The History Behind Denial

There is no such thing a coincidence, and the day after my post on Denial there was a long interview with Richard J Evans in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/14/richard-evans-interview-holocaust-denial-film

It was interesting to see that focus of the film had to be on Lipstadt to make it work as a drama, but it was the three years of detailed work that Evans and his team carried out made it clear to Lipstadt's team that they had probably won the case before it started: what remained to be decided was the scale of the victory.

I also read that Richard Evans had locked horns in exchanges with Michael Gove over the teaching of history in schools. I've read his Third Reich Trilogy and am currently reading The Pursuit of Power, his new history of Europe in the 19th century: all have been excellent and I will certainly read more of his work.

Denial

I'd wanted to see Denial ever since I'd read an interview with David Hare about the writing his screenplay for the film. I'd known about the subject matter of the film in general terms but had not been aware of the details. The film seems to have had a relatively limited release but I managed to catch up with it and was very impressed: in an age when a government spokesman can talk of  "alternative facts" and politicians can question the value of "experts" it was a timely reminder of the value that an eminent historian can bring to the real world.

For obvious reasons the exchanges in the court scenes were lifted verbatim from the official transcript, but what was not clear until I did some research on line at home was the timescale of events: Richard J Evans and his team took three years reviewing Irving's published work and tracking his quoted back to their original sources: it was their work which proved the truth of the statement about David Irving in Lipstadt's book . Evans subsequently wrote a book - Telling Lies About Hitler - about his role in the case which I am currently reading and it is both fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.

Evans dismisses Irving's key document that supposedly exonerates Hitler from culpability for the extermination of the Jews is absolutely damning:

This supposed key document in Irving's arsenal of alleged documentary proof of Hitler's lack of culpability for the extermination of the Jews had long been regarded by professional historians as nothing of the kind. He could only present it as such by ignoring the logical contradictions in his reading of the document, by ignoring is immediate context and by suppressing all the uncertainties with which it was associated.

This is definitely one for us to screen at our film society.

Here is the trailer: