Inevitable Historicity

Gender history arose within the discipline of history within the context of the Women’s Liberation movement and the larger second wave of the feminist movement. However, to a large extent, this emergence was limited to women’s history, with less of a concern for broader issues of gender. Rather, not until a couple of decades later did this initial development in gender history flourish to include considerations including issues of race and class, as well as a non-binary understanding of gender. The cross-fertilization of gender history with Marxist and postcolonial approaches resulted in further developments in the field. The result has been an increased emphasis on group identity and its role in history. As John Tosh writes, “In addition to race, class and sexual orientation have had an immense influence on how women are perceived – and also on how they perceive themselves – and most historical work now relates to specific groups rather than womanhood in general. This enhances the bearing of

women’s history on social history, where these distinctions are central.”[1]

Tosh notes here how social history has intersected with gender history, but cultural history has also played an important role. For instance, in her review of four gender histories, Susan Whitney notes how cultural history; in discussing Dena Goodman’s Republic of Letters, which Whitney calls “a cultural history of the French Enlightenment,” she writes that the book “concentrates not on Enlightenment ideas but on the social and discursive practices and institutions—including polite conversation, letter writing, and the salon—of the Enlightenment,” thereby making gender “central to the history of the French Enlightenment.”[2] Elsewhere, discussing Sian Reynold’s France Between the Wars, Whitney writes that “Because official political culture was so resolutely masculine, however, [women’s political activity] occurred outside official political channels and institutions.”[3] In both cases, Whitney acknowledges the crossing over of cultural history with gender history.

With regard to the distinction between women’s history and the gender lens, Joan Scott’s essay is most informative in noting how the classic gender binary has been challenged when using the gender lens. She writes, “We need a refusal of the fixed and permanent quality of the binary opposition, a genuine historicization and deconstruction of the terms of sexual difference.”[4] In this regard, the gender lens, particularly as applied since the 1980s, applies techniques from poststructuralism to challenge our underlying assumptions about gender influidity, among other topics. The result is the ability of a gender-oriented lens to bring into focus more complicated aspects of both gender identity and gender relations with regard to how they have impacted and been impacted by historical events and processes.

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[1] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 303.

[2] Susan Whitney, “History Through the Lens of Gender,” Journal of Women’s History, 11, no. 1 (1999): 200.

[3] Whitney, “History,” 196.

[4] Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91, no. 5 (1986): 1065.Reply to Thread

Social and cultural history have impacted political history in a number of ways. In the case of social history, according to Mark Leff, whereas social history originally posited itself as a “remedy” to the overemphasis on elites of political history, over time, it has forced political history to re-examine itself, such that “rather than imprisoning themselves within the very institutions from which others had fled, recent political historians have adapted the work of gender and social historians.”[1] Regarding cultural history, one way in which this field has impacted political history is through decentering the concept of identity and, in that way, offering a counterpoint to the increasing tendency of social history to focus on the politics of identity. As Paula Fass writes, “As social historians played into the politics of identity of the 1980s, cultural historians turned to deconstructing identity altogether, and attributing to the past some of the willfulness of contemporary culture.”[2]

The importance of the lenses of social and cultural history to political history have to do with the ability that they provide for political historians to subspecialize by examining topics outside of the thoughts and actions of elites. For instance, while a traditional political historian would emphasize elites in his/her discussion of certain events, the social historian and cultural historian, who are more concerned with history “from below”; as Julian Zelizer writes, “Social and cultural historians focused on studying American life from the ‘bottom up.’ To do so, many of them turned to sociology and anthropology for guidance.”[3] Thus, in the same way that political history has always shared some territory with political science, the lenses of social and cultural history resulted in a broadening of the territory of political history to the respective disciplines of sociology and anthropology.

Beyond this broadening of the shared territory of political history with the social sciences, another key change that social and cultural history have caused political history to undergo has to do with the source bases that political historians use. Whereas the historian working in the tradition of Ranke would have limited him- or herself to depicting the past “as it really was,” the historian informed by sociological theory has the advantage of seeing the larger historical processes and factors that might have contributed to an event. As Josh Tosh makes clear in his book, Marxist interpretation offers a particularly fertile lens for examining historical events. Regarding cultural history, Tosh clearly enunciates the point of how a more cultural approach broadens the source base: “All surviving material from the past is grist to the historian’s mill. If that precept holds, it must apply to visual no less than textual sources, in which case the historian should be as quick to draw conclusions from paintings, sculpture and material objects as from deeds and diaries.”[4] Indeed, in social history, the writers of diaries themselves grow larger as a group since we can now consider the diary of a housewife or middle manager, in addition to that of a prime minister or monarch.

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[1] Mark H. Leff, “Revisioning U.S. Political History,” American Historical Review, 100, no. 3 (1995): 850.

[2] Paula S Fass, “Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue,” Journal of Social History, 37, no. 1 (2003): 39.

[3] Julian Zelizer, “History and Political Science: Together Again?” Journal of Policy History, 16, no. 2 (2004): 127.

[4] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 209.

The period I’ve chosen to examine in this assignment in the Third Reich (1933-1945). Two threads from social history that have emerged in the study of Nazi Germany have been analyses based on class and on violence. Regarding cultural history, two threads that have emerged over the course of several decades in studying Germany under National Socialism have been religion and myth.

Because of its positioning of itself as a movement dedicated to opposing Marxism, National Socialism unsurprisingly evoked from its beginnings analysis and critique by Marxists. Among the most important texts to first do so was Franz Neumann’s Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism,[1] which was published while the Nazi regime was still in power. Later social histories expanded class analysis to a social-historical perspective. Rather than viewing Nazism as a symptom of late capitalism, as the Marxists had done, historians chose to view class in Nazi Germany “from below,” i.e., from the standpoint of members of those classes. In his The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany,[2] for instance, Richard Grunberger examines the role of the Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic or “folk” community) in overcoming class conflict — not only as applied as part of the Nazis’ totalitarian plan but more important as perceived by average Germans across all economic classes.

