Robert Manne’s Memoir: a witness to history
Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
Political scientist, author and public intellectual extraordinaire, Robert Manne has engaged courageously and unflinchingly in bitter and divisive debates that have alienated large sections of the Australian commentariat, while also winning him supporters who applaud his efforts to right the wrongs of history, as he perceives them. There is hardly a controversy in recent decades that Manne has not scrutinised forensically, bringing the full force of his remarkable intellect, allied to painstaking and extensive research, to identify problematic fallacies, and to bolster arguments that confound his adversaries, of whom there have been many.
Every so often, Manne’s politics have triggered a toxic backlash that might have withered any lesser campaigner. One admires his courage, his fortitude in confronting and exposing weaknesses and errors in opponents’ arguments; and his moral code and integrity in identifying and highlighting what he deems falsehoods in contemporary debates.
In his recently published book, Robert Manne A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars, he emerges as a formidable warrior for the fundamental and enduring truths of history, politics and literature, to name a few of the disciplines with which he has engaged intellectually and polemically over recent decades.
The memoir is extremely dense with historical narratives, reasoned arguments, ethical considerations, a multitude of facts and his acerbic perspectives; nonetheless, all presented with clarity and consistency. There is, however, an underlying human story woven throughout the book that provides a most moving raison d’etre for Manne’s lifelong commitment to shaping and creating a better world. He reveals early on that the evil of the Holocaust in which so many of his Jewish family perished, shaped his thoughts and, indeed, his life, especially as a politics professor at La Trobe University, as Editor of Quadrant magazine, and as someone engaged in the identification and analysis of socio-political issues of the day. His profound consciousness of the planned extinguishment of the Jewish people by the Nazis has powered his academic writing, books, essays and participation in the culture wars.
In a seminal opening chapter, he reveals the ‘soul shock’ he received as a young child when he first realised that ‘the German state had attempted to rid the Earth of the Jewish people’. He states that the Holocaust ‘stands at the beginning of my political thought’ and that ‘It is just the way it was and is’. In October 1941, his maternal grandparents, Otto and Frida Meyer, were deported from Berlin to the Lodz ghetto, where his grandmother died in February 1942. Three months later, his grandfather was asphyxiated by carbon monoxide gas in the extermination camp of Chelmno.
Manne’s paternal grandparents, Chaim and Leonora Manne, together with their children Henry and Siegmund, lived in Vienna, as did 90 percent of the 200,000 Austrian Jews. He writes that the Anschluss in March 1938, the German occupation of Austria, unleashed ‘a violent, vicious and lawless pogrom that historians have characterised as an “open season” on the Jews’. While the Manne’s older son Henry was in Prague on business, the family attempted suicide and Leonora died, while Chaim and their son Siegmund survived. Chaim was among 9,486 Viennese Jews transported to a concentration camp near the Belorussian village of Maly Trostinec, close to Minsk. Manne notes that the first transport from Vienna left on 6 May 1942, with the last leg of the nightmare journey in cattle cars. ‘Eighty-one were selected for work in the Maly Trostinec concentration camp. The remainder were driven to a killing site, stripped to their underwear, ordered to lie face-down in the mass grave that had been prepared for them and shot in the back of the neck. My paternal grandfather, Chaim Manne—a man who had done no ill to any man or woman—was one of them, murdered because he was a Jew’.
The author devotes several chapters to this tragic family saga ‘that shaped my future political life’, referencing the death of his father in 1959 and his own challenging adolescence as the sole primary carer for seven years, from the age of ten, for his invalid mother suffering from multiple sclerosis. ‘It was in the closeness of relations with my mother, both before and during her years of illness, that I learned the meaning of fidelity to another and of unconditional love,’ he states.
Manne discusses the impact of intellectual mentors at Melbourne University, who influenced his evolution as an anti-communist democratic socialist ‘with a particular interest in the historical roots of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust’, an identity that later shifted from left to right. It was also at this time that his friendship began with fellow student Raimond Gaita, now acknowledged as a leading moral philosopher. It was at Oxford University, however, that Manne encountered political works that affected him deeply, ‘those driven by a moral intelligence capable of finding a language equal to the enormity of the evil that is analysed’. On his return to Australia, those words could justifiably apply to Manne’s own remarkable career, his active political role and engagement with contemporary issues of substance and significance at home and abroad.
Manne’s book traverses important territory, including the Cold War, the Petrov affair, his own conservative decade in the 1980s, and his tenure as Editor of Quadrant, which included his oversight of the 1995 scandal over the book The Hand that signed the paper written by Helen Darville, who notoriously peddled a false Ukrainian identity. Manne, appalled by the book that was ‘historically ignorant or consciously deceptive’, deplored its ‘moral-revisionist interpretation of the Holocaust, ideologically anti-Semitic’. I found this chapter especially mesmerising. My work in the Media Unit of the University of Sydney had brought me into close contact with the revered Chancellor, Professor Leonie Kramer, and many a time I stood alongside her at graduation ceremonies in the Great Hall as she handed testamurs to graduands. She was always a most dignified figure. She was also Chair of Quadrant’s Board and, in that capacity, clashed with Manne over the book, stating in a letter published by the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘I hope that someone will analyse the reasons for the sustained and vitriolic attack on the book and its author’. Shortly afterwards, Manne’s book on the controversy, The Culture of Forgetting, was published.
In 1996 and 1997, Quadrant featured Manne’s articles ‘strongly critical of the government’s response to the High Court’s Mabo and Wik judgments’. He discusses at length the Bringing Them Home report and the conflagration that ignited in the country. Among other fascinating chapters, there is an analysis of the Howard years and their impact on Indigenous communities. This is a most rewarding memoir for the serious reader willing to engage with issues, and especially rewarding for the student of Australian history, politics, culture and sociology. There is much in this memoir with which readers might agree or, indeed, disagree. But one fact remains incontrovertible: Manne’s integrity as a researcher, writer and social justice activist.
Robert Manne A Political Memoir: Intellectual Combat in the Cold War and the Culture Wars
La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. 2024.
