Ian Kershaw

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Sir Ian Kershaw (born April 29, 1943 in Oldham, Lancashire, England) is a British historian of 20th-century Germany, whose work has chiefly focused on the period of the Third Reich. He is noted for his monumental biography of Adolf Hitler, which has been called "soberly objective."^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Bavaria Project 3 Structuralist views 4 The "Working Towards the Führer" model 5 Honours and memberships 6 Published work 7 References 8 External links 9 See also

[edit] Biography

Educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, the University of Liverpool (BA) and Merton College, Oxford (D.Phil), Kershaw originally trained as a medievalist but turned to the study of modern German social history in the 1970s. He was the leading disciple of the late West German historian Martin Broszat, and (until his retirement) professor at the University of Sheffield. Kershaw served as historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning From History and War of the Century. He taught a module entitled 'Germans against Hitler'.^[2]

His wife Dame Betty Kershaw was a Dean at Sheffield.

[edit] Bavaria Project

In the 1970s, Kershaw worked on Martin Broszat's "Bavaria Project", which resulted in his first book on the Third Reich, The 'Hitler Myth': Image and Reality in the Third Reich which was first published in German in 1980 as Der Hitler-Mythos: Volksmeinung und Propaganda im Dritten Reich. This book examined the "Hitler cult" in Germany, how it was developed by Joseph Goebbels, what social groups the Hitler Myth appealed to and how it rose and fell.

Also arising from the "Bavaria Project" and Kershaw's work in the field of Alltagsgeschichte was Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. In this 1983 book, Kershaw examined the experience of the Third Reich at the grass-roots in Bavaria. Kershaw showed how ordinary people reacted to the Nazi dictatorship, looking at how people conformed to the regime and to the extent and limits of dissent. Kershaw described his subject as ordinary Bavarians, or as he referred to: "the muddled majority, neither full-hearted Nazis nor outright opponents, whose attitudes at one and the same time betray signs of Nazi ideological penetratation and yet show the clear limits of propaganda manipulation".^[3] Kershaw wrote in his preface "I should like to think that I had been around at the time I would have been a convinced anti-Nazi engaged in the underground resistance fight. However, I know really that I would have been as confused and felt as helpless as most of the people I am writing about".^[4]

Kershaw argued that Goebbels failed to create the Volksgemeinschaft of Nazi propaganda, and that most Bavarians were far more interested in their day to day lives than in politics during the Third Reich.^[5] Kershaw concluded that the majority of Bavarians were either anti-Semitic or more commonly simply did not care about what was happening to the Jews.^[6] Kershaw also concluded that there was a fundamental difference between the anti-Semitism of the majority of ordinary people, who disliked Jews, and the ideological anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party, who hated Jews.^[6] Kershaw found that the majority of Bavarians disapproved of the violence of Kristallnacht, and that despite the efforts of the Nazis, continued to maintain social relations with the members of the Bavarian Jewish community.^[4] Kershaw documented numerous campaigns on the part of the Nazi Party to increase anti-Semitic hatred, and noted that the overwhelming majority of anti-Semitic activities in Bavaria were the work of a small number of committed Nazi Party members.^[4] Overall, Kershaw noted that the popular mood towards Jews was indifference to their fate.^[4] Kershaw argued that during World War II, most Bavarians were vaguely aware of the Holocaust, but that were vastly more concerned about and interested in the war than about the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".^[4] Kershaw made the notable claim that "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".^[7]

Kershaw’s assessment that most Bavarians, and by implication Germans were “indifferent” to the Shoah faced criticism from the Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka and the Canadian historian Michael Kater. Kater contended that Kershaw downplayed the extent of popular anti-Semitism, and that through admitting that most of the “spontaneous” anti-Semitic actions of Nazi Germany were staged, argued that because these actions involved substantial numbers of Germans, it is wrong to see the extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazis as coming solely from above.^[8] Kulka argued that most Germans were more anti-Semitic than Kershaw portrayed them in Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, and that rather than “indifference” argued that “passive complicity” would be a better term to describe the reaction of the German people to the Shoah.^[9]

In the Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) of 1986 to 1989, Kershaw followed Broszat in criticizing the work and views of Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom Kershaw saw attempting to white-wash the German past in various ways. In regards to the debate between those who regard National Socialism as a type of totalitarianism versus those who regard Nazism as a type of fascism, Kershaw, though feeling that the totalitarianism approach is not without value, has argued that in essence, Nazism should be viewed as a type of fascism, albeit fascism of a very radical type.^[10]

[edit] Structuralist views

Like Broszat, Kershaw sees the structures of the Nazi state as far more important than the personality of Hitler (or any other individual for that matter) as explanation for the way Nazi Germany developed. In particular, Kershaw subscribes to the view argued by Broszat and Hans Mommsen that Nazi Germany was a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies in perpetual power struggles with each other. In Kershaw's view, the Nazi dictatorship was not a totalitarian monolith, but rather comprised an unstable coalition of several blocs in a "power cartel" comprising the NSDAP, big business, the German state bureaucracy, the Army and SS/police agencies (and moreover, each of the “power blocs” in turn were divided into several factions).^[11] In Kershaw's opinion, the more "radical" blocs such as the SS/police and the Nazi Party gained increasing ascendency over the other blocs after the 1936 economic crisis, and then onwards increased their power at the expense of the other blocs.^[12]

