First World War to end on Sunday with final payment

Startling story in the Irish Examiner on Wednesday.  Germany has until this week still been paying off First World War reparations.

The First World War “finally draws to a close”, the Examiner says, on Sunday 3rd October, with Germany’s final payment of wartime reparations to the Allies. 

After 92 years, a final payment of €69.1 million payment will discharge the onerous debt, which the paper correctly describes as “the price for one world war and a cause of another”.  For campaigning against the reparations was one of Hitler’s main themes, and it struck a chord with some Germans who wouldn't otherwise have given him the time of day.  See my recent post What was it like at the time?

The reparations were set at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, as both compensation to France, Britain, and America, and as punishment for the war.  Article 231 of the Treaty (the so-called 'war guilt' clause) declared Germany and its allies responsible for all 'loss and damage' suffered by the Allies during the war and provided the basis for reparations.

John Maynard Keynes was the principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference. In June 1919 he resigned in protest at the extent of the reparations, and subsequently protested publicly in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

What follows is quoted from the Irish Examiner story. “The initial sum agreed for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132bn. At the time this was the equivalent of around €28bn – the then equivalent of 100 million kilograms of gold.

“However, interest on that sum was added to considerably when Hitler rose to power and refused to foot the bill any longer. The Treaty of Versailles settlement is also credited with accelerating the Nazis’ rise to power as it was a substantial roadblock to getting the country back on a sound economic footing as money poured out of the country to finance the debt.

“France, which was on its last legs after the war, pushed hardest for the maximum fiscal punishment for Germany. 

“The Wall Street Crash in 1929 sounded the death knell of the already feeble Weimar Republic and the country sank further and further into debt. Just four years later, Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and by the end of the decade, the country was at war again in Europe.

“The reparation debt came back at the end of World War II, and was quickly frozen again when the nation was split into West and East Germany. Following the 1990 reunification, the debt was renewed. 

“Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds.”

The shore of our ignorance

John Archibald Wheeler (1911 – 2008) is someone I must find out about.  He said: "As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."  He was an American theoretical physicist, and one of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein.  He is also known for having coined the term black hole.  But if he never did anything except coin that phrase about the island of our knowledge and the shore of our ignorance, he would have justified his existence.   

Even though he probably borrowed the thought from TH Huxley who said "The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.  Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land." (Huxley was "Darwin's Bulldog" 1825 – 1895)

Delphic Oracle on In Our Time

Crypt of Necromanteion of Epirus

Near Parga in NW Greece in the early 1980’s we were conducted round an ancient temple of necromancy, the Necromanteion of Epirus. Nekromanteion means oracle of death, or of the dead, and people went there to talk with their ancestors.

This temple of necromancy was devoted to Hades and Persephone. I remember our tour guide leading us up the river Styx. We actually waded up it and she maintained it really was the Styx and she showed us the entrance to Hades. At the time I believed her. Having looked into, I now realise we were probably wading in the River Acheron (marked Aheron on my tourist map). Acheron translates as the "river of woe" and it was believed to be a branch of the underworld river Styx over which in ancient Greek mythology Charon ferried the newly dead souls across into Hades. So I was nearly right. Here's the webpage I've consulted.

When we got to the Necromanteion our tour guide described for us how supplicants would come to the oracle to speak to the dead. The whole business, it seems, used to involve a lot of sleep- and food-deprivation, drugs, ranting and raving in the darkness and general terror. Some of this applied to the priestess and some to the supplicants and some to both so far as I can remember. Standing there in the cave it was easy to imagine how this must have been a very effective way of convincing people that they were getting important messages from the dead, or the gods. Doubtless not inconsiderable sums of money changed hands in the process.

But I ought to avoid cheap jibes when discussing these things as I'm sure genuine spiritual experiences took place here. I can imagine the Delphic Oracle was a similar sort of place and I'm eagerly awaiting next week’s In Our Time (30th Sept) on this subject.

In mythology, the Delphic Oracle used to wrap her predictions up in such a tricky way that they were invariably misunderstood. And whenever the Delphic Oracle predicted something bad, and people tried to avoid whatever bad thing the oracle had predicted, all they succeeded in doing was to tragically bring upon themselves the very bad thing they were seeking to avoid.

