WHAT must be one of the outstanding events in the book publishing year was the first English edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, of Victor Grossman’s Stalingrad, a  kind of prequel to his magnificent Life and Fate.
 
Grossman was throughout the second world war a special correspondent for Red Army newspaper The Red Star and was posted in 1942 to the armageddon of Stalingrad, the battle that marked the beginning of the end of Hitler’s war.

More than simply a novel or history, this symphonic work captures the day-to-day desperate struggle for survival by soldiers and civilians alike.

There is no glamorisation in Grossman’s merging of cinematographic detail with a poetic prose that captures the pain, hope, love and seemingly impossible resilience of humanity at the extreme.

Will all the anguish be remembered in the future? he questions, for while the stones of large buildings and the glory of generals endures, human suffering does not. Grossman’s two great works positively answer any doubts.

In the epilogue to his gangster comedy treatment of Hitler, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht warns that “although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”  

Gabriel D Rosenfeld’s Fears of a Fourth Reich charts the various post-war attempts to replace the fuhrer’s short-lived thousand-year disaster.

What appeared to many as fanciful dreams by ex-nazis comfortably at home in Adenauer’s US-established German Federal Republic are disabused by the growing far-right movements in Europe and nasty little hangers-on in Britain today.

This should be a major concern. The spectre of fascism can reincarnate whenever capitalism is beset by its ever-more-frequent crises

On a lighter but equally instructive note, Me Me Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England by Jon Lawrence reads with the colour and interest of a novel.

Based on extensive interviews and social studies taken from the immediate post-war to the present, Lawrence sets out, not totally convincingly, to refute the generalised opinion that traditional community has been replaced by a consumer society dominated by the language and the ethos of the market “as the arbiter of public good.”

I write before the election, which we must hope will prove that there is an acceptance that we all need to belong to “a greater social connection.”