 Good evening everybody and let me acknowledge that firstly we are at ANU, welcome to the Australian National University, for those of us who are here present, welcome to a very chilly Canberra evening and for those of you who are listening in via streaming, I hope it's very pleasant wherever you are in the Northern Hemisphere because it's freezing right here right now. This is the land of the Ngunnawal people and as we always do at ANU we pay our respect to them and recognise their unbroken connection to the past in the present. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marnie Hughes-Warrington, I'm Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic at ANU and tonight's talk is, as I've already said, being live streamed. So hello to everybody that's watching online and don't forget that you can also tweet in your questions for Professor Richard Evans by using the handle at ANU underscore events or hashtag ANU and perhaps some in the audience who are here tonight will probably be also tweeting as well. We would encourage you to do so. It's my particular pleasure to have the chance to introduce Professor Richard Evans who is going to come up and do a Q&A in just a minute and somebody's already observed that maybe this has become the Q&A this evening in Australia which I think is absolutely true. But before we get going I do want to acknowledge and really say thank you very much to Academy Travel and also the History Teachers Association of New South Wales, Paul Keim, is in the audience somewhere and he has worked extremely hard to make this event available. I just will wave for via streaming those of you living overseas the History Teachers Association of New South Wales Conference on Norfolk Island in January next year so there's flyers up the back there if you want to join them. If you are a history teacher and you don't belong we really encourage you to do so. So on now to Sir Richard Evans, I don't think I really need to introduce him to very many people in the audience tonight, extremely well known across the world for his contributions to modern German and European history. A man of incredible productivity in terms of writing and his I think contributions are best known for his work on the Third Right but also his book In Defence of History which has gone to second to two editions. I'm going to ask Richard about his early work in just a minute because that's the bit I think most people are not aware of just how diverse and interesting a background he has got as an historian but just a few biographical notes on him he informed me last night that he went to Jesus College in Oxford because of course he's Welsh so that's the connection he was invited there I was unfortunate never got to go to to Jesus even though I've got a Welsh surname too. He is currently Regis Professor Emeritus of History in the President of Wolfson College University of Cambridge and Provost of Gresham College in London. As I said he's published many many books and he's going to talk about his latest book this evening before I open it up two questions from the floor and I noticed that we've got a great mixture of people in the audience tonight including school students and university history students in particular so those of you who are studying history I think I hope that you'll feel just as entitled to ask a question because we of course want to encourage the study of let me be very very biased one of the best subjects on the planet so if you want to ask a question about history you can do so you're very welcome to ask him of course about his current work but his work on modern Germany and of course about historiography of which I'll have a particular interest. If you are going to ask a question we'll bring a microphone to you just to remind you that you should wait for the microphone to arrive before you say your question because of course there are people that are watching this via stream and then they would really like to be able to hear your Christian question as well and occasionally Catherine will wave her arms to let me know that a question has come in via Twitter and then I will re-articulate the question so I'm going to get Richard up if you can just hop up here the second Richard he's very very nice so I've always been dying to ask you Richard so your very first book was actually on the feminist movement in Germany the turn of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th century a second book an overview of feminist history you then started working on the disease burden in particularly in Hamburg you did work on intelligence reports amongst workers you then looked at crime in Germany it's an incredible range of social and cultural events that you began to research so how did you really decide that you were going to write that first book on feminist history and then how did you get from there across to the third Reich so I'm just I'm just interested in 140 characters if you could do that for me okay thanks very much Molly and thanks to two Academy travel particularly for ringing me it's great to be back I haven't been in Canberra since 1986 and that was in the spring and it wasn't as cold as it is now so well how did I get into this I'm a baby boomer I was born and brought up in London and my family are Welsh and of course like anyone who grew up in London in the 50s I was very struck by the all the bomb sites all the damage done to the houses wondered who'd done this and of course my parents had been in the war in various ways they talked about the war quite a lot with their friends so Germany was a kind of presence in the background no no personal connections with Germany at all and then when I got to Oxford or in we call it in Cambridge the other place in the late 1960s that was just at the time when German history was opening up when the archives had become available historians were just beginning to turn to write about Nazi Germany and its origins in the short and long term after a period of kind of collective amnesia while the Germans were having their their economic miracle and a lot of my generation in Britain went into European history continental history because the universities are expanding at the time and there were jobs going in that field and a lot of people who were teaching us and supervising our work who are specialists in British or French or Spanish or Russian or whatever it was history so I thought German history and the arguments that were going on amongst a new generation of German historians who were emerging at that time were very much about the place of Nazi Germany in the longer course of German history and particularly about Imperial Germany the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser where these historians were arguing it was a kind of anti chamber to the Third Reich you could already see the destruction of liberal political culture even needed it ever existed in a full sense in Germany you could see turning to the right you could see an authoritarian state a deeply conservative society resistance to liberal emancipatory change so I thought I would test this by picking a liberal movement of social and political emancipation I started off by looking for the temperance movement but it seemed it was completely unimportant in German history they just like they drink too much so I then turned to the feminist movement at the suggestion of Jill Stevenson who'd just written really the first book about women in Nazi Germany and was she was struck by the lack of any any work any published work on on the history of feminism there was a work that was beginning to appear in Britain particularly about the suffragettes whose political importance was undisputed but nobody seemed to know anything about this fundamental in Germany and yet when I began to look into it as I was learning German to do my doctorate in Oxford it became clear it was very large very well organized and its history had really been suppressed since the since the third right so as I went over to