Richard Evans:
Why There Are So Many Books About the Nazisby John Crace
IT'S a Monday morning in Cambridge and
Richard Evans shuffles out of the porter's lodge
at Gonville & Caius College trailing a large suitcase
behind him. "Been somewhere nice for the weekend?" I ask.
Evans looks confused for a moment. "I haven't been
anywhere," he eventually replies. "I've got someone
flying in from the US to
research the
Irving trial and these are some of
the documents."
The emphasis here should be on the "some". In the five
years between 1995 and 2000 the standard bibliography of
works on the Nazis increased from 25,000 to 37,000: the
figure has no doubt grown still further since then, and
Evans himself has to take his fair share of the credit.
Or blame.
As professor of modern history at Cambridge and one of
the country's leading experts on the Nazi period, he's
generated several shelves of archives on his own -- most
notably as the star defence witness for Penguin books in
the David Irving Holocaust denial libel
trial in 2000. 
Indeed,
the story of the publication of his book about the trial,
Telling Lies about Hitler, produced its only mini
sub-archive as first Heinemann, then Granta and finally
Profile declined to publish it for various legal reasons,
before Verso stepped in. "You can read all about it in
Private
Eye," he adds, a little testily.
And this month sees yet another addition to the Nazi
canon as Evans publishes The Coming of the Third
Reich, the first in a projected trilogy on Nazi
Germany. So what more can be said on the subject? "It's
precisely because the literature is so enormous, that I
felt there was a need for a major overview and synthesis
of the material," he argues. "Research has gone in three
phases: in the 50s and 60s West German historians tried
to understand how fascism arose from the Weimar
democracy, then in the 70s and 80s historians worked on
the structures of the Reich between 1933-39, and since
the 90s the main focus has been the war and the
Holocaust."
Evans's books will dovetail nicely with these three
periods. The Coming of the Third Reich steers a
comfortable middle-ground between the determinists, such
as A J P Taylor, who reckon that Nazism was a
historical inevitability for Germany ever since Luther
drew his first breath and the only real surprise is that
it didn't happen earlier, and those who see it as an
aberration with no deep roots in German culture.
"The trouble with history is that you study it in
reverse, so everything can appear to have an immediate
cause and effect," he points out. "So while the driving
force of Nazism can be seen as far back as Bismarck with
the marginalisation of the Catholics and socialists
together with the emergence of a nationalism based on
Social Darwinism and eugenics, you can never say it was
an inevitability. If German unification had taken place
in a less authoritarian way, if the first world war had
not taken place, if the Weimar constitution had been
worded differently, if the Depression had not put
one-third of the workforce out of a job and had
Hindenburg not written off the Nazis as politically naive
and compliant, then German history of the 30s and 40s
might have looked very different."
EVANS also has an implicit pop at modern academics, such
as Michael Burleigh, for what he sees as a new
trend for overwriting history as a series of moral
judgments. "Of course a historian cannot avoid expressing
certain values," he says. "It's clear from my own work
that I believe in a multicultural democracy, but to go
from that position to say someone is morally good or bad
is either unnecessary or simplistic. The principle task
of history is to explain and interpret, not to issue
moral judgments."...
Towards the end of the 90s he took on the
postmodernists and post-structuralists who were
predicting the end of history as an academic discipline
in his book In Defence of History. In it, he
fought off suggestions that all history was a matter of a
reader's interpretation, by asserting the right of the
author to define the text. You get the feeling he bit off
a little more than expected, as the book was attacked on
two fronts -- by the conservatives for being too
quiescent to the wishy-washy liberals and by the
postmodernists for being too reactionary.
"It was all good-natured stuff, really," he laughs.
"The really nasty spats died out when dons stopped living
in college, as the disputes tended to be more marital
than academic."
Still, as ever, he came out fighting, quickly adding a
50-page afterword, reiterating and refining his position,
for the paperback edition and, though he admits he wasn't
as clear as he might have been in the original, he
reckons he more than won the argument. "The
postmodernists rather proved my point by complaining I
had misrepresented what they had written and, far from
dying out, history has gone from strength to
strength."
Not that Evans believes all is well within the
discipline. "When I came to Oxford in the late 60s you
had to have studied Latin and at least one other modern
language," he says. "Now there is no language
requirement, and I worry for the state of British history
if none of our academics of the future is able to study
foreign sources. Already my PhD students are
predominantly German as they are bilingual."
As professor of modern history at Cambridge for the
last six years, and at Birkbeck for nine years before
that, Evans acknowledges it is a long time since he came
into contact with any average undergraduates. But he does
feel that with history no longer compulsory at GCSE and
with the A-level syllabus -- in many people's view --
extremely limited, many students have huge knowledge
gaps. "It doesn't work to my advantage at all," he
smiles. 
"Most
of those who come up to Cambridge are sick and tired of
learning about the Nazis and want to start afresh. I've
only got four undergraduate students at the moment."
Private Eye, June 2002, accuses Evans of lying:
Richard Evans was one of the expert witnesses chosen by
Prof Deborah Lipstadt for her defence in David
Irving's libel action
write to David Irving