Book Review Supplement Spring 2001

Canadian Military History Volume 10 Issue 2 Article 9 2001 Book Review Supplement Spring 2001 Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh Part of the Military History Commons Recommended Citation "Book Review Supplement Spring 2001." Canadian Military History 10, 2 (2001) This Book Review Supplements is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military History by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact [email protected]. et al.: Book Review Supplement Autumn 2001 CANADIAN MILITARY HISTORY BOOK REVIEW SUPPLEMENT Spring 2001 Issue 13 looked incredulous. “Why?” she The “David Irving Trial” asked. “Because the wheelbarrow and the Practice of History is red,” my classmate replied. “All wheelbarrows are red,” the profes- Graham Broad sor sputtered. “I still think it’s about Department of History, communists,” my classmate in- The University of Western Ontario sisted. “Well, no,” the professor said firmly, “it’s not. There’s no “More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s evidence for that.” car ... than died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.” – David Irving1 Her insistence that there was a right and wrong way to understand “I will leap laughing into my grave because the feeling that I have the poem was at once refreshing and five million people on my conscience is for me a source of extraor- rather unsettling. It was certainly dinary satisfaction.” – Adolf Eichmann2 unfashionable in a discipline domi- nated by literary critics who argue that the postmodern condition is Richard J. Evans, Lying About Penguin, 1995), $21.95 paper, 288 such that no single interpretation Hitler: History, Holocaust, and pages, ISBN 0-45227-274-2. of a text can be privileged over an- the David Irving Trial (New York: other. While agreeing that works of Basic Books, 2001), $41.50 US, s an undergraduate I was literature allow many possible in- 318 pages, ISBN 0-465-02152-2. A profoundly puzzled one after- terpretations, my professor also noon by the famous William Carlos believed that when a given interpre- Robert Eaglestone, Postmodernism Williams poem that goes, tation, such as the one offered by and Holocaust Denial (Duxford, So much depends my classmate, goes beyond what the Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), Upon evidence can support, a reasonable $9.99 US, 75 pages, ISBN 1-84046- A red wheel person is entitled to say that it is 234-5. Barrow wrong. Glazed with rain In the last twenty years, the D.D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Water theories of postmodernism have Trial (New York: W.W. Norton, Beside the white established a beachhead in the his- 2001), $35.99 US, 328 pages, ISBN Chickens.3 torical profession. At their most 0-393-02044-4. innocuous, the postmodernists When my professor asked us what claim that old-fashioned notions Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the we thought the poem was about, a such as historical truth and objec- Holocaust: The Growing Assault classmate of mine said, “I think it’s tivity are no longer tenable. Every on Truth and Memory (Toronto: about communists.” The professor historian perceives the past through © Canadian Military History Book Review Supplement, Spring 2001 1 Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2001 1 Canadian Military History, Vol. 10 [2001], Iss. 2, Art. 9 a socially conditioned lens, and his else’s. The Holocaust deniers are mean, as the deniers claim, that the or her view is obstructed by deeply- not postmodernists (although some Holocaust itself is “off-limits” as an rooted biases. In this perspective, postmodernists have been sympa- historical topic. The field of Holo- pretensions to objectivity are just thetic to the deniers), but in caust studies is rife with very lively that, while absolute “facts” and Deborah Lipstadt’s view (and sometimes acrimonious) de- “truth” are relics of an era when the postmodernism creates an atmos- bates about the origins, nature, and profession spoke in one voice – the phere of excessive “permissiveness meaning of the Holocaust, as any- voice of a white, male elite. None towards questioning the meaning of one who has followed the debate of this strikes me as particularly historical events”, an environment between Christopher Browning and objectionable. Common sense alone which has of late fostered the Daniel Goldhagen over the role of suggests that when an historian “fac- “growing assault on history and ordinary Germans in Nazi atroci- tors-in” ideology, race, class, and memory” that she studies in her ties knows. In particular, two gender, things start to look rather book, Denying the Holocaust (18- schools of thought have emerged different. One need not be a 19) regarding the role of Adolf Hitler postmodernist to comprehend this: Holocaust denial, too, is noth- in the