The Science of Destruction

Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century by Patrik Ouředník

“I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium,” professed the philosopher William James in his 1910 essay ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’. “The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticism, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them… I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.” It is a declaration, an optimism, that seems naïve, if not positively obtuse, when viewed in the light of the decades that followed it, nearly a century of the worst violence and destruction the world has ever known.

 

       Nazi Diagram of Gas Chambers at Auschwitz

 

Patrik Ouředník, in this extraordinary short novel, takes pains to remind us of just that in what is largely a compendium of brutal, if deftly rendered facts. The novel begins like this:

The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot the would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. It was said of the First World War that people in it fell like seeds and the Russian Communists later calculated how much fertilizer a square kilometer of corpses would yield and how much they would save on expensive foreign fertilizers if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals instead of manure. And the English invented the tank and the Germans invented gas, which was known as yperite because the Germans first used it near the town of Ypres, although apparently that was not true, and it was also called mustard because it stung the nose like Dijon mustard, and that was apparently true, and some soldiers who returned home after the war did not want to eat Dijon mustard again…

 

            U.S. Government Diagram of ‘Fat Man’ 

Continuing in the same matter-of-fact tone, if with the occasional inflection of irony, of humor, Europeana is—in the tradition of Rabelais and Beckett (both of whom Ouředník has translated into his native Czech)—a prose poem of modern hubris and folly, a dazzling, finally breathless, primer on the horrors and absurdity of our times.   

 

Peter Adam Nash