Richard J. Evans
Sir Richard John Evans FRSL FRHistS FBA FLSW (born September 29, 1947) is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008). Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until his retirement in 2014, and President of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He has been Provost of Gresham College in London since 2014. Evans was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours.[2][3]
Richard J. Evans
Ieuan Trefor Evans, Evelyn (Jones) Evans
The women's movement in Germany, 1890–1919 (1972)
Tony Nicholls[1]
Early life[edit]
Richard Evans was born at Woodford, Essex, to Ieuan Trefor Evans and Evelyn (Jones) Evans, who both came from Wales.[4] He was educated at Forest School, Jesus College, Oxford (MA), and St Antony's College, Oxford (DPhil). In a 2004 interview, he stated that frequent visits to Wales during his childhood inspired both an interest in history and a sense of "otherness".[1] He said one reason that he was drawn to the study of modern German history in the late 1960s was his identification of parallels between the Vietnam War and German imperialism. He admired the work of Fritz Fischer, whom he credits with inspiring him to study modern German history.[1]
Historian of Germany[edit]
Evans first established his academic reputation with his publications on the German Empire. 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 20th century.[1] It was later 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 from 1840 to 1920.[1]
A theme of both books was the weakness of German middle-class culture and its susceptibility to the appeal of nationalism. Evans argued that both liberalism and feminism failed in Germany for those reasons despite flourishing elsewhere in the Western world.[1]
Evans' main interest is social history, and he is much influenced by the Annales school.[1] He largely agrees with Fischer that 19th-century German social development paved the way for the rise of the Third Reich, but Evans takes pains to point out that many other possibilities could have happened.[5] For Evans, the values of the 19th-century German middle class contained the already germinating seeds of National Socialism.[1]
Evans studied under Fischer in Hamburg in 1970 and 1971 but came to disagree with the "Bielefeld School" of historians, who argued for the Sonderweg thesis that saw the roots of Germany's political development in the first half of the 20th century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848. Following a contemporary trend that opposed the previous "great man" theory of history, Evans was a member of a group of young British historians who in the 1970s sought to examine German history during the German Empire "from below".[6] These scholars highlighted "the importance of the grass-roots of politics and the everyday life and experience of ordinary people".[7] "History is about people, and their relationships. It's about the perennial question of 'how much free will do people have in building their own lives, and making a future", Evans has said.[8] He says he supported 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".[7]
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 regarding Wilhelmine Germany. With the historians Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Evans instead emphasized 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.[9]
Among Evans' major research works are Death in Hamburg (1987), a study of class conflict and liberal government in 19th-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-19th century and exploring the politics of the death penalty until its abolition by East Germany 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 conman.[1]
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 Evans' 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.[1]
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.[1]
In the 1980s, Evans was a conspicuous figure in the Historikerstreit, a controversy surrounding the historical work and theories of German historians Ernst Nolte, Joachim Fest, Andreas Hillgruber, Michael Stürmer, Hagen Schulze, Imanuel Geiss and Klaus Hildebrand, all of whom Evans considered German apologists attempting to white-wash the German past. Evans' views on the Historikerstreit were set forth in his 1989 book, In Hitler's Shadow. In that book, Evans took issue with Nolte's acceptance of the Commissar Order as a legitimate military order; with Nolte's argument that the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Ukrainian Jews were a justifiable "preventive security" response to Soviet partisan attacks; his description (citing Viktor Suvorov) of Operation Barbarossa as a "preventative war" forced on Hitler by an impending Soviet attack; and his complaints that much scholarship on the Shoah expressed the views of "biased" Jewish historians.[10]
Evans characterized Nolte's statements as crossing the line into Holocaust denial[11] and he singled out Nolte's rationalization that since the victors write history, the only reason why the Third Reich is seen as evil is because it lost the war.[12]
Evans also denounced, as an attempt to justify the Holocaust, Nolte's claim that Chaim Weizmann's letter of 3 September 1939 to Neville Chamberlain, promising that the Jewish Agency would support the war effort constituted "Jewish declaration of war" on Germany that justified the pre-emptive internment of Jews in concentration camps.[13]
In his 1989 book, In Hitler's Shadow, Evans also criticised the intentionalist theories of Hillgruber and Hildebrand.[14] and criticized Stürmer's excessive focus on political history and overlooking of social conditions, as a regression to the outmoded great man theory of history.[15] For his part Evans praised Sir Ian Kershaw, who wrote that "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference".[16] (It was Evans who first suggested to Kershaw that he undertake to write a biography of Adolf Hitler.[17])
Evans' In Defence of History defends the discipline of history against postmodernist skepticism of its value. The limitations of our ability to understand and learn from the past notwithstanding, it is still possible, he argues, to reconstruct past events. Evans suggests that the spread in the 1980s and 1990s of post-modernist theories, which declare that history is solely the construct of the historian and depict the rationalist tradition of the West as a form of oppression, was not necessarily left-wing or progressive, for by denying the possibility of accessing past facts, it had also done much to increase the appeal of Holocaust denial.[18]
Regius Professor of Modern History[edit]
In 2008, Evans was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge (in 2010 the word "Modern" was removed from the title by royal decree). The post is a royal appointment in the gift of the Prime Minister of the day and dates back to 1724. Previous holders of the title have included John Dalberg-Acton (1895), Herbert Butterfield (1963), Geoffrey Elton (1983), Patrick Collinson (1988) and Quentin Skinner (1998). Evans is the first historian to have to apply for the post and be interviewed by a Board of Electors, including Cambridge's Vice-Chancellor, Alison Richard, and representatives of the history faculty and the university, as well as external assessors from Yale, Harvard, Oxford and London. The board selected a shortlist of four, each of whom was asked to give a presentation to the entire Cambridge history faculty. The shortlist of four was then reduced to two, whom the board interviewed, resulting in the board's recommendation of Evans to the Prime Minister and in the issue of a Royal Warrant for his appointment.[41] As well as serving as Regius Professor, Evans served as chairman of the history faculty from October 2008 to 30 September 2010.
Evans is used to combining administration with research. At Birkbeck College, London, where he worked before Cambridge, he acted as Master of the college when Baroness Blackstone left suddenly to become Tony Blair's first higher education minister. On 27 January 2010 he was elected to the position of President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, serving the statutory seven-year term of office until retiring from the post on 30 September 2017. During this period he focused on building up the college as a centre of contemporary culture, with art exhibitions by Richard Deacon and Anthony Green, and talks by Martin Amis and Neil MacGregor, among many others. In 2014 he was appointed Provost of Gresham College, in the City of London, an institution founded in 1597 to provide free lectures to Londoners. There are now over 2,000 lectures on the college's website and the 130 lectures a year are all live-streamed.
Other contributions[edit]
Evans has been co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History since 2000, and has also served as Deputy Chair of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, a UK government non-departmental public body formed to make recommendations to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on the restitution of cultural objects looted during the Nazi era. He has been a judge of the Wolfson History Prize, the UK's richest history book award, for over twenty years.
1978 Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
1988 Wolfson History Prize
1989 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine
1993 Civic Medal for Arts and Sciences of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
1994 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History
1998 Honorary Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford
1999 Honorary Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
2010 Founding Fellow, Learned Society of Wales (FLSW)
2011 Honorary Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
2012 Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of London
2015 Honorary Doctor of Letters, University of Oxford
2015 British Academy Leverhulme Prize and Medal
2017 Honorary Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge