Real History and the Balance of History Index to the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech Alphabetical index (text) your dossier on the oligarchsyour index on origins of anti-Semitism [images added by this website] Melbourne, March 5, 2007 Clark details untrue: author Manning Clark Family papers show Manning Clark did not witness Kristallnacht as he had claimed, writes David Marr.
AS AN old man looking back on his life, Manning Clark claimed to have seen the horrors of Kristallnacht.
Witnessing this infamous Nazi pogrom changed his life, said Clark, and made him the historian he was. “I happened to arrive at the railway station at Bonn am Rhein on the morning of Kristallnacht,” he told the poet John Tranter in 1987. “That was the morning after the storm troopers had destroyed Jewish shops, Jewish businesses and the synagogues … I saw the fruits of evil, of human evil, before me there on the streets of Bonn.” But Clark was not there.
His biographer, Mark McKenna , reveals this week in The Monthly that Clark did not reach Nazi Germany for another fortnight. The person who saw the broken glass and smoking synagogues on that morning in November 1938 was the woman Clark was to marry, Dymphna Lodewyckx . In the last years of his life, Clark told the story on radio and television and in the newspapers.
He wrote a moving version in his memoirs: “Dymphna was there on the platform at the Bonn railway station when I stepped off the train early in the morning of 8 [sic] November, 1938. We walked in ecstasy up the stairs of the Bonn railway station, out of the darkness below into the light. We were in for a rude shock. It was the morning after Kristallnacht.”
Working on the Clark family papers last year, McKenna found a letter Lodewyckx had written from Bonn to Clark in Oxford a couple of days after these events. At first McKenna thought he had made a mistake. “I re-read Dymphna’s letter carefully, checked Clark’s diary entries, and saw that it was impossible for Clark to have been in Bonn on the morning of 10 November.
As his own diary confirms, he did not arrive in Bonn until 26 November,” he writes. “I am convinced that Clark chose deliberately to place himself on the streets of Bonn, knowing full well that he was not there.” McKenna, a fellow in history at Sydney University, acknowledges the big problem for Clark is the retelling of the Kristallnacht story in the 1990 autobiography A Quest for Grace.
Here Clark quotes other letters of his and other diary entries from those months in 1938. “It seems highly unlikely,” McKenna said, “that Manning did not see the letter that showed quite clearly that Dymphna was there the morning after Kristallnacht and not him.” Our dossier on the origins of anti-semitism The above news item is reproduced without editing other than typographical Register your name and address to go on the Mailing List to receive 2007