Why Not Let the Leaning Tower Collapse review: ‘big questions on history and morality’

Daniel Snowman is a prolific author and was for many years a distinguished producer at the BBC. He has written and edited almost 20 books, many of them on history and the arts, including acclaimed books such as The Hitler Emigrés The Amadeus Quartet and The World of Placido Domingo and has contributed regularly throughout this time to this newspaper. Snowman has just published a new book of essays, Why Not Let the Leaning Tower Collapse?

What is immediately striking is the range of the essays’ concerns, from Mahler, Barack Obama and Auschwitz to the BBC and classical opera. But as Snowman writes, he is “at heart a cultural historian”. What links most of these essays is a love of modern culture and its historical context.

These essays are never dry. He writes clearly and brings even quite abstruse subjects to life. This is partly because he asks big questions. What causes historical change? Should we commemorate Hitler with plaques marking significant moments in his life or would this attract right-wing fascists who might want to place flowers at these sites? Is the historian’s job to judge the past, perhaps even condemn it, or to understand it? Snowman tackles these questions with tremendous enthusiasm. He’s a populist historian in the best sense. Accessible but not middlebrow.

Perhaps his love of history is a matter of timing. Snowman was born in November 1938, in the week of Kristallnacht. After Cambridge, he went to graduate school in America in the early 1960s, an extraordinary time, during the Kennedy years. He later joined the BBC during the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s and was influenced by some of the great social and cultural historians of the time.

Then came what one might call Snowman’s Jewish turn. Some of the best essays are about Jewish refugees, Nazism and the Holocaust. Some draw on his best-known book, The Hitler Emigrés (2002), including a lecture published here on The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism, which focuses on three key questions: Is the book a contribution to Nazi and Holocaust studies? How Jewish were the cultural émigrés? And what does their experience tell us about immigration and displacement?

There is another fascinating essay, originally published as the Introduction to a collection of essays, called Insiders/ Outsiders (2019), also on the contribution to British culture of Jewish refugees. Two other fine essays are on very different subjects: an interview with President Truman about his decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and an essay on opera in America. A fifth very different essay is about Dresden after it was destroyed by Allied bombs. What do you do, asks Snowman, if your city has been destroyed? Should you rebuild the past or move with the times? It’s a question that confronted so many city planners after the war. Sometimes it tells us more about the past when a famous building is left terribly damaged, like the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in central Berlin. In Dresden, however, the famous Frauenkirche was rebuilt. Which was the right decision?

This brings us to the last big theme that runs through much of the book: morality. Many of these big questions are agonising. There are no simple solutions. In an essay called, Should we concrete over “dark tourist” monuments?, Snowman asks what should be done about Auschwitz as it starts to disintegrate. Should it become a tourist site or a historical memorial or should it just be left to fall apart over the decades? Which is the historically authentic response to such a barbaric past?

More big questions about history and culture.