Dan Snow's History Hit - WW1 and its Aftermath with Sebastian Faulks

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Sebastian Faulks is a novelist who really needs no introduction, perhaps most famous for his novel Birdsong, he has written powerfully and poignantly about the impact of war on the human spirit. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Dan to talk about his newest novel Snow Country. Set in Austria in the aftermath of the First World War the novel serves as a perfect starting place to discuss how wars are remembered by those who took part and those whose lives were shaped by them. They explore how the experiences of veterans differed depending on whether they had experienced victory or defeat and how this influenced his decision to set the novel in Austria. They also discuss How Sebastian came to be fascinated by the First World War, why he chose to write about this period and the important role that fiction can play in connecting the general public to history.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got one of the greatest contemporary authors of historical fiction on the podcast today, Sebastian Fawkes. He's famous for his books about the First World War and its aftermath. He is famous for doing meticulous research, for vividly recreating the set on which he places his actors, his fictional characters. We all read Birdsong, we all read Charlotte Grey, we all read The Girl at the Lion Door. He is described as one of those rare novelists as being literary and popular at the same time. He's presented TV shows, he's on radio all the time.

Bit of a legend, and it was great to have him on the show. He's just finished another novel about the aftermath of the First World War and the trauma that people lived with following it, called Snow Country. So I saw that and thought it was an homage to me. So he's coming on the pub, no question, so it's great to have him on. I discover, to my great sadness sadness that I played absolutely no part whatsoever in the titling or the contents of his new book, but still, I'm glad we had a chat. If you want to watch the vast amount of programs, documentaries, listen to the podcasts that we have about the First World War,

you can do so at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. We've got a subscription service, very, very small amount of money every month. You get the world's best history channel, no aliens on there, no kind of bonkers conspiracy theories, just history about things that have happened from the Stone Age to the Nuclear Age around the world. You can access anywhere in the world, and we do our best to make sure we've got a lot of global history on there at the moment. We've got a lot of First World War content, both around the Western Front, but other theatres as well, including the millions of troops from the British Empire that fought alongside, well, inside the British Army in the First World War.

Please go and check out historyhit.tv for all that wonderful stuff. But in the meantime, here is Sebastian Fuchs. Enjoy. Sebastian, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Well, I was honoured when I saw the title of your new book. I'm sure you had me in mind when you... It's a homage. It's a rather long homage, but I'm sure you're worth it. The more I read and study about the First World War, the more interested I become actually in the aftermath. We have the poetry, we have the sources, we have the films, the novels about the war. But it doesn't feel like we do as much for that generation who then stepped out back into civilian life. I think that's probably true, or maybe I haven't read as much as I might have done.

Certainly the subject of the rebuilding of Europe after the First World War, it doesn't seem to me to have been as touched on or to be so current in people's minds. I mean, there's just been a book out about Germany after the Second, which has received a lot of attention. But the rebuilding of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or rather, rebuilding of society in the wake of the dissolution of the empire, how people managed in Germany and Austria in 1920 say, it is pretty interesting. And it went through many phases, I think, of dissolution and despair.

And one of the main sources I used in looking at the background for Snow Country was Stefan Zweig's memoir, which I think is called The World Was Yesterday. But Zweig is a very strange man and not particularly likable, but he does document in some detail the struggle of people in those countries to, well, basically to survive, first of all. And lots of those, literally like you, that I have read in this period, it's from members of the elite who care very much about Austria's reduced circumstances and I wonder why

you chose to set the novel here you could have written a novel about trauma in Britain or France or even Germany but is there something about the trauma of having been through conflict terrible terrible war and also seeing your nation your imperial unit that you were once part of and proud of, just disappear from the map? Are there two levels of trauma here? I think so. Basically, the reason that Snow Country is set in Austria is because it forms part of a very loosely linked, I don't really like the word trilogy, but a group of three novels anyway,

the first of which was called Human Traces, which came out in 2005. And that concerns a young Englishman and a young Frenchman who are both very ambitious psychiatrists, who at the end of the 19th century, have this shared ambition to set up a sanatorium or a hospital which will treat poor people by charging rich people a lot of money. But beyond that, they will really unriddle the secret of the human being, why we are so given to excesses, to violence, to instability, and why one in a hundred of us is sort of functionally mad. And the reason that therefore they ended up in Austria was for fairly obvious reasons, that it was in the last years of the 19th century, that that was the sort of focus of

exploration of this kind of work in Vienna in particular. Also, because I like Austria, there's a part of it I've been to a lot, Carinthia in the southeastern part, where a friend of mine's family comes from. But Snow Country, like all the books I've written, really, is about, as you've just said, trauma on a sort of dual scale, on two levels, really. And it's about the personal lives of people. And don't let's forget, you know, it's a novel, it's not a history. It's a novel about people's hopes and fears and loves and desire to get on in the world.

