Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman with William L. Shirer (left) and John Eisenhower (right) at the Conference on Research and World War II and the National Archives , 14-15 June 1971

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [ ˈtʌkmən ] née Wertheim ( January 30, 1912 in New York City – February 6, 1989 in Greenwich , Connecticut ) was an American reporter and historian .

Life

Barbara Wertheim was the daughter of New York private banker Maurice Wertheim and Alma Morgenthau, a daughter of Henry Morgenthau Sr. She attended Radcliffe College until 1933 , graduating with a thesis on "The Moral Justification of the British Empire" and a Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduating, she first worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo before moving to the Nation , the oldest weekly newspaper in the USA, in 1936. This was published by her father Maurice Wertheim. Tuchman became a foreign correspondent in 1937 and went to Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War . After the outbreak of World War II she also worked briefly as a correspondent for the New Statesman . In 1940 she returned to New York and married Lester Reginald Tuchman (1904–1997) , an internist . The marriage produced three daughters, including Jessica Tuchman Mathews (b. 1946), President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 1997 .

After Tuchman published her first book, The Lost British Policy , on relations between Britain and Spain since 1700, in 1938, for a few years she devoted herself entirely to raising her children. In 1956 her second book, Bible and Sword, was published. England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour , with which she tried to shed light on the background to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Her book The Zimmerman Telegram (1957) on the Zimmermann telegram became a commercial and critical success . She won her first Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for her 1962 book The Guns of August (German title: August 1914 ), a work on the outbreak of World War I. The book vividly describes the misjudgments and errors with which generals and statesmen of Europe marched into the abyss of the First World War.

Tuchman received the second Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 . In 1978 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1968 she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . She enjoyed great commercial success with her work Der ferne Spiegel , a 14th-century description in the form of a biography of the French nobleman Enguerrand VII de Coucy . Shortly before her death, The First Salut was published. The title of the monograph refers to the first gun salute of Sint Eustatius on November 16, 1776, through which the ship and flag of the then renegade "United States of America" received international recognition for the first time by the Dutch governor Johannes de Graaff .

Barbara Tuchman died of complications from a stroke on February 6, 1989 .

plant

Tuchman became very well known in Germany beyond specialist circles in 1964 when her book was published in August 1914 in the news magazine Der Spiegel . The success of the book in Germany was also due to the fact that there was no monograph on the outbreak of the First World War in 1962 and one had to rely on the brief descriptions in handbooks and school books. In the United States, the book was among the best-selling works about the First World War in 2014; A new edition was published in Germany in 2013.

She is not a creator of new approaches in historical studies; she rarely and only partially used even newly emerging contemporary methods. She represented a conventional event-historical perspective and described the actions of political actors and the resulting consequences in individual cases. For example, she described how Lyndon B. Johnson , the socially minded and domestically shrewd President of the United States (1963–1969), relied on his domestic political experiences during the Vietnam War and thus suffered a miserable shipwreck in the foreign policy environment, almost through no fault of his own.

She was less concerned with structures, inescapable laws, epochs, cycles and models of history than with the weaknesses and virtues of state leaders in decision-making situations. The narrow-minded and the wishful thinkers are omnipresent, but also the characterful and spiritual luminaries. Even references to everyday stories, which have become increasingly popular, were sparingly made by Tuchman. However, she devoted a longer study to the history of mentality and culture before the First World War . The methods of history of politics and events are not sufficient to explain a phenomenon of such frightening malignancy. According to Tuchman, one can learn from history despite the uniqueness of what happened in each case; Political advice from historians is permitted and required. The political biography also has its justification as a prism of history.

Her choice of subject and questions made her large monograph Sand Against the Wind on American warfare in China, Burma and India during World War II a standard work that is still useful today. The same is true of her last major investigation, a monograph on the early history of the United States: The First Salute . In addition to skilful heuristics , Tuchman maintained a varied and understandable narrative style that encourages reading through the books in one go and not just looking back.