Other social historians have examined the role of violence in the Third Reich from the standpoint of the average Germans who were expected, and usually did, commit acts of violence on behalf of their government. In this regard, Christian Gerlach’s book Extremely Violent Societies,[3] while it treats cases beyond Nazi Germany, places the specific case of the German occupation of Greece and collaboration in violence among civilians as an example of how the breakdown of socioeconomic stability contributes to the likelihood of average people to engage in acts of violence.

Cultural historians have examined the role of religion in the Third Reich in a variety of ways. Obviously, the experiences of Jews and Judaism have been a major focus, but so too have been the changes undergone by the Christian churches over the twelve years of Nazi control. For instance, Doris Bergen’s Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich[4] examined how the evangelical Lutheran church was divided by the rise of National Socialism, with the larger segment of the church forming a movement aligned with the regime and creating a syncretic form of Christianity that denied the religion’s Jewish roots.

In the realm of myth, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism[5] sought to understand how Nazi ideology reflected earlier mythic traditions among Germany’s völkisch nationalists, some of whom helped to found the Nazi Party. Members of the Thule Society, for example, believed in an ancient homeland for the Germanic people in the Arctic north, in addition to also holding the core antisemitic beliefs that would characterize mainstream Nazi thinking. All four of these aspects of social and cultural history provide insights on Nazi political history that go beyond the vantage point of the Nazi leadership generally or Hitler specifically. As such, they offer me a greater understanding of political mobilization in Nazi Germany under the control of forces other than government programs or propaganda.

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[1] Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942).

[2] Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1971).

[3] Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010).

[4] Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

[5] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935 (New York: New York UP, 1992).

The two big things that the inclusion of social and cultural history do to the overall research process is expand the theoretical basis on which the interpretation of history can rest and enlarge the base of sources on which historians can rely. On the first point, whereas the historian working in the tradition of Ranke would have limited him- or herself to depicting the past “as it really was,” the historian informed by sociological theory has the advantage of seeing the larger historical processes and factors that might have contributed to an event. As Tosh makes clear in his book, Marxist interpretation offers a particularly fertile lens for examining historical events. On the second point, cultural history, Tosh clearly enunciates the point of how a more cultural approach broadens the source base: “All surviving material from the past is grist to the historian’s mill. If that precept holds, it must apply to visual no less than textual sources, in which case the historian should be as quick to draw conclusions from paintings, sculpture and material objects as from deeds and diaries.”[1] Indeed, in social history, the writers of diaries themselves grow larger as a group since we can now consider the diary of a housewife or middle manager, in addition to that of a prime minister or monarch.

Inherent in the definitions of social history and cultural history are one of the distinct differences between the two. I.e., whereas social history is concerned with society and so studies the people who together constitute a society — as well as the institutions that these people create as a society — cultural history concerns itself with the beliefs and practices of the people. Therefore, whereas the rituals that emerged within the Catholic Church might be an appropriate topic of cultural history, the institution of the church itself and how, e.g., the reforms of the Second Vatican Council were conceived by lay Catholics might be a topic of social history. Another distinct difference between social and cultural history is whether the sources that are at hand are written or not. Tosh’s example of the Reformation is informative here. He points out that, while the conflict between Luther and the Catholic Church was in many ways a matter of elites, “the huge outpouring of cheap prints that lionized the reformers and satirized the Catholic Church in Germany,”[2] particularly given the overwhelmingly visual nature of this material, was a specifically cultural reflection of how the changes in religious institutions affected the beliefs of the people.

Ultimately, I think the choice of whether social history and cultural history are better used together or independently depends very much on each individual case. On the one hand, the individual historian might have a particular sociological orientation or cultural affinity that orients him/her toward social or cultural history, or perhaps the historian prefers to take a broad approach of the topic at hand and study it comprehensively and thus with both social and cultural lenses. On the other hand, the topic itself might be one that limits the historian to one lens or the other. Clearly, the visual arts or cinema fall more strictly within cultural history than social history. Where the two lenses can be complementary is nicely illustrated by Paula Fass’s example of the graduate student taking his orals in social history could be eloquent about gender and sexuality so far as it was reflected in societal norms and the perceptions thereof, such as homosexuality and prostitution, he knew little about the actual sexual practices of the period under study: “He had nothing at all to say about contraception, the sexuality of youth and adolescence, the nature of male-female relationships in the family, or issues relating to fidelity-adultery.”[3] The student, although he had a solid foundation in social history, lacked any insights that would have been afforded from cultural history. As such, his knowledge was one-dimensional, and a more ecumenical approach to social and cultural history might have helped.

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[1] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 271.

[2] Tosh, Pursuit of History, 277.

[3] Paula S. Fass, “Cultural History/Social History: Some Reflections on a Continuing Dialogue,” Journal of Social History, 37, no. 1 (2003): 42.

As stated in the module overview for this week, historical lenses are the “various branches [of the discipline of history] that ultimately allow the historian to have a specialization, as it is impossible to know everything about everything.”[1] This seems to me a decent definition, although it does raise the question of where the limitations of such a definition lie. Looking at the course syllabus, it is obvious that the lenses we’ll examine in this course incude social history, cultural history, political history, and gender history. However, within gender history, for example, there can be Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist approaches. Moreover, if “Marxist” is an historical lens but also can be applicable with a gender perspective, then clearly it is a lens that goes beyond mere economic or political history — where it would seem to apply most readily. Therefore, I can only agree with the definition provided in the overview in the most generic sense and suggest that the definition remains somewhat nebulous.

We have multiple lenses of study within the discipline of history becaue the sheer amount of information about past events — to say nothing of the events themselves — requires us to apply a lens if for no other reason than to narrow down the amount of material with which we must contend. Tosh refers to this issue as the “surfeit of records” or “profusion of the available sources,” writing that “sources may, it is true, represent a very incomplete record; yet for all but very remote periods and places they survive in completely unmanageable quantities.”[2] Whereas Tosh does not use the terminology of a “lens” in discussing how historians specialize to manage the task of information management, he discusses how historians have typically considered the concept of facts as a way of negotiating this landscape. In so doing, historians have the choice of how they approach these facts, as well as how they choose to present them to the reader. Thus, the significance of lenses lies in the multiplicity of approaches that historians can take to present some selection of the available sources.

