When people look at the past, they lose some of the complexity of what it takes to be a human being. Often, we’re reading about heroes or villains. Those people are easy to fit into black and white categories even if that fitting reduces their complexity. But what about those helped the heroes or supported the villains? Do we label them as good or bad? While it would be easy to do so, it’s overly simplistic. Human motivation is often complex and less based on reason than we like to admit. We all know and acknowledge this; yet, we also believe that if we were in a historical horror, we’d act in what today would be the ‘correct’ manner. We would do the right thing. We’re nothing like the ‘bad guys.’ In The Collaborators by Ian Buruma, readers are given a look into the lives of the supporters of the villains. Himmler’s masseuse, a Manchu princess used as Japanese propaganda, and a Jew who fleeced other Jews out of money promising them safety while leaving them to fate are the focus of this book. Buruma looks at how their lives led them to the positions they found themselves in. He also relays their accounts of their actions and how they justified their own actions. It’s a look into how one finds themselves on the wrong side of history and the all too human path that led there.
Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.
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TL;DR
The Collaborators by Ian Buruma tells the story of three liars from World War 2. Each had their reasons; each rewrote their own lies; each ultimately believed their own lies. While history cannot forget what they were a party to, Buruma shows how they weren’t outliers. Highly recommended.
From the Publisher
Ian Buruma’s spellbinding account of three near-mythic figures—a Dutch fixer, a Manchu princess, and Himmler’s masseur—who may have been con artists and collaborators under Japanese and German rule, or true heroes, or something in between.
On the face of it, the three characters in this book seem to have little in common—aside from the fact that each committed wartime acts that led some to see them as national heroes, and others as villains. All three were mythmakers, larger-than-life storytellers, for whom the truth was beside the point. Felix Kersten was a plump Finnish pleasure-seeker who became Heinrich Himmler’s indispensable personal masseur—Himmler calling him his “magic Buddha.” Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender-fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and was mythologized by the Japanese as a heroic combination of Mata Hari and Joan of Arc. Friedrich Weinreb was a Hasidic Jew in Holland who took large amounts of money from fellow Jews in an imaginary scheme to save them from deportation, while in fact betraying some of them to the German secret police. Sentenced after the war as a con artist, he was regarded regarded by supporters as the “Dutch Dreyfus.”
All three figures have been vilified and mythologized, out of a never-ending need, Ian Buruma argues, to see history, and particularly war, and above all World War II, as a neat story of angels and devils. The Collaborators is a fascinating reconstruction of what in fact we can know about these incredible figures and what will always remain out of reach. What emerges is all the more mesmerizing for being painted in chiaroscuro. In times of life-and-death stakes, the truth quickly gets buried under lies and self-deception. Now, when demagogues abroad and at home are assaulting the truth once more, the stories of the collaborators and their lessons are indispensable.
Review: The Collaborators by Ian Buruma
Felix Kerstin is a dutch masseuse who becomes part of Heinrich Himmler’s inner circle by relieving the nazi’s stomach cramps. Felix enjoys the good life that comes with serving the powerful. He has money, influence, estates, and travels the world. Kawashima Yoshiko is born a Manchu princess but quickly becomes a tool of the powerful, colonial Japanese. She does her best to navigate the world she’s thrust into with myth, with story-telling, and, ultimately, lying to herself. Yoshiko attempts to play both sides, but that’s a line few can walk well. In the end, she couldn’t. Friedrich Weinreb was a European Jew whose family moved around as antisemitism rose on the pre-war continent. Weinreb, seemingly clear-eyed about what was happening, ended up running a scam in Holland. Some he may have saved. Some he gave to the SS. Kawashima doesn’t survive the war; she’s executed but lives on as myth. Weinreb and Kerstin survive the war; they go on to write memoirs that explain their side of things. What’s common between the three is how they rationalized their actions, their lives, and their complicity.
Kawashima, Weinreb, and Kerstin are the subject of Buruma’s study into the nature of people. The Collaborators uses World War 2 as a backdrop to the story of these individuals’ lives. None of them were soldiers, civilian decision makers, or military personnel. Each navigated the situation they were in with the knowledge they had available. In lesser hands, this book would have dragged the three across simplistic, binary morals. Instead, Buruma takes the reader into the nitty gritty of reality. He paints each simply as doing the best they can with what they’ve got. Buruma’s nuanced narrative brings forth the humanity in each of these three without skimping on the harm they witnessed and occasionally caused. While they aren’t painted as monsters, none of the three leave the book looking good.
The Collaborators by Ian Buruma is a historical narrative featuring Felix Kerstin, Kawashima Yoshiko, and Friedrich Weinreb. Each chapter features, at least, two of the three. Often, they all appear in the chapter. Buruma begins with their early life and moves through the war to the ending. There are often digressions that give a lot of information that eventually tie the reader back into the section at hand. This book is packed with information, and it’s a slow read worth taking the time to pay attention. Have a search engine on hand for further context and referencing.