Germany I had a nice scholarship to go there I went into the archives found massive numbers of political police reports on the feminists I found their own archive their own vast collection of minutes correspondence and so on I found personal papers and it's I really got into because it's nothing more exciting for a story than to actually reconstruct a history of something that's quite unknown and has not been written about before from the original sources so it's a very heady experience for me as I went into the 1970s what I argued in the end was that here was a dynamic liberal movement of social and political change with a suffragette movement demanding the vote with a sexual liberation movement demanding legalized abortion equal rights for unmarried mothers and illicit with children there was there was a whole range of issues in which one wing of the movement was extremely dynamic and radical but this wing then was outmaneuvered and eventually pushed aside by the more conservative or as they call themselves moderate wing of the feminist movement just before the First World War so I think that's a kind of turning point in history where liberal values amongst enormous swath of middle the middle class majority of women of course began to decay and then you could I followed that I wrote more and researched more after I finished a doctorate right through to 1933 and you could see the force that was driving them to the right was nationalism were attacks by nationalists accusing feminists of undermining the German family and undermining the lowering the birth rate and destroying Germany's prospects about breeding the French and all sorts of arguments like that and feminist themselves started to become much more nationalist and the increasing overlap between the views of the moderate majority and the views of the national socialists on that's what I argued there the center for the movement was in Hamburg starting if I go on too long money but the center of the movement was in Hamburg and they that because it's a liberal self-governing city in the federal system of Germany as it still is and they had a very active political police which kept tabs on the on the feminist and as I was looking into this I discovered sets of what they called pub or pub or bar surveillance reports which in which eight or ten policemen dressed up as workers and went and listened in the bars and inns of Hamburg and noted down the opinions they heard there but they didn't just just a sample opinion so the essentially so the the ruling Senate could decide whether the workers were more revolutionary than the social Democrats who pose a real threat to the merchants dominance of the city or whether they were less radical but there was enormous range of reports and they all started in 1992 so what happened in 1992 so I discovered there was a huge cholera epidemic and more than that the only cholera epidemic anywhere in Western and Central Europe and as I got into that you know history never works and it goes a straight line one thing one does lead to another but in a rather haphazard way so I was going to write an article about the cholera epidemic and then it was going to be two and then a short book and I ended up by writing 650 pages on it because it's an enormous it's a fantastic opportunity to to look at a whole society lit up as in a flash of lightning by this terrible catastrophe of 10,000 people dead in in six weeks and Hamburg considered itself a liberal English type city in a kind of more conservative Germany so again the angle of German comparison featured there and then after I'd done that I looked at the these reports I asked them the archivist I was by now very friendly with him are there any more of these things not just on themes like trade unions or feminism or cholera and said yes and there's a whole room full of the 20,000 reports are labeled worthless reports the rest of one of it and which meant they were the ones just put to the files of not no great interest but they are still there and they were fantastically interesting sampling the the workers opinions on enormous variety of subject so I did a book a selection of about I think 450 best reports in 20 different chapters and my only book in German I introduced them in German my editor the publishers said yes it's grammatically fine but not quite idiomatic and then the red pencil came out but I still quite proud of having having done that and I had a broader interest in all of this in the themes of authority and obedience in German history so I started looking at criminal records of one sort and another and the areas what also directed me towards the cholera epidemic was that the the areas in which cholera was worst in Hamburg were the so-called criminal quarters of the cities what would you in Victor and England they called the rookery slums in other words and there's a fantastic record of those but that fed into the cholera project and meanwhile I'd gone to the Prussian Ministry of Justice archive in West Berlin very convenient it was the only minister Prussian Ministry where the archives are in West Berlin all the others were in East Berlin or in Potsdam much more difficult to research and I just came across a report of an execution there which was the most extraordinary document I've I've ever read I think it it was from 1854 and it described a public execution by decapitation in which the poor malefactors head was struck off with a sword blood spurted out of the wound and people rushed up with bugs and caught the blood and rushed away so hey this is pretty odd for the mid 19th century and that got me interested in the whole reasons why this happened how what this told you about German attitudes to particularly Prussian attitudes towards deviance, malefactors, lawbreakers and it seemed to me quite a complicated sort of history so I spent 17 years on and off working on that and I had this rather silly idea that no German professor would ever take me seriously unless I wrote a thousand page book so I wrote a thousand page book which of course hardly anybody's ever read as a consequence I yeah I know you read on my stuff Marnie I'm deeply grateful to you for all of it so but um and of course you translate into German you have to add 20% on to an English length if you translate into German because there are dates more words to say the same thing and the words themselves are longer so it's 1300 pages in German so what lies behind all this is is kind of the guiding the connecting link is a comparison really between England and Germany because the German historians who I and my friends like Geoff Haley and Dave Blackbourne and Dick Gehrian others were looking at in a critical way was the idea that England was kind of model transition to modernity and Germany deviated for the English path and this seemed very strange and over simple to us at a time when there's a lot of discourse in England on the left about the backwardness of the English social hierarchies so that kind of comparison was is the thread that's running through that that led me to write a comparative work about feminism uh and then uh then I think I'll stop there because of course every historian well I say one thing more every historian of Germany I think has in somewhere or other to confront the phenomenon of Nazism it kind of lies like a shadow over the whole of German history so a lot of my work had been trying to answer the question what were the long-term roots of Nazism was it this deviation from the English path uh was it a collapse of liberalism before 1914 and was it the lack of democratic values and I got involved in um as an expert witness in a defamation action a libel trial which hinged on holocaust denial and the lawyers uh in the trial for the defense of liberal lipstick is being accused of um libeling David Irving the writer by calling him a falsifier of history and a holocaust denial they said can you just direct us to a good solid quite fairly large-scale detailed history of Nazi Germany