The thread of brutality
May 13, 2016 08:52ByOliver Kamm, Oliver Kamm
By Richard J. Evans
Abacus, £12.99
As I write, the Labour Party is engaged in intemperate debate about Hitler's attitude towards Zionism. It's scarcely credible that Britain's main opposition party should be conducting itself like this, but it's still more bizarre that Ken Livingstone stoked the dispute by making ahistorical claims drawn from a far-left polemicist. As the Nazi era recedes from living memory, it's more vital than ever that historical scholarship prevails over prejudice and myth. This volume of essays and reviews by one of Britain's foremost historians of modern Europe excellently fulfils that role.
"The historian is not a prosecutor and history is not a court," writes Evans in one of these reviews (criticising a book that makes an inquisitorial case against the complicity of diplomats with Nazism). The importance of his book lies in his ability to illuminate the character of a barbarous regime while never allowing judgment to outstrip evidence. The essays are grouped loosely by chronology (from the breakdown of the Weimar republic to the aftermath of war) and theme (including the social history, economics and foreign policy of Nazi Germany).
Of all the essays, the ones I found most valuable were those about Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. The autocracy that plunged Europe into the First World War has escaped historical censure relative to the evils of Nazism but it was a genocidal regime nonetheless - in Africa rather than Europe. Do the cruelties of German colonialism prefigure the genocide of European Jewry? Evans gives a balanced judgment: no, the Herero war didn't inspire the Holocaust, but it was more virulently racist in conception and brutal in execution than other countries' colonial wars.
A thread runs from these reflections on what came before the Holocaust to its distinctiveness in modern history. The Final Solution was one genocide among many in the 20th century but, says Evans, "unlike all the others it was bounded neither by space nor time". Its victims were not regionally limited. The status of world Jewry, Weltjudentum, in Nazi ideology has no counterpart in the deranged imaginings that inspired the slaughter of Armenians, Cambodians or Tutsi Rwandans in the last century.
As a master of his subject, Evans is not afraid to take aim at highly regarded works that he believes occlude or even trivialise the sufferings wreaked by Nazism. He is particularly unsparing in criticising the recent book Bloodlands by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder for, in his view, too narrow a focus on the geographical region fought between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I admired the book but I see what Evans is getting at: the killings were not all of a type, and the regimes that perpetrated these horrors were different. It's the instinct of most of us to designate Nazism as a uniquely evil phenomenon. Evans gives substance and scholarship to it. I wish the book were clearer in relation to the reviews' contents or the dates of their original publication, but the text is exemplary.
Oliver Kamm is a Times writer and JC columnist