A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker.  But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles.  Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange.  At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences.  Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters.  After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf.  Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends.  In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge.  So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating. 

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.  

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship.  Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests.  The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.

 

 

We: The Forgotten Beginning of the Dystopian Novel

 

I finally read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We at the urging of a friend, and I am glad I did.  As I was reading, I knew I had found the source that of the stream of dystopian novels I have loved. Written in 1920–21 during the earliest years of the emerging Soviet state, the novel was considered too dangerous to publish in Russia. It first appeared in English translation abroad in 1924 and was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, just before the Soviet system itself collapsed. That history alone makes We sadly typical of Soviet repression. It is one of the earliest warnings that a revolution promising perfect equality could end in brutal tyranny.

Reading We today, however, requires adjusting one's expectations. If I had read it before reading George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, I might have stopped reading. Instead, I often found it strange, dreamlike, and structurally uneven. The plot is weaker than the novels it inspired, and at times the symbolism overwhelms the story. George Orwell reached much the same conclusion in his 1946 review, praising the book's originality while acknowledging that it was not entirely successful as a novel.

Yet dismissing We because of its shortcomings would be a mistake. Its historical importance and flashes of brilliance more than justify reading it.

The novel follows D-503, the chief engineer of the spaceship Integral, who lives in the mathematically ordered One State. Citizens have numbers instead of names. Glass buildings eliminate privacy. Daily life is governed by precise schedules. Individual freedom has been sacrificed for collective happiness. D-503 begins as a loyal servant of the state, convinced that reason has solved every human problem. His orderly existence begins to unravel after he meets the mysterious I-330, whose unpredictability introduces him to imagination, passion, and rebellion. 

[Aside on names: In the novel men are consonants, women are vowels. Their apartment number and name are the same. In translation, this caused a small difficulty because the first-person narrator is "I" in English. His lover is also "I" short for I-330 and confusing to an English reader.  In Russian the narrator uses Я to refer to himself.  His lover is И-330 or И for short.  The work of translation is endlessly complex.]

The central conflict is not merely political but philosophical. Can human beings ever be completely happy if they are not free? Can reason eliminate the irrational parts of human nature without destroying humanity itself?

One of the novel's finest moments comes during D-503's conversation with I-330 about revolution. D-503 assumes that history can eventually reach perfection, a final state beyond which no further change is necessary. I-330 calmly dismantles this assumption. Revolution, she argues, is never finished because there can never be a final number. Just as there is no largest number, there can be no final revolution. Every system claiming perfection eventually becomes another system needing to be overthrown. It is a remarkable passage because it transcends its Soviet setting and becomes a meditation on every ideology that promises permanent political perfection.

The dialogue:

D-503:  Do you realize what you are suggesting is revolution?

I-330: Of course it's revolution. Why not?

D: Because there can't be a revolution. Our revolution was the last and there can never be another. Everybody knows that.

I: My dear, you're a mathematician: tell me, what is the last number?

D: What do you mean the last number?

I: Well, then, the biggest number?

D: But that's absurd. Numbers are infinite. There can't be a last one.

I: Then why do you talk about the last revolution?

-----------

Reading We, it quickly becomes apparent how deeply it influenced later dystopian fiction. Orwell's debt is unmistakable. The surveillance state, suppression of individuality, manipulation of language, and psychological control all anticipate 1984. Huxley borrowed different elements. The sacrifice of individuality for social stability, the management of desire, and the preference for engineered happiness over freedom all echo through Brave New World. 

Margaret Atwood, who wrote the introduction to my edition translated by Bela Shayevich, rightly places We among the foundational works of modern science fiction. Without Zamyatin, it is difficult to imagine the dystopian literature that followed throughout the twentieth century.

