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Frank Westerman

It was in 1932 that Stalin first used the expression ‘engineers of the soul’ to refer to Soviet writers. It would become a well-known phrase and a feared concept. Together with the actual engineers, these engineers of the soul were supposed to contribute to the definitive establishment of the Communist paradise: by changing the appearance of the country with ambitious waterworks – Moscow Seaport! – and by playing upon the souls of its inhabitants in books in such a way that the New Man would rise up, respectively.The writers (the liriki) were also given the special task of lavishing praise on the builders (the fiziki): this became a literary-propagandistic genre in its own right, to which Westerman, himself once a student of hydraulic engineering, devotes much of his attention. For this book he undertook two spectacular journeys: the first was to the Gulf of Kara Bogaz, now a muddy bay in the Caspian Sea, but once described by Konstantin Paustovski as a marvel of hydraulic engineering, and the second led through the books – and the lives – of other Soviet writers, like Maxim Gorki, Andrej Platonov, Boris Pilnjak and Isaak Babel.Paustovski is well-chosen as the main character of this drama in many acts: in the Soviet period he was an intriguing figure, who became a virtual legend with his six-volume autobiography Story of My Life, but in those volumes you will find practically nothing of what Westerman came to learn about his life in the course of his travels. The fact that for this reason Engineers of the Soul also has acquired literary newsworthiness is an additional merit of an outstanding book, which has given writers their history back – at the very place where their freedom of expression was taken away from them.

'Engineers of the Soul' is a beautifully written, well-documented, extraordinarily fascinating book, full of wonderful anecdotes.

Endlessly fascinating, breathtaking. 'Engineers of the Soul' is surprising and original, not to mention meticulously researched and well-written.

de Volkskrant

Book

Non-Fiction

Asset

Assets

Ingenieurs van de ziel

'Engineers of the Soul' is the riveting story of how authors were forced to write in service of an ideology, in this case communism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. Westerman’s sharp pen combines a fine example of investigative journalism with a dash of literary history. In the book’s ingenious construction he continually contrasts the Soviet past with present-day Russia, leading the reader into a maze of mirrors through 'Absurdistan'.

Engineers of the Soul

Westerman’s painstaking research yielded answers that encompass more than a century and a half. The first reference to El Negro dates from 1831, when he was exported to Paris from Africa, ready stuffed, part of a shipment of exotic animals and birds. He turns out to have come from South Africa and lived to be 27. But even more fascinating for Westerman were the underlying questions that arose. How did he end up in this part of the world, preserved like a prized animal? And what kind of thinking led to his bizarre fate? Westerman became captivated by the broader history of colonialism and racism, the story of Europe’s imagined superiority to the rest of the world. It was a history in which he would later play a brief role himself, in a more enlightened period, as a young idealist whose dreams were quickly shattered by the realities of aid work in developing countries. The book describes this experience as well, hence the title, El Negro and Me; two stories on the same theme, intriguing biography and candid autobiography, travel literature and historiography combined.The clever way these strands are woven together makes El Negro and Me read like a very personal history of the civilization of ‘old Europe’, answering many old questions while subtly suggesting incisive new ones. Are we really so certain where the boundary lies between civilization and barbarism? Does Europe, in an era of development aid, not continue to place itself above other civilizations? El Negro’s ‘life after death’ ended in 2000, when ‘Europe’ tried to do him justice after all by interring him in African soil. Both storylines lead inexorably to post-apartheid South Africa, where the subjects of race relations, culture and civilization are examined in the harsh light of today’s reality.

A dramaturgic masterpiece.

El Negro en ik

In december 1983, Frank Westerman, a 19-year-old student of tropical agriculture, visited a museum in a small Spanish village and found himself eye to eye with a stuffed black man in a glass display case. It was an experience that would remain with him for ever. Twenty years later, by then a well-known journalist and author, he set out to identify the man known simply as El Negro. The Negro. Who was he? When did he live? Where did he come from?

