Re: [Marxism] Gluckstein, Abraham, the Nazis and big business

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ian wrote:
> SWP (British) stalwart Donny Gluckstein's book 'Nazis, Capitalism and the
> Working Class' (1999), from what I've heard, presents a theory similar to
> that advanced by David Abraham in his earlier book 'The Collapse of the
> Weimar Republic' (1981), namely that big business in essence placed the
> Nazis in power. Abraham's thesis was comprehensively discredited, it
> seems, by a range of historians (see Richard J. Evans - 'In Defence of
> History', pp116-123 - Evans has some credibility not least because of his
> pivotal role in utterly discrediting the neo-fascist historian David
> Irving in the highly publicised trial, on highly rationalist grounds).

Evans has a beef with Marxism and postmodernism apparently. I am not that
familiar with his work, but a cursory look into Jstor is rather unsettling.
In his article "German Women and the Triumph of Hitler" (The Journal of
Modern History, Vol. 48, No. 1, Mar., 1976), Evans blames women for
Hitler's victory rather than big business. (He argues that a collective
crush on Hitler explains the rise of Nazism.) Myself, I'll stick with big
business.

I know Abraham's name from another tiff he was involved with:

The Nation
February 16, 1985
BOOKS & THE ARTS.

Footnotes to History

JON WIENER

Two senior historians, one at Yale University and one at the University of
California, Berkeley, have devoted their time and professional reputations
over the past year to destroying the career of a young Marxist historian,
David Abraham, whose book, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (Princeton
University Press), has been found to contain numerous errors. In the past,
debates among scholars have occasionally been vicious, but the Abraham
controversy is more than a debate: it's a vendetta, and it's unprecedented.
Abraham's critics, led by Professors Henry A. Turner Jr. of Yale and Gerald
A. Feldman of Berkeley, seek not just to expose Abraham's errors but also
to make sure that he will never get another academic job and to persuade
his publisher to withdraw his book; they've also argued that the University
of Chicago should rescind his Ph.D.

Lawrence Stone, Dodge Professor of History at Princeton, comments, "I've
never seen a witch hunt like this in forty years in two countries." Natalie
Zemon Davis, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton, has seen
something like it before: "In some ways it's reminiscent of McCarthyite
hysteria."

These events reveal much about the position of Marxism in the history
profession today, about the debate between old-fashioned positivists and
interpretive historians on where historical truth lies, and about the
current state of ethics in academia.

In the course of researching and writing his book, Abraham misdated and
misattributed one document, mistranslated another document in a way that
distorted its meaning and treated a paraphrase of a third document as a
quotation. He has also been accused of making dozens of lesser mistakes.
Abraham has acknowledged his errors in print and has apologized for them.
His critics, however, have not been satisfied. As historian Carl Schorske
remarks, "They're not saying, 'Here's a serious error'; they're saying,
'Here's a lie, and I'll tell you why this guy lies.' " In accusing Abraham
of fraud, his critics imply that he had to fabricate documents because his
Marxist interpretation could not be sustained by the truth.

Stone, whose major work is in the hotly contested field of
seventeenth-century English social history, disputes Feldman's claim that
good historians do not make mistakes, especially in their archival
research. "When you work in the archives," he says, "you're far from home,
you're bored, you're in a hurry, you're scribbling like crazy. You're bound
to make mistakes. I don't believe any scholar in the Western world has
impeccable footnotes. Archival research is a special case of the general
messiness of life."

Indeed, there is ample evidence that David Abraham is not the single bad
apple in a barrel of virtuous footnoters. The publishers of the great
British historian Sir Lewis Namier planned a second edition of his masterly
Structure of Politics at the Accession of George 3rd. When editors checked
the footnotes, Stone says, "I was told they found endless, constant, minor
errors." Recently Emmanuel Le Roy Ladune, France's most celebrated
historian, has been criticized by the Vatican librarian for mistranslations
and other errors in Montaillou.

Perhaps Abraham's mistakes are more serious than those made by other
archival researchers? "I can't think of another case in which an author's
footnotes have been systematically checked in the archives," Stone says.
"David's errors seem at the moment to be worse than others', but we can't
be sure because nobody else's have been subjected to this kind of
systematic scrutiny." Feldman and Turner disagree; each reports that his
own work has been checked and upheld.

The campaign against Abraham was begun by Turner, a bitter opponent of
Marxist history who had been working for years on a defense of German
businessmen in the period immediately preceding the rise of Hitler. Turner
became furious after hearing Abraham's work praised at a March 1983
colloquium on Weimar history at Harvard University. He wrote a letter
attacking the book and

sent it, along with photocopies of original documents that he said Abraham
had misquoted, to colleagues in the United States and West Germany. One of
the recipients, Arno Mayer, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at
Princeton University, wrote Turner protesting his private campaign against
Abraham. Feldman, the author of Iron and Steel in the German Inflation,
1916-1923, who had read Abraham's manuscript and recommended it for
publication, sided with Turner.

