Would time travel make historians redundant?

This is a transcript of my first piece for the Pod Delusion podcast, back in May last year.

________

Right then class, settle down please.

Now, at the risk of making history unacceptably “relevant” and “accessible” to you all, I'd like to start off this session with a short creative exercise.

If you could travel back to any point in human history, to answer one question, when would you go and what would you want to find out? Personally, I'm as obsessed with the Tudors as the BBC seems to be, so I'd use it to discover what Queen Elizabeth I was really like and, in particular, ask what she thought of the possibility of using artificial insemination to produce future heirs to the throne. But I wouldn't - in fact couldn't - use it to complete my PhD in history any quicker. Not just because I work on Nazi Germany, and the risk assessment form for that trip would take months to complete.

There are many straightforward questions that we could answer with a time machine. We could find out for sure who or what killed the princes in the tower. With some very careful positioning we could establish if there really was a female Pope. We could park it on the grassy knoll and learn very little indeed about the assassination of President Kennedy. These questions are intriguing and engaging but they are not the sort of concerns that are central to academic history. Establishing “what really happened” is only a tiny part of what historical research is about. What really motivates the discipline is why things happened, and what effects this had. The gathering of facts can only take us so far in this. The real work lies in the interpretation of source material, and in writing this up as a coherent account which people can actually use.

When it comes to those really big events that every schoolchild (and all of you) should know about – the French Revolution, for example – sending a historian to observe things as they unfold would not produce a definitive, completely accurate history. One person can only do so much and what particular aspects they recorded would depend on who we sent back and what they thought was most important. The result would be just one more biased eyewitness account; more useful for learning about the historian's own mindset and priorities than those of eighteenth-century French citizens.

What really drives history are factors that can't easily be observed from the ground, and only emerge with hindsight: tensions between different groups in society, the ways that people measure success in their lives, generational conflict, the extent to which people trust authority; all of these have an impact on events, arguably more so that the “great men of history”. This, incidentally, is why I wouldn't use my turn at time travel to kill Hitler, or even send a robot assassin after his mum; you can pull down a lightning rod but it won't make the storm go away.

So maybe my future career as a historian is more under threat from time-travelling social scientists?

I'm still not worried, and not for boring, practical reasons such as the fact that time travel is, sadly, impossible. No, the final, crucial task of the historian, the task which is currently making me tear my hair out and discover new, innovative methods of procrastination, is the task of actually writing a history. Take something we have a lot of information on: the riots that took place in London in 2011. We could, from CCTV, camera phone and news footage, figure out pretty much the exact movements of everyone involved, and we could also interview them later about their motives. But how would we synthesise this mass of data into a manageable, useful account? Which parts are open to other interpretations? What's the actual story here? Does it lie in the events themselves or in people's reactions to them? What bearing might this have on future events, and what does all of this tell us about our society and how much or little we've progressed since the “olden days”? This is what the process of history research and writing is all about, and, as I've hopefully made clear, every resulting work of history has its own omissions and biases, and opens up a world of questions for the next wave of researchers.

And so class, that brings me on to your homework. If you could put together a time capsule to tell people hundreds of years from now about the London riots, what would you include? Would you go for camera footage, rolling news reports, police reports, witness accounts, or testimony from the resulting trials? Would you consider the reactions of people not directly involved to be at all relevant? Would you include newspaper opinion pieces from the weeks afterwards, or maybe from the one year anniversary? Would you go back to before August 2011 and include information on social tensions, race relations or maybe on modern consumer culture? Think through this properly and you'll have a better understanding of what's involved in the research and writing of good history than many of those responsible for the survival of the discipline.

Class dismissed.

Hitler wasn't racist either, but...

Having written a bit about the problems of "trivialising" the Nazis last time, I hope I'm not going to come across as too flippant here. On the other hand, I didn't want to shy away from quoting Adolf Hitler directly*, as it's important to know what he said and what effect this might have had on his audience, rather than treating his words as though they'll conjure up demons. I'm not particularly satisfied with this translation, and have included the original at the end of this post for easy reference.

Although I found in difficult to render the crucial sentence (here in bold) in English, I was struck by how similar it is to sentiments expressed quite freely in Britain today; that there is nothing wrong with other races and cultures, but that they should exist seperately and the culture and rules of one should not be forced upon another. In this case, parallels are being drawn between British rule in India and Jewish "imperialism" in Germany. Nowadays, the fact that the European way of doing things was being exported long before the (alleged) attempted introduction of, for example, Sharia Law to European countries, tends to be ignored.