and I couldn't there's an old one by Bracher that's a terrible one by Shira there's a more recent one but very partial one by by Burley but otherwise no uh and so in as is the way of things I decided to write mine myself and it was going to be one volume um and then it all got too long so then it was two volumes and then finally it became three and again chant centers the picture because the initial idea of Penguin the publishers was that my two volumes would be kind of broader background to Ian Kershaw's two volumes on Hitler um but Richard Overy is another friend of mine he somehow he was late he'd failed to deliver a book called The Dictators which is going to be their lead uh title in their autumn my Christmas catalog and uh he said it's going to be two years late so they said rather desperately could you do three volumes instead of two I already sent them the first six chapters of what was to be the first volume so it became three volumes and um it works much better that way because Kershaw's dividing point of 1936 doesn't really mean very much I think it's a bit arbitrary whereas dividing the history of Nazi Germany in 1933 uh with the Nazis are a power and then 1939 with the um outbreak of war uh makes a lot more sense so it's quite pleased that it went that way and then along the way I um I did some teaching and some thinking about how you study history what history means can we know anything about the past and so on so a few much much shorter books um appeared about about that as four or five that I've done uh in between times that were so that's the answer I'm pretty incredibly long detail answer to your your question open up to the audience just a second but we've got a questioning already from the internet from Kirk when what contributed most to the whole of us to pre-existing German anti-Semitism? Well it's not uh pre-existing German anti-Semitism because uh a very large sections of the German population were only very very mildly anti anti-Semitic if you look at the social democrats and the communists for example they they actually got more votes than the Nazis did and if you put them together in the last three elections of the Weimar Republic in November 1932 and they famously condemned anti-Semitism as they said it's the socialism of fools in other words you're a fool if you think it's the Jews are causing the uh poverty of the working and exploitation of working class it's capitalism uh and capitalists uh and and they are not Jewish only a very tiny number are so uh German anti-Semitism no um the uh you can see there's a lot of liberal sentiment and liberal parties in Germany um they again they drove through the granting of civil equality to uh German Jews practitioners of the of the Jewish religion in the 19th century and were very much um pro if you like phylo-Semitic there's a strong strand of phylo-Semitism there but there are were forces in the uh in in the Weimar Republic in particular the democracy set up at the end of the First World War which um blamed the Jews uh for through an incidentally less than one percent of the German population uh at that time for the defeat of Germany in the First World War the so called stab in the back legend and Hitler in particular who came into politics at the end of the First World War thought uh that the Jews in Germany were a terrible subversive force and they had to be eliminated uh if Germany under his rule starting in 1933 was going to win the war that he planned or intended from the very beginning they had to be thrown out of Germany so there's no furthest no no new stab in the back and uh he succeeded in pushing about half of the Jewish population about half a million uh uh sorry uh yeah out out of Germany um by one means in another uh the population was uh as it's a very small but he forced many of them to to emigrate um and then uh the paranoid uh anti-Semitism of Hitler and the Nazis became even more so as it were with with the war he gave a famous speech in the 30th of January 1939 where he said if there is not a world war the Jews start another world war and by this time he saw the Jews everywhere as plotting to destroy Nazi Germany then he said it was not the Germans who will be annihilated it will be the Jews of Europe and uh when you had the because it goes in stages it becomes more and more uh radical but certainly when America in effect entered the war with uh with the Atlantic Charter and the autumn of 1941 and when uh he invaded the Soviet Union just a couple of months before uh then for him the war became a war against the Jews and very quickly extermination program began so it happens in in stages I think and it's wrong to read anti-Semitism of that extreme murderous kind back into further reaches of German history. Thank you, you could speak louder as Mark. I look back to you very much for the fantastic historical scholarship you've done around uh Nazi Germany I've read so many books on um Nazi Germany big law books uh definitely the best um my question is um it's a fairly big question so I'm sure that I don't want to give a more rushed sort of answer but I also destructed over the battle of Berlin uh just how much the resistance to the Russians just continued um on and on of course was completely homeless and had an impression that German people read a large number of German people seemed to have faith in old Hitler and his regime right to the sort of deterrent just in broad terms what happened immediately after the war I mean and over the next five years in terms of changes in public opinion particularly for all me working last year. Right right well there's several questions there I think um this can you hear me I think this is you got to turn this up again. Okay yeah that's that's better um well first of all why did the Germans carry on fighting towards the end I mean they knew you know we've got the secret um service the SD this the security service of the SS you have their reports and local authority reports about morale right through the Third Reich and we know that from 1943 onwards people felt that Germany was going to lose the war things are getting more and more desperate and indeed they started blaming Hitler and the and the Nazis famously Hermann Göring uh said if a singer who's the head of the Luftwaffe the the Air Force if a single Allied bomb lands on a German city you can call me Mr. Meyer so after several thousands of bombs of everybody called him Mr. Meyer. So they they fight on well they fight on for several reasons what is they fight on for nationalist reasons so less and less are they fighting for Hitler and the Nazis and more and more for in order as they see it to preserve Germany for to to hold up Germany against invaders and secondly they they fight out of fear fear first of all of the Nazi party because in the later stages of the war it it it increasingly took over from the state and ratcheted up the terror of people who they saw as defeatists until the last months of the war they were hanging people publicly in the streets of labels around their neck saying I wanted to do a deal with the Bolsheviks or I I believe that we couldn't win this kind of thing and even more it's fear of the of the the red army of what they will do. Goebbels used that in in propaganda when the red army started invading of the atrocities that they committed they're very real I mean there are it's an unknown but certainly hundreds of thousands of women are raped by the red army for example and there are tens of thousands of German civilians who are killed by them so it's a very real fear and that is a very strong force I think in impelling people to fight on. Propaganda plays a role coming back also the previous question but it's not as effective as you might as you might think. Goebbels could not persuade anybody that Germany was winning the war apart from a handful of fanatical Nazis for example after the war well yeah that was a question so well after the war well first of all it's very interesting when you look at the