THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF ISRAEL
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Let’s begin with some personal background. We would like to know where you come from and how you became an historian eventually, anything in your childhood or youth that directed you in that way.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I’m of a Welsh background; all my family comes from North Wales and were all Welsh-speaking, though I grew up in London, and so I didn’t learn Welsh. But we used to go back to North Wales a lot when I was a child, at least once a year, and sometimes more. I was very intrigued by all the ruins, partly the ruins of the medieval castles there, which Edward I first built when he conquered Wales and were modeled on Crusader castles, but more, actually, by the very recent ruins of the slate quarries; it was a big industry in North Wales. My grandfather was a slate quarryman. I could see the rusting machinery there and it was as if people had only just left. And of course, I became intrigued by this idea that there’d been a past which I couldn’t know about directly, involving people I hadn’t met and couldn’t meet, because my grandfather was dead by then. So I think that really got me interested in history. And also, of course, going back and forth from London to Wales, just going from the big city to the countryside, I experienced a huge cultural and linguistic difference: London was very cosmopolitan, Wales was not cosmopolitan; Welsh was a different language I didn’t understand; the people were rooted very much in a Calvinistic Protestant religion. It was all very, very different. And then finally, as a child, of course I used to go into the East eEd of London – we lived on the eastern edges of London – and see all the bomb sites, see the rows of houses with gaps in them. You could even the wallpaper and the mantlepieces on the exposed upstairs bedrooms, which seemed rather shockingly intimate. What had happened to the people who had lived there: were they dead? Who had killed them or forced them to leave?
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So these were your first impressions or memories of the war?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes. I mean, I grew up after the war, but the bomb sites were still around for at least 10 years after that, and very slowly repaired.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And did you inquire what happened?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes of course. Of course I asked my parents. And that’s really the start of my interest in Germany, in a sense, because of course the Germans had bombed London, and my mother had memories of the Blitz, and my father had been in North Africa and Italy during the war. A
Prof. Joseph Mali:
He was a soldier?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
No, he was an airman. His eyesight wasn’t good enough to fly, so he ran the field airstrip radar; he moved out behind the armies as they advanced. And I always remember him telling me how he’d arrived in Milan just after Mussolini and Clara Petacci had been strung upside-down from a petrol station gantry, and he saw the blood on the ground, after the bodies had been cleared away. And of course, in the ’50s and early ’60s the war was still very present, I mean, all the politicians were still wartime politicians. I felt, with some of my school friends, that it was the end of the postwar years when Churchill died in 1965. So we went to his funeral; we stood on Ludgate Hill, some of us, because it marked the ending of the postwar era.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right. And what was the image of Germany at the time?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, of course it was very intriguing: you know, why had these people done this; why did they try and destroy London; what was their reason? I should say that the Holocaust has never played much of a role in English perceptions of wartime Germany. It’s quite different for America. For the British, Nazi Germany has always appeared as a country that conquered Europe, a country hell-bent on conquering other lands. The Holocaust was never really much discussed until the ’90s, I guess, and it’s still not the central feature of the British memory of the war.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And so when you went up Oxford, it wasn’t in your mind to specialize in German history?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
No, I was particularly interested in 17th-century England, and … I was taught by Keith Thomas and went to lectures by Christopher Hill. And that was all very exciting. I was also interested in the Crusades because I was excited by reading Steve Runciman’s marvelous history of the Crusades. But in the late ’60s, German history was really opening up and there were historians like Tony Nichols and Tim Mason in Oxford who were starting to do serious research on it. And the archives had been opened. The Frankfurt war crimes trials in 1964 made a big impression on me. Fritz Fischer, a German historian who posed the whole question of continuity, the longer-term roots of Nazism, by writing about Germany’s war aims in the First World War, came to Oxford and generated a huge amount of excitement, and that’s really what determined me to work on German history rather than seventeenth-century England.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Let me just ask two related questions, although they are separate. Given that the Holocaust has always been subsidiary or peripheral, even now, what was your first engagement as a young kid anyway, with Jews and the Jews of England? That’s the first question. The second question is this: There’s no doubt that the Israeli historians, who got interested in German history, ultimately their interest was based upon the fact that there was a Holocaust. Whereas you’re saying British historians not and, yet, of all the British historians – I wouldn’t say “all” – Ian Kershaw is there as well – you have made the Holocaust pretty central, especially if you look at the Snyder-Evans debate. So what explains this?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
First of all, my best friend at school was Jewish, quite by chance. I have no idea whether that influenced me or not but maybe it did; it just seemed natural, not worth thinking about, so I was all the more shocked when I first came across anti-Semitism. And of course I did encounter at the end of the ’60s anti-Semitism and racism with the rise of the National Front in Britain, and also to some extent the rise of the NPD, the Neo-Nazis in Germany, which happened in the late ’60s. And that’s one of the things that made me, and quite independently, I think, several other people of my generation who wanted to become historians, look to Germany, because, again, rather naively, I think we wondered if we were in the early stages of fascism. I remember a Germanist in Oxford, Hartmut Pogge- von Strandmann, saying, ‘Britain is in the early stages of the run-up to fascism.’ And all the student movements in 1968, when I was an undergraduate, seemed incredibly exciting, of course; one of the key issues was the Vietnam War, which raised the question of why some countries invaded others, especially if there seemed no convincing rational basis for their doing it. So Germany became a kind of laboratory, if you like, for the study of fascism and imperialism. My generation of British historians who worked on Germany started off mostly by looking at Imperial Germany rather than the Nazi period, because that’s where we thought we could locate the long-term origins of these phenomena that were so troubling and so threatening in the present.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right. And that’s where Fischer was so important. So both the current rise of neo-fascist movements in England and in Germany, and the Fischer visit directed you to the origins of German nationalism in the 19th century?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, the sudden seeming collapse of liberal values and tolerance were deeply shocking. Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech is important here, because that was extremely dismaying when you saw dockworkers marching on parliament to declare their support for his essentially racist outburst. I had French and Latin, and on that basis it’s not difficult to learn another Indo-European language, and so I learned German and decided to a doctorate in the field of modern German history. One of my teachers was Anthony Nicholls, who had written a very good book, the first serious English history of the Weimar Republic, based on German research. And so I went to study with him.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
But it is interesting with the Fischer, I mean, would it be fair to say that I accused the German historians of being far more interested in why Weimar democracy failed than … understanding the dynamics of Nazism? This was the Sonderweg approach which somehow elided what the Israeli historians concentrated on, for obvious reasons. And they were far more interested just in why did democracy fail.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, there were two sides to the question, obviously: one, why did democracy fail, and the other is, why was it replaced by an extreme racist fascist dictatorship. They’re two slightly different, though related, questions. Obviously at the back of our minds was the second question as well as the first. What I did for my thesis was to pick a liberal movement of social reform, in order to follow it over a long period, from 1890 or so, up to 1933, to see whether it held to liberal values or whether these decayed. I tried first the Temperance movement, but I discovered it was absolutely a nonstarter in Germany; they were much too fond of their beer and wine. So I hit upon the feminist movement. There was contemporary work in Britain by Brian Harrison and others, in that area and I followed that as an example. I found that there were some major changes just before the First World War, in 1912, where the German feminists moved a long way to the right, became much more nationalist, more conservative, retreated from the demand for the vote and retreated from the demand for equality for women.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So if I understand you correctly, feminism was kind of a test case for liberalism in Germany, for you?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