Even the newest entries in the genre continue to explore questions Zamyatin first raised. Vince Gilligan's Pluribus imagines a world transformed by an alien phenomenon that leaves almost everyone peaceful, cooperative, and genuinely happy—but at the cost of individual identity and independent will. Unlike Orwell's nightmare of oppression, or Huxley's world of engineered pleasure, Pluribus asks whether humanity might willingly surrender its individuality for universal harmony. The question is strikingly similar to the one at the heart of We: If freedom disappears but conflict, hatred, and war disappear with it, have we created paradise—or simply another prison? 

I kept reading not because of the plot itself but the atmosphere of uncertainty. Throughout the novel I remained genuinely unsure who would betray whom. Loyalties constantly shift. D-503 cannot even trust his own thoughts as his awakening consciousness places him increasingly at odds with the One State. That suspense carried me through passages that otherwise felt obscure or overly symbolic.
In the end, We is probably more important than it is enjoyable. Its influence far exceeds its literary polish. Orwell and Huxley would write more disciplined novels with stronger narratives, Atwood would bring dystopian fiction into the modern era through the experiences of women, and Gilligan has carried many of the same philosophical questions into the twenty-first century. Yet all of them owe a debt to Zamyatin's astonishing act of imagination.

For readers who have already experienced 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid's Tale, and now Pluribus, We is not simply another dystopian novel. It is the spring from which much of modern dystopian fiction flows. Despite its uneven plot and occasional obscurity, it deserves to be read for its originality, its courage, and the remarkable prescience of its warning. Reading it more than a century after it was written, and decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union that once suppressed it, I admire how clearly Zamyatin saw the dangers that lay ahead.

David Hockney at the Serpentine: Peace in a Place Built for War

 

On a recent visit to London I discovered that the setting of an exhibition can become part of the experience. That was certainly true of David Hockney's exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery in Kensington Gardens. Much of the exhibition is devoted to the landscapes Hockney painted during his years in Normandy, images filled with quiet country roads, blossoming trees, changing seasons, and the gentle rhythms of rural life. Yet these peaceful scenes are displayed inside a former World War II ammunition bunker.

The irony is striking. Visitors descend into a structure built to support war and find themselves surrounded by paintings celebrating peace. The contrast is made even richer by Hockney's choice of subject. Normandy is remembered throughout the world for the D-Day landings and the fierce battles that followed in the summer of 1944. Yet Hockney largely ignores that history. His Normandy is a place of orchards, hedgerows, sunlight, and renewal. The same countryside that once echoed with artillery now becomes a celebration of color and life.

Five years ago I visited Hockney's exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, where his landscapes from Normandy also dominated the galleries. Seeing this newer exhibition reminded me how deeply the French countryside has become part of his artistic imagination. Rather than chasing novelty late in life, Hockney has continued to explore familiar landscapes with undiminished curiosity, finding endless variation in changing light, weather, and the cycle of the seasons.

What continues to distinguish Hockney's work is his extraordinary delight in seeing. His paintings are less concerned with photographic realism than with communicating the experience of looking closely. Trees seem almost to pulse with energy, colors become more vivid than nature itself, and ordinary country lanes invite the viewer to slow down and pay attention. His landscapes radiate optimism without becoming sentimental.

The exhibition also demonstrates Hockney's willingness to embrace new technologies while remaining faithful to traditional artistic concerns. Whether working with oil paint, acrylic, or digital media, he is ultimately pursuing the same question: how can an artist represent the experience of seeing the world?

Leaving the gallery, I found myself reflecting once again on the remarkable irony of the exhibition. A wartime bunker had become a sanctuary for paintings celebrating peace, while landscapes forever associated with one of history's greatest battles had become images of serenity and renewal. It was a fitting reminder that places marked by conflict can, with time, become places where beauty once again flourishes.

War and Power: Logistics, Industry, and the Reality Behind Victory

Phillips Payson O'Brien's War and Power is one of the most thought-provoking books on military history I have read in recent years. It complements Graham Allison's Destined for War in an unexpected way. Allison asks why great powers find themselves on a path toward conflict. O'Brien asks a different question: once war begins, what actually determines who wins?