The supreme Delphic Oracle story concerns King Oedipus. His father was Laius king of Thebes. Laius consulted the Delphic Oracle, where the priestess told him he would be murdered by his son, should he ever have one. Not only that, but the boy would go on to marry his own mother, that is to say Laius’s queen, Jocasta.

So when Oedipus was born, in a vain effort to thwart the oracle, Laius and Jocasta exposed the baby on the hillside to die.

Despite this Oedipus survived and grew up in neighbouring Corinth. He in turn consulted the oracle, and in turn attempted to thwart its terrible prediction that he would kill his father and marry his mother. But the very attempt to thwart it by running away from Corinth, led him to Thebes where the oracle came to pass.

I'm halfway through writing up the story of Oedipus for my putative book of “ten stories your child should know”. But I'm stuck. It’s hard, a lot of messengers coming and going and names to remember. I still don’t know if it will work.

Angry reaction feared to new evolution claim

Worker bee - sterile
Photo: Albert Freeman

A revealing insight into the sociology of science.  The 26th August edition of the Nature podcast (the leading scientific journal) carries an interview about a new theory of kin selection.  What causes worker bees to help the queen bee to reproduce, when they themselves are sterile?  Since the 1960’s it’s been widely held that natural selection can't account for this, so a theory of kin selection is required. Harvard’s Martin Novak now says that the kin selection theory is redundant and natural selection can fully account for the worker bees’ behaviour. Mathematics is adduced in support.

I didn’t follow the argument, but it’s not important for the point which I'm coming to.

After an interview with Novak, Nature editor Patrick Goymer comments “Given how core kin selection has been, this is the sort of thing that will ruffle many feathers.”

Presenter Kerry Smith then prompts him: “Yes, to say the least – what do you think will be the implications of Martin Novak and his team’s new work?”

Goymer adds: “There will be some anger from some people. It will take quite a while for people to digest the maths and work out how this fits in with things that have gone before. So I think the debate will move on possibly slowly.” 

Wot!  Faced with a new theory, scientists get huffy?  They ought to say “aha! so that’s how it works!” and be really pleased.

Richard Dawkins tells a story from his undergraduate days of a professor who admitted he had been wrong for 15 years about a pet theory, and publicly thanked and shook the hand of the man of who had proved his error.  He cites this example to show how science works, in contrast to religion where dogma rules. The Nature editor's comments suggest it’s frequently not as tidy as that.

More about podcasts

Shakespeare never saw the sea

Clarkson Stanfield  Shakespeare Cliff Dover, 1849
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

Shakespeare never saw the sea. He saw the Thames and the Avon but that was as far as he got, waterwise. This was asserted most confidently by Simon Winchester who was interviewed on an Australian radio show on 1st September, about his book The Atlantic Ocean: a biography. 

I’ve learnt subsequently that to Shakespeare scholars Will-never-saw-the-sea is an old chestnut, and probably true.  Apparently there are notorious examples of Shakespeare getting it wrong about the sea, though I have no chapter and verse.  I hope to come across these one day.  Must look up The Tempest.

But could someone who had never seen cliffs, I ask myself, have written the cliff passage in King Lear?  Intending to do away with himself, the blind Gloucester asks Edgar (his son but he doesn’t know it) to lead him to Dover.

There is a cliff, whose high and bending head

Looks fearfully in the confined deep:

Bring me but to the very brim of it ...

Edgar fools his father into thinking he is at the cliff edge and describes the scene:

Here's the place! - stand still - how fearful

And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eye so low!

   ... half way down

Hangs one that gathers samphire: dreadful trade!

Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

In homage to this passage, Dover boasts a Shakespeare Cliff. The Dover museum website tells us that samphire is one of those plants which abound on chalk grasslands and even on the cliff face. The Rock Samphire is a native perennial with small yellow florets, and was once a favourite vegetable, the leaves and stalk of which were cooked and eaten like asparagus. Samphire gatherers collected the plant by attaching themselves to a rope suspended from the cliff top. In 1768 a highwayman escaped from confinement in Dover Castle down a cliff by way of a rope left by a samphire gatherer.

