the Lipstadt Trial Anne F. of a Sydney, Australia, high school, asks on about Magda Goebbels and history revisionism How to write history, and what about Magda Goebbels? I ATTEND Burwood Girls High School in Sydney, Australia, and as part of a historiography course I am researching Magda Goebbels , my specific task being to examine how she typified the Nazi ideal of womanhood. Any views you might have on this area of study would be greatly appreciated.

I am also currently reading your Goebbels biography , and any sources I reference in my essay must be discussed in regards to the historian. I would be very grateful if you could reply with a response to the following questions. 1. Do you believe historians are able to maintain an objective viewpoint and would you consider yourself to be an Empiricist? I don’t know what the second question means. Objectivity is desirable but difficult to maintain.

A Marxist like professor Richard “Skunky” Evans sees the world through his own pink-tinged glasses. It is a danger that has to be recognised and neutralised in advance. I always knew that objectivity would be difficult, and I consciously run mental self-diagnoses on my brain as I write, in an attempt to keep its cerebral chalkboard clean.

When you think of it, the historian is taking millions of words of source-material and ideas, and making a selection of just a few thousand for a book or paper; it is in this selection process that objectivity matters. Incidentally, there is another consideration that always weighs with me. Normally editors ask journalists, is the guy dead? And if he is, then it’s open season on him.

If I am writing about somebody who is dead, I am a thousand times more careful to get the facts straight, because he is no longer able to speak for himself. When I wrote the Hitler biography , I refused to look at movies or TV documentaries or read other books on him, as I wanted to ensure that my sponge-like brain absorbed only undoctored facts, so that when the time came to distill its content onto paper, I could be reasonably sure it was unadulterated history. 2.

How do you think your upbringing and political, social or religious outlook influences the way you interpret history (if at all)? When I was young I had the usual childhood habit of fibbing, and took a lot of stick for it. See how I remember that even now over a half century later! But I also went to Church every Sunday, and what you learn there sticks.

I think that for all their mealy mouthed and sanctimonious utterances, many of the world’s leaders today have forgotten the moralities they learned at their Mother’s knee. They speak Good, but they act Evil. 3. Could you please tell me something of your methodology? Good question.

When I wrote Hitler’s War , it was the old fashioned way: I built up over ten years, around 1965-1975, a substantial card index, a chronological database referencing on about 20,000 cards every utterance and document, every diary entry about him, for the war and pre-war years, and also a personalities index. I did the same for the Goebbels biography. That kind of spadework pays off in the long run, although it does not show.

Next: I did the pre-drafts in ink, in handwriting: I took ledger-style writing books, drew a line down the center of the right hand page, and wrote only on the right of that. That gives you a lot of space — and you’ll need it — for annotations, additions, and working notes. Next, I try to write as much as possible of the pre-draft from memory, and then go