People, Nations and Traditions in a Comparative Frame: Thinking about the Past with Jonathan Steinberg

By Anthem Press

If the turn of the twenty-first century was characterised by the ‘history wars’ in which bitter internecine battles raged between different historical schools, Jonathan Steinberg was noteworthy for his methodological pluralism. His own historical worked spanned diplomatic history, military history, the social history of war, biography, social history, banking history, political culture and genocide studies. He often employed a comparative historical approach, which teased out deep historical explanations by examining personalities, nations and traditions simultaneously. This book offers a critical appreciation of his contribution to modern historical practice with contributions by former students and colleagues, whose own interests are as diverse as those of Steinberg himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785277696

Book preview

People, Nations and Traditions in a Comparative Frame

Jonathan Steinberg, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1980s. Reproduced with the assistance of Timothy Harvey-Samuel, Bursar and Steward of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and the permission of Peter Steinberg.

People, Nations and Traditions in a Comparative Frame

Thinking About the Past with Jonathan Steinberg

Edited by

D’Maris Coffman, Harold James and Nicholas Di Liberto

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2021 D’Maris Coffman, Harold James and Nicholas Di Liberto editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933263

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-767-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-767-7 (Hbk)

Cover image: Painting by Warren Brandt, untitled, given to Edith Steinberg, Jonathan’s mother, ca. 1962. Reproduced with kind permission of Peter Steinberg.

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Foreword – Zara Steiner

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

D’Maris Coffman, Nicholas Di Liberto and Harold James

Part One Methodological Pluralism and New Applications

Chapter OneAll or Nothing: From Comparative to Transnational History

Ben Mercer

Chapter TwoSwiss History Only as National History? How to Break out of the Cage of National Historiography

Georg Kreis

Chapter Three‘The Kaiser’s Navy and German Society’: The View from the Tattooist’s Studio

Jane Caplan

Chapter FourThe Warburgs and Yesterday’s Financial Deterrent

Harold James

Part Two Personal and National Character

Chapter FiveClarendon’s Exile and the Role of Personality in Historical Explanation

D’Maris Coffman

Chapter SixLeslie Stephen and the Americans

Michael O’Brien

Chapter SevenFrom Bodyguard to General: The Strange Career of Joseph ‘Sepp’ Dietrich

Christopher Clark

Chapter EightJohnny Eyetie and the Teds: British Soldiers’ Attitudes towards their Italian and German Enemies in the Second World War

Alan Allport

Part Three Society, Families and the Sovereign Self

Chapter NineThe Family of Sovereigns at Modern Times

Tara J. Westover

Chapter TenFrench Family Policy and the Family of Nations in the Interwar Years

Kristen Stromberg Childers

Chapter ElevenDeath of a Dream: Liberal Values and the Crisis of the British Welfare State, 1945–2014

Harold Carter

Part Four History Out of Sync: Modernity and Tradition

Chapter TwelveA Risorgimento Influence on the Modern European Image of St Francis of Assisi

J. Casey Hammond

Chapter Thirteen Hometown Hamburg: Constructing the Non-Liberal and Non-Modern Foundations of the Weimar Republic in the Long Nineteenth Century

Frank Domurad

Chapter Fourteen‘Revolt Against the Modern World’: Religion and the Fascist Right in Contemporary Italy

John Pollard

Part Five History, Narrative and the Human Condition

Chapter FifteenApril 1945: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II