His answer challenges many of our assumptions. O'Brien argues that we have been captivated by the myth of the decisive battle. History remembers names such as El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, Midway, and the Somme because they are dramatic moments with enormous casualties and unforgettable stories. Yet he contends that these battles were often symptoms rather than causes of victory. The real decisions had already been made elsewhere—in factories, shipyards, railroads, ports, oil fields, and supply depots.

The book repeatedly demonstrates that armies do not lose because they suddenly fail on the battlefield. They lose because they can no longer replace men, tanks, aircraft, ammunition, fuel, and food. By the time many famous battles occurred, one side had already exhausted its ability to sustain the war. The battlefield merely revealed a defeat that logistics and industrial production had already made inevitable.

O'Brien applies this argument particularly well to the world wars. His discussion of the First World War is especially illuminating. The conflict is often remembered as a succession of horrific battles with staggering casualties but little territorial gain. O'Brien shifts the focus away from individual offensives to the broader industrial struggle. By 1918, the Allies had achieved overwhelming superiority in the production of artillery, aircraft, tanks, trucks, ships, and munitions. Germany's armies continued fighting bravely, but the nation itself was running out of the means to wage war. Retreat at the front and revolution at home were the consequences of an economic defeat that had been developing for years.

His treatment of the Second World War follows the same pattern. El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Kursk remain immensely important, but O'Brien argues that they should be understood within larger campaigns in which logistics, industrial capacity, and strategic resources had already shifted the balance. Empty fuel depots, broken transportation networks, and factories unable to replace losses mattered as much as battlefield tactics.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its willingness to challenge familiar narratives without diminishing the courage of the soldiers who fought. O'Brien never suggests that battles were unimportant or that individual acts of leadership and bravery did not matter. Rather, he places them within the larger systems that made victory or defeat possible. Soldiers fight battles; nations fight wars.

War and Power is a superb work of military history because it changes the questions we ask. Instead of focusing exclusively on generals and battlefields, O'Brien reminds us to look at the factories, railroads, merchant fleets, oil supplies, and industrial workers who sustained the armies. His arguments are persuasive, clearly written, and supported by an impressive command of historical evidence.

After finishing this book, I found myself looking back at both world wars with a different perspective. We remember the great battles because they are dramatic. O'Brien reminds us that wars are often decided long before the decisive battle begins. It is a compelling reinterpretation, and one that has encouraged me to read more of his work.

 

Destined for War: Ancient Greece and the Shadow Over the Twenty-First Century

 

A friend with deep connections in China recommended Graham Allison's Destined for War after President Xi Jinping warned President Trump that the United States and China were falling into the "Thucydides Trap." Xi spoke confidently about a Greek historian who died twenty-four centuries ago. Trump appeared unfamiliar with both the history and the warning. Watching him respond to Xi, Trump seemed to be willing to dive into the Thucydides Trap rather than just fall into it. That exchange vividly displayed that ideas born in ancient Athens still shape the diplomacy of the twenty-first century.

Destined for War asks a question that has haunted statesmen for nearly 2,500 years: What happens when a rising power challenges an established one? Drawing on the insight of the Greek historian Thucydides, Allison argues that such moments create enormous structural pressures that can make war more likely—not inevitable, but dangerously plausible. His book is both a work of history and a warning directed at the relationship between the United States and China. If you follow the link above you will see Allison's Thucydides Trap project at Harvard.

The concept at the heart of the book is the "Thucydides Trap," named for Thucydides' explanation of the Peloponnesian War. Writing about the conflict between Athens and Sparta, he observed that it was "the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Allison examines sixteen historical cases in which a rising power confronted an established one, showing that many ended in war while others escaped it through exceptional diplomacy, restraint, or luck.

