History Archives - Page 2 of 3

Wehrmacht – Wolfram Wette

Published on March 3, 2008

Cover of Wehrmacht

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
Wolfram Wette
372 pages including index
published in 2002

One of the enduring myths of World War 2 is the idea that the crimes committed by nazi Germany were the work of a relatively small number of villains with the vast majority of the German population either being their victims or just trying to make the best of a bad situation or to do their duty to their country. More specially this myth lives on in the idea that while the Waffen SS was a criminal organisation responsible for uncounted numbers of warcrimes, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s most important military organisation, had relatively clean hands. With tens of millions of German men having served in the Wehrmacht during World War 2 it is no surprise that this myth came into being. Far easier to believe you were the innocent dupe of Hitler than to acknowledge that you may just be a fellow criminal. What’s strange is that this idea is believed not just in Germany, but throughout Western Europe and America. If like me you’re interested in military history, you sooner or later come across military enthusiasts extolling the martial virtues of the Wehrmacht, without much consideration of the context in which they fought.

Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality was written to explode this myth and explain how and why it came into being. Its author, Wolfram Wette, is a German historian who’s made his speciality in researching Germany’s history of militarism. Until 1995 he worked for the official German institute for military history research, where he worked on Germany’s official history of World War 2, which should lend considerable weight to this book. This is no firebrand outsider courting controversy with a perhaps overstated sensationalist thesis (as with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners), but a distinguished senior historian attempting to put an generally accepted truth before the general public.

The Peoples of the Hills – Charles Burney & David Marschall Lang

Published on February 16, 2008

Cover of The Peoples of the Hills

The Peoples of the Hills
Charles Burney,
David Marshall Lang
324 pages including index
published in 1971

I picked up The Peoples of the Hills because I wanted to know more about the history of the caucasus in general and Armenia in particular, mainly because Doug of Halfway Down the Danube had been blogging about his being stationed there. He had been posting about some of Armenia’s history and it seemed interesting. Since I knew next to nothing about any of the history, espcially the early history of Armenia, Georgia and the Caucasus, The Peoples of the Hills seemed a good start.

Unfortunately however it disappointed. For a start, I didn’t realise how dated it was, having originally been written in 1971 and reprinted for the History of Civilization series published by Phoenix Press. Not that there was much choice in the library I picked this up: it was this or nothing. In thirty years a lot can change and I’ve found that on the whole more modern history books are preferable to older ones (this is not an absolute rule of course). But what also disappointed me was the writing itself. This is, unfortunately, a very dull book, full of facts but lacking sparkle.

The Celtic Empire – Peter Berresford Ellis

Published on February 3, 2008

Cover of The Celtic Empire

The Celtic Empire
Peter Berresford Ellis
246 pages including index
published in 1990

This was a bit of a disappointment. The full title of this book reads The Celtic Empire: the First Millennium of Celtic History 1000 BC – 51 AD and I picked it up thinking I would get a full overview of Celtic history, up until the final subjugation of the Celts by the Romans. However, most of the promised history is skipped over in favour of telling the last part of the Celtic story, of how Rome conquered the various Celtic tribes in Italy, Gaul, Spain, Asia Minor, Britain, etc. An interesting story in its own right, but not what I expected.

More disappointingly, this story was told, more often than not, not through Celtic eyes, but from a Roman or a Carthegenian or other point of view, in a context that’s almost exclusively that of Roman history. So not only do you not get the entire Celtic history as the title promises, but the history it does tell of the Celts is somewhat fragmented, shown only where it impacted on the expansion of Rome.

The Fall of Rome – Bryan Ward-Perkins

Published on February 3, 2008

Cover of The Fall of Rome

The Fall of Rome
Bryan Ward-Perkins
239 pages including index
published in 2005

When I was googling for some background information on Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome was mentioned the most alongside it in reviews. In those reviews The Fall of Rome was described as a much more agressively counter-revisionist attack, compared to Heather’s book, much more scathing in its rejection of the view that the fall of Rome was not that big a deal. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to read, to see what the more traditional view of Rome’s collapse would look like.

It turns out however that Ward-Perkins’ rhetoric here is actually stronger than his actual disagreement. He’s scathing about those historians who go too far in arguing that the transition from Roman Empire to the post-Roman, Germanic west was a relatively gentle affair, but his own view isn’t quite the Gibbonesque tragedy of traditional history either. He argues that the transition period was violent, that there was a decline in civilisation, that the death of the western Roman Empire was a tragedy, but that this was far from the end of civilisation. But because Ward-Perkins spent much of this book arguing against the more rose-tinted views currently in vogue of the transistion from a Roman to a post-Roman world, his disagreements may seem bigger than they actually are.

The Fall of the Roman Empire – Peter Heather

Published on January 5, 2008

Cover of The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Fall of the Roman Empire
Peter Heather
572 pages including index
published in 2005

I found I hadn’t read enough about ancient history in recent years, so I went looking for some interesting books on Roman, Greek or other ancient cultures. The Fall of the Roman Empire was what I found, a new look at how Roman domination came to an end. I’d been interested in that topic again since watching Terry Jones’ excellent series The Barbarians, which revised the traditional picture of hordes of uncultivated barbarians coming over the borders for an orgy of rape and plunder. The Fall of the Roman Empire is in a similar revisionist vein. Though Heather goes much less far than Jones in revising the traditional relationship between Romans and barbarians.

Now my knowledge of Roman history is not extensive, to say the least, mostly build on having read the usual popular history books everybody with the slightest interest in history reads at age twelve, which tend to be fairly conservative in their outlook, often a generation or so behind academic consensus. Therefore I wasn’t that surprised that while I thought Heather’s main point, that the Roman Empire didn’t so much collapse because of structural defects, but because of several contigent factors coming together at the worst possible moment, was quite radical, a little bit of googling seems to show Heather is actually somewhat of a counterrevolutionary. His position as set up here is that the Western Roman Empire did in fact collapse, at roughly the time tradition has always set it had, but that this wasn’t the overwhelming catastrophe of myth and that this wasn’t a pre-ordained outcome. This is halfway between the traditional view of the End of Civilisation for a Thousand Years and the revisionist view of denying that a collapse happened at all, that the Roman Empire continued as Byzantium and in the west more or less morphed into its succesor states.