When President Bush came to Britain in June, a number of historians were among
the dinner guests at 10 Downing Street. One, David Cannadine, was a mover in
setting up a History and Policy Unit, in the hope that, when politicians are
contemplating such weighty matters as regime change, knife crime or ID
cards, they might call on a historian to evaluate past precedents.
Yet Professor Cannadine has just published a book in which he maintains that
the morale of professional historians (whose collective name in AL Rowse’s
time was reputedly “a poison”, and is now supposedly “a malice”) is at an
all-time low. Andrew Roberts, another Downing Street invitee, agrees. He has
called for a regulatory authority for historians and suggests it could be
called Ofhist. Its task would be to protect what he designates “proper
historians” from incursions by “amateurs” into writing history books, and to
restrain literary editors from commissioning “Clist celebs” and the writers
of “chick lit” to review such historians’ work.
So, where does the truth lie? Are historians the repository of the nation’s
past wisdom, essential policy wonks’ adjuncts? Or an endangered species in
need of protection from today’s nasty, dumbed-down world? Let’s attempt a
historian’s answer: it depends where you stand. Certainly, if that’s in most
parts of Europe, the answer would be that the reputation of British
historians has never been higher.
Professor Sir Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and
Nemesis, has been a huge critical and commercial success in Germany as well
as in Britain, where a single-volume abridged paperback comes out in
September. “It’s hard to imagine,” says Kershaw, who was knighted for
services to history in 2002, “that the British public would give a warm
welcome to a biography of Churchill written by a German historian.” Yet
Kershaw’s is seen in Germany as the definitive biography of the Führer.
Richard Evans, whose third volume in a series on the Nazis’ rise to power, The
Third Reich at War, is scheduled for an October release, also sells well in
Germany. “Although, of course, I’m drawing on the work of German scholars,”
says Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, “I am doing something
German historians in general don’t do - that is, providing a broad-based
history that is accessible for the general reader. The first two volumes
have been translated into 12 languages, including Dutch, French and Italian,
and the second volume has proved even more popular in America than it is
here.” Anne Louise Fisher, a literary scout with a talent for finding
serious nonfiction (as well as literature) for European publishers, agrees.
“Ian Kershaw’s book is being published in translation this autumn in
Denmark, Sweden, Finland - that’s relatively new. Scandinavian countries
used to buy small quantities of such books in English, but now they are
having them translated and selling to a bigger market, particularly to
history book clubs, which are flourishing over there.”
Why should this be when, as Kershaw points out, there is scant reciprocity?
Try to recall a European historian who has made a big impact on the British
trade (rather than specialist academic) market and it’s a long haul - back
to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, in 1978, or Carlo Ginzburg’s The
Cheese and the Worms, soon afterwards. The consensus is that it’s the
ability to write authoritative, broad-brush history, with appeal to the
bookshop browser as well as the specialist, that makes British historians
such stars abroad. “We have an embarrassment of riches at the moment,” says
the historian of Russia, Orlando Figes. “British historians are acknowledged
as being the best in the world.”
Evans agrees about the tremendous influence British historians have in other
countries: “No German interested in the history of his or her own country
can afford to ignore the work of Ian Kershaw, no Russian the work of Robert
Service or Geoffrey Hoskins, no Spaniard the work of Paul Preston, no
Italian that of Denis Mack Smith or Lucy Riall, no French man or woman
Theodore Zeldin. The list goes on.” Historians like these, and others such
as Lisa Jardine, Linda Colley, Simon Schama and Orlando Figes, are all
university academics, giving them an authority and credibility Europeans
value. The latter is key to their success, but so, Fisher insists, is the
fact that they write engagingly.
Evans makes the point that, on the Continent, the divide between academic and
popular history is far deeper. Elsewhere in Europe, history is seen as a
social science (Wissenschaft), so it tends to be written in “high
academese”, a technical, theoretical style that can be impenetrableto all
but the committed specialist. In Britain, history is seen as a branch of
literature, rather than science, and the tradition of writing narrative,
empirical history, often with an emphasis on biography, provides a vivid
“story” that can be appreciated by the educated reader.
Simon Winder, who publishes Kershaw, Evans and other bestselling historians at
Penguin, thinks British historians have a particular ambition to engage with
a wider public, a tradition of wanting to tackle large themes and make them
comprehensible to a general audience. His view is that it is also sometimes
easier for an outsider to write about a country whose history is still
sensitive. He cites Vichy France, the Spanish civil war, Stalin’s Russia
and, of course, Nazi Germany. Evans, while saying that there is “pretty much
a consensus about Hitler now”, does recognise that an outsider can come to a
painful subject without the inhibitions a local historian might have, and
can push a wedge into a wall of silence that opens a space for that
country’s own historians to be able to write about it.