I read The History of the Peloponnesian War in translation and studied portions of it in the original Greek. I found Allison's treatment of Thucydides both thorough and engaging. He avoids reducing the ancient historian to a slogan. Instead, he demonstrates how Thucydides analyzed fear, honor, ambition, miscalculation, and political leadership—forces that remain as relevant today as they were in the fifth century B.C.

When Destined for War was published in 2017, the United States still largely understood itself as the defender of the liberal international order. Allison's analysis therefore assumed a strategic competition between an established democratic superpower and an increasingly powerful authoritarian China. Reading the book today, however, reminds me how much the world has changed. The international landscape has shifted, and so has American politics. The structural rivalry Allison describes remains, but the political assumptions underlying his analysis are very different than when the book was published. Trump admires dictators and undermines democracy at home and in foreign policy.  

The book's greatest strength is its insistence that history is not destiny. The Thucydides Trap is a warning, not a prophecy. Structural pressures matter, but leaders still make choices. Misjudgment, arrogance, fear, and nationalism can accelerate conflict; prudence, communication, and strategic imagination can help avoid it.

What makes the book unsettling is not that Allison predicts war, but that he demonstrates how intelligent leaders throughout history have stumbled into wars they neither wanted nor expected. Thucydides understood that nations often drift toward catastrophe through a series of decisions that seem reasonable at the time.

For me, Destined for War was more than an exercise in strategic analysis. It was painful to read because Thucydides has long been one of my favorite historians. To see an ancient warning become part of the political vocabulary of our own age—and to watch leaders in both Washington and Beijing invoke it—is to recognize that under Trump we are a declining power because he ignores history in his arrogant ignorance. 

Allison cannot tell us whether the United States will avoid the Thucydides Trap. But he reminds us why understanding history matters. The first great historian still has something urgent to say to the twenty-first century, and we ignore him at our peril.

A Day at the Imperial War Museum Duxford

 

One of the highlights of my recent visit to England was a bicycle ride from Cambridge to the Imperial War Museum Duxford, one of the finest aviation museums I have ever visited. Housed on the historic airfield from which RAF fighter squadrons flew during the Battle of Britain, Duxford is much more than a museum. It is a living airfield where history still flies.

My visit began with an unexpected thrill. A beautifully restored Bristol Blenheim taxied past, its twin Bristol Mercury radial engines producing a sound that transported me back to newsreels of the early years of World War II. Soon afterward, a Supermarine Spitfire taxied onto the runway, accelerated, and lifted gracefully into the sky. Seeing a Spitfire fly from an active wartime airfield was one of those rare experiences that no photograph or film can truly capture. It was easy to imagine the young RAF pilots who once took off from the same runway to defend Britain.

I spent the remainder of the day exploring Duxford's five major exhibition halls, each offering a different chapter in aviation history. Together they present an extraordinary survey of British aviation, from the fragile aircraft of the First World War through the Battle of Britain, the jet age, and the Cold War.

As impressive as the British collection is, I was equally surprised by the museum's remarkable display of American aircraft. Few museums outside the United States possess such a comprehensive collection. The American Air Museum houses iconic aircraft spanning nearly the entire twentieth century, including fighters, bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, cargo planes, helicopters, and Cold War strategic aircraft. Walking beneath these machines provides a vivid reminder of the enormous industrial and technological effort that shaped the outcome of World War II and the decades that followed.

Unlike many museums where aircraft are displayed as isolated exhibits, Duxford presents them within the broader story of military aviation. The exhibits explain not only how airplanes evolved but also how they transformed warfare, strategy, and the lives of the men and women who flew and maintained them. Restoration workshops visible to visitors further emphasize that preserving aviation history is an ongoing craft rather than simply displaying artifacts behind ropes.

Perhaps what impressed me most was the atmosphere of the place. Because Duxford remains an operating airfield, the museum never feels static. The sound of aircraft engines, the sight of airplanes moving across the taxiways, and the possibility that a historic aircraft might suddenly take flight create an experience unlike any conventional museum.

