The Shooting Star (The Adventures of Tintin) Review

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(More customer reviews)After a string of stories loosely based on mystery/crime plots, 'The Shooting Star' initiates the formula that would become fairly standard in the Tintin books to come: the science-fiction adventure, a kind of modernist Jules Verne. A huge meteorite flying past earth splinters a large fragment which lands near the North Pole. Containing a new metal called phostlite, named after the astronomer who detected it, Tintin and Snowy join an expedition of world-class scientists to lay claim to the rock, in a ship captained by one Haddock, now unlikely President of the Society for Sober Sailors (despite smuggling crates of whiskey for the journey). Their quest, however, is pre-empted by another expedition, financed by crooked Sao Rico banker, cigar-chomping (anti-Semitic caricature?), Bohlwinkel.
The first dozen pages of 'Star' are unequalled in literature for sustaining a nightmare mood of unaccountable suspense and anxiety (appropriate given the Occupation context [1941] in which the story was written). The meteor is introduced as both a speedily growing incandescence in the night sky, and by a melting heat afflicting the usually drizzly Brussels, the tar on the roads melting, armies of rats fleeing the gutter, car-tyres popping and mad prophets pronouncing millenarian judgements. The spangled blackness of the sky is offset by the dreamlike twilight blue that illuminates the streets. When Tintin rushes to the observatory, he finds the spanking, steely modern technology run by an eccentric gaggle of Dickensian relics, all black frock-coated dodderers, running around in the vicious circles of their own self-absorption, headed by the appropriately-named, anvil-headed Phostle. When he encourages Tintin to look into the giant, cannon-priapic telescope for himself, he sees a colossal spider heading towards the planet.
No work could keep up that sweat-making momentum, and Herge wisely lets the narrative dip, mixing comedy (including Haddock's pathetic attempts to sneak a nagan, Snowy's incessant raids on the kitchen, and the sight of the world's finest minds keeling over in green-faced sea-sickness) with race-against-the-clock suspense as our heroes strive to reach the meteor, despite various chilling sabotage attempts by their rivals. The meteor itself is a creation worthy of Swift, soon erasing memories of 'The Black Island'. The affirmative faith in science that propels the action is undermined by the instabilities of the sinking meteor, with its magnified lifeforms (including flies and spiders) and exploding toadstools (among the book's many great visual effects, the best is possibly the shrinking in successive frames of our hero as the mushroom enlarges). The massive apples that knock Tintin on the head may be an ironic allusion to the great Enlightenment hero Newton, who could be said to usher in modern science, and the famous fruit in the Garden of Eden (like Adam, or Columbus, Tintin explores virgin land), a warning against the dangers of pursusing too much knowledge (earlier predicted by the decline into madness of the scientist Philippus); nature will always fight back, in ever more aggressive and distorted forms.

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The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks) Review

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(More customer reviews)Gellately's research radically alters our understanding of how the secret police operated in Nazi Germany, as well as in the German Democratic Republic and elsewhere. Essentially, Gellately is challenging the notion that the Gestapo was omnipotent, i.e. there was an agent on every corner who provided the regime with all the information it needed. By looking at remaining files in the area of Wurzburg, Gellately found that only a small number of total agents were available to cover a relatively large area. He concludes that even if those agents worked all day and all night, they still would not be able to accumulate the type and amount of information that they did. So, if there was not a Gestapo agent on every corner, how was the regime able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance and how could they enforce their racial policies? Gellately suggests that the key factor was the willingness of Germans to provide the authorities with information about alleged criminal activities. In fact, most cases began with denunciations or self-policing. In other words, the Gestapo was reactive, not proactive. Gellately suggests that without this cooperation, the Gestapo would have been far less efficient and successful. So just why did the Germans denounce each other? Gellately found that motives were usually quite petty. One had to worry about being denounced by former lovers, business competitors, jealous neighbours, and so on. In fact, Nazi officials tried to put the brakes on the denunciations. In a nutshell, Gellately is suggesting that the secret to the success of the Gestapo was not that it had an agent on every corner, but that the population was so willing to denounce each other for personal gain. The result was an environment of self-policing. There was a Gestapo agent on every police corner, but just in the minds of the German people. But according to Bentham's theory about pan-optic society, that was enough. Germans behaved because they thought they were being watched, whether they were or not was neither here nor there. Gellately's work suggests that there are a lot of problems with the notion of a totalitarian regime. Total control is not only impossible, but not necessary in even the most notorious regimes. Far from being a regime which depended completely on terror and compulsion, the Nazis appear to have been successful largely because of public participation. The only shortcoming is that Gellately's evidence is drawn from one set of files from one part of Germany. We have to assume that the results here would be similar if not identical to other areas, even though we have no evidence from those other areas. Gellately is aware of this and it is beyond his control since most Gestapo files were completely destroyed. This book is a must read for German and Holocaust historians.

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How was the Gestapo able to detect the smallest signs of non-compliance with Nazi doctrines--especially "crimes" pertaining to the private spheres of social, family, and sexual life?How could the police enforce policies such as those designed to isolate Jews, or the foreign workers brought to Germany after 1939, with such apparent ease? Addressing these questions, Gellately argues that the key factor in the successful enforcement of Nazi racial policy was the willingness of German citizens to provide authorities with information about suspected "criminality." He demonstrates that without some degree of popular participation in the operation of institutions such as the Gestapo, the regime would have been seriously hampered in the "realization of the unthinkable," not only inside Germany but also in many of the occupied countries.Offering an intriguing examination of the everyday operations of the Gestapo and the product of extensive archival research, this incisive study surveys the experiences of areas across Germany, drawing out national, local, and regional implications.

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