countries that Germany the Nazis occupied you find resistant movements everywhere and when the Allies occupy Germany there's no resistance this just doesn't happen and it's partly because Hitler's been killed or killed himself as emerges so and a lot of people had thought it kind of consisted of being held together to some extent by people's allegiance to Hitler though increasingly less so but there was no Hitler anymore the Nazi party dissolved it just fell to bits at the end of the war Germany had been utterly defeated cities were in ruins millions Germans have been killed so it was a complete utter and total defeat unlike the first world war which ended with the Germans still occupying enemy territory so it's the complete sort of defeat and then the Allied occupation is very very thorough lasts quite a long time and they're very very tough because they're very neurotic nervous about possibility German resistance and you find their opinion polls quite interesting there's a notorious one about five years after the end of the war where a majority of Germans say with these kind of multiple choice thing and they plump for Nazism was a good idea poorly carried out but you have to think about that you know it's a bit shocking they say it's a good idea but then what do they mean by good idea they don't mean extermination of the Jews they mean rebuilding society all the Nazi propaganda about everybody getting together and and making it prosperous and making Germany stand tall in the world and so on but badly carried out I think is just as important as the the idea that was good and of course there were the Socialist Party and Social Democrats re-emerged very much with the old Marxist program which showed that the large proportion of the working class had not actually taken on board the Nazi ideology at all they just sort of just kept quiet about what they what they thought and it wasn't until 1959 that the Social Democrats abandoned an official policy of a Marxist revolution albeit a peaceful and a gradual one communism in West Germany collapsed very quickly because it was identified with East Germany so there's no mass communist movement in West Germany like there is in Italy or France for example and it's the economic miracle I mean the revival of German prosperity the German industry German economy in the 1950s so-called economic miracle that then convinces the broad mass of people that democracy unlike in the army years democracy can deliver prosperity so it's okay well I don't know I mean I was always obsessed with history I wrote my first history book at the age of 10 I have to confess I had model I had I had modeled soldiers and I used to do the maneuvers then sort of write them up so it's a bit sad really but still but I really loved reading history books even the most boring textbook I would just read it from cover to cover as soon as I got it and I was a teenager and then of course I was introduced to to the the great works of history and I think one piece of advice I'd give would be find a great narrative work of history it doesn't you know it can be anything but for my case it was Stephen Runsellman's three volume history the Crusades which is the most gripping narrative the one of the most extraordinary episodes in in in history but there are plenty of other ones but read read a whole book and from cover to cover and read and get some idea of the excitement that history can convey and it's particularly important for young historians people studying history to read books outside the curriculum don't just stick to the textbooks go and read other books and even if they've got nothing to do with with what what you're studying it's very important because you get ideas from them I got a lot of ideas from Stephen Runsellman's history the Crusades about social upheaval social crises all the kinds of things which has kind of fed into into my later work I might even have got the idea of writing a three volume work from Stephen Runsellman I think if I'd have been giving advice to my younger self it would actually have been don't spend all your time reading history have a bit of fun while you're at university do you regard Nazism as a unique phenomenon completely well you know comparison is very very important and comparison means saying what things got in common and what makes them differ so Nazism obviously is part of a much wider phenomenon of fascism in interwar Europe and you find fascist movements in most European countries larger or small but it also differs from them so although all fascist movements are racist they're not racist in the same way so the Italians Mussolini's fascists wanted to build a new Italian person they were appallingly racist racist against the Ethiopians when they invaded Ethiopia as somebody once once complained the Italian fascists in the end wanted to make the Italians into second-rate Germans but you know Mussolini said you're all sort of disorganized you you like your pastor too much you know you're going to be disciplined and so on no wonder it failed in the end so the phenomenon of fascism Nazism is different above all because of its anti-Semitism which is far deeper than most fascist movements so not the Romanian or the Hungarian who are just as anti-Semitic out with the Croatian and you can go on making more more comparisons but what about the present day well there are neo-fascist or post-fascist movements called dawn in Greece and their logo is like a kind of modified swastika and there's an out strong anti-Semitic element in Yobik the post-fascist movement in Hungary but of course they're targeting immigrants above all the far right in in Europe is basically rides on anti-immigrant sentiment and that's not a part of interwar fascism I think comparisons with IS al-Shabaab Boko Haram these extremist Islamist movements are not they don't really work you can actually they're much you know they're not fascist fascist movements are essentially anti-religious for one thing they don't you know Hitler said we're not a religious movement we believe in science we believe in a secular rational approach to the future as as he saw it so I think the kind of ideology that's driving Islamist extremism is very very different there was a cult of self-sacrifice in Nazism but it wasn't they never believe themselves up they never the idea of a suicide bomber which is central to extreme Islamism is not a part of Nazism and you can it's it's much better to place Islamist extremist movements in a much longer history of Islamic revival so if you think for example the the revivalist movement as far best known is the the Mahdi's movement in Sudan in the late 19th century when you remember the famous image of General Gordon on the steps of Khartoum being there's a not a very good film starring Lawrence Olivier as the Mahdi and Charlton Heston as General Gordon but that's that is a kind of it's it's a period of one of these periodic Islamist revivals that are fundamentalists in all kinds of kinds of ways it's quite different from from fascism or Nazism I've got a question from Matt Esmer on Twitter, I do remember teaching you and he's asked you if you can or should his story be any moral about trauma that's in your source? How do you think the moralist council should be trying to judge the vigilance? Yeah that's an interesting question I mean I think you can't avoid having a personal moral take on what you're writing about but it's quite redundant to if you're writing about Nazism to say this was bad these guys were evil you know you don't need to say that you shouldn't need to say that if you're you know describing torture brutality murder aggression all of these things you don't have to label them as being immoral but I think you in a way one should let your moral once moral starts come through the writing indirectly I think by the way one writes about these these events My question is something to do with my childhood I grew up in Germany and in 1969 emigrated to Australia and I felt