Until Filip Springer’s History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town came into the house a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Miedzianka. The little mountain town was in Lower Silesia, a region that has over the centuries been part of Poland, Bohemia, the Hapsburg Monarchy, Prussia, Germany (German Empire, Weimar Republic, and Third Reich), and Poland again. Today, Miedzianka is still in Poland, but it would exist only in the memories of its increasingly few former inhabitants, were it not for Filip Springer, a young “self-taught journalist.” With persistence that may amount to obsession, he has recovered the story of the town’s life and times and chronicled the melancholy history of its several disappearances. In a nice tactical move, he has set the place and its people before us in the present tense, an approach that has truly taken distance out of the past.

Miedzianka, called Kupferberg until 1945, has its roots in a medieval mountain settlement named Cuprifodina and owes its existence to mining, first for silver and copper, later for other elements that would come to obsess the modern world. The hectic proliferation of tunnels, drifts, and galleries beneath the ground has been one agent of the town’s disappearance, as, over time, portions of it have simply vanished into sinkholes. But there were other forces at work: war, fire, pestilence, and the cartographer’s pen.

The Thirty Years War brought destruction from both sides of the conflict, first, in 1634, from the Catholic Hapsburgs, in the shape of Croatian troops who burned down the town and massacred everyone who had not managed to hide in the forest. A few years later, the Protestant Swedes appeared on the scene, pursuing their own righteous and bloody mission. In this case, as Springer remarks in his characteristically dry way, “if Kupferberg does not disappear for a second time, it is only because they have hardly managed to rebuild it.”

History gives the town a buffet or two in the next couple of centuries, but accidental fire, plague, and cave-ins get in some good licks. The town escapes the Great War’s devastation, losing only a half dozen men on distant battlefields. Economic forces, however, are another matter: The mines, which frequently change hands over the years into the twentieth century, always promise more than they yield. They go in and out of production, with the town’s well-being and population fluctuating accordingly.

On the other hand, Kupferberg is the site of a more reliable and, indeed, convivial resource: Kupferberg Gold, a beer of regional renown. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Wilhelm Franzky, the brewery sends horse carts out across a wide territory every day, “filled to the brim with barrels and clinking with green bottles” of “the best beer in the Giant Mountains.” The excellence of this celebrated brew is said to derive from the mountain water; though, to be sure, that supply is sometimes interrupted when underground chambers and corridors from abandoned mining operations collapse and damage the aqueduct.

We are introduced to the brewery through seven-year-old Georg Franzky, grandson of the founder. The boy is smuggling a bottle of Kupferberg Gold to Max Sintenis, “a ne’er-do-well reveler and carouser” locked up in the town’s jail for bad behavior. (Max has, and not for the first time, promised Georg a pet monkey for this service.) This vignette burgeons to include the story of the brewery; of the tavern and its bathtubs; of the famous “Underwear Ball”; of Max’s brother, a celebrated naturalist; of the pastors, Catholic and Lutheran; of artisans, shopkeepers, and councilmen. Drawing from interviews, newspapers, books, and archival sources, Springer moves through the generations, in a great leafing-out of the little town’s unique character.

Kupferberg is still part of Germany after the Great War, but times are hard during the ensuing periods of hyperinflation and economic depression — and in 1936, the Hitler Youth come marching through town: “The powerful, measured step of hobnail boots. Pounding them on the pavement. Singing songs . . . Black shorts, mustard-brown shirts, handkerchiefs tied around their necks with leather rings. Armbands. Knives at their belts.” Most of these boys are from a nearby town, though a couple are sons of Kupferberg: as a group they halt before the priest’s house to shout slogans and abuse. “The town stands stock-still. People stand at their windows watching, or go out to the back garden, not wanting to see anything. But they listen.” Shortly after, townsmen begin to disappear, drafted into the Wehrmacht. Racial registration is introduced, and Kupferberg’s few Jews disappear. The priest disappears. With war, the church bells disappear, to be forged into guns.