Our attitude towards other races is that of objective disinterest. Just as with the Indian people, the German people is made up of several races and tribes. The Indian people, with its four-thousand-year-old culture, has developed its own racial laws, which cannot easily be translated into a European context. Dr. Goebbels is quite right to say that it is incorrect to speak of races of lesser value. No race is inherently inferior to another; at most, the different races which populate the earth are of differing value. This applies also to the Jewish race. The Jew is not inherently inferior within his own environment, but his outlook is not a good fit for the German people, and can in fact be damaging. For that reason, the Jews must endeavour to live as a separate people. Each race must find within themselves their own world and this is why we are quite right to defend ourselves against another race's attempts to force their peculiarities upon us, as the Jews have done in Germany.

What I want to get across here is that fact that almost nobody wants to admit to being racist. Everyone knows that racism is unacceptable. However, there are many ways to twist the definition of racism so that it happens to exclude the views that you hold and the policies you are advocating. This goes for people even as unashamedly racist as the leaders of the Nazi party, if they were called upon to account for their views: they had nothing against other races, you understand, they merely recognised that different races have different strengths and weaknesses, and will thrive better in their own habitat. They were worried that combining more than one in the same place would inevitably cause damage. Every race has the right to an area which belongs only to them and not to have alien laws and habits forced upon them. If a race such as the Jews have no place where they belong then one can be found for them but really this is their responsibility. And, partly for their own good, they can't be allowed to take up space which belongs to another race. Of course they have nothing but our good wishes, so long as they conform to this natural order, but due to the difficulties involved and their unwillingness to cooperate then if they were to... disappear from this scheme it would greatly benefit the world in years to come. But none of this is "racist"; it's just recognising the nature of things. See?

There are very few self-confessed racists in the world, BUT... people still die purely because they are considered to belong to the wrong race for the bit of earth they're standing on. That fact should be what we reach for, when getting lost among the excuses.

*These words are from official notes taken of an interview between Hitler and Indian journalist Dr. Sinha, 6th December 1935. They are quoted in an article by Johannes H. Voigt: 'Hitler und Indien' in Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 19/1 (Jan. 1971) pp.33-63. It is not clear how accurately they record Hitler's specific phrasing.

"Unsere Einstellung zu anderen Rassen sei die einer objektiven Desinteressiertheit. Genau wie das indische setze sich auch das deutsche Volk aus mehreren Rassen und Stammen zusammen. Das indische Volk mit seiner vieltausendjährigen Kultur habe sich eigene Rassengesetze gegeben, die auch nicht ohne weiteres auf europäsche Verhältnisse zu übertragen seien. Dr. Goebbels habe ganz recht, wenn er es als unrichtig bezeichne, von minderwertigen Rassen zu sprechen. Keine Rasse sei an sich minderwertig; die verschiedenen Rassen, die die Erde bevölkern, seien höchstens untereinander anderswertig. Das gelte auch für die jüdische Rasse. Der Jude sei an sich nicht minderwertig in seinen Anlagen, aber seine Auffassungen paßten nicht für das deutsche Volk, sie seien vielmehr geradezu schadlich, und deswegen müsse der Jude dafür sorgen, daß er für sich allein als Volk leben könne. Jede Rasse müsse ihre Welt in sich finden, und darum wehrten wir uns mit Recht dagegen, daß uns eine andere Rasse ihre Eigentümlichkeiten aufzuzwingen suche, wie es die Juden in Deutschland getan hatten."

Holocaust Memorial Day: Thoughts and Complications

I wasn't going to write anything in particular for today because this isn't something I find easy to put into words in a little white box on my computer screen. It's on the one hand too complex a topic to say anything concrete about it at all (we still don't know, as an indisputable historical fact, how many people died, how, and on precisely whose orders*) but on the other hand it can be summed up quite simply: long-running prejudices, left largely unchallenged, led to the systematic murder of millions of people. However, living in Germany and studying Nazi cultural history means I think about this a lot and in connection with many other topics, and I might as well commit some of those thoughts to paper.

