The Great War’s Great Historian Appreciated the Good LifeDavid Fromkin’s ‘A Peace to End All Peace’ was a masterpiece. But I wish I’d eaten at his restaurant.
The historian David Fromkin died last Sunday, a couple of months shy of his 85th birthday. I first met him over lunch in 1986, when he was working on the book that would be his magnum opus, “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.” That book, about how France and Britain endeavored to impose a new political dispensation on the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I, was published in 1989, to near universal commendation.
All of Fromkin’s signature virtues were on display in “A Peace to End All Peace.” It was the product of prodigious but lightly worn research. It was politically canny about the realities of power (Fromkin had been a student of Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago). And it was beautifully written. It is worth stressing this last point. He commanded a light, allegro prose, spare but deeply evocative, clear as an Alpine spring.
“A Peace to End All Peace” was also shot through with a recurring leitmotif typical of Fromkin, at once nostalgic and admonitory. The nostalgia focused on the lost sense of innocence and amplitude that marked the decade before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914—“Europe’s Last Summer,” as he put it in the title of his 2004 book about who started the Great War. (Spoiler: there were really two wars. One was started by the Hapsburg Empire when it attacked Serbia, the other by the Germans.)
The innocence had to do with the political easiness of the time. The opening decade of the 20th century was a time of apogees and consummations. There was a shared sense, Fromkin wrote in his book “The Independence of Nations” (1981), that Europe, finally, at last, had become civilized. Sweetness and light reigned, and would reign, forever. He quotes the historian A.J.P. Taylor: “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state. . . . He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.” For the most part, there were no passports. One didn’t even need a business card when traveling. A personal card would do. This was an age before the income tax, before exchange controls and customs barriers. In many ways, Fromkin notes, there was more globalization than there is now.
There was also immensely more security—or so it seemed. In several of his books, Fromkin quotes a melancholy passage from the Austrian author Stefan Zweig about the decade before the Great War: “The Golden Age of Security,” he called it, “Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency.”
Except, of course, that it wasn’t. The admonitory current that flows through Fromkin’s writing has to do with the real permanencies in life: the intransigence of competing cultures, the unyielding imperatives of power, the awful awakenings of shattered illusions. It is appropriate that one of his abiding passions was ancient Greek civilization—he was involved in several archaeological digs in the islands off the Turkish coast—for the old teaching that nemesis was the inevitable result of hubris was a recurring theme in his work.
In politics, Fromkin was a species of Democrat that scarcely exists today. He was an unapologetic American patriot of decidedly cosmopolitan tastes. He adulated FDR and clear-eyed, disabused politicians like Scoop Jackson and Pat Moynihan. He admired much about Bill Clinton, was repelled by Mr. Clinton’s wife, and regarded Barack Obama with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion (though he undoubtedly voted for him). Unlike so many politicians of both parties today, he had the supreme political wisdom to understand that when politics becomes all-important it has failed in its primary duty: to safeguard and promote the good life.