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[1] “Module Overview,” HIS-502-Q5671: Historical Methods 20TW5, Southern New Hampshire University, accessed July 19, 2020, https://learn.snhu.edu/d2l/le/content/454812/viewContent/8977297/View

[2] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 209.

Rozenblit, Marsha L. Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.

Marsha L. Rozenblit is Harvey M. Meyeroff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland and a former President of the Association for Jewish Studies (2009-2011). Having studied under István Deák at Columbia, Rozenblit has published two books on Austrian Jewish history, as well as coediting the volume Construction Nationalities in East Central Europe (2009) with Pieter Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History (2018). Most recently, Rozenblit coedited the collection World War I and the Jews (2018) with Jonathan Karp of SUNY Binghamton.

In Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (2001), Rozenblit contributes to the body of work addressing the topics of Jewish identity in Central Europe, the wartime period and its effects on countries and their populations, and the emergence of antisemitism and ethnic nationalism in the late 1910s and 1920s. Rozenblit’s concerns here are nationality and politics, considered from the standpoint of both political elites and “from below.” On the one hand, in discussing how Austrian Jewish identity undergoes a transformation during World War I, she traces the reactions of political party members and religious and secular community leaders; on the other hand, she also tracks the thoughts and feelings of soldiers, regular citizens, and refugees.

The central argument of Rozenblit’s book is that Austrian Jews had a tripartite identity in the years leading up to World War I: they were politically Austrian, culturally German (or Czech or Polish, although Rozenblit’s focus is on German-speaking Jews), and religiously, ethnically, or “nationally” Jewish: “Multinational Habsburg Austria allowed the Jews to assert their Austrian patriotism, to declare their love for the culture of one or another of the national groups, and at the same time to feel part of the Jewish people. In particular, the German-speaking Jews […] could be loyal Austrians, devotees of German culture, and members of a separate Jewish ethnic group.”[1] While the war provided Jews with certain opportunities to express this tripartite identity as patriotic Austrians, cultural Germans protecting central Europe from Russians, and ethnic Jews expressing solidarity with refugees from Galicia and Bukovina. With the disintegration of Austria-Hungary at the end of the war, Jews had to negotiate a new sense of identity in the absence of the supranational empire, which had encouraged a sense of loyalty without nationalism. They did so with varying levels of success, but what ultimately emerged was an increased sense of Jewish nationhood.

The book is organized chronologically into six chapters. Rozenblit first establishes the situation for German-speaking Austrian Jews in August 1914, following this material with four central chapters covering patriotic reaction to the war’s outbreak, the home front and refugees, Jewish men’s experiences as soldiers, and the increasing urgency with which Austrian Jews clung to their tripartite identity in a context of rising antisemitism. The final chapter covers the crisis of the empire’s dissolution, while the brief epilogue provides a country-by-country summary of how identity ultimately emerged in Austria-Hungary’s successor states. With this structure, Rozenblit is able to present a logical process by which tripartite identity is transformed by temporally and across subsets of the population under study.

            Rozenblit grounds her argument about tripartite identity in theories of ethnicity and nationalism. For instance, in her introduction, she traces the concept of nationhood from Ernest Renan’s “daily plebiscite” and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community”[2] to Anthony Smith’s concept of the nation as grounded in “common culture and alleged descent.”[3] She further grounds Austria-Hungary as a supranational state within the paradigm offered by Rogers Brubaker in Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (1992): Austria-Hungary was neither like France — a nation-state that engendered civic nationalism and propagated a shared sense of identity — nor like Germany — an ethnocultural nation based on the concept of ethnicity or Volk. In the absence of a unified cultural identity, either civically or ethnically, the nations of the Habsburg Empire could be both patriotically attached to the Dual Monarchy and proud members of their individual nations. While for most of these nations, their sense of cultural identity and nationhood coincided, for Jews in Austria-Hungary, cultural identity was determined by affinity with Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, or Poles, while national identity was unique in combining nebulously defined aspects of religion and religious heritage, language, and the experience of antisemitism.

            By limiting her discussion to German-speaking Jews for the most part, Rozenblit avoids most of the complicating factors that would render her theoretical grounding less coherent. Since most German-speaking Jews were either secular or practiced “liberal” forms of Judaism, for example, religion contributed less to their sense of nationhood than it did for Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews in Galicia or Bukovina. However, this depiction does, at time, fray around the edges, such as in her avoidance of the treatment of Yiddish-speaking secular Jews of these same regions, who were already identifying nationally as Jews by 1900 and who shared little sense of cultural identification with Poles, Ukrainians, and Romanians. That Yiddish was not broadly recognized as a language in its own right explains this elision to some extent, but not entirely. Indeed, Rozenblit does not mention the General Jewish Workers’ Association (the Bund) — the socialist Jewish political party active in Galicia and Bukovina — at all. Instead, Bundists are presumably incorporated into a larger agglomeration of “Jewish nationalists,” including Zionists.

            The source base on which Rozenblit relies is twofold: newspapers and memoirs. On the former point, Rozenblit relies on Anderson’s concept of print nationalism to justify this inclusion. On the latter, she is less theoretical and concedes an inherent limitation in the use of memoirs: “While it is true that these memoirs, written mostly after the Holocaust, tend to view the pre- World War I period in idyllic terms, especially in contrast to what came later, there is no reason to doubt their veracity on basic issues of identity.”[4] Finally, she uses archives in Vienna and Prague, as well as the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem — likely informing her emphasis on Zionists to the exclusion of other nationally conscious Jewish groups. Regarding secondary sources, Rozenblit’s coverage is admirable, and she does not overly rely on any one work or historian.

            There are two key criticisms that can be made of this book. First, Rozenblit’s writing is often repetitive in stating its thesis of tripartite identity, sometimes to the extent of becoming tiresome. Second, Rozenblit’s analysis of Bukovina often feels like an afterthought. In treating Galicia and Bukovina as a single unit, her examples come overwhelmingly from the Galician side of the border. The reader might ask whether the material on Bukovina were added at the suggestion of a reviewer or editor.

