7. Debating Toynbee after the Holocaust: Pieter Geyl as a post-war public historian

Remco Ensel

The worst that our generation has had to witness, the persecution of the Jews …

Pieter Geyl, 14 October 19441

In January 1948 Pieter Geyl and Arnold J. Toynbee discussed their profession and the ‘catastrophe’ that had befallen the world on BBC radio. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, the two men were among the first generation of professional historians to use broadcasting to get their message across and present themselves as authoritative public intellectuals in mid-twentieth-century Europe. The aim of this chapter is to locate Geyl specifically as a public historian in the intellectual atmosphere of the post-war years. It is this author’s contention that Geyl’s famous dictum about writing history as ‘an argument without end’ should not so much be seen as a timeless aphorism but as an intervention in the new post-war climate of the Cold War.

In recent literature on the history of historiography at least two approaches can be identified. The first recognizes the importance of biographical aspects of historiography as an academic endeavour.2 The second investigates the implications of the professionalization of history for the formation of a ‘scholarly self’.3 It is clear that both approaches are complementary, for example when concealing personal experiences under the guise of scholarship becomes a virtue. It is thus better to speak of separate realms, that of biography and that of the ideal scholarly self. Here we will devote attention to both, by focusing on the appearance of the historian in public debate. Along with Geyl’s publishing strategy, the historical debate shows how historians perceive their ideal relationship with colleagues and their target audience. It is a little-recognized fact that much of the proverbial ‘discussion without end’ in fact takes place beyond academic forums and journals. The radio debate, which developed into an intense dispute after 1948, illustrates how differently Geyl and Toynbee perceived their role in the post-war world. Toynbee was not afraid to supply the general public with political and moral advice, even beyond the boundaries of his specialist knowledge. His contemporary had a more restricted role in mind for historiography. In this chapter, the two approaches are compared through an analysis of the debate, which yielded fundamental questions on collective and individual responsibility and guilt.

Geyl as a public historian

Pieter Geyl (1887–1966) was a committed historian. He considered the practice of history a serious occupation based on skills, and thought its influence should not be contained within the walls and media of university. Geyl, who also worked as a journalist, published in journals such as De Gids, the leading Dutch literary journal then, and in many other public periodicals. Geyl was a polemicist, a debater who knew how to keep his fellow historians on their toes. The Dutch historian Niek van Sas called him ‘a troublemaker and a firebrand, always contrarian but in an infectious manner’.4 Geyl’s biographer van der Hoeven likened him to ‘an English intellectual, to whom the scholarly practice involves an element of play, including fierce polemics, which however were not meant to affect personal relations’.5 The pleasure of this gentleman’s disagreement was dominant but it would be wrong to think that this was an insignificant ‘game’. Geyl was extremely indignant when a critic reproached him with having shown himself overly respectful towards, even exhibiting ‘humble kowtowing’ in his debate with, Arnold Toynbee (this will be looked at more extensively below). Geyl did not like it at all that mildness was attributed to him. His opponent ‘argues that I spare my adversaries and only put up a sham fight’. On the contrary: ‘In my polemics, I have always endeavoured to give my opponent the full measure.’6 This was especially true when he told Toynbee that his approach made a mockery of the most elementary notions of their profession.7 ‘Even among his best friends, Geyl hardly ever engaged in small talk. But surveying historiography and debating were Geyl’s great passions.’8 In doing so, Geyl employed the complete register that historians have at their disposal, including the deployment of authority as an established historian and the rhetorical strategy of denying a colleague the status of historian.9

Geyl’s battleground as a historian was the early modern era and especially the political history and historiography of the Dutch republic. Nonetheless, like no other he knew how historians are affected by current events. After his doctorate, Geyl lived through the First World War in England, as a journalist for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant.

At the beginning of the Second World War Geyl was interned in Buchenwald and subsequently for two years in the Brabant town of Sint-Michielsgestel.10 There, he wrote poems and had them published illegally, an autobiography that would only be published posthumously decades later and Patriotten en NSB’ers (1946). In this latter book, Geyl negated the argument that the rather unpopular eighteenth-century Patriot party and the members of the Dutch National Socialist Party (NSB) could be seen as ‘traitors to their country’.11 His historiographic study on Napoleon is also a product of his years of imprisonment.12 The irresistible parallel between the French emperor and Hitler forced itself on Geyl even before the war, before Jacques Presser took Hitler and Stalin as models for his biography of Napoleon.13 After the war, the parallel with Hitler was universally recognized in Geyl’s internationally praised book, with respect for his years of imprisonment adding to its status. Conversely, Geyl’s book led to historiographic studies on Hitler, Auschwitz and Hiroshima.14 Contemporary history of the Nazi dictatorship supplied Geyl with a subject, and his study induced, with some delay, historical reflections on Europe’s recent history of repression and mass violence.