Thomas Childers

Chapter SixteenBeing Human as a Method and Research Finding in Social Science

Alison Liebling and João Costa

Chapter Seventeen Bleak House Syndrome

Joanna Wade

Afterword – David Bell

Bibliography of Jonathan Steinberg’s Works

Index

Foreword

Zara Steiner

I knew of Jonathan long before I met him. His father, Rabbi Milton Steinberg, a political liberal and rabbinical reformer, was much admired by my parents who found him to be a breath of fresh air in the complex religious and political environment of pre-1939 New York City. When I came to Cambridge, I knew Jonathan was a member of that talented group of PhD students taught by Harry Hinsley, before the latter gained eminence as the author of the multivolume study on British intelligence during the Second World War. Though never a member of that circle, and always an outsider as its members were appointed to university posts, I knew of Jonathan’s work on Tirpitz, a ground breaking study of the pre-war German navy, which fed my own research.¹ When I joined New Hall, I heard from my students of this brilliant lecturer and engaging supervisor, who took an active interest in his students, even those not at Trinity Hall. When I started to supervise an increasing number of foreign PhD students, mainly, though not exclusively, from the United States and Germany, I found that Trinity Hall was a favourite choice of college, for Jonathan was not only accessible but a source of special assistance and support to those who found Cambridge a perplexing environment to say the least. After I finally met him and we subsequently became friends, I found his book Why Switzerland? an insightful introduction to that onion-like country where my husband was teaching.² I learned much, too, from his comparative study of Germany and Italy³ and was heavily dependent on his bibliographies when the study of the Holocaust became an important part of the Modern European History paper. Having spent some years before coming to Cambridge working in the city (for a time at S. G. Warburg & Co, the London-based investment house), Jonathan’s interest and grasp of economic history and theory was always more than purely academic. It informed his treatment of the Deutsche Bank, a highly contentious subject, which Jonathan handled in an authoritative and exceedingly well-balanced way.⁴ This background, as well as his wide reading in the field, has provided a solid base for his recent teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Jonathan’s interests have always been broad; his outstanding and enviable linguistic talents has meant that he has crossed national boundaries with ease, interviewing and lecturing, as well as reading and researching in Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. He is at home in the literature as well as the history and politics of these countries, whilst never abandoning his involvement with American topics. As his recent, compelling biography of Bismarck clearly shows, he writes with verve, clarity and humour, providing fresh insights into this supposedly familiar figure.⁵ In some ways, I have personally benefitted most from the many lunches and teas with him and Marion since he left Cambridge and became the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania. These are among the highlights of the year. Almost every subject can provoke debate: Jews, American and European politics and economics, literature, contemporary and past, dance and music. The range and depth of these discussions often leaves me breathless and limping behind. There is so much common ground that the basics need not be negotiated, and one can just delight in the give and take and the many points of disagreement. And always, tolerance, generosity and kindness are Jonathan’s hallmarks, even to the point of reading my 2000-page manuscript, and offering critical and constructive advice. This collection of essays is a fitting tribute to an unusual person, a first-rate and innovative historian, and an outstanding model and teacher for those living on both sides of the ocean and beyond.

Notes

1 Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (London: MacDonald, 1965).

2 Why Switzerland? 3rd ed. (1976; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

3 All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust 1941–43 , 2nd ed. (1990; repr. London: Routledge, 2003).

4 The Deutsche Bank and Its Gold Transactions during the Second World War (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999).

5 Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank a number of people associated with the production of this volume. As some readers will know, this collection has been eight years in the making, a long birthing process which has forced a number of contributors to publish their pieces elsewhere. We thus would like to express our gratitude to Sam Hirst, Mark Russell, Ulinka Rublack and Adam Tooze for their draft chapters and our regret that the delays forced them to withdraw from the project. Likewise, we would like to thank Pamela Zinn for her interest in the volume, and are sorry that the vicissitudes of producing this volume amidst the COVID-19 pandemic precluded her involvement.

We would like to acknowledge an enormous debt of gratitude to Tej Sood of Anthem Press for his enthusiasm for this project and his patience in the face of our long delays in producing the manuscript.

Penelope Coffman and the late Zara Steiner deserve recognition and thanks for their generous efforts at editing and proofreading early drafts of approximately half the chapters. We are especially grateful to Tricia O’Brien for her willingness to see us include her late husband’s chapter on Leslie Stephen.

We would like to acknowledge and thank Trinity Hall, Franklin University, Switzerland and the University of Pennsylvania for allowing us to use archival photographs of Jonathan. Special thanks are due to Timothy Harvey-Samuel, Bursar and Steward of Trinity Hall, and Sara Steinert Borella, Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs at Franklin University, Switzerland, for their swift and gracious attention to our queries.