            Overall, Rozenblit’s delineation of tripartite identity is quite convincing and elucidating. It offers a viable paradigm for discussion Jewish identity in this specific time and place (although, as noted, it is significantly less viable when applied to certain subpopulations). As such, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Jewish life in Austria-Hungary, particularly in areas outside Vienna. In addition, she often provides fascinating detail about the Jewish experience during World War I, for instance, the controversy that emerged over whether Jewish soldiers would be buried in common graves with other Austrian soldiers and how the presence of Jews in these graves would be marked. As a result, specialists in both Jewish history and the larger context of European history will find Reconstructing a National Identity useful.

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[1] Marsha L. Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 38.

[2] Quoted by Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 5.

[3] Quoted by Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 6.

[4] Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity, 12.

The historian approaches research first by devising a research question. Once a question has been devised, the next step is to imagine the source base(s) that would be useful to answering the question and determining whether these sources are, in fact, available. The “meat” of the research begins with note taking and, while doing so, engaging in arguments about the topic and attempting to construct a narrative that uses the evidence at hand to tell a story. While doing so, it is also important to be mindful of the secondary literature and where one’s own argument fits within that literature. Finally come the drafting, revising, and editing of the research essay itself.

Each of these steps poses its own challenges. A research question, for instance, always runs the risk of being too broad or too narrow for the task at hand. Moreover, the research question can evolve over the course of the conducting of research. As Hung and Popp write, “Defining questions within your project is not a linear process. Rather, questions will define your directions of inquiry and, in turn, the results of your inquiries will refine your question. Developing research questions is an iterative process evolving with your project.”[1] Similarly, Wagstaff and Gant identify an important challenge that emerges when determining one’s source base, i.e., avoiding confirmation basis, which emerges when historians or history students “notice only the information that confirms their preconceptions.”[2]

I think that the ways in which historians can overcome the challenges inherent to the research process. In the case of the tendency of a research question to evolve over time, the main thing that the historian can do is be open to the mutability of the research question. As long as the research subsequently performed is undertaken with an open mind, it is not likely to cause too many problems. More difficult to overcome is the possibility of confirmation bias. Here keeping an open mind is, of course, important, but I also think that volume can help to overcome our resistance to considering views opposite from our own. Therefore, the historian should engage in as broad a heuristic technique as possible, consulting the full range of sources available to him/her. In this regard, I found Brundage’s chapter on finding sources particularly useful. He writes, “Whatever kind of paper you are writing and whatever its topic, there are bound to be reference materials of vital importance to you. Used intelligently in harness with your primary and secondary sources, they will both deepen your understanding and lighten your labors.”[3]

[1] Po-Yi Hung and Abigal Popp, “Putting Boundaries on Your Research,” Learning Historical Research, accessed July 28, 2020, http://www.williamcronon.net/researching/questions.htm

[2] Stillman Wagstaff and Jesse Gant, “Finding Your Evidence,” Learning Historical Research, accessed July 28, 2020, https://www.williamcronon.net/researching/documents.htm

[3] Anthony Brundage, Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing, 6th ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2017), 50.

This post is intended to provide news that I’ll enroll in the fall at the University of Pennsylvania to earn a Master’s degree. More on that later, but in the meantime, I’ve enrolled in an online graduate history course at SNHU to complete 18 post-baccalaureate credits in history to qualify for teaching. For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting my work from that course. Here’s the first discussion post.

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I’ve thought quite a bit about the role of the historian since deciding to enter into formal study of the discipline. In general, I’m a proponent of Ranke’s dictum of presenting things “as they really were.” However, I definitely disagree with the idea that history ought not “[instruct] the present for the benefit of the ages to come.”[1] Further, although Tosh asserts that “Even within the time-span of a hundred years, history does not repeat itself,”[2] I disagree and would instead point to two other important voices on the role of history and whether it repeats: Santayana (“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”[3]) and Marx (history repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”[4]). Therefore, I see the role of the historian as not only clarifying to the best of his/her ability determining what happened but also using that information to provide insights into present circumstances that pose similar issues or problems. I intend to work as an historian to this end.

One challenge that I can envision having to face is the coherence of an approach or “school” of history to apply to the topics in which I’m interested. As is stands, I find aspects of several of the different approaches discussed by Brundage in this week’s readings to be interesting and potentially fruitful, but I’m unsure whether any of them in and of themselves would be wholly appropriate to my topics of interest. For example, I like the longue durée of the Annales school and how it takes a broad view of the social processes that generate historical events, but at the same time, it seems passé at this point, having been eclipsed by postmodernism, although I do believe that there is (or should be) a strong social-scientific component to history.

That said, I have had conversations about this topic and find some hope in the idea that the topic itself can dictate the approach used by the historian. For instance, a topic covering a century or more might lend itself to a school descending from the Annales, while a topic covering a single place and time might be more conducive to a microhistorical approach. I find it particularly useful to have read that Ladurie’s Montaillou is “a kind of annaliste approach with an extremely local focus.”[5] For my topics of interest, this form of analysis could be very fruitful.

Finally, how all of these foregoing considerations would impact my drafting of a research proposal is an open question. It would seem, based on the reading, that one of my goals is to “have a theoretical background and a methodical approach to solve the problem”[6] that I choose to study. I fear that having this approach before encountering the actual research environment puts the cart before the horse, but perhaps this course will help me to reconcile that fear with the reality.

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[1] Quoted in John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 24.

[2] Tosh, Pursuit of History, 56.

[3] George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, edited by Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 172.

[4] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, translated by Saul K. Padover, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (accessed June 23, 2020), para 1.

[5] Anthony Brundage, Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing, 6th ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2017), 13.

[6] “How to Write a Research Proposal,” Study Guides and Strategies, http://web.archive.org/web/20190222150214/http://www.studygs.net/proposal.htm (accessed June 23, 2020).

The discipline of history has undergone multiple transformations over the course of the last 100 years, with the predominant empiricism of Rankean methodology giving way to numerous novel approaches, including the Annales school, social history, and various postmodern approaches embracing aspects of critical theory, Marxism, and feminism. To varying extents, these approaches have made their way into the academy, informing our understanding of numerous fields of history, including the study of the Holocaust. However, at the same time that our knowledge about the Holocaust has grown, attempts to deny the Holocaust under cover of honest inquiry have increased. Whereas most historians have chosen to avoid deniers, upon occasion, the publicity generated by deniers has warranted a response.