But also it is about how these are constrained and influenced by the larger historical events which had been taking place all around them. And in the main character in Snow Country, Anton, the obvious way in which his life has been hugely affected is by having fought for Austria-Hungary between 1914 and 1918. And for the other main character, Lena, who's a young woman, some 15 years younger than him, her world is constrained, well, partly by the difficulties a young woman, some 15 years younger than him, her world is constrained, well, partly by the difficulties of her family, but also by the rather corrupt world she finds in Vienna as it tries to pick itself up after the war. I've talked to lots of veterans on this subject of more recent wars, but how do you come to think about the relationship between surviving

with the things that you've seen and done on the battlefield and the new political reality like is there a link or can it be easier to deal with the things that you've experienced if your side is said to have quote unquote won if you're happy with the politics around you i think you sound diffident about putting the question in those quite simple terms but i think it's a good question, actually. I think it is significant. And I think a lot about my family, although I haven't written specifically about them. My father was of a generation, he was born in 1917, so he was 22 in 1939. And he spent six years in the army. And he saw a lot of action in North Africa and then in Italy at Anzio where he was quite badly wounded but you know he survived obviously otherwise I wouldn't be here and it was very interesting growing up with I was born in 53 so the late 50s early 60s

basically all the fathers and some of the mothers of the kids I knew had had experience of this war and to some degree, some rather more actively than others. And, you know, it was very interesting how the ones who hadn't been active were restive about that. They wished they'd been more engaged, most of them. But dealing with it, I think, I mean, my father was a very phlegmatic character and he was an optimist and he was very well balanced. very phlegmatic character and he was an optimist and he was very well balanced. A man with a very good temperament who was just determined to have a good life and to provide for a family and that his children shouldn't have to go through what he'd been through. But undoubtedly, I think that it was probably easier for him, thinking that what Britain had done alone initially and then with the Allies was a thoroughly worthwhile thing and

probably that helped him to deal with the feeling that he had witnessed on the battlefield terrible things. Well we know what happens on battlefields and your men and your friends get dismembered in front of your eyes. Not an easy thing for a 20 year old to accommodate but knowing this has been in a good course certainly I think was probably helpful to him that he wasn't particularly given to introspection but in Snow Country the main character Anton has been on the losing side and has seen the power of his country completely disappear into this rather shambolic sort of corrupt society which is completely polarized in the 20s

between go-ahead left-wing Vienna and backward rural Catholic, the rest of the country. And he, Anton, finds it very difficult, I think. It is hinted that he's suffering from something like post-traumatic stress disorder, but we don't really go into it. It doesn't really need a diagnosis, I think. It is just something that any sensitive man would struggle to deal with. The disappointment as well is so palpable and there's a line that I found very compelling when it said something about

we're into this new century thought it could be a century of bloody science and engineering and aviation and instead we just poured ourselves into the greatest wars in human history. That feels like a line that speaks to the present as well. Yeah, that line is actually spoken by a woman that runs the asylum. She's the daughter of one of the people who set it up. And she's not a gloomy person. She's rather practical and forward-looking and optimistic, though having to deal with the fact that there's no bloody money in Austria, and therefore she's going to find it hard to finance her asylum, her sanatorium. But I think it's true that certainly the last years, the sort of fin de siècle and the first, maybe first decade of the 20th century, you would find in enlightened and educated Europe,

this, well, for a start, you have in Paris this explosion of modernism in art, but also in psychological science, this feeling that following on what Freud had written, that there was real progress and a real chance that we might sort of understand the human mind. And then it turned out that most of Freud's early cases were scientifically somewhat less than secure, shall we say, to put it politely. But in any event, rather than solve the riddle of humankind in some sort of benevolent and philanthropic way, what the big questions facing the intellectual elites of Eastern and Western Europe in 1920 were, what kind of creature are we after all? I mean, the means of mass destruction has been available for a relatively short time, machine guns and big field artillery. And what were the chances that

when they were widely available in Europe, the political leaders would overlook their potential and pursue the sort of fathers of peace? Well, very slim as it turned out so i think that sort of what you might call existential problem obscured any sense of progress in science and politics does that line come from a place of pessimism now do you know i mean the 90s this trope is slightly overdone but there was a sense you and i were both very very young in the 90s obviously hardly remember it at all you were a child winner of lots of best book awards in 1990s but there was a sense that oh we've the cold war's done we've got where the old shadow of nuclear obliteration thank goodness we can file that under done the future is all going to be sort of internet and great excitement