Excellent Historical Writing
Ian Buruma is a great writer. Of course, over his life he’s honed his craft to razor-like sharpness. The prose serves the information while being more than just a recounting of the facts. Bad historical writing reads like a list; Buruma’s writing reads like a story, yet, also not like a story. In The Collaborators, his descriptions create photographs, like the reader is looking through a scrapbook.
Buruma being a historian is quick to point out the limits of our knowledge in his writing. If little is known about a subject, he clearly states that. Where he’s extrapolating, it’s evident as opposed to when he’s drawing from the historical record. Buruma labels when the story is being recounted from a clearly biased account, and, most importantly, he’s able to call a lie, a lie. While he has his own biases (who doesn’t?), Buruma is attempting lay the information out there as objectively as possible. Surely, there’s information he’s left out for whatever reason that others would use as evidence of him pushing his own agenda. (Because everything is political and everyone has an agenda, right? eyeroll emoji) Buruma being clear with the reader about the limits of his and our knowledge is important. In a day and age when research means watching a crackpot on YouTube, Buruma’s inclusion of historiography makes this valuable as an example of historical work product as well.
Occasionally, Buruma inserts himself into the book. While he wasn’t part of that generation, he lived among them and had access to people in his own family. While I typically don’t like author insertion, it works here. I can’t exactly explain why, but I think it’s because Buruma’s previous writing built up enough good well and trained me to expect the tangent to have an impact on the main point that I just accepted it.
A Modern Interpretation of a Historical Fact
The story of Kawashima Yoshiko is fascinating for many reasons. However, I want to highlight Buruma’s treatment of what to modern eyes feels like a non-traditional gender identity. The historical record treats Kawashima as a woman, and Buruma does as well. However, he notes that her behavior fits better under what we today would call a non-binary gender identity. Without being able to ask her, Buruma treats Kawashima as she was treated in her time. But she clearly enjoyed presenting as both female and male at differing times in her life. Maybe she was gender fluid. It’s beyond our ability to know at the moment. However, I like that Buruma indicates this because modern readers will recognize some of those traits about her. Buruma also indicates why he uses the ‘she/her’ pronouns when discussing Kawashima so as to avoid someone thinking he’s misgendering her. I think it’s important to put this disclaimer down to say that Kawashima’s actions through her life have many interpretations. Since we have as much myth and fabrication as we do fact, we can’t really know how she felt. (Also, I don’t know if early 20th century Japanese or Manchu cultures had the concept of gender fluid/non-binary. If you do know, please, let me know in the comments.) But we can point out that her actions may have had more meaning than we understand. Humans are often more complex than they appear from the outside, and rarely do modern people attribute complexity to those in the past.
Also, I think it’s important that Buruma notes this in light of contemporary, partisan hostility to trans/non-binary/genderfluid people. As political powers attempt to erase these people from our lives, they indicate that non-traditional gender identities are modern inventions, which, of course, they’re not. Noting that, nonetheless, shows that there’s more to history that attribute to it. We may think only a binary gender identity applied to the past, but that doesn’t mean we’re correct. It means that we only see the examples that prove our point. And if we look at how the past treated nonconforming individuals, we may see more of these individuals popping up in societal reactions.
Epilogue
The Collaborators by Ian Buruma is a great book. I loved learning about these three individuals; so, when I say the epilogue was my favorite part, I’m not trying to down play the rest of the book. In the epilogue, the reader gets Buruma’s philosophical musings on history, truth, good and evil, living lies, and, also, sums up the book. In light of today’s shallow understanding of historical revisionism, Buruma’s epilogue argues clearly for the need to revisit, reinterpret, and dig deeper into the research. As the American Right continues its attack on education that it doesn’t agree with and as the American Far Left continues to ignore the lessons of the fall of Communism, its important for historians who work with the historical record to remind us what truth is, what role history plays, and what its limits are. Buruma correctly notes that belief that there is one and only one truth is a lie. It’s a lie that too many embrace to further their political ends. Modern pundits are more like Kerstin, Kawashima, and Weinreb than they’d like to admit. They push lies; they lie to themselves, their audiences, and their bosses. In doing so, they cause damage to put money in their pocket. Hopefully, history sees them as the collaborators that they are.
Conclusion
Ian Buruma’s The Collaborators is another wonderful book from an accomplished author. His work continues to surpass my expectations, and while there’s much to learn in The Collaborators, Bururma’s ability to showcase Kerstin’s, Kawashima’s, and Weinreb’s humanity is marvelous. He takes what are traditionally the ‘bad people’ and shows they were just people. Highly recommended.
The Collaborators by Ian Buruma is available from Penguin Press now.
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