interesting to have some conversations at home on the dinner table with my siblings and parents when my older sister said that the history teacher taught chapter one, two, three, four, five and chapter six was the Nazi era and the teacher said we'll do that one later they skipped and they ran out of time and I'm just wondering do you have any overview as to when Germans became more able to talk about it than I'm likening to my experience of the 1980s where I think in Australia there was a turning point celebrating white people being people emigrating to Australia and sort of coming to terms with Well that's an interesting question I think the great barrier of course to the Germans in particularly German schools teaching Nazism was the fact that most teachers in the 1950s and first of 1960s had been teachers in the 1930s and so they they'd rather avoid the subject and that's true of many of the professions doctors lawyers even historians they'd all been in post under Hitler so they preferred to avoid the subject and it began to change in 1968 with the arrival of the first generation of post war students who'd been educated entirely in particularly West we're talking about West Germany here but in a democratic system in which Americans British and French of course were very careful that education from the beginning in 1945 would is a democratic education with democratic values and when these kids arrived in university at the age of 18 or 20 then they were confronted by an older generation of professors who were didn't been involved in a Nazi period and that's one of the things that fueled the clash of generations that made the universities plunged universities into chaos in 1968 and I think it's after that really in the 1970s that the situation begins to change and by the late 20th century German kids were complaining that they were taught nothing but Nazism in schools every year you know we'd love to think it's important but we love to do something else yeah well I think public debates are very important for historians to engage in I wouldn't presume to tell you know the majority of historians they should do it but somebody's got to do it with a profession so one example would be that when the then Secretary of State of Education in the UK in the Cameron's Coalition government Michael Gove wanted to introduce a history curriculum in the schools that would have kids learning nothing but British history and imbibing only a patriotic out of myths about it I got very cross about that because I think politicians should listen to the professionals and here he obviously wasn't and I thought that would give kids a very narrow education in an age of globalization they need to learn about the world and whether or not the Conservatives Party in Britain likes it we are part of the European Union so they should learn about European history too and history is an academic discipline like physics or chemistry where you need to be taught in schools you need to be taught the rules and how you do it and how you have a critical take on documents and how you assess the past and how you judge historians and so on and he was going to chuck that out of the window and just have people learn facts or other myths so it was called content rich education so I took I started writing articles in the papers in the Guardian factual times even attacking this and got into a scrap with him and in the end because the British Academy the World Historical Society and the Historical Association the teachers organization weighed in as well he had to withdraw it and I thought that was an important thing I'm very proud to have been part of that campaign so I think when you see that thank you very much yeah I even got a medal from these history teachers but I don't think you know I think as historians we need to represent our subject in public and make sure it's treated with respect even by politicians so you have to say it again people like Oh Lenny Riefenstahl would I regard them as what? Is it a deep of feminist urge in Nazi Germany or a deep of feminist urge? No you know she was an actress who makes her name in mountain alpine alpine romances and she became a film director and Hitler took a shine to her she was rather beautiful and he rather like this Goebbels the propaganda minister was very cross when he commissioned her to do a film of the Nuremberg party rally in 1934 that became triumph of the will most probably the most famous propaganda film in history and the only one they stopped after that Goebbels was very much against propaganda films he preferred entertainment and he thought people got bored by them and he's probably right she then went on to make other movies and so on and after the war explored tribal societies in East Africa scuba diving and so on and lived to the age of 100 so she's part of that sort of world of glamour of entertainment and I don't think you can describe that in any sense as feminist even though she didn't conform to the Nazi stereotype of women as basically sitting at home cooking for their husbands and having 10 children if you had 10 children you got a special medal from from Hitler the mother's cross with laurel wreath or something like that and you had to uh Hitler was automatically the godfather of your 10th child which led to a number of unfortunate men being called Adolf so I don't think there's any deeper feminist urge there the rise of popular history digital history digital history um well popular history has kind of always been with us really I think on the whole it's a good thing again um although some journalists write very good popular history and some freelance writers think of William Dalrymple or Antonio Fraser um and there's a recent excellent book by journalists uh on the concentration cabinet ravensbrook the sarah helm sarah helm and she's been in archives in 12 countries she writes fluently and I think the historian professionalism is going to learn from a lot of popular historians about how to write for a general public and again I think though not all of us should do this and not everything we do should be addressed to a popular audience again it's important to try and convey the results of research to as wide a leadership as possible um digital history um well I'm not quite sure what it means but one of the things it does mean is uh let's take the example of the the um the the the court the the court and trial records uh of the old bailey and the new gate records in 18th century london uh those have all been digitized and they're all online and you can go and look look up and get a fantastically vivid view very easily now of um of 18th century crime poverty the justice system all of this and in fact it was made into it was the basis of a very successful television drama drama series um so if digital history means digitizing large numbers of sources and make them freely available I'm always uh I'm very keen on that time the British royal family digitized its archives I think that's before we take another question from as well just wondering how many history teachers we've got here this evening so what's your hand up if you're a history teacher oh if you were to hear what about history students how many high school students have we got here right is there a history student that's got a question for which and I'm aware down there in the front or in the back there in the middle you described shire as a count of the third right as uh quite a horrible one what makes a good word of history and why is shire so bad well well shire was a superb journalist and he lived in Germany for a large chunk of the the 30s in fact because america he's american because america was neutral up to 1941 um he lived there during the early part of the war but he's eventually expelled because uh he was getting too too close to people who are opposing Hitler essentially and he was warned that the Gestapo were after him he kept diary and published it as the berlin diary and it's a wonderful source it's highly readable and