Rewriting German History

Rewriting German History is a Festschrift for Sir Richard Evans on the occasion of his retirement as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. With the exception of Geoff Eley, Evans’ contemporary, and author of the introductory essay, the editors and contributors are Evans’ former PhD students, ranging from one of the very first, Lynn Abrams, who completed her PhD in 1989, to one of the very last, Rachel Hoffman, who finished hers some 25 years later. Many are now incumbents of prestigious posts, including the two aforementioned, holder of the chair of modern history at Glasgow University and Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge. Geoff Eley introduces the volume by asking whether there has been a distinctive British approach to German history. Eley is a master of the generationally and socially contextualized historiographical survey, and this chapter is no exception. Along the way, he deftly locates the significance and highlights of Evans’ career. For the present reviewer, as someone half a generation behind Eley and Evans, the same age as their oldest PhD students, it was a pleasure to see the German History scene as it existed when I entered the profession, sketched in with a generous and accurate eye. It seems fair to argue that in the 1970s and 1980s, British historians were at the forefront of a series of interlinked challenges to orthodoxies in German history writing, strengthening moves within Germany towards social history and away from the history of high politics and encouraging the embrace of the history of the everyday, of women’s history and more. In all of this, as Eley notes, Evans could claim to be the emblematic figure.

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