There was a specific group of liberal women associated with the left-wing liberals in Germany. And there was another entirely different feminist movement which was part of the Social Democratic movement, which had its own particular agenda, basically a Marxist one.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Tell us something about your experience in Germany, because the early ’70s, of course, were a period of wild political movements, radicalism all around.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I came in at the tail end of that. And that was very exciting, of course, and very fascinating, for me. And of course there had been, there were radical student movements in England.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right. And what was your impression of Germany historiography at the time? I mean, or put it differently, when did you decide on a specific course of research that is social history as against current or the more dominant German schools of historiography at the time?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, it was a time when Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his group in Bielefield, but also the students of Fritz Fischer, all of whom I got to know very well, were moving into what Georg Iggers called the social history of politics, explaining Germany’s political development by social factors. And I felt, and as I got to know other British historians working in the field, like Geoff Eley, Dave Blackbourn and a number of others, that this idea of a German Sonderweg, put forward by the Bielefeld School, arguing that Germany had somehow departed from the normal path of development in modernity, in 1848, with a failed bourgeois revolution which had led to a modern economy but not a modern society and not a democratic political system, was wrong. We all felt that involved a ridiculous idealization of British political and social developments, which we saw in the wake of Perry Anderson’s articles in New Left Review as being backward, hierarchical, all the things that the Germans said it wasn’t. So that kind of interpretation did not really work for us.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Your interest in feminism or in lower classes or movements in German history, how did you conduct your research, you know, whereas most German archives are full of political diplomatic sources?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I’ve never called myself a social historian. I began my career when the New Left was emerging in Britain, and post-1956, post-communist historians like Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Ronald Hilton, Victor Kiernan, John Savile, Edward Thompson and others, were enormously influential in my generation. We utterly rejected the idea, as G. M. Trevelyan said, that social history is history with the politics left out. For us it had to be right in there. In a way, I made my career by applying British social history methods in that tradition, to German history, which didn’t have that kind of approach to social history, indeed barely studied it at all. So I was able to find subjects which the Germans had not touched, and there essentially were three research projects: one was the feminist movements, and absolutely nobody had worked on that, and in fact the whole history of it had been suppressed in the Weimar Republic and afterwards; and secondly, there was the social history of medicine and health; and thirdly, there was the social history of crime and punishment. Medicine and health were studied in medical faculties, and crime and punishment in law faculties, and they didn’t do social history. And the sources available were, above all, police reports; the political police in Hamburg, where I began, had an enormous archive – and there were analogs elsewhere, but it’s by far the largest one – where they had surveillance put on all of these movements – there’s hundreds of files on the feminist movement, for example, particularly because the Suffragettes in England were involved in violent activity – not violence against people – digging up golf courses, burning railway carriages and this kind of thing; there was nobody in the railway carriages. But they were thought to be very dangerous, rather like the much more violent anarchists, so the police kept tabs on them. So there’s an enormous amount of information, which included reports on meetings and clippings from newspapers, all of that kind of thing.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
And then, again, there were personal papers, minutes of organizations. I found a whole archive of the main German feminist movements in Berlin in a sort of a backstreet house, unorganized, but it was there. I found the archive of the Protestant Women’s Association in the attic of a girls’ home in Hanover. So a lot of this stuff was very neglected but it was all there.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Did you go to East Germany as well?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes, I did, I went to East Germany. I was also researching the Social Democratic women’s movement and only later did I realize it couldn’t, it was far too much. And I did a separate book on that.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
What did you experience there?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, I had a recommendation from Fritz Fischer, who counted as okay with the East Germans. You know, they have this categorization of socialist historians, bourgeois historians, and bourgeois historians trying to be objective. And he was for them a bourgeois historian trying to be objective. So he wrote me recommendations and I got in. I got into the Institute for Marxism-Leninism. And of course the main Reich archives were in Potsdam, in East Germany, so I used them fairly extensively. And it was all right. I mean, life was, when I stayed there, not very exciting. The food was pretty terrible. But I met some interesting people. At the Institute for Marxism-Leninism I had a very difficult interview with a man who went by the extraordinary name of Herr Übel, Mr. Evil, as if he had come out of a James Bond movie. He was in fact a historian and archivist. And he said, ‘Is there something you want?’ I said, ‘Well, can I see a catalogue?’, because they didn’t allow you to see catalogues. You had to work through the footnotes of other people’s books and then use them and guess. And he said, ‘No, you can’t. When Mr. Nixon,’ who was then president, ‘allows us to see his catalogs, you can see ours.’ I said, ‘What have I got to do with Mr. Nixon? So I did encounter hard-line ideologues there.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Who really formed your German historical consciousness?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yeah, well, it was a mixture, obviously. I mean, it sounds a big arrogant, but I kind of formed it myself, really, because there was so much going on in German and English history; it was a time of such dramatic change. And then of course I discussed it all with Geoff Eley and Dave Blackbourn and Dick Geary and all of my friends whom I got to know.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Who were your comrades, not your teachers, right?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Tim Mason was in St. Antony’s, where I was, at that time he was a junior research fellow, and he was very influential; I mean, I read his work and so on. He read my work. But he was working on the Nazi period itself.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
To what extent you were exposed to French fashions in historiography?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
A huge amount, because at St. Antony’s there were a lot of Ph.D. students who were supervised by Theodore Zeldin, and who were very heavily influenced by the Annales school. So I used to go out drinking with them in the pubs and we’d have long conversations abpout French and German historiography. And I read a lot of the Annales work as a result, so that influenced me quite strongly. And in fact,
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And did you use any of their tools in your own research?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Unconsciously really, because it wasn’t till after I’d published Death in Hamburg that one of my students pointed out to me that it was in fact in the the classic style of the French regional study, in which I took one region – Hamburg is a very large city, second after Berlin – and studied the interconnections between the economy, society, demography and politics, which is exactly what the classic French studies do.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So let’s elaborate on that work, which may rank as the most significant piece of work on social history. You published that book in 1987 and indeed the “Death in Hamburg”, with all the associations we have, but the subtitle is “Society and Politics in the Cholera Years”. How come that you associate the epidemic with society and politics?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, as I’ve said, I’ve never called myself a social historian, because I don’t really believe in categorizing historians. I don’t believe in rigid demarcation lines between different kinds of history.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
But could you just say something about that epidemic and why was it so interesting for you?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
When I published my work on feminism, I was searching for a postdoctoral project, and I wanted to tackle the theme of obedience and authority in German history; so I thought the way to do this is through the history of crime. I tackled it in two places. In the political police files in Hamburg, I found the personal file of the local feminist leader who’d got involved in a demonstration in 1906 by the Social Democrats against an attempt – successful – by the ruling elite in Hamburg to take voting rights away partially from the working class because they were getting too powerful. The demonstration turned into a riot in which the so-called criminal class had emerged from the dock area, the slums of the dock area, and actually broken up the jewelry shops and things like that. So I thought that’d be an interesting place to start, looking at the social composition of these so-called slum areas near the docks, which were filled with casual laborers. I was very heavily influenced by Gareth Stedman Jones’ book, “Outcast London”, which appeared in the ’80s, which did the same thing for London. And as I opened the files, they all went back to 1892 and no further, which is when a large cholera epidemic had swept the city, killing 10,000 in six weeks. Hamburg had a reputation as a liberal city, an English city, in a German context. And so it seemed to be a good way of comparing British and German social structures and attitudes and politics in respect of social authoritarianism and popular attitudes to it. Hamburg was very laissez-faire; it was run by merchants, in the interest of trade; and so it was terrified of quarantines of any governments in the world and imposing bans on Hamburg ships arriving there. And it had a huge trade in Russian migrants going to, and hundreds of thousands every year, to America and other parts of the world.