I can recommend it to everybody for a picture of Germany the mid 30s to the early 40s but he then got into he's a kind of left liberal really and he got into trouble in the McCarthy era with senator McCarthy's persecution of communists and he essentially he lost his job and so to make money he wrote a history of Nazi Germany and it became an instant bestseller rising for the third right sold over a million copies in a year um but and it's brilliantly written but the problem with first of all it's a book that um focuses very much on foreign policy and military things and so on uh even the stuff that he recounts in the diary is as much broader in its application but above all he'd been to the Nuremberg rally he'd been a more than one I think but he certainly went to the one in in one in the mid 30s and he was totally impressed by the overwhelming uh support and enthusiasm hysteria even of people you see in triumph of the will you know it begins symbolically of course of Hitler's flying above the clouds he then descends onto earth you know and then he goes in a cavalcade through the streets of Nuremberg and they're hysterically crying shouting saluting crowds all along the way Shara thought this this is the German people they're all 100 behind Hitler and it's a very he was fooled in a way by the propaganda the orchestration that went into that so he gives a very very crude picture of the German German people's support for Hitler which he then of course subscribes in the way of wartime propaganda to Martin Luther teaching people to the state and Germans yearning for a strong leader and all these cliches that we now know are really terribly over simple so that's why I think it's it's a bad it's a bad book it was ruthlessly devastating and criticized by the German American historian Klaus Epstein when it appeared in 1964 I think it was or before that it was out of date even when it was published because Shara has simply hadn't read the historical work that had been going on and what was the second part of the question was the second part was a good historical work well well I think you need to first of all you need to do your homework you need to read a lot whether it's in the sources if it's a work of research you need to read as much as you know as much as possible that's relevant you decide what's relevant but my experience in doing research is that eventually finally when you read everything of any possible relevance you hit a law of diminishing returns and the archives start telling you things you already knew no and then it's time to stop and get writing if you're writing a survey you read all this is secondary work a lot of which is terribly repetitious thank goodness or you'd be doing it for decades and again it's the same rule applies so you need to read everything that's and you need to take a broad view not a narrowly focused one and then you need to structure your book so as it makes sense to a reader and you need to write in a way that's addressed to to ordinary ordinary readers not fill it with jargon special terms sentences 50 lines long or anything like that you need to develop a style that will carry people people on and I always try and write my books to be read from beginning to end you start beginning going to the end not as works of reference that you dip into and I think that's important too well it's more difficult now than it was because it was just expected that you knew a language so one of the qualifications before you even allowed to to to try and get into oxford to read history in when I did it in the in the 60s you had to have latin and one other foreign language and the in the entrance exam that they set then you were set tests on these and in your first term you had to end with translating chunks of the venerable beads historic historic ecclesiastic ecclesiastic against St. Glorum which is terrible it's a medieval latin you know if you're used to Cicero and Caesar it's pretty poor stuff and then to talk to those ancient regimes on so once you get the basis of an Indo-European language the structure is all the same whatever language it is so German becomes or Spanish or Swedish becomes they could become very easy because you just slot slightly different words into the same kind of structures so I'd say the key thing is to to try and keep language teaching going and expand it in in the schools and then if you want to do something like German when you're 21 you you can you can do it so I think that that's the answer about languages and historians it's very disturbing that it's becoming more difficult for historians to study the history of other countries because historians very often don't know the languages anymore. German history is very popular in British universities and my generation it was taught mainly by British people now it's taught mainly by Germans. So Richard it strikes me that we still treat the period of the third right as extraordinary and different from anything else I mean I'm always reminded what Barbara Tuckman wrote in a distant mirror she wrote the book to show the worst centuries in the 20th century yes do you think we're going to get to the stage where we treat that era as okay terrible events don't you speak about that but we'll have terrible events in the past we'll probably get in the future and it's more on history not yeah excuse me a particular extraordinary crime. Yeah interesting yes Barbara Tuckman was a very good American popular historian she wrote this book The Distant Mirror about the 14th century I think to show that it was pretty rotten and sentry but there's been we know a lot more about about Nazi Germany than we do about most other centuries medieval historians have got relatively little to go on in most cases and I do think of course again it comes down to comparison doesn't it you know but I do think that the Nazi extermination of the Jews the Holocaust is a unique historical event it is a genocide and unfortunately there have been other genocides since but it's a very different kind of genocide it is designed to be global in scale and absolutely total 100% extermination and most other generally not even the you know even the Rwandan genocide is not not as extreme or as thoroughgoing as that so I think it has a unique horror and that I think increasingly has been what's made people think it is different from other periods of history there are many other respects in which you can compare Nazi Germany social policy for example policy towards women many things like that with muslims Italy or even in some ways with Stalin's Russia but I do stand out I think how much bear well I never believe in things like the German psyche Germany is more than most societies is very divided country in which people of many different kinds of thought and believed many different things it's divided between Catholics and Protestants where it's almost all other European countries are overwhelming the one or the other in Germany there's a much more even balance and that's a key fact in modern German history it's divided by classes an enormous industrial working class in the 1930s and the class antagonists are very deep and they crisscross with these other ones so talk of the German psyche I think is just misleading basically Albert Speer was a professional architect you know the kind of architect who runs a large firm with complex organizations so he's not just one guy sitting drawing buildings on a piece of paper and he was taken on by Hitler as his personal architect and in some ways became his personal friend and he eventually became munitions minister during the war when his predecessor was killed in a plane crash in 1942 and Speer reorganized the economy rationalized it so instead of producing kind of 45 different kinds of nuts for tanks there was only one kind and so on he boosted industrial production and then he was tried at the end of the war for war crimes in particular for the direction of forced labor and his ministry oversaw a vast program of forced