and fixing the world's problems and now we're dealing with like catastrophic well various things that we don't have to rehearse but one of them is a bizarre and strange undermining of Western democracy itself. Did you feel the parallel when you're writing this book? No, I hadn't really thought about it until you spelled it out. But we got married in 1989. And I remember writing something at the time. I wrote a poem to my wife to celebrate our getting married. And I remember it contained various references to the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the freeing

of Mandela, the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, all these things which, you know, one had grown up with as a sort of unshakable evil doom around the world. And there was undoubtedly a feeling of fantastic optimism that these things which had seemed immutable and awful could actually crumble and change and could be changed for the better. And we all remember books called The End of History and so on, which suggested that a sort of social democratic enlightened model would rule the world, etc., etc. And, you know, why this hasn't come about is for many complex reasons. Instead, we've seen a rise of a rather barbaric and populist and, as you rightly say, in some ways, rather anti-democratic feeling around the world.

But I wouldn't want to stress the parallels too closely, because I think, as far as this country was concerned, the writing had been on the wall for some time, and the pre-war Edwardian era was already a period of intense doubt and uncertainty, as our empire was disappearing, partly at our volition, partly at its own volition. If you read Kipling and you read his famous poem, Recessional, the captains and the kings depart, etc., the fire's dwindling on the headland. This is written in the 1890s, so there's already a sense of change and actually of peril, I think, as well. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, I've got Sebastian Fox, legend, on the podcast. More coming up.

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listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. You mentioned you got married in the 90s you also published a famously bird song one of the most successful novels of our lifetimes and there's been this huge upsurge of interest in the first world war around the anniversary but before and after it's always fun for me to have historical novelists on this podcast because in a way do you think and don't be modest i mean do you think you've done more for that public engagement with the war than historians? Historians would hate that. I think when I was writing Birdsong I was aware of a paradox which was that I had become

very interested in this. I'd always been slightly interested in the First World War but I'd always shied away from it as the background for a novel as being a subject too big, too complicated, and frankly, too repulsive. There wasn't much fun and laughter to be had from khaki and mud and wounds and gas and putrefaction and mass slaughter. So I wasn't really sure how I would ever put it into a novel that people would enjoy reading. But at the same time, I did become aware, I think in the late 80s, when I was working on a newspaper on the books pages, when quite a lot of books came out in the 70th anniversary of the armistice. And I read some of them, and I chatted to friends of mine, pretty well-educated, enlightened people, and they seemed to know very, very little about it,

really. And I do feel there was a way in which the memory of the First World War was obscured by the way that the Second World War was so much better remembered and indeed memorialized, largely because of the Holocaust and the efforts of Jewish community worldwide to make sure that this was not forgotten, that it was properly understood, and so on. And I think that allowed the First World War to slide out of popular public consciousness as it were but at the same time the paradox was there are plenty of books being produced of course it was still being taught at university and school level and there was still plenty of excellent historians writing about it and re-evaluating and so on but it didn't really I think reach the general public and I do think it's very immodest of me to say so, but you've tempted me into immodesty,

that novels like Birdsong and also the works of Pat Barker did ring a bell because they reminded people of something they had half forgotten. And of course, I was fortunate enough when I was researching it in the early 90s that I could still meet veterans of the First World War. and I met quite a few and talked to them. In fact, their reminiscences as spoken to me were rather less use than actually the documents I was able to read in the Imperial War Museum by and large. By this stage, all these men were at least 95 years old, and most of them were telling anecdotes that they could no longer remember if they were true or not really. But they knew that this was my such and such story

and this is my gas story. But actually, to me, the great joy of being with these men, talking to them, was it gave me a sense of validation when I went to France with them and I stood on battlefields with them. And they had that way, as old men do,

of physical contact, holding your hand as they explain that this was the very spot on which they'd stood. So for me as a novelist, the great thing about that was it brought history out of being an academic thing by which one was rather intimidated. And it brought it into the present. It was this guy. It could have been me. It could have been you. It was this piece of earth right here. Nothing to be afraid of. We can talk about this. We can understand this still to some afraid of we can talk about this we can understand this still to some extent and then as you say there was of course the four years of remembrance between 2014 and 2018 which i think were pretty well conducted and i think then the efforts of

the government and numerous bodies to educate basically to reach out commemorate the bbc among many other people, English Heritage, the Commonwealth War Grades Commission, the Imperial War Museum, and so enormous number of initiatives to engage younger people, particularly. And I think that that did stimulate quite a big debate. And the historians rather fought back at this stage, I must say. And there's a school, as you know, of historians who hate this idea of First World War exceptionalism, that this was a conflict unlike any others. On the contrary, they argue, it was just an egregious, admittedly, and horrible example, but an example

in the continuing story of European bloodlust. And that debate, I think, was public. And I think that was interesting. And I think it was taken up by the public. And I think the understanding of that war was increased by it. I have talked to historians that tried writing historical novels, they find it very freeing. And one of them has said to me, they find actually they can get closer, they think probably to some kind of historical truth, by free themselves, by using the novel form. How should we think about the novels that you write, in this case, No Country Without Postwar, the novels you've written about the First World War? How should we treat those as readers? I think the interaction between fiction and history is that part of the problem of the