Although Holocaust denial as a phenomenon began while the Final Solution was still under way, and it persists into the current day, its peak period of visibility was between December 1978, with the onset of the Faurisson Affair, and July 2001, when David Irving’s application for appeal in Irving v. Lipstadt was denied. This period of twenty-some years saw historians attempt to negotiate the specific challenges presented by Holocaust denial, with varying extents of success. Their responses since the late 1970s have concluded that denial is best defended against methodologically rather than by responding to challenges to specific documents or testimonies. The cases of Irving and Faurisson, as well as that of Ernst Zündel, demonstrate the progression toward this conclusion.

The Faurisson Affair

            Robert Faurisson, a French professor of literature at the University of Lyon, rose to notoriety with the publication of a letter to Le Monde in December 1978, in which he expressed the opinion that there had been no homicidal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps and that stories attesting to their existence constituted a hoax. Over the course of the subsequent year, Faurisson was prosecuted for and convicted of defamation of the dead, fined approximately $3,500, and given a three-month suspended sentence. As a result, his case was taken up as a cause by a broad spectrum of political personalities from left to right as a violation of principles of free speech. The case attracted international attention when it was reported that the American linguist and left-wing dissident Noam Chomsky had signed a petition condemning Faurisson’s prosecution.

            The response from the French intellectual community came in two waves. First were immediate responses in Le Monde by historians including François Delpech, Georges Wellers, and Olga Wormser-Migot; in addition, a declaration of historians was organized by Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Léon Poliakov and published in Le Monde on February 21, 1979. A number of historians sought immediately thereafter to directly refute Faurisson’s allegations in lengthier works. Among the first was Wellers, who was a scientist, historian, and former internee at Drancy, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. Wellers had already published shorter pieces refuting earlier deniers such as Arthur Butz and Wilhelm Stäglich, and following the Faurisson Affair, he published Les Chambres à Gaz Ont Existé (The Gas Chambers Existed) in 1981. Wellers’s book includes a preface in which he addresses the affair and the methodology of Faurisson and his spiritual mentor, Paul Rassinier, whom he accuses of engaging in “endless, inextricable analyses of details of style, which are of no real importance but which divert the reader’s attention to trivialities, causing him to forget the real issues by hiding them behind a cascade of style exercises.”^[1]

The second, lengthier wave, led by Vidal-Naquet, who was an historian specializing in ancient Greece, approached the issue from more purely political and methodological standpoints. During the 1980s, Vidal-Naquet published a number of essays on Holocaust denial; the most significant, “Un Eichmann de papier” (“A Paper Eichmann”), was published in 1980. In the essay, he appeals to Rankean methodology: “a formula in which truth is opposed to falsehood, independently of any interpretation.”^[2] He writes that “it is absolutely impossible to debate with Faurisson. Such a debate, which he persists in calling for, is excluded because his way of arguing – what I called his use of the nonontological proof – makes discussion futile.”^[3] Finally, echoing a charge from Wellers, Vidal-Naquet argues that Faurisson attempts to apply principles of literary analysis too directly to be useful in historiography. He quotes Faurisson as writing, “Texts have only one meaning or they have no meaning at all,” and then he comments, “With reference to poetry, which Faurisson interprets professionally, the principle is palpably absurd: poetry perpetually plays on polysemy; but the rule has value when referring to plain language such as: I am going out to buy a French bread.”^[4]

In a later essay, “Thèses sur le Révisionnisme” (“Theses on Revisionism”), Vidal-Naquet considers whether it is necessary at all to refute Faurisson’s allegations. “Such will certainly not be my intention in these pages,” he writes. “In the final analysis, one does not refute a closed system, a total lie that is not refutable to the extent that its conclusion has preceded any evidence.”^[5] In combination with his notion of Faurisson’s nonontological proof – “the gas chambers did not exist because nonexistence was one of their attributes”^[6] – Vidal-Naquet enunciates in more concrete terms what the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard would express in his 1983 treatise La Differend. In this work dedicated to examining how linguistic disputes, when unresolved, perpetuate injustices, Lyotard uses the Faurisson Affair among several examples. He summarizes Faurisson’s position:

The only acceptable proof that [a gas chamber] was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber. – The plaintiff complains that he has been fooled about the existence of gas chambers, fooled that is, about the so-called Final Solution. His argument is: in order for a place to be identified as a chamber, the only eyewitness I will accept would be a victim of this gas chamber; now, according to my opponent, there is no victim that is not dead; otherwise, this gas chamber would not be what he or she claims it to be. There is, therefore, no gas chamber.^[7]

Later, Lyotard concludes, “The historian need not strive to convince Faurisson if Faurisson is ‘playing’ another genre of discourse, one in which conviction, or the obtainment of a consensus over a defined reality, is not at stake. Should the historian persist along this path, he will end up in the position of victim.”^[8]

Finally, the most comprehensive response to Faurisson was Jean-Claude Pressac’s Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, published in 1989. Pressac, a pharmacist by training and originally a disciple of Faurisson, conducted several visits to Auschwitz during the 1980s, initially intending to demonstrate the lack of evidence for gas chambers in the archives there. He found precisely the opposite: Technique details what Pressac 39 “criminal traces” in response to Faurisson’s demand for “just one proof” of homicidal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. More importantly, Technique includes a “postface” in which Pressac describes his own methodology in comparison to Faurisson’s. Compared to his own slow but ultimately productive methodology, Pressac writes that Faurisson

is the proponent of a rather special approach. In his view, it is necessary to intervene rapidly and hit hard. A kind of “commando” technique. As regards Auschwitz, where he had made only one or two brief visits, he “understood” everything very rapidly. To support this “new understanding” he had brought back from Poland an abundant documentation to support his thesis, and in the eyes of the uninitiated this appears true and convincing.^[9]

In short, whereas Faurisson only collected enough material to prove his thesis, Pressac gathered documents slowly and methodically and drew his conclusions on the basis of what the whole of the evidence said. Unsurprisingly, Faurisson was not daunted, and until his death in 2018, he continued to claim that his demand for a single proof had never been met. Nevertheless, two forms of response had been established beyond direct refutation: analysis of denier methodology and acknowledgement of the futile and counterproductive nature of debate.