Refugees from the Russian advance begin to arrive, and as these terrifying troops draw closer, Kupferbergers evacuate their town, moving west — though many are forced back, finding only destruction. Springer follows the heartbreaking journeys and appalling hardship of several refugees, German and Polish. When the Russians enter Kupferberg in May 1945, beatings and rapes commence.

By the end of the war, Kupferberg is part of Poland and has become Miedzianka. The remaining Germans are deported and the town repopulated, over a period of years, with Poles. Some houses remain empty, however, and they are dismantled bit by bit for fuel — as indeed are many of the houses in which people are actually living. Fuel is scarce, floorboards are abundant. Household goods and furniture left by the former owners are taken over or looted; or, because Communist strictures on private property prevail, a large piece — a piano, say — will be dragged out and left to molder until it is eventually chopped up for firewood.

But the mines are open again, this time as a source of uranium, under Soviet supervision. Prosperity of a sort comes to the town, reflected in the hustle and bustle of a new set of characters vividly captured by Springer. But uranium mining brings radiation sickness and further damage, including the collapse of buildings from heedless tunneling below: “Of course nothing was said officially,” says one township leader quoted by Springer, “because then we’d have to say our Soviet friends’ overexploitation caused the whole town to cave in.”

Here I will leave what is a mere sketch of a very rich narrative; suffice it to say, the account continues and teems with neighborhood events and the doings of people we have come to know. It also includes many ghoulishly absurd tales of Soviet enterprise — a genre in itself. One such episode involves mining supervisors arranging periodic explosions to give the impression that underground extraction is being conducted — while, in fact, workers are sifting uranium ore out of waste tips.

Some of the most striking parts of this wonderful book are interstitial sections of personal testimony concerning various events and situations. It is testimony infused with fear, prejudice, hope, evasiveness, and denial — and there is much contradiction. Some reflections are filled with the yearning sense of loss felt by the town’s former inhabitants, people who live in its memory or have returned to view the vanished places of their vanished youth. I call this a great book, a superb work of intelligence, originality, and tremendous enterprise.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2p1DVlb

How do we gauge the success of a presidency? The media has recently found itself asking this question. There are standard measures like passing durable legislation and responding well to crisis. Equally important, at least for the current president, are keeping campaign pledges and maintaining popularity through statements and speeches. President Obama’s goal seemed to be stability and incremental progress; President Bush (43) disregarded the headlines, content to let history judge his bold actions. Each administration seems to offer a new lens through which to view the office and its occupant.

When we evaluate the present, we inevitably measure it against the past. This raises an interesting question: just how effective were our most revered presidents? Take, for example, the man widely thought of as one of the greatest among them—Abraham Lincoln. He gazes out from iconic photographs and up from the pennies in our pockets with such reassuring benevolence that we tend not to assess his performance critically. The late writer and noted historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor urges us to do so in Six Encounters with Lincoln, her provocative final book.

An acclaimed biographer of Robert E. Lee and Clara Barton, Pryor found six overlooked episodes that reveal Lincoln’s character, his fallibility, and the awesome task he confronted, at times with mixed success. With them she seeks to replace the “mirage” that Lincoln has become with a living, breathing politician. “When we are aware of greatness we want to hear about it over and over again,” she writes, “but greatness does not mean perfection.” Lincoln’s blunders interest Pryor more than his moments of high inspiration.

Four of these six encounters involve interviews between President Lincoln and petitioners: a Union soldier, a Cherokee elder, a group of politically active women, and a southern businessman. The remaining two are set-pieces rather than conversations: a bungled flag-raising and a military review. Pryor uses each to illuminate some aspect of Lincoln’s presidency or character that is under-explored, or uncomfortable, or simply illuminating for its novelty. Several episodes are stretched rather thin, such as the brief interview with the soldier, during which Lincoln used the word “nigger.” This leads Pryor to discuss at great length a lamentable fact that was already known: that Lincoln used coarse and racially ugly language throughout his life. But other encounters are more telling.