Holocaust. To the “Who am I to say what was ‘moral’ ing new, as Lipstadt, a professor of intentionalists, Hitler harboured or ‘immoral’ in the abstract?” A.J.P. history at Emory University, dem- genocidal intentions from the mo- Taylor asked in a similar context onstrates. Incredulous dismissals ment he attained power, intentions more than forty years ago. “From of reports of the Nazi death camps which festered until the moment what point of view – that of the Ger- began even before the war ended. was right to convert them into ac- mans, of the Allies, of neutrals, of It was this realization that prompted tion. The war itself provided the the Bolsheviks?”4 Eisenhower to urge Allied govern- cover necessary to carry out mur- In its extreme form, however, ments to send representatives to der on a vast scale. By contrast, the postmodern theory contends that it visit the liberated concentration functionalist school, of which Hans is impossible to adjudicate between camps. Present-day denial is cen- Mommsen and Christopher Brown- one version of historical events and tred around the activities of the ing are leading scholars, has argued another, that all textual interpreta- California-based Institute for His- that what culminated in mass ex- tions are equally valid, and a few torical Review. Founded in 1978, termination began as a series of postmodernists have even proposed the IHR, which describes itself as increasingly brutal, functionally the absolute equivalence of history “devoted to truth and accuracy in related anti-Semitic policies and fiction. In some respects, I am history”, has sought to imbue Holo- hatched by senior Nazi bureau- less hostile to such views than many caust denial with a veneer of aca- crats. While Hitler knew and ap- of my colleagues seem to be. For demic respectability, publishing a proved of these schemes and might one thing, I recognize that these professional-looking quarterly have been their prime instigator, he theories are mostly a revival of very journal and holding annual confer- did not necessarily plan on exter- old epistemological questions and ences. mination all along, if only because that their practical impact on the The IHR and its supporters he may not have believed it was discipline of history has been far claim that there was no Nazi exter- technically feasible. less than some hypersensitive pur- mination policy, no gas chambers Perhaps in its original form, ists contend. Furthermore, the no- used for the purpose of mass kill- British writer David Irving’s depic- tion that perception creates reality ing, and that those Jews who did tion of the Führer in his best-sell- will come as no surprise to anyone die (far fewer than 6 million) were ing Hitler’s War, as a leader too who has read Shakespeare: “For indirect victims of war, not delib- absorbed with military matters to there is nothing either good or bad,” erate murder. In short, they argue be bothered with the details of the Hamlet mused, “but thinking makes that the Holocaust is a hoax, a post- extermination program, seemed it so.” These amusing exercises in war fabrication of Allied propa- close enough to what would later sophistry have their place, but many ganda, while the persistence of the become the functionalist view to be postmodernists doggedly attempt to myth into the present owes itself to graced over by the many responsi- apply them even in circumstances a wealthy Jewish elite who seek to ble historians who lauded Irving’s where they are entirely inappropri- exploit the Holocaust for the ben- scholarship. Irving, a divided in- ate. efit of the state of Israel. The de- dividual who rapidly went from We have come to the point. For niers depict themselves as embat- doubting that Hitler ordered or if it is true (how odd to use that tled researchers whose efforts to approved of the extermination pro- word when describing such theo- uncover the truth are hamstrung by gram to denying the existence of the ries!) that no one historical account a conservative historical establish- program altogether, is nonetheless is privileged over another, that ment unwilling to pose difficult by far the most historically sophis- there is no “truth”, no “fact” which questions about the Holocaust. ticated of the deniers. He is cer- cannot be retold or recast, then a It is of course true that no repu- tainly the only one to have ever pro- Holocaust denier’s account of Nazi table historian denies the existence duced any respectable body of his- atrocities is as good as anyone of the Holocaust, but this does not torical work. 2 © Canadian Military History Book Review Supplement, Spring 2001 https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol10/iss2/9 2 et al.: Book Review Supplement Autumn 2001 In the 1970s, Irving earned a To this end they recruited Richard Irving’s work.

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