• The Holocaust is not just Nazi history and Nazi history is not just the Holocaust; although neither can you extract one from the other. An accusation often more of less explicitly levelled at historians of "every-day life" in the Third Reich is that we (I guess I'm one of them too) are "trivialising" the Nazis, particularly when trying to trace broader continuities in cultural history. By looking at what people read or cooked or how they spent their days off, we're reducing the crucial question of "how could such evil have come about?" to just one of many sideshows. The counter-accusation is that of fetishising the Holocaust; by studying it only in a certain way, sealed off from other historical currents, we run the risk of draining it of all real meaning. Detaching the events from the physical and cultural worlds in which they took place - denying that they were a product of normal humans, and normal political processes - is to make them intangible and incomprehensible.
• Related to this is the issue of "learning the lesson", of "never forgetting" and of "the message". If you ask someone what that message is, they will probably say something along to lines of "never again". Probe any deeper, and everything suddenly falls apart. What shouldn't we do again? Give governments control over life and death? Allow them to remove people from next door without paying attention to where they're going? Happily let much of the popular press print story after story, systematically demonising a particular religion or minority group? Vote for a man with a small moustache?
• Sometimes, it seems that the main "lesson" to be learned is not to dress up in Nazi uniform or have any kind of fun while invoking that particular set of shared associations. I agree with Jennifer Lipman (who wrote this in the Telegraph today) that it would be nicer all round if people didn't do that kind of thing, and that it is a probable indication of a general lack of awareness. However, returning to my first point, the Nazis were not *only* mass-murderers. As a group they were also self-important, deluded, frustrated, crowing, bullying, pathetic... humans. They built themselves up as something greater than everything that had gone before and as the fathers (and mothers) of a new, better world order but, in the end, they were wrong and they were human. They deserve ridicule, not that hushed, fearful awe which so easily morphs into respect. The more people making fun of the mere idea of them, the more they can be kept spinning in their graves, and the less easy it is for groups wanting to emulate them to gain any kind of traction**. I'm not worried about people playing Nazi-themed games on a skiing holiday. I'm worried about people very carefully planning to plant home-made bombs in areas with high immigrant populations and paint neo-Nazi slogans on the resulting headstones. I doubt there's much overlap.
• The other thing which the above article displays is the emphasis on visits to former concentration camps - primarily Auschwitz - as the best method of "understanding" the Holocaust. There's an assumption that if you haven't been there then you won't "get it", and that making people go will make them somehow "experience" "it" and (as I feel Lipman is implying) change their behaviour in accordance with this increased respect and understanding. I've never visited the Ground Zero of the Holocaust or any of the other former camps. I'd definitely learn something if I went - I'd have a greater understanding of the spaces people moved in, of the numbers, of the lack of privacy, of the dehumanising impact of the surroundings. But the Holocaust was not just in the camps. It was on packed freight trains, station platforms, on trams and on foot; it was in every city, town and village in Germany and occupied Europe. It was in the empty houses the victims left behind and the tragically hopeful letters they sent to their relatives. It was in every aspect of life from the laws which people supported and the brief economic prosperity they enjoyed, down to the desperate fugitives in their neighbour's attic and the second-hand clothes they received when their houses were bombed. The Holocaust was everywhere and in everything, and it certainly can't be "got" by a group of warmly-dressed, well-fed tourists looking at a gas chamber, before putting into practice their legal right and physical ability to turn around and walk away.

I have no way to conclude all of this except to say that I could spend my whole life studying the Holocaust and would still never claim to understand it. Nor would I criticise anyone for spending less time studying it than whatever is generally considered to be sufficient for a historically-aware citizen. Every one of the myriad factors and processes leading to the Holocaust is still in existence today in some form and in many different combinations. They are unavoidable aspects of humanity. We need to constantly be aware of them and prevent them from combining in such a way as to cause discrimination, suffering and death on anything like the same scale. The Holocaust is an example of what can happen; arguably the worst of many examples from history. To those with no personal connection, that's all it ever can be.

*Too many, horrifically and unnecessarily, and on the orders of people whose politics should never, ever be re-adopted.

**Making fun of fascism is not a worrying new trend but has happened for as long as there have been fascists to make fun of. Was Charlie Chaplin or the designer of this poster guilty of trivialising events? It's only wrong when we assume that people are doing it out of ignorance or a lack of empathy, which really isn't for anyone else to judge.