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This chapter looks at the significance of metahistory in combating Holocaust Denial, and takes as its case study the Irving/Lipstadt Libel Case from 2000. After describing the metahistorical commitments of denial, the chapter outlines a postmodern understanding of historical writing as a genre, developing the ideas of Jean-François Lyotard in The Differend, with generic rules, including conventions about evidence, context, and reasonable argument. It then argues that the trial showed that David Irving did not follow these conventions, and that, as the Judge made clear — it was this that showed Irving to be no historian. This analysis of the trial is then used to illuminate problems in empiricist defences of history, and to defend postmodern thought against the charge that it allows Holocaust denial.

Witnessing can assume many different forms including religious, literary, and legal versions. This chapter begins by focusing on examples of textual witnessing such as the sourcebooks of Tcherikower and Dubnow mentioned in Chapter 2 in which