Rethinking History, Dictatorship and War

New Approaches and Interpretations

Claus-Christian Szejnmann

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441107107
• eBook ISBN: 9781441150264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The main focus of this book is to analyse and explain, rather than merely narrate, developments of modern war. The volume will present up-to-date and genuinely original scholarship that has not been previously published. This collection deals with three of the most important themes of historical studies: the way history is or ought to be written, the nature of dictatorships, and the nature of wars. The primary focus is on modern Europe and two defining experiences in the first half of the twentieth century, namely the First and Second World Wars and totalitarian dictatorships. Both remain issues of intense debates and with ever widening ramifications. It provides a unique overview of the current state of research on three important themes that are of great interest to scholars, and students. Each essay and a substantial introduction summarises complex findings, approaching the topic from a variety of perspectives (19th and 20th century history; national and regional history; comparative history; cartography; and, biographical, intellectual, structural, social and military history) thus challenging traditional interpretations and methodologies, and addressing unresolved questions. The book brings together a mix of established and younger experts thinking critically about these major themes and writing accessible and stimulating pieces that challenge existing interpretations and suggest ways the subjects are changing. The contributors tackle big issues and dare to come up with bold explanations.

1
History, Dictatorship and War: A Conversation with Richard J. Overy¹

PART I: BECOMING A HISTORIAN: REFLECTIONS ON THE WAY HISTORY IS OR OUGHT TO BE DONE

1. What got you interested in history, and what made you decide to become a historian?

It is obviously quite hard to think of the exact point when I realized that history was what I was fascinated by. I think that it was my mother who was always interested in history, who first aroused my interest. She had some idiosyncratic interests and was fascinated by the Anglo-Saxons. I had books and materials that she had collected as a teenager, which I remember looking at when I was 7 or 8. From that stage onwards I was always fascinated by history, and it never occurred to me that this was an oddity for a 7 - or 8-year-old. But my real love was for Ancient History. I did Latin at school until I was 18, and for a long time I thought that I wanted to become an archaeologist. […] I had a particular interest in Ancient Egypt. But by my middle teens I began to realize just how archaeology was developing. Even then it was becoming a very scientific subject and I recognized my limitations. I might have a historical imagination but I had no scientific skills at all, no capacity for science really, and about the same time I became much more interested in contemporary politics and current affairs. When I was age 15 or 16, I realized that my primary interest intellectually was in engaging with ideas and political issues and concepts of the twentieth century. I am still fascinated by archaeology: I read all the articles in the newspapers I can, I go to exhibitions and I have a small collection of antiquities in a cupboard, where I try to keep an artefact from every known civilization. I have never lost that fascination with the fact that you can have an artefact from every civilization going back the last 6,000 years and yet they can all be housed in a single cupboard. By the time I reached 16 or 17 I was doing history as an A-level subject. It was the only subject that really engaged me. What I enjoyed most was the sense that one could argue with other people’s views of the past. And I suppose by the time I had gone to university I could not imagine myself doing anything else. My mother wanted me to go into the Church, and just before I went to university I was visited by the local dean of ordination in Somerset, who was very keen to sign me up. But I knew that it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and in my first term at Cambridge I lost my faith entirely almost overnight. So that was never really an issue any longer. But coming from a tiny grammar school in Somerset I had a terrible inferiority complex about what I was capable of doing, and I assumed that when I got to Cambridge I would meet geniuses and that being a historian would be a hopeless ambition. But in fact I got completely absorbed by it. What I liked about it was this capacity to link together imagination and analysis in ways that very few other subjects allow you to do. And after that I worked extremely hard because I knew that the only way you could get on was to achieve a lot at university level. And from that point on I have spent 40 years as a historian.