During these years, Geyl positioned himself as a public intellectual. In his comparative study on the public presentation (‘öffentliche Praxis der Historiker’) of post-war historians in Germany and Italy, Marcel vom Lehn also speaks of ‘public intellectuals’.15 He follows Stefan Collini in his description of the intellectual as someone who, based on their cultural authority, seeks publicity to consider general issues before a large public.16 However, vom Lehn avoids the concept of the ‘public historian’, since people referred to in this way tend to present themselves as ‘experts’. There is also Michel Foucault’s distinction between the universal and the post-war-specific intellectual, with the latter more explicitly rooted in an academic field. Geyl, although from an earlier generation, moves more in the direction of the specific intellectual.17 That said, this author prefers the more precise term ‘public historian’ because of the opportunity it offers to investigate the specific (and historically developed) professional role of the historian for whom knowledge of the past remains the point of reference and source of intellectual and moral authority. For Geyl, public debate was part of what it means to be a historian.18

Pierre Nora’s position supports the position taken by this chapter. Historien public is the title of a collection of essays by this French historian, archivist and publisher.19 Although he is primarily known for the multivolume Les Lieux de mémoire (‘The Sites of Memory’), Nora’s career testifies to his much broader engagement with numerous social and intellectual issues. The historien public as envisioned by Nora is not a representative of public history as commonly defined, that is to say a representative of illustrative or applied history. With the knowledge and skills of his profession, Nora’s public historian takes part and intervenes in public debate. His prime objective is not entertainment – although that is part of his performance. The public historian informs, nuances, contextualizes, comments and puts issues present in society on the agenda.

There is an interesting connection here with the well-known German public debate. The public character of historiography played an important role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas started the debate by reacting to a publication by the historian Ernst Nolte that questioned the uniqueness of the Holocaust, writing: ‘It is not an issue of Popper versus Adorno, it is not a question of disputes about scientific theory, it is not about questions of value-free analysis – it is about the public use of history.’20 The quote is from an opinion piece in Die Zeit, which Habermas wrote in response to Nolte’s article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. In his article, Habermas explained that if Nolte had published his controversial opinion in a historical journal, the philosopher would not have reacted. Indeed, ‘I would never have even laid eyes on it’ (‘Ich hätte die Debatte gar nicht zu Gesicht bekommen’). But as it concerned a contribution ‘in the full public gaze’, Habermas felt obliged to react, for the Historikerstreit, as the polemic about the position of the Holocaust within German history came to be known, was now no longer restricted to the ivory tower of historiography. The debate had become part of the ‘public sphere’ and the historian was now a public historian who was broaching a social issue – the laborious processing of a charged past – based on their authority. It is noteworthy that Ernst Nolte would later declare that his approach and vision had been influenced by the so-called ‘International Toynbee Debate of 1955/6’ and particularly by Toynbee’s vision on the Jews and their persecution.21 Geyl played a crucial role in opening this debate, possibly not only because of his opinion on the issue but also because of his interpretation of the role a committed historian should play in society.

The debate as play

Pieter Geyl was not only the historiographer of the debate, he also served as a debater himself. Geyl saw historiography as a social activity in which the historian always has to balance his engagement as a citizen against the detachment of the academic.22 This presupposes a necessary reflection on the profession of the historian, on the authority which historians, in their role of ‘knowledge specialists’, can employ and on the obligations this entails.23 How does the individual historian operate and how does the ‘historical community’ function in this social force field of interested parties?