And so the people who ran Hamburg made sure that the medical personnel, the medical authorities, the state medical officer, clung to an old-fashioned way of looking at disease, which saw it as resulting from a miasma coming from the ground, and not contagion from person to person or through contaminated water. And because of this, migrants from Russia in 1892, most of them Jews, brought the disease to the city. It was very hot. The river was low. And the bacillus went from the migrant barracks and the lodging houses, up to the water intake. And again, because of their laissez-faire attitude, the city fathers had not built a properly filtrated water system, and so it went into the water supply and 10,000 people died within 6 weeks.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Most of them, I assume, from the lower classes?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes. I could show by statistical methods, looking at the different districts and correlating their average income, percentage of households with their own bathroom, and occupational structures, with death and disease rates from Hamburg, and show that it affected proportionately the working classes much more.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So in other words, I mean, there’s a lot of interest in history of epidemics, you know, McNeill and others. So in your view, a case like that, epidemic, shows us much more about a society and politics,
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Because it tests, as it were, the civil norms to the limits?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
That’s right. Hamburg was forced, then, because it was the only city in Western and Central Europe that has a major epidemic in that year; it was forced by the Prussian or rather the Reich government run by Prussians, to abandon its laissez-faire policies and have much more state intervention in society, to become, as it were, more German.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
You had to acquire some knowledge in medicine in order to do that work, no?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Absolutely, yes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Historic medicine, at least.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So how did you prepare yourself for, even among your main achievements in the book, even to pinpoint the origin where the bacilli came from?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, of course there were massive investigations afterwards, and you can try and figure out which is right. There’s no absolute certainty but it looks like it certainly came from the Russian migrants. And interestingly, the fact that most migrants were Jewish was taken up by the small nascent anti-Semitic movement in Hamburg, but of course they accused the ruling Senate of being run by Jewish interests.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
There was a very wealthy and influential Jewish community in Hamburg, you know, the Warburgs for instance.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Most of them were well-off and most of them lived in the so-called Villa Quarter on the banks of the Lake of the Außenalster in the middle of the city. There were also poor Jews, near the docks, who suffered badly from the epidemic. But there’s not much evidence that the cholera stimulated anti-Semitism in a major way.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right. Shall we move to the next book, which was, as you mentioned, on capital punishment in Germany?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, the other prong of my study on authority and obedience, as seen through “Crime and Punishment”, was to go to the Prussian Ministry of Justice archives, which were the only Prussian ministry archives which were in West Berlin; all of the others were in East Germany. So that was quite fortunate in that sense. And it’s an enormous archive, barely tapped, and it’s huge; it runs from the eighteenth century, right through to the Nazi period. I remember I took microfilm of a whole survey of crime in the mid 1830s, which I never used in the end. I found these files on capital punishment, however, and I opened the first one, and there was an account of public execution by the sword, in the 1840s, in which people come up from the crowd and caught the blood in beakers and drank it. And I thought this is the most extraordinary thing. This is the 1840s, you know, and this sounds like the Middle Ages. So that got me really fascinated in the whole social and political function of capital punishment. The answer is the blood-drinkers were epileptics and it was seen as a cure for epilepsy, but a very ancient one; you find it in Hippocrates, for example: gladiators’ blood is drunk by epileptics. In the Christian world of 19th century Germany, it has to do with driving out the devil, because the malefactor is absolved by a priest immediately before death, so his blood is seen by the ordinary people as holy. But there are other ways of looking at it as well, and more complex anthropological ones.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
So, first of all, I mean, in both studies you said there, you started out with the interest in obedience to authority.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Both of them seem to have been diverted to quite different directions. By the way I’m delighted to hear that you said you don’t categorize historians as political, social, because basically you almost needed anthropological techniques in this study.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I read Victor Turner and other people, anthropologists, in an effort to decode all the implicit meanings in such rituals as blood-drinking.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Did you read Foucault on that matter?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes, I did, but I wasn’t, I mean, of course, but I wasn’t very convinced. I think Foucault’s great achievement in “Discipline and Punish” is to undermine the story of punishment as a story of increasing humanity. But I think his positive theories are ultimately not at all convincing. You can see behind the change of discourse is a very crude Marxist,
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Even though in your work as well as in his, and the main aim of all these rituals of Retribution, is to strengthen political authority?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
In the end I concluded that capital punishment was not a means of combating crime but a means of asserting symbolically the authority of the state. And you can show that in more liberal periods of German history, the Weimar Republic or the 1870s, there were very few executions; in more authoritarian periods like the 1890s or the 1850s, there were more executions, because a key thing is that the sovereign always has the right to commute death sentences into sentences of imprisonment. That’s an incredibly important attribute of sovereignty, which is used very extensively.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And in that work you dealt with the executions during the Nazi period as well?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I went from 1532, which is the law code of Charles V, all the way to 1987, which is when the East German state formally abolished the death penalty. I did extensive research on the Nazi period. And of course there I found that it ceased to be an expression of sovereignty, in a sense, and became a means, in the end, of racial policy, because the Nazis regarded criminality as a product of heredity, of racial degeneracy, amongst Germans as well as others.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Would you think that it has a greater applicability, if you take the one country where it’s still rampant even though declining, and that is the United States,
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
And China.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
And China, although I know much less about China. – would you say that the function is similar or you’d have to look for different cultural roots?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I think you’d probably have to look for different cultural roots. I think it’s always been, however, about retribution. It’s always been about paying back, as it were, the criminal; it can’t really, by definition, be about anything else, and certainly not about deterrence. There are some very cogent memos from Prussian bureaucrats in the 1840s saying, ‘Look, capital punishment is not a deterrent, because for those who commit their crimes rationally, they think they can get around it; they think they can get away with it. For those who commit a crime in a moment of passion, they don’t care anyway, so it’s not going to deter people.’
