Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History

131 Pages·2013·1.09 MB·English

by  Richard J. Evans

Altered
PASTS
COUNTERFACTUALS IN HISTORY
RICHARD J. EVANS
THE MENAHEM STERN JERUSALEM LECTURES
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS Waltham, Massachusetts
BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS / HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF ISRAEL
An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com
© 2013 Richard J. Evans All rights reserved For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book,
contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, Richard J.
Altered pasts: counterfactuals in history / Richard J. Evans.
pages cm.—(The Menahem Stern Jerusalem lectures) Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61168-537-4 (cloth: alk. paper)— ISBN 978-1-61168-538-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)— ISBN 978-1-
61168-539-8 (ebook) 1. Imaginary histories. 2. History—Philosophy. 3. Historiography—Political aspects
—Great Britain. 4. Great Britain—History—20th century. 5. Right and left (Political science)—Great
Britain. I. Title.
D21.3.E87 2013
901—dc23
2013029719
FOR CHRISTINE
If we had not met …
The historian … must always maintain towards his subject an indeterminist
point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the
known factors still seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis,
then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks of the coup d’état of
Brumaire then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously
repulsed.… [Yet] the historian tries to discover some sense in the remains of a
certain period in human society.… The historical context we posit, the creation
of our mind, has sense only insofar as we grant it a goal, or rather a course
towards a specific outcome.… Therefore historical thinking is always
teleological.… For history the question is always “Whither?” History must be
granted to be the teleologically oriented discipline par excellence.
—JOHAN HUIZINGA, quoted in Fritz Stern, ed.,
The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
1 Wishful THINKING
2 Virtual HISTORY
3 Future FICTIONS
4 Possible WORLDS
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
T
he following pages reproduce, with additions, the Menahem Stern
Jerusalem Lectures that Richard J. Evans delivered in April, 2013.
Before coming to Cambridge, where he has been professor of modern
history, Regius Professor of History, and president of Wolfson
College, he had taught at Stirling, East Anglia, Columbia, and Birkbeck College,
London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Historical Society,
and of the Royal Society of Literature, and a regular broadcaster and writer for
the literary and political press. His 1987 book Death in Hamburg is a prize-
winning history of the 1892 cholera epidemic, which reconstructs not only what
had happened but also the state of medical science at the time, the social
services, the class inequalities, and many other relevant themes. This book was
the basis for a German film televised in 1990. In the Lipstadt-Irving trial in
2000, Professor Evans was the main witness for Lipstadt, who as defendant was
vindicated.
Richard J. Evans is first and foremost a historian of Germany. He not only
contributed to it numerous studies, but he also opened up fields of German
history that had been mostly neglected before. Led by his interest in history from
below, he pioneered such new fields as German feminism, the working classes,
crime and punishment, medicine and disease, labor and the peasantry, the
proletariat, the underworld, and the unemployed. His research included the
juridical system, torture, witchcraft, forms of execution, social conditions and
relations, family life. On all of these subjects and more, he conducted pioneering
research and built up new schools of thought. He is interested in both central and
marginal parts of society, in outcasts as well as political leaders. His book
Rituals of Retribution traces the history of capital punishment in Germany over
centuries, not just as an instrument of the law but also as a form of state power.
And all of these seemingly specialized subjects are shown to be essential for a
full understanding of the German social and political culture, including the
acceptance of authoritarian regimes, as well as the activities of organizations
from below.
His trilogy on the Nazi period has been generally recognized as the definitive
history of that period. The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power,
and The Third Reich at War were published between 2003 and 2008. Of special
interest are the thematic chapters dealing with the different aspects of public life,
such as education, the press, the cinema, the economy, the universities, and
many other aspects, each researched and presented with great expertise and
detail, in its own professional terms. The combination of analysis and
integration, policies and processes, conscious decisions and emotional reactions
effectively brings the period to life.
Careful and critical examination of other historians’ work or mistakes has
rightly become an essential part of history writing. The value of this approach is
brought out in Richard J. Evans’s works of historiographical analysis, which
include In Hitler’s Shadow, a sharp-sighted book on the Historikerstreit of the
1980s, which has other historians’ arguments as its central theme. In his book In
Defense of History (1997) we find his most interesting approach to causality in
history, which is clearly nondeterministic. He argues that Nazism was not, in his
opinion, an inevitable result of German traits, even though one can show certain
continuities. The failure of the liberal revolutions of 1848 did not cause the rise
of Nazism. The Sonderweg was not an inevitable development. There were other
possibilities, and there is almost invariably more than one historical explanation
of why a certain road was taken and others were not. In his most recent book,
Cosmopolitan Islanders, he studies the engagement of British historians with the
European past. The present short book falls into this series, as a study of mainly
British, and to some extent also American, French, German, and Italian, studies
of “what-if” questions in history. It analyzes specific examples of this approach,
particularly in relation to twentieth-century Germany, as well as the
epistemological problems raised by “counterfactual” history.
HEDVA BEN-ISRAEL
Hebrew University Jerusalem
PREFACE
T
his short book is an essay on the use of counterfactuals in historical
research and writing. By counterfactuals, I mean alternative versions
of the past in which one alteration in the timeline leads to a different
outcome from the one we know actually occurred. In the chapters that
follow, examples that are discussed at length include what would have happened
had Britain not entered the First World War but stood aside as a neutral
nonbelligerent; what the result might have been had Britain concluded a separate
peace with Nazi Germany in 1940 or 1941; or how the British might have
behaved had they lost the Battle of Britain and been conquered and occupied by
the armed forces of Hitler’s Third Reich. The opening chapter surveys the
development of counterfactual history from its beginnings in the nineteenth
century, and tries to account for its revival and its popularity, especially in
Britain and the United States, in the 1990s and 2000s. The second considers the
arguments for and against the use of counterfactuals, and discusses some of the
principal contributions to the genre and their implications for what many of their
authors call historical determinism. Chapter 3 looks at a variety of ways in which
writers of history and fiction have reinvented the past for their own purposes,
including the construction of parallel “alternate” histories and imaginary
representations of the future based on alterations made to the past. The fourth
and final chapter tries to pull all this together and reach some kind of conclusion
about whether or not counterfactuals are a useful tool for the historian, and, if so,
in what ways, to what extent, and with what limitations.
I first became interested in counterfactuals in 1998, when I took part in a
televised discussion on BBC News 24’s program Robin Day’s Book Talk with
Antonia Fraser and Niall Ferguson, who had just published his pathbreaking
book in the field, Virtual History. My own In Defense of History had just come
out, and the idea of counterfactual history seemed to raise in a new way the
fundamental questions about the borders between fact and fiction with which
that book had tried to grapple. So when I was asked to deliver the Butterfield
Lecture at Queen’s University, Belfast, in October 2002, it seemed a good
opportunity to come to grips with these questions at greater length. An edited
version of the lecture was published as “Telling It Like It Wasn’t,” in the BBC
History Magazine, number 3 (2002), pp. 2–4; and then reprinted by request in
the American journal Historically Speaking, issue 5/4 (March 2004), where it