How interesting that you should publish (May 31) a series of articles reconsidering Franz Kafka 100 years after his death in the same edition as a review by Natasha Lehrer of Maurice Samuels’s Alfred Dreyfus, given the “Kafkaesque” circumstances of Dreyfus’s surprise arrest on October 15, 1894: days of interrogation and crude solitary confinement, bewilderment at not knowing the charge. His wife Lucie, expecting her husband Alfred for lunch, was told by the lunatic Major Armand du Paty de Clam simply that her husband was in prison, but not where, that he was a “wretch, scoundrel and coward” and that she was to tell no one of his arrest: “One word, a single word uttered by you and he will be ruined”. Given that Dreyfus’s story was later widely known in Europe, one can speculate that Kafka had the Dreyfus affair in mind in writing The Trial.
Natasha Lehrer writes that after Dreyfus’s pardon and resignation from the army in 1908, “he lived quietly until his death in 1935”. Far from it. Dreyfus took an active interest in French society and politics in the years before the outbreak of the First World War, publishing and lecturing in particular on the history of syndicalism. More significantly, shortly before his fiftyfirst birthday, Major Alfred Dreyfus received his mobilization orders on August 2, 1914, subsequently serving as an experienced and efficient artillery officer both during the crucial defence of Paris in 1914 and throughout the Western Front, at times in dangerous and difficult circumstances, until 1918 when he was made a full Lieutenant Colonel, and from chevalier of the Legion of Honour was promoted to officier. As the Journal de Genève exclaimed in a headline: “Quantum mutatus ab illo”.
■ Colin Lovelace Anglet, France
In her excellent review of Maurice Samuels’s book on Alfred Dreyfus (May 30), Natasha Lehrer notes that Dreyfus died in 1935, and so was “not to witness France’s betrayal of its Jewish population five years later”. This called to mind the bitter sense of shock I felt years ago when I found Dreyfus’s family tomb at the Montparnasse cemetery and saw the name of his granddaughter directly below his, with the inscription: “A la mémoire de Madaleine LEVY deportée par les allemands disparue à Auschwitz à l’age de 25 ans”.
■ Jack Flam New York
Garden chinoiserie
Nicola Shulman (May 24) writes of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, as popularized by the likes of “Capability” Brown, as a reaction to French formalism, no doubt seeing it as part of the century-long Anglo–French rivalry. She regards it as a “Whiggish version of nature, all grass and water, grottoes, rides and templehaunted slopes”, and claims that, “despite its fakeries and upheavals”, it has entered the English “cultural bloodstream”.
This emblem of Englishness has decidedly un-English, indeed e