Finally, producing this volume would not have been possible without the kind assistance of Jonathan’s son, Peter Steinberg, and Jonathan’s partner, Marion Kant. We hope that they are pleased with this collection, as it expresses our enormous gratitude and warm affection for Jonathan and all that he has given the historical profession.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Alan Allport is an Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University. He is the author of Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (2009), Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945 (2015) and Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941 (2020).

David Bell was one of Jonathan’s very first pupils when he moved to Trinity Hall. At his urging, David applied for a Thouron scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania where he spent two years. He was Washington Correspondent of the Financial Times and later Managing Editor and Chief Executive before joining the board of Pearson and also becoming Chairman of the FT. He is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall.

Jane Caplan is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. She has published widely on the history of Nazi Germany and the history of individual identity documentation in modern Europe. Publications in the latter field include, as editor, Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (2000) and, as co-editor with John Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (2001).

Harold Carter is an Oxford University historian, Chairman of the Wakeham Trust (a grant-making foundation focused on community action projects) and the farmer of a small organic farm. Before returning to academic life in 2000, he was a strategy consultant working in France and the UK, principally for large clients and the French government. From 1983 to 1987, he worked in the private office of Dr David Owen (leader of the SDP) in the House of Commons. Prior to that he was a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group and a banker at Chase Manhattan Bank. He has a BA from Cambridge (History and Social & Political Science) where he was a senior scholar and President of the Cambridge Union, an MBA (Distinction) from INSEAD where he was a Kitchener Scholar, and an MPhil (Distinction) and DPhil from the University of Oxford (St Catherine’s College). From 2005 to 2009, he was a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Gonville Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Thomas Childers is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania and Emeritus Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of The Nazi Voter (1983), editor of The Formation of the Nazi Constituency (1987) and co-editor, with Jane Caplan, of Reevaluating the Third Reich: New Controversies, New Interpretations (1993). He has completed a trilogy of narrative histories of the Second World War, Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II (1995), In the Shadows of War (2003) and Soldier from the War Returning (2009). His most recent book is The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (2017).

Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and the author of a number of books, including Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (2006), The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012) and Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics from the Thirty Years War to the Third Reich (2019).

D’Maris Coffman is Professor in Economics and Finance and the Head of Department and Director of the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management at University College London. Before joining UCL in 2014, she spent six years as a fellow of Newnham College where she variously held a junior research fellowship (Mary Bateson Research Fellowship), a post as a college lecturer and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. In July 2009, she started the Centre for Financial History, which she directed through December 2014. She did her undergraduate training at the Wharton School in managerial and financial economics and her PhD in history at the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where Jonathan Steinberg was her first-year supervisor and then subsequently honorary chair of her doctoral committee.

João Costa is the Chair of the Portuguese National Preventive Mechanism against torture and other forms of ill-treatment of persons deprived of their liberty. He also has experience in peacebuilding, conflict and security, and development, having worked in the field and headquarters with the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organizations, donors and NGOs. He holds an MPhil in Criminological Research from the University of Cambridge (distinction), an LLM from the University of Coimbra (top of the class) and a BA in Law from the University of Coimbra (top of the class).

Nicholas Di Liberto completed his PhD in European Intellectual History at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. From 2010 to 2019, he taught European and World History at Newberry College. He is president of the Southeast World History Association and associate editor of the World History Bulletin. He works now as a freelance editor.

Frank Domurad is a historian of the Weimar Republic and the author of the book, Hometown Hamburg: Artisans and the Political Struggle for Social Order in the Weimar Republic (2019), based upon his thesis work with Jonathan Steinberg, whose mentorship and friendship, intellect and integrity inspired a love for German history.

J. Casey Hammond completed a PhD in Modern European History under the direction of Jonathan Steinberg at the University of Pennsylvania. He has lived and worked mostly in the South China Sea region, most recently lecturing at universities in Singapore and Malaysia. He studies cultural flows and international relations between Greater China and the Malay Archipelago, and linked concepts of regional identity. He also collects colonial era photographs and maps from the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and Formosa (Taiwan).

