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ter> Grave Offenses vs. Tendentious Misconstruals The David Abraham Case The historical field concerning the Weimar Republic, Germany's parliamentary government during the interwar years, is not only an extremely sophisticated area of study, but an extremely competitive one as well. In the early eighties, a much heated and unprecedented scholarly dispute arose surrounding The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, written by David Abraham at the time, a fledgling historian and assistant professor at Princeton University. Nazi seizure of power from the Weimar Republic has long intrigued scores of historians. Various models have been constructed in an attempt to explain how an entity such as the Nazi movement came to power over such an industrially, culturally, and socially advanced society such as Germany's (Notes from Jamie van Hook 2 / 14). One such model, and the one used in Abrahams book, seeks to illustrate the role of capitalism, German industrialists, in the fall of the Weimar Republic (Notes from Jamie van Hook 2 / 14).
More specifically, Abraham attempts to decipher: how did Germany's divided economic elites attempt to articulate a national agenda around which they could unite, how and from whom was popular support won (if it was); how could the institutionalization of accord first work and then fail? Initially, the book received favorable reviews; it was called imaginative and interesting and distinguished, among other praises. But alas, high praises gave way to harsh, uncivil criticisms. Abraham was attacked for having a fanatical attachment to his preconceived notions and a complete insensitivity to and lack of interest in what actually took place in the past.
The controversy ultimately ended with David Abraham being effectively ostracized from the historical community. So how did Abrahams book go from being deemed the most important book on 20 th century Germany written in the last 15 years to being called fraudulent? What was the reasoning behind Abrahams downward spiral? Why did the events surrounding Abraham escalade into an academic crucifixion rather than culminating in nothing more than a passionate academic debate? Abrahams Marxist-like viewpoints might have something to do with it. Here, the word Marxist-like is used because although Abraham himself acknowledged the pronounced Marxist influences in his book, he had hoped his work would be distinguished from recent Marxist scholarship and debates.
However, the situation calls for more complicated reasoning; after all, Abraham was not the only Marxist historian. Jon Wiener points out that if Abraham had written a Marxist study about the Weimar Republic that did not discuss the role of businessmen, Henry Turner would probably not have bothered to check his footnotes. If he had written a Marxist theoretical essay on the Weimar Republic that did not include archival evidence, Turner would not have been interested. Jon Weiner concludes: What aroused Abrahams critics was his having placed his empirical research on the politics of big business within a framework of a Marxist theory. In order to be able to adequately grapple with the issues of interpretation or misinterpretation, it is first imperative to understand what Abraham was arguing in his book.
He believed that for the industrialists, there was no feasible and acceptable alternative to the NSDAP, because no other force could claim real popular support while also demonstrating a credible commitment to eliminating Weimar's fragmented political democracy and generous social welfare system. He emphasized that the issue was not one of evil but of how industrialists... in light of the Nazis independently achieved successes, attempted to insert their interest into what Brother has called the power vacuum of the last eight or nine months of the Republic. The movement against Abraham began in 1983 by Dr. Henry Turner, an opponent of Marxist theory and who was himself writing a book that ran countercurrent with Dr. Abrahams book.
He held that big business gave relatively little support to the Nazi movement. Turner: If Abraham is right, Im wrong. Through a private campaign of letters and documents sent to colleagues, Turner accused Abraham of forgery and misquoting, misdating, and mis attributing several key documents in such a way that they appear pro-Nazi. Dr. Gerald Feldman, who had initially recommended the book for publishing, was among the colleagues to receive the letter and sided with Turner. When Turner finally went public with his accusations (seven months after the initial private letter campaign) in an article in the American Historical Review, Abraham, who had returned to the archive in West Germany, responded and conceded his dating and attribution of certain letters had been erroneous.
One of the letters in question was one from Paul Reusch, a Ruhr industrialist, to Edgar Jung, a political writer who was interested in establishing a unified right in Germany. However, Abraham misidentified the recipient of the letter to be Martin Blank, Reusch's Berlin bureau chief. Abraham had also cited a report misattribute d to Blank instead of to August Heinrichsbauer, a right-wing business journalist. Abraham maintained that his errors were not intentional nor was his material forged or fabricated, as Turner had accused.
He also pointed out that the correct attributions would have actually strengthened his case; Heinrichsbauer was known as a key middleman between the Nazis and industry and was more important in this area than Blank. More importantly, Abraham had not attempted to conceal or deny the errors and profusely apologized. He attributed them to committing the embarrassing and elementary error of hasty and niggardly note taking. Although many in the historical community believed that Abrahams work was sloppy, there was a subsequent general feeling that Abraham had beaten charges of forgery. Many began to view Turner as a man with an ax to grind; a man bitter perhaps because his own work had been preempted by a younger scholar whose Marxism he disliked. Turner relinquished his attacks.
However, Feldman picked up where Turner let off, perhaps partly due to having originally supported and recommending Abrahams work for publication. What ensued was a vicious cycle of accusations and counter accusations and what transpired had far-reaching effects that went beyond the scope of a single historian being attacked for a single book. The age-old dilemma of interpretation and trust and its vital role in academia were among the many issues raised by the David Abraham case. At the root of the controversy was the relatively high frequency of errors that seemed to plague Abrahams book.
