I am back with my evergreens, some of them time-yellowed and in tatters, especially if they are paperback, with leaves loose and held in place with clips and duct tape. They mean so much to me, being friends of my youth. The authors are a German, a Turk and two Israelis.

A book that never fails to impose itself on me is Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, a brilliant architect who later became Adolf Hitler’s armament minister and maximised arms production despite carpet-bombing by the Allies. It is a much quoted book, and combines memoirs with a deep insight into Hitler’s personality, his taste for art and architecture, his astuteness as a leader, his ability to broadly grasp the fundamentals of a complicated situation and the clarity of his orders... until the first setback on the Eastern front in the 1941-42 winter stripped him of the “reassuring air” of “an infallible leader.”

I first found it at a second-hand bookshop in Clifton in the 1960s and read it avidly. Later, during my stint as Dawn’s Washington correspondent in the ’90s, I purchased a brand new edition and read it all over again. When I returned to Pakistan, I thought there had been enough of a time gap and I could afford to read it a third time. Which I did. Now I have no intention of reading it from page to page, but I still do leaf through it from time to time.

Hitler’s enemies admit he could have won the war but, as Speer’s book amply illustrates, his weird racial theories made him take decisions that ultimately proved disastrous. He thought the physics of relativity was a Jewish conspiracy, and showed utter indifference to the building of an atomic bomb, because he saw a Jewish hand in nuclear research — even though, before the war, Germany was ahead of all countries in this science.

After the fall of France and the post-Dunkirk chaos in Britain, Hitler’s generals suggested an attack on Egypt, because the entirety of North Africa was at his disposal — Libya was under Italian occupation, and the area from Morocco to Tunisia was controlled by Vichy France, which was collaborating with Germany. The capture of Egypt and the Suez Canal, his generals — especially his naval chief — argued, would mean Britain would be out of the war. However, Hitler was hell-bent on destroying Russia and said a collapse of the British empire would benefit “Asian barbarians.”

Books that have been long companions

Hitler also came to racial conclusions after meeting an Arab delegation, which told him of Muslim victories in Spain and France until the defeat at Tours. Hitler said that, because of Europe’s harsh winter, the Arabs would ultimately have been subjugated by “the more vigorous natives”, and “Islamised Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammadan Empire.”

Speer admits his initial admiration for Der Fuhrer, but later realised the catastrophe to which he was dragging his people. As Germans retreated, Hitler ordered a scorched earth policy, even for German territory about to fall to the Allies. To Speer, this criminal order made no sense. His country was, no doubt, going to lose the war, but the German people had the right to exist.

He didn’t carry out the orders and, in their last meeting in the bunker, Speer confessed to Hitler that he had violated his orders. As Speer got up to take his leave for the last time and went for a handshake, Hitler didn’t even look at him. This scene has been beautifully enacted in the German film Der Untergang [Downfall], with Bruno Ganz playing Hitler.

Another paperback on the verge of fragmentation is Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s memoir. His outstanding book, My Name is Red, is a novel, but it is Istanbul: Memoirs and the City, which fascinates me for the way he describes the city and relates himself to it and to the phenomenon that is the Bosporus.

It is an autobiography, no doubt, but it is also the city’s and, in a restricted sense, Turkey’s history, with a flashback every now and then to Ottoman times, especially of its days of decline, and the shame Pamuk says the Turks of those days had for “being considered weak by the West” — especially after the treaty of Kucuk Kanarci that followed a disastrous war with Russia (1768-74). There is, Pamuk says, “no return to a civilisation whose time has come and gone.”

The author defines his relationship with the city of his birth thus: “I live in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.” (Oh, how almost true this is of me and Karachi!)

An intrinsic part of life in Istanbul is the Bosporus. It is not a sea you go to for family picnics; it is part of your life, a phenomenon, a totem with an irresistible pull, a way of life, a national trophy which every Turk considers their family heirloom. As a child, from his flat Pamuk counted the ships as they sailed and heard not only “ships’ horns booming through the fog”, but also occasionally the sound of explosions as ships collided. His cousin considered every ship to be Russian, carrying arms to Turkey’s enemies.