Harold James, the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University, is Professor of History and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and Director of the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate. His books include The German Slump (1986), International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1996), The End of Globalization (2001), The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle (2009), Making the European Monetary Union (2012), The Euro and the Battle of Economic Ideas (with Markus K. Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau) (2016) and Making a Modern Central Bank: The Bank of England, 1979–2003 (2020). He is also the official historian of the International Monetary Fund.

Georg Kreis is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the University of Basel and was founding director at the Europainstitut/Institute for European Global Studies from 1993 to 2011. He was for 20 years chief editor of the Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte and editor of the handbook Die Geschichte der Schweiz (2014). He has published extensively on Swiss and European History and, from 1996 to 2003, was a member of an expert commission investigating Swiss involvement in the Second World War. Among his numerous publications are Zensur und Selbstzensur: Die schweizerische Pressepolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1973), Die Schweiz in die Geschichte, 1700 bis heute (1997), Switzerland in the Second World War (edited with Bertrand Müller) (2000), Kein Volk von Schlafen: Rassismus und Antirassismus in der Schweiz (2007), Frankreichs republikanische Grossmachtpolitik, 1870–1914 (2007) and Gerechtigkeit für Europa: Eine Kritik der EU-Kritik (2017). He first met Jonathan Steinberg in 1975 in Cambridge, during his time as visiting scholar of Corpus Christi College, and they have remained in continual exchange for nearly half a century.

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. Her books include The Prison Officer (2001), Prisons and their Moral Performance, with Helen Arnold (2004) and The Effects of Imprisonment (2005). She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2020.

Ben Mercer completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Jonathan Steinberg. He is now Lecturer in Modern European History at the Australian National University and the author of Student Revolt in 1968: France, Italy and West Germany (2020).

Michael O’Brien was an intellectual historian of the American South. He read for his undergraduate and postgraduate research degrees at Trinity Hall with Jonathan Steinberg as his director of studies. O’Brien later continued his postgraduate education at Vanderbilt University. He was a Professor of American Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, which he joined in 2002 after 30 years at the University of Michigan, University of Arkansas and Miami University of Ohio. He was the recipient of numerous awards from the historical profession, including the Bancroft Prize, and was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy.

John Pollard is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Anglia Ruskin University and an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He has written widely on Catholicism and Fascism, including the Fascist Experience in Italy (1998) and The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958 (2014). He is currently writing ‘Blood & Honour’: A Transnational History of Skinhead Fascism.

Zara Steiner was a Fellow in History at New Hall, now Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, from 1965 until her retirement in 1996, upon which she was elected as Fellow Emerita. She was elected as Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. She held visiting posts at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Stanford University. Her scholarly works include The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898–1914 (1969), The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 and The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939, both volumes appearing in the Oxford History of Modern Europe series in 2005 and 2011, respectively.

Kristen Stromberg Childers has a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on Modern France. She is the author of Fathers, Families, and the State in France, 1914–1945 (2003) and Seeking Imperialism’s Embrace: National Identity, Decolonization, and Assimilation in the French Caribbean (2016).

Joanna Wade arrived at Trinity Hall in 1977 as part of the first wave of women. Despite greatly enjoying being taught history by Jonathan Steinberg, she became a solicitor, volunteering in her spare time for the homeless charity Crisis of which he was also a devoted supporter. She is now Regional Employment Judge at the Central London Employment Tribunal.

Tara Westover is an American author and historian. Her memoir Educated (2018) was a finalist for a number of national awards, including the LA Times Book Prize, PEN America’s Jean Stein Book Award and two awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. Currently, she is a senior research fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. She was awarded a Gates fellowship and completed her MPhil at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009 and her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2014.

Introduction

D’Maris Coffman, Nicholas Di Liberto and Harold James

The diverse essays in this volume reflect Jonathan Steinberg’s methodological pluralism and insatiable curiosity for historical questions which cross disciplinary and geographical boundaries. Animating students, colleagues, friends and wider audiences with his enthusiasm for ‘thinking about the past’ was his vocation, one that he pursued with unmatched enthusiasm. Through this collection, we hope to convey something of the intellectual range, analytical purchase and moral purpose of his historical writing and teaching.

