Letters

Abigail Green affirms Jeffrey Veidlinger’s finding that ‘in places like Lithuania – spared the worst of the violence in the [Russian] civil war – the Germans would find it harder “to set in motion an extensive pogrom against the Jews”’ (LRB, 21 July). This is contradicted by Christoph Dieckmann’s vast scholarship in this area, which is published in German and informed by his reading of first-hand sources in German, Lithuanian, Russian, English, Yiddish and Hebrew (my English translation of the first of Dieckmann’s two volumes on the occupation is awaiting publication). Dieckmann recounts in appalling detail how, within days of invading, German forces had instigated anti-Jewish pogroms which rapidly became eliminationist in character. The Germans were joined by large numbers of organised Lithuanian antisemites, many of whom had prior experience of anti-Jewish violence.

Dieckmann documents the pogroms in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, immediately following the German invasion on 22 June 1941, and before the advanced sections of the Wehrmacht’s 16th Army reached the city on 24 June. These Lithuanian-directed pogroms were characterised by ‘beatings’, ‘public humiliations’ and the throwing of whole Jewish families into makeshift prisons. Then, from 25 June, pogroms of ‘monstrous proportions’ were carried out in Kaunas, including the violence enacted in broad daylight on 27 June in front of the Lietukis Garage, when between fifty and sixty Jews were killed. Wehrmacht photos of the perpetrators, taken during the pogrom, show civilians wearing white armbands, the symbol for organised Lithuanian co-operation with the German forces. Indeed, Lithuanians’ willingness to terrorise and kill Jews was so intense in this early phase that German military leaders put a temporary stop to the pogroms, in order to regain control of the process. From 30 June the focus shifted to a ‘Jewish concentration camp’, set up under German control four kilometres from the city centre. There, Lithuanian guards carried out mass rapes of female prisoners and shot dead thousands of Jewish men.

Within a few months of the German invasion more than 150,000 Jews had been murdered – around three-quarters of Lithuanian Jewry – at more than two hundred locations: the Kaunas atrocities were not exceptional. The argument that Lithuanians were more reluctant to participate in anti-Jewish violence than other Eastern European populations cannot stand. What’s more, it chimes – unwittingly, certainly – with the notorious ‘Two Genocides’ theory, which was influential in Lithuanian scholarship until the late 1990s, and which uses the purported attempted ‘genocide’ against the Lithuanian people carried out by the Soviet occupiers in 1940-41 to legitimise the Lithuanian participation in the murder of Lithuanian Jews from the summer of 1941. It portrays the Lithuanians as a freedom-loving people, reluctantly forced into fighting off the foreign Judeo-Soviet body in their country.

Mike Jay writes that ‘the earliest known written account of hitchhiking was by a student named Charles Brown Jr, who in 1916 described his 800-mile journey from Fort Wayne, Indiana to New York City’ (LRB, 23 June). There is an earlier one, published by Methuen in 1910 under the title Lift-Luck on Southern Roads. Tickner Edwardes (1865-1944) undertook a ‘ramble’ from Torquay to his home in Sussex, relying on assorted vehicles, mostly horse-drawn: ‘I had hardly hoped to escape altogether from the presence of motors, even when going by the least frequented ways. In fact, I had all but counted on an occasional motor-lift, if only as a variation in the scheme of travel.’ How long Edwardes’s journey took isn’t made clear, but he covered two hundred miles, much of it on foot, assisted by rides in almost sixty vehicles.

One reason this book may not enjoy the reputation of writings by the likes of Edward Thomas or W.H. Hudson is that it depicts not a pastoral England now lost, but, almost contemporary with the account of devastations wrought by Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows (1908), English roads in the process of being made to carry vehicles other than those for which they were intended.

Stephen Sedley again omits to present any evidence concerning 18th-century Old Bailey procedure, and this time suggests that we should rely on what happened at the trial for high treason of the Leveller leader John Lilburne in 1649 (Letters, 4 August). Yet his own essay in the LRB of 25 September 2003 begins by stating that in the 18th century a criminal defendant in England ‘was allowed to question [witnesses] as best he could and then tell the jury from the dock why he was innocent’, and that ‘at trial he had to speak for himself or perish.’