The apparent scientific backwardness of Tuchman's methods led to clear and true-to-life judgments in the history of events and politics she examined. There, the protagonists are divided into winners and losers, despite all the structures, models and mechanisms, not least by their minor and fringe figures, who often feel the results of political action in their bodies and fortunes most clearly themselves.

importance

John F. Kennedy also read and remembered August 1914 when preparing the naval blockade against Cuba , which he declared on October 22, 1962 for the United States. Confident that the Soviet Union would not go to war over Cuba , Kennedy feared that misunderstanding and false pride could embroil the two superpowers of the time. Therefore, he issued the directive, in case of breaking the blockade, to aim only at the rudders and propellers of the Soviet ships and to give priority to searching for Soviet submarines, not to searching the ships to be stopped.

publications

• 1938: The Lost British Policy
• 1956: Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour , ISBN 3-596-15265-8
• 1958: The Zimmermann Telegram , ISBN 3-404-65039-5
• 1962: The Guns of August – August 1914 , ISBN 3-596-15265-8
• 1966: The Proud Tower : A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914 , ISBN 3-426-03671-1
• 1970: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 - Sand Against the Wind. America and China 1911–1945 , ISBN 3-426-03671-1
• 1972: Notes from China
• 1978: A Distant Mirror : The Calamitous Fourteenth Century . The dramatic 14th century , Claasen, Düsseldorf 1980, ISBN 3-546-49187-4
• 1981: Practicing History – Thinking in History , ISBN 3-423-30081-7
• 1984: The March of Folly : From Troy to Vietnam - A meditation on unwisdom (as distinct from stupidity) as a force in history . From Troy to Vietnam , ISBN 3-423-30081-7
• 1988: The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution , ISBN 3-10-080006-0 .

literature

• Barbara W. Tuchman , in: International Biographical Archive 12/1989 of March 13, 1989, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Imanuel Geiss (ed.): July 1914. The European Crisis and the Outbreak of World War I , Munich 1965.

web links

Commons : Barbara Tuchman  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Barbara Tuchman in the German National Library catalogue
• Barbara Tuchman. In: FemBio. Women's biographical research (with references and quotations).
• Barbara Tuchman in the Find a Grave database

itemizations

1. ↑ Richard Pearson: Pullitzer-Winning Historian Babara Tuchman Dies at 77 . In: The Washington Post , February 7, 1989; Eric PaceBarbara Tuchman Dead at 77; A Pulitzer-Winning Historian . In The New York Times , February 7, 1989.
2. ↑ DIED: Barbara W. Tuchman . In: The Mirror . No. 7 , 1989 ( online ).
3. ↑ Members: Barbara W. Tuchman. American Academy of Arts and Letters, retrieved April 30, 2019 . 
4. ↑ Imanuel Geiss (ed.): July 1914. The European Crisis and the Outbreak of the First World War . Munich 1965, p. 9.
5. ↑ Lucian Hölscher: Event. In: Stefan Jordan (ed.): Lexicon historical science. Hundred basic terms. Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-15-010503-X .
6. ↑ Barbara Tuchman: The Folly of Rulers. From Troy to Vietnam. Fischer paperback publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-596-24438-2 , 388 ff.
7. ↑ Thomas Welskopp: Structural history. In: Stefan Jordan (ed.): Lexicon historical science. Hundred basic terms. Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-15-010503-X .
8. ↑ Jochen Schlobach : Cycle theory. In: Stefan Jordan (ed.): Lexicon historical science. Hundred basic terms. Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-15-010503-X .
9. ↑ Barbara W. Tuchman: The Proud Tower. A portrait of the world before WWI 1890-1914. Droemer/Knaur, Munich et al. 1969, foreword p. 12.
10. ↑ Chris Lorenz: Heuristics. In: Stefan Jordan (ed.): Lexicon historical science. Hundred basic terms. Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-15-010503-X .
11. ↑ Michael R. Decided: JFK. The Kennedy years 1960 to 1963. Powergame. Econ Paperback Publishing House, Düsseldorf et al. 1993, ISBN 3-612-26040-5 , p. 472f.