As a variation on Geyl’s famous dictum that history is ‘a discussion without end’, this chapter asks the question of how ‘the historical discussion’ is started and along what lines it is carried out. Geyl’s famous, somewhat apodictic quote comes from the introduction to his historiographic study of Napoleon. Just as in the case of Ranke’s ‘bloß sagen wie es eigentlich gewesen’ (‘just say how it actually was’), this phrase was lifted from its context and turned into an aphorism.24 Geyl was pleased with his coinage and had the phrase included in the heading of his introduction. The article in the heading ‘The discussion without end’ seems to suggest that Geyl thought the phrase applied only to the French publications about Napoleon. Nothing could be further from the truth. For Geyl, its meaning was much broader. Difference of opinion, discussion and debate are inherent to historiography: ‘Truth, though for God it may be One, assumes many shapes to men.’25 The international success of his Napoleon study stimulated Geyl to proceed with his investigation in the collection of essays Debates with Historians. How fitting that the German edition of this collection appeared under the title Die Diskussion ohne Ende (‘Debates without End’).26 In the original text, the quote was put at the end of the introduction. Now, it had been promoted to book title, and the author of the introduction, the German historian Franz Petri,27 had opted for the italicization of the phrase: ‘Im Original nicht kursiv’ (‘unitalicized in the original’).

The historian Jo Tollebeek has pointed out that the titles of Geyl’s essay collections suggest that he thought in terms of ‘reactions’ and ‘tourneys’.28 Historiography is a battleground, possibly also a joust. But, it should be added, this is a serious game, a rule-bound social practice in which people, as homines ludentes, broach social issues. Historiography is simultaneously a fight, a tournament and a game in which some play within the rules, others dodge the rules and still others make their own rules to which they then subject the other participants.

All this recalls Johan Huizinga’s considerations on the family resemblances between play and war. In Homo Ludens (1933), Huizinga devoted a chapter to each of the three related forms: play and law, play and war, playing and knowing. The element of play, in the shape of competition and controversy, is also present in scholarship. The debate as play and as competition directs us to the arena, the (unwritten) rules – the tacit knowledge, the conventions of self-control and discipline, the transgressions and the moral outrage caused by them.29 Geyl was full of praise for French polemics and added that ‘we’ also had known times ‘when our history was our political battle ground … There are certain dangers involved in such a use of history, I would be the last to deny it. But it brings it closer to the public, it enables it to permeate and enrich public life.’ Geyl’s words here seem tinted by nostalgia or jealousy of the French polemic public sphere. For, as has been remarked about the present-day Dutch historical community, ‘[i]n the Netherlands, historical truth is not a boxing ring, but a negotiation table’.30

The radio debate

The ‘model debate’ between the fifty-nine-year-old Toynbee and the sixty-year-old Geyl was not held in one of the academic journals or at a scholarly conference. The debate took place at the invitation of the BBC in a British radio studio for the Third Programme, the ‘wavelength of intellectuals’ in Geyl’s words. Toynbee had been giving radio talks for some time31 and Geyl was also an experienced radio speaker. The debate was broadcast on 4 January and 7 March 1948. In the same year, an English transcript was released by Dutch and American publishers under the title Can We Know the Pattern of the Past? 32 In the radio guide, the debate was scheduled to last forty minutes. The published version could never have run to double this amount of time, so there must have been an editorial selection from the transcript.33 The fact that it was broadcast on radio illustrates the importance of non-academic media in these post-war years in reaching the general public. And to professional historians: in her memoirs the Groningen historian Bunna Ebels-Hoving described how she was introduced to the discipline of historiography through courses on ‘Toynbee and his radio debates with Geyl’, even though her lecturer dismissed historiography as ‘a kind of Spielerei’ [‘just fooling around’].34

Both historians were familiar with the transfer of historical knowledge to the general public and with their role as public historians. But Geyl cast himself as Toynbee’s adversary, in the role of the searching historian averse to overarching structures and theories.

The origins of the radio debate lay in the Dutch academic world. No earlier than August 1946, Geyl acquired the first six volumes of A Study in History through his old friend the historian David Mitrany. Geyl believed that the Amsterdam historian Jan Romein was an avid admirer of Toynbee and it therefore seemed a good idea to challenge his competitor with a biting critique in a lecture for the Dutch Historical Society. Or, as he wrote to his correspondent of many years Carel Gerretson, ‘This is the book that is so admired by Romein, but that he has not understood at all.’35

Geyl was irritated by Romein’s praise and by his tendency to ridicule ordinary historians as navigators lost at sea, in contrast to the great historical philosophers who, compass in hand, survey the general course of history. He took aim at Toynbee to get at Romein: ‘For me, Romein was obviously the background to this,’ he explained to Gerretson after earlier writing to him that he had found Toynbee’s book fascinating, ‘enlightening, and moreover beautifully written’. In his second review, years later, in 1955, Geyl would again mark out the ‘neo-Marxist’ Romein as an advocate of Toynbee’s. But already in 1947 Romein had grasped that he himself was the real target. In his letter to Geyl he wrote that Geyl had rashly and paternalistically judged a book which Romein had been working on for two years. Geyl thought the letter petty: ‘Weak – and small-minded’. Personal animosity certainly seems to have been a factor in the origins of the debate.