Regina v. Zündel

            If Faurisson and his antecedents, like Butz (a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University) and Stäglich (a German financial court judge), represented an attempt to endow denial with a veneer of academic and professional respectability, Ernst Zündel was something quite different. A German national born in 1939 who emigrated to Canada in 1958 and eventually drifted into the political far right, Zündel was an avowed neo-Nazi by the 1970s. He established a publishing company, Zamisdat, to produce Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi tracts, including his own The Hitler We Loved and Why, which he published under a pseudonym. In the culmination of charges brought against him by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and the Ontario provincial government, Zündel was indicted for spreading false news – a crime under Section 181 of Canada’s criminal code – for publishing a decade-old denial screed by a former member of the British National Front.

            To prove that Zündel spread information that he knew to be false, the government called six Holocaust survivors as witnesses, as well as Raul Hilberg – arguably the most important historian of the Holocaust. After the defense failed to disqualify Hilberg as an expert witness,^[10] he was, in the words of Thomas Kuttner, “subjected to the barbs, the vacuous badgering, the gratuitous insults and vapid philosophizing” of defense attorney Doug Christie.^[11] Although Zündel was ultimately convicted, Hilberg’s testimony was hardly an unequivocal success. Part of the problem was that the judge in the case, Hugh Locke, did not take judicial notice of the facts of the Holocaust, leaving Hilberg in the position of having to prove that the Holocaust happened. As a result, under cross-examination, Hilberg had to face the attempts of Christie to (paraphrasing Wellers above) divert the jury’s attention to trivialities, causing them to forget the real issues. For example, Robert A. Kahn writes, “Hilberg testified that parts of SS Officer Kert [sic] Gerstein’s confession—but not his evidence of the gas chambers—were unreliable, precisely the sort of measured judgement historians are trained to make.”^[12] Instead, according to Kahn, egged on by local media, such concessions were deemed “smoking guns” that Zündel’s claims might be true.

            Nevertheless, some important points were made by Hilberg in his testimony. First and foremost, he established himself as an empiricist in methodology: “I look at the material carefully and over very long periods of time, in some cases, to be able to interpret it. I have found, many times, that original documents are not necessarily self-explanatory, and they do require a good deal of interpretation and analysis, in the main by recourse to other documents, since documents explain each other.”^[13] In contrast, commenting on the pamphlet sold by Zündel, Hilberg said, “It’s hard to use the word ‘methodology’ in connection with such a pamphlet. Methodology presumes some honest look at the material and conclusions drawn honestly from it. What I find here is concoction, contradiction, untruth mixed with half-truths as some ordinary statements which anyone can accept in order that it’s hard for me to comprehend.”^[14] Perhaps the most pointed statement came from the government’s prosecuting counsel Peter Griffiths, who (likely unknowingly) echoed Lyotard in characterizing Christie’s attempts to disqualify Hilberg as a witness: “Your Honour, the proposition that Mr. Christie puts before you, that in order to prove a historical fact all the participants involved in that historical fact must be called to the Court, is a novel one. It would indicate that, perhaps, when the last veteran of World War I is dead, we no longer know whether we had World War I because there is no living witness.”^[15]

            After successfully having his conviction overturned on appeal, Zündel again stood trial in 1988. This time, the chief expert witness-historian was Christopher Browning – himself perhaps the most important American Holocaust historian since Hilberg. This time, the judge in the case did take judicial review of the Holocaust as factually indisputable, although details thereof were not.^[16] Nevertheless, this change in attitude, according to Browning, was instrumental in the case against Zündel being easier to prove because it “focused much more clearly on proving that the denial pamphlet that Zündel had disseminated and vouched for […] was demonstrably a fraudulent concoction and that beyond any reasonable doubt Zündel knew it to be such.”^[17] The position of the prosecution also changed, according to Browning:

Instead the prosecution based its case primarily on selected historical documents and texts that could be shown to the jury side by side with the claims of the Zündel pamphlet. When examined one by one, the falsifications of the pamphlet were so clumsy and the misuse of sources so blatant that even a jury composed basically of people who read so little that they had not heard of the first trial became convinced of Zündel’s bad faith.^[18]

The approach was successful and without subjecting survivors to hostile cross-examination or leaving the historian-expert unprepared.

Once again, Zündel was convicted, although the law that he had been convicted of breaking was ruled unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1992 – vacating Zündel’s conviction in the process. Facing possible prosecution yet again in the late 1990s, Zündel married his long-time press secretary Ingrid Rimland, an American citizen, and moved to the United States. After failing to appear for a routine immigration hearing, Zündel was arrested in 2003; deported to Canada, where he had already surrendered his landed immigrant status; and finally extradited to Germany, where he was tried and convicted of inciting racial hatred and sentenced to five years in prison. Barred from entering the United States as a security risk, he died in 2017.

            What the two Zündel trials showed was best summarized by Browning: “the job of the historical expert witness was to set the standard of historical competence and integrity in their reports and courtroom testimony against which the deniers of the Holocaust could be measured

and found wanting”^[19]; notably, this job does not include refuting the charges of the deniers, and Browning elected not to respond to their specific claims. That the job was more competently done by Browning than by Hilberg – not due to any fault on the latter’s part – is clear if only because, while deniers have routinely attacked Hilberg’s testimony over the past 35 years as a “victory” for their cause, they have been comparatively mum regarding Browning’s testimony.

Irving v. Lipstadt

            David Irving represented yet a third category of Holocaust denier. Neither an academic like Faurisson nor an overt neo-Nazi like Zündel, Irving had established himself as a successful writer of popular histories of World War II, beginning in 1963 with The Destruction of Dresden. With eight books under his belt, Irving set off a controversy in 1977 with his publication of Hitler’s War, the first in a series of works dedicated to exonerating Adolf Hitler for responsibility in the Holocaust. At the time, multiple historians – notably Martin Broszat in the essay “Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung’: Aus Anlaß der Thesen von David Irving” (“Hitler and the ‘Final Solution’: On the Occasion of the Theses of David Irving”) and Gerald Fleming in Hitler and the Final Solution – responded to Irving’s exculpatory thesis, elevating Irving to the status of a kind of enfant terrible among historians of the Third Reich.

