The Courtly Reich

Power does not change its forms as much as we think. Whether it is a state which controls vast resources and populations or a state which has shrunk to the level of the city or the village, the means of exercising power and its problems are often similar. A state has to use levers to exert force- the image is exact because the order of a single politician has little to no power, it is the way that that is converted into the actions of hundreds, thousands or millions that is the key to his power. The Third Reich in that sense is an interesting example of what a state can do- insane and destructive policies which led to hideous human rights abuses and the holocaust, not to mention the destruction of Germany and much of Europe in the bloodiest war ever seen. Amongst the central issues anyone has to confront when they look at Hitler's regime is how such insanity- and such unstable clowns- came to govern a civilised and educated state for 12 years and become intensely popular, not merely in Germany but also abroad. How did they exert that influence- what kind of levers did they pull?

The answers to that are vast- they swallow things like ancient anti-semitism and modern economic crisis. Amongst the reasons that the Reich was able to exert such power was that its leaders were able to use traditional resources within German society. They wooed and won the Princely and aristocratic classes of the German state- more Princely scions supported the Nazis than any other group save for doctors. The reasons why these people supported the Nazis are dealt with in Christopher Clark's illuminating review of Fabrice d'Almeida's new study of the Nazis and High Society. What he shows is that Hitler and Goring in particular created the image of a court- they surrounded themselves with aristocrats and attempted to attract them (especially after the war) through the acquisition of art and antiques. Hitler was invited to salons as an outsider whose peculiarity and uncouth manners were part of his attraction. As we get into the thirties, the Nazis made it very clear that they were willing to give the traditional elites access- Goring's marriage in 1935 for example was attended by at least 63 Noblemen and women.

The Nazi elite were keen to burnish their cultural credentials as well- both using these to offer access- Ribentrop invited 2000 guests to an Olympic party in 1936 but also creating a gift culture within organs of the Nazi state. So for example the Nazis collected massive amounts of art- especially after the conquest of France in 1940 which they distributed onwards to their friends and allies. Generals and princes received paintings and monetary rewards to buy their silence. What we see in part within the Nazi regime is the manipulation of very old methods to govern the state: governing through display and through patronage and of course through old elites. Officers within the Wehrmaht and the SS were disproportionately from the noble classes- this gave the regime legitimacy in the eyes of conservative Germans as well as creating the image of the Nazi party as guardians of European civilisation against communism.

Courtliness served the cause of Hitler just as demagoguery on the streets of Thuringa helped him. As Chris Clark notes, we have neglected for too long the appeal that Hitler had to German elites, this means that we do not neccessarily appreciate the sources of the power of Hitler's despicable regime: one of those sources was Hitler's popularity with the masses, another was Hitler's popularity with their masters. Art and snobbery burnished the reputation of the Nazi regime within and without and helped serve them in controlling Germany and leading it and Europe into disaster, atrocity and war.

Scottish Law: the problem of feudalism

Adam Smith provided one of the classic accounts of the development of human society. He argued that human society proceeded through four stages of development in which law, society and economics all did different things. Most people will recognise this kind of theory as the beggining of another line of thought that culminated one hundred years after Smith was writing with Karl Marx's Kapital. But actually Smith provided one of his fullest accounts of these stages within his Lectures on Jurisprudence (though the Wealth of Nations too is a historical work as much as an economic one) and as Knut Haakonsen has argued, Smith and other enlightened theorists drew mostly upon natural law arguments provided by Pufendorf and Grotius not upon economics.

The point of Smith's arguments was that they occurred at the same time of course as the settlement of the union. Smith lived in a late eighteenth century that was dominated in Scotland by the consequences of the union of 1707 and the failed Stuart rebellion of 1745. After 1745 (when Smith was 22 and David Hume was 33) the British government took action to repress the feudal jurisdictions that had dominated the highlands. Such action was approved of by many members of the Scottish elite- despite the fact that it in seomed to violate some of the terms of the act of union. George Wallace for example heralded the fall of heritable jurisdictions as the demise of 'tyrannical principles' within the law in 1760. Lord Bankton agreed: such reforms placed the Scots upon the same 'foot of liberty and independency with the other people of Britain'. Feudalism was meeting its demise and being replaced by a Britannic equality before the law.

