Deborah E. Lipstadt: Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (2016)•
Deborah Lipstadt (1947- )Deborah Lipstadt: Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (2016)
[Hato Hone / St. John Opportunity Shop, Wairau Park - 2/5/24]:
Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denial: Holocaust History on Trial. ['History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier', 2005]. Ecco. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016.
Richard J. Evans. Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial. 2001. Basic Books. New York: Perseus Books, 2002.
Lying About Hitler
The Richard J. Evans book pictured above was my point of entry into the intricacies of David Irving's infamous libel case against American Professor Deborah Lipstadt for labelling him a Holocaust denier.
So fascinating did I find Evans' book, in fact, that I made it the centrepiece of a whole module in the Creative Nonfiction Masters course I put together with my Massey colleague Ingrid Horrocks.
Peter Bradshaw: Review: Overwhelmingly relevant assertion of truth (26/1/2017)l-to-r: Andrew Scott, Rachel Weisz and Tom Wilkinson in Denial
When I heard that there was to be a film about the trial, I felt very anxious to see it. However, if it was screened in any of the cinemas around here I must have missed it. Instead I was forced to order the CD online and watch it that way.
Denial, dir. Mick Jackson, writ. David Hare (based on Deborah Lipstadt's book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier) – with Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius, John Sessions, Alex Jennings – (UK / USA, 2016).
So it was a distinct feeling of pleasure that I finally ran across Deborah Lipstadt's own book about the trial in an Op shop the other day. It was the film tie-in version (not surprisingly), and I was reminded yet again of how difficult Rachel Weisz finds it to look anything but gorgeous in any of her roles. I guess she'll just have to put up with the fact: there are worse fates, after all.
Spotlight, dir. Tom McCarthy, writ. Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – with Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d'Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, Billy Crudup – (USA, 2015).
The same might be said of Rachel McAdams, one of the stars of the movie Spotlight, which appeared in 2015, just a year before Denial.
The parallels don't end there, of course. Spotlight is a film about the Catholic Church's attempts to cover up the wide-spread child abuse cases concerning their priests in Boston. It's certainly a serious, cerebral film - but it struck a chord with viewers. It was both critically and financially successful, and proved that you really can underestimate the intelligence and taste of filmgoers.
Denial is equally serious and challenging. David Hare's script is both restrained and effective, and he does a wonderful job of conveying the urgency of the questions under debate in the courtroom, while still providing meaty roles for the impressive cast. Alas, it ended up losing money rather than making it, and attracted a somewhat muted critical response also. Spotlight clearly hit a nerve that Denial, a year later, didn't.
Guttenplan, D. D. The Holocaust on Trial. 2001. New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2002.
So why do I see this trial, and the various books and feature film provoked by it, as so very important? It's not really the fact that it concerns the Holocaust - I mean, anyone who needs the verdict in a British libel trial to convince them that the Holocaust actually took place is probably impervious to any conventional standards of evidence.
No, it's the question of whether or not any historical event can be proved to have taken place in the face of someone else's claim that it didn't. Does it matter? Well, yes, it does. If someone can stand up and say that there was no Second World War - or Roman Empire - and have their opinion on the matter treated as seriously as anyone else's, then there can be no history, no settled sense of the past, no context for anything but assertions of opinion.
That may sound like a world of paranoid delusion, but in our present political situation, where the number of attendees at a rally can be disputed on the grounds that "alternate facts" can co-exist in the universe as we know it - or where the results of an election depend on your pre-conceived view of who would win - it suddenly becomes quite a vital question.
The easiest way to summarise my view of the importance of this libel trial might perhaps be to summarise some of the notes I wrote on the subject for our Masters Course:
To make a long story short, an American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust (1993) in which she described prominent British military historian David Irving as a Holocaust denier. The book was published in the UK as well as in the US, and Irving accordingly brought a libel action against Lipstadt, claiming that she had done irreparable damage to his professional reputation.
In Britain (unlike the United States) the onus is on the person accused of libel to prove their own innocence of the charge. Lipstadt therefore had to show sufficient evidence of systematic distortion of the facts in Irving's - very extensive - published work to win her case and avoid having to withdraw her book and pay substantial damages.
Irving filed suit on 5 September 1996. The judge's final 333-page written verdict was delivered on 11 April 2000. In between those two dates the historian Richard Evans and his assistants spent thousands of man-hours combing through Irving's books, articles and diaries - not to mention an immense amount of time spent on the case spent by the lawyers and other experts.
Evans says in his book that he'd thought initially that a court of law was a terrible place to judge history. By the end of the process, however, he concluded that it was actually an excellent place. Only there could people actually be forced to answer questions, and could matters of details be examined from all angles without having to apologise for testing the patience of those concerned.
It was the failure of other readers, both professional and casual, to subject Irving's work to this unprecedented scrutiny which explained how its shockingly unbalanced nature had avoided exposure previously.
What is truth? Truth, it turns out, is the Holocaust. Or, rather, events of that cataclysmic nature. It is not a criminal offence to deny that the Holocaust took place in most countries (though it remains one in Austria and Germany). You may be a Holocaust denier yourself. Bully for you.
For a professional historian to twist and subvert the documents he uses to make them imply things they don't actually say is a crime of a quite different nature, however. Irving used every device at his disposal to attempt to prove Hitler's innocence of the crime of genocide. At first he was content to blame it on Hitler's subordinates, but later he decided that no substantive crime had taken place at all (beyond some deaths from disease at such camps as Auschwitz).
