Volume 10, Number 11 · June 6, 1968
Far-Away Countries
By A.J.P. Taylor
Diplomat in Berlin 1933-39: Papers and Memoirs of Józef Lipski, Ambassador of Poland
edited by Waclaw Jedrzewicz
Columbia University, 679 pp., $17.50
Stalin, Hitler, and Europe 1933-39 Volume I, The Origins of World War II
by James E. McSherry
World, 308 pp., $10.00
The years before the Second World War continue to provide difficulties for historians. There is an enormous amount of available material in erratic proportions—sometimes excessively rich on less important subjects and sometimes tantalizingly small. There is also an assembly of accepted beliefs which are often treated as sacred and immune from dispute. For much of the time evidence and belief do not tie in together, and attempts to treat the period historically still cause trouble. Things are said to be better than they were seven years ago when I published The Origins of the Second World War, and I am sometimes surprised to notice that my views, once so frowned on, threaten to become a new orthodoxy. For instance, Alan Bullock, who was once certain that Hitler had precisely defined plans, is now equally sure that he had not. The old legends survive fully only in American universities, perhaps because it is too much trouble for professors to change their lecture notes or maybe because a stretch in the State Department—now a common experience for professors—leaves an incorrigible conformism behind.
Review, 2206 words
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