This tied into an argument, expressed by Lord Kames amongst others, that actually Scots and English law derived from the same source- a fusion of Saxon and Norman custom mixed by a series of leglislators from William the Conqueror and David I on. Kames suggested that differences between English and Scottish law 'illustrate each other by their opposition'. Comparative study of their institutions further the notion that Scottish society needed releasing from feudalist law: Sir John Dalrymple argued that 'in the declensions of almost every part of the feudal system the English have gone before us'. What Colin Kidd suggests based on this evidence is that what you have is a sense in the eighteenth century of the reform of Scots law being the same as the anglicisation of Scots law: union therefore being a mechanism whereby Scots commoners were freed from the jurisdiction of Scots nobles. In a sense just as the SNP today argue that allegiance to Europe is a way of escaping the bullying English, so in the 18th Century Scottish lawyers and theorists argued that anglicisation was a way of escaping the bullying authority of local gentry and aristocrats.

There is a further point here: to resume where we started with Adam Smith and David Hume. Part of the strength of their argument and the sense of where it goes must derive from this unique opportunity. 18th Century Scotland was a place where two legal systems existed in the same state- Scots would be familiar with their own law but also had the right to appeal such judgements to the English House of Lords. (This appellate issue is one of the central interesting anomalies within the Union.) As historians we often underrate the affect of context on thinkers- living in a fused state makes comparison and contrast a much more vivid enterprise (there is a reason why histories of Europe have become much more subtle over the last half century). The unique political community that Smith and Hume were part of must have made arguments about the historicity of law and its connection to social structure much more important and vivid not merely as theoretical constructs but as a reality.

This comparative impulse is one of the reasons that Hume called Scotland the 'historical nation': Scotland was the historical nation because the process of union that it was involved in confronted Scots with issues about the past and future, the stratification of history and the relationship between law and society in a way that other citizens of other societies (including the English) were not so immediatly confronted.

The Damned United

The Damned United opens to the songs of Leeds supporters- it closes to the songs of Derby supporters. The film's power and drive lie in the narrative of the rivalry of these two clubs led by Don Revie and Brian Clough during the late sixties and early seventies. It also chronicles the almost manic devotion to success that Clough felt, the way that he set up Revie as an inspiration and later as a nemesis and the way that nothing came before that devotion to success nothing, his family or his long term partner, Peter Taylor. The narrative is separated into two parts- one half tells the story of how Clough at Derby became the most promising young manager in England, how he built a team of champions and how eventually he fell out with the board and was sacked. The second story concerns Clough's 44 days at Leeds United- a month and a half of disunion and disaster which culminated with Clough being sacked but becoming financially secure for the first time in his life (a fact that the film does not dwell enough on, though Clough later in interviews stressed it). The stories are told well but is there more to them- do these stories matter or is this a film only to see as a Derby or Leeds supporter?

The film unsubtly makes the point that behind all of this lies a love story between two northern males- giving film critics everywhere a chance to make an intellectual point. Essentially this film makes sense as a romantic comedy. Clough and Taylor are united at the beggining of the film- we see their partnership blossom and Clough's magnetism drive it onward and then, through stupidity, Clough throws it all away. At the last of course Clough becomes contrite and goes back to Taylor and apologises. Grovelling on the ground, he says sorry and the two men are united hugging at the end of the film in a spasm of emotional intensity. There is some truth to this account of Clough and Taylor's relationship but to be honest, it is nothing that we have not seen before on screen. There is a sense that this film loses out by relinquishing the individuality of the two men concerned: bar the fact that they were males with northern British accents, would this really have been out of place in a Hollywood romcom.

The other thing the film could and should be is an account of how Clough knit together a team at Derby and failed to knit together one at Leeds. To be honest again the real issue here is that we are shown the surface of both Cloughs. We are shown the Clough who at Derby nurtured his players and the Clough at Leeds who told his players to take their medals and put them in a bin. We are shown the Leeds players gathering in the background and intriguing against him- but we are never offered any reasons why Clough was an inspirational leader at one place and wasn't at another. We could all go into a dressing room and shout 'Come on', some people have a natural wit and intelligence, but few even of those are Brian Clough! The film doesn't have anything save the natural pieties to say about football management- this goes for Don Revie as well. Though the film captures Revie's family building- the way he would take all his players to bingo games- it shows that as mere illustration, not what it was a method (whether conscious or not) that bound together those young men- in some cases young thugs- into a team.