One feature of Jonathan’s inspiring and charismatic lectures was his unique ability to combine an analysis – always fresh, never pre-cooked – of big historical structures and trends with an acute awareness of the importance of individual personalities. His interest in structural analysis is reflected in all of his written work, in Yesterday’s Deterrent and in Why Switzerland? and, probably most strikingly and rigorously, in the comparison of German and Italian wartime mentalities in All or Nothing. The culmination of his deep probing into the human psyche that occurred in all of the undergraduate and general lectures came late in his career in powerful form in the masterful biography, Bismarck. What made that book so insightful was the fresh portrait he painted of how the monarch, King and later Kaiser Wilhelm, was a substitute father to the German politician and how the political relationship which moulded the constitution of Imperial Germany was the outcome of the family dynamics in the upbringing of future ‘Iron Chancellor’ – the distant father and the emotional mother. In developing this analysis, Jonathan went far beyond other biographers, even beyond Otto Pflanze, who spent his life writing and then rewriting his Bismarck biography after taking a turn from diplomatic history to psychoanalysis.

There are other features that deserve emphasis. There was a concern for structure, but also an awareness of the importance of chance. Jonathan was also amusing about this, and looked for illustrations in his own biography: he liked to tell the wonderful story of how he became interested in Germany, as if it were not obvious that the son of a famous rabbi should be interested in the cultural and political origins of the greatest crime of the twentieth century. After he trained as a medical orderly to deal with shell shock, or post-traumatic distress, his personnel file apparently had slid behind a radiator so that he was not sent to Korea. But in early 1950s Germany, where he went instead, there was (supposedly) no shell shock in the US army, so he had plenty of time to investigate Germany and the German problem. Or, there was the story of his work in the Warburg bank in Hamburg, at that time still oddly named ‘Brinkman und Wirtz’, after the ‘aryanizers’ of the late 1930s. Thus, Jonathan always had a good eye for the links between structure and chance that drive both politics and market developments. He also understood that history was deep; it was about strange identities and about the profound alien-ness of past mentalities.

One other attribute is worth recalling. Jonathan had a sense that a moral argument depended on his historical case, so he refused to let anyone else try to overturn that case. When he came to give a seminar at the Davis Center in Princeton in the late 1980s, when that seminar was run by the formidable Lawrence Stone, there was a firm ritual about the event. It started at 10:30 and NEVER went on after 12:15. Jonathan’s talk ended with a comprehensive statement by Stone about what was wrong with the paper that had been presented. Jonathan wasn’t going to take that, so he hit back with a vigorous riposte. Lawrence insisted on the last word, so he made another intervention. And so on: the meeting went over the time limit for something like half an hour. It was like being at a tennis match with a rally that goes on and on, with balls being slammed ever faster into ever more distant corners of the court.

Jonathan was a real pioneer of what is now called, in a term that had become too trite and complacent, transnational history. Yesterday’s Deterrent was about the interactions not just of diplomatic strategies but of different British and German mental worlds. Why Switzerland? is also inherently comparative, in the sense that one of the driving questions is how the Swiss path came to be so different from that of its neighbour in the north, Germany. And the essence of All or Nothing is the comparative approach. It is therefore helpful as a way into Jonathan’s intellectual world to follow Ben Mercer’s careful dissection of comparative and transnational history. Mercer shows how a tendency to vagueness is an inherent flaw in much of this writing, and what analytic strategies are needed to combat the danger. Gesturing beyond the comparative framework, transnational history has been concerned with the attempt to correct a perceived neglect in much national historiography of processes and movements that cross national frontiers, with the goal, also, of provoking greater awareness of the historian’s role in the construction of historical knowledge. Yet, transnational history has offered none of the same empirical insight or methodological innovation that the older comparative work aimed to achieve. Likewise, global history’s case against the nation as a unit of analysis is rendered problematic by the stubborn persistence of nation states themselves into an era of apparent ‘globalization’ and by the difficulties ideas, concepts and historians have in crossing the linguistic and physical boundaries that separate them.