For anyone interested in military history, engineering, or aviation, the Imperial War Museum Duxford is an extraordinary destination. It combines the history of the Royal Air Force, the remarkable contribution of American air power, and the excitement of seeing historic aircraft still alive and flying. For me, the ride from Cambridge and the day spent at Duxford became one of the most memorable experiences of my visit to England.

Reading Robert Alter: The Psalms and the Wisdom Books

 

Over the past year I have read two of Robert Alter's remarkable translations of the Hebrew Bible: The Book of Psalms and, more recently, The Wisdom Books. Together they have reinforced my conviction that the best biblical translations are usually the work of a single gifted scholar rather than a committee.

Committee translations inevitably smooth away differences. Their goal is broad acceptance, which often means compromise. A single translator, by contrast, can preserve a coherent literary vision. Whether one agrees with every choice or not, the reader encounters a distinct mind wrestling with an ancient text. Robert Alter is such a translator.

Alter approaches the Hebrew Bible first as literature. His translations are attentive to rhythm, repetition, wordplay, and imagery, qualities that are often flattened in more familiar English versions. Reading his Psalms reminded me that these are not simply devotional texts but poems of extraordinary beauty, emotional range, and literary craftsmanship. Joy, despair, thanksgiving, anger, hope, and doubt all find expression in language that feels both ancient and surprisingly fresh.

The Wisdom Books extends that accomplishment. Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes emerge not merely as religious documents but as sustained reflections on how human beings should live in a world that is often perplexing and unjust. Alter allows each work to retain its own distinctive voice. Proverbs celebrates practical wisdom and disciplined living. Job confronts undeserved suffering with relentless honesty. Ecclesiastes questions almost every human certainty while continuing the search for meaning. Reading them together reveals not a single philosophy but an ongoing conversation about the human condition.

For me, one of the greatest pleasures of Alter's work lies in the extensive footnotes. They are not interruptions but companions to the text. His commentary illuminates linguistic subtleties, historical background, literary structure, and alternative translations without overwhelming the reader. Again and again, I found myself learning something new—not only about ancient Hebrew but about why a particular phrase has echoed through centuries of Jewish and Christian interpretation.

These books are far more than translations. They are invitations to read the Hebrew Scriptures as great literature while respecting their religious significance. Alter combines the skills of a philologist, literary critic, historian, and teacher, producing editions that reward slow, careful reading.

For readers willing to linger over both the biblical text and Alter's insightful annotations, The Book of Psalms and The Wisdom Books offer a richer encounter with Scripture than almost any modern translation I have read. They remind us that the Bible is not only a sacred text but one of the foundational works of world literature.

America's 250th Anniversary vs. the Bicentennial

 

My tank, Bad Bitch, on a tank trail on Fort Carson, Colorado, July 1976.

On July 4th 1976 I was in a tank in the desert training area on Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  Our unit, 1st Battalion/70th Armor, just began two months of field training before we deployed with our entire brigade to Wiesbaden, West Germany.  

When we drove the tanks on roads, many of us clipped 13-star colonial flags on our radio antennas. Many of our 54 tanks and one-hundred-plus support vehicles flew the flags celebrating our bicentennial.  

I was 23 years old and excited at the prospect of living in another country.  More than that, our alert area was in Fulda on the East-West border between the two Germanys.  We were being sent as a full mechanized combat brigade of 4,000 soldiers to show America was still committed to NATO and Europe despite our recent troubles.  

Those alive during America's bicentennial will remember a nation beset by riots and terror bombings.  In 1974 President Nixon resigned in  disgrace.  In 1975, we abandoned Saigon and lost our ill-fated war in Vietnam, abandoning our allies.  Our economy was a mess with high inflation and gas shortages.  

Yet, we survived and thrived. Today we are in another series of crises with leaders far more corrupt and foolish.  We just lost another war we started (much quicker this time) but I am planning to celebrate our nation just as I did 50 years ago.

