Sir Ian Kershaw (born 29 April 1943) is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's foremost experts on Nazi Germany and noted for his biography of Adolf Hitler.

Kershaw worked at the University of Sheffield. He has called German historian Martin Broszat an "inspirational mentor" who did much to shape his understanding of Nazi Germany. Kershaw has served as historical adviser on numerous BBC documentaries, notably The Nazis: A Warning from History and War of the Century.

Background

Ian Kershaw was born on 29 April 1943 in Oldham, Lancashire, England, to Joseph Kershaw, a musician, and Alice (Robinson) Kershaw. He was educated at Counthill Grammar School, St Bede's College, Manchester, where he was taught by Father Geoffrey Burke, the University of Liverpool (BA), and Merton College, Oxford (DPhil). He was originally trained as a medievalist but turned to the study of modern German social history in the 1970s. At first, he was mainly concerned with the economic history of Bolton Abbey. As a lecturer in medieval history at Manchester, Kershaw learnt German to study the German peasantry in the Middle Ages. In 1972, he visited Bavaria and was shocked to hear the views of an old man he met in a Munich café who told him: "You English were so foolish. If only you had sided with us. Together we could have defeated Bolshevism and ruled the earth!"adding in for good measure that "The Jew is a louse!" As a result of this incident, Kershaw became keen to learn how and why ordinary people in Germany could support Nazism.

His wife, Dame Betty Kershaw, is a former professor of nursing and dean of the School of Nursing Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Bavaria Project

In 1975, Kershaw joined Martin Broszat's "Bavaria Project". During his work, Broszat encouraged Kershaw to examine how ordinary people viewed Hitler. As a result of his work on the project, Kershaw wrote his first book on Nazi Germany, The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich, which was first published in German in 1980 as '. 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 () was Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich. In this 1983 book, Kershaw examined the experience of the Nazi era 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 subjects as ordinary Bavarians:

Kershaw went on to write in his preface:

In a 2008 interview, Kershaw lists as his major intellectual influences Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen, Alan Milward, Timothy Mason, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, William Carr, and Jeremy Noakes. In the same interview, Kershaw expressed strong approval of Mason's "Primacy of Politics" concept, in which it was German Big Business that served the Nazi regime rather than the other way around, against the orthodox Marxist "Primacy of Economics" concept. Despite his praise and admiration for Mason, in the 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw was highly sceptical of Mason's "Flight into War" theory of an economic crisis in 1939 forcing the Nazi regime into war.

In the () of 1986–1989, Kershaw followed Broszat in criticising the work and views of Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom Kershaw saw as attempting to whitewash the German past in various ways. In the 1989 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw devoted a chapter towards rebutting the views of Nolte, Hillgruber, Fest, Hildebrand, and Stürmer. In regard to the debate between those who regard Nazism as a type of totalitarianism (and thus having more in common with the Soviet Union) versus those who regard Nazism as a type of fascism (and thus having more in common with Fascist Italy), 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. Writing of the debate, Kershaw finds the moderate approach of Jürgen Kocka the most satisfactory historical explanation for why the Nazi era occurred. In the 2000 edition of The Nazi Dictatorship, Kershaw wrote a scathing criticism of Gerhard Ritter's claim that one "madman" (i.e. Hitler) "single-handedly" caused the Second World War in Europe, and added that he found the historical approach of Ritter's arch-enemy Fritz Fischer to be a far better way of understanding and reckoning with German history. Along the same lines, Kershaw criticised the 1946 statement by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke that Nazism was just a particularly unfortunate () of history.

Kershaw was later in a 2003 essay to criticise Ritter and Meinecke, stating that by their promotion of the theory or by blaming everything upon Hitler, they were seeking to whitewash the German past.