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Let’s move, I mean, move back to the more personal story. Through the ’70s and ’80s, you assumed an academic career. Maybe you can tell us, just roughly, where you taught, and what were the experiences as a teacher and professor of history.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, the British higher-education system expanded extremely fast in the 1960s, with the Robbins Report saying that the proportion of students going to university, which was only about 7% in the mid-’50s, should be expanded because Britain was behind other countries. So a lot of new universities were founded. But by the time I came on to the academic job market in 1972, that phase was ending and there were hardly any jobs left. Four jobs came up in modern European history at the newly founded University of Stirling in Scotland, so I applied for and got one of them. It was so new that they were still building my office when I got there, and it took me over six months before I could move in. I was only 24 when I started, so it was a good place to start, because I could devise my own courses, I had people to help me, I could make all the mistakes that one does make at that age. I learned a lot the hard way, by experience.But it wasn’t a great place for Germany history. So when a job came up in 1976, the University of East Anglia offered two jobs in modern German history, because Michael Balfour had retired, and Volker Berghahn had gone to Warwick. The jobs were in a School of Modern Languages where the students jointly a language and history.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Is that were Sebald taught?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Did you get to know him while you were at East Anglia?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes, I did, yes, very well, because of course we were both in the same school, in Modern Languages, and he was a German language and literature teacher and I was a German history teacher. In fact, I was working with him on his last project when he so tragically died.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Oh, is that so?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes. I remember him saying, I can’t remember exactly when, but he was just chatting some time in the early eighties and he said, ‘I feel a creative period is coming on. I’m going to start writing, creative work.’ And he gave me a copy of his first book, “Nach der Natur”, which was a prose poem, with a small publisher, in a rather limited edition. He only became famous later on.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
That’s very interesting, you know, bearing in mind what you later wrote about fiction and history. How do you rate Sebald’s work?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, we discussed it. Of course it’s a mixture. So, for example, he tended to merge individuals into a single composite individual. So one of the figures in The Emigrants is based on the painter Frank Auerbach, but not completely on him. His last project, which was never finished and barely started really, was going to be about Germany itself; it was going to be about the area he grew up in; rural Southern Germany. And he was going to take, I think, two women he knew quite well in the village he came from, and meld them into a single figure. And he got a grant from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, which was set up by the filmmaker David Puttnam with government money when Tony Blair came to power, to fund creativity.Max e had a grant that brought him out of teaching for two years. But they insisted you have a mentor, as they call it, who’d be your liaison with NESTA. And that was me; he asked me to do it, so I did. And I helped him in various ways. He had all sorts of odd questions about relations, well, various people related to him, and were there letters of people in the First World War, and what about Sonthofen, the Nazi elite school which is quite near where he grew up, and similar things.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And when you read his stories, or novels, does it help you to understand something about Germany, something that you didn’t know, I mean, from your own research?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
No, not so much about Germany, because they’re about exile. And that’s why it’s so tragic he didn’t finish the last book, really. He was well known in Germany by the time he died, however. He did of course write many essays, among them the controversial On the Natural History of Destruction, which ignited a debate on the Allied bombing of German cities during the Second World War. Sebald was a kind slightly old-fashioned man of letters, as it were. And he loved provoking. He loved stirring up discussions.Hhis essays, if you look at them, liked to attack orthodoxies and get people thinking. I think that’s where I would see his work On the Natural History of Destruction. I’s quite different from Georg Friedrich’s book, which is really a veiled attack on the Iraq war.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
On the Iraq war?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
It comes from the left. But of course, by writing it as he did, it got taken up by the right. It was a rather ambivalent book in that sense. Well, later when I’d moved to Cambridge, Max – incidentally we called him Max because his first name was Winfried, and he got so fed up with the English saying ‘Oh, “Winifred”, it’s a woman’s name’ that he decided to be called Max.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
UEA must have been a very exciting place to be during the 70s and 80s.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Unexpectedly exciting. I also knew Malcolm Bradbury ,a novelist who wrote “The History Man”. He taught creative writing and American literature at UEA. You could see we had great fun in spotting who was the history man. And you could see there were bits and pieces of colleagues who were made into this composite figure. UEA was also exciting for me because there were some excellent specialists in modern German history at UEA. You see Werner Mosse was there, Alice Teichova was there, Paul Kennedy was there. The librarian was W.L. Guttsman, who published several works on Social Democrats. And of course my students could read German, so it was a fantastic place to be for a bit. I got a grant and put on ten workshops in modern German social history, over a period from 1979 to 1985, where I had funding to invite young German, American and British historians working in the field, and we learned a tremendous amount from them, made many superb contacts, and helped German social history gain acceptance and legitimacy. I think the international dialogue also helped break down barriers between young historians in the different countries too, which was something new.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Coming back to Sebald, I would like to ask, in this relationship, to what extent do you think literary works can add to our understanding of the past?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Literature, fiction, is a different way of perceiving the past, from which historians can sometimes learn something. And of course, some literary scholars, like J.P. Stern, for example, have written quite illuminatingly on the Nazis and on modern history.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So that leads us actually to your book “In Defence of History” and the whole controversy with postmodernists. What made you write this book?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, I hate to sound like A.J.P. Taylor, who maintained that everything in his life was an accident; but as you can see, there’s no kind of straight path. I’m not the sort of historian who conceives a magisterial research project and follows it through with an absolute consequentiality. I’ve always followed my nose as a historian. So what happened at the University of East Anglia was that the long-term collapse of foreign language-learning in Britain began in the schools in the 1980s, and so we had fewer students and they did not want to learn German to do history and literature, but for business studies, to get a job. So increasingly I found myself teaching contemporary Germany more than I taught German history. The other people in German history retired, like Mosse or Alice Teichova or Willi Guttsman, or went away like Paul Kennedy to Yale. And so it was time to move, I thought, and I left for a professorship at Birkbeck in London in 1989, which is London University’s Center for Adult Education.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Was Hobsbawm there with you at the time?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
He’d retired in 1984, I think. But he was around. And indeed, we got an office for him when I was head of department, so he could come in and use the postage and photocopier and that kind of stuff. So he was very much present, and indeed in exchange for giving him an office, we asked him to spend time talking to the younger historians, many of whom we appointed to their first job, at Birkbeck, when the Department started expanding in the early 1990s. So anyway, we had a course called “Philosophy, Politics and History”, which was an interdisciplinary degree. And there was a core course for that, on epistemology. So there was epistemology of the social sciences, which I remember was taught by Sunil Khilnani, who was working on Gandhi, and pure epistemology taught by a philosopher. And then there was the history, which was taught by Roy Foster, but then he went to a chair at Oxford. And so I was landed with the job of teaching the six lectures on historical epistemology. I hadn’t thought about this since the days of Carr and Elton in the ’60s, and I started reading up about it, because the students all had a certain amount of philosophical training, so you couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes. I was astonished to find that there was a whole new range of works on the theory of history, historical knowledge and so on, which seemed to me to deny, in the wake of the poststructuralists and the linguistic theorists, that there was any possibility of knowing anything about history in the past at all. So I made that the core of my lectures. And I had some wonderful arguments about it with the philosophy students, who were all poststructuralists. I don’t usually write out my lectures in full, but I wanted to get everything absolutely right for the philosophy student, and I showed them to colleagues and they said, ‘Oh, this is interesting. We’d been reading a bit of this stuff. This is great. Work it up into a book.’ So I did. I showed it around, I made changes to it, I read a lot more, and eventually it became a book.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Something completely new for you, I mean, getting involved in literary theory and philosophy.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I was commissioned to do an article by The Journal of Modern History, and then that turned into a book, through the good auspices of Arno Mayer. What I tried to do there was to assert the possibility of historical knowledge but also to say that of course there are relativistic elements involved in it. I tried to distinguish between moderate postmodernism, which I thought was very fruitful and very interesting and challenging, and extreme postmodernism which denied the possibility of any kind of historical knowledge and said everything is just interpretation and it all depends on the point of view of the writer, and that a writer puts meaning into a text. And of course when I turned around and I said to the critics, ‘Okay, I’m interpreting your text in this way, and there’s nothing you can do about it,’ they got very annoyed and said, no, they themselves had laid down the actual real meaning of what they were saying and I was misinterpreting it!
