled in their timely and spatial contexts: the first part describes the features to be discussed later, as they appear at the end of the Roman Empire which is also the chronological start of the investigation; in the last part we arrive at the end of this history and into the commercial world of the Carolingian empire in which all fades spun in the book are connected. This end is a new beginning as well: in McCormick's view a true “European Economy” originated here. The transparent construction of this vast book which processed and handled such a large amount of data, makes it a scholarly top performance. Let's now look into the content of Origins of the European Economy.

Part one (ca. 120 pp.) describes the “end of the world” (here: Italy within the Mediterranean and W. Europe) i.e. the economic situation at the end of the Roman Empire: its long-term trends, demographic data, metalurgical and ceramic industry while half of this part is devoted to land, river and sea communications.

Part two (ca. 160 pp.) describes the “people on the move” between 700 and 900: pilgrims, ambassadors and other envoys, missionaries, traders, slaves, exiles, fishermen, etc. who travel in some way or other through the Mediterranean.

Next part (ca. 100 pp.) is devoted to “things that traveled”: relics and, in particular, coins.

The fourth part (ca. 180 pp.) handles “patterns of change”, that is to say: the experience of travel (storms, ships, ports, dangers, etc.), the several rhythms which are characteristic for the Mediterranean movements (seasonal, speed, etc.), the routes at sea and overland, while a chapter is in particular devoted to the Venetian breakthrough, Venetians as mediators between East and West.

The last part (ca. 230 pp.) describes “commerce” in the Carolingian realm and period: the several European trading worlds at the time, the merchants in Italy and Frankland, routes of goods and money, eastern imports to Europe and European exports to Africa and Asia.

My comments have to start, of course, with the titIe of the book. Indeed, this is puzzling! If the undertitle Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300-900 was choosen as main title, scope and content of the study should be reproduced nearly perfectly (in this case a geographical indication should be preferable). As such it could be a good predecessor of Peter Spufford's brilliant Power and Profit. The Merchant in Medieval Europe which was published nearly simultaneously.

Of course, it would be a dull title, and – more important - apparently McCormick's aspirations reach much further: he is, therefore, in need of a programmatic creed. Still, he did not choose alternatives like The Origins of .. or Origins of a .. or .. of a Western European Economy or .. European Economies and therefore one has to conclude immediately: in his perception, there must be more origins then the one's he will indicate and there is only one European Economy which was shaped in the period AD 300-900; apparently this must be an economy of the now existing Europe. Questions like, 'Was there “no economy” in the European lands which are covered in the study before AD 300? What does “Europe” means in those remote times, and many others, arise. The introduction must provide us with some indications of (an) answer(s). We leave it here that the attractive main title for the sake of readers persuasion is chosen. Attractive anyway, because with it many problems are catched as well!

In the first sentence McCormick's message is announced: The Mediterranean appearing in his book is 'a different place from the one that historians have imagined until now.' An astonishing announcement after Braudel published a quarter of a century ago the English translation of his classical masterwork about this sea, its surroundings and histories notwithstanding the projection of this book for 'the Age of Philip II'. Was it McCormick's intention to repeat this job for 'the Age of Charlemagne'? I do not think so. Braudel is not mentioned in his programmatic introduction, nor in the concluding chapter, while the transparent methodology of Origins does not resemble at all the highly complicated one of Braudel.

When one historian has to be mentioned here who inspired McCormick than it is the Belgian Henri Pirenne; in nearly the first and the last sentences of the book and many in between his name and thoughts appear. Together with Alphons Dopsch Pirenne developed around 1920 highly influential and contrasting theses about “international”, long-distance trade in Carolingian times. The former was pessimistic ('minimalist') and Pirenne optimistic (maximalist); at present only a few historians follow another Pirenne-thesis that the Arab conquest killed international commerce. McCormick definitely criticized this thesis in his book. It lead 'directly back to that greatest of historical problems, the fall of Rome and the end of the ancient world' which is, of course, only true for scholars familiar with late-Roman and early Medieval history.

However, an optimistic McCormick wanted more, too much in my view: the role of the great estate should be seen much more optimistic; the extraordinary trading world of the North Sea has come into the orbit of serious research; there is an 'explosion' of new information about shipping and exchange; a new way of reading the Latin and Greek works from this period is apparent; numismatics 'has gone from triumph to triumph' in explaining use and movements of money; most of all the digital revolution has resulted in new insights simply by the new possibility of processing and searching vast collections of texts and investigating more precise the languages of early medieval writers. Indeed, McCormick's Origins is quite a result of this last revolution. If one reads the enthusiastic story about his adventures on 'the electronic path to knowledge' in the Widener Library (www.news.harvard.edu/gazette), one knows immediately the truth of this conclusion. Is, however, his general optimism about the other themes well-founded?