With regard to the Nazi foreign policy debate between "globalists" such as Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, Jochen Thies, Gunter Moltman and Gerhard Weinberg, who argue that Germany aimed at world conquest, and the "continentalists" such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, who argue that Germany aimed only at the conquest of Europe, Kershaw tends towards the "continental" position. Kershaw agrees with the thesis that Hitler did formulate a programme for foreign policy based on an alliance with Britain to achieve the destruction of the Soviet Union, but has argued that a British lack of interest doomed the project, thus leading to the situation in 1939, where Hitler went to war with Britain, the country he wanted as an ally, not as an enemy, and the country he wanted as an enemy, the Soviet Union, as his ally. At the same time, Kershaw sees considerable merit in the work of such historians as Timothy Mason, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat and Wolfgang Schieder, who argue that Hitler had no "programme" in foreign policy, and instead contend that his foreign policy was simply a kneejerk reaction to domestic pressures in the economy and his need to maintain his popularity.

Regarding the historical debates about () in German society, Kershaw has argued that there are two approaches to the question, one of which he calls the fundamentalist (dealing with those committed to overthrowing the Nazi regime) and the other the societal (dealing with forms of dissent in "everyday life"). In Kershaw's view, Broszat's () concept works well in an approach, but works less well in the field of high politics, and by focusing only on the "effect" of one's actions, fails to consider the crucial element of the "intention" behind one's actions. Kershaw has argued that the term should be used only for those working for the total overthrow of the Nazi system, and those engaging in behaviour that was counter to the regime's wishes without seeking to overthrow the regime should be included under the terms opposition and dissent, depending upon their motives and actions. In Kershaw's opinion, there were three bands ranging from dissent to opposition to resistance. Kershaw has used the Edelweiss Pirates as an example of a group whose behaviour initially fell under dissent, and who advanced from there to opposition and finally to resistance.

In Kershaw's view, there was much dissent and opposition within German society, but outside of the working class, very little resistance. Although Kershaw has argued that the (immunity [against indoctrination]) concept has much merit, he concluded that the Nazi regime had a broad basis of support and it is correct to speak of "resistance without the people".

The debate in the late 1980s between Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer over Broszat's call for the "historicization" of Nazism, Kershaw wrote that he agreed with Friedländer that the Nazi period could not be treated as a "normal" period of history, but he felt that historians should approach the Nazi period as they would any other period of history. In support of Broszat, Kershaw wrote that an approach to German history, provided that it did not lose sight of Nazi crimes, had much to offer as a way of understanding how those crimes occurred.

During the "Goldhagen Controversy" of 1996, Kershaw took the view that his friend, Hans Mommsen, had "destroyed" Daniel Goldhagen's arguments about a culture of "eliminationist antisemitism" in Germany during their frequent debates on German TV. Kershaw wrote that he agreed with Eberhard Jäckel's assessment that Hitler's Willing Executioners was "simply a bad book". Though Kershaw had little positive to say about Goldhagen, he wrote that he felt that Norman Finkelstein's attack on Goldhagen had been over-the-top and did little to help historical understanding. Kershaw later went on to recommend Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn's extremely critical assessment of Goldhagen's book, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth; stating that "Finkelstein and Birn provide a devastating critique of Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic and misleading interpretation of the Holocaust. Their contribution to the debate is, in my view, indispensable".

Structuralist views

Like Broszat, Kershaw sees the structures of the Nazi state as far more important than the personality of Hitler (or any one else) as an explanation for the way Nazi Germany developed. Kershaw subscribes to the view argued by Broszat and the German historian 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 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 each of the "power blocs" was divided into factions). In Kershaw's opinion, the more "radical" blocs such as the SS/police and the Nazi Party gained increasing ascendancy over the other blocs after the 1936 economic crisis, and then increased their power at the expense of the other blocs.

left|upright|thumb|[[Adolf Hitler, the subject of several of Kershaw's books]]

For Kershaw, the real significance of Hitler lies not in him, but rather in the German people's perception of him. 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. Kershaw rejects the great man theory of history and has criticised those who seek to explain everything that happened in Nazi Germany as the result of Hitler's will and intentions. 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 and to seek to explain the fate of sixty-eight million people solely through the prism of one man is in Kershaw's opinion a flawed position.