Georg Kreis’ contribution examines precisely the problem of national historiography in a field in which Jonathan Steinberg made a notable contribution, one of many foreign observers of Swiss history and culture. The Swiss case reminds us that nation states are not naturally occurring phenomena, neither are their historians always without personal and professional biases; and although one might expect external observers of the Swiss case to produce analyses more critical than native scholars, in Kreis’ view, the works of many such ‘foreign’ authors have tended to reify simplistic versions of national character that, when nurtured by personal sentiment, incline some to make excuses for the idiosyncrasies of an alien culture. In Steinberg’s case, while a Swiss national character shaped by geography, languages and the longevity of its republican political culture made an ideal case study, he nevertheless was under no illusions that the Swiss presented as a monolithic national culture. Indeed, for him, their longstanding democracy had been undermined by recent events.

Steinberg, of course, believes in national character, or, more precisely, that ‘The rich compound of language, habits, tradition, architecture, social structure, laws, history, climate and geography that give a place its specificity is undeniably out there in reality.’¹ It is perhaps a historical irony, explored in All or Nothing, that nothing surprised Italy’s leaders more than the fact that their German allies meant what they said; i.e., that the Nazis embodied an extreme example of German national seriousness in their commitment to exterminate a people and rule the world. National character, then, is not the ‘real’ object of historical analysis; rather, comparing perceptions of national character help the historian explain the incongruous and unexpected that would otherwise escape the conventional narrative reconstruction of the past.

In All or Nothing, Steinberg relates the historian’s difficulty in representing the synchronicity of the past with the diachrony of narrative history and laments, ‘There ought to be a sort of historical polyphony in which all themes develop independently but the listener hears them as a whole. Instead, like all writers, I have to put one word after another.’² Of course, the reason historians can gain perspective on past events that would be impossible for historical agents immersed in them is precisely because historians are removed from the polyphony.

Alan Allport tests Steinberg’s comparative history of the mutual misperceptions of Italians and Germans by using an external point of comparison: British soldiers’ and their leaders’ views of Italians and Germans in the last stages of the Second World War. Allport demonstrates how British perceptions of their enemies’ national character had much more to do with the anxieties of their own self-understanding since the last war. Visions of Italian weakness and congeniality, of German vigour and blind respect for authority to the point of murderous inhumanity, were the tropes used to rebuke a British society that had let its youth go soft. At the same time, these images of the enemy provided the reason why the calm, steady determination of the free-thinking British soldier would triumph over the fanatical authoritarian personality of the German, or the childish caprice of the Italian. While Allport calls these stereotypes of national character at one point ‘nonsense’, these myths enabled the British to maintain their determination to fight Nazi aggression and to believe, in the Italian case, that a degree of common humanity might still exist on the other side.

Harold James applies Steinberg’s Cold War metaphor in Yesterday’s Deterrent to an American–German dialogue of more than a century ago, which also raises the interpretative issue of whether the other culture is peaceful or aggressive: the search for financial reform in the early twentieth century, and specifically, in the aftermath of the 1907 financial crisis. Two brothers are the focus: Max Warburg in Hamburg (the man who built up the bank in which Steinberg later worked) and his younger brother Paul in New York. The institutions that they designed, a revised approach to the management of the German central bank, but above all the US Federal Reserve System, were seen as instruments to promote national security.

Also taking Steinberg’s work on Tirpitz and the German Navy as a starting point, Jane Caplan expatiates a different manifestation of maritime life, and its human significance, in a time when tattoos accompanied the rise of the German navy and became a symbol of personal virility as well as national resurgence. She then examines the career of the German folklorist Adolf Spamer, whose work understood and interpreted this popular and apparently ephemeral phenomenon and provided the conceptual vocabulary for the new discipline of Volkskunde.

In picking up Jonathan Steinberg’s interest in the historical value of life-writing, D’Maris Coffman’s piece highlights Steinberg’s view that historical understanding requires a range of methodological approaches from the quantitative, social-scientific to the ‘softer’ literary and biographical. Using the example of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and combining biography, bibliography and reception history, Coffman demonstrates how Clarendon’s less appreciated miscellaneous writings can provide insights into more than just his personal beliefs and tragic experiences; they can also be read as important moments in the acculturation of the ideals of what Norbert Elias called the ‘civilizing process’. A once exiled statesman, victim of the uncertain politics of Restoration England and an ungrateful monarch, who never fit into the emerging political divide, became the archetypal embodiment of the values of conservative moderation and self-control. Later generations of Tory conservatives would come to accept, as a matter of course, the ‘acculturated’ views on manners, education, familial duty and morality that, in his own time, Clarendon’s ‘lesser’ writings had only thematized for family and a narrow circle of friends.