One thing is immediately clear: about the “trading world of the North Sea” he has quantitatively and qualitatively nothing to say beyond what, for instance, is written by me nearly twenty years ago. His theme is another sea, the Mediterranean, the importance of which he describes with amazing skills. McCormick also knows that the use of the electronic tools does not change the fact that the evidence on long-distance trade and shipping remains not abundant, that is to say, not abundant in the written sources. Archaeology gives new clues; reformulating the question provides a certain solution and rereading the relevant documents with different eyes as Pirenne and Dopsch is useful, while they and their followers looked for evidence of merchants and long-distance trade but not of communications. So, the use of computers or new software will give a quantitative advantage (more and/ or quicker of the same can be processed) which, however, urges more as in earlier times to come up with a comprehensive theory in which all these new data can be understood.

That is the moment, alas, when innocent historians and archaeologists are caught in the nets of central place ideologists with their ridiculous hierarchies (classical part of the German Ideology, in this case of Walter Christaller). As I understood McCormick well (p. 573 ff.) he fully avoids this rather dangerous model building and tries to develop his understanding by analyzing the practical problems before he comes up with reflections about the relationships of these problems within larger frameworks. That is, indeed, the road we all have to go! It's certainly not a “highway to heaven” but has, first, more of a winding path through the bush full of white spots, false inroads, wrong traffic indicators, and the like. McCormick, who studied so many travelaccidents and desasters in the Mediterranean, is the right man to overcome all these pittfalls a traveler through time meets incessantly! Still he has to be very cautious.

In his view, namely, the understanding of 'the origin and functioning of these (great) estates has recently changed profoundly' , but he reproduces largely the present version of the optimistic view of the original 19^th century German constructors of the ideological model of the selfsufficient (autarky) Carolingian estate (look there are many incentives to trade; they are not as isolated as always thought). He knows of the existence of this model, adhered for different reasons by Conservatives and Marxists alike, and even warns for it, but apparently did not study its development enough (a typical side road for him). Otherwise he should have used Slicher van Bath's well-known agrarian history which gave the realistic alternative.ⁱ

Small wonder, in all principal matters here nearly his only source is the Belgian medievalist A. Verhulst, a competent historian with the wrong basic ideas and until recently a remarkable amount of controversial friends like historians as Petri and Steinbach or archaeologists like Jankuhn; they are all classical defenders of the German Ideological Model, a Charlemagne idolatry, exaggeration of the performance of the Roman Catholic Church, and so on.

McCormick does not make the impression to know of all these backgrounds which is as naive as charming as long as the main bulk of his study can be used without recurrence to these ideological backgrounds. That seems happily the case, because this study sticks to the undertitle! It's an impossibility to come further with Verhulst, Devroey, c.s. in trade and commercial matters.

For a fine political historian as the author of Eternal Victory it's, furthermore, remarkable not having considered how this particular model as well as a specific medieval practice were first and foremost political one's resulting in that part of the economy which is derived from political (here including religious) authority as a function of this authority's consumption. In the very German and Roman Catholic tradition defended by most Flemish and Rhineland medievalists not only the whole of the economy is derived from political and religious ideas (bishoprics are categorically seen as “central places” in urban hierarchies, etc.). For instance, Charlemagne's divine mission to carry the Christian civilization into pagan lands was in the end also the source for the (idea of a) domanial economy, etc. Long ago, there was already a strong criticism of these ideological views which is not considered here anyway.ⁱⁱ

If one has the aim to come up with a reliable analysis or description of the (early) medieval economy, in principle, one has to sketch a farmers and peasant economy (arable farming) and pastoralist economy (including animal husbandry) as production economies; the authorities economy (oikoidal consumption economies) and the intermediary economy (links all the former economies) in their spatial and timely changing connections. All of these economies do have, therefore, market relationships which most of the time compete with each other. In other words: because trade and commerce are intermediaries between production and consumption of the different classes in every society, you need a picture of this whole circuit in order to be a realistic historian or whatever other scientist.

