Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim

Time Stood Still

by Paul Cohen-Portheim

Boiler House Press, 2023

British readers with little notion of what WWI internment camps were like on home soil will find this guided tour a revelation. To discover civilians imprisoned in pleasant market towns like Skipton or seaside destinations on the Isle of Man is to enter a topsy-turvy version of history, as all versions not written by the victor are. The author’s theatrical milieu and staggeringly amiable attitude inspire his incarceration memoir with an unreal air, as he leads us through blank stages, where the enemy, as in a war film, speaks with an English accent.

With the evolution of concentration camps darkening the horizon, we uneasily await specifics of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s treatment at the hands of these local commandants. But Time Stood Still sets its sights beyond the ubiquitous barbed wire of the period and its psychological insight is generous enough to resonate with all manner of human captivity. Treatment, Cohen-Portheim says, “was really a very minor matter once the fact of imprisonment had been accepted.”

First published in 1931, this reissue of Time Stood Still comes courtesy of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, with a new introduction by Andrea Pitzer and afterword by Panikos Panyani. Pitzer has written a history of global concentration camps and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov: both make her a fine match for Cohen-Portheim, who first appears to have tottered out of a Nabokov novel. A brilliant but guileless emigre of sophisticated tastes, he is ruled by inner passions, aloof from pesky real-world details. Like Nabokov himself, Cohen-Portheim was multilingual: as Panyani says, Time Stood Still was unique amongst such accounts in being written in English. But Cohen-Portheim lacks Nabokov’s savagery. Whereas Invitation to a Beheading, a work of clarified bile, enacts a noble mind’s vengeance on its former jailers, Time Stood Still conveys injustice with distilled and intimate grief. Consonant with the slow, “degrading influence on the soul of man” which Cohen-Portheim identifies as internment’s ‘true terror’, his descriptions have the force of fully internalised despair. Summing up camp life’s social catastrophe, he calls inmates “a casual rabble of men forced to be inseparable”.

This world of men (none below 18, none above 50) couldn’t be further from the world Cohen-Portheim is captured from. Busily designing costumes for a Carmen he will never see, his arrest gives us the book’s tuning note: after asking what he should bring, the detective replies: “I would pack as if you were going on holiday.”

Bound for Stratford, Cohen-Portheim marvels at the ‘delicate attention’ of his captors: how thoughtful, knowing the German reverence for Shakespeare! A misunderstanding worthy of Pnin, it turns out, as Cohen-Portheim finds himself in East London. This visit to the wrong Stratford is an overnight stop only: the bulk of his three-year internment is split between Knockaloe Camp on the Isle of Man and Lofthouse Park in Wakefield. Knockaloe was the largest internment camp worldwide, holding over 23,000 prisoners during the war.

The hallmark of interred life, Cohen-Portheim makes clear, was futility. Never alone, an inmate’s selfhood was subsumed into the aggregate entity of ‘The Camp’, leading to the confinement psychosis Dr. Adolf Lukas Vischer labelled “barbed wire disease.”

Unlike criminals, camp inmates had indefinite sentences. Unlike military POWs, they had no combative relation to the enemy. It was ‘the system’ they were up against, one as “cruel as must be all systems which do not aim at justice”. Instead, it took aim at an infernal quid pro quo; Cohen-Portheim recording how daily calories were “reduced to correspond” with rumoured conditions of British prisoners in Germany. The antagonistic energies of inmates were deferred, with sad inevitability, onto each other: “It is not the men of bad character or morals you begin to hate, but the men who draw their soup through their teeth, clean their ears with their fingers…”

Often Cohen-Portheim sounds, to put it mildly, philosophical; expressing concern he may look back on internment in “too rosy a light.” Acknowledging the horrors of incarceration he nevertheless insists: “to me personally it has been of the greatest value and assistance.” Having taken the detective’s recommendation, he wore white flannel and swore by the preserving powers of routine: “self-respect and shaving brush lie in mystical union.” Transferred from Knockaloe to Wakefield, he feels “an illogical and sentimental regret,” infuriating his fellows by speaking “almost tenderly of that place, for it is part of the psychology of internment camps to consider anyone a ‘traitor’ who finds anything but martyrdom in any of its aspects.”

Here, we see Cohen-Portheim’s particular bravery. He does not, as he fears, sugar-coat his time in the camps. Neither does he conceal what he found beneficial about a life in which “you could do as you pleased provided it was of no earthly use to anybody.” Throughout his internment, Cohen-Portheim sketched, painted and wrote, and Time Stood Still is not only a record of artistic development but its culminating proof. Its historical portrait of incarceration, “second to no other work” in Panyani’s expert opinion, is enough to recommend Time Stood Still. But it is Cohen-Portheim’s singular accomplishment, his refusal to sleepwalk through a world in which time itself “was the archenemy”, that makes it astoundingly universal.

Ash Caton is a writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland where he works in a bookshop and hosts the literary podcast "Ear Read This."