Norman Davies: As an outsider he reshapes our understanding of Europe
To the historian of Poland, the history of all Europe looks different. Ordinarily, Eastern Europe is thought to begin somewhere around Prague, with everything beyond relegated to mystery and backwardness. Half a century behind the Iron Curtain only deepened the traditional estrangement, making it seem natural to regard countries with very different identities as part of a monolithic Eastern Bloc. People who instinctively recognize the difference between the Germans and the Dutch feel no need to understand the difference between Ukrainians and Poles, or between Serbs and Croats — until they start to kill one another, whereupon they become examples of "age-old," unchangeable hatreds. This state of affairs has been decried over and over again by writers such as Milan Kundera, who once protested the way "a Western country like Czechoslovakia has been part of a certain history, a certain civilization, for a thousand years and now, suddenly, it has been torn from its history and rechristened ‘The East.'"
The career of Norman Davies, the popular and sometimes controversial British historian, has been devoted to hammering home that same point, for the benefit of readers who think of "the West" as beginning in California and extending to about the Elbe. Mr. Davies made his reputation as the leading English-language historian of Poland. His survey of Polish history, "God's Playground" (1982), is the standard work on the subject, and is very popular in Poland itself, where it was first distributed clandestinely by Samizdat in the early 1980s. Over the last decade, Mr. Davies has branched out, producing wideranging, synethetic books on big subjects: "The Isles" (1999) dealt with the history of Great Britain and Ireland, "Europe: A History" (1996) took on the whole continent.
But the outsider's perspective that he developed as a scholar of Poland is always in evidence. The very fact that Mr. Davies' history of Britain is not a history of Britain, but a history of "The Isles," suggests how he uses the facts of geography to unsettle the myths of history. Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England are no more Britain, Mr. Davies argues, than Poland and the Czech Republic are "the East." To understand history correctly, we must first rid of ourselves of such illusions, even comforting and comfortable ones.
"No Simple Victory" (Viking, 490 pages, $30), Mr. Davies's new book, is the latest installment in his project of illusion-demolition. This is a revisionist history of World War II, designed to shake the complacency of British and American readers who are accustomed to thinking of it as "the good war." ...
Read entire article at Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun
The career of Norman Davies, the popular and sometimes controversial British historian, has been devoted to hammering home that same point, for the benefit of readers who think of "the West" as beginning in California and extending to about the Elbe. Mr. Davies made his reputation as the leading English-language historian of Poland. His survey of Polish history, "God's Playground" (1982), is the standard work on the subject, and is very popular in Poland itself, where it was first distributed clandestinely by Samizdat in the early 1980s. Over the last decade, Mr. Davies has branched out, producing wideranging, synethetic books on big subjects: "The Isles" (1999) dealt with the history of Great Britain and Ireland, "Europe: A History" (1996) took on the whole continent.
But the outsider's perspective that he developed as a scholar of Poland is always in evidence. The very fact that Mr. Davies' history of Britain is not a history of Britain, but a history of "The Isles," suggests how he uses the facts of geography to unsettle the myths of history. Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England are no more Britain, Mr. Davies argues, than Poland and the Czech Republic are "the East." To understand history correctly, we must first rid of ourselves of such illusions, even comforting and comfortable ones.
"No Simple Victory" (Viking, 490 pages, $30), Mr. Davies's new book, is the latest installment in his project of illusion-demolition. This is a revisionist history of World War II, designed to shake the complacency of British and American readers who are accustomed to thinking of it as "the good war." ...