Right at the moment Verhulst defended for the first time his bi-partite model of the domanial system, he was in a fundamental way attact by Duby, Abel and Slicher van Bath.ⁱⁱⁱ If it is not an ideal construction at all, the (alleged) reality is exceptional in all means: whatever their size and extent, they occupied only a tiny part of the economy in a tiny part of Europe with not many lasting economic effects.^iv The main incentives to an “European take-off” came from North Italy (and, therefore, from the interactions with “The East”) and not from the Carolingian heartland.

The rather old-fashioned graingrowers and political ideology Verhulst and, in particular, his (German) compatriots propagated had, alas, effects not the least thanks to the very controversial Flemish Movement in which these historians all participate somehow and to the idiosyncratic anti-Pirenne thoughts they adhere.^v That they could dominate after a while in “Northwestern Europe” was a result of the non-digesting of the Second World War by the post-war historians. It's one reason why a most eminent medievalist as Slicher van Bath turned his back to the “Old Europe” and disappeared as scholar to the “New World”.

Of course, to cover all these elements is too much for one person, even for somebody with the energy of a McCormick but one should first understand and indicate this complexity after which can be chosen easily which part of it will be analysed or descripted. Now, production and consumption of the different classes is largely neglected and by definition trade/ commerce remains, therefore, a rather abstract phenomena. In short, it remains a strange picture how a new American, coming according to the current prejudice from a typical market society, falls in the traps politicized Old Europeans concocted. Happily for us, McCormick is overwhelmed by “The Mediterranean” in profiling the intermediary economy (trade, commerce, communication), although he partly relies on a tradition and framework which is profoundly inimical to do so, while refraining of the available alternative (Slicher van Bath, etc.) which offers the best tools and insights to reach his aims. In that way, certainly, 'the origins of the European commercial economy' will not remain 'a much greater enigma' (p. 319) to him and us.^vi So let's leave this perspective of the main title and look at the considerable results of McCormick's new use of the electronic knowledge.

Part one describes the book's starting position. The perception, 'that the economy which had sustained the Roman empire collapsed' - from Gibbon to long after Alfred Rosenberg romantic historians experienced it nearly as a traumatic affair - is only partly qualified by McCormick in part one of the book and this in several senses. He is mainly concerned with the period 'between c. 250 and 650' (although Romans left already large parts of Germania and Brittany in the first century A.D. with which the so-called 'collapse' in fact started); only with trade and communications in the Mediterranean; in particular with the state sponsored annona system which should have killed all private initiative by making trade and communications largely unidirectional (together with the plague it is even supposed to be the main reason for the decline of shipping and trade); only with developments which 'threw the system into crisis ... that must have attended the events of 617 and subsequent years' (although the classical Roman Empire was as dead as a doornail for more than 200 years). McCormick's conclusion after all this, that 'Pirenne was right in focusing scholarly attention on how different the economic age of the Caroligians was from that of late antiquity' seems to force an open door only.

However, if he, for instance, should have looked into the brilliant studies of Dennis Kehoe (since 1988) and Dominic Rathbone (1991) on the Roman agriculture, in particular on their (African) large estates, this Pirenne statement is not at all self-evident. Not only the practices in and among these estates, but also the discussions about their meaning (self-sufficiency or not; exceptional or not, etc.) closely resemble those in or about the Carolingian period. The question, furthermore, whether one has to speak of “The Roman (Imperial) Economy”, “The Imperialistic Economy of the City of Rome” or “The Economy of the Imperial Household (with its mediterranean network)” and some other relevant alternatives, should have been discussed in this opening part. This could have improved the coming discussion about the (much more limited and primitive) Carolingian empire. Many details in this part can provoke quite critical remarks but I have to refrain on it.

For this reviewer, at least, with part II McCormick's study should have been started. Certainly, his investigation of 669 individual stories (72% of envoys and pilgrims; 3% were merchants) leads rightly to the conclusion 'that the evidence about early medieval shipping and communications is dramatically larger, and richer, than has ever been realized ... the role of the Arab world appears surprising.' This conclusion is right as a result of an investigation from a “Carolingian point of view”. From an Arab and Andalusian perspective it's a welcome but late acknowledgement. Already in 1970 H. Cohen used Arabic biographical dictionaries (tarājim) as a valuable source in which he, for instance, disclosed the phenomenon of the Arabian merchant-scholar who lived from the 5^th to the 11^th century. Pirenne should not have believed its existence and McCormick had found the ideal job in which trade and communication are concentrated. From the 14,000 entries of scholars Cohen discovered 4,200 were merchant-scholars (22% merchants in textiles, 13% in food, 4% in jewels, 4% in perfumes, the same percentages for leather-work and books, 3% in metals, 2% in wood, 2% in general commerce and 9% in other commodities; 3% acted as bankers and 2% as middlemen too).^vii What a wealth on comparative information should have come available if they were processed in the “McCormick way”! And what does it say about the “Carolingian” performance?

