| June 2000, pp. 27-29
HISTORY AFTER IRVING Now that holocaust denier David Irving has been discredited, what is the future of history? Michael Kustow talks to defence witness Richard Evans[1] ON the first day of his six-day cross-examination by David Irving, [Feb. 10, 2000] I watched Richard Evans, chief expert witness for the defence against Irving's libel charge, bring the blustering falsificator to a momentary halt. He used a simple phrase. 'The facts have a veto over what we can and cannot say.'[2] Evans, like Deborah Lipstadt, the defendant in Irving's libel case, had hitherto refused to debate with Irving, 'because I only debate with historians'.[3] Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge University, is a quietly-spoken Welshman with a frown of concentration, who made Irving look even more the flailing con-man that he now is in the judgment of the High Court. May was the month when Irving was being held to account for the first installment of the defendants' £2 million costs, when Sasha Baron Cohen ('Ali G') received anti-Semitic hate mail and was warned by the police to raise his personal security, when the commission on art works in British museums stolen by Nazis from German Jews started its work, and the Tories led the hunting pack against asylum-seekers with New Labour not far behind. In the month of after-echoes and reminders of the Holocaust, I went to Cambridge to talk to Evans about the Holocaust in British consciousness and about history after Irving. Working with two research assistants over two years, Evans had produced a 740-page report, which took the historian's scalpel to Irving's malignant distortions and fantastical claims, the most brazen of which was that, because there are no signs of nozzles or apertures in the ruins of the gas-chambers, the Nazis never gassed the Jews.[4] They just fumigated their corpses. The Jews had died from typhus and overwork, you see. Tragic business, as Irving perfunctorily said once or twice, but the fortunes of war and conquest, don't you know. Evans is not a 'Holocaust historian' but the leading British interpreter of German history in a series of gripping books about such history-from-below subjects as a cholera epidemic in Hamburg, capital punishment in Germany since the 17th century, and rethinking German history itself. They combine archival research, as assiduous as Irving's, with a subtle reflection on the methods and goals of that craft. In his thrilling polemical book, In Defence of History, Evans takes on postmodernism in history, and knocks its reductionists out of the ring, with their claims that all the world's a text, that history is nothing but disguised ideology and time merely a fictional construct. Michael Kustow: Michael Kustow: One of Irving's wiliest claims was that a verdict against him would be a verdict against free speech, because there would be no further questioning of the Holocaust, and a consensus about it would be confirmed. Has there ever been such a consensus, particularly in this country?
However, what the trial has established is that debate among historians must continue on the basis of the evidence. Of course we do interpret the evidence in different ways, but what we don't do as responsible historians is to doctor the evidence to suit our own arguments. Michael Kustow: A key event during the period of the Irving trial has been the publication of US historian Robert Novick's The Holocaust and Collective Memory, in which he traces how the Holocaust has been placed at the centre of American culture over the past half century.[5] He intertwines US Cold War foreign policy, Israel's defeats and victories, the shift from 'integrationist' views of what it is to be American to particularist celebrations of ethnicity and difference. It's a deeply dialectical work about Jews in America, America and the Holocaust. Now Britain is going have a Holocaust Day, like Israel and America, and a Holocaust wing will open in June at the Imperial War Museum. Do you think the Holocaust is beginning to be used as a moral and political touchstone, as it has in America?
But saying that there is overwhelming evidence that 5 million to 6 million Jews were killed in the Second World War, that this was systematic, that Hitler knew about it, that gassing was one of the principal means used, through purpose-built gas chambers -- saying all that does not commit one to any particular position on Israel, the position of Jews in society or anything else. Michael Kustow: Do you think that history is a truth-telling?
Michael Kustow: What kind of compass do you take on this search?
Irving bragged about how open he was with his archive discoveries. He is open where he wants to be, but elsewhere he makes it difficult to check things out. Some of his footnotes are very vague, very opaque. He has no faculty of self-criticism, so that he really does go into the archives with a view to proving his fanatically-held belief that Hitler was a friend of the Jews. If the evidence doesn't fit, so deep-rooted are his beliefs that he will doctor the evidence to make it fit, or suppress or ignore it. Michael Kustow: Is Irving finished?
Michael Kustow: Don't you think publishing on the website, especially after such exposure as Irving has had, gives whatever he puts there a kind of paranoid power? You know, 'the truth they were too scared to publish'? The medium itself, its 'outlaw' quality, can appeal to people at the extremes.
I think it is very important to keep this whole thing in proportion. While I think that Lipstadt's book is a solid piece of work, welI researched, I don' t agree with her on one crucial point: she says that Holocaust denial is becoming more dangerous because the last generation of Holocaust survivors are dying off. I simply don't agree with that. At this trial, no Holocaust survivors were called to give evidence. That was a deliberate decision. At one point Irving was going to call various Nazis to testify.[7] There was an argument in the defence that 'the other side' should be called, but we did not want to subject them to Irving's kind of bullying. He was saying that all Holocaust survivors are suffering from a form of mass hysteria or mass delusion; we didn't want that. Also, these are elderly people whose memories are not always intact. The trial was done entirely on the basis of historical evidence, as if there were no survivors around. That was part of its importance. It was the first trial to deal with the Holocaust in that way. It was about historians' techniques, and it resulted in a vindication of historians, in the technical ability and competence of the real historians who want to establish some kind of objective factual account of what went on. One does encounter among students sometimes the cynical view that historians just assemble the evidence that supports their own thesis. I think the judgment in the trial struck a major blow against that kind of facile cynicism. I think that ought to reassure people that what Lipstadt says is a bit alarmist. Michael Kustow: Where now does history of your kind exist and how does it reach the widest possible public? Is it through books, is it through movies, television or fiction sometimes?
Michael Kustow: Television series are seen by a comparatively small audiences. What do you think about movies that reach millions of people? Did Schindler' s List serve history?
There has been a tendency in the past 20 years or so for historians to bury ourselves in technicalities and obscure journals, and I think historians ought to come out more. I think we do have a public role to play, particularly now when there is such increasing interest in history. Michael Kustow: Your own statement in the trial -- 'the facts put a veto on what we can and cannot say' -- is not only a dismissal of the Irvings of this world, but a rebuke to the radical scepticism of the post-modernists.
Michael Kustow: Do you think that either New Labour or the left has enough of an awareness of history?
I think New Labour is a sort of a historical phenomenon,
which lives very much in the present and takes its clues
from the social sciences. I think that there is a need for
the left to look for new ways of making the past into a
source of inspiration. Michael Kustow's new book, Theatre@risk, is published this month by Methuen For David Irving's Trial Diary, and his evaluation of Evans' performance as a witness, go to http://www.fpp.co.uk/trial/diary, published Monday, July 3, 2000 | |||||
David irving cross-examined Prof. Evans on the following days. Click for the transcripts. | ||||||
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