In a piece inspired by Jonathan’s deep interest in personality as a force in history, Chris Clark explores how the volatile mixture of personal relationships and political structures shaped the career of Joseph ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, a thuggish, uneducated man whose proximity to Hitler and capacity to win the leader’s confidence put him on the road to a high military command, despite the poor esteem in which he was held by his military colleagues.

In a tribute to Jonathan Steinberg’s own Leslie Stephen lecture, Michael O’Brien examines Leslie Stephen as an advocate of transatlantic conversation, and his acute awareness of the difficulty of intercultural translation. Can a foreigner understand a really quite different culture? Or do you need to be a foreigner to really do that? After all, Americans too often see the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville as the clearest explainer of what the new American nation meant. O’Brien specifies the worry about what happens when the particular dissolves into the general.

Jonathan Steinberg shared O’Brien’s concerns, but he framed the discussion in terms of how far historical thinking could be called ‘scientific’ and why such a designation might matter. Steinberg first engaged that debate through a review article he published 40 years ago in the Historical Journal, which at the time was a kind of house journal for the Cambridge History Faculty.³ In it, he explored the contributions of philosophers of history to debates about the reality of the historical past. The two positions he identified, realist and idealist, were framed around questions of the ontological reality of the past and the epistemological problems of knowing it. In the intervening decades, debate has largely been superseded by the questions raised by the ‘Linguistic Turn’ about the possibility of a reality outside language and, in any case, was only secondarily interested in history as scientific knowledge. Presumably, for those philosophers, if history could be shown to be scientific, it was only because it dealt with a real human past. In Steinberg’s discussion of their ideas, he proposed the plain English definition of history as the ‘science of human beings in time’.

The question, of course, is what exactly does that mean. If history is a science, does that mean that all the knowledge it generates must be stipulated as ‘scientific’? More to the point: what kind of science is it? And if we label something a ‘science’, particularly in the English language, what assumptions have we made about its truth claims, its disciplinary allegiances, rules of discourse and about other forms of knowledge that we may or may not rightfully call scientific? As Jonathan was fond of asking students, if we say that ‘history is the science of humans in time’, does that imply a direct comparison with geology (the science of rocks in time) and astronomy (the science of extra-planetary objects in time)? To be sure, geology and astronomy are not self-sufficient disciplines. As descriptive sciences, both survive today in the academy because they draw heavily on the experimental findings, tools and methods of chemistry, physics, mathematics (at least in the case of astronomy) and biology. But what seems to distinguish history from those two disciplines (apart from its subject matter) is its use of and, in fact, reliance upon narrative in both its poetics and its rhetoric. The subject matter too is problematic. Human motives and actions even in aggregate are not easily quantifiable or experimentally reproducible; they have to be interpreted. In this sense, and in the sense that it produces texts even when it does not use them as evidence, history is a hermeneutic science.

Steinberg was thus not afraid to call historical thinking scientific; it was systematic thinking about the past that produced an organized body of knowledge. But historical knowledge differed from knowledge in the natural and social sciences because history had to deal with objects of its analysis that were also subjects. History, therefore, constituted a special form of knowing common to all the human sciences, a mix of fact, analysis and intuition. Despite, or rather because of, its ‘soft’ character, historical science required the rigorous use of sources and evidence and also the imaginative understanding to render that interpretive work into a narrative that could be communicated to and debated with others. History was, for Steinberg, above all else, a conversation about the past, and into that conversation he warmly welcomed other disciplines. As history increasingly expands its scope to questions of how human culture mediates between consciousness and environment, in subdisciplines like the history of medicine and disease, climate and ecology, as well as the more encompassing environmental history, historians borrow methodological procedures and empirical data from the so-called ‘hard’ sciences and use it in such a way that the objectivity of the natural scientist’s analysis is revealed to depend, much as it does in history and the humanities, upon imaginative interpretation and drawing metaphorical connections to make quantitative and empirical data intelligible to other human beings. Historians should not be so content to accept its ‘soft’ status if that means its findings will be more easily dismissed as perspectival opinions.