Kershaw wrote about the problems of an excessive focus on Hitler that "even the best biographies have seemed at times in danger of elevating Hitler's personal power to a level where the history of Germany between 1933 and 1945 becomes reduced to little more than an expression of the dictator's will".

Functionalism–intentionalism debate

In the functionalism versus intentionalism debate, Kershaw has argued for a synthesis of the two schools, though leaning towards the functionalist school. Despite some disagreements, Kershaw has called Mommsen a "good personal friend" and an "important further vital stimulus to my own work on Nazism". Kershaw views the Holocaust not as a plan, as argued by the intentionalists, but rather a process caused by the "cumulative radicalization" of the Nazi state as articulated by the functionalists. Citing the work of the American historian Christopher Browning in his biography of Hitler, Kershaw argues that in the period 1939–1941 the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was a "territorial solution", that such plans as the Nisko Plan and Madagascar Plan were serious and only in the latter half of 1941 did the phrase "Final Solution" come to refer to genocide. This view of the Holocaust as a process rather than a plan is the antithesis of the extreme intentionalist approach as advocated by Lucy Dawidowicz, who argues that Hitler had decided upon genocide as early as November 1918, and that everything he did was directed towards that goal.

"Working Towards the Führer" concept

Kershaw disagrees with Mommsen's "Weak Dictator" thesis: the idea that Hitler was a relatively unimportant player in Nazi Germany. He has agreed with his idea that Hitler did not play much of a role in the day-to-day administration of the government 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:

<blockquote>Everyone who has the opportunity to observe it knows that the Fuhrer can hardly dictate from above everything which he intends to realize sooner or later. On the contrary, up till now, everyone with a post in the new Germany has worked best when he has, so to speak, worked towards the Fuhrer. Very often and in many spheres, it has been the case—in previous years as well—that individuals have simply waited for orders and instructions. Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact, it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Fuhrer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Fuhrer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future, one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.</blockquote>

Kershaw has argued that in Nazi Germany officials of the German state and Party bureaucracy usually took the initiative in initiating policy to meet Hitler's perceived wishes, or alternatively attempted to turn into policy Hitler's often loosely and indistinctly phrased wishes. 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, he has argued that Hitler was a "lazy dictator", an indifferent dictator who was really not interested in involving himself much in the daily running of Nazi Germany. The only exceptions were the areas of foreign policy and military decisions, both areas that Hitler increasingly involved himself in from the late 1930s.

In a 1993 essay "Working Towards the Führer", Kershaw argued that the German and Soviet dictatorships had more differences than similarities. Kershaw argued that Hitler was a very unbureaucratic leader who was highly averse to paperwork, in marked contrast to Joseph Stalin. Kershaw argued that Stalin was highly involved in the running of the Soviet Union, in contrast to Hitler whose involvement in day-to-day decision making was limited, infrequent and capricious. Kershaw argued that the Soviet regime, despite its extreme brutality and ruthlessness, was basically rational in its goal of seeking to modernise a backward country and had no equivalent of the "cumulative radicalization" towards increasingly irrational goals that Kershaw sees as characteristic of Nazi Germany. In Kershaw's opinion, Stalin's power corresponded to Max Weber's category of bureaucratic authority, whereas Hitler's power corresponded to Weber's category of charismatic authority. In Kershaw's opinion, Hitler's vision of a racially cleansed provided the impetus for German officials to carry out increasingly extreme measures to win his approval, which ended with the Holocaust.

For Kershaw, Hitler held absolute power in Nazi Germany due to the "erosion of collective government in Germany", but his power over domestic politics became more challenging to exercise due to his preoccupation with military affairs, and 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".

