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Hitler claimed that Germany had a right to annex the region, which was populated largely by ethnic Germans. And when Chamberlain returned to England after the third and final meeting with Hitler in Munich, he held aloft the signed treaty, giving Hitler what he wanted, in triumph.
“Here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine,” Chamberlain asserted.
The British public cheered: now there would never be another war as catastrophic as the Great War. The Munich Agreement, Chamberlain said, was “only the prelude to a larger settlement in which Europe might find peace.”
But, where Chamberlain saw a binding document, Hitler saw a flimsy paper that could be discarded whenever he saw fit. The following spring, Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia.
Jack Beatty, news analyst for NPR’s On Point, a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of numerous histories, including The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began and The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, has spent years pondering the three meetings between the 20th century’s most infamous dictator and the British politician whose reputation for many years was that of both appeaser and hopeless naif.
The Battle Not Begun, Beatty’s two-person play dramatizing the meetings between Hitler and Chamberlain, will have its Upper Valley premiere Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in a staged reading at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield. The reading is free to the public. There will be a short intermission.
It is not a Shaker Bridge Theatre production, its artistic director Bill Coons wrote in an email; but Shaker Bridge is supplying the space, in Enfield’s Whitney Hall, and the technical support.
Ken Bolden, an actor and teacher at the University of Pittsburgh, will play Hitler; Steven Crossley, a British actor who played Salieri in a 2010 Northern Stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, will read Chamberlain.
The play is directed by the Boston-based actor and director Myriam Cyr, who is the artistic director of the Hamilton, Mass., Black Box Lab, where two previous readings of Battle were staged in 2016. For this version, Beatty streamlined the number of characters from 12 to the main actors, Hitler and Chamberlain.
Beatty’s initial interest in the Munich Agreement was stirred less by the meetings themselves and more by how Munich is a lens through which we can read post-war American foreign policy in Vietnam and the Middle East. In contemplating the American role in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson worried that he’d be seen as an American Chamberlain if he did not try to stamp out the Communist North before — as the thinking went then — Communism swept like a wave through the governments of Southeast Asia, Beatty added.
“Fight them now so we don’t have to fight them later. It’s a profoundly misleading metaphor, and a constant in U.S. policy,” Beatty said in an interview in his West Lebanon home.
As Beatty researched a subject that has already yielded volumes of history, however, he had two realizations. The first was that “it would be redundant to write another investigation of this.”
The second was that the meetings between such profoundly different men, at a turning point in world history, was the stuff of great drama. And it hadn’t been done on stage. Why not take it on, then?
The early days of World War II have been revisited recently in popular culture, including the Oscar-nominated films Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, which won its star Gary Oldman an Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill.
But theater can do some things that film and written history can’t. The virtue and challenge of dramatic writing, particularly for these two men, is that “you’ve got to stand and deliver, you can’t just pile on the facts, you have to give a distillation of a personality,” Beatty said.
Beatty read many of the major biographies of Hitler in preparation for writing his play. What he found, he said, is that Hitler, as a person, “disappears or is frozen in some depictions as pathological and crazed, which indeed he was, but you didn’t come away with a distillation of what made this character tick.”
To try to understand and personify Hitler, Beatty looked to his transformation during World War I.
“I used his war experience as the place to begin to discuss the dynamics of the man. It was the first time he felt at home in the world. The destruction outside matched the destruction inside,” Beatty said.
What Hitler had in ferocious intensity, and which Chamberlain lacked, was “an existential wish to destroy society, a powerful will to war,” Beatty said.
Beatty’s Chamberlain is not quite the hapless, obtuse leader that some of his contemporaries and post-war historians depicted him as being, however. Yes, he was a genteel, class-bound creation of the late Victorian era facing off against a ruthless, modern, “supremely wicked man,” Beatty said.
But, Beatty added, “he was playing the hand he had. … I try to rehabilitate Chamberlain, to show he wasn’t a total doddering fool, but show him as the competent, sharp-minded man he was. He wanted peace so much because he saw the disaster of what the Second World War would be.”
That view was echoed by the British military. To go to war with Germany in 1938, the generals told Chamberlain, would be tantamount to suicide. They were not ready. While Chamberlain’s horror of war was at the root of the Munich Agreement, he also bought the British military time to re-arm.
Paraphrasing the historian David Kennedy, “appeasement is another word for diplomacy,” Beatty said.
Both men condescended to each other. Chamberlain, then 69, was repelled by Hitler’s modest origins, his coarseness, and thought of him as a buffoon. Hitler, 20 years younger, “loathed Chamberlain. He had a kind of contempt for him,” Beatty said.
After the agreement was signed, Hitler said, “Chamberlain seemed such a nice old gentleman that I thought I would give him my autograph.”
Chamberlain, a leader of the Conservative party, was a class snob but he also drew on a wellspring of feeling for the “soil of England,” Beatty said. He ached at the thought of what could happen to his country should war arrive.
In Hitler’s case, “you have to show how feral and clever he was,” Beatty said.
Hitler had the public force of personality that Chamberlain eschewed. While upper-class Germans viewed Hitler as a philistine and underestimated his drive to an absolute dictatorship, Beatty said, “even people who were deeply offended by him understood his power. … He released this almost animal fervor. He had genuine charisma, and what he said connected with a massive populace.”
Historians and political analysts have pointed to the ways in which leaders with authoritarian tendencies have mimicked Hitler, consciously or not. Although Beatty is careful not to draw too close an analogy between Hitler and President Trump, because such comparisons are inevitably facile and trivializing, there are some echoes. A man, not taken seriously and despised by elites, who nonetheless has a powerful hold on other segments of society. The sense that the leader understands them, and that he has their back. An element of tribalism. The fomenting of corrosive, antagonistic emotions, and sometimes violent outbursts. The politics of division.
Eighty years after the Munich Agreement was signed, it casts a long shadow. And interpretations of what it meant will continue to evolve, Beatty said. He feels his play is a part of that evolving historical discussion.
“I don’t say I have the final word on it, but I do have a word on it,” he said.
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.