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
But my question to you would be, now, will you not agree that, willy-nilly, in one way or another, given the discourse and the tone of the times, we are all influenced in one way or another by a moderate kind of postmodernism?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes. I think the idea that language and culture have an independent, although connected, influence on history is one that has, I think, now been established. The New Left initially saw the economy as the determining factor. So I think we now do see things in structural terms of mutual influences, in which language and culture are very important. IN the end, Hayden White had to admit that there was a possibility of knowing, of establishing the Holocaust happened, and then he had to retreat from his extreme relative position.
Prof. Steven Ascheim:
Would you agree that, to a great degree, what we write will be colored by autobiographical dimensions?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Oh, yes. Yes, of course. But there’s a dialogue, isn’t there? There’s a dialogue between ourselves, our purposes, our prejudices, our ideas, our formation, and the material we encounter in the archives. E. H. Carr’s What is History? is a very wrong-headed book in all kinds of ways, but in that I think he’s right: There is a dialogue in which the material modifies your initial question, it probes and sometimes undermines your assumptions. And you have to allow it do that. So every time I see historians arguing a case for political or personal reasons and not considering the alternatives or taking the evidence properly into account, I get interested. This happened first with In Hitler’s Shadow, which I published in 1989. It started with the so-called Second Cold War, wen President Reagan and Chancellor Helmut Kohl were trying to bolster West German confidence in the face of what they perceived of as the threat from the evil Soviet empire in the East, by drawing a line under the Nazi past, really. And Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher, pulled together a number of different writings that he subsumed under this heading, and it gave rise to an enormous row because a lot of historians in Germany said, ‘This is wrong. We should not draw a line under the past.’ And as somebody who’d published on modern German history, I was asked by The Journal of Modern History to review a collection of books on this row. It’s one of those terrible reviews when you’re writing and more books keep coming in, you know, you’re writing more, and so it takes much longer, and gets much longer, than you originally intended. When I wrote the review, it sparked a lot of interest in the States, amongst historians, because it was really the first thing they’d read about this so-called Historikerstreit, the ‘Historians’ Quarrel’. And so I was asked by Arno Mayer and Pantheon Books to write a short book about it. I was very fortunate because the book took a little longer and, by the time I finished it all, the Historikerstreit publications were out, including Ernst Nolte’s big book, which ultimately was the center of the whole thing. However, of course, then came German reunification, and the whole Historikerstreit became pretty irrelevant, really. There was no more need to bolster the self-confidence of the West Germans. The ‘evil empire’ was gone.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
But the essential problems of the Historikerstreit are still there with us, like relativization and normalization, historization and all that.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, yes, in a way. I mean, but I don’t think they’re in that form. I mean, an attempt to make West Germans, or later Germans, forget about their Nazi past never had a chance and it never happened. And public memory about the Nazi past is extremely strong in present-day Germany. Ernst Nolte’s article was entitled “The Past that Will Not Go Away”, “Won’t Pass Away”, and though he tried to get it to, it wouldn’t. You can look back and look at Nolte’s original path-breaking work, Three Faces of Fascism, and see that he sees fascism and Nazism as not just a direct repost to communism but also copying communism’s methods. Nolte was also, as it were, flirting with Holocaust denial, particularly in the footnotes to his book when that came out.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
This was about relativization of the Nazi past, but what about a parallel debate then on the idea of ‘historicization’, treating it as history, no more and no less? Surely this is inevitable. The kind of question is, what kind of historicization? It cannot be otherwise, and that’s where I think I’d like to hear what you say.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
You know, normalization and historicization of, say, Alltagegeschichte, the history of Nazi Germany with the Jews of the Holocaust left out, because if you concentrate on life in a certain German village, say like in Heimat, so it looks very normal; that’s normal life, that’s daily life. But what you don’t show is so much more important. I mean, that was the Broszat-Friedlander discussion.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
That’s right, yes. But then if you go to a village in South Germany in 1936 or ’37, you’re as likely as not to see a notice just outside saying “Jews are not wanted here.”So they didn’t escape from that at all I do think however that we can understand, and should try to understand, these events historically through the tools and means, concepts and methods of history. I don’t think we should cordon it off, the Holocaust, as some kind of mystical, incomprehensible event. It might be suitable to look at it in that way on some level of theology, but we have to approach this in a secular, rational way.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
We’ve gone back to the end of the 1980s, when you moved to Birkbeck, in London. What happened to your career there?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
In the early ’90s the whole higher-education system, after stagnating and not expanding for nearly 20 years, expanded very quickly again, under John Major and then Tony Blair. And so, again, another wave of new universities was founded, and existing universities grew very fast. And Birkbeck existed to provide mature students, 21 and over, with, as the slogan was, a second chance for a first degree. But of course, with the huge growth in the number of students with a first degree in the ’90s, there was a massively greater demand for masters courses, doctorates and so on. So I oversaw a big growth in the history department in Birkbeck. When I came there 1989 there were 9 on the faculty; now there are about 35. So it grew very fast. So I got a reputation for managing things, and so I became Vice-Master of Birkbeck, in effect Deputy Vice-Chancellor, because by that time it had become an independent university, under the University of London umbrella, rather like Berkeley and UCLA are independend universities under the University of California umbrella. London University broke up in the ’90s because it expanded too fast to stay as one. And so I became, as it were, a manager. And then when the Master of Birkbeck went into government with Tony Blair in ’97, I was running the place. It was extremely interesting and very rewarding, and I was very fond of Birkbeck; I think it’s a wonderful institution, because it just takes the general public; you don’t have very high entrance qualifications and so on.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
It’s only evening classes there, right?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
You teach from 6 to 9 in the evenings, because people do it after work.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
It’s different, though, from the Open University?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes, because the Open University’s by correspondence,
At Birkbeck students take classes two or three evenings a week. Eric Hobsbawm used to call it the poor man’s All Souls because you have the day free for research; at All Souls College Oxford, because they have no students at all, they have the whole day free and the evenings too. I realized, fascinating and rewarding though it was to run an institution like Birkbeck, if I carried on along that road, I’d never write another word of history in my life. And I felt there were things I did want to do. So a professorship came over at Cambridge, a chair of modern history, and I applied for that and I got that and moved there in 1998.
Prof. Joseph Mali: And about that time you became involved in the Irving versus Lipstadt libel case?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes. It began before I moved to Cambridge. In 1996, David Irving issued a writ for defamation against Penguin Books and their author Debra Lipstadt, who accused him of being a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history, of saying that six million Jews were not killed, it was only a tiny number, there was no plan or program, there were no gas chambers, the evidence was concocted after the war.. The only way to defend this, really, was by proving that her allegations were true. Anthony Julius, a solicitor in London, and his team decided that they would engage a number of historians to investigate Lipstadt’s allegations against Irving. I was one of those chosen, and my task, and I agreed to it – it’d be very interesting – would, in a way it was a sort of case study in what I’d been arguing about in In Defence of History. And so I agreed to do it.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right. And so what exactly was your task?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, my task was to go through his work; all his books, and indeed also recordings of his speeches, and any other material that was relevant, a lot of which she obtained by court order, from Irving’s files, and to see whether these allegations were true: Was he a Holocaust denier in this sense? And crucially, did he falsify the evidence?
