Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Monday, October 15, 2018

The Passing of a Great Historian

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

When I was a university student, many moons ago, few courses in modern history were without a book, or at least a number of scholarly articles, by Walter Laqueur, assigned as part of our readings. Laqueur, who died Sept. 30, at the age of 97, was a giant in his field.

A German Jew who fled Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he was part of an era when historians wrote on a broad range of topics and countries. All these issues and places in one way or another had affected his own life.

At the time of his death, Laqueur was a retired professor at Georgetown University and chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 

He was born in Breslau, the city that is today Wroclaw, Poland, on May 26, 1921. He was 17 in 1938 when he left Germany days before the Nazi-led Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews and managed to gain entry to the British mandate of Palestine as a student. His parents perished in the Holocaust.

Laqueur worked as a journalist in Israel before moving to London in 1955, where, along with another eminent historian, George Mosse, he founded and edited the Journal of Contemporary History and other publications.

From 1965 to 1994 he was director of the London-based Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, a leading archive and repository of documents.

Some of Laqueur’s works will remain classics, including his 1972 A History of Zionism and A History of Terrorism, published in 1977. Both remain in print and are as relevant as the day they were published.

A History of Zionism traced the movement from its beginnings, with the emancipation of European Jewry in the wake of the French Revolution, to 1948, when the Zionist dream became a reality. 

In A History of Terrorism Laqueur described the trajectory of political terror from nineteenth-century Europe to  the operations of various Middle Eastern and other groups today. 

The book was a companion to Guerrilla Warfare, published that same year, which sought to provide a critical interpretation of guerrilla theory and practice throughout history.

He wrote dozens of other books, on a wide array of subjects, including antisemitism, Communism, fascism, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the Soviet Union. 

When the USSR disintegrated in 1991, Laqueur predicted the emergence of “an authoritarian system based on some nationalist populism.” And this indeed came to pass.

Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West, published in 2015, explained how three long-standing pillars of Russian ideology -- a strong belief in the Russian Orthodox Church, a sense of Eurasian “manifest destiny” and a fear of foreign enemies -- continue to exert a powerful influence on the Russian people. 

Laqueur’s last book, The Future of Terrorism: ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Alt-Right, written with Christopher Wall, was published this year. There, he cautioned that the Islamic State’s short-lived successes in creating a caliphate demonstrated that “true believers now have a model that they can hope to achieve and acquire, because it has been done.”

When he visited his boyhood home after the Second World War, he wrote in his 1992 memoir, Thursday's Child Has Far to Go, “the world I had known as a boy no longer existed, and as I tried to remember the people I had known when I was 16, I realized that most of them had died a violent death.

“Some were killed in the ruins of Stalingrad,” he added, “others in Auschwitz, some in 1948 in the battles for Palestine.”

No one could call Walter Laqueur a starry-eyed idealist. In his long and productive life, he had lived through too many historical tragedies to assume that there was a “right side of history” and that the world was becoming a more just and peaceful place. 

In one of his last works Laqueur called himself a “veteran pessimist” We will miss his steely-eyed insights into politics and human nature.

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