John Keegan

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Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan , OBE (born May 15, 1934 in Clapham , London , † August 2, 2012 in Kilmington , Wiltshire ), was a British military historian , popular military writer and journalist .

Life

Keegan was born in Clapham to an Irish Catholic family; his father was a World War II veteran. He attended King's College Taunton and the Jesuit Wimbledon College in London. In 1949 he contracted tuberculosis for the first time . In 1953 he became the study of history at Balliol College of Oxford University approved (MA). His teachers included u. a. Richard Southern and Christopher Hill , a Marxist historian. He then worked for the US Embassy in London for two years .

In 1960 he became a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst , where he taught, most recently as senior lecturer, for 25 years of military history. He was u. a. Visiting Professor at Princeton University (1984) in New Jersey and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar College (1996–1998) in New York. In 1986/87 he held the Lees Knowles Lectures at the University of Cambridge .

In 1986 he became editor of the Daily Telegraph , most recently as Defense Editor. He also published u. a. in The New Republic and US News & World Report . In 1998 he wrote and presented the BBC series War and Our World .

From 1991 to 1997 he was director of the E. Somerset NHS Trust.

Like other historians, Keegan was involved in the controversy surrounding the history revisionist and later Holocaust denier David Irving . He found Irving 's work Hitler's War valuable in part, but disliked Irving's amorality. Keegan considered it perverse that Irving claimed that Hitler did not find out about the extermination of the Jews until October 1943.

In 1995, the study Die Kultur des Krieg (1993 in London as A history of warfare ) was published in Germany. In this he dealt particularly critically with Clausewitz and saw him as a pioneer of the " total war ". Political scientists and military historians such as Clausewitz researchers Michael Howard and Christopher Bassford sharply criticized this suggestion. In this context, Beatrice Heuser spoke of a well-known “Clausewitz defamation”.

He was married and had four children.

Awards

Prices

Orders and decorations

Honorary doctorates

Memberships

Works (selection)

literature

Obituaries :

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So Keegan's statement in the Irving against Lipstadt trial , contained on p. 8 of the verbatim protocol http://www.hdot.org/en/trial/transcripts/day16/pages6-10
  2. ↑ Michael Howard : "To the Ruthless Belong the Spoils" . In: The New York Times Book Review , Nov. 14, 1993, p. 10.
  3. ↑ Christopher Bassford : John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz: A Polemic . In: War in History 1 (1994) 3, pp. 319-336.
  4. ↑ Beatrice Heuser : Read Clausewitz! An introduction (= contributions to military history, compact military history . Vol. 1). Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57743-3 , p. 21.
personal data
SURNAME Keegan, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Keegan, John Desmond Patrick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British military historian and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Clapham , London
DATE OF DEATH 2nd August 2012
Place of death Kilmington , Wiltshire