Daniel Snowman

HOW will future historians judge society today? How does that vision of the past change over time – and how does our perception reflect our own foibles, assumptions and beliefs?

Such philosophical questions have exercised historian Daniel Snowman throughout his six-decade career – and in a new book, Why Not Let The Leaning Tower Collapse?, he draws together essays that ask fundamental questions about history, memory, fact and interpretation – key elements in any historian’s locker.

He begins by considering our unquenchable thirst for stories from our past. “History is everywhere, or so it seemed as we entered our new millennium,” he writes.

“On television, Henry VIII and Hitler, pyramids and puritans, antique roadshows, costume dramas, Timewatch and Time Team jostled to fill the airwaves. Visitor numbers to museums, galleries and heritage sites burgeoned while a raft of new historical magazines sprouted.”

This popular interest reflects research that says the older, more educated and wealthier a society, the more people have an interest in the past. This means, he argues, historians have a never-ending pool of consumers as the population of Britain, and comparable Western societies, contain more and more elderly people, with disposable time and income than ever before.

And it is to this audience he addresses a series of interesting, exciting and tricky ideas.

“Looking over some of the articles and essays I have written over the years, I find myself forever asking potentially awkward questions,” he says.

He recalls as a child questioning his Jewish background, asking why his family kept a kosher kitchen, why should he primarily befriend other Jewish children and not simply everyone?

“Ever since I have enjoyed engaging with thoughtful people who might have interesting answers to quasi-philosophical questions,” he says.

“The great French historian Marc Bloch, murdered by the Nazis in 1944, said: ‘Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past’.”

It is this quest that is the motivation for the collection.

The 40 essays illustrate Snowman’s personal interests – he has written extensively on opera, so we are treated to his musings on his hero Verdi, as well as Wagner and Puccini. Other topics include Judaism, the role of the historian, Modernism, judging the past, and historians and the arts.

Through this a range of topics, Snowman asks if historians have a role of prosecuting the past, and uses the case of French president Marshal Pétain.

Pétain, the First World War hero, headed the French government when the country fell to the Nazis. His memory is vilified for being a collaborator who betrayed France. General De Gaulle commuted a death sentence and sent him to a small Atlantic island.

To weigh up Pétain’s reputational legacy, Snowman considers historian Julian Jackson’s biography of Marshal Pétain. Jackson asks what else could Pétain have done, and did he in fact act to save as many lives as he could? Was Pétain a buffer between the worst excesses of the Nazis and the French people?

In the same essay, he raises the same issue over Churchill, citing how as a child the wartime PM was considered to be the saviour of the Western world and had, “in all probability, saved my life”.

“Later, I learned in some detail how the young Churchill had been a ruthless white racist, the very embodiment of an old-fashioned British imperialism which I, with my growing aspiration towards a cross-cultural internationalism, found utterly abhorrent,” he adds, showing how muddy accepted historic narratives can be.

It prompts him to ask the next question:

“I wonder how we will be judged by future historians? What might be pardoned, and what erased?,” he considers.

“You and I may realise that many people and places of the past, once celebrated by historians, were often racist and sexist in ways that we would find intolerable.

“Something of this has been rectified by recent scholarship so we can perhaps look back on earlier times with a more balanced view.”

But does that mean  societies today will be fairly judged in the future, he wonders.

“How will our intellectual successors look back on our own failures and inadequacies? Not just the possibility of increasing warfare between enemy states and regimes, but our evident incapacity to confront and resolve the imminent climate crisis that could possibly threaten the entire future of humanity? Let’s hope that, like all good historians, those in the future won’t simply judge us. Rather, they might try to understand the era in which we are living, the attitudes and actions of our times and how these might have contributed to the potential non-viability of humanity on this overpopulated, overheating little planet of ours.”

Above all, the study of history has infinite angles and options in approach, all able to offer a window into understanding the context of events, movements and issues.

“Any art form like political or economic systems, religions or what we call science – is also a social construct,” adds Snowman.

“Ideally we historians should try to achieve a kind of Hegelian synthesis drawing together the specialist insights of the history of art and music with those arising from more mainstream historical research in the hope that something mutually enhanced might emerge.”

• Why Not Let The Leaning Tower Collapse? By Daniel Snowman, Brown Dog Books, £11.99