But if he actually believed this to be true, why did he need to lie about it and distort the evidence? This is where the balance between unrestrained relativism ("there is no truth: only points of view") and old-fashioned pragmatism ("the documents don't lie: there was a war, there was an Auschwitz, there was a genocide") becomes most tricky.
It's a morass you can't avoid, no matter how much you'd like to, which is why the details of the Hitler libel case should be so fascinating to all of us. Irving was proved to be a liar because he had to cite the sources of his lies: those are the rules professional historians play by. You can write an article or a speech off the top of your head, and assert anything you like. When you sit down to write a history, though, you need to cite chapter and verse.
Everybody makes mistakes. If they didn't, we wouldn't need to cover the same ground again and again, with different emphases and different interpretations. You can simply get it wrong. You can also change your mind (if you're honest you'll admit it: if you're less honest you'll just try to sneak revisions to your original point of view into subsequent work).
None of that has anything to do with the Irving case. Evans showed, in painstaking detail, that Irving could not have misunderstood the nature of some of the documents he relied on to exculpate Hitler from the charge of genocide: he misquoted and mis-paraphrased them deliberately. Tellingly, there were never any mistakes in the opposite direction - all his "mistakes" tended towards one end, the exoneration of Adolf Hitler.
Did Irving do this because he believed it to be true on some deeper level than the documents would allow? Did he simply make things up and distort them because he couldn't find any real evidence for his beliefs? It's hard to tell. But it seems as if he can't really have believed it himself - if he had, why would he have needed to lie? If Hitler really was innocent of genocide, then surely that fact would sooner or later become clear.
Irving was an autodidact. He never attended a university. His fluent German, his archival scholarship, were all self-taught. Like many autodidacts, he felt an inferiority complex about these deficiencies in his professional CV. He therefore took every opportunity to deride products of the Academic system as mindless drones and yes-men. As he saw it, they supported the party line on the Holocaust and everything else simply because that is what they had been taught to do.
Irving's books are unreliable trash not because he didn't understand historiography, but because he was a liar. The motives for his lies are complex: probably more personal than ideological in the final analysis. It would be unfair to suggest that his love for Adolf Hitler as a man and an historical figure was anything but passionate and lasting.
But would anyone in the 1960s and 1970s, when Irving was at the height of his influence, have wanted to read a series of love letters to Hitler? Of course not. He was therefore forced to try to sound objective while secretly stacking the deck in favour of his hero. The most obvious example is in his very influential 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden, which, largely as a result of Evans's investigations, can now be seen to be fundamentally flawed and completely unreliable on points of detail: especially the absurdly padded casualty figures that Irving provided, on the most tenuous evidence.
The moment you accept the possibility of a lie: that a statement can be untrue, then you simultaneously admit the need for a complex and nuanced model of historiography. If, however, you believe that the opinion that there was no Second World War, or there was no Holocaust (in the accepted sense of those terms) has no less validity that the opposite view, then you inhabit a field of extreme relativism which probably qualifies you more for Linguistic Philosophy than Historiography - or, for that matter, for an Austrian jail. Irving was sentenced to three years imprisonment in Austria in 2005 for "Nazi activities." He was released in 2006 after serving only a year of his sentence, but was banned from ever re-entering the country.
The argument, of course, continues. It is a criminal offence in Turkey to use the word "genocide" in connection with the First World War massacres of Armenians in that country. Is this justified? Any and every event in history can - and should - be questioned - and questioned repeatedly.
If you have a preconceived bias on the matter you're discussing, you must say so. If David Irving had prefaced any of his books with the words: "I adore Hitler. I don't believe so wonderful a man can have been a mass murderer," then our opinion of him might have been different. Many people loved the late serial killer Charles Manson on even slighter grounds. It's doubtful that it would have been much of an incentive to major publishers to issue his books, however. And Irving did need the money.
Life's too short to spend your time talking to narcissists and liars. Any of you who've spent any time in their company will recognise what I'm talking about. The ingenious twists and turns of their reasoning always tend, in the end, towards self-exculpation. Whoever's to blame, it's never them.
Does all the attention paid to the Holocaust distract us from other, equally wicked and terrible events which have also taken place over the past century or so? It would be easy to argue that it does. Others claim that terms such as "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" are used too frequently for crimes which pale into insignificance beside the twelve-year ordeal of Europe's Jews at the hands of the Nazi party. These are philosophical and ethical issues which ultimately come down to matters of personal opinion.
It's as well to be aware of at least some of the implications if you really do feel inclined to offer the benefit of the doubt to Holocaust-deniers, though.
The Holocaust is a subject for respect, for tears at the sheer horror of what people can do to each other. It's not something to make cheap jokes or chop logic about. Mind you, if you feel equally horrified by Rwanda or Srebrenica or the genocidal assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza, all I can say is that I couldn't agree with you more.
But, to be honest, I've never noticed any of the people who say we 'talk too much' about the Holocaust, or Slavery, or the other great crimes of history having much to offer in the way of alternative topics of conversation.
Perhaps the final lesson here, then, is simply to have a bit of respect. Listen to those who were there. Otherwise it's hard to imagine that you're likely to have much to contribute to the world's thought.
Richard J. Evans. In Defense of History. 1997. American ed. 1999. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000.
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- category - History: Anthologies & Secondary Literature
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