First World War, there weren't many good novels about it at the time. The 20s produced a lot of really terrible fiction in which soldiers attempted to write novels in which they just changed the name of their regiment to the Royal Loam Shires or whatever it might be. And then they told their stories. And then there were memoirs which came out largely about 10 years later, most of them Sassoon and Graves and others. But writing fiction is a very different matter. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is that fiction will always start with the internal life of the character. It's going to start with, how do I feel? How do I respond to this? Not what is going on. And I think that's something that novelists can do, which probably most other writers,

however good they may be with words and sentences, however great an understanding they may have of historical events, struggle with. I mean, so for instance, in Birdsong, you don't really have any sense of what is happening politically. You have absolutely no sense of the causes of this conflict.

You only get a sense of what it felt like to an ordinary guy. And I think that is, of course, a very valuable contribution that fiction makes if it's read in conjunction with history, with informed history, and with primary sources. You don't find that in history, but I think the two are, should be, this is going to sound a rather bland answer history but I think the two are should be this is going to sound a rather bland answer but I think they should be complementary really. Snow Country is immediately after First World War why do your novels seem to hinge on these decades the 20th century do you find it easy to write about is it the subjects are sufficiently weighty what is it about this time? I'm a writer who likes to think that I'm very objective and

there is nothing personal nothing subjective with me in my books so I think of myself like a painter who goes and you either imagine an abstract or you paint from life in the countryside or whatever but you're not painting yourself there's no self-portraiture going on at all however it's big however of course everything comes out of your head and everything comes through your fingers and the women are created by you as much as the men the old people the young people the people from other countries living at different times and so on and as I've got older I realized that a lot of my books are actually really trying to answer the same question, which is a question I sort of first

posed to myself when I was about 17, which is, how on earth did we find ourselves in this mess? I'm 17 in 1970. And this is a pretty bleak time in the Cold War, not as bad as when I was a little boy at school during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it felt like we all might go to hell. school during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it felt like we all might go to hell. So I do think that seeing my father go off to the local hospital to have some German shrapnel taken out of his arm, in which had worked its way down there, so this would have been in about the late 50s. Seeing my mother's scrapbook of her father, who'd been killed by a German sniper crossing the Rhine in 1945 when he was going actually as a reporter. He'd been a soldier in the First World War. So I never met him. And just trying to figure out, I'm not saying I had a particularly unusual childhood or

that I was traumatized in any way by things, but you do want to work out who you are. And I think over a long period, if you write a lot of books, you are inevitably working out the questions which affect you personally. Who are we? And then I suppose my study of history, which was pretty random, frankly, I didn't do much history at school. I didn't really start reading serious historical books until I started writing novels. But one thing it led me to ask is, I don't really go very far in history before I come into anthropology, which is, you know, what kind of creature are we to do these things? You think of the excesses of the Roman Empire,

the Roman soldiery, which marched through a village and left no woman unraped, no child unkilled. And, you know, likewise, the First World War, here we are, Europe, the continent of Shakespeare and Goethe and Mozart and so on, and we just stand in a field and kill 10 million of one another. So I suppose the second lot of books I wrote really span out of that into sort of what is the flaw? What is the terrible thing that runs through us that makes us the way we are and I think all of this really comes back to a sense of puzzlement when I was a child growing up and I still haven't really found the answer well Sebastian that's disappointing because I was going to finish this podcast by you telling me the answer come on man you've worked it out is it called testosterone

no I think it's to do with evolution and I'm very interested in anthropology and how we evolved and what were the sort of important changes which made Homo sapiens dominant. And in fact, the next book I'm going to write won't be the third of the Austrian trilogy. It'll be something along those lines. But a reviewer of Snow Country did say, I hope he won't wait 15 years before he completes, because he's posed so many questions. We do want to know the answer.

So I promise you that the third volume of the Austrian trilogy, which I assume will come out in about four or five years' time, will give the complete answer to everything, rather like sort of Stephen Hawking meeting Socrates, all rolled up in one. You've got to try, haven't you? Yeah, I'm going to try. Otherwise, what's the point? I agree. Sebastian Fuchs, thank you very much. The book's book's called snow country everyone and named close to my heart thank you for coming on thanks dan thank you very much

thanks folks for listening to this episode of dance notes history as i country all work out and finish. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful.

And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our Medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods