The Books: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, ‘The Strange Case of David Irving’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

A 2001 joint book review from the Los Angeles Times: Hitchens reviewing The Holocaust on Trial, by D.D. Guttenplan, and Lying about Hitler, by Richard J. Evans.

In discussing these two books, Christopher Hitchens takes on historian David Irving, with whom he had some personal dealings (he gets into it in the piece). Irving is the most notorious, the most famous, Holocaust denier, due to him he sued Debroah Lipstadt for libel (for calling him a “denier” and a “bad historian” in her book on Holocaust denial), which resulted in a very public trial. Hitchens starts off by saying that no serious person could “deny” that the Holocaust happened. However. And it’s a big however. David Irving’s work should not be censored. It should be read, and allowed to live or die in the public eye, just like any other book. We do not need to be “protected” from it.
Hitchens had some creepy run-ins with Irving (one in particular which makes my skin crawl, and Hitchens felt the same way), but he thought that if you believe in freedom of speech, then you believe in it also for people whom you think are dead-wrong.

A small chilling memory: Years ago, I was in a production of Anne Frank’s diary. We were a traveling group, we played it in schools, synagogues, community centers, all over Chicago. I was also in a band at that time. I was being driven home from band rehearsal by some guy who had been watching the rehearsal. I guess he lived near me or something. I don’t remember why I was in his car. He was asking me about myself. I told him I was an actress, and currently I had a gig in this production of The Diary of Anne Frank. And he said, so casually, “What do you think about the theories that it’s a fake?” That was the first thing he said. The only thing. I said, “I don’t credit those theories at all.” He said, “Huh. I think it’s interesting to think about.” And that was the end of our conversation, because, no, I don’t think it’s “interesting” to cast doubt on Anne Frank’s diary. I don’t like to talk to dummy-dumbs who think horseshit is “interesting.”

And when you LIE to uphold your agenda … when you cherry-pick quotes to support your bias and distort history …. In this day and age, you will be “found out” immediately. There will still be morons who will follow you, because you are saying what they want to hear, but no serious person will credit you at all as someone to be listened to in any serious way. You know, there are history books out there that put out the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation. Like, 10 Commandments Christianity. Those books are readily available, should you want to read them. I mean, these people are crackpots, and I wouldn’t call them good historians, but you can actually read the books and see for yourself and make up your own mind. That’s the world I prefer living in, thankyouverymuch.

I like Hitchens’ point that some of the greatest historians of all time were writing in order to prop up their pet agenda.

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, ‘The Strange Case of David Irving’, by Christopher Hitchens

History, especially as written by historians in the English traditions, is a literary and idiosyncratic form. Men such as Gibbon and Macaulay and Marx were essayists and polemicists in the grand manner, and when I was at school, one was simply not supposed to be prissy about the fact. We knew that Macaulay wrote to vindicate the Whig school, just as we knew of the prejudices of Carlyle (though there were limits: Nobody ever let us read is Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, a robustly obscene defense of slavery). Handing me a copy of What is History?, by E.H. Carr, my Tory headmaster loftily told me that it was required reading in spite of its “rather obvious Marxist bias.” The master of my Oxford college was Christopher Hill, the great chronicler of Cromwell and Milton and Winstanley and the Puritan Revolution. Preeminent in his field, Hill had been a member of the Communist Party and could still be slightly embarrassed by mention of his early book, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, in which the name of Leon Trotsky was conspicuous by its absence. Moving closer to our own time, we had Sir Arthur Bryant, whose concept of history as a pageant culminated in extreme royalism and a strong sympathy for Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Then there was A.J.P. Taylor, one of the most invigorating lecturers of all time, who believed that the Nazis had more or less been tricked into the war. And how can one forget Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of the definitive narrative of Hitler’s final days, who had close connections to British intelligence, who might be overheard making faintly anti-Jewish remarks and who later pronounced the forged Hitler diaries genuine? These were men who had been witnesses and participants as well as archivists and chroniclers. Their accounts were essential reading; the allowance for prejudice and inflection was part of the fun of one’s bookkeeping.

This of course doesn’t license absolute promiscuity. Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party (much later than Hill), may have advertised his allegiances but retained the respect of most critics because he had a strong sense of objectivity in his historical work. In other words, no dirty tricks were to be allowed.

So, what I mean to say for now is that when I first became aware of Irving, I did not feel it necessary to react like a virgin who is suddenly confronted by a man in a filthy raincoat.

