Norman Davies

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Norman Davies, Warsaw (Poland), October 7, 2004
Norman Davies, Warsaw (Poland), October 7, 2004

Ivor Norman Richard Davies FBA (born June 8, 1939 in Bolton, Lancashire) is an English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Poland, Europe and the History of the United Kingdom & Ireland.

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[edit] Academic career

A disciple of A. J. P. Taylor, Davies studied history at Magdalen College, Oxford. After stays abroad in Grenoble, France, and Perugia, Italy, he intended to study for a PhD in the Soviet Union, but was denied an entry visa. Instead, he went to Kraków to study at the Jagiellonian University and do research on the Polish-Soviet war. As this war was denied in the official communist Polish historiography of that time, he was obliged to change the title of his dissertation to The British Foreign Policy towards Poland, 1919-20. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Kraków, the English text appeared under the title White Eagle, Red Star. The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20 in 1972.

From 1971, Davies taught Polish history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) of the University of London, where he was professor from 1985 to 1996. Currently, he is Supernumary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Throughout his career, Davies has lectured in many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, Poland, and in most of the rest of Europe as well. In the 1980s, Stanford University controversially denied him a tenured faculty position for alleged "scientific flaws".[citation needed]

Holding a professorial chair in London since 1985, he retired in 1996.

[edit] Work

The work that established Davies's reputation in the English-speaking world was God's Playground (1981), a comprehensive overview of Polish history, which still ranks as one of the most influential in the field. It gave Davies fame and notoriety in Poland,[citation needed] although — or rather because — it could only be distributed as an underground samizdat copy in the early 1980s.[citation needed] It would be published officially after the fall of communism in Poland. After 1989, God's Playground became required reading in many Polish classrooms, where each subsequent book was immediately translated and became an instant commercial success. In 2000, Davies's Polish publishers Znak published a collection of his essays and articles under the title Smok wawelski nad Tamizą ("The Wawel Dragon on the Thames"). It is not available in English.

In 1984, against the backdrop of the current events in Poland, Davies published a more concise, essayistic description of the role of the past in Polish present, entitled Heart of Europe.

In the 1990s, Davies returned with two monumental works: Europe (1996) and The Isles (1999). In both books he sets out to present the importance of the "peripheries" on an equal footing and to revise conventional wisdom in historiography that he considers too Westernly biased and Anglo-centric, respectively. In The Isles, Davies sought to expose what he considered the myth of a British nationality. In Davies's view, the whole idea of Britishness was an 18th-19th century myth created in order to justify English rule over the neighbouring 'Celtic' peoples such as the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh. Davies ends The Isles with a call for the end of the United Kingdom with Northern Ireland joining the Republic of Ireland, independence for Scotland and Wales, the abolition of the British monarchy and England seeking its fate in a united Europe. Davies has often criticised those in the United Kingdom who favour the Atlanticist orientation with closer ties to the United States. In Davies's view, the destiny of England lies with closer ties to Europe.

In 2002, at the suggestion of the city's mayor Bogdan Zdrojewski, Davies and his former research assistant Roger Moorhouse co-wrote a history of Wrocław / Breslau, a Silesian city. Titled Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City and published simultaneously in three languages (Polish, German and Czech), it became an instant bestseller in both Germany and Poland. The book considers the city a focal point of Central European history and uses it to present that history "in a nutshell".

Davies also writes essays and popular articles for the mass media. Among others, he has worked for the BBC as well as British and American magazines and newspapers, such as The Times, The New York Review of Books and The Independent. In Poland, his articles appeared in the liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.

Davies's book Rising '44 describes the Warsaw Uprising and was internationally well received on the occasion of the Rising's anniversary in 2004. In Europe at War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory (2006), Davies attempts to revise western perspectives of World War II. The chronicle treats the Eastern Front and the Soviet contribution as the decisive factors in the defeat of Germany. The book also directs the reader to review the broader reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union, both as an early ally of Hitler, and as an amoral totalitarian state.

In 2008 Davies had participated in the documentary film "The Soviet Story"[2].

[edit] Criticism

Some colleagues have accused Davies of being an opinionated and biased Polonophile[1] who strives to give the most charitable interpretation towards Poland's actions in Polish-Russian, Polish-Jewish, Polish-Ukrainian or Polish-German conflicts.[1] In particular, some historians, most vocally Lucy Dawidowicz[2] and Abraham Brumberg,[3] object to Davies' historical treatment of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. They accuse him of minimizing historic antisemitism, and of promoting a view that the Holocaust occupies a position in international historiography which tends to minimize the suffering of non-Jewish Poles. Davies’ supporters contend that he gives due attention to the genocide and war crimes perpetrated by both Hitler and Stalin on Polish Jews and non-Jews. Davies himself argues that "Holocaust scholars need have no fears that rational comparisons might threaten that uniqueness. Quite the opposite." and that "...one needs to re-construct mentally the fuller picture in order to comprehend the true enormity of Poland’s wartime cataclysm, and then to say with absolute conviction ‘Never Again’."[4][5]

In 1986, Dawidowicz’s criticism of Davies’ historical treatment of the Holocaust was cited as a factor in a controversy at Stanford University in which Davies was denied a tenured faculty position for alleged "scientific flaws". Davies sued the university for breach of contract and defamation of character, but in 1989 the court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction in an academic matter.[citation needed]

[edit] Awards and distinctions

Davies holds a number of honorary titles and memberships, including honorary doctorates from the universities of the Jagiellonian University (since 2003), Lublin, Gdańsk and Warsaw (since 2007), memberships in the Polish Academy of Learning (PAN) and the Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea,[6] and fellowships of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.[7] Davies is also an honorary citizen of Polish cities of Warsaw, Wrocław, Lublin and Kraków. Member of the committee for Order of the Smile.

In 1999 he received the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (Knight's Great Cross) from the Prime Minister of Poland.

[edit] Publications

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Benjamin Schwarz, "God's Playground by Norman Davies", The Atlantic, December 2002
  2. ^ Lucy Dawidowicz, "The Curious Case of Marek Edelman". Observations. Commentary, March 1987, pp. 66-69. See also reply by Norman Davies and others in Letters from Readers, Commentary, August, 1987 pp. 2–12.
  3. ^ Abraham Brumberg, "Murder Most Foul", Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 2001. Essay on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross. Tony Judt and Abraham Brumberg. Letters, Times Literary Supplement, London April 6, 2001. See also response by Norman Davies, Letters, Times Literary Supplement, London April 13, 2001.
  4. ^ Norman Davies, "Russia, the missing link in Britain's VE Day mythology", The Times, London, May 1, 2005.
  5. ^ Norman Davies, lecture, University of Cincinnati Department of History and the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, Cincinnati, OH. April 26, 2005.
  6. ^ [1][dead link]
  7. ^ Royal Historical Society Contact Us
  • Snowman, Daniel "Norman Davies" pages 36–38 from History Today, Volume 55, Issue 7, July 2005.

[edit] External links

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v • d • e
Books by Norman Davies
White Eagle, Red Star · Poland, Past and Present · God's Playground · Heart of Europe · Europe: A History · The Isles: A History · Microcosm · Rising '44. The Battle for Warsaw · Europe East and West