The Declaration of Independence remains the greatest and most influential political document in history.  

Happy 250th America!!

Nazi Death Camps and C.S. Lewis

Emily, Me and Cliff

Since 2017, I have visited sixteen different Nazi death camps in Germany, Poland, Czechia and France.  A few of them twice.  I have also visited Holocaust memorials including Yad Vashem and the Deportation Memorial in Paris on the same island as Notre Dame Cathedral.  Since 1977, I have read all the works of C.S. Lewis, many of them several times.  When I visited death camps, it is with a mind very much formed by Lewis’s view of the world.  Lewis did not write about the camps or the Holocaust, but he has given me the ability to tour the camps and learn the details of the torture and murder committed in these places and maintain my sanity. 

The three books in particular are in the back of my mind if not in conscious thought when I visit Nazi death camps. They are The Four Loves, The Great Divorce, and The Screwtape Letters. The first death camp I visited was Auschwitz-Birkenau.  In 2017, I rode a bicycle to the city of Oswiecim from Belgrade the continued on to Lviv, Ukraine. I learned from reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder that Auschwitz was the center of industrial murder of Jews. Lviv was the place where the Nazis did almost nothing. Residents of the city raped, robbed and murdered all the Jews in the city and disposed of the bodies.  My intention was to see the worst sites of the Holocaust. Then I flew to Israel and visited Yad Vashem.  I returned to Europe and spent a week with my best friend. He and I were roommates in Wiesbaden, West Germany, in the Cold War US military in the late 1970s.  I left the Army and went to college. Sgt Cliff Almes upon discharge joined the land of Kanaan Lutheran monastery in Darmstadt and became Bruder Timotheus. 

In the years since my first visits in 2017,  Cliff and I visited death camps together.  It was wrenching to go alone, but with Cliff, we could discuss what we saw afterwards.  In The Four Loves Lewis says the posture of friendship is side-by-side, sharing the same journey.  Cliff and I went to a dozen death camps together and also spent a week in Israel. Lewis says facing a hard task together is much better than facing it alone. (He also says shirking is best done with companions.) On our most recent journey Cliff and I were joined by a mutual friend who was deployed to Poland and got a four-day pass to join us.  I taught ESL with Emily a decade ago in Lancaster. She visited Kanaan in 2019. In 2020 she joined the Army and became a combat medic. She was running a medic team in Poland.  The three of us went to the Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek death camps.  A pair of friends can always be joined by another.

Every death camp different. Many people asked me why go to so many death camps? Because each death camp is unique. While the ultimate goal was death to the Jewish people and all deemed unfit to live by the Nazis, each camp was run differently.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau more than a million Jews from all over Europe were murdered: gassed or worked to death. It was also a huge slave labor camp.  Some inmates lived more than a year and survived their terrible confinement. Treblinka, by contrast, was death machine.  Trains ran back and forth from Warsaw to Treblinka.  Those on the train were murdered on arrival, and another train rolled in. More than 800,000 were murdered in just two years. Another contrast in these camps: Treblinka was hidden from view in a remote forest.  Auschwitz is right in the city of Oswiecim. One of the strangest things about visiting Auschwitz is hearing the church bells.  The Catholic Church is adjacent to the camp.

The camps were all run by human beings.  As I see the barracks, the gas chambers, the cremation ovens, the kitchens, the latrines, the guard towers, the work rooms, I see places that were run by men and women who had eternal souls.  The people who ran the camps were not another species of evil beings, they were no different from us in substance, just different in the way they chose to live their lives.  I am aware that choice is limited in a totalitarian regime, but there was resistance.  German police were mobilized in thousands to murder Jews with gunshots and shove them into mass graves.  Some few refused. They were allowed other duties. Lewis made clear there are no ordinary persons. We are all eternal. Including murderers of innocents. Someday they will join the queue for the tour bus.  If they board they will travel to the edge of Heaven and a victim of their crimes will make the long journey to offer them forgiveness.  How many will heed that offer?