2. What influences were there in your formation and during your career?

I think it is quite usual for historians to say that they read such and such a book and that this transformed their view of history or their commitment to history. I find it hard actually to pinpoint a particular influence but I am aware of the fact that when I was a young historian in the 1960s so much history being written in Britain was written from a Marxist or sub-Marxist perspective. I read Marx, and then briefly became an enthusiast for Communism in the late 1960s, early 1970s. I absorbed the current view in the 1960s that everything could be explained by labour protest, peasant rebellion and so on, and that one needed to look at the economic structures to be able to understand or explain historical development. I think I did more or less take that on board without much criticism. So I chose to become an economic historian, and my first work focused a lot on the economic dimension of history. But it was in the 1980s that I went through something of a sea change in my view of history and the historical process. […] There were two philosophers – both of them German in fact – who I think had an enormous influence on the way I understood history. The first was Hegel, and I have come to the (perhaps arrogant) conclusion that it is very difficult to be a historian and not to have some familiarity with what Hegel has said and done to transform our approach to the past. Above all I think from Hegel what I took was the realization that ideas play an extraordinarily important part … in understanding the way in which human history has developed. The social and economic dynamic which had attracted me at first was not irrelevant but it had to be understood in terms as Hegel understood it: as the result of a dialectical process in which tensions, antagonisms, between the material world and the world of ideas and culture explain how history moves forward; above all that history is not just materialist – and for the first 10 years of my career I was a materialist. So that was a very important stepping stone. The second one was my growing familiarity with Nietzsche. […] Nietzsche for me was extraordinary because much of what he writes and the way he writes match my own views about everything from the paradoxical nature of reality to confronting death and the true nature of the human condition. Nietzsche was very important both for my personal life, in the way in which I have confronted issues and problems and think about the nature of reality, and because he made me think again about my history rather differently and certainly made me aware – much more of course than Hegel, whose views are really very different – of the indeterminacy of history, that some historical issues have no answer. I think I’ve been brought up as all Western European historians were, with a rather narrow rationalism. I think the recognition is important that there are some questions to which there are not answers, or that there are different answers, diverse answers – and I don’t mean that in any kind of fancy post-modern way but simply understanding the paradoxical nature of much of human experience. Sometimes people ask me questions at conferences: ‘Why did Hitler do X?’, and sometimes you just have to say: ‘We don’t know’; ‘Maybe he did not understand it fully himself when he made that decision.’ There is an extraordinary reluctance in the Western intellectual tradition to accept that we cannot always have an answer, or that the answer is not going to be a progressive one, or that there may be a number of different answers and explanations which are ambiguous or contradictory.

3. Most of your writing has focused on the interwar crisis and the Second World War.² Why did you not do more work on the origins of this devastating first half of the twentieth century, in other words the period before the First World War, or on what happened after 1945?

[…] The First World War was in a sense accidental, and it changed the terms entirely for Europe for 25 or 30 years. Its aftermath – psychological, cultural, political, economic and so forth – represented an extraordinary distortion of the way in which Europe was going to develop. I do not hold the view that Europe pre-1914 was all rosy and happy, but there were trajectories from before 1914, dominant trajectories, which would have produced a very different outcome in the twentieth century. After 1945, of course, the discourse on ‘progress’ had to be rediscovered or reinvented by Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Different forms of progress, but there is a sense that Europe gets back on a trajectory which it had lost in 1914. I have been preoccupied with the exceptionalism of this 25-year period. Many historians emphasize the continuities, and I am also keen now to encourage younger historians to think across the divide of 1945. But I still see those 25 years as an extraordinary period which has generated its own patterns of explanation. […]

4. Do you have any regrets about work you have done, or not done?

I have a number of regrets. I do not regret things I have not done because I hope I still have 20 or 30 years of writing ahead of me and I still have many questions I want to be able to address. In terms of things that I did not do but I should have done I have one profound regret which makes me embarrassed every time I think about it: it is that I spent a long time working on the economy of the Third Reich between the 1960s and the 1980s, and it never ever really occurred to me that the issues I should be addressing would be issues connected, for example, with the campaign against the Jews or the expropriation of Jewish wealth. In other words, that I should link my economic history with the wider nature of the Third Reich. It just never occurred to me, and most of the works I have read and books I have looked at from the 1960s and the 1970s did not see it either. It was assumed in the form of a Marxist narrative of the Third Reich that the system was dominated by capitalists, in which state capitalism repressed workers. It is not that I left it out because I did not want to write about that – for a long time it just never really occurred to me. I think looking back it is shameful the extent to which we were dominated by class categories and incapable of seeing the nature of racial discrimination and its wider manifestations. I was very pleased to have the opportunity in 2005 to give the annual Holocaust Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow and I chose as my subject the economics of the Holocaust. I gave my lecture on the period from the early economic discrimination in 1933 through to the massive expropriations of the Second World War. I think probably in choosing this subject and giving that lecture I felt somehow that I had not exactly expiated my sins but somehow come to terms with a subject which I had started 30 years before and which I had failed really to understand fully.