Turner went public with his campaign against Abraham in the October 1983
issue of the American Historical Review. In a letter alleging that Abraham
had forged a document showing business support for Hitler in the last days
of Weimar, Turner reminded his colleagues that forgery was "among the
gravest of scholarly offenses." It's hard to remember such a serious charge
being made against another historian.

Abraham then traveled to West Germany and found the document from which he
had quoted. It had no signature and an imprecise date; he conceded in his
American Historical Review response that his dating and attribution had
been erroneous. Even those who agreed with Abraham's interpretation of
Weimar felt that some of his research was sloppy and that his mistakes were
not trivial. But there was a consensus that Abraham had successfully
defended himself against the charge of forgery. Turner never apologized or
offered a retraction for his allegations, and to many in the profession, he
now looked like a man with an ax to grind: his own book had been pre-empted
by a younger scholar whose Marxism he despised. At that point Turner ceded
the front lines of the battle against Abraham to Feldman.

(clip)

Many younger scholars see the vendetta against Abraham as a consequence of
his Marxism, but it's more complicated than that. If Abraham had written a
Marxist study of Weimar that didn't discuss the role of businessmen, Henry
Turner wouldn't have bothered to check his footnotes. If he had written a
Marxist theoretical essay on the Weimar state that didn't present archival
evidence, Turner wouldn't have been interested. What aroused Abraham's
critics was his having placed his empirical research on the politics of big
business within a framework of Marxist theory.

Marxism is indeed an issue. The Nocken typescript distributed by Feldman
alleges that Abraham follows the "official East German theory" of the rise
of the Nazis by portraying industrialists as "mighty wirepullers" behind
Hitler. (In fact, East German reviewers have attacked Abraham for
"whitewashing the big bourgeoisie and its responsibility for barbarism and
war.") Turner's new book, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler,
published this month by Oxford University Press, concludes with a diatribe
against Marxist historians. He doesn't distinguish between the neo-Marxists
who may be found in American universities and Soviet or East German
historians. All seek "to discredit and undermine societies with capitalist
economies and to legitimize repressive anti-capitalist regimes." Feldman,
on the other hand, denies that he opposes Abraham because he is a Marxist.
He did recommend Abraham's book for publication, and in the past, he has
directed dissertations by radical students.

Abraham's critics have focused their outrage almost exclusively on his
research concerning the relationship between big businessmen and Hitler. In
doing so, they've missed the point of his book. It is not an analysis of
the growth of Nazism but a structuralist study of the success and failure
of capitalist democracy: of how German elites won popular support from
socialist and Catholic organized labor, and how this accord failed in the
face of the Depression.

"The collapse of the Republic and the Nazi assumption of power were by no
means the same," Abraham writes in his conclusion. "That no stable ruling
bloc could be organized under a democratic form of state did not, of
itself, indicate that a fascist solution, whatever its nature, would
follow." The fact that he focuses his research on structures rather than
individuals has been widely praised in reviews and was the basis for the
Princeton history department's decision to hire and then promote him.

The vituperative and wide-ranging attack on Abraham's book is, in fact,
part of a larger debate between two kinds of historiansthose who seek to
identify broad levels of causation and those who confine themselves to a
chronicle of events. The former group includes Marxists as well as
structuralists, members of the Annales school and practitioners of
cliometrics, all of whom seek to identify general causes beyond the acts
and motives of individuals. As for the latter group: "Their attitude,"
Schorske says, "is that because their footnotes don't contain errors, their
understanding of history is correct."

The rise of different schools of historical interpretation signals the
decline of a monolithic profession presided over by an establishment of
"old boys." Twenty years ago, if the senior men at Yale and Berkeley said
an assistant professor was no good, that would have been the end of the
matter. The fact that three departments were interested in hiring Abraham
last year, despite the opinion of two senior men, and that one actually
voted to hire him, helps a little to explain Feldman's frenzy.

Abraham wants Princeton University Press to publish a revised edition of
his book in which he would correct the errors. Feldman argues there would
be nothing left of the book; Schorske disagrees: "The defects in David's
book are glaring and inexcusable, but they are remediable and without any
substantial impact on the unfolding economic and political analysis. When
all the errors are corrected, the argument will stand exactly; the
historical configuration will not change; the interpretive logic of the
book will be upheld."

The Abraham controversy has recently been reported in The New York Times
and in Time. Feldman says that people "admire my courage in pursuing this
matter," and he is emboldened by this to call for a broadened effort to
"clean up shop" in the history profession. Robert Tignor, chair of the
Princeton history department, takes a different view of the consequences of
the case's notoriety. He worries about its effect on young scholars: "The
message is: Don't tread on the toes of established historians. Stay away
from controversy. Don't take chances. The history profession is a sea full
of sharks."

It's also full of decent people who have come to Abraham's defense. As of
this writing, he is again being considered for jobs at good colleges. Carl
Schorske explains, "David Abraham is a guy who understands historical
processes and has a subtle and refined interpretation. That's the reason
why one wants to save him for the profession."



Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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