Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You have won numerous awards, sold millions of copies of your books and had them translated into lots of different languages. But I was wondering which historians inspire you?
The very first historian to inspire me was John Keegan, who I studied under at Sandhurst, because he wrote The Face of Battle, which was one of the key moments in the turning points of military history. Up until then military history had usually been written by retired officers or generals, trying to make out that commanders were chess grandmasters playing some brilliant game, when in fact it was all chaos and fear and smoke. It was the first time that military history had been written as history from below.
Then, interestingly, there was a period afterwards when suddenly oral history started to become fashionable. I was always rather dubious about oral history because I felt it had no proper context. From my point of view John Keegan’s book was the greatest influence because it pushed me in the direction where I was eventually heading, of trying to integrate history from above with history from below.
What is it that makes you particularly interested in World War II?
To start off with I was particularly interested in the Napoleonic Wars and I will eventually go back to them when, for me, World War II is finally over. But World War II continues to be the most important war in history because of the effect that it had on so many people’s lives and on so many countries.
The most important lesson I ever learned came to me in the French archives when I was researching a book about Paris after the liberation. After six months of waiting for permission from the Ministry of the Interior I came across this report from the security police describing how a German woman had been found in Paris in the summer of 1945. In fact it was a German farmer’s wife who had fallen desperately in love with a French prisoner of war who had been working on their farm and she’d followed him back to France by smuggling herself on to the train carrying deported prisoners back to France. That suddenly raised so many other questions for me. We always think about those who have died and the casualties of war without fully appreciating how the decisions of Stalin or Hitler changed everybody’s lives.
That is very true. Your first choice is a novel by someone whose work you know very well indeed – the Russian writer Vasily Grossman. You edited his war notes. But this is his novel, Life and Fate, which was considered highly controversial and banned in Russia.
Yes, the manuscript was confiscated when it had just been written in 1960. The KGB came into his apartment and then went to his secretary’s apartment, and confiscated even the typewriter ribbons and the carbon papers because the novel was regarded as so dangerous.
Why was that?
Grossman was the very first person to make the moral equivalence between Nazism and Stalinism. It was that which was so devastating. He quite clearly indicated that Stalin had been responsible for the appalling disasters of the early part of the war and for the repression that came through towards the end of the war. What is interesting about Grossman is that he is one of the few examples where you get both physical courage and moral courage in the same person. That is very rare – normally moral courage and physical courage are two separate things and don’t exist together.
How did he show physical courage?
He showed physical courage as a slightly middle-aged, totally unfit, Jewish intellectual from Moscow going into the front line with the Red Army and living the same life alongside many of the soldiers. This is where he got his material. He was obviously not one of the Stalinist hacks who came out with preposterous propaganda. The soldiers had read his stuff in the Red Star, the army newspaper, and they knew that he was about the only honest one. And he wouldn’t take any notes. He would just sit down beside them and then write up the notes afterwards, because he knew perfectly well that if he sat down with a pad that would switch them off. And he used to work incredibly long hours into the night writing up all the conversations that he had had.
These were the notebooks that we worked on in Moscow and one realised that here was most of the raw material for Life and Fate which I think is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.
Antony Beevor is a best-selling British historian and author. His book Stalingrad won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. Beevor’s books have sold more than five million copies and have been translated into 30 languages. He is currently working on a general history of World War II, to be published in June 2012
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