The military review affords Pryor the opportunity for her most trenchant criticism: that Lincoln was ineffective as a wartime president. She offers it bluntly: “he blundered through military labyrinths with all the agility of an angered buffalo, while thousands of people died.” Shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration, a group of 78 Army officers came to the White House to meet their new commander in chief. Inexperienced in the customs of military pageantry, Lincoln shook hands rather than saluting, allowed his attention to wander during the ceremony, and generally struggled to project authority. It was a sign of things to come. During the Civil War, Lincoln “wrote orders himself, countermanded decisions, or sent mixed messages, without informing senior leaders—then wondered why his commands were not carried out,” Pryor writes. She also contends that his visible agonizing over the war projected indecision to the troops rather than the certainty that they needed. Worst of all, Lincoln had a talent for picking and promoting mediocre officers, culminating in the insubordinate leadership of General George McClellan.

These are fair critiques, yet Pryor does not tell the whole story. Lincoln of course relieved McClellan of his command, eventually recognizing and relying on the brilliant generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. He did not countermand their decisions. Lincoln proceeded from a key strategic insight: given the Union’s larger military and economic resources, time was on his side, despite individual Confederate victories. His military leadership was only part of his conduct of the war; political moves like the Emancipation Proclamation, preventing Maryland from slipping into the Confederacy, and securing passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had military repercussions. Lincoln’s careworn face may have revealed indecision to some soldiers, but in a broader sense it reflected the agony of the nation’s most tragic hour. Brisk confidence would have been out of place. And, of course, Lincoln’s side won the war. Any fair discussion of his military leadership must show tally marks on both sides of the column.

The flag-raising encounter was a symbolic blunder that Pryor uses to explore Lincoln’s love of anecdote. Charged with christening a new Marine bandstand, he managed to pull the flag into a tangle between the pavilion and the flagpole. When the standard finally emerged it was badly torn and missing several stars: an uncanny representation of the fractured country. Lincoln might well have saved the scene for later use; he always had (or thought he had) the perfect yarn or homely story. In Pryor’s telling he told such tales strategically, deflecting opponents, delivering a cutting rebuke, or avoiding politically tense moments by taking the floor and then laughing uproariously. At other times Lincoln could be tone-deaf about his stories. A cruel political cartoonist has lady liberty asking Lincoln, “Where are my 15,000 sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” To which the president replies, “This reminds me of a little Joke…”

Pryor uses other encounters to portray Lincoln as unsympathetic to women’s rights and indifferent to Native Americans. She closes with his interview with a southern businessman named Duff Green during Lincoln’s famous trip to Richmond at the end of the war in 1865. The two discussed Reconstruction, and by most accounts Lincoln was receptive to Green’s pragmatic suggestions for rebuilding the South. Yet Pryor is harshly critical of Lincoln’s conduct after leaving the ship that brought him to Richmond. He threw aside caution and toured the southern capitol while freed blacks surrounded him in adulation. White southerners seethed at the display, and Pryor seems determined to view the scene through their eyes, describing “an unwise victor, chuckling over his spoils in a most offensive manner.” But whose perception was more important: the vanquished South, which had after all caused the devastating war, or the liberated slaves, finally free after centuries of bondage? African-Americans in Richmond had earned their moment of jubilation, and so had the victorious president.

There is a difference between illumination and revision—between saying “he is more complex than you thought he was,” and “he is not as great as you thought he was.” Six Encounters with Lincoln walks this ridge and leaves too many footprints on the wrong side. A focus on his failures, paradoxically, casts the magnitude of his achievement into even stronger light. Lincoln proved himself both a political genius and a moral luminary—he freed the slaves, won the Civil War, and preserved the union. For all its trenchant analysis and graceful writing, Six Encounters with Lincoln manages to ignore these central facts. Perhaps Pryor thought them so well-established that they needn’t be repeated. Yet the result is a book that reads as a misguided effort to cut the great emancipator down to size. Pryor is right that Lincoln was not perfect. What she fails to say is that he was a close to perfect as any president we have had so far.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2oQZ3PQ