Niall Ferguson: evaluation

Transcript context

…From a philosophy-of-history point of view, where do you think Taylor’s Second World War book went wrong? Hitler is too much of a bumbler, right? What happened there? I think the contrarian impulse is a very strong one, and it’s a part of the British academic tradition. What Taylor wanted to do was to turn everyone on their head, including people he loathed like Hugh Trevor-Roper, his successful rival for the Regius Chair at Oxford, so there was a personal element to that. At the same time, I think Taylor’s method — because it strictly adhered to the diplomatic documents — led him to the very appealing conclusion that Hitler was just a traditional German statesman, and the war was a kind of accident, mainly due to misunderstandings. I think that’s really as much about the nature of the source material as it is about Taylor’s love of paradox and contrarian thinking. Actually, Taylor’s account of the events of 1938–’39 is quite good. There’s much in it that’s right, but what’s missing is that which you would only find from looking at what Hitler was saying in other contexts. I think Taylor knowingly underplayed Hitler’s ideological motivations because he was pursuing that contrarian argument and had the material to pull it off. But you have to ignore the diabolical and ultimately catastrophic impulses that were Hitler’s primary motivations. I think the antidote to a book like Taylor’s is Michael Burleigh’s excellent book of, gosh, more than a decade ago, The Third Reich: A New History, which emphasizes Hitler’s messianic political-religious side. You can’t really explain why Hitler is able to overcome the anxieties of Germans in 1938 and initiate a war in 1939 — after all, Germans had as terrible memories of World War I as anybody did — you can’t understand how he’s able to deliver the mobilization of ’39 unless you recognize that there’s something more than just traditional realpolitik going on here. I think Burleigh, better than most English-speaking historians, captures the political-religious quality of national socialism, the sense that some national redemption is taking place, that Hitler is the redeemer. Most of the English-language biographies that people read — like Ian Kershaw’s or Alan Bullock’s or Richard Evans’s very boring books — fail to capture the diabolical appeal that Hitler had and make him sound almost, in Ian Kershaw’s account, like a negligent colleague at a provincial university. Only Michael Burleigh really gets that Hitler has this terrifying star quality that leads Germans into the abyss again. It’s the second time they’re going into that abyss. That’s what’s missing from Taylor. What have you learned from Quentin Skinner about history?…

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