Later career

Kershaw retired from full-time teaching in 2008. In the 2010s, he wrote two books on the wider history of Europe for The Penguin History of Europe series: To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 and Rollercoaster: Europe, 1950–2017.

Honours and memberships

  • Fellow of the British Academy
  • Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1994
  • Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, 2000, for Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane)
  • Co-winner of the British Academy Book Prize, 2001
  • Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
  • Member of the Historical Association
  • Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
  • 2002, appointed Knight Bachelor in the 2002 Birthday Honours for services to History
  • 2004, a collection of scholarly essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw was published.
  • 2005, Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography for Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis and the Road to War
  • 2012, Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (together with Timothy D. Snyder)
  • 2018, Charlemagne Medal

Works

  • Bolton Priory Rentals and Ministers; Accounts, 1473–1539 (ed.) (Leeds, 1969)
  • Bolton Priory. The Economy of a Northern Monastery (Oxford, 1973)
  • 'The Great Famine and agrarian crisis in England 1315-22' in Past & Present, 59 (1973)
  • "The Persecution of the Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich" pp.&nbsp;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), online free to borrow
  • The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987, rev. 2001), online
  • Weimar. Why did German Democracy Fail? (ed.) (London, 1990),
  • Hitler: A Profile in Power (London, 1991, rev. 2001)
  • "'Improvised genocide?' The Emergence of the 'Final Solution' in the 'Wargenthau" pp.&nbsp;51–78 from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Volume 2, December 1992
  • "Working Towards the Führer: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship", pp.&nbsp;103–118 from Contemporary European History, Volume 2, Issue No. 2, 1993; reprinted on pp.&nbsp;231–252 from The Third Reich edited by Christian Leitz, London: Blackwell, 1999,
  • Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (ed. with Moshe Lewin) (Cambridge, 1997),
  • Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998),
  • Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London, 2000),
  • The Bolton Priory Compotus 1286–1325 (ed. with David M. Smith) (London, 2001)
  • Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the British Road to War (London, 2004),
  • "Europe's Second Thirty Years War" pp.&nbsp;10–17 from History Today, Volume 55, Issue # 9, September 2005
  • Death in the Bunker (Penguin Books, 2005),
  • Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 (London, 2007),
  • Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (Yale, 2008),
  • Hitler (one-volume abridgment of Hitler 1889–1936 and Hitler 1936–1945; London, 2008),
  • Luck of the Devil The Story of Operation Valkyrie (London: Penguin Books, 2009. Published for the first time as a separate book, Luck of the Devil is taken from Ian Kershaw's bestselling Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis),
  • The End: Hitler's Germany 1944–45 (Allen Lane, 2011),
  • To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914–1949 (Allen Lane, 2015),
  • Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950–2017 (Allen Lane, 2018), ; The American edition is titled The Global Age: Europe, 1950–2017, eBook
  • Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe (Penguin Press, 2022)

Notes

References

Sources

Further reading

  • Kershaw, Ian, Working Towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw, edited by Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk, Manchester University Press, 2003, .
  • Lukacs, John, The Hitler of History, New York : Vintage Books, 1998, 1997, .
  • Marrus, Michael, The Holocaust in History, Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987, .
  • Pozzi, Enrico. "Può suicidarsi una nazione? Ian Kershaw sugli ultimi 10 mesi della Germania nazista" (extended review of The End), Il Corpo, January 2012, Suicidio finale della Germania di Hitler: luglio '44 - maggio '45 | IL CORPO | Rivista in Progress

On Kershaw

  • The Road to Destruction, Richard Gott on Hitler: Nemesis
  • Sir Ian Kershaw: Dissecting Hitler
  • Review of Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris
  • Review of Fateful Choices by Gerhard Weinberg

Kershaw interviewed

  • Interview with Ian Kershaw on the Penguin website
  • Interview with Ian Kershaw
  • Interview with Kershaw
  • Interview with Ian Kershaw

By Kershaw

  • Beware the Moral High Ground
  • Review of Hitler's Library