Richard J. Evans - Career As A Historian

Career As A Historian

As an undergraduate, Evans was much influenced by the History Workshop school, which was in its founding phase at Oxford while he was studying there, and by the English Marxist historians. He was also influenced by E.H. Carr's What Is History?

Evans was drawn to modern German history in the late 1960s because of what he saw as parallels between the Vietnam War and German imperialism. Evans first established his academic reputation on the Second Reich period of German history. He admired the work of Fritz Fischer, whom he credits with inspiring him to study modern German history. In the early 1970s, Evans travelled to Germany to research his dissertation, a study of the feminist movement in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Evans's dissertation was published as The Feminist Movement In Germany, 1894–1933 in 1976. Evans followed his study of German feminism by another book, The Feminists (1977) which traced the history of the feminist movement in North America, Australasia and Europe in the period 1840–1920. A theme of both books was the weakness of the middle class in Germany with a culture that laid great stress on traditional values such as honour, deference, and the need for women to obey men. For these reasons, Evans argued that both liberalism and feminism failed in Germany while flourishing elsewhere in the Western world

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 nineteenth 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.

Evans studied under Fischer in Hamburg in 1970–71, but came to disagree with the "Bielefeld School" of historians who argued for the Sonderweg thesis and saw the roots of Germany’s political development in the first half of the 20th century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848. Influenced by the New Left, Evans was a member of a group of young British historians who in the 1970s sought to examine German history in the Imperial period "from below". Evans argued that he and his associates wanted to highlight "the importance of the grass roots of politics and the everyday life and experience of ordinary people" Evans argued he sought the creation of a "new school of people's history", which was a result of a trend that "has taken place across a whole range of historical subjects, political opinions, and methodological approaches and has been expressed in many different ways". In 1978, as editor of a collection of essays by young British historians entitled Society And Politics In Wilhelmine Germany, he launched a critique of the ‘top-down’ approach of the Bielefeld School associated with Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka in regards to the Wilhelmine Germany. With the historians Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Evans emphasized instead the "self-mobilization from below" of key sociopolitical groups, as well as the modernity of National Socialism. In the 1980s, Evans organized ten international workshops on modern German social history at the University of East Anglia that did a good deal to refine these ideas, to pioneer research in this new historical field and, in six collections of papers, present it to an Anglophone readership.

Evans' two major research works are Death in Hamburg (1987), a study of class conflict and liberal government in nineteenth-century Germany using the example of Hamburg’s cholera epidemics and applying statistical methods to the exploration of social inequality in an industrializing society, and Rituals of Retribution (1996), a study of capital punishment in German history applying structural anthropological concepts to the rituals of public execution up to the mid-nineteenth century, and exploring the politics of the death penalty till its abolition by the GDR in 1987. In Death in Hamburg, Evans studied the cholera outbreak in Hamburg in 1892, which he concluded was caused by a failure in the medical system to safeguard against such an event. Another study in German social history was Tales from the German Underworld (1998), where Evans traced the life stories of four German criminals in the late 19th century, namely a homeless woman, a forger, a prostitute and a con-man. In Rituals of Retribution, Evans traced the history of capital punishment in Germany, and using the ideas of Michel Foucault, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias as his guide argued that opposition to the death penalty was strongest when liberalism was in the ascendancy, and support for capital punishment coincided when the right was in the ascendancy. Thus, in Evan's view, capital punishment in Germany was never a mere matter of law being disinterestedly applied, but was rather a form of state power being exercised. In addition, Evans examined such subjects as belief in witchcraft, torture, the last words of the executed, the psychology of mobs, varying forms of execution from the Thirty Years War to the 1980s, profiles of executioners, cruelty, and changing views towards the death penalty.

In the 1980s, Evans played a prominent role in the Historikerstreit. He took issue with the historical work and theories of Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Hagen Schulze, Imanuel Geiss and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom he described as German apologists seeking to white-wash the German past. Evans's views on the Historikerstreit were best summarized in his 1989 book, In Hitler's Shadow. Evans took Nolte—the central target of his book—to task for his defence of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order; his argument that the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Soviet Jews were a reasonable "preventive security" response to partisan attacks; his statements citing Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler by an alleged impending Soviet attack; and his claim that too much scholarship on the Shoah has been done by "biased" Jewish historians. In In Hitler's Shadow, Evans strongly criticized Nolte for statements which implied that perhaps there was something to Holocaust denial In addition, Evans took Nolte to task for his claim that the victors write history, and that the only reason why Nazi Germany is seen as evil is because Germany lost the war rather than because of the Holocaust. In addition, Evans attacked Nolte for claiming that a letter written to Neville Chamberlain from Chaim Weizmann on 3 September 1939 promising that the Jewish Agency would support the war effort was a "Jewish declaration of war" on Germany that justified "interning" all Jews in concentration camps as an attempt to justify the Holocaust Writing from a functionalist perspective, Evans took Hillgruber and Hildebrand to task in In Hitler's Shadow for their intentionalist theories about the Holocaust Evans denounced Stürmer for writing a laudatory biography of Otto von Bismarck, which he felt marked a regression to the Great man theory of history and an excessive focus on political history. Evans argued that a social historical approach was a better way of understanding German history. Concerning the attitudes of the German people towards the Holocaust, Evans wrote that he very much approved of Ian Kershaw's conclusion that "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference", namely that the German people were by and large indifferent towards the Holocaust. 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 Elton, all of whom Evans viewed as part of a neo-conservative historical trend. In the same book, Evans endorsed Martin Broszat's call for the "historicization" of the Third Reich as a "rational approach to Nazism" and as a "gain" to history. Though Evans had much to offer in the way of praise for the functionalist arguments of Hans Mommsen, he also wrote of Mommsen's work that "it was surely the case that the argument has now been carried a little too far".

One of Evans' 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. Evans suggested that the appeal of Holocaust denial had been much increased by the spread of post-modernist theories since the mid-1970s which declare that history is a construct, and that rationalist tradition of the West is a form of oppression 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.