[lbo-talk] Speaking of Celine...

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 14 18:31:39 PST 2009



> (Didn't see much trace of Fascism in anything I read by
> him so far.)
>

He was charged with treason for active collaboration by the French liberation government, wrote a hilarious, biting reply, not the way you are supposed to respond to potentially capital charges.

Read Castle to Castle, his account of fleeing with his Nazi friends from the advancing allies. Great interview in a preface to an English translation I once had, Asked who he admired, he snarled, "Who am I to hand out certificates of appreciation!?") And then: "Stalingrad -- that's catharsis for you." If he had a saving grace in his politics, it was that he hated everybody, not just specifically the Jews.

Btw Celine's first book, his doctoral thesis, is a life of Dr Semmelweis, the Hungarian Dr to whom every woman, and every one who loves one, should give thanks every day. I'm not kidding. S discovered in the 1840s that death in childbirth went through the floor if attending physicians washed their hands between examinations. This was before Pasteur's germ theory of disease, discovered around the time of S' death. For this genuinely great, if very simple, discovery, possibly the single greatest public health achievement in history, he was ridiculed, hounded out of the profession, and driven to insanity. Shortly after he died his practice became standard, essentially eliminated all but freak incidence of disease-induced death in childbirth in hospitals (and among everyone who practiced it). Celine's bio is a pretty decent job, considering that he really wasn't a historian of science.



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