As my original account of Julian’s case in the LRB of 23 June made clear, we do in fact have voluminous contemporary reports of proceedings at the Old Bailey. (Through the pioneering efforts of Robert Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock, they can all be read freely at oldbaileyonline.org.) These printed texts tend to give only brief accounts of most trials, but there is plenty of evidence of defendants testifying, if necessary through interpreters. At the session that began on 14 October 1724, Julian was convicted on the basis of his prior confession, which was read to the jury. But defendants in other trials adjacent to his spoke at length. Among them, Moses Ouseman, alias Souseman, a German Jew facing a capital charge for major theft, ‘call’d several Jews to his reputation’, but also ‘pleaded much … at the Bar’, explaining his actions, inactions and previous statements. Frances Slade was convicted of pickpocketing, after jousting with the judge and giving the court a detailed but implausible account of having come by a handful of gold coins that she had secreted ‘in her Privy Parts (but she made use of the plain Name)’. Fredrick Discount, indicted for stealing a wig from Edward Maplesdon’s barber’s shop, likewise called no witnesses, but simply ‘pleaded, He bought the Wig, that Maplesdon had him take it’, then told his story of what had happened and why he was innocent. The jury believed him.

Stephen Sedley and Fara Dabhoiwala are both mostly right (Letters, 7 and 21 July). A defendant in the 18th century was expected to speak, but could not speak under oath. But while a case in 1724 would indeed probably have been lawyer-free, it’s borderline. As J.H. Langbein observes in The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, prosecution counsel were beginning to pop up in felony trials by the 1710s and 1720s. What’s more, pretrial prosecution work was becoming standard, so even if prosecution lawyers weren’t in the courtroom, they were certainly beginning to have a hand in preparation. It was at least in part a fear of this imbalance that led to the introduction of defence counsel (the earliest appears on record in 1732). Needless to say, once counsel started to appear regularly, trials got a lot longer. In 1787, it was noted of one Old Bailey trial: ‘This trial began at a quarter past five in the afternoon; and lasted till half past seven the next morning.’ Since jurors were expected to return verdicts without rest or food, the advent of the bum-numbing adversarial trial must have been pretty unpopular.

Tom Stammers remarks that ‘among composers, only Wagner can be said to have secured an “ism”’ (LRB, 4 August). Perhaps so in Britain; but never discount the encyclopédisme of French culture in the long 19th century. Burke, writing in 1793, picked out ‘Condorcetism’ and ‘Fayettism’ as extant discursive terms for systems of thought derived from individuals, and subsequent French music journalism and criticism abounds in examples. The Goncourt brothers referred to ‘Gluckisme’ in 1862; Edmund von der Straeten’s much reprinted article discussing the leading pre-classical modes of French music (‘Lullisme, Ramisme, Gluckisme’) was collected in book form in 1878. In 1906, the critic Raymond Bouyer wrote in the journal Le Mercure musical: ‘Gluckisme, rossinisme et meyerbeerisme, berliozisme, massenétisme, wagnérisme, franckisme, debussysme: ces sept ou huit barbarismes ne résument-ils point l’histoire des “états d’âme” musicaux d’un siècle d’art?’

Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly is, as J. Robert Lennon attests, enormous fun (LRB, 21 July). It’s all the more fun when you don’t know what is revealed halfway through the novel. That’s a pleasure lost to anyone who has read Lennon’s review. Or indeed anyone who read any review in the English-language press, or Penguin’s description of the novel online, or the blurb on the inside of the dust jacket. French readers had the best shot, as it seems their publishers don’t go in for blurbs in the same way, and the marketing of the book was relatively spoiler-free. Those still in the dark would be advised to take a punt, just buy the hardback and remove the cover before opening it. Unless, of course, this is all part of the game? Le Tellier might well enjoy there being two groups of readers: those who do not know, and those who have been forever tainted by a moment’s revelation they cannot undo.

James Butler offers some reflections on the English and their gardens (LRB, 23 June). He is off on one point. In Hardy’s poem ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’, the nameless man ‘harrowing clods’ (not ‘harrying’) isn’t a gardener but a ploughman, suggesting the endurance of the human connection with the earth, transcending historical time.

Ferdinand Mount mentions the spread of baths in England in the 1850s, ‘variously described as Turkish, Roman and Irish’ and promoted by David Urquhart (LRB, 26 May). However, there were precursors to these: from 1814 to the late 1830s Sake Dean Mohamed, who had previously opened the first Indian restaurant in England, ran a vapour bath, or ‘Turkish bath’, in Brighton. It was patronised by George IV and William IV, and had various imitators. Dean Mohamed styled himself ‘shampooing surgeon’, from the Hindustani verb champna, ‘massage’ – the origin of our verb ‘shampoo’, as the massage was combined with washing.

Emily Wilson, in her diary about the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, near Athens, surprised me by remarking that this site features ‘the only stone bridge that survives from ancient Greece’ (LRB, 4 August). There is certainly another stone bridge, Mycenean in origin, near the village of Arkadiko on the road to Epidaurus. In view of the durability of massive Mycenean stonework, I shouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t others lurking somewhere.