John Rodden

George Orwell : the politics of literary reputation

The current stature of George Orwell, commonly recognized as the foremost political journalist and essayist of the 20th century, provides a notable instance of a writer whose legacy has been claimed from a host of contending political interests. The clarity and force of his style, the rectitude of his political judgement and his personal integrity have made him, as he famously noted of Dickens, a writer well worth stealing. Thus, the intellectual battles over Orwells posthumous career point up ambiguities in Orwells own work as they do in the motives of his would-be heirs. This study examines how Orwells legacy as a writer developed and the importance of his work both during and after his lifetime. John Rodden seeks to bring Orwells work into proper focus while providing insight into the phenomenon of literary fame.

If He Had Lived, or A Counterfactual Life of George Orwell

This essay represents an example of what might be termed “counterfactual biography,” or in Niall Fergusons phrase, “virtual history.” George Orwell died in January 1950 at the age of 46. Assuming he had lived to a healthy old age, the authors engage in a counterfactual thought experiment, speculating how he might have responded to numerous public controversies of the last half of the twentieth century and even beyond. Among the topics and issues explored are McCarthyism and the Cold War, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the wars in Korea and Vietnam, imperialism and post-colonialism, the womens and environmental movements, the nuclear freeze debates of the 1980s, the war on terrorism and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and more.

EDUCATION FOR TOLERANCE, EDUCATION FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY: THE UNUSABLE GERMAN PAST?

Now we’re “the happiest people on earth!” exclaimed former West Berlin mayor Walter Momper during the euphoria amid the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.1 But even though Germany has entered the new millennium and commemorated its tenth anniversary of unification last October, it seems that the normally phlegmatic national temper has once again reverted to type. Almost everyone acknowledges that the task of creating a truly united Germany has been – and will continue to be – far more difficult than first promised by the rosy vision of East and West Germans dancing hand-in-hand atop the Wall.

The Galileo of the GDR: Robert Havemann

The following portrait is a tribute to Robert Havemann, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death in January 2007. Largely forgotten, Havemann deserved to be remembered as one of the leading dissidents of the German Democratic Republic and as a courageous and outspoken critic of state injustices. A leading physicist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute during the Third Reich and until the mid-1960s in the GDR, Havemann grew from being a loyal Party man in the early years of the GDR, to its fiercest intellectual critic and indeed his generations conscience during the last two decades of his life.

Politics and the German language

In this essay, I trace the recent history of “Orwellian” language in Germany, first in the late 1980s in the GDR and then in the Federal Republic since reunification in October 1990. My points of departure are Orwell’s own work, both Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) with its diabolical state and Party jargon, Newspeak; and “Politics and the English Language” (1946), Orwell’s famous essay on obfuscation in the English language. As we shall see, the same abuses that Orwell warned against in the English language have, unsurprisingly, also developed in German, if not more so. Some odd twists and turns in the rise and decline of manipulative language have occurred – and yet, one reports with dismay, government and bureaucratic Newspeak are alive and well in Germany today.