El Negro and Me

Westerman returns to the village where he grew up and speaks to his former maths teacher, a man no less well-versed in the Scriptures than he is steeped in the truths of mathematics. He also talks to a geologist, an avowed atheist who is deeply convinced that science will one day be able to fathom all the mysteries of life. But above all his journey takes him to Mount Ararat where, according to biblical tradition, Noah’s ark ran aground and God made his covenant with mankind.Westerman had seen the mountain once on the horizon. Now he sets out to confront it, a challenge both physical and religious. As such, Ararat becomes a symbol of religion, and in attempting to conquer it, he aims to discover ‘whether I was capable of freeing myself from that inheritance.’The book is not unambiguous in its answer. During the climb Westerman feels faith steadily recede from him. The questions he poses at the foot of the mountain remain unanswered and he is certainly not converted. Nevertheless he quotes with approval the Russian cosmonaut who for years had to propound the official doctrine of dialectical materialism and now sighs: ‘There is something between heaven and earth about which we humans know nothing.’ For Westerman the nature of that ‘something’ remains inscrutable; it is perhaps the very essence of religious mystery.Ararat ends, symbolically, just short of the summit, which remains tantalisingly out of reach in a storm of powdery snow on a sloping expanse of ice. Meanwhile he has met some of the innumerable ark-seekers who search for historical traces of the biblical story. At the foot of Ararat, Westerman notes the extent to which the mountain is bound up with the centuries-old history of warfare in this region at the frontier between different cultures.

Westerman unites the best of two worlds: the brainpower, curiosity and precision of the scientist with the freedom and artistry of the literary writer who uses language to feel out those things that escape our understanding.

Ararat is a clever book, because Westerman has managed to create an exciting story out of this complex subject matter.

Ararat

As so often among Western Europeans, religion had slipped out of Frank Westerman’s life unnoticed - until he became a father and wondered which aspects of his own religious background and upbringing he wanted to pass on to his daughter. Ararat is a piece of highly personal journalism, splendidly combining Westerman’s own questions with the history of religion, political conflict and advances in scientific research.

Central in this amazing turnabout is the European agricultural technocrat Sicco Mansholt who worked his way up from farmer’s son in Groningen to Minister of Agriculture and subsequently Agricultural Commissioner of the EEC and Chairman of the European Commission. His controversial ‘Mansholt Plan’, formulated in the sixties to reform agriculture and manage it in a more industrial way, fundamentally changed European agriculture. By means of stable grain prices and import levies Mansholt was able to push grain production up sharply. But the initial success turned against him. From the seventies, ever larger surpluses of grain, milk, butter, and meat were created which then had to be dumped on the world market. Ultimately, Mansholt’s agriculture policy absorbed more than half of the eec budget and was permanently abandoned in the eighties.Because of the enormous increase in scale, many farmers in Europe had already given up. Meanwhile Mansholt had also undergone a sea-change in his thinking. Under the influence of the Report of Rome and his remarkable relationship with the German Green politician Petra Kelly, he changed his mind about the idea of food self-sufficiency and became a champion of the idea of preferring the environment to agriculture.De graanrepubliek ends with this apotheosis. The plan to flood fertile agricultural land will definitely mean the end of gentlemen farmers and farm workers. In a compelling way Frank Westerman shows how the history of the grain republic of Groningen is in fact the story of the destruction of all European farmers and of an old world that has disappeared.

A rich and interesting book.

Westerman tells a story of human desires and follies. At times his book reads like a thriller.

De graanrepubliek

From time immemorial, the Dutch have owed their survival to pushing back the sea. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the dikes will be pierced and water let in once again. In the grain republic of Groningen where the clay is richest and the best grain harvested, the centuries-old polders will be flooded. The farming community, and with it a thousand-year-old tradition, will have to yield to environmental pressures and recreation.

The Republic Of Grain

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