← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE Literary Festival 2014: The books that inspired David Stevenson
00:08:51
Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:05]
A
From 24 February to 1 March 2014, the London School of Economics will hold its sixth annual literary festival. Under the theme Reflections, the festival will explore how the social sciences and the arts help us understand the world around us and our place within it. The LSE Review of Books will be hosting two events, Sex and Psychopaths, celebrating 100 years of Freud's on narcissism on 27 February and don't judge a book by its cover, reflecting content through design. On the 1st of March. To see a full programme of events and to book free tickets, go online to lseac.ukpublicevents to celebrate and support the festival, we're launching a series of special academic inspiration segments featuring prominent LSE academics and event speakers. In the second episode in this series we hear from David Stevenson, professor of International History at the lse. Professor Stevenson is an expert on the International relations of 19th and 20th century Europe and has written extensively on the First World War. He begins by telling us more about the literary festival event he's chairing before discussing the books on World War I that have had the most impact on his academic career.
- [01:31]
B
I'm going to be chairing and contributing to a panel discussion. This will be happening on Wednesday 26th February 2014 and this will form part of the LSE Literary Festival and be fitting in with the themes that have been chosen for the festival this year, which coincides, of course, with the year of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The particular event is entitled why Remember Reflections on the First World War Centenary and what we've put together is a multidisciplinary panel. This includes historians. There'll be Margaret Macmillan from Oxford, who's just published an important new book on the July 1914 crisis that led to the outbreak of war. I'll be chairing it and also be making some contributions from a historical perspective. On the other hand, we have Lily Kuluraki from the Media and Communications, who will be talking about the First World War in the media, how the wartime combat experience was represented. Michael Cox from International Relations will be talking more from an international relations perspective, the connection between the wartime experience and the origins of the League of Nations and new changes in international organization. And finally, John Hutchinson from the Department of Government, who's an expert on nationalism, will be talking more about commemoration and the psychological and social and cultural consequences of the war and its impact. My interest in the First World War goes back a very long way and I'm old enough to remember the previous commemorations at the time of the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. So we're looking back at the 1960s. I know that was a very formative period for a number of reasons. But if I put my finger on one book from that period, it's the book by A.J.P. taylor, whose book, the First World War, An Illustrated History, came out in the early 1960s as being a kind of classic that's been in print with Penguin unchanged ever since. And it's a book that's still worth looking at today. It tells you almost as much about the attitude and perspective and outlook of the 1960s, actually, as it does of the generation of 1914. But it's a very disillusioned, cynical kind of book with wonderful captions to the photographs, which is one of the things that many people remember from that book, as well as AJP Taylor's very kind of inimitable, cynical, disillusioned style. But that was the book that got me into the First World War. I think I remember reading it because I was actually in hospital at the time. And it's a book that presents a picture of the First World War as chaotic as governments out of control, nobody really knowing what was happening. If I could mention one other book which presents almost a diametrically opposed view, which once I got into serious research into the First World War, one of the books that most influenced me was, as many other People, was a book by German historian Fritz Fischer. This book came out in 1961, and the German title of it is Griff Nacht e Weltmacht, which means Grasp for World Power, translated into English as Germany's Aims in the First World War. Now, this presents a diametrically opposed view to Taylor, because what it analyzed was what the objectives were that the German government was fighting for. There's lots of new evidence in there, very important at its time, showing that the German government repeatedly discussed what they were fighting for, tried to establish what their war aims were, that they wanted to surround Germany with a chain of buffer states in Eastern and Western Europe and expand globally with a chain of overseas colonies and naval bases. So this presents a very purposive picture of the war, much more in line with another book that's influenced me. This is the classic Buffet, Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theorist on war, and his famous sentence there, that war is the continuation of politics by other means. So you have these views, you have the AJP Taylor view that it's all chaos and confusion and people are out of control. You have the Fischer view that is very purposive, much more chilling kind of view that this terrible war was fought through to a finish as a kind of act of policy. The truth, I think is somewhere between these two alternative, extreme, opposed views. And some ways all the work I've been doing since has been trying to find where you should fit your interpretation of the war between those opposing interpretations. The book I'd recommend is a book by Christopher Clark called the Sleepwalkers which came out, I think two years ago. It's a new interpretation of the crisis of July, August 1914, the outbreak of the crisis. It's extremely well written, very vivid and very easy to follow. It contains a lot of new research, particularly from Serbia, from Russia, as presents a new picture of the outbreak of the First World War less centred on Germany than the interpretations had been ever really since. Fritz Fischer, who I spoke about earlier on, looks at the responsibility of all the other powers and tries to argue that the outbreak of the First World War was a shared responsibility, not just German. It kind of de centers Germany from the overall picture. Now that's controversial and I don't go as far as what he has to say. I think in the interpretation that I would put. I still see Germany and its ally Austria Hungary as taking the initiative and having the primary responsibility in the July crisis and for causing the outbreak of war. Though it's perfectly true to say that it took both sides to make this war happen and to keep the war continuing. But though I don't agree with everything in the book, I would strongly recommend it. And I think it's a book that more than anything else has forced me to rethink my own views about this subject. I used to read lots of novels when I started off in my academic career. I made a determined attempt to set aside time at the weekends to read the big 19th century novels. And I did read a lot, but I don't have time to do that now. But if there's one book that sort of stuck with me from that period, it sounds pretentious, but it's Tolstoy's War and Peace. That's the book I read twice when I was a student and then when I began as a lecturer. Hopefully when I get to retirement I'll read it again. It'll be interesting to go back to it because I think of it as a young man's book. So it'll be interesting to see how well it wears when I come back to it, perhaps in retirement. But there are passages in that book, and scenes and episodes and dialogues which have just stayed with me, and I come back to them again and again.
- [07:54]
A
That was Professor David Stevenson on the books that sparked his interest in World War I. That's all for this podcast. Join us next week when Dr. Ellen Helsper, lecturer in the media and communications department at LSE, tells us about her favourite books on media technologies. Dr. Helsper is also speaking at the LSE Literary Festival event Private Lives Do We Still Value Our privacy? On the 1st of March. To see a full program of events and to book free tickets, go online to lse.ac.ukpublicevents for the latest reviews of books in the social sciences. And for more podcasts, go to lsereviewerbooks.com I'm Amy Mollett. Thanks for listening. Sam.