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And there was also the matter of his reputation.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
The judge found that irrelevant in the end. Actually, Irving tried to insist, in his statement of case, that he had a high reputation. But I slightly misunderstood that as being part of the case, and the judge sort of bruskly dismissed the first hundred pages of my report, saying, ‘That’s not the point. The point is not his reputation; the point is, is he a Holocaust denier, does he falsify history.’
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Give us an example of demonstration of falsification.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Himmler kept a phone log; he was very meticulous, not to say pedantic. And in his phone log, he recorded a conversation in November 1941 where he issued instructions to Heidrich, his deputy, by phone in Prague, saying, “Judentransport aus Berlin. Keine Vernichtung,” (“Do transport from Berlin. No annihilation.”). And Irving claimed in his writings, in his book “Hitler’s War”, that this was an instruction that no Jews anywhere were to be killed. And this is issued, must have been issued by Himmler on the instructions of Hitler, because he headlined the conversation, “aus dem Bunker”, (“From the bunker”), so he must have been in a bunker in Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia with Hitler who’d said something like, ‘I don’t want any Jews to be killed. ‘
Now, you have to unpick it all very carefully. First of all, it says “Judentransport”, which is singular; it means one trainload of Jews from Berlin. And we can actually identify it, because we have the date, 30th November, we know who was on it, and we know it referred to this. And we know, from other sources, that Himmler was concerned that the Jews from Berlin, who were incidentally transported in normal trains to get from, not in cattle trucks, to give them the feeling that it was a normal journey. He was concerned that news of executions would get back to them and cause unrest in Berlin, at a sensitive time in the war. So he wanted a sort of pause; in fact it didn’t work, because the message didn’t get through to Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS commander in Riga, where the train went to, and they were all shot. And Himmler then disciplined Jeckeln and said, ‘You must obey orders, and don’t this again without permission’. And of course the transports were resumed not long afterwards. Then again, it said “aus Berlin” (“from Berlin”); it’s only one trainload and it’s from one place. And there’s no way you can say legitimately that it refers to all transports from everywhere. And then there’s no written evidence of any kind that Hitler had issued or told, that he was involved in any way. And so, indeed, during the trial, Himmler’s appointments diary from the so-called KGB special archive in Moscow, was published. And in that appointments diary, he says,”beim Fuhrer” (“With the Fuhrer”); because he was so in awe of Hitler; he always recorded every time he met him. And that’s half an hour after the phone conversation. So if Hitler had told him to issue the order, he would have met him before the phone conversation. But the appointments diary says he met him after the conversation. So, and then “aus dem Bunker”. And he says, first of all, in the appointments diary, “gearbeitet” (“worked”), because he has his own bunker in the field headquarters at Rastenburg. He’s not in Hitler’s bunker and there’s no way he could have worked there, he didn’t have office space in it. So the appointments diary strongly suggests they did not meet at all until after the phone conversation. So there’s kind of multiple levels on which that is falsified.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Do you have any idea – moving on – what motivates Irving? I mean, is it just that he’s a plain anti-Semite,
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, the court wasn’t interested in motivation, of course,
What the court said was that he shaped or molded or manipulated the source material to conform to his prejudices, and wasn’t interested in why,
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And what was your experience cross-examined by him for, what, 8 days or so?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I was cross-examined by him for 28 hours in the witness box, yes. It was very similar from the impression that I got from reading his work, which is that, first of all, he was good on detail, but he couldn’t really see the larger picture. So he found, when he was questioning me, for example, he wasn’t able to distinguish what the important questions were from the unimportant ones. He said, ‘It will be death by a thousand cuts. I will destroy Prof. Evans’ work by showing all the details are wrong.’ But the judge repeatedly pointed out to him, as he was cross-examining, ‘You can find little mistakes here or there in Prof. Evans’ work, but you’re not tackling the big issues.’ But he couldn’t really see the big issues.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
What are the repercussions of that trial and 10 years after? I mean, has there been any continuation in any sort of way, or, I mean, where is he now, do you know?
, Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
He had to pay the costs, but he declared himself bankrupt. The costs were over 2 million pounds because a lot of people worked on this case for a long time. Ultimately, Penguin’s insurers had to pay up about a million. Pearson Longman, who own Penguin, a multinational corporation, paid out the rest. And I think it was a very courageous stand on the part of the publishers, who one must remember had previously, of course, defended Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” against criminal charges. So they had a very good record but, of course, historians would not have touched Penguin had they not taken that stand.. And of course, the court upheld freedom of speech for critics of Holocaust deniers, whom Irving was tryiing to silence, but on the other hand, Irving could still be a Holocaust denier and carry on happily.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
But his reputation as a serious historian is ruined.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, his reputation had been damaged somewhat beforehand when he became a Holocaust denier, in the sort of hard-line sense of the word, in the late ’80s. And so his presence in the media was much diminished after that, because newspapers became nervous about touching him. But I do think the trial severely damaged his reputation and that of Holocaust deniers in general. I also think the trial and the result was a major act of Holocaust education, because the newspapers, at the end of the trial, printed acres of print about the Holocaust and why Holocaust denial was wrong in every way, morally, factually, historically, politically.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And do you think there is still a real danger? I think about this conference in Tehran a couple of years ago. Is there a real danger of Holocaust denial nowadays, would it pose a danger to historical knowledge?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
No, I don’t think it does. I don’t think historians have ever taken it seriously.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
On the public, at least.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, it’s a very small minority. Of course Holocaust denial is deeply offensive and deeply wrong, but I think one has to keep it in proportion. I think what you might call the old-style Holocaust deniers, like Irving for whom it’s very important, or even the kind of professional Holocaust deniers in the self-styled Institute for Historical Review, in California, they are a tiny, tiny minority. It’s certainly wrong in Britain, to make it illegal, because you’d just give them publicity and make them into martyrs for freedom of speech. Irving was arrested in Austria, for Holocaust denial, some short time after the trial, when he went there. He had an existing conviction; he was jailed for a year. And I do think that was wrong, because that gave him publicity he would not otherwise have had.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So you don’t see any danger in their activities?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
There is also Islamist extremist Holocaust denial, and that’s what was really behind Achmedinejad’s conference of so-called Holocaust experts, which was a Holocaust denial conference, and no bona fide historian took that seriously. But I think, for the Islamist extremists, it’s a rather secondary issue. What I think they really are aiming themselves at is the State of Israel, and for them it’s a way of delegitimizing it. But there are other more important ways in which they can try and delegitimize it, through attacking the legitimacy of the settlements or attacking the policy of the present Israeli government, or whatever it might be. So Holocaust denial as a historical aspect of the delegitimization of the State of Israel is not the first, the most important thing for them.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Another question, or a general question: Here are you in a professional historian going into the public arena, as it were. Is there any lesson there? Should professional historians be more active in public education and public affairs?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I think that historians should not just shut ourselves up in the ivory tower and write for other historians. Not everything we do, of course, should be for the public. Producing documents, writing specialized research articles, all of that’s very important. But I think we should also try and reach out to a wider public; otherwise we leave it to journalists, not all of whom are bad but a lot of whom don’t do their homework. There are also many other ways in which we can bring our expertise to bear on public issues. For example, I’m Deputy Chair of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, which advises the UK government on claims for the restitution of artworks from UK galleries and museums that were looted or unjustly taken from their owners during the Nazi era, and I’m proud to have been able to use my expertise to help clear up some of the difficult historical details in such cases and get the original, mostly Jewish owners compensated, or the artwork restored.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Are historians in some way valorized as the moral conscience of the society?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
No, I don’t think so. I mean, history has become very popular in Britain since the late ’90s. History books are best-sellers, history books of all kinds. And some of the historians who achieve best-seller status are academics and some are not academics. I think we’ve always treated history as a literary expression. The way we write history is a literary, we write it as a literary genre, as it were. We don’t write it as dry social science, and I think that’s been part of the reason for our success, not just in Britain; historians like Ian Kershaw get translations in many different languages, or Paul Preston in Spain, and many others. I think, however, as regards British history, the current arguments about British history are largely leaving professional historians aside. So the current Conservative Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, is trying to turn history-teaching in the schools into a vehicle for the creation of a rather simple kind of patriotism….