slave labor in effect there were seven million foreign minister foreign workers in Germany by the end of the war partly because the Nazis did not want to recruit women into the industrial workforce and they gave them such generous subsidies that women didn't want to go and work in a factory anyway they'd rather stay at home as it were and and ride it out and and bring up their children this is what the regime wanted so you've got this enormous system of forced labor which hundreds of thousands of people die killed terrible working conditions living in camps overseen by the brutal SS Fritz Salkal who was the commissioner for forced labor was one of these rough uncouthed Nazis and he was executed in Nuremberg trials Speer was a smooth polished educated middle-class professional and he managed to persuade the jurors the judges at Nuremberg that he'd not been involved in any of this that he didn't know about Auschwitz and he had a very clever line which is well I didn't know about Auschwitz or the extermination of the Jews of course if I had known I'd have been horrified and I'd have opposed it and so on in fact he had a 20 year prison sentence and I came out and wrote his memoirs and so on in fact though there's good documentary evidence that he did know about the extermination of the Jews and indeed had a part in it he was quite keen on getting homes for his workers and staff in Berlin in in flats apartments that were vacated by by Jews and he was opposing when him legate his famous notorious speech about the extermination of the Jews so Speer I think pulled the wool over people's eyes including get a serenity who wrote a very long sometimes quite critical book about him but in the end he persuaded her to that he didn't know about the HDs now under 80,000 words so how many 80,000 80,000 yeah do you see a future for the 200,000 plus megabook in the current publishing landscape well the I I did an Oxford doctorate and it's 100,000 words in Oxford it's always been 80,000 in Cambridge and this is said to be the reason why people who did a doctorate in Oxford writing this very florid or a ton of style people writing Cambridge they do the very spare kind of economical style whether that's true or not I don't know you can you know you can do a PhD in 80,000 words I've supervised about about 30 of them in Cambridge I think the the amount of time you take over it that's become an issue now in Britain you have to finish PhD in four years and every department has to have an 85 percent completion rate or it gets blacklisted and doesn't get government grants until it's put its house in order it's a very strong incentive that's probably a good thing actually the day is when you could take I mean when I got to Birkbeck in London which is part-time education I took over sort of managing the PhDs they just gave me something to do and to start with and I found one person who'd been doing his PhD for 35 years now okay it's part-time I took him I took him on and he did finish it and he got he got he got the PhD in an end I kind of made him do it basically but I think that is a little bit too long really as for the length of a PhD famously of course in France there was never any any length the Pierre Chaunus work on Atlantic trade is 10 volumes long I think though about eight of them are statistics but I there's a place for the long book but I think the PhD was an apprentice piece right it's the show it's the show you can do research and you get trained in doing research and you trained in writing and a good supervisor will actually supervise quite closely and direct the student and help the student and finding documents and using them and crack the whip you know get on you've only got six months to go but after that if you want to write a long book and a publisher is willing to publish it then why not I mean I can't complain I've written three volumes to two thousand pages on the third right I thought that's what it took to do in a reasonable level of detail well yeah I you know there were these famous let's you went along to see them and Trevor Roper he was he came unstuck with the Hitler diaries he identified them too quickly he did change his mind before anybody else but he did authenticate them and ever since his name he took it had a peerage is known as Lord Daker and ever after that he was known as Lord Faker because the Hitler diaries were a forgery and he said they weren't but he's a very a very elegant historian who wrote in a very elegant way and had an enormous range of subjects from the middle ages up to the present he knew about 10 languages he was a very keen social and cultural historian at a time when diplomatic history and political history were very dominant so he was the readers professor in Oxford but he wasn't a great lecturer he he would read an essay out basically in his characteristically florid um oxonian style and um he was very short-sighted and every now and then and we always wait for this every now and then he would laugh so much or one of his own jokes he'd lose the place and then then you'd see him going his finger trying to find it you know so I think to be a good lecturer the first thing you need is a love for an enthusiasm for the subject it doesn't matter rules rules of lecturing are usually completely redundant that's what really gets what that's what gets gets it across if you can convey to people your enthusiasm for the subject you're at least halfway halfway there you have to do the boring things like structure is and so on um but you I think Taylor was extraordinary because he would just stand for half an hour or 50 minutes and just give a lecture prepared it was mock extemporary you might say um but spellbinding riveting stuff in in in very spare and powerful language um there's an old adage you know that the uh a lecture tends to go from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without going for the mind of either and I think that's to be avoided at all costs yeah it's interesting question um Hitler wanted from the beginning to uh were unite Germans and that meant uh behind his version of fascism and that meant um winning over the working class uh from socialism and communism which is after all third of the you know it's nearly half the population of the working class and those two parties commanded a third of the population so it's very important in building a mass party and it's all symbolized in the Nazi flag if you can visualize it it's got a red background it's personally designed by Hitler the red background for socialism uh then it has a white circle and the black swastika and the three colors red white and black are the colors of the old imperial Germany uh so the message is uh we are socialist but we're also looking back to the days of the Kaiser trying to combine these these things and the idea was it was floated by um some extreme anti-Semitic parties before the first of all they actually fringe phenomenon uh of using anti-Semitism to win over win over the working class for the national cause so uh it's national um nationalist in other words but it's also a socialist and they're often the rambling where Nazism in the western two thirds it leaves a structure of industry and ownership as a capitalist one in a sense it kicks out the Polish owners but it puts in German ones instead it doesn't nationalize capitalist enterprises and it deports again an astonishing number of million or so Poles Polish men to Germany on racial grounds as slave laborers so it's a very different kind of kind of picture and what do they think about it and secondly what do you think perspective is everything the perspective changes everything what do you think a young Richard Evans will think of the second world war saying 30 years time doing his PhD that's a very complicated kind of time travel sort of question it's to the scale it deems emphasizing once the war on the eastern front begins in the 22nd of June 1941 there's never less than two thirds of the entire german armed forces are