In 1946 Geyl gave a lecture on Toynbee and published a translated version of it in the American Journal of the History of Ideas.36 Subsequently he received the invitation to do the radio broadcast from the BBC. On 1 January 1948 – exactly a year after his correspondence with Romein – Geyl left for London ‘for a week or so’.

It is interesting that Toynbee opened the debate in Geyl’s style with a game metaphor: ‘Well, the BBC has put on for you a kind of “historians’ cricket match” and the bowler has just delivered his ball.’ On other occasions, Toynbee preferred boxing metaphors. The booklet that transcribes the radio debate in fact consists of two successive monologues. When we read in Toynbee’s contribution ‘as I said a minute or two ago’, we are made aware of the passing of time that is part of conversational debate. At another point Toynbee says he would like to correct ‘an impression that I think our listeners may have got …’ Interruptions or signs of actual dialogue are lacking in the transcript, but the speakers clearly reacted to each other’s arguments and objections. Geyl at one point encouraged Toynbee to elaborate upon a subject because ‘our listeners would be very much interested to hear what you say about that’. And finally, there is the inevitable: ‘Toynbee, our time is up. There are just a few seconds left.’ Formatted in this way, the transcript attempts to give the impression of a real conversation.

Geyl had ‘greatly enjoyed’ the radio discussion and, furthermore, he heard afterwards that ‘the laurels went to G’. The debate confirmed Geyl’s global fame, but he was generous enough to admit that this was completely due to Toynbee’s fame, in which he, as the critic, had been able to bask. Geyl had chosen his opponent well.

The published transcript is comparatively sterile, intended for the attentive reader, ‘the British intellectual’. The conversation was about nothing less than the state of humanity in the post-war world. Central was the role which the historian, still endowed with significant authority, could fulfil in offering orientation in confusing and disturbing times. The radio debate was not just a reflection of a substantial conversation between two academically trained historians; here, two people were talking in a world that had just experienced the Second World War and a mass murder without comparison. We now read Geyl’s ‘discussion without end’ as a timeless aphorism, but it can also be interpreted as a phrase bound by time and place. It is important to put this phrase into context. It is not coincidental that Geyl introduces the phrase by referring to Jan Romein’s concern for the ‘pulverization’ of our view of the past caused by ever increasing specialization.37 Against Romein’s desire for a univocal perspective on the past, Geyl underlined the inevitability, even necessity, of disagreement. In a similar manner, Geyl wrote about his meeting with ‘Soviet historians’ who were weighed down by ‘mental regimentation’ in ‘the discussion without end’, ‘which to me and most of my western colleagues is the practice of our profession’. Their work, in Geyl’s opinion, ‘was an impressive show of arms’ (but was filled with ‘parroted stories’).38 ‘Unhindered discussion’ was a pillar of civilization which in Geyl’s time, the mid twentieth century, was still shamelessly identified with the west. The debate at the BBC radio studio was proof of the rationality of western civilization. In this sense, the ‘discussion without end’ was also a statement made in the context of Cold War politics.

Analogy and a sense of the new

Toynbee wrote books about the Sumerians, the Greeks and the Romans, but they also contained a message relevant to world citizens of the twentieth century. The destiny of mankind depended upon whether humanity (read: the historian) could distil lessons from the past. Western civilization had been in decline since the Renaissance. In 1948, Toynbee stated that the recent war had confirmed his thesis of decline: ‘There is no doubt, when we look around us, a great deal to induce gloom …’: ‘We have learned to split an atom and are in danger of splitting it to our own destruction.’ Toynbee saw only one ray of hope: Christianity offered guidance to avert the apparently inevitable doom. Toynbee’s system of civilizations was popular with people who were trying to find their bearings after the war and were apprehensive about the future. Especially through the rhetoric of the historical parallel, Toynbee could lend authority to his doom scenario. Analogy is the cherished tool of public history and one of the forms that comparative thinking can take, according to Alix Green in her introduction to applied history.39 Analogy as a heuristic device evokes continuity, but in combination with a blasé mindset it tends to become a blunt instrument. Or, as John Tosh pointed out in his overview of public history, ‘It is equally important for historians to be able to recognize the new.’40