5. How would you describe a good historian?

This is a very difficult question. I think it is probably easier to describe a bad historian. I think above all the hallmark of a good historian is historical imagination: to be able to put yourself back in the period in which you are interested and make that imaginative leap, not to share the assumptions that surround you in the contemporary world but to imagine that the rest of history has not yet happened. I think that historians find that enormously difficult to do, but I think that imaginative leap is critical before you then start applying your normal skills of research analysis to the period that you are interested in. This is extremely difficult to do even for the twentieth century. It is very important to recognize that people do not know what is going to happen – the expectations or ambitions might be very different from reality – or indeed history might for one reason or another take a sudden shock turn. So I have come increasingly to think that the most important thing a historian does is to place himself in that context and I think much of the best history has been done in the Medieval and early Modern periods, where historians have been able to do that to quite an extraordinary degree, whether they are looking at language or the symbolism of pictures, or whether they are looking at religious discourses, and so forth. They have enhanced their capacity to put themselves imaginatively back in their period and to shed all the things that clutter up the mind from the modern day. I think historians in the Modern period do not do that enough. […]

6. Why should people care about the past? How can the past talk meaningfully to us today?

I think it is not so much a question about people caring about the past as that the past is impossible to ignore. A useful analogy is to see history as a collective human mind … just as individuals we spend a lot of our time going back and thinking about our own past, decisions we made and mistakes we made, trying to unravel our own psychological narrative. I think that is what we do as whole societies too. We do it now in quite professional, rational ways. If we did not, we would still do it but in the way societies might have done it 400 years ago: through folk songs, memories, traditional rites and so on. The past is something which is always with us. It is impossible, rather nightmarish, to imagine a community which has turned its back on the past. Having said that I think that there are enormous dangers in commodifying the past. […] So much of life has been commodified in the last 30 or 40 years. The past is presented in cosy chunks and we are encouraged to experience the past as consumers. One thinks, for example, of the ‘Blitz experience’ in the Imperial War Museum. I cannot imagine how anybody would have a desire to experience the Blitz, but it has become a commodity which is sold to schoolchildren who go there and have this ‘experience’. Managing the past or relating the present to the past is a great responsibility and a difficult thing to do well; and I worry that our appropriation of the past is becoming increasingly superficial and consumerist. I think as historians that is something we have a responsibility to combat.

7. Can we learn from past wars and genocides?

There is a difference between the question can we learn from past wars and genocides and should we learn from past wars and genocides. Of course it is tempting to say: ‘Let’s go back and look at past wars and see what lessons we can learn for today.’ But all of these things are subject to very different sets of circumstances. There are too many contingent things, I think, to be able to pass judgement very easily. We should clearly learn from past wars and genocides; we should look back and we should say that that choice was the wrong choice; we should recognize the frailty of decision-makers when they are confronted with real choices. But the process of applying history to the present is extraordinarily unsophisticated and underdeveloped. There was a move a couple of years ago to see whether the British Government would consider having a permanent historical advisor. Although one might think that this is a good idea, I think that decision-makers are not going to listen to historians. They are going to say: ‘That’s very interesting, thank you, but you know we face this pressure, that pressure, these difficulties.’ For the general public, learning from past wars and genocides seems fairly straightforward. In the Western world people deplore both and hope that they do not happen again. They deplored war in the 1920s and 1930s but the Second World War happened nonetheless. I have come to realize over the years that this idea of learning from the past, which is what people are so keen on, or the relevance of the past, which governments are trying to teach in schools, the relevance of history for the present, and so forth, is a largely misplaced endeavour. We can do our best to highlight these elements of the past and to explore the conditions which made them extremely likely. But in the end all we can rely on is the vigilance of contemporary elites or the contemporary public to ensure that these are not paths one chooses. I am very struck by the war in Iraq in 2003. There were a lot of lessons one could have learned about that. The public was overwhelmingly hostile to the idea of waging war. The decision-makers had their own trajectory and it is disheartening, I think, to recognize that still, in the twenty-first century, the will of most ordinary people is to live in peace but the circumstances that shape political decisions produce very different outcomes.

