B10 Thursday, April 23, 2009
Old Gold & Black Life
Book Review | The Bloody White Baron
Intriguing book gives biography of pre-Hitler figure By Jacob Bathanti | Staff writer
The derangements and perturbations of fictional characters can be pretty entertaining. Think Ignatious O’Reilly, rollicking through the streets of New Orleans in Confederacy of Dunces; Esther Greenwood, descending into madness in The Bell Jar; the sociopathic, classical music-loving Alex in A Clockwork Orange. But lunatics are a bit less amusing in real life. Think Pol Pot, killing off Cambodia’s professional class on the way to a peasant utopia; Idi Amin, snacking, it’s rumored, on human flesh and feeding his ministers of state to crocodiles; and, of course, the cliché: Adolf Hitler, building a thousand-year Reich.
James Palmer’s book skirts the line between entertaining and disturbing in his book The Bloody White Baron. Palmer, a historian and travel writer tells the odd tale of Baron Roman von Ungern von Sternberg, a GermanRussian aristocrat who eerily foreshadowed Hitler at the close of the Russian Revolution. With Romanov Russia going under in 1917, Ungern took his anti-Semitism and curious affinity for “Eastern” mystic traditions to war, holding out against the Bolshevik tide. Any description barely scratches the surface of Ungern’s oddity, but one can try: this was a man who had Jews and Communists skinned alive, who claimed to be a god of war and a protector of Buddhism, who dressed like a shaman and became, briefly, the last Khan of Mongolia. It is peopled with other curious characters, like the blind Bodg Khan, the sybaritic head of the Mongolian Buddhist orders who anointed Ungern to lead his crusade.
Toward the end of his life, Ungern so weird. Clearly mentally ill, his fighoped to lead a crusade out of Mon- ure gallops across the pages, meting golia to reconquer Russia, and China, out bizarre punishments (exile to city and perhaps beyond, in the name of rooftops for months at a time) to his Buddhism and martial glory. men, attempting to lead an army on Palmer relies on varia retreat and ous other texts, includpilgrimage “...the intrigues, the torture ing memoirs, which treat to Tibet, and chambers, the bloodlust. You Ungern, and also draws instituting a on his own experiences reign of terror might as well substitute any traveling through Mon- other 20th or 21st century dicta- in the Mongolia to supplement his golian capital. tor.” historical research, proBut Ungern ducing something of a was not only a hybrid work. nut case, but a Present Mongolia informs yester- murderous nut case who held considday’s steppes, and Palmer’s slightly erable power. His oddity makes him sarcastic voice breaks in on occasion, fun to read about. But it should be reminding us of the existence of enti- remembered that he also committed ties outside the text: present-day Mon- dreadful atrocities, and that his madgolia, and the author whose distinct ness was an integral part of his will to vision propels the narrative forward. power. That narrative is one in which historiThe Bloody White Baron is in this cal biography is made appealing and sense instructive, particularly as Uninteresting to lay readers in. gern was in some ways a precursor to It helps, of course, that Ungern was Hitler. His rabid anti-Semitism, and
his fascination with the esoteric “East,” which provided fuel for his rejection of Christianity and commitment to militarism and feats arms, are highly reminiscent of the Fuehrer. Sometimes his beliefs coalesced in truly bizarre ways, as when he claimed that Communism was a 3,000 year old conspiracy founded by the Jews in Babylon. But in many ways his short reign was utterly banal: the intrigues, the torture chambers, the bloodlust. You might as well substitute any other 20th or 21st century dictator. Whether Ungern is representative or anomalous, The Bloody White Baron is still an entertaining, if unsettling, read. Besides entertainment, and education, it performs one other function as well. In plucking Ungern out of a dustbin of obscurity, it may serve to remind us that the world is still wider, and weirder, than we may imagine, and that there are considerable gaps in our understanding of the space that we humans inhabit.
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