The museum offers the additional information that in medieval Dover, Sharpness Cliff was a place of execution. The prosecutor had to double as executioner and throw the thief off the cliff. 

But I digress. Could Shakespeare have written those lines without ever seeing a cliff, that’s the question. Hm. Maybe. And perhaps the same applies to the beetling cliff in Hamlet? Horatio fears the ghost will lead the prince there to his death and warns him in these words …

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,

Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff

That beetles o'er his base into the sea,

And there assume some other horrible form,

Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason

And draw you into madness? think of it:

The very place puts toys of desperation,

Without more motive, into every brain

That looks so many fathoms to the sea

And hears it roar beneath.  

Talking of what Shakespeare saw or didn’t see, there are no cliffs near Elsinore, so this passage gives the lie to the notion that Shakespeare ever went there, an idea that’s explored in the Elsinore guidebook.  For more on this see my visit to Elsinore in 2009. 

References Lear Act IV, Scene 1; Hamlet Act I, Sc 4

One of my favourite things

But what was it like at the time?

At university I studied the causes of the First World War, and at one time I could have itemised all the telegrams that bounced back and forth between the various embassies and foreign ministries in August 1914.  But forget the telegrams, the First World War was “inevitable” because of imperialist rivalry, mutually antagonistic European alliances, war by timetable, French politics and all that.  But what was it like at the time? To what extent did people (both the élites and others) see it coming? I don’t remember studying this. Or maybe this aspect of the matter didn’t engage my interest then. But it does now.  

Insofar as people did see it coming, WHAT did they see coming?  Something like the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, I suppose.  Imagine the First World War had been over by the Spring of 1915, which I'm sure in August 1914 was a widespread supposition. It wouldn't have been the First World War. The 20th century wouldn't have happened. No Russian Revolution, no Irish War of Independence, no sudden break-up of the Austrian and Ottoman empires, no Hitler, no Second World War, no Holocaust, no Hiroshima, no State of Israel, no 9/11.  Some of those no’s are questionable but you get the point. It was the war’s unforeseen military history that made it into a cataclysmic event. 

But what about "the lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime "?  British foreign secretary Edward Grey is supposed to have said this staring out upon St James Park as lights were being extinguished on the dawn of August 4, 1914.  So maybe here’s at least one key player who actually foresaw the First World War’s dreadful consequences.  I should be interested to know if he really did utter these immortal words, and really was that prescient.

Left: British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1914. Did he really say the lamps were going out ?  Right: The sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410 AD, Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, 1890.  The naked savages are probably unhistorical. Both images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So that’s one sort of what-was-it-like-at-the-time question, “did they see it coming?”  Here's another sort of what-was-it-like-at-the-time question.  “Did they realise it was happening?”  What was it like when the Western Roman Empire ended?  In the first place, did anyone know that it had ended? In the second place, did they care?  When you investigate history’s turning points closely, they always disappoint. (But I said the First World War was a turning point … so I’ve contradicted myself!)

Talking of turning points that weren’t, when I was at school the Renaissance was meant to have occurred in the 15th century. Now historians talk of the 12th century Renaissance.  Last year I heard of an 11th century Renaissance, and I think I may even have come across a 10th century Renaissance.  Just take it back a century or two, and there won't be any need for a Renaissance at all.  And at the time? Did anyone know the Renaissance was happening?  The OED says that in English the word was used first in 1845.

These musings began 10 days ago when I heard the historian Philipp von Rummel interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme. He suggested that the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 may not have been the cataclysmic event that is usually portrayed, or that Saints Jerome and Augustine took it to be (neither of whom were there).  No naked savages as in the Sylvester painting.  In this interview von Rummel didn’t call it a turning point; though since it was viewed as one at time, and we still think of it as one, does that make it one?  Does thinking make it so? 

An historical conference will be held in Rome 4-6 November 2010, dealing with the event, its context and its impact.

As to the Visigoths, in 2006 I went looking for them in Spain and found that far from barbarians who had destroyed the Roman Empire, as I learnt at school, modern historians regard them as “late Romans”. Another turning point which wasn’t. See a note I made at the time.