More on Peter Novick. He was adviser to
David Abraham, who wrote a dissertation and
then a book on Weimar Germany and the rise of
Nazism. Abraham's thesis was largely "structural"
or "systemic", i.e., he argued that there was a
certain inevitability to Nazism due to the
conditions Germany faced. This did not sit well
with the academic establishment, notably Henry
Turner of Yale and Gerald Feldman of
Berkeley. They much preferred debating Weimar in
terms of whether Big Business could have, or did,
contribute to the rise of Hitler. In the event, Abraham made some mistakes in his
book, these seem to have occurred because of sloppy
note-taking in German archives. Most historians
were understanding of this but Turner and Feldman
launched a veritable jihad to destroy Abraham,
accusing him of fraud and much else besides; see
Novick's book, That Noble
Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American
Historical Profession, 1988, Cambridge
UP, pp. 612-622 As a result of this campaign, Abraham was denied
tenure at Princeton, his book was never
republished, he was never able to get another job
in academia, and he left to go to law school. The above background is instructive I think in
two ways. First, it shows how much even
"non-deniers" in academia can be destroyed if, in
the pursuit of their thinking, they contradict
established orthodoxies, and second, it gives a
good reason as to why Novick might have desired to
distance himself from revisionism as much as
possible, calling revisionists "cooks, crackpots,
misfits", "screwballs" and "fruitcakes." -- Alan
B Kennady. |
IN
1999 Prof. Peter Novick (Professor at the
University of Chicago, 
and
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