Alan JP Taylor

Alan John Percivale Taylor , FBA (born March 25, 1906 in Birkdale , Southport , † September 7, 1990 in London ) was a British historian .

Life

Taylor came from a wealthy, politically left-wing family. His mother was in the Communist International in the 1920s (and also a feminist (suffragette) and supporter of free love, one of her lovers was the communist Henry Sara, who also influenced Taylor as a father figure) and an uncle was even a founding member of the CP in Great Britain . They were pacifists during World War I and sent their son to a Quaker school in protest against the war. A classmate at Bootham School in York remembered him as a highly compelling, stimulating personality, with a committed anti-civic and anti-Christian attitude . From 1924 Taylor studied modern history at Oriel College, Oxford. From 1924 to 1926 he was influenced by the military historian Tom Wintringham as a member of the CP (and visited the Soviet Union in 1925 and 1934), but resigned after the general strike in 1926 because he was dissatisfied with the CP's role in the strike. He was thereafter an ardent Labor Party supporter .

After graduating from Oxford in 1927, he worked for a short time in the legal field and then went to Vienna to study the influence of the Chartists on the revolution of 1848 for a planned doctoral thesis . He then switched to a dissertation on the formation of the Italian nation state , which led to his first book in 1934.

From 1930 to 1938 he taught history at the University of Manchester and from 1938 to 1976 he was a fellow at Oriel College, Oxford, where he taught modern history as a lecturer until 1963. His lectures were generally very well attended. In the context of the controversy surrounding his book The origins of the second world war , his lectureship at Oxford was not renewed and he taught at the Institute of Historical Research at University College London and at the Polytechnic of North London. In 1984 he was hit by a car while crossing the street in London and injured so badly that he had to give up teaching.

Honors and memberships

In 1956 he was admitted to the British Academy and in 1985 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Private

Taylor was married three times, had six children, and an unbureaucratic relationship. From 1931 to the divorce in 1951 he was married to Margaret Adams and from 1951 to the divorce in 1974 with Eve Crosland. In 1978 he married the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti (1923-2005), who did research on British-Hungarian history, in his third marriage . When Taylor got Parkinson's disease , she cared for him. Haraszti wrote biographical essays on Taylor and published her diaries. Taylor was after his death in Golders Green Crematorium in London cremated , where his ashes is located.

plant

His main topics were British and international history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Numerous books became great hits with a wide audience and many are still in print. Taylor often took controversial positions and also generated unusually high income from publications in national daily newspapers and television appearances, which he also achieved an extraordinarily high level of awareness in the British public. He also became legendary through his lectures, which were given without a manuscript.

His academic teacher Alfred Francis Přibram introduced him to the history of Austria and Southeast Europe, which was reflected in several publications. His book “The Course of German History”, first published in 1945, attempted to explain the emergence of National Socialism through social and intellectual failures within German history. Taylor saw the Third Reich as a genuinely German phenomenon and thus positioned himself as one of the first representatives of the German special path thesis in European history. In comparison, German history was extreme, radical and abnormal. He interpreted the Pan-Germanism of the Wilhelminers as an aggressive beginning, which almost directly led to National Socialism. Since the book was a sales success in Great Britain and the USA, it could not be ignored in the international and domestic German discussion due to the explosive nature of its theses at the time and thus gained international fame.

His thesis from “Origins of the Second World War”, that by no means a small clique around Hitler, had triggered the Second World War, was discussed controversially. This assertion ("Nuremberg thesis") was made to excuse the German people and to be able to use the young Federal Republic in the Cold War. In fact, Hitler's foreign policy should be seen in the line of the Weimar Republic and the Empire, that is, “normal German” foreign policy. Even worse: Hitler was also a normal Western politician like Chamberlain or Daladier who wanted to make his country strong. Taylor's book sparked heated controversy. Among his greatest critics were Hugh Trevor-Roper (especially the interpretation of the Hoßbach transcript ) and AL Rowse (who was friends with Taylor before that).

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (1954) , which is often used as a reference work, and Volume XV of the Oxford History of England (1965), which covers the period from 1914 to 1945 , also come from Taylor's pen .

Fonts

• The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847-1849 (= Publications of the University of Manchester. Historical Series. 67, ZDB -ID 434536-8 = Publications of the University of Manchester. 232). Manchester University Press, Manchester 1934.
• Germany's First Bid for Colonies 1884–1885 A Move in Bismarck's European Policy. Macmillan, London 1938.
• The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918. A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary. Macmillan, London 1941.
• The Course of German History. A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815. Hamilton, London 1945.
• The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. 1848-1918. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1954.
• Bismarck. The Man and the Statesman. Hamilton, London 1955, (In German: Bismarck. Mensch und Staatsmann. From the English by Hans Jürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Piper, Munich 1962).
• The Trouble Makers. Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (= The Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford. 1956, ZDB -ID 420177-2 ). Hamilton, London 1957.
• The Origins of the Second World War. Hamilton, London 1961 (In German: The origins of World War II. (German by Dieter Werner). Mohn, Gütersloh 1962).
• English History. 1914-1945 (= The Oxford History of England. Vol. 15). Clarendon Press et al., Oxford et al. 1965.
• Beaverbrook . Hamilton, London 1972, ISBN 0-241-02170-7 .
• A personal history. Hamilton, London 1983, ISBN 0-241-10972-8 (autobiography).
• From the Boer War to the Cold War. Essays on Twentieth-Century Europe. Allen Lane, London 1995, ISBN 0-713-99121-6
• Struggles for Supremacy. Diplomatic essays. Edited and introduced by Chris Wrigley . Ashgate, Aldershot et al. 2000, ISBN 1-8401-4661-3 (contains 67 articles and reviews as well as a short biography of Taylor's work).

literature

• Kathleen Burk: Troublemaker. The Life and History of AJP Taylor. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 2000, ISBN 0-300-08761-6 .
• Robert Cole: AJP Taylor. The Traitor Within The Gates. Macmillan, Houndmills et al. 1993, ISBN 0-333-59273-5 .
• Alan Sked , Chris Cook (Eds.): Crisis and Controversy. Essays in Honor of AJP Taylor. Macmillan, London et al. 1976, ISBN 0-333-18635-4 .
• Chris Wrigley: Alan John Percivale Taylor, 1906–1990 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 82 , 1993, pp. 493-523 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Alan JP Taylor in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Kathleen Burk: Troublemaker: The Life and History of AJP Taylor, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 41
2. ↑ ADOLF HITLER - Neither hero nor villain? , Article of November 22, 1961 on Spiegel Online