Were Abrahams errors so numerous, and of such a serious nature, that he could no longer be considered a trustworthy historian and should thus be banned and prevented from practicing or teaching history? Here, the word relatively is used because this case was indeed unprecedented. Never before had a historical work undergone such close and systematic scrutiny. Thus, there was no definite standard which other works were measured and judged against, and therefore, no standardized range for books to be measured as having a high frequency or low frequency of errors. What percentage of error is acceptable for a work to meet some predetermined scholarly standard? Who is to decide what this predetermined scholarly standard should be?
What exactly constitutes an error (for example, do typographical errors count)? Will different types of errors be weighed differently? It seems awkward to try to attach such concrete and definite questions to such an abstract and dynamic area of study such as history. Yet this is exactly what the historical community and scholars had to grapple with. Despite its dynamic nature, there are those who do believe that the practice of history and procedures for historical research can and should be treated as more or less analogous to the natural sciences in that historical archival research and treatment of facts should be more along the lines of scientific research methods and strict treatment of facts and data.
The empiricists of history prefer to let the facts speak for themselves. Those critical of the empirical school of thought deem that empiricists confine themselves to the chronicle of events and that their attitude is that because the footnotes dont contain errors, the understanding of history is correct. On the other hand, structuralists prefer to use the facts to explain larger patters of behavior and seek to identify broad levels of causation. Turner and Feldman fell into the empiricist category, whereas Abraham fell into the structuralist one. Because of their fundamental differences, the age-old question of interpretation played a crucial role in the David Abraham case. Empiricists and structuralists differ in the manner in which they treat facts.
In his book, In Defense of History, Richard Evans defines a historical fact as something that occurred in the past that can be verified through sources left behind. Theory and interpretation then come into play when a fact is converted into evidence (when a fact is used in support of an argument). Thus, a fact can be interpreted and used as evidence differently by different historians. Whereas a fact interpreted by a structuralist might be seen as sufficient evidence to support an argument or thesis, an empiricist might argue that the same fact is insufficient evidence to support the thesis. In the same manner, what Feldman called an error might well have been a different interpretation of the facts.
The questions of interpretations become more complicated when put into practice. Ulrich Nocken, a former graduate student of Feldman, stated in his article Collapse of the Weimar Republic (Dusseldorf), that only four of seventy of Abrahams citations were correct and that ninety-eight of three-hundred twenty-seven pages contained errors. This seems like detrimental statistics against Abraham. However, this article, later used to support Feldman's efforts to undermine any chance of employment for Abraham, circulated as an unpublished manuscript. Additionally, Nocken's review of the book was one in thirty reviews in which the thesis was not understood to be what Abraham had intended; thus, meaning that Nocken had interpreted the material in Abrahams book differently than the author himself as well as other reviewers. If it was possible for Nocken to interpret differently or perhaps misinterpret the thesis, it was also entirely possible that what Nocken calls errors are different interpretations or misinterpretations of the data.
In A Collapse in Weimar Scholarship, Feldman chose the following passage to illustrate a characteristic example of Abrahams inventive misuse of documents. He italicized the portions which he alleges to be fabricated. The Nazis are not to be circumvented; more than that, they are the positive force. We should contribute to them and their efforts and assist them in altering some of the utopian aspects of their economic policies. [Schacht] After a productive two hour talk with Hitler yesterday, I fully and completely agree with your suggestion... I find myself in complete sympathy with the National Socialists, though they are a bit tactless. [Reusch] [I have begun] a collection for the purpose of supporting them and enlightening them on economic issues. [Schacht] In this passage, I might interpret giving money to enlighten them on economic issues as sounding like politician-language for active collaboration with the Nazis. Although big business was not the initial mastermind behind the Nazi movement, by giving monies to their cause, they were probably hoping to ride the wave of a seemingly rising movement in return for favorable economic policies.
One must concede to Feldman that the italicized portions strengthen the power of the passage. However, in defense of Abraham, even without the italicized insertions, big business shows a propensity, a tendency, if you will, toward engaging in active collaboration with and lending support to the Nazi movement. Feldman presented the aforementioned erroneous passage as a characteristic example of erroneous passages found throughout Abrahams book; one whose errors are extreme in character. He used these examples to strengthen his argument and justify his leading role in the character assassination of David Abraham. But surely this example - cited because it was characteristic of the erroneous representations throughout Abrahams book, a quintessential Abraham error - is not so grandiose as to constitute the type of assault mounted against Abraham. Arno Mayer, a professor at Princeton University, judged the assault to be petty and full of sniping attacks.
Nevertheless, Feldman did accuse Abraham of other errors that may not be attributed to or explained by questions of interpretation. Among other things, Feldman charged Abraham with misidentification's, false dating's, false attributions, and false connections. As a specific example, Feldman cited the Christmas 1930 Exchange, an alleged conversation between two German industrialists. Perhaps the most damaging of Abrahams errors was found in the Reusch letter to Jung and the report attributed by Need to Heinrichsbauer. In the letter, by le...
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