In an analogous exercise, then, in which a different and equally important aspect of Jonathan’s work is presented, Alison Liebling and João Costa use their empirical work on the social relationships in prisons to explore how the fundamental concept of what is human – and specifically how human dignity – matters. They show that social science can go wrong when it neglects this fundamental, less quantifiable human need for recognition. Although the results of their interviews, focus groups and surveys rely on subjective feedback from oftentimes antagonistic sides of the prison community, Liebling and Costa insist: ‘There is a better way, which we can defend on empirical grounds.’ Historians can and should be equally sure of their attempts to understand the human past, as it is in Jonathan’s words, ‘a process of change which is not random or arbitrary but subject to certain regularities and trends that we can define and hence grasp as hypotheses subject to evidence’.

Jonathan Steinberg’s service as an expert witness in 1992 for the Commonwealth of Australia War Crimes prosecution of Beresowky and his work in examining the Deutsche Bank’s gold transactions during World War II were in turns painful, difficult and heroic acts to balance society’s need for justice with the equally important requirement to ensure probity and due process. In her piece, Joanna Wade elaborates another central aspect of the legal system, where, much like the problems historians face in articulating the motivations of historical agents, solicitors and judges must understand the emotional investment of petitioners to have their cases heard. Like Dickens’ unfortunate characters in Bleak House, plaintiffs will often persist in their claims even when the chances of an advantageous settlement have become hopeless and the continuation of their complaint self-destructive. That solicitors too often interpret their role (and the basis for their fees) as enablers of their client’s lost causes, judges can at least exert more of a guiding influence towards reason and away from the syndrome of endless litigation.

Historians often find the personal and individual reflected in and against the more general expectations about a society and a political culture. As an immigrant to Britain, Jonathan Steinberg admired Beveridge’s welfare state as it evolved in the post-war period. Harold Carter combines a structural and a comparative argument in his analysis of the development of the British welfare state. Heavily influenced by the discussion of the German model, it produced increased expectations and then, as these were disappointed, an erosion of confidence. That led to a return or reversion to the older problematic: as Carter puts it, a revival of the older, nastier language of social exclusion.

Kristen Stromberg Childers takes a different tack on the development of the welfare state in France as she examines how political uncertainty at home and the threat of German aggression from abroad drove interwar France to adopt an innovative and progressive institutional structure to demonstrate the strength and moral legitimacy of the state. State responsibility for social welfare and family policy represented a continuity between the Third and Fourth Republics, and the Vichy regime between them. Social policy was devised not just as an answer to the well-known French anxieties about low fertility and demographic decline but also as a model for a universal approach that would be transmitted in a sort of race to the top promoted by the League of Nations. But, as the example of France’s former colonies demonstrate, debates about the universal right to social welfare have always depended in France, as elsewhere, on who counts as citizens and, in the particular French case, on how ethnic, religious and gender identities conform to the modern image of the French secular state and its more traditional notion of the ideal, reproductive family.

Expectations about the role and constitution of the modern family come to life vividly in Tara Westover’s case study of the reform community established at Modern Times, New York, where the ideas for utopian communities in Europe combined with religious movements like Mormonism in the United States in reformers’ attempts to treat, morally and scientifically, the ‘family question’. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Steinberg took religion seriously as an object of historical research, and understood both the place of religion in organizing and disciplining family life and the role of religious institutions in cultural life.

In homage to Steinberg’s engagement with Catholicism, Casey Hammond looks at how an unlikely version of the life of St Francis, authored by a French Protestant, helped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers to develop a modern vision of Catholic renewal, but one that nonetheless remained very traditional in its view of Catholic devotion to the church. The long story of Catholicism’s interactions with modernity is followed up in the subsequent chapter. John Pollard gives a typology of religious and radical conservative movements in modern Italy, using the experience of the ambiguous