Which brings me to the bespeckled embodiment of Nazi evil. A failed Austrian salesman with a talent for logistics who joined the Nazi Party in Germany soon after Adolph Hitler took power because he needed a job.  Adolph Eichmann became a Nazi official and by 1935 was organizing the deportation of Jews from the Reich. In an irony of obeying orders, Eichmann saved the lives of thousands of Jews by deporting them.  Many Jews wanted to leave but could not navigate the approvals necessary. Eichmann organized a large arena where all the agencies were under one roof, completing all the paperwork in a day or two.  The Jews he processed lost all their property but escaped with their lives. 

 When the Nazis invaded Poland, Eichmann was on hold for two years from late 1939 until early 1942 when the Final Solution became Nazi policy.  The same Eichmann who got Jews out of the Reich used his same logistic skill to round up Jews and send them to death camps. Eichmann took three million Jews from their homes and sent them to death camps.  He was efficient and thoughtless.  Screwtape, the mid-level bureaucrat in the lowerarchy of Hell does what his Father Below orders.  As I visit camps, I look at the rail sidings, the offices, the barracks, and feel the presence of clerks doing their jobs. Reading and rereading The Screwtape Letters I was amused by the wit that assembled these advice letters to Wormwood.  But the evil hovers there.  Eichmann was a small and vain man. When he did his job well he bragged and expected praise.  He would fit perfectly within Screwtape’s world. 

My friends Bruder Timotheus and Sergeant Emily Burgett are with me at Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald and all the other camps helping me to navigate the near-infinite evil of these camps. And C.S. Lewis is there also.

 

Mittelbau Dora--The Death Camp That Made V-2 Rockets

 Mittelbau-Dora, located near Nordhausen in central Germany, was one of the most brutal and technically driven camps in the Nazi system. Established in late 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald, it became an independent concentration camp in October 1944. Its creation was tied directly to Germany’s desperation in the later years of World War II, as Allied bombing made above-ground weapons production increasingly vulnerable.

The camp’s central purpose was the underground manufacture of V-2 rockets, the so-called “vengeance weapons” developed under Wernher von Braun’s program. Production was moved into a vast network of tunnels carved into the Kohnstein mountain. Prisoners—drawn from across occupied Europe—were forced to excavate, expand, and work within these tunnels under horrific conditions. Unlike camps designed primarily for extermination, Mittelbau-Dora was a labor camp, but the distinction is misleading. The labor itself became a method of mass death.

In its early phase, prisoners were not even housed in barracks. They lived and slept inside the tunnels where they worked, without sunlight, adequate ventilation, sanitation, or sufficient food. The air was thick with dust, chemicals, and smoke. Disease spread quickly. Exhaustion was constant. Those who could not keep up—through illness, injury, or simple collapse—were beaten, executed, or sent to other camps to die.

By the time the camp was liberated in April 1945, more than 60,000 prisoners had passed through the Mittelbau system, including its many subcamps. An estimated 20,000 died. Many were Soviet prisoners of war, along with Poles, French, Dutch, and other European detainees, as well as political prisoners and resistance members. Jews were also among the victims, though the camp’s population was more mixed than extermination camps like Auschwitz.

The irony at Mittelbau-Dora is stark and enduring. The V-2 rockets produced there represented one of the most advanced technological achievements of the war—an early step toward spaceflight. Yet they were built through conditions of almost unimaginable human degradation. More people died constructing the rockets than were killed by their use.

When American forces approached, the SS evacuated much of the camp, sending prisoners on death marches. Those who remained were liberated on April 11, 1945.

Mittelbau-Dora stands as a reminder that the Nazi system was not only about ideology and extermination, but also about the ruthless exploitation of human beings in service of technological ambition. It is a place where modernity and barbarism existed side by side—indistinguishable in practice.