The performances in the film are fine: Michael Sheen slips into caricature as Clough occasionally, Timothy Spall does well as Taylor (though playing an impassive and goodhearted working class man is not that much of a stretch for the veteran of several Mike Leigh films), Jim Broadbent plays a caricature midlands chairman complete with plump cigar drooping from between his lips. All the cast are fine- but somehow the lack of definition within the film means that the performances do not add up to the sum of their parts. The Leeds United squad are a perfect example- the actors capture the characters well but never really get them to be anything more than thugs with Celtic accents. That means that we never really care for them- and with Sheen's caricature neither do we really care that much for Clough. It is an entertaining film- the performances make it that- and Sheen's Clough gives the laughs and the lines their due merit but its the deeper points, the broader contexts (you never get an impression of Britain in the seventies like you do for instance from Control), that you never get. Ultimately the Damned United is ok, but it is damned to be soon forgotten.

Onibaba

Two women live in a marsh. They are isolated from almost all other contact with the outside world. Their world, Japan, is torn by civil war anyway and armies march across the land- the swamp seems some kind of safe haven amidst the strife. But any samurai who strides into it risks everything- for the women are unable to make money by any other way than by murdering the samurai and taking their armour which they sell on to a local trader. The reality of their lives is pretty brutal and unpleasant. They live together on the floor of a one room hut and sleep on straw- they scurry about like beatles in the long grass and they risk continually being caught by those that they wish to capture (indeed one of the women is at one point almost killed by a samurai warrior that she meets). However they are tied together- without cooperation it is certain that both would die, without cooperation they could not kill in order to steal in order not to starve. Added to that though their lives are consumed by desire- the arrival of Hachi the best friend of the son of one woman and the husband of the other- is a knell of doom for both of them. The younger of the two immediatly falls in lust with him- his leering reminds the mother in law of a dog after a bitch- and both women animalistically desire Hachi almost immediatly. The desire creates tensions and those tensions ultimately lead to disaster.

When Hachi first enters the lives of the women they are sitting eating. The way they are eating at that particular point is significant- tearing strips of meat off a bone with their teeth. Hachi arrives as another carnivore with his and their object both being sexual desire for each other. One gets used in this film to the flowery poetic language of love being replaced by a brutal signification of desire- I want to sleep with you confesses the mother to Hachi after bearly meeting him. The other thing about this is the impermanence of the relationships- Hachi and the daughter in law enjoy moments of sexual extasy but there is no plan for the long term here- afterall what is the longterm in this environment but death. The only thing that seems long term is the neverending warfare erupting around them (which killed the son) and the swaying long tendrils of the grass which isolate these women from the rest of the world and confine their horizons to literally the fields that they live in.

Lastly it is significant to note the role of superstitition in the film: superstition is an adjunct to these lives. The girl believes in devils, her mother in law seeks to persuade her that these devils exist (it is the mother in law's way of persuading the girl not to visit Hachi in the middle of the night). Superstition is a means for the mother-in-law of convincing her daughter that the trysts in the night are not merely dangerous but they are sinful. Those superstitions are almost political devices- but what the director here shows is that whilst the supersitition is incorrect, the sense that the world is biassed against human beings is not. The very fact that the samurai blunder into this maze and never comes out reflects the vicarious nature of human existance- as does the conclusion of the film itself. In both cases it is the lusts of men and not the power of some deity that destroys.

Onibaba's title- Devil Woman translated from the Japanese- is meant ironically but it is also powerfully descriptive. This title is meant to tell us something about ourselves- it is meant to tell us that the film that we are about to see is a film about men and women as devils but also a film about how we can become devils. For these women, that cycle involves deprivation, narrowness and lusts- it involves the warping of sexual desire, animalistic sexual desire into animalistic rage and jealousy- inevitably producing a doom that swallows up everyone in a group in which to fail to cooperate is to die.