I went to Mishcon de Reya this week to listen to Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers – Anthony Julius and James Libson – discuss her victory over the disgraced historian David Irving in 2000. He sued Lipstadt for libel because she called him a Holocaust denier, which he was. He said the gas chambers in Poland did not exist and that Hitler was a friend of the Jews.
Twenty-five years on, the memorial panel felt like the endowment of a minor Jewish festival. Irving is such a ridiculous person that I must force myself to remember how dangerous he was in the days when men crawled through Auschwitz-Birkenau with tape measures, trying to prove that Crematorium V was a spa.
Irving’s father, a British naval officer, was traumatised by battle and abandoned his family after the war. Irving reports that he had no toys, and no childhood. You could reply, look to the people of the East and their lost childhoods, but some people are broken from the beginning.
So Irving chose another father, who led him to ruin, as he did everyone. Irving is certainly wacky: he called the judge “Mein Fuhrer” at the trial. (Julius called it “a case that was impossible to lose”, though not for this reason).
Antisemitism is a mental illness, and no one embodies that better than Irving, except perhaps Adolf Hitler, the dream father who never knew he existed. Irving’s intellectual career was, among other things, an act of trauma.
We should thank him for suing Lipstadt, even if it is bitter. It made us safe from Holocaust denial for one generation.
Is it possible to feel nostalgia for those days? There was a solidity to the Irving action – pen and paper, a courtroom, a judge – because it predated the internet era, and its formless noise. And, of course, they won. Irving was bankrupted, and he fell to selling Nazi memorabilia, which I suspect was always his true calling: Hitler’s walking-stick, and a lock of his hair.
Mishcon de Reya established a tableau to evoke the trial: a room set up to look like its offices in the 1990s, a door to a lost world.
Antisemitism is both static and dynamic: that is its nature, and a function of its success. Lipstadt, who served as Joe Biden’s envoy on antisemitism, says that those who practise Irving’s brand of Holocaust denial (she calls it “hardcore denial”) are outliers still, though “they will have their followers”. And those sometimes get onto Piers Morgan’s show and Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan, once a comedian, has the No1 podcast in the world. He has hosted guests who claim Jeffrey Epstein worked for Israel, and that Hitler opposed Kristallnacht. But I doubt Rogan would allow a guest to say the Holocaust didn’t happen; in any case, he doesn’t need to.
Modern Holocaust denial, Lipstadt said, is “squishier. ‘Oh, here’s the Holocaust again’, or rolling the eyes. That diminution, and that’s much harder, that’s whack-a-mole.”
What she calls “softcore Holocaust denial” is broad. Sometimes it is subtle; sometimes it is not. There is mainstream belief in Jewish evil (the idea that it happened but the Jews deserved it); attempts to minimise the Jewishness of the victims with an over-representation of perpetrators in popular culture (didn’t everyone suffer?); romantic novels set in death camps (how bad could it be?); and sometimes an emphasis on so-called Jewish collaborators (who did it really?).
There is, above all, fatigue. I used to think this was a product of shame, and the need for moral survival – if the Jews deserved their fate the world is a safer place for the rest – but I am not so sure now.
Towards the end Julius said: “These battles are fought in every generation.” Victories, he added, “are always critical but never more than provisional”, and he is right.
In that spirit I will say this: I thought the appearance of the playwright David Hare on the panel – he dramatised the trial in the film Denial (2016) – was odd for the following reason: Hare also dramatised Bernard Schlink’s novel The Reader in 2008. This is a self-serving, exculpatory and trivial film about an illiterate (and beautiful) concentration camp guard (Kate Winslet). It suggests that, had she known poetry, she would not have helped burn 300 Jews alive in a church.
Yet, the majority of the men around the table at the Wansee Conference had post-graduate degrees and the SS volunteer units were heavy with doctoral theses, many of them in the humanities.
The Reader is a terrible and immoral book: for a novel about the Holocaust its emphasis, to me, is repugnant. Still, it was a happy day, and to quote Billy Wilder: nobody’s perfect.
