Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’ | Harriet Swain / The Guardian

The Guardian, 14 February 2017

Richard Evans: the film Denial ‘shows there is such a thing as truth’
The historian, a key player in the libel case involving Holocaust denier David Irving, talks about Trump, Goebbels and why he agrees with John Bercow
Sir Richard Evans
Sir Richard Evans: ‘Politicians have always told lies – but nobody cares now’. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Harriet Swain
@harrietswain

Tuesday 14 February 2017 07.00 GMT

Towards the end of Denial, released in cinemas this month, the lead character, played by Rachel Weisz, argues passionately that historical truth exists. “Slavery happened. The Black Death happened,” she says. “Elvis is not alive.”

It is a point that historian Richard Evans, president of Wolfson College in Cambridge, provost of Gresham College in London and a key player in the events that inspired Denial, has been making for most of his professional life. It is also something that, he argues, has become even more important in the era of “alternative facts” and Donald Trump.

But it is not always straightforward. Before writing the screenplay for Denial, David Hare spent two hours quizzing Evans, an expert on Nazi Germany, about his part in the 2000 libel trial on which the film is based. Evans was an expert witness in the case, taken by the maverick historian David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, who had called Irving a Holocaust denier and accused him of falsifying history. According to Evans: “As he got up to go, David Hare said, ‘I have interviewed a number of people about the trial and everyone seems to have a different point of view.’”

John Sessions as Richard Evans in Denial

Evans thought the film might therefore end up showing the action from lots of different perspectives. But in the end – wisely, he believes – Hare chose to focus on the experience of Lipstadt and her struggles with her legal team’s insistence that she should not give evidence but leave them to prove that her allegations were true.


Whatever the differing views of the trial, the fact is that her defence was successful. The judge found Irving to be a Holocaust denier, antisemite and racist who had deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence, and ordered him to pay more than £2m in legal costs.

Evans, who had been employed to trawl, with a couple of assistants, through Irving’s work, had never read any of his writing before – “It’s of no interest to academic historians … all empirical narrative with no real ideas in it” – and says they were repeatedly astonished by the falsifications and distortions they found. To keep up the tension, the film suggests the trial was in the balance. “But that wasn’t quite accurate,” says Evans, “because the defence knew from the beginning that it would win. The only question was by how much.”

Proving it nevertheless took Evans three years, during which he produced a 740-page report and was cross-examined for more than a week by Irving, who represented himself. It was stressful, he says, because he constantly had to watch out for Irving distorting his words. In the film, all this is reduced to a single but pivotal courtroom scene. The dialogue in the film is based entirely on transcripts from the trial, but Evans says John Sessions, who plays him, delivered the words much better than he did at the time.

Author David Irving Photograph: Peter Jolly/Rex Shutterstock

One legacy of being involved in the trial was that Evans became convinced of his duty to engage with the world outside academia. Another was a file full of obscene hate mail, all of which – with an eye on the historical record – he has kept. While he has not, so far, experienced any abuse as a result of the film, he acknowledges that it has stirred up antisemites. Earlier this month leaflets referencing the film, and in support of Irving, were left on cars around Cambridge University, directing readers to a Holocaust denial website. Nevertheless, he insists: “The film is bad for Holocaust deniers and it’s bad for Mr Irving. It underlines again the evil of Holocaust denial.”

He also hopes it will convince people watching it “that there is such a thing as truth and you can discover it”. His book In Defence of History, published in 1997, famously challenged the postmodernist rejection of objectivity that had become increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s: a time, he points out, when many of Donald Trump’s team were students: “I think that affected a generation of university graduates in the States,” he says.

Evans’s own interest in history was sparked as a young boy living on the borders of east London, where he saw the remains of bombed-out homes, the wallpaper still clinging to ruined walls. War and its aftermath were what his parents – a teacher and bank clerk – and politicians talked about and he became fascinated by why it happened, who made it happen.
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He also liked writing. He wrote about the exploits of his model soldiers, and even wrote three or four novels before deciding he did not have the imagination to invent things; he always needed to return to facts. By the time he went to Oxford – the first in his family to go to university – he knew he wanted to be an academic. It was a time when German history was “just warming up” as Germans began talking about the past and reflecting on the roots of Nazism. He studied for a doctorate on the feminist movement in Germany, for which he learned German, and taught at the universities of Stirling and East Anglia and Birkbeck College in London before successfully applying to be Regius professor of history at Cambridge. Meanwhile, he was writing book after book, including an acclaimed three-volume history of the Third Reich.

His studies of 1930s Germany have suggested parallels with the global political turmoil of the past few months, he says. While the current context is different – no shadow of the first world war, less acceptance of political violence – “if you ask a different question, about how democracies die, you can see some parallels”.

Trump’s contempt for constitutional propriety and for the rule of law, and his hatred of the free press, rang particular alarm bells, as did his willingness to dismantle international agreements. Evans points out that one of the first things Hitler did when he came to power was to abandon the League of Nations.

“You can put quotes by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, about what he called the Jewish lying press and how it would be closed down when the Nazis came to power, side by side with quotes by team Trump and they look almost exactly the same,” he says. Like Trump, Hitler chose to rule with a team of close allies. The democratic roots of the Weimar Republic were also much deeper than is often assumed, which means a secure democracy such as America could be similarly vulnerable. The most worrying question in America, says Evans, is: “Are the institutions going to stand up to the assault they are being subjected to?”

Evans says he is by nature optimistic, “but at the moment I think we are going through dark times”. This is true on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the Brexit vote, he has had to reassure the students at his postgraduate college, who come from all over the world, that whatever else happens they will continue to be welcome. He is concerned for the future of British universities if they are starved of the international networks on which science and scholarship thrive, and he worries that Britain’s dominance of literary history – from which, he says, many countries outside Britain get an understanding of their own histories – could also be under threat.

And then there’s the issue of lying. “Politicians have always told lies,” says Evans. “It’s just that nobody cares now.”

He argues that academics – and journalists – have a particular duty today to stand up for truth. And he believes the fightback is beginning. He admires Elizabeth Warren, the American academic and Democratic politician who has consistently stood up to Trump. He also supports petitions and demonstrations against Trump’s state visit to Britain. “I’m absolutely with John Bercow,” he says, referring to the Commons Speaker’s speech saying that Trump should not be allowed to address parliament because of his racism and sexism.

And while Denial is scrupulous in making the case that facts should triumph over emotion, Evans says emotions have their place. Seeing elderly people in the public gallery during the libel case with their sleeves rolled up and Auschwitz numbers tattooed on their arms was undeniably moving, he says. “One has to be passionate about the truth.”