The core of the Geyl–Toynbee debate was the evaluation of the disaster(s) that were in store for humanity. For Geyl, the future was uncertain, which suited the habitus of the historian. Toynbee, on the basis of his perception of the profession, thought he should prescribe a remedy for humanity. In Geyl’s opinion, that was the very reason why Toynbee could hardly assume the title of ‘historian’. It is, Geyl wrote, ‘no amazement that the great system builders mostly do not come from the ranks of professional historians, who are daily wrestling with the unruly material’. Toynbee was the exception. He truly was a professional historian and moreover, as an Englishman, familiar with the national empirical tradition. Yet Toynbee’s twelve-volume A Study of History could not, notwithstanding its dizzying erudition, be deemed worthy of the title of a historical study. It was a prophecy, Geyl judged later in his perspicacious review in the Journal of the History of Ideas.41 His correspondent Gerretson confirmed this: ‘such immense erudition wasted on a hopeless endeavour’.42 Toynbee reacted briefly and rather weakly by saying that ‘in choosing a name for the book under review, I deliberately called it not a history, but a study of history’. For a study of Shakespeare is not a sixteenth-century play.

It can be gleaned from the debate that the greatest concern of both parties lay in man’s capacity for self-destruction on a global scale. In the British post-war climate, with which Toynbee was familiar and Geyl to a certain extent, there was a dominant fear of omnicide, one or more Holocausts that would impact the whole world. Fear of a world-wide nuclear disaster seemed greater than the fear of mass murder affecting specific groups, analogous to the Shoah. Omnicide was more a concern about self-destruction than a concern about violence against others. Seventy years later, we must now acknowledge that the mass murders that took place after the Second World War – in Rwanda, in Indonesia, in Cambodia, in Bosnia … – were perpetrated without the deployment of weapons of mass destruction.43

If the two men’s main concern was humanity’s self-destructive capabilities, the genocide did not surface in their debate. They showed no awareness that the ‘gloom’ of the war was not only the general destruction it caused, a ‘fate of the world’ and a ‘destiny of mankind’, but could also refer to the specific extinction of other people because of descent or religion. At the same time, it cannot be absolutely ruled out that hints were made in reference to this. The terms with which we now refer to ‘the genocide’ or the Holocaust were not then available; the vocabulary was different. When Geyl, in his historiographic essays in De Gids, discusses German history, it is evident that the true question is how this catastrophe could possibly have taken place. In retrospect, even the great German historian Leopold von Ranke fell victim to this, with his so-called ‘objective’ attitude, his abandonment of individual responsibility, his veneration of the state and his conviction that each epoch should be regarded as ‘unmittelbar zu Gott’ (‘immediate to God’). ‘Ranke as trailblazer of National Socialism?’ Is this what is wrong with Germany? ‘Political quietism: finding God in history, in the hope of finding Him willing to take the blame for what goes wrong.’ Therefore, the title of Geyl’s essay read ‘Ranke in the light of the catastrophe’. History does not absolve humanity from individual responsibility; on the contrary, it emphasizes taking that responsibility. Possibly we can substitute Toynbee for Ranke here.44

We can only guess whether in the radio debate of 1948 the persecution of the Jews played a part. In the consequences of the debate, however, it would assume an ever more prominent place, corresponding with the more general tendency in the historiography of the Holocaust.

The persecution of the Jews

Both historians were aware of and familiar with the First World War. Toynbee was involved as a public historian in collecting data on the war in Turkey. At the time, people talked about ‘atrocities’ and Toynbee came to be seen as an ‘atrocity expert’ after his data-collecting missions. ‘Atrocity’, often linked to ‘barbarism’, had taken on a new importance after the renewed attention to the international rules of war just before and after the turn of the century.45 ‘Atrocities’ was also the juridical and moral term in which, in the first instance, the mass murder of the Jews came to be framed. With the realization that a new phenomenon was occurring, a new term quickly emerged: ‘genocide’.