That he had a sneaking sympathy for fascism was obvious enough. But his work on the bombing of Dresden, on the inner functioning of the Churchill government and on the mentality of the Nazi generals was invaluable. He changed sides of the issue of the Hitler diaries, but his intervention was crucial to their exposure as a pro-Nazi fabrication. His knowledge of the German language was the envy of his rivals. His notorious flaunting of bad taste and his gallows humor were not likely to induce cardiac arrest in anyone like myself, who had seen many Oxford and Cambridge history dons when they were fighting drunk.

While helping to edit the New Statesman in 1981, I encouraged the American historian Kai Bird, now a distinguished student of the cold war, to analyze Irving’s work. Bird turned in a meticulous essay, which exposed Irving’s obvious prejudice and incidentally trashed his least-known and worst book – a history of the 1956 Hungarian uprising that characterized the revolt as a rebellion of sturdy Magyar patriots against shifty Jewish Communists. Irving briefly threatened to sue and then thought better of it. In the early 1990s, he took part in a public debate with the extreme denier Robert Faurisson, at which he maintained that there was definite evidence of mass extermination at least by shooting (and gratuitously added that he thought the original Nazi plan to isolate all Jews in Madagascar was probably a good scheme). I noted this with interest – there’s nothing like a good faction fight between extremists – but had con contact with him, direct or indirect, until he self-published in England his biography of Josef Goebbels in 1996.

This book is still on my shelf. I read it initially because St. Martin’s Press in New York decided not to publish it, or rather, decided to breach its contract to do so. This action on its part was decisive, in that it convinced Irving that his enemies were succeeding in denying him a livelihood, and it determined him to sue someone as soon as he could. It was also important in that St. Martin’s gave no reason of historical accuracy for its about-face. For the publisher, it was simply a question of avoiding unpleasantness (“Profiles in Prudence,” as its senior editor Thomas Dunne put it to me ruefully).

Well, as I say, I’m a big boy and can bear the thought of being offended. The biography, based largely on extracts from Goebbels’ diaries, told me a great deal I hadn’t known. I’ll instance a small but suggestive example. Irving had in the past been associated with the British fascist movement led by Sir Oswald Mosley. In my hot youth, I’d protested at some of the meetings of this outfit and had circulated the charge that, before the war, it had been directly financed by the Nazis. This charge was always hotly disputed by the Mosleyites themselves, but here was Goebbels, in cold print, discussing the transfer of funds from Merlin to the British Black Shirts. On the old principle famously adumbrated by Bertrand Russell – of “evidence against interest” – it seemed that Irving was capable of publishing information that undermined his own position. He also, in his editorial notes, gave direct testimony about the mass killing of Jews in the East (by shooting) and of the use of an “experimental” gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmno. The “deniers” don’t like this book; on the strength of it you could prove that the Nazis tried to do away with the Jews. There was some odd stuff about Hitler’s lack of responsibility for Kristallnacht but, as I say, I allowed for Irving’s obsessions. I wrote a column criticizing St. Martin’s for its cowardice and described Irving himself as not just a fascist historian but a great historian of fascism. One should be allowed to read Mein Kampf as well as Heidegger. Allowed? One should be able to do so without permission from anybody.

As a result of this, Irving contacted me when he was next in Washington, and I invited him to my home for a cocktail. He got off to a shaky start by refusing any alcohol or tobacco and by presenting me with two large blue-and-white stickers. Exactly the size of a German street sign, they were designed to be passed over the originals at dead of night. “Rudolf Hess Platz,” they said: a practical-joke accessory for German extremists with that especial sense of humor. Because they were intended to shock, I tried to look as unshocked as I could. Irving then revealed, rather fascinatingly, that some new documents from the Eichmann family might force him to reconsider his view that there had been no direct order for the annihilation of the Jews. It was a rather vertiginous atmosphere all around. When it came time for him to leave, my wife and daughter went down in the elevator with him on their own way out. Later, my wife rather gravely asked me if I would mind never inviting him again. This was highly unlike her; we have all sorts at our place. However, it transpired that, while in the elevator, Irving had looked with approval at my fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter, then five years old, and declaimed the following doggerel about his own little girl, Jessica, who was the same age:

I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian;
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.

The thought of Carol and Antonia in a small space with this large beetle-browed man as he spouted that was, well, distinctly creepy. (He has since posted the lines on his Web site, and they came back to haunt him at the trial.)