Richard J. Evans
Professor Richard Evans (born 1947) is a British historian of Germany. He was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville & Caius College. He has also taught at the University of Stirling, University of East Anglia and Birkbeck College, London.
Early life
Evans received his education at the Forest School in Walthamstow and Jesus College, Oxford. His first teaching position was at the University of Stirling between 1972 and 1976 where he taught a final year unit entitled 'Weimar Germany and the Third Reich', despite another member of department, Peter D. Stachura, teaching another final year unit on 'Adolf Hitler and National Socialism'.
Career as a historian
He was drawn to German history in the late 1960s because of what he saw as parallels between the Vietnam War and German imperalism. Evans was much influenced by the Sonderweg view of continuity of German history of Fritz Fischer. Evans' main interests are in social history and he is much influenced by the Annales School. He largely agrees with Fischer that the way that German society developed in the 19th century led to the rise of Nazi Germany, although Evans takes pains to point out that this outcome was one among many possibilities and was not inevitable. For Evans, the values of the 19th century German middle class had the seeds of National Socialism already germinating.
In the 1980s, Evans played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit. Evans took issue with the historical work and theories of Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom he described as seeking to white-wash the German past. In addition, in his book about the Historikerstreit, In Hitler's Shadow, Evans attacked the historical work of Robert Conquest, Hugh Thomas, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, all of whom Evans claimed were part of a sinister neo-conservative historical trend.
He is perhaps best known for his role as expert witness for the American historian Deborah Lipstadt when she was sued for libel by the British historian David Irving. His book Telling Lies About Hitler describes the trial, his role as an expert witness, and the study he made of Irving's work.
One of his most famous works is In Defence of History, a book in defence of the study of history against postmodernist theories that hold the study of history to be outmoded and no longer useful. However, Evans stresses throughout his book that some of the criticisms made by postmodernists have been beneficial to history as a whole, in particular that subjectivity is an inevitable and unavoidable part of the historic construct.
Work
- The feminist movement in Germany, 1894-1933, London : Sage Publications, 1976.
- The feminists : women's emancipation movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840-1920, London : C. Helm, 1977.
- Society and politics in Wilhelmine Germany edited by R.J. Evans, London : Croom Helm, 1980, 1978.
- The German family : essays on the social history of the family in nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany, London : C. Helm ; Totowa, N.J. : Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.
- The German working class, 1888-1933 : the politics of everyday life, London : Croom Helm ; Totowa, N.J. : Barnes & Noble, 1982.
- The German peasantry : conflict and community in rural society from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries edited by Richard J. Evans and W.R. Lee, London : Croom Helm, 1986.
- The German unemployed : experiences and consequences of mass unemployment from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, London : C. Helm, 1987.
- Rethinking German history : nineteenth-century Germany and the origins of the Third Reich, London : Allen and Unwin, 1987.
- Comrades and sisters : feminism, socialism, and pacifism in Europe, 1870-1945, Brighton, Sussex : Wheatsheaf Books ; New York : St. Martin's Press, 1987.
- Death in Hamburg : society and politics in the cholera years, 1830-1910 Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1987.
- The German Underworld : deviants and outcasts in German history, London : Routledge, 1988.
- In Hitler's shadow : West German historians and the attempt to escape from the Nazi past, London : I.B. Tauris, 1989.
- Proletarians and Politics : socialism, protest, and the working class in Germany before the First World War, New York : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.
- The German Bourgeoisie : essays on the social history of the German middle class from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century London: Routledge, 1991.
- Rituals of Retribution : capital punishment in Germany 1600-1987, New York : Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Rereading German History : from unification to reunification, 1800-1996, London ; New York : Routledge, 1997.
- Tales from the German Underworld : crime and punishment in the nineteenth century, New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 1998.
- In Defense of History, New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 1999.
- Lying About Hitler : History, Holocaust, and the David Irving trial, New York : Basic Books, 2001.
- Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, Verso Books, 2002.
- The Coming of the Third Reich, London : Allen Lane, 2003.
- The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939, New York : Penguin, 2005.
See also
References
- Guttenplan, D.D. The Holocaust On Trial, New York: Norton, 2001.
- Snowman, Daniel "Richard J. Evans" pages 45-47 from History Today Volume 54, Issue #1, January 2004.