Geyl saw the persecution of the Jews in a different light to Toynbee, even if the subject was not explicitly mentioned in the debate. After the November pogrom in 1938, he had already called the persecution a monstrosity of barbarity (echoing the ancient language of atrocity) and made a moral appeal to the authorities to welcome Jewish-German refugees.46

In 1949 the historian Harry Elmer Barnes reviewed Geyl’s study of Napoleon. He was struck by the ‘extremely bitter and jaundiced’ view of the Nazis exhibited by Geyl in the preface. The circumstances under which he had lived in the political section of Buchenwald had not been too bad, after all. Geyl had even been able to write his book while there! And look at the ‘barbarities’ of the Russians, the French and the Americans in Germany. ‘It is better that the pot refrains from denouncing the kettle.’47 Remember, this was in 1949, four years after the end of the war, yet the genocide does not register on Barnes’s moral compass. It never would. Against the unwritten rule not to react to reviews, Geyl responded with a letter. He pointed out that his opinions of the Nazi movement (which had its roots in the 1930s) were based not on his own experiences but on the gruesome treatment ‘of many thousands of prisoners’.48 The correspondence with Barnes and the tenor of the debate with Toynbee appear to correspond with the usual perception of the post-war memory of the Holocaust. In the first post-war decade, amid a mounting Cold War atmosphere, the larger story of the war was thought to be one of national grief and heroic resistance. People were still reluctant to make a distinction between ‘categories’ of victims, so runs the argument, but the fallen heroes were honoured by name.49 Jewish victimhood remained virtually unmentioned. With regard to the post-war Netherlands, France and Great Britain, it has also been pointed out that (rising) antisemitism was an obstacle to the recognition of Jewish victimhood. The Cold War created an enemy image in which West Germany was on the side of the good and too much stress on the horrors of Nazi Germany was unwelcome. The turning point would come in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The deportations, the imprisonment and the mass murder came to be seen ever more emphatically as steps in a genocide, which still later was fashioned into concepts such as Holocaust and Shoah. In 1948, not everyone was yet ready for this.

But this argument invites further scrutiny. The first-hand reports and film images were already available. In De Gids, Geyl’s favourite magazine, an essay on the then best-known camp, Bergen-Belsen, was published.50 In recent times, historiography has devoted much attention to these earliest reflections on what would later be summarized as a single ‘Holocaust’. The monograph Multidirectional Memory by Michael Rothberg is an inspiring example of this direction in Holocaust memory studies. Rothberg shows how the persecution of the Jews was discussed via other means, in political debate, in art and in literature. In his study on British Holocaust memory, Andy Pearce calls for a ‘mining at micro level’ in order to make these references and memories visible.51 This does not mean that the historical image suddenly turns from silence to a cacophony of Holocaust references but that a landscape develops of hints, phrases and gestures, wisps of recognition, here and there traces of the awareness that a few years ago, an all-encompassing genocide occurred in the heart of Europe. As a professional historian, Geyl was more perceptive in this respect than Toynbee, with his overarching vision.52

It was with a heavy heart that Geyl undertook to read the 2,500 pages of the last four volumes of A Study of History in 1955. But it was also something he had to do, particularly in the light of the radio debate. ‘Everybody seemed to expect it of me.’ This time, he gave the persecution of the Jews centre stage in his reassessment of Toynbee’s work.

Geyl’s review became a nearly unprecedented condemnation of a work containing so much impressive erudition but so precious little historiography. Possibly, he had already formed his opinion on the basis of the previous volumes. The title ‘Toynbee the prophet’ seemed to indicate as much. The books were more of the same: plenty of erudition, scant historiography. However, this time, Geyl was also concerned with an aspect that had gone unmentioned in 1948: ‘Extraordinary … is Toynbee’s appreciation of the extermination of the Jews by the National-Socialist regime.’ Toynbee had done something that became a trend in the post-war world. He had connected his assessment of the persecution of the Jews to Israel and its armed conflicts with Arab countries. Of course, Geyl stated, first, there is the customary condemnation of the extermination, but what followed? Toynbee equated Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes and country with the genocide, indeed, ‘he describes this as a more heinous sin than that committed against the Jews’ in several instances in history. Geyl deemed Toynbee’s equalization of the Nazis and Israel as an inadmissible trivialization of the genocide. Toynbee’s assessment was connected to his condemnation of Israel. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, it appeared that the evil of the Germans lay not in the genocide but in allowing the survival of a small number of Jews who had now become sinners themselves. In the review, Geyl quoted Toynbee: ‘As for the National-Socialist Germans, on the Day of Judgment the gravest crime standing to their account might be, not that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that they had caused the surviving remnant of Jews to stumble.’53 Is it possible, Geyl asked rhetorically, to write with less balance than Toynbee had here? What had inspired the historian to write this ‘amazing outburst against the Jews’? It seemed that Toynbee’s concerns about the atom bomb and his anti-communism put all other violence in the shadows. Toynbee had a deep aversion against secular nationalism. The Jews were twice wrong: before the war, the Jewish faith had been a self-centred relic of the past (‘fossilised’, in the original) and after the war, the Jews were too modern with their successful nationalism. Only the old Christendom as the universal religion could save western civilization. Not unimportantly, the historian stood ‘profoundly unsympathetic’ against Judaism and the Jews, as his biographer William McNeill put it.54 Moreover, thinking in terms of atrocities did not provide a suitable framework for interpreting the various forms of mass violence.