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
We know about that.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
…by simply emphasizing Britain, British history, as a success story full of great heroes who children have to admire. I’ve written several articles about this, beginning with my article in 2010 at the London Review of Books. Professional historians should really play a role in this; we have to say, ‘No, this is not what history is about. History is an academic discipline; it’s not a means of instilling the values of citizenship into children. It’s a means of getting children to think for themselves.’ And if you look at the Ofsted Inspector’s reports on history in 166 selected schools a few months ago, many children there say what they really like about history is the ability to make their own minds up about the past. So I’ve been arguing with the Secretary of State in print, and indeed in person, about this whole thing. And he’s beginning to listen to the professionals a bit more than he did at the beginning. So I do think that we should play a role in this. We have our expertise; we should use it.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right, which leads us to the last, I think, section of our conversation – we’ve been going for some time – that is, your decision to write the trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany. I mean, I understand there is some connection to your experience in the trial.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I’ve always thought that anyone who works on modern German history has to confront the problem of the Third Reich at some stage or other in their career. After all, its longer-term origins are what got me into history in the first place, German history in the first place. Since 1982 I have always taught a special course in universities I’ve been at, on Nazi Germany; most recently at Cambridge, jointly with Adam Tooze on the social and economic history of the Third Reich. And so I’ve been collecting material and books and keeping up with the historiography, since the early ’80s. And in the trial, one of the first things that the lawyers said to me was, ‘We need to read up on this. Can you recommend us a large, reliable, up-to-date, detailed and readable book on the Third Reich?’ And I said, ‘I’m afraid no, I can’t. There are some good brief introductions. There are one two good larger books, but they’re very out of date or they have serious flaws and omissions in them.’
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Like Shirer and,
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Shirer was out of date when it was written. But it’s still very popular. ‘And a much better book, by Karl Dietrich Bracher, called “The German Dictatorship”, was written in the ’60s.’ So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll do one myself. Thinking about doing it coincided with the fact that I couldn’t publish my book on the Irving trial (which emerged out of my expert report) in England, because the English libel law is much more in favor of the plaintiff than the American. So it was out in America in 2001, but after a year I still hadn’t had it published in England because Irving was threatening to sue publishers and they were chickening out. So, among other things, I changed agents. And with my new agent, Andrew Wylie, I discussed what I would do when we got this Irving book published, which he did in the end through New Left Books. And I said, ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about writing a large one-volume history of the Third Reich.’ So I sent him a synopsis and he said, ‘It’s too much for one volume. Make it two volumes, not one.’ And so I did. And then when I had written about two-thirds of the first volume and sent the chapters to my editor at Penguin, he said, ‘Look, we have a problem: We don’t have a big book for our autumn list. Can you make it three volumes and send in these chapters reworked into a proper book ?’ So that, again, chance and coincidence came then. What I’d intended as a single volume became three. But I was very glad. It was meant to be a parallel to Ian Kershaw’s book, Hitler, where the dividing line between his two volumes falls in 1936, but ’36 is not a meaningful dividing line, really, and 1933 and ’39 are much more meaningful, so it made much more sense in the end to have three volumes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
What were the main decisions, I mean, where to start, for example?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I decided to begin really with Bismarck and the founding of the German Empire in 1871. I don’t think much before that is directly relevant at all, Then I would carry the first volume and up through, with becoming kind of thicker in detail and analysis, up to the seizure of power in 1933. I wanted it to be a book that had academic foundations but that also appealed to a wide public. So I decided that in order to bring home the nature of Nazism and the Third Reich to a broader readership, I would include personal stories in it, using diaries and memoirs and letters and so on, so that there are individuals whose lives and experiences thread through all three volumes. And I tried to write it in a way that would be readable, and so not to talk about other historians, because what readers want is not what Prof. X said to Prof. Y and why they disagree, but information about the people in the past. Of course I mentioned different interpretations of what was going on, and you can follow them up through the footnotes, but not in the text.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Right. And I was impressed when I read that volume, that the last quarter or so of the book deals with the seizure of power, the way a democracy or republic turns into dictatorship in such a short time and so totally.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
One argument I wanted to get across was, contrary to what some historians were saying, namely that it was simply a matter of consensus among the Germans, the fact that the Nazis used mass violence on the streets, huge intimidation, in order to get their way. The seizure of power began when Hitler was appointed Chancellor. That wasn’t the seizure of power itself. But from then on, in six months, the Nazis coerced and cowed the German people into accepting a one-party dictatorship, by the force and the threat of force, with 100,000 or more socialists and communists imprisoned in makeshift concentration camps and moderate, liberal and conservative parties intimidated by the Nazis. There was the law of 7th of April which expelled Jews from the civil service in Germany but also expelled political opponents of the Nazis. And so in a situation of mass unemployment with over a third of the workforce unemployed, people with state jobs, and this is all the way down to people who worked in the municipal gasworks in some local town, they of course rushed to conform or they’d lose their jobs. So there’s intimidation at very different levels. Still, for a third to a half of Germans, there was enough in common with the Nazis to agree to the creation of a dictatorship. The Nazis, of course, did have mass support; they were, after all, still the largest single party; but they never had a majority in a free election, one has to remember that.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Hitler is almost invisible in that volume, in the first volume.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I wanted to make the point that it’s not all Hitler, that there were larger and wider forces at work. So I deliberately didn’t introduce him until about a third of the way through the book. But then of course you have to say that, again, he had no political success whatsoever up until the Depression. In the elections of 1928, the Nazis scored less than 3% of the vote. It’s only when you have this fundamental shattering economic and social crisis, which for many Germans is the last straw for the unsuccessful Weimar Republic, that his speaking talents came into play, that he could give rabblerousing speeches within astonishing success, within just three years going from nowhere to winning 37% of the vote.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
But another thing I want to ask about: How do you rate, after all, the Weimar Republic? There’s so much literature which glorifies the golden age and all that. And I got the impression that you are not as enthusiastic as other historians about the great, about the Weimar Republic, as such, culturally perhaps, but not politically or socially.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, if I was writing a history of the Weimar Republic for its own sake, I’d write it differently, of course. What I’m doing in my chapters on the Weimar Republic is try to explain why the Nazis came to power. So I have to try to tread a tightrope between explaining why people in the end turned so strongly against the Weimar Republic when the Depression came, on the one hand, and avoiding make the Nazi seizure of power seem inevitable on the other. At the same time, one of the aims of this trilogy is to cover every aspect of social, political, economic and cultural life. So I hope that what comes through in the short sections I have on cultural life in the Weimar Republic is its extraordinary vibrancy, is the terrific contribution of modernist artist writers, artists, musicians, and many others made to one of the richest cultural scenes in modern times.