In 1983, he became involved in another controversy, in which diaries purported to be Hitler’s were acquired by the German newspaper Stern but ultimately proved to be forgeries – a position that Irving adopted before the mainstream historian Hugh Trevor-Roper concluded the same. Irving moved directly into Holocaust denial later that decade. He testified for the defense in the second Zündel trial and proclaimed himself “converted” to the idea that there were no homicidal gas chambers by the defense witness Fred Leuchter – a self-proclaimed engineer and expert in capital punishment technology. A series of subsequent controversies, including the charge that he had tampered with archival evidence and, more importantly, his inclusion among the subjects in Deborah Lipstadt’s 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, culminated in his exclusion from the mainstream publishing world. In 1995, Irving filed a libel suit in London against Lipstadt and her U.K. publisher. The case went to trial in 2000.

            Notably, Lipstadt was not the first author to address Holocaust denial in academic writing. Gill Seidel of Bradford University had published The Holocaust Denial in 1986, and while the book discussed multiple aspects of the Faurisson Affair, it was written while the first Zündel trial was under way and did not address the case at all. Moreover, Seidel’s approach was primarily taxonomic, placing denial within the constellation of far-right, antisemitic organizations of postwar Europe and the Anglosphere, as some respondents to Faurisson had done in the past. The blunt statement with which Seidel begins the eight pages of The Holocaust Denial that she dedicates to Irving – “He does not deny the Holocaust”^[20] – indicate their origin before the second Zündel trial. Other historians and authors had published shorter studies of denial generally or Irving in particular, including Michael Shermer and Roger Eatwell, and while Irving responded in various ways to these writings, he saved his legal assault for Lipstadt.

            For her part, Lipstadt and her publisher in the U.K., Penguin, responded by calling all hands on deck. Expert reports and testimony were elicited from multiple historians of the Third Reich, the most prominent of whom were Browning, Peter Longerich, and Richard Evans, as well as the historian of architecture Robert Jan van Pelt, one on the foremost experts on the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex. Irving chose to represent himself; as a result, Irving v. Lipstadt stood in stark contrast to the two Zündel trials. Whereas in those trials, there was no direct interaction between Hilberg and Browning, on the one hand, and Irving and Faurisson, on the other, in the Lipstadt trial, Irving engaged in direct debate with the aforementioned historians over a variety of topics, including the nature of Holocaust denial, historical methodology, and where Irving himself stood relative to the defense’s expert witnesses within the landscape surrounding the historiography of the Holocaust. In addition, both van Pelt and Evans wrote books about their experiences in Irving v. Lipstadt, and Browning mentioned the trial in several articles.

            Each historian’s exchange with Irving was revealing. For instance, during his testimony, Browning drew a clear distinction between the conclusions that can be drawn using regular historical methods and those drawn from Holocaust denial, specifically appealing to the importance of previous scholarship: “There is a range of views which involve a looking at the evidence that historians seeing that evidence would say, ‘This is within a range of interpretation.’ The example I then gave was that if one invents further evidence, this is not within the realm of acceptance as one example of where I would say we could say one has gone over the line.”^[21] Longerich was even more pointed: asked by Irving whether he would refer to someone with whom he did not agree as a Holocaust denier, Longerich responded, “No. That is for somebody who just makes general sweeping statements, just not accepting historical facts, not basing his expertise on thoroughly reading and analysis of documents. One has to make a strong point here. There is a strong difference between a discussion among colleagues, among historians, and between historians and Holocaust deniers, if you want to say so.”^[22]

Van Pelt and Irving debated how historians set research questions and then pursue research accordingly. Asking whether the issue of whether Hitler had directly ordered the Final Solution or whether it had emerged gradually, including by independent initiatives from people in the field, van Pelt responded:

I think that it is an important question in so far as you think this is an open question. I think that, if as an historian you have come to the conclusion, on the convergence of evidence and the work of many eminent historians, that it is not any more a great historical question, or a historical question at all, then I do not think that you are going to waste your energy researching that issue.

[Mr Irving]: Is “convergence of evidence” another way of saying “reading between the lines”?

A. [Professor Van Pelt]: No. “Convergence of evidence” is exactly what it says. That is, at a certain moment, for example, I will give just the example of the morgue number 1 in crematorium 2, that is a convergence between what Sonderkommandos say about it, what Germans say about it and what the blueprints tell us, and what the ruins tell us.^[23]

Irving was attempting to corner van Pelt into admitting that all historiography is subjective; instead, van Pelt demonstrated how convergence of evidence works in the specific case of the gas chamber in Krema II at Birkenau.

            The most heated exchanges were between Evans and Irving. At one point, asked by Irving whether a responsible historian should not disregard testimony that a court would regard as hearsay, Evans responded, “If it suits you, Mr Irving, you will put this hearsay in. If it suits you to discredit it because it is hearsay because it does not conform to your arguments you will leave it out. You have double standards in dealing with this evidence.”^[24] In the less contentious environment of his book, Evans expanded on this idea and, in doing so, touched on a point already made in the cases of Faurisson and Zündel: “If Irving was implying here that he would not accept any evidence about the Second World War unless it was written at the time, then how did he justify his own extensive use of the postwar testimony of members of Hitler’s entourage given in interviews with them conducted himself? Here again, he was applying double standards in his approach to different types of evidence.”^[25] Importantly, with this statement, Evans takes the point about the inherent futility in attempting to meet the deniers’ standard of evidence introduced by Lyotard (speaking of Faurisson) and expanded on by Griffiths (speaking of Christie) at the 1985 Zündel trial, and altering it slightly, he is able to draw a conclusion about Irving’s own flawed methodology and biases.

            As noted, Irving lost the case. The decision rendered on April 11, 2000, found that Lipstadt was justified in her depiction of Irving in Denying the Holocaust. Although the decision would not be considered final for more than a year, Irving eventually abandoned his pursuit of an appeal. Remarkably, in a decision numbering more than 125,000 words, 30,000 words were dedicated to specific claims about Irving’s flawed methodology. In this regard, it stands as the utter refutation of the previous 25 years of Irving’s career.