8. What is your view of the ongoing debates as to whether there is objective knowledge about the past?

I was brought up in a school of English historical writing which assumed that there was objective truth and that you just had to describe and define it – approach the past rationally. It has taken me some time to shed this idea. Clearly the past is apprehended in a wide variety of different ways, and there are different narratives which have to be reconciled. It is not a question of there being objective history; it is a question of recognising the variety of subjective elements which are injected into any narrative and which it is the job of the historian to be able to apprehend and explain. I am less attracted to the idea, which currently seems to dominate the British education system, that all historians are biased. This seems to be the corollary to the idea that there is no objective truth, that narratives are paradoxical and complex. It is claimed that all historians tell only partial truths, or that all historians are biased or prejudiced. The historians’ view of the past is coloured, of course, by their preconceptions, their intellectual interests, the intellectual trajectories they might have travelled, and it would be useful to know more about those. But the idea that somehow we are biased and therefore that what we say is a deviation from the ‘truth’ is of course an absurdity.

9. Much of your work has focused on the Second World War, which, in your own words, saw a ‘horrifying catalogue of human destruction’ with ‘no equal in history’. However, again in your own words, the security and prosperity enjoyed in the West since 1945 ‘have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war’.³How then is it possible for us, in the West, to empathize with the past, in particular the suffering and horrors of the victims?

I think it is very difficult but historians have to make that kind of leap. It is very difficult to understand those circumstances because we live largely in nonviolent societies and imagining how whole cohorts of people could engage in atrocities, even that mass armies could be made to fight, becomes harder and harder to do. In the 1960s, when I first became interested in the history of the Second World War, it did not seem so difficult to explain and I do not remember trying to explain it to myself. I took it for granted that a whole generation of young men were conscripted and went off and killed each other. Because the two world wars were then quite recent and a lot of people were around who had fought in the First World War, it seemed almost normal, that it was characteristic of modern European history. It has taken me the whole of the last 30–40 years of historical research to realize that it is not normal: it is abnormal. It is abnormal not just for European societies but for other societies too; and that means it is increasingly difficult for historians to really understand the nature of perpetration and victimhood. I think one of the important things historians have got to do is to find an adequate language, an adequate set of explanatory tools, to do justice to what it was that Europe did during that period. We are getting closer to that, partly because historians have had to borrow a great deal from social anthropology, social psychology and so forth, having to do what scientists do routinely when they talk about violence. […]

10. You seem to have made a habit of challenging orthodoxies throughout your career. For example, the orthodox interpretation of the origins of the Second World War stressed an aggressive German foreign policy and the ‘evil’ dictator Hitler, who was fortunately challenged by the ‘good’ Allies in the defence of democracy and freedom. You argued that a much broader and complex interpretation was needed and stressed the interplay of specific factors and more general causes ‘making for instability in the international system’. Or, as in Why the Allies Won, you argued that Allied victory was not at all predictable but took shape because of a dramatic transformation among the Allies between 1942 and 1944.⁴To what extent do you regard practising history as a kind of ‘rebellion’, and how has this shaped your career?

I think I have been more argumentative than most historians in the course of my career. I have always read the standard view or consensual view about something and thought: ‘What is inadequate about that? What does not work in the explanation?’ I think I am instinctively a troublemaker – that I see a thesis and think: ‘What is wrong with that thesis?’ What I have not written about but on which I have strong views is the outbreak of the First World War, the Fischer thesis and the dominant view which emerged from the 1960s onwards that Germany was largely responsible for the outbreak of the First World War.⁵ I have never accepted this view and perhaps at one point I might like to write about it. But it seems to me that really I am doing what historians do for every period, which is to challenge the prevailing myths, for example the prevailing myths surroun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 History, Dictatorship and War: A Conversation with Richard J. Overy
• Part I: The Way History is or Ought to be Written
• Part II: The Nature of Dictatorship
• Part III: War
• Notes
• Index
• Footnote