engaged in an eastern front so there's only one third in the whole of the rest of it all the other things the war put together it's on a vast scale the numbers of dead the numbers of tanks kursk is the largest tank battle in history the scale the sheer scale of some of the battles is just mind-boggling and there's no parallel in the in the west really of course west of the western powers knew about this and they were but they wanted to make sure that that sort of destructiveness didn't happen in the war in the west so they delayed having a second front the indeed a enormity invasions and so on much longer than Stalin would have wanted Stalin was extremely profligate with his soldiers he didn't care how many died basically was general like Montgomery really did um so uh that what's curious is then after the war particularly in Britain and again in America and out of knowledge of the war on the eastern front really rather faded away and if you look at the military histories of the 50s and the 60s even the 70s they're overwhelmingly focused on on uh on the west and the eastern it's only recently that you find books on histories of the Second World War like Anthony Beaver's example give a much more prominence quite rightly to to the red army and to the conflict in in in the east um I think what do we think of the Second World War well what will we think in future it's very difficult to predict how it will be seen but that has been a notable shift and I think that's not going to change I think general histories of the Second World War well they've got to do two things now they they give enough prominence to the eastern front but they're not enough history of the Second World War to integrate the pacific theater with the uh with the european north african theaters um they're treated too much as separate wars but they're intellect in all kinds of all kinds of ways so I think that's something that a young historian should look at I feel so fortunate I'm a PhD student in chinese history and I have a series of questions for you and if your page on the wikipedia was right that in your earlier career um you were you were influenced by EH Carl's book what is history so through your your long career of historical writing and research do you have your own uh answer to this question do you have a new perspective in this question and then as so what's the question what question what is history oh I see right okay yes and then um right let's say two is enough right two questions two questions okay another is that as your book title suggested you are dealing with memories in history and we probably can see the memories constitute a part of the making of history so will you see your method and approach and deviate a little from the analysis score that earlier have influenced you right okay well if you take EH Carl um EH Carl was foreign office manager for 20 years and that very much influenced the way he saw the writing of history became a historian later on uh in his career and wrote a huge history of Soviet Russia but he thought um that history is only important if it's useful essentially from foreign policy in a way so the history of Soviet Russia is very strange book indeed because he doesn't tell you how the Bolsheviks came to power and say anything about the Bolshevik revolution what it does is it looks at the policies that were implemented by Lenin and Stalin and how they developed before you know when the Bolshevik party was founded uh and so what we now think of the most important parts of the Russian revolution is just not there um vast detail about policies many of which were not implemented um so it's a bit of a kind of white elephant really um he wrote this this short series of lectures called what is history um and uh he has various answers in it i actually did a uh a long um forward to a reissue of the book for in its 50th 40th 40th anniversary uh came out in 1961 and i did it in 2001 um and i think his achievement was to say uh that history is strongly affected by the historian's own experiences and perspectives um but a lot of things uh that don't stack up about about the book it's written in a very engaging style and you also have to imagine these are lectures uh given in in Cambridge and a lot of the people he's talking about are actually sitting there you know her but Butterfield was in the front row and Cass says i prefer Butterfield sober to Butterfield drunk you know this kind of stuff so very provocative and still still well worth reading i think but to be looked at really very very critically um uh what is history well history is to study the past but it's study a past not uh it's a study of past for a particular reason and that is to under understand and explain the past so Chronicle is the study of the past but it's not the same as history because it simply is a list of dates and things that happen my uh one of my teachers in Oxford was Martin Gilbert who became Boghe of Churchill i was actually his last undergraduate student i think after me he gave up on them um because he wouldn't discuss my ideas and arguments i got a very fed up with him we got on very well in the end and we became friends but um he's a chronicle if you look at his books they are just chronicles you know his book the first world war history of the 20th century it's just what happened in each year and in his his by far his greatest book is the holocaust because that technique works really well with that with that that particular subject um so it's not chronicle you're not looking at the part you're not studying the past for legal reasons to drag out details of why you should find somebody guilty or innocent and there are many other it's not like art history where you are studying the past but you're trying to classify um different kinds of paintings and go into the iconography of paintings and see where they came from but most art historians i'm getting into dangerous waters here so i'm very careful okay the artists are in the in the audience but most artists are not really interested in explaining art through the relating to its social and physical context so your history has started the past with the aim of understanding and explaining it thank you from them and also the students of history who have been reading you work for a long time it's a ordinary privilege it is to meet your person. Olivia has always said it's best to set up your own eyes. You try that to read it you do form a connection you do begin to follow someone's work and you appreciate all the effort that's gone there but also the power of the insight that's at work here it is also good so those of you streaming watching streaming you're very lucky but to be here and to have a chance to ask you questions is an extraordinary privilege. I'm sure all of you sort of looked very very you were frowned upon with Twitter to get to this but you would have I think appreciated the applause for what a powerful thing it is to enter into the conversation to be able to ask questions and hear from you and to I think really see your generosity in answering these questions but also spending a whole day with history teachers here today in the university we're incredibly grateful for your time thank you for making the journey and we just want to express our thanks with a big round of applause. Okay thank you very much. We're going going now Richard is available to sign his notes book up for that here but just before you disappear Dean Koplowski is going to give a full right to see which lecture this week American politics and diplomacy and historical context during the 30s and 40s he's going to look at American efforts to send European Jews to the Philippines during the period of the Holocaust as well as the US's ongoing ties with the events on the 29th July or to the 5th at the end so if you want to get more information look at the A&M website so a double history this week and a great way to head off the way thank you very much Richard and he'll be up at the back of the sign.