Next in line to incur the wrath of Geyl was A. J. P. Taylor; the historian, known for his TV appearances, exculpated Hitler by laying all the blame on ‘Versailles’ and accidentally forgetting the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Elmer Barnes was thrilled.

The Eichmann trial took place in 1961, forcing public recognition of the persecution of the Jews. This was also the year that Toynbee was criticized for his views on the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel. In that year the final volume of his magnum opus appeared in the form of a retrospective entitled Reconsiderations. In it, it was stated more clearly than ever before: ‘In the Jewish Zionists I see disciples of the Nazis.’ What was left unmentioned in the radio debate of 1948, and what Geyl had pointed out in the 1950s, now became a major issue. In March 1961 Toynbee was held accountable when, according to the Dutch Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad, the Israeli treatment of the Arabs was morally equated to the ‘racial murder of the European Jews by the Nazis’. A battle of words ensued, and the promise to continue the discussion via correspondence.55 A debate on the same issue was held with Yaacov Herzog, the Israeli ambassador and brother of the later president Chaim Herzog, at McGill University in Canada. The debate was broadcast on radio and led to articles in The Jewish Quarterly Review.56

Debate in the shadow of the Holocaust

Geyl felt compelled to complain that Toynbee, in his endeavour to become a prophet of his time, had neglected conventional debating rules. Toynbee, being a prophet, found it hard to react to the criticism of his opponents. He did not seek the truth, for he already knew it. In Toynbee’s vision, the image of history was clear and simple – if only those historians would stop making it so unnecessarily complicated. But it was Toynbee’s own work that was filled with ‘[t]he non-sequiturs and the contradictions, the far-fetched comparisons, the dizzying assumptions’. Toynbee refused to respond to concrete criticism: ‘He dwells in a world of his own imagining, where the challenges of rationally thinking mortals cannot reach him.’57 The debate, which Geyl, according to his adage that history is ‘a discussion without end’ had made into the core of his profession, was from Toynbee’s position hardly rewarding. In his obituary, Toynbee even mischievously referred to it, as he had consciously avoided further debates with Geyl, knowing that ‘a sure way of teasing him was to decline battle’.58

Did any of this matter to ‘the public’ whom the public historians thought they were addressing? Certainly. See for instance the way Pieter Geyl, in an essay disparaging Soviet historians (yet again with a wink towards Romein), ironically remarked that, since Marxist epistemology dictates that everyone is determined, it is impossible to make reproaches against individual members of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Similarly, Hitler was no more than an exponent of capitalism and not much different to other westerners. Impassioned, Geyl cried: ‘Indeed, I also have a faith. Not a faith in Marx or any other system. But faith in life, faith in the mind.’59

Here, also, the difference between Geyl and Toynbee was apparent. In Toynbee’s historical model, people wandered as defenceless and helpless monads in a world ruled by great historical processes. But Geyl’s historical model still saw people as individuals in mutual connection, each with their own agenda and agency. This had direct consequences. In Toynbee’s world, people bore no individual guilt; they were victims of circumstance. This may help explain Toynbee’s popularity in post-war Germany: ‘the appeal to inevitability, of the doomed fate of a certain generation …’.60 It would return in the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s. For Geyl, there was hope, not in Christendom or in any other system mapping out the future, but in his premise of an open future with people who, as moral creatures, are able to make choices. This point of view of Geyl’s also directly affects our judgment of the connectedness in time and place of historians as committed public intellectuals.