Spoiler alert: don’t read this if you intend, but have yet, to watch the German mini-series Generation War. I may also manage to spoil Wolf Hall, the six-part TV dramatisation of which begins on the BBC on Wednesday.
The Wolf Hall trilogy has already gone through two Booker prizes and two RSC stage adaptations. I have mixed feelings about it. Historical drama is, broadly speaking, worth watching in proportion to how hard it is to stomach.
The Henrician era is not challenging at all to modern Britain’s vision of itself. Historically, the era has little to recommend it to the modern audience. Unlike the civil war, whose faultlines you could trace from 1642 to the regional voting habits of 2015, the 1520s had a political context that was unrepeatable; you could even call it niche. You’re not going to break with Rome twice. The appropriation of monastic land, like Thatcher’s great council-house selloff, was dramatic in its audacity but not exactly edifying: “I’m taking it and selling it because I can” It’s not Julius Caesar, is it? It’s not statecraft in action.
I thought, before Hilary Mantel, that the richness of the soil was all down to the intersection of legacy, mortality, politics and sex: a king who cannot assure his place in history unless he can impregnate someone, anyone; Anne Boleyn weaving for him a fantasy of his own virility, becoming trapped by her own lie. In the hands of Philippa Gregory, this is totally, start-to-finish delightful, but in the form of a guilty pleasure.
It is particularly noticeable, the current British cultural unwillingness to pick a scab, when you compare our war films with the recent German Generation War, which was first aired there in 2013. This was not the first time the Nazi story had been told in German (Downfall did that). Nor was it unique in dealing with the key events of the period so unflinchingly. Rather, it was notable for the message, bald and never circumvented, that some good people did some terrible things.
According to the German press at the time, it opened up conversations between this generation and their grandparents that had never been had. It stood as a catalyst for discussion at the last moment in time that this history could be discussed with the people who made it. There is plenty to find fault with in the drama – the presentation of the Polish resistance as, if anything, more antisemitic than the average German was historically iffy (though the story was meticulously researched, a couple of key historians could have given the lie to this claim). One Polish news magazine was so incensed that it ran an illustration of Angela Merkel in a concentration camp whose finer message (that the drama was Merkel’s fault? That anyone can play fast and loose with the truth?) was a bit muddy but whose sentiment came across loud and clear. The sheer statistical improbability of the two Jewish characters, both betrayed, still being alive at the end, while their Aryan peers had perished in battle bears some examination.
Where does the line fall between reversing expectation and rewriting history? It’s not a line you could build into a rule, but you know when a drama has crossed it. It works creatively because it tries to tell something that has long been considered untellable.
Contrariwise, the second world war is, for British culture, the opposite – a comfortable bolthole for some wish-fulfilment, where our judgment is always sound and our strength only boosted by the severity of the test. It would be much more fruitful for us, in the quest for self-awareness, to make films about the Boer war, but for some reason we never do. Downton Abbey, likewise, pretends with the odd subplot to have something to say about haves and have-nots, but is in fact telling a very photogenic, undemanding story about wealth.
We appear to be living through a time when our cultural identity can cope only with flattery. Yet with her Henry VIII Mantel has built something entirely different, something dark but more than that, challenging and difficult. It is her astonishing talent to be able to take events so familiar that they seem anodyne and turn them into the most devastating social and human critique. The fascination of Thomas Cromwell lies in more than his intelligence, his manipulation, his indifference – in more even than his mercurial ability to slip seamlessly into any place.
These books are not simply a portrait of a polymath, a historical rendition of outrageous talent. Rather, they are an account of a life that defied hierarchy, showing what it took to do so: what was lost, what was left. Even though I thought the stage versions far less successful than the books, there was something they conveyed deftly that was a bit less obvious in the text: the physical shock that met this upstart creature, Cromwell; the steady, always-too-slow, appalled realisation of his betters that a man of low birth could be preferred and could triumph.
At times it is enjoyable in a David-and-Goliath way – the offended dignity of the mighty Duke of Norfolk, intellectually outclassed by the son of a blacksmith. Other times it is painfully human, as when Cardinal Wolsey realises the precariousness of a position he thought he’d won. Always it stares unflinchingly at this centuries-old question: what is birth against quality? Will the high-born ever cease to believe that they weren’t simply born better? Cultural confrontation is, Mantel shows us, not in the gift of events themselves, but in the hands of the author.