Paul Preston thinks the “distance factor” has certainly been important in
writing about Spain, first with Hugh Thomas’s ground-breaking book on the
civil war, then his own work and that of Antony Beevor. Indeed, when the
70th anniversary of the Spanish civil war was coming up, it was Beevor that
the Spanish publisher Critica approached to write a completely new version
of his 1982 book The Battle for Spain. It went straight in as a No 1
bestseller in that country, where divisions still run deep. Arabella Pike,
Preston’s publisher at HarperCollins, says his next book is about the
“Spanish holocaust” - the victims of Franco’s genocide - using witness
accounts. It’s a subject that would still be difficult for a Spaniard. The
book also already has a publisher in America, Italy and, of course, Spain.
Winder mentions Christopher Clark’s work on Prussia. “After the second world
war, Prussia was a dirty word. Probably even today, no German historian
would tackle it.” Yet Iron Kingdom, published in 2006, has been - according
to Clark’s German publisher, Thomas Rathnow, of Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
who also publishes Kershaw and Evans there - “an almost totally unexpected,
word-of-mouth runaway success”. Der Spiegel interviewed Clark at length, and
he was invited to meet the president.
Yet the “outsider” is not welcome in every market. So far, Figes’s books on
Russia have been translated into 23 languages, including those of the former
Soviet satellites Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.
Not one, though, has been published in Russia, though there is talk of his
prizewinning The Whisperers - previously unpublished accounts of everyday
life in the Stalin era - appearing in Russian bookshops. There, according to
Figes, there is “only a small market so far for the sort of history we do so
well in Britain - it’s either unreadable collections of historical papers or
really sensationalist stuff, of the ‘I Was Stalin’s Bodyguard’ or ‘The
Secret Life of Rasputin’ sort”.
When Beevor’s Berlin was first published in 2002, the Russian ambassador in
London told him sternly: “You must understand, victory is sacred.” Beevor
adds: “The Red Army just will not face up to its past.” Yet Berlin, a No 1
bestseller in nine countries and published in at least 27, has now been made
available in Russia. “It was brave of AST [the publishers there] to do it,”
he concedes.
It was regime change that made Norman Davies a celebrity in Poland. When God’s
Playground was published in 1981, it shot up the UK and US bestseller lists,
but in Poland anyone found with a copy was liable to go to prison. The flat
of a woman who was engaged on a secret translation was repeatedly raided by
the police. When underground copies were published, they were immediately
impounded. With the collapse of Communism in 1989, the Polish minister of
culture phoned Davies to say: “Now is the time.” Ever since, Davies’s is the
book that has given young Poles a history of their country. He is fêted
whenever he visits and has been given a flat by the state.
Why, then, does Britain seem so resistant to foreign imports? It is part of
our insularity, thinks Will Sulkin, the publishing director of Bodley Head:
“We are parochial.” After all, we don’t translate many novels, either; and,
unlike the Greeks, says Mark Mazower, who has written about their history,
we don’t seem that interested in what others might be able to tell us about
ourselves. We are not a receiving culture in the same way as other
Europeans. In Germany, Thomas Rathnow agrees: “English authors and
publishers take it for granted that they will be published elsewhere, often
for a considerable advance, even though many of their histories are long,
800 pages or more, and expensive to translate. It is rare for an English
publisher to translate nonfiction unless there is a substantial subsidy on
offer.”
Anne Louise Fisher adds: “Almost all the European publishers I deal with are
fluent in English. So they can assess any book that comes across their desk.
That is just not the case in Britain.”
“Maybe,” counters Simon Winder, “but I can’t say there are many books that
have come out in Europe in the past few years about which I can say ‘I
should have published that’, though I do scour all the lists.”
British historians are writing more fluently than ever, and with authority, on
subjects people want to read about. Furthermore, with the decline in
university funding, they are more professional and commercially orientated
than they used to be. A decade ago, few academic historians had agents; now
all the powerhouse agencies have a small but lucrative clutch of
professional historians whose books they know they can sell worldwide.
For how long, though? Linda Colley, a British historian with a chair at
Princeton, whose most recent books, Captives and The Ordeal of Elizabeth
Marsh, have a global cultural reach, is pessimistic. “With the decline of
language teaching in schools,” she wonders, “how many graduate students will
have the linguistic ability to immerse themselves in foreign archives?” What
will that do for Britain’s hegemony in writing the world’s history? Now that
really should be on the agenda for the History and Policy Unit.
Juliet Gardiner is the author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945. She is
writing a history of the 1930s for HarperCollins, to be published in 2009
