David Reynolds is, of course, a well-known author to H-Diplo subscribers, if only for his magisterial In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (2004) and his superb collection of earlier essays From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (2006).[1] His latest offering focuses on "modern summitry--made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction and made into household news by the new mass media" (p. 36).[2] The first encounter between statesmen which met that definition was in Munich in 1938, the object of chapter 2 (chapter 1 examines the evolution of meetings between kings and emperors since antiquity). Neville Chamberlain unwittingly gave the perfect justification of these personal meetings during a sitting of the cabinet before he undertook his first trip to Germany: "you could say more to a man face to face than you could in a letter" (p. 49). But then--and it is a constant theme of the book--the personal dimension can be a very dangerous one, sometimes turning into what Reynolds terms "a battle of egos" or "a test of virility" (p. 6).
Reynolds offers a very interesting discussion of the origin and implications of the word "summit," arguing that Winston Churchill's famous remark on February 14, 1950--"It is not easy to see how matters could be worsened by a parley at the summit"--has to be replaced in the context of the conquest of Mount Everest, then a national obsession (p. 1). But then when Chamberlain arrived at Berchtesgaden on September 15, 1938, he still had to "climb" to Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg aerie ("Berg" meaning, of course, "mountain" in German). "In a startling and almost literal sense, Mahomet goes to the mountain,'" a percipient New York Times journalist wrote (p. 455). Thus, what Churchill saw as a metaphor had in fact been a real-life experience for Chamberlain, and not a happy one if we accept Reynolds's verdict on this first visit: "By taking the Czech crisis to the summit, the prime minister had exposed Britain's status and prestige to an alarming degree" (p. 65). Yet, of course, "none of Chamberlain's cabinet was willing on September 17 to sacrifice London for the sake of Prague" (p. 63). On September 22, at Bad Godesberg, on the banks of the Rhine, Chamberlain was spared another literal "climbing of the mountain," but not a metaphorical one, and, at the end of the unpleasant meeting, "having staked his political future on the success of summitry, he had climbed too far to turn back" (p. 74). So, he went to Munich and came back triumphantly with the undertaking never to go to war again against Britain, which he had personally asked Hitler to sign during a private meeting. Everyone is familiar with the rest of the story. "Summitry had made Chamberlain's name and then destroyed it," Reynolds pithily concludes (p. 102) ...
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