Conclusion

            The defeat of the plaintiff in Irving v. Lipstadt did not mark the end of Holocaust denial. Like Faurisson and Zündel before him, Irving continued to claim a moral victory, although he revised his position substantially in the mid-2000s after being arrested in Austria and charged under that country’s Holocaust denial laws. Nevertheless, as Nicholas Terry writes, the “heyday” of denial was over, giving way to an “era of relative decline.”^[26] This heyday demonstrated an important trajectory for historiographic responses to Holocaust denial, specifically a mix of direct refutation and methodological critiques with Faurisson, followed by these two lines of critique in the form of testimony in the Zündel case, and finally the single methodological approach in Irving v. Lipstadt. That this final approach yielded unqualified success in the Lipstadt case showed that Holocaust history could be most effectively defended against denial by defending sound methodology.

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^[1] Georges Wellers, Les Chambre à Gas Ont Éxisté: Des Documents, des Témoinages, des Chiffres (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 20-21, translation mine.

^[2] Vidal-Naquet, “A Paper Eichmann: The Anatomy of a Lie,” in Assassins of Memory: Essays on Denial of the Holocaust, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), 17.

^[3] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Paper Eichmann,” 2.

^[4] Notably, Faurisson’s approach to textual analysis as enunciated here is distinctly not postmodern. Rather than allowing for multiple, equally valid interpretations, it allows for only one correct (i.e., his own) reading. Ironically, this is precisely the opposite concern expressed by Richard Evans (see sub) claiming that the relativism of postmodernism leaves open the door to Holocaust denial.

^[5] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Theses on Revisionism,” in Assassins of Memory, 82.

^[6] Vidal-Naquet, “Paper Eichmann,” 23.

              ^[7] Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester UP, 1988), 3-4.

^[8] Lyotard, Differend, 19.

^[9] Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, translated by Peter Moss (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989), 549.

^[10] Jason Tingler, “Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Memory,” Genocide Studies International, 10, no. 2 (2016): 218.

^[11] Thomas S. Kuttner, “Legal Constraints on the New Anti-Semitism: The Canadian Experience,” in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, vol. 1, edited by John K. Roth, Elisabeth Maxwell, Margot Levy, and Wendy Whitworth (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001), 832.

^[12] Robert A. Kahn, “Rebuttal versus Unmasking: Legal Strategy in R. v. Zundel,” Patterns of Prejudice, 34, no. 3 (2000): 11.

^[13] Quoted in The First Zündel Trial: The Court Transcript of the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, 1985, edited by Germar Rudolf (Uckfield, U.K.: Castle Hill, 2020), 119. This text was published by a Holocaust denial concern, but the transcript was checked against Canadian government documents for accuracy.

^[14] Quoted in First Zündel Trial, 128.

^[15] Quoted in First Zundel Trial, 122.

^[16] Kuttner, “Legal Constraints,” 834.

^[17] Christopher R. Browning, “Historians and Holocaust Denial in the Classroom,” in Remembering for the Future, vol. 1, 774.

^[18] Browning, “Historians and Holocaust Denial,” 774.

^[19] Christopher R. Browning, “The Personal Contexts of a Holocaust Historian: War, Politics, Trials, and Professional Rivalry,” in Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, edited by Christopher R. Browning, Susannah Heschel, Michael R. Marrus, and Milton Shain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 63.

^[20] Gill Seidel, The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism & the New Right (Leeds, U.K.: Beyond the Pale Collective, 1986), 121

^[21] David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt (2000), EWHC QB 115, testimony of Christopher Browning, pp. 103-104, “Day 17 Transcript,” Holocaust Denial on Trial, Emory University, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.hdot.org/day17/.

^[22] Irving v. Lipstadt, testimony of Peter Longerich, p. 125, “Day 25 Transcript,” Holocaust Denial on Trial, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.hdot.org/day25/.

^[23] Irving v. Lipstadt, testimony of Robert Jan van Pelt, p. 112, “Day 9 Transcript,” Holocaust Denial on Trial, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.hdot.org/day09/.

^[24] Irving v. Lipstadt, testimony of Richard Evans, pp. 103-104, “Day 23 Transcript,” Holocaust Denial on Trial, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.hdot.org/day23/.

^[25] Richard J. Evans, Lying About History: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 122.

^[26] Nicholas Terry, “Holocaust Denial in the Age of Web 2.0,” in Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Analysis, edited by Paul Behrens, Nicholas Terry, and Olaf Jensen (New York: Routledge, 2017), 35.

Clearly, the extent to which historians have constructed narratives about the past have changed. As White notes, it was commonplace in the 19th century for the historian to do so, although at the time of the writing of his essay, that matter had changed. In his telling, the analytical philosophers, who “sought to establish the epistemic status of narrative, considered as a kind of explanation especially appropriate to the explanation of historical […] events and processes,”[1] were most in the mold of Leopold Ranke, who prescribed narrative as a way to tie together the evidence at hand. While the Annales school sought to “extirpate” narrative from history, the poststructualists and the hermeneuticists viewed narrative with suspicion but not as inherently flawed as a technique. Thus, it would seem that narrative remains an essential part of history writing for most historians, and as White points out, even the Annales school’s criticism has been “more polemical than […] distinctly theoretical.”[2]

I do think that it is entirely relevant whether the narrative itself is true or false. I’ll choose a perhaps odd example to demonstrate. A few years ago, I watched a miniseries on HBO called The Night Of, about a young man falsely accused of murder. The detective working the case painstakingly took all the available physical evidence, laid it out on a table along with a map of Manhattan (where the story took place), and constructed a narrative about how the protagonist first met the woman who ended up murdered, accompanied her to her apartment, and murdered her. The narrative fit all of the evidence and its time stamps such that it plausibly explained how the murder had happened.

The problem, of course, was that the story was untrue in its most important aspect, i.e., who had committed the murder itself. Therefore, though the Rankean technique had been adhered to nearly to the letter in this particular case, it did little to elucidate what Ranke would have called “the past as it is really was.” In this sense, at the very least, we must bear in mind that our narrative explanations of the past – regardless of how well they engage the available evidence – must remain provisional and scaled according to probability. They might make good stories but they often would not provide sufficient evidence to convict in a court of law.

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[1] Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory, 23, no. 1 (1984): 7.

[2] Ibid, 8.