Another sad example of Nazis making money on slave labor is Flossenburg.

A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics by David Stipp: The Joy of Understanding!

 

A Most Elegant Equation by David Stipp is a small book about a large idea: that mathematics, at its deepest level, is not a collection of separate tools but a unified language capable of describing the universe with astonishing precision. Centered on Euler’s identity—often called the most beautiful equation in mathematics—the book shows how seemingly unrelated parts of math come together in a single, elegant statement.

As someone whose formal math education stopped at Calculus II, I found the book both accessible and intriguing. It does not require advanced training to appreciate the central insight: that numbers, functions, and constants that appear to belong to entirely different domains—imaginary numbers, exponential growth, circular motion—can be woven together into a relationship that is both exact and profound. The equation itself feels almost like a coincidence at first glance, but the book patiently reveals the deeper structure behind it.

What makes the book especially compelling is its ability to convey why this matters beyond mathematics. The same abstract relationships that produce Euler’s identity also underlie the physical world—waves, oscillations, and the geometry of space. It is a reminder that mathematics is not just invented, but discovered, uncovering patterns that seem to exist independent of us.

At times, the explanations push the edge of what a non-specialist can easily follow, and some readers may find themselves rereading sections to fully grasp the connections. But that effort is part of the experience. The reward is a clearer sense of how disparate ideas—real and imaginary numbers, algebra and geometry—fit together into a coherent whole.

In the end, A Most Elegant Equation succeeds not by teaching advanced mathematics, but by revealing its unity. It leaves the reader with a renewed sense of wonder at how something so abstract can so precisely describe the world we live in.

Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills--The Gettysburg Address Moved America from Constitutional Compromise to Aspiration

 

Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg is a short book with a large argument: that Abraham Lincoln, in just 272 words, redefined the meaning of the American republic. Wills’s central claim: the Gettysburg Address does not look to the Constitution as the nation’s founding document, but to the Declaration of Independence. In this address, Lincoln shifted the moral center of the United States from a framework of compromise to one of aspiration.

The Constitution, as Wills reminds us, is a document forged through political necessity—one that accommodated slavery in order to secure union. The Declaration, by contrast, proclaims a principle: that all men are created equal. Lincoln’s genius at Gettysburg was to elevate that principle above the compromises of 1787 and to present it as the true foundation of the nation. “Four score and seven years ago” reaches back not to the Constitution’s ratification, but to 1776, reframing the Civil War as a test of whether a nation dedicated to equality can endure.

Wills shows that this was not rhetorical flourish but the culmination of Lincoln’s evolving thought. Over the course of his career, Lincoln moved from a position of containing slavery to one of confronting its moral incompatibility with the nation’s founding ideals. Yet he never abandoned his primary objective: preserving the Union. In Lincoln’s mind, the Union and the principle of equality were not separate goals but intertwined ones. The Union gave political life to the Declaration’s promise; without it, the principle would remain abstract.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is Lincoln’s refusal to treat the Confederacy as a separate nation. Even in the midst of a brutal war, Lincoln spoke and acted as the president of all Americans. Southerners were not foreigners but citizens engaged in rebellion—participants in what he viewed as an unlawful act against a legitimate government. This stance shaped both his wartime policies and the tone of the Gettysburg Address, which avoids vindictiveness and instead calls for “a new birth of freedom” that would bind the nation together more fully than before.

Wills also situates the address within its intellectual and cultural context, contrasting Lincoln’s spare, biblical language with the ornate oratory of his contemporaries. The result is a speech that feels both timeless and radical, quietly overturning the assumptions on which the nation had been built.

Lincoln at Gettysburg is ultimately a study in how ideas shape history. Wills demonstrates that Lincoln did not merely commemorate the dead at Gettysburg—he reinterpreted the American experiment itself, grounding it not in compromise, but in a moral vision that continues to define the country’s aspirations.