All of that was then destroyed by the Nazis. Yet politically, the Weimar Republic was always very fragile. And economically, I think the so-called stable period, the middle between the end of the inflation in 1924 and the onset of the Depression in 1929, was something of a kind of fool’s paradise, if you like, because it was all built on American loans. Still, the triumph of Nazism wasn’t inevitable. You can say that people in November 1932, that the opponents of the Nazis were heaving sighs of relief and saying it’s the beginning of the end for the Nazis because their vote had gone down by a couple of million since July. That’s the very reason, however, why the conservatives brought them into coalition, because they thought they were weak.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Let me quote one sentence from the second volume: “The further in time we get from Nazi Germany, the more difficult it becomes for historians living in democratic political systems”, I’m quoting you, “to make the leap of imagination necessary to understand people’s behavior in a state such as Nazi Germany.” Could you elaborate?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
There are a number of books by American and German historians and Canadian historians, for example, Robert Gellately’s Backing Hitler or Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband’s What We Knew, or Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries, that essentially argue the Nazi state was not a coercive state, that it was all done by consensus. And I think that’s simply a failure of the imagination. I think we have to think ourselves back and look at, and when you start looking carefully at it, you can see this massive apparatus of coercion, within which, of course, Germans still had some room for maneuver to make moral decisions and choices of their own – it’s not as if they were totally regimented and oppressed. But we have to realize that that apparatus was there, even down to the block wardens on every block, every street block, who checked and controlled what people were doing, that you hung out your flags on Hitler’s, birthday, that you didn’t correspond with Social Democrats, that you conform, at least outwardly, and if you don’t’, you may lose your benefits, or get sent to do dirty work on the West Wall.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
I was especially intrigued – I’ve never heard of her before – by Louise Solmitz.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Louise Solmetz is a conservative Protestant schoolteacher who’s in favor of the Nazis, because she sees them as restoring order. Some of her diary was printed in a volume edited by Werner Jochmann about the Nazi seizure of power in Hamburg, but only up to the beginning of 1933 where she is jubilant about how wonderful it is that Hitler’s Chancellor of a coalition cabinet with conservative politicians she trusts. But she is married to a man, Friedisch Solmitz, whom the Nazis classify as Jewish. They are Protestants in religion. They have nothing to do with the Jewish religious community. In a sense, they don’t regard themselves as Jews. And I went to Hamburg to read the rest of the diaries; they would be, if her handwriting were legible all the way through, one of the great diaries. But it’s so illegible that, when she gave them to the archives, the archives called her in, and over a period of several weeks she had to read them out so they could transcribe them. I looked at the originals, and the originals, you could do it but it would take months, even years. It took me an hour to read a page of the thing, or less. And some of it’s not legible at all. And there are 700 pages per year, all in tiny cramped handwriting. So only extracts are transcribed, but all the way up to 1945, and she gets more and more disillusioned. They are conservative German patriots, in fact, her husband, a 1914-18 veteran, actually tries to volunteer for the German army in 1939, just showing how unreal was the world that they lived in; he was rejected, of course, because the regime told him he was Jewish. The Solmitzes actually feel resentful at having to mix with religious Jews. Yet she gets more and more disillusioned through and ends up by absolutely hating Hitler. So it’s an extraordinary story.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
It’s extraordinary.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
An awareness of what was transpiring in the east, is that there?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
She does record seeing Jews being transported to the east, these unfortunate people, she calls them.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
So she’s one of those voices which you involved as you go through the years of Nazism.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And some others like her?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Yes.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Wow, that’s remarkable. I mean, the combination of personal stories, more structural or political histories,
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
This is coming in, I mean, Friedlander’s work.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
It’s very similar.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Now there’s a work by Bernard Wasserstein called “On the Eve”, which is the Jews of Europe before World War II, which is an attempt, it’s not always successful, to weave the personal with the more general. The danger with that is you get tiny snapshots. You don’t really get a sense of the person.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
What I try and do is give longer personal histories, so that some people keep recurring and coming back. I learned this originally from Theodore Zeldin’s France 1848-1945, except that he only gives one-off pen-portraits of people, since his book is purely analytical while I adapted this to cover a longer narrative and so individuals like Solmitz or Klemperer come up every few chapters. At the same time of course there are some individuals who only appear once or twice. It depends on the source material.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
And what about this division, you know, perpetrators/bystanders? And victims, of course. Do you hold to that, I mean, especially as Germany people are concerned?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
No, I don’t, no. I think it’s importing legal categories into history, and it involves moral judgments of a simplicity and crudity that I don’t think are very helpful to understanding history. And when you start looking at the individuals involved, these categories often start to dissolve. So I avoid that. I try and let people’s deeds and views speak for themselves in the book so readers can make up their own minds as to how they judge them.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
And that there are more subtle and less subtle ways of going about it.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
I think it’s fairly clear who I disapprove of, as it were, in the book.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Just maybe one last word about your future plans?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
For most of my career, I’ve taught 19th as well as 20th century European history. So I was commissioned about 20 years ago to write the Penguin history of 19th century Europe and in a ten-volume series. Ian Kershaw is doing the 20th century. Tim Blanning’s done the 17th and 18th centuries. And I was about to start when the history boom happened, the Irving case happened, and I worked for more than a decade on the Third Reich. Now I’ve come back to that, because several volumes in the series have appeared in the meantime. That’s what I’m currently working on. When the series was commissioned, it was going to be short books but, because the history boom has been most effective with blockbusters, it’s now, at Penguin’s request, gone from 120,000 to 280,000 words. I’ve done about half of it, and I hope to finish it next year.
Prof. Steven Aschheim:
Well, I’m privy to something else in your work, which is conspiracy theories.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Ah, yes. Well, I recently got interested in conspiracy theories and conspiracies in modern history. So I now have a large grant for five years, which will employ six postdoctoral research fellows, and I have two co-investigators. So in the fullness of time, there will be a book about conspiracies and conspiracy theories in history.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
9/11?
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, one thing we’re doing, for example, is comparing JFK before the Internet and 9/11 after the Internet, seeing what difference the Internet makes, and many other things; we have two Internet engineers working on the project devising various kinds of questions, we are using an opinion poll company, we have two historians, two philosophers, and an anthropologist, so it’s truly interdisciplinary; this is something very new for me, and very exciting. There are so many new things to learn from it in so many respects..
Prof. Joseph Mali: And we haven’t even mentioned counterfactual history, so there’s so much left out…
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Well, that was the subject of my Menahem Stern lectures here, and I’ve finished the book, bar a few footnotes, so you should be able to read my views on conterfactuals later this year: it will be called Altered Pasts.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
Just to put it on the record, thank you very much for this interesting conversation.
Prof. Sir Richard Evans:
Thank you too, it’s been a pleasure.
Prof. Joseph Mali:
We are done.