Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’. By Harriet Swain
NB: This is a therapeutic article for those who are beginning to falter in their belief in truth, not the Absolute, but the truth. Also for those who think 'ideology = truth', another way of upholding relativism, as in 'all truth is class truth'. (Substitute caste, nation, race etc for class and you get the same result. As in the Nazi dictum "relativity is Jewish physics"). We live in an age of ideology, which works constantly to undermine our sense of reality. This is nothing less than the political abolition of truth. Richard Evans stood up to the evil represented by the Holocaust denier David Irving, about whose motives we may only speculate. The Holocaust happened. The atom bomb was dropped. The 1971 genocide in East Pakistan happened. Deliberate instigation of violence and ethnic cleansing across the Indian sub-continent has happened. Mass deaths happened under Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot. So did many things sought to be denied by ideologues of every persuasion.
Yes, truth is repressive - of lies, deceit, superstition and ignorance. Deal with it, and defend it. DS
The historian, a key player in the libel case involving Holocaust denier David Irving, talks about Trump, Goebbels and why he agrees with John Bercow
Yes, truth is repressive - of lies, deceit, superstition and ignorance. Deal with it, and defend it. DS
The historian, a key player in the libel case involving Holocaust denier David Irving, talks about Trump, Goebbels and why he agrees with John Bercow
Towards the end
of Denial, released in cinemas this month, the lead character, played
by Rachel Weisz, argues passionately that historical truth exists. “Slavery
happened. The Black Death happened,” she says. “Elvis is not alive.” It is a point that
historian Richard Evans, president of Wolfson College in Cambridge, provost of
Gresham College in London and a key player in the events that inspired Denial, has been making for
most of his professional life. It is also something that, he argues, has become
even more important in the era of “alternative facts” and Donald Trump.
But it is not always straightforward.
Before writing the screenplay for Denial, David Hare spent two hours quizzing
Evans, an expert on Nazi Germany, about his part in the 2000 libel trial on
which the film is based. Evans was an expert witness in the case, taken by the
maverick historian David
Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, who had called
Irving a Holocaust denier and accused him of falsifying history. According to
Evans: “As he got up to go, David Hare said, ‘I have interviewed a number of
people about the trial and everyone seems to have a different point of view.’”
Evans thought the film
might therefore end up showing the action from lots of different perspectives.
But in the end – wisely, he believes – Hare chose to focus on the experience of
Lipstadt and her struggles with her legal team’s insistence that she should not
give evidence but leave them to prove that her allegations were true. Whatever the differing
view of the trial, the fact is that her defence was successful. The judge
found Irving to be a Holocaust denier,
antisemite and racist who had deliberately misrepresented and manipulated
historical evidence, and ordered him to pay more than £2m in legal costs.
Evans, who had been
employed to trawl, with a couple of assistants, through Irving’s work, had
never read any of his writing before – “It’s of no interest to academic
historians … all empirical narrative with no real ideas in it” – and says they
were repeatedly astonished by the falsifications and distortions they found. To
keep up the tension, the film suggests the trial was in the balance. “But that
wasn’t quite accurate,” says Evans, “because the defence knew from the
beginning that it would win. The only question was by how much.”
Proving it
nevertheless took Evans three years, during which he produced a 740-page report
and was cross-examined for more than a week by Irving, who represented himself.
It was stressful, he says, because he constantly had to watch out for Irving
distorting his words. In the film, all this is reduced to a single but pivotal
courtroom scene. The dialogue in the film is based entirely on transcripts from
the trial, but Evans says John Sessions, who plays him, delivered the words
much better than he did at the time.
One legacy of being
involved in the trial was that Evans became convinced of his duty to engage
with the world outside academia. Another was a file full of obscene hate mail,
all of which – with an eye on the historical record – he has kept. While he has
not, so far, experienced any abuse as a result of the film, he acknowledges
that it has stirred up antisemites. Earlier this month leaflets referencing the film, and in support of Irving, were left
on cars around Cambridge University, directing readers to a Holocaust denial
website. Nevertheless, he insists: “The film is bad for Holocaust deniers and
it’s bad for Mr Irving. It underlines again the evil of Holocaust denial.”
He also hopes it will
convince people watching it “that there is such a thing as truth and you can
discover it”. His book In Defence of History,
published in 1997, famously challenged the postmodernist rejection of
objectivity that had become increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s: a
time, he points out, when many of Donald Trump’s team were students: “I think
that affected a generation of university graduates in the States,” he says.
Evans’s own interest
in history was sparked as a young boy living on the borders of east London,
where he saw the remains of bombed-out homes, the wallpaper still clinging to
ruined walls. War and its aftermath were what his parents – a teacher and bank
clerk – and politicians talked about and he became fascinated by why it
happened, who made it happen. He also liked writing.
He wrote about the exploits of his model soldiers, and even wrote three or four
novels before deciding he did not have the imagination to invent things; he
always needed to return to facts.
By the time he went to Oxford – the first in
his family to go to university – he knew he wanted to be an academic. It was a
time when German history was “just warming up” as Germans began talking about
the past and reflecting on the roots of Nazism. He studied for a doctorate on
the feminist movement in Germany, for which he learned German, and taught at
the universities of Stirling and East Anglia and Birkbeck College in London
before successfully applying to be Regius professor of history at Cambridge.
Meanwhile, he was writing book after book, including an acclaimed three-volume
history of the Third Reich.
His studies of 1930s
Germany have suggested parallels with the global political turmoil of the past
few months, he says. While the current context is different – no shadow of the
first world war, less acceptance of political violence – “if you ask a
different question, about how democracies die, you can see some parallels”.
Trump’s contempt for
constitutional propriety and for the rule of law, and his hatred of the free
press, rang particular alarm bells, as did his willingness to dismantle
international agreements. Evans points out that one of the first things Hitler
did when he came to power was to abandon the League of Nations. “You can put quotes by
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, about what he called the Jewish
lying press and how it would be closed down when the Nazis came to power, side
by side with quotes by team Trump and they look almost exactly the same,” he
says. Like Trump, Hitler chose to rule with a team of close allies. The
democratic roots of the Weimar Republic were also much deeper than is often
assumed, which means a secure democracy such as America could be similarly
vulnerable. The most worrying question in America, says Evans, is: “Are the
institutions going to stand up to the assault they are being subjected to?”
Evans says he is by
nature optimistic, “but at the moment I think we are going through dark times”.
This is true on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the Brexit vote, he has had
to reassure the students at his postgraduate college, who come from all over
the world, that whatever else happens they will continue to be welcome. He is
concerned for the future of British universities if they are starved of the
international networks on which science and scholarship thrive, and he worries
that Britain’s dominance of literary history – from which, he says, many
countries outside Britain get an understanding of their own histories – could
also be under threat.
And then there’s the
issue of lying. “Politicians have always told lies,” says Evans. “It’s just
that nobody cares now.” He argues that
academics – and journalists – have a particular duty today to stand up for
truth. And he believes the fightback is beginning. He admires Elizabeth Warren,
the American academic and Democratic politician who has consistently stood up
to Trump. He also supports petitions and demonstrations against Trump’s state
visit to Britain. “I’m absolutely with John Bercow,” he says, referring to
the Commons Speaker’s speech saying that Trump should not be
allowed to address parliament because of his racism and sexism.
And while Denial is
scrupulous in making the case that facts should triumph over emotion, Evans
says emotions have their place. Seeing elderly people in the public gallery
during the libel case with their sleeves rolled up and Auschwitz numbers
tattooed on their arms was undeniably moving, he says. “One has to be
passionate about the truth.”
see also
Articles on ideology in East Europe
Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
