Professor
Richard ("How much will you pay me?")
Evans in 1987:   German
reunification is simply not a realistic
possibility, and to talk about it or to
advance historical arguments in its
favor is to indulge in political
fantasizing.
 -- Richard
Evans, 'The New Nationalism and the Old
History -- Perspective on the West
German Historikerstreit,' in Journal
Of Modern History, Dec 1987, page
785. We
are indebted to John Lukacs for drawing
attention to the failed prophet Evans
in The Hitler Of History (NY:
Knopf, 1977, page 233n), and to
Mark
Weber for
telling us about it.
|
ON October 3, 1989, David Irving
addressed a press conference at the
Bristol Hotel Kempinski in Berlin about
that evening's demonstration (above)
planned outside the Sender Freies Berlin
television centre, which had cancelled his
attendance on a historians' forum because
the cowardly German historians including
Eberhard
Jäckel had refused to sit at
the same table. In the course of his address to the
thirty journalists, who included The Daily
Telegraph and BBC representatives, Mr
Irving predicted: "You may not believe it,
but let me tell you this: Twelve months
from now, Germany will be reunited."
The German journalists present scoffed,
and declared the prediction both
incredible and undesirable. Only The Daily
Telegraph printed it. Twelve months later: Germany was
reunited on October 3, 1990, twelve months
to the day after the press conference.
Asked by a German journalist in 1990 why
the others present had failed to print his
prediction, Mr Irving said: "Journalists
the world over are all the same: they have
the horizon of a lavatory lid -- the
Horizont eines
Klosettendeckels." | 
London, March 9,
1990 |
Right
on THE opening up of East Germany has put
a new spring into the step of the
controversial Right-wing historian
David Irving, who has found a ready
audience in Dresden for his claim that the
bombing of the city was one of history's
gravest war crimes. Irving, now at the end of a lecture
tour across Europe, has distributed 300
copies of his book about the bombing in
Dresden, whose citizens, he says, are
thoroughly confused by recent developments
and "are like a huge family of ducklings
who have lost their mummy and daddy." He uses an equally curious image to
describe his opponents in the German
press, who "hooted with laughter" when he
claimed, in October that reunification
would take place within a year. "It didn't
surprise me," snorts Irving. "The German
press has all the horizon of a lavatory
lid."
[Speaking at
his Berlin press conference on October 3,
1989, Mr Irving had predicted to the
astonished journalists that Germany would
be reunited in twelve months. The Berlin
Wall was still standing at that time.
Germany was formally reunited on October
3, 1990.] |
 London, October 2, 1990
Told
you so THE CAST of 42nd Street may be looking
down in the dumps, but the biggest grin in
academe must belong to the highly
controversial historian David Irving. On
October 3 last year -- before the fall of
the Berlin Wall -- he declared that the
two Germanies would be one within a
year.  Irving: star gazer "You won't believe this," Irving told a
Berlin media conference, "but within 12
months Germany will be reunited." When the writer -- the best-known
apologist for Hitler -- heard that October
3 [1990] was to be Reunification
Day, he was delighted by the
coincidence. "I nearly fell off my chair," he tells
me, before adding: "You have a gut
feeling. Nobody thought that one thing was
going to lead to another, but to me it was
perfectly obvious." Peterborough |
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