Did Constantinople ‘fall’ or was it ‘conquered’? Five and a half centuries have passed since Mehmet II took the city, and the Turkish republic has — until Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s assumption of power — tried its best to dissociate itself from the Ottoman past and failed. The 500th anniversary of the city’s conquest fell when Pamuk was a child and, to register the republic’s indifference to the event, neither then president Celal Bayar, nor former prime minister Adnan Menderes attended the ceremony. But would that matter to Europe?

Constantinople wasn’t just another city; it was the capital of the Roman empire. The Turks didn’t just take a city; they committed what to Europe was virtually a sacrilege: they put an end to Byzantium. For this crime, the West hasn’t forgiven the Turks. Pamuk points out how, when his wife of Russian extraction wrote of the ‘conquest’ of Constantinople in an exam paper, her American teacher told her she was too nationalistic.

Like all Turks, Pamuk is fiercely patriotic, but it is a patriotism that doesn’t inhibit criticism. He harshly criticises what he considers society’s hypocrisy, for prejudice against ethnic minorities and for its craze for Westernisation which, he says, amounted “to the erasure of the past”, the effect on culture being “reductive and stunting”, which made homes turn into museums.

The book has 204 black-and-white pictures. I haven’t seen that many in any book of memoirs, but they portray not only Pamuk at various stages of life (in grandma’s lap to a naughty boy), but also a culture that was in transition from its Ottoman past to the era of republican reconstruction, with old villas creaking with moth-eaten timber catching fire every now and then. However, the shock is the pictures do not have captions. Wrong, captions are indeed there, but all 204 of them are towards the end of the book!

Finally, we have two books by Israeli authors, both about Moshe Dayan: his autobiography Story of My Life, and Moshe Dayan by Martin van Creveld, a Holland-born Israeli national who has many uncomplimentary things to say about the soldier with the eye patch, his financial corruption and sexual debauchery.

Involved in all major Arab-Israeli wars, Dayan tries to dispel the impression that he was a hawk and portrays himself as a dove who tried to find a modus vivendi with the Arabs. He was the architect of Israel’s 1967 victory, and also dwells at length on the 1973 Ramazan war, which had caught the Israeli military by surprise.

Dayan had got wind of the coming war and was angry with Israel’s intelligence apparatus (which was fed up with him) and with then prime minister Golda Meir’s cabinet, for failing to heed his warning. Such was the stunning and initial success of the Egyptian attack across the Suez Canal, that Dayan told Meir it was the end of the third temple unless she mobilised the nukes and informed then American secretary of state Henry Kissinger about it. (Another book says Meir had decided to commit suicide.)

Van Creveld’s pen fails to rise above Zionist prejudice, for the word ‘Arab’ or the name of a Palestinian leader is invariably preceded by a pejorative, especially “terrorist.” Writing about such a freedom fighter as Sheikh Izz-a-Din Qassam, who was killed by the British, the author uses the word “terrorist” twice in a four-line description of the Arab legend, who he says became “the patron saint” of “the modern Islamic terrorist group, Hamas.” Like former American president Donald Trump, Van Creveld doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know, the difference between ‘Islamic’ and ‘Islamist’.

Dayan’s relationship with his colleagues was difficult; he “quarrelled with everybody.” During army examinations, he “cheated like mad” and had the “unique ability to disguise his deviousness with a show of honesty.” He asked fellow officers — even when he was chief of staff — to come with him to steal oranges because “I don’t get caught.”

He was financially corrupt, sold newly discovered artefacts illegally, bought relics with cheques he knew would be dishonoured, occupied land which didn’t belong to him and earned from lawmakers the title of “Moneymaking General.” He was also “an insatiable womaniser, changing mistresses [one of them being his daughter’s friend] as other men do socks.” No wonder his wife went for a divorce.

Next, among others: Mao: The People’s Emperor

The writer is Dawn’s External Ombudsman

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 3rd, 2021