Walter Ze’ev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Poland in 1929. He is author of may outstanding and prescient books…rsk
For many Europeans of my generation—those who came of age before World War II—Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was not only the most important writer of our time but a beacon of light in a very dark world. Novelist, essayist, dramatist, art historian, humanist, pacifist, idealist without compare, he was our great guide in the battle against philistine obscurantism on the one hand, creeping barbarity on the other.http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/09/romain-rolland-beacon-of-light-or-apologist-for-evil/
Were we right about him? Since his name is now all but unknown, it would be helpful to start with the bare facts.
Born in a small town in Burgundy, France, Rolland was early on recognized as a budding young intellectual star. After attending the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he became a teacher and lecturer in the history of art and music. In those days, he seems not to have had much interest in politics; throughout the furor over the Dreyfus affair, the great political battleground of his thirties, he appeared to favor neither side.
The same irenic (or perhaps non-committal) temperament informs Jean-Christophe, the huge ten-volume novel that made him famous. Appearing in installments from 1904 to 1912, it tells the cradle-to-grave story of a young German composer who makes his way to Paris, what he experienced there—especially his burgeoning friendship with a young Frenchman—and how these experiences influenced him and shaped his life and ideas. For that novel, and for his writings at the outbreak of World War I urging Germany and France to resolve their differences through a shared devotion to the lofty goals of truth and humanity, he was awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fittingly, he passed along the prize money to the Red Cross in Geneva. Later on he wrote a series of what would become known as “heroic biographies”; among the passionately admired figures profiled in these books were Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.
It was Rolland’s stand in the Great War, and specifically his stirring denunciations of the senseless mass murder that sustained it, that made him so influential at the time, and even more so in later years when that conflict came to be seen as the root from which sprang the subsequent scourges of fascism, Communism, and World War II. In the 1930s, he became the leading intellectual supporter of the anti-fascist cause in Europe.
And here things began to become more complicated. An incurable romantic, Rolland was a fervent admirer of German culture, and the most eminent interpreter of Germany in France. After 1933, although saddened by the rise of Hitler in Germany, he still regarded Italian fascism and Mussolini as a greater danger than Nazism. (The fact that his earlier books were still being published in Germany may have affected that judgment.) At the same time, however, he also came to adore Josef Stalin, going so far as to justify almost all of the Soviet tyrant’s crimes. No Marxist, not even a socialist, he defended the Soviet Union as a leading force in the battle against fascism, and that conviction, together with his impulsive political romanticism, enabled him to suppress any misgivings he might have had about the Moscow show trials of 1936-1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.