For Kershaw, the real significance of Hitler lies not in him but in how the German people saw him.^[13] In his biography of Hitler, Kershaw presented him as the ultimate “unperson”; a boring, pedestrian man devoid of even the “negative greatness” attributed to him by Joachim Fest.^[14] Kershaw has no time for the Great Man theory of history and has criticised those who seek to explain everything that happened in the Third Reich as the result of Hitler’s will and intentions.^[15] Kershaw has argued that it is absurd to seek to explain German history in the Nazi era solely through Hitler as Germany had sixty-eight million people during the Third Reich, and to seek to explain the fate of sixty-eight million people solely though the prism of one man is in Kershaw’s opinion a flawed position. Kershaw’s biography of Hitler is an examination of Hitler’s power; how he obtained it and how he maintained it.^[16] Kershaw has argued that Hitler's leadership is a model example of Max Weber's theory of Charismatic leadership.^[17]

In the Functionalism versus intentionalism debate, Kershaw has argued for a synthesis of the two schools, though Kershaw leans towards the functionalist school. Kershaw has argued in his two-volume biography of Hitler that Hitler did play a decisive role in the development of policies of genocide, but also argued that many of the measures that led to the Holocaust were undertaken by many lower-ranking officials without direct orders from Hitler in the expectation that such steps would win them favor.^[18] Though Kershaw does not deny the radical anti-Semitism of the Nazis, he favors Mommsen’s view of the Holocaust being caused by the “culminative radicalization” of the Third Reich caused by the endless bureaucratic power struggles and a turn towards increasingly radical anti-Semitism within the Nazi elite.

In recent years Kershaw has come to form a thesis based on the ideas of both traditions of Nazi theory.

[edit] The "Working Towards the Führer" model

Kershaw disagrees with Mommsen's "Weak Dictator" thesis: the idea that Hitler was a relatively unimportant player in the Third Reich. However, he has agreed with his idea that Hitler did not play much of a role in the day-to-day administration of Nazi Germany. Kershaw's way of explaining this paradox is his theory of "Working Towards the Führer", the phrase being taken from a 1934 speech by the Prussian civil servant Werner Willikens.^[19] Kershaw has argued that in Nazi Germany, officials of both the German state and Party bureaucracy usually took the initiative in beginning policy to meet Hitler's perceived wishes, or alternatively attempted to turn into policy Hitler’s often loosely and indistinctly phrased wishes.^[19] Though Kershaw does agree that Hitler possessed the powers that the "Master of the Third Reich" thesis championed by Norman Rich and Karl Dietrich Bracher would suggest, Kershaw has argued that Hitler was a "Lazy Dictator"; an indifferent dictator who really did not have the interest to involve himself much in the daily running of Nazi Germany.^[20] The only exceptions were the areas of foreign policy and military decisions, both areas that Hitler increasingly involved himself in from the late 1930s.^[20]

Thus, for Kershaw Nazi Germany was both a monocracy (rule of one) and polycracy (rule of many). Hitler held absolute power but did not choose to exercise it very much; the rival fiefdoms of the Nazi state fought each other and attempted to carry out Hitler's vaguely worded wishes and dimly defined orders by "Working Towards the Führer".

[edit] Honours and memberships

• Fellow of the British Academy
• Co-Winner of the British Academy Book Prize, 2001 ^[21]
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Member of the Historical Association
• Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin^[22]
• 2002, Knighthood for Services to History^[23]

[edit] Published work

• Bolton Priory Rentals and Ministers; Accounts, 1473–1539, (ed.) (Leeds, 1969)
• Bolton Priory. The Economy of a Northern Monastery, (Oxford, 1973).
• "The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich" pages 261-289 from Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, Volume 26, 1981.
• Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. Bavaria, 1933–45, (Oxford, 1983, rev. 2002)
• The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, (London, 1985, 4th ed., 2000) ISBN 0-340-76028-1
• The 'Hitler Myth'. Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987, rev. 2001). ISBN 0-19-280206-2
• Weimar. Why did German Democracy Fail?, (ed.) (London, 1990) ISBN 0-312-04470-4
• Hitler: A Profile in Power, (London, 1991, rev. 2001)
• Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, (ed. with Moshe Lewin) (Cambridge, 1997) ISBN 0-521-56521-9
• Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, (London, 1998) ISBN 0-393-32035-9
• Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, (London, 2000) ISBN 0-393-32252-1
• The Bolton Priory Compotus, 1286-1325, (ed. with David Smith) (London, 2001)
• Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the British Road to War, (London, 2004) ISBN 0-7139-9717-6
• Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 (London, 2007) ISBN 1-5942-0123-4
• Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (Yale, 2008) ISBN 0-3001-2427-9
• Hitler (one-volume abridgment of Hitler 1889–1936 and Hitler 1936–1945; London, 2008) ISBN 1846140692

[edit] References

• Working Towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, edited by Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk, Manchester University Press, 2003.
• Marrus, Michael The Holocaust in History, Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987.
• Snowman, Daniel "Ian Kershaw" pages 18-20 from History Today Volume 51, Issue 7, July 2001.
• Kershaw, Ian (2008-10-19). "The writing life: sometimes history just depends on that next cup of coffee". Washington Post Book World: p. 11. 

[edit] External links

• Ian Kershaw's website at the University of Sheffield
• Interview with Ian Kershaw on the Penguin website
• The road to destruction, Richard Gott on Hitler: Nemesis
• Ian Kershaw interviewed at Vision
• Sir Ian Kershaw: Dissecting Hitler
• Review of Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris
• Review of MAKING FRIENDS WITH HITLER Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War
• Review of Hitler's Library by Ian Kershaw.
• Interview with Ian Kershaw
• The Germans Are Coming, Haaretz

[edit] See also

• List of Adolf Hitler books
• Saul Friedländer
• Daniel Goldhagen