Guest blogger Eric Hildrew joins Sir Ian Kershaw in Sheffield University Student Unions own bunker to hear about Hitler’s last days.
The muggy basement of the Sheffield University Union is humming with anticipation. “Where can I get a ticket?” a middle-aged man asks with a hint of desperation, “I only found out about this in the paper on Saturday!” He’ll be lucky – many more eager audience members (a suspicious number of them also middle-aged men) are streaming past him, filling up the tightly-packed lecture theatre seats.
Who is the local hero this crowd have braved the October rain and wind to see? A star of prime time television? Schama? Starkey? (Are they still letting Starkey out in public?) In fact, the leather elbow and gore-tex clad legions arise for Sir Ian Kershaw, formerly of Sheffield University history department, now retired, and arguably the greatest living authority on Hitler and the Nazi regime (yes, even including the Germans).
Over 800 books were published about the Nazis last year alone. Hitler killed himself 66 years ago – just why are we so fascinated with this dark portion of Europe’s fairly dark past? Kershaw has a plausible answer, and is clearly torn between his own obsession – he’s written more than 10 books on the subject himself – and an unease at the ongoing macabre trade in Nazi horror stories. We (and by we he means a global audience, not just the Dad’s Army-loving Brits) are drawn inexorably to the subject because, unlike mass murdering contemporaries in other regimes, Hitler and the Nazis exported their horror to the rest of the world. Nazism produced total war, its genocide was ideologically driven by racism – it simply created the biggest global impact and left the largest legacy.
Kershaw doesn’t need to justify the compulsion of the period to tonight’s audience. In clear, lucid terms he outlines the thesis of his latest (and, he assures us, his last) book on the regime: The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944-45. His goal is to answer the question he claims has troubled historians since the events took place: just why did Germany fight on to the bitter end, incurring unimaginable casualties, simply to delay its inevitable allied occupation? You won’t be surprised to hear there’s no single or simple answer (history does that a lot) and if you want an essay on the topic you’ll have to buy the book. But Kershaw’s brisk, assured style successfully conveys the gist of the main arguments in under an hour. Anyone hoping for history channel-style grandstanding narrative would have been disappointed – Kershaw is a historian’s historian; careful, measured, not ashamed to admit that he lacks the novelist’s prerogative to make the plot simpler. The crowd ask informed (perhaps scarily informed) questions. Kershaw responds respectfully and with the patient air of a great teacher – if only Jamie’s Dream School had approached him instead of Starkey. Rousing applause suggests a contented crowd – who needs Hollywood budgets when the simple power of an authoritative speaker can do so much?
Off the Shelf Festival continues until 29th October in Sheffield and features a host of other historical/literary treats, both local and global. Booking in advance is a good idea.