Ollie
What are your views regarding A J P Taylor’s book The Origins of the Second World War? It’s a long time since I read it but I think his view was similar to yours regarding the Versailles treaty at least, i.e. the Versailles settlement of 1919 was an artificial absurdity that was bound to unravel. This unraveling could have been done rationally, as in the early stages of British and French appeasement over the Rhineland, Germany's anschluss with Austria, and so on; but after Munich, in 1938, it was increasingly bungled. Having appeased Berlin over more-contestable territorial issues, the British changed their stance and decided to fight over Danzig and the Polish Corridor, where the German case for revision was stronger. The result, Taylor maintained, was a war in Europe that nobody wanted and that personally dismayed Hitler. World War II was simply an accident: Hitler never imagined that the democracies would actually go to war over Poland, especially because London and Paris could do almost nothing to defend the Poles. Great Britain and France had in the past vacillated between policies of appeasement and resistance.
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/A_J_P_Taylor.html
Taylor's initially 'outrageous' revisionism was increasingly, but not fully, accepted by British historians and by a majority amongst the rising generation of German historians.
Taylor's own statements such as "in principle and doctrine, Hitler was no more wicked and unscrupulous than many a contemporary statesman" were highly controversial. Perhaps only someone of his standing could get away with that sort of statement without getting into serious trouble. I think what spoils this thesis was the blatant attack on the Soviet Union, it’s difficult to imagine anything as selfish and ruthless.
I fully agree with you that my views seem very similar to those of Taylor. There are more similarities than differences. It however seems equally true that Taylor's views have had less impact on dominant cultural opinions than historians might like to believe. That is, the general public does not really exhibit any signs of exposure to Taylor's line of argumentation. Thanks for giving my argument some historiographical context. I think I will re-read Taylor's text (I have it somewhere). I should point out that Versailles has come under fire over the past years as the dominating force behind Hitler's rise and the outbreak of WWII. This argument, as you point out, begins with Taylor.
Taylor, for all of the good points raised, dismissed the revolutionary nature of French and English attitudes towards Germany after 1918. The war had deepened the view that Germans acted in unison. Taylor could not understand that the Germans were anything but a collective mass that shared similar values. While Taylor made a real attempt to understand standard German grievances and argued that most Germans would naturally fight against Versailles, his "Hitler was normal" theory dissolved the important differences between democratic, socialist and Nazi Germans. His book glossed over the de facto German civil war that ended with Nazi victory. Allied support of German democracy during the 1920s and 1930s could have thwarted Hitler. As it was, the inner conviction that Germans opposed democracy shaped Allied policy and radicalized European politics. Ultimately, many of the interwar problems sprang from the simple fact that neither London nor Paris politicians really accepted the German right to exist as a sovereign entity. It can be argued that many of these politicians even questioned the right of the German state to exist. That was anything but normal.
In general, I think that Taylor's mindset prohibited a better appreciation of the dangers of Stalin. Not only did he fail to explore the Soviet Union in sufficient depth, his attitudes toward Moscow betray the type of thinking alluded to in the first paragraph. He treated Moscow like a "real" state with a "real" foreign policy. Most contemporary socialists were of course guilty of the same warped analysis. Stalin became a normal politician working for normal political ends. Taylor never really described the horrors of Stalinist Russia. 1920s German democrats are never accorded the dignified treatment granted Stalin. Stresemann, for example, is viewed as a typically German Versailles revisionist. Stalin's interwar actions on the other hand were characterized as defensive or aiming at collective security.
Was Taylor's "Origins" really an attempt at explaining the outbreak of WWII using a fair framework? Taylor wrote elsewhere that "Germany is not a typical European nation, nor even a typical Great Power; shaped by history, it has acquired a unique character and played a unique role, a role almost entirely aggressive and destructive, an alien body in the structure of European civilization". [Taylor,
The Course of German History, p. 7]. These types of statements betray the real Taylor. In my opinion, Taylor really believed that "Hitler ist Deutschland". This was the true message of "Origins"...although hidden using incredible sophistication.