Kershaw on history and junk psychology

Last night I listened to several episodes of The Rest is History’s back catalog while I worked on a project, among them an excellent two-part interview with Sir Ian Kershaw, one of the preeminent experts on Nazi Germany and author of the two-volume biography Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis.

After introducing Kershaw and talking about his background as a medievalist who stumbled into expertise on the Third Reich, hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook turn toward the interview’s main subject: Hitler himself. In discussing Hitler’s ideas and motivations, they raise the questions of popular myth and psychology (at approximately the 28:00 mark in Part I of their interview), especially as causal factors in major historical events:

Holland: Because it becomes almost a kind of comfort, doesn’t it, the idea that you can explain what Hitler does, say, come across some core psychological flaw. So people often talk about “Was Hitler’s grandfather a Jew? Was this something that he worried about?” or something like that—

Kershaw: That answer to that is no he wasn’t.

Holland: So the answer to that is the grandfather wasn’t Jewish and Hitler didn’t worry about that. So that as an idea is a nonsense.

Kershaw: That’s right. I think these psychological theories are best treated in a very critical and conservative fashion. That is to say, that, again, it’s an easy operation for any biographer to take up psychological theories which are usually non-provable because the subject had never been on a psychologist’s couch even, and then read into that an entire intricate and complex historical development. And I tried my best in the biography to avoid that and discarded the various psycho theories of Hitler—mainly in footnotes rather than in the text itself—and I’ve never had very much trouble with those ideas whether it’s Hitler or anybody else for that matter. So I think what we have to deal with are political processes that explain these things rather than psychological hangups.

I’ve written a lot about what Chesterton called “the inside of history.” Understanding what mattered to people of the past, and how and why, is one of the crucial tasks of the historian. But it is another thing entirely to pretend to actual psychological insight or even diagnosis of psychological problems. These are almost always, as Kershaw notes, unfalsifiable. Such theories or explanations are pretty weak stuff on a purely personal level and make for misleading history, but made to bear the weight of historical causality they become positively nefarious. And the more causal weight, the worse.

To stick with the topic in question, stated baldly, such theories—that the Holocaust happened because Hitler had some kind of self-loathing about being part Jewish or (a deeper cut for a certain kind of amateur) because the doctor who failed to save his dying mother was Jewish—sound properly silly. But this kind of history is simple, and therefore easy to repeat and spread, and therefore almost ineradicable when it reaches the popular level. Here there be monsters—the monsters of popular myth.

Last spring I read the late John Lukacs’s The Hitler of History, a historiographical study, and blogged about it twice along similar lines: on the too-easy explanations of Hitler as madman and Hitler as Antichrist. For more on Chesterton and “the inside of history,” see here.