In part III of the study the movement of things must add 'further, independent layers of evidence to the movement of people'. It's certainly a find to choose relics to demonstrate the quality and quantity of communications (and trade) in early medieval western Europe. It's, however, a pity that the relics from Sens and Chelles in Gaul concern only a small amount of highly falsifiable products collected over two centuries (700-900). And is'nt it the case with all relics, so that the question must be answered whether we are dealing here with “hot air”? Anyway, for statisticians it's not an impressive case, but McCormick can make his point that a certain long-distance communication in this realm existed even with the Caliphate. Brilliant analyses are given, however, of the roads the several coins took from the East into the world of Charlemagne (ch. 11 and 12). Indeed, the old studies of Bolin (1953), Lombard (1972) – and may I say my own (1986) - about the crucial role of the Arabian Mediterranean for the western European developments, is further supported by McCormicks findings.

Thanks to his large stock of personal travel information, McCormick is able to cut through the narratives and brings to life the mostly hidden backgrounds and contexts of land, coastal or blue sea travel in the Mediterranean realm. Whatever critical remarks can be made about comparing and combining trends of relatively small amounts of data over long periods (chart 14.3 for example), indications of possible or the most plausible developments are given. After this whole part IV, so full of unexpected information about the early Middle Ages, indeed, it 'is tempting to sense .. the distant pulse of an ancient economy.' A much more realistic pattern arises from these detailed analyses.

The last part of Origins starts again with a discussion of Pirenne's views. To a large extent they are accepted by McCormick, although the decline of the exports has changed and reaches its lowest level around 700. But, for instance, to explain the contraction of long-distance trade with mainly external causes (war in particular) is difficult to defend. McCormick rightly defends the position and effects of commerce here against those who maintain the 'overwhelming priority of agrarian production' (he should have better said: graingrowers production) or who hold that Eastern coins found in the West does not mean trade but plunder. He describes in detail the different sea routes with the help of the many shipwrecks, their cargo, home port, etc., or how the Frankish empire was flanked by highly interesting trading worlds which, in a different way, were all in 'full swing' around 800. Personally, I found the chapters 22 about the Carolingian

tolls, fairs and Rhinetrade and chapter 23 about the connections between the Frankish traders and markets with the North, South and East highly convincing. The next two chapters complement the picture which is drawn here. They concern not only the heartlands of the Carolingians but also the heart of the matter: the importance of trade and commerce in these important regions.

How McCormick came (also) here with much new evidence is, for instance, to demonstrate were he is compared with brilliant earlier studies like those of Olivia Constable about Muslim Spain (1996): she lets Muslim trade with the northern Christians begin in the middle of the 12^th century, whereas McCormick is able to start this story in the first decades of the ninth century and similar stories even in the concluding decades of the eighth century. Important are here as well McCormick's collectors activities - for instance, the prices or numbers of slaves in Europe and the Mediterranean - to provide as much data as possible (comparable or not!). Just now is it possible to profile the problems at issue and come to understand, for example, the profitability of this slavetrade as source of the western wealth.

The results of all these relatively separate investigations in relics, coins, travelers and their trips, ships, roads, seasons, the goods and their supply and demands, and so on; the analysis of all these movements and their means, in particular centred on and around the Mediterranean from ca. 700-900, are manifold.

In my view, it's not only worthwhile how he rolled back the trade and commerce responsible for the formation of a western European economy unto the eighth century or discovered that “Europe” partly financed its take-off 'by the sale of its own people', but how, in particular, only thanks to the manifold interrelations with “the East” (Byzantine, Muslim or Arab countries and beyond) the underdeveloped western European countries, starting with Spain and Italy, were able to recover from the set-backs in earlier centuries. After reading this book, one can wholeheartedly acknowledge the bold first sentence of it I quoted above. Therefore, thanks to Origins, McCormick will receive in historiography the characteristic of a loyal anti-Pirenne and, in particular, of the new Maurice Lombard: Europe became much more formly linked to the Muslim world as ever before. The famous “Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” is too pessimistic and false considering this history. Only in rare cases a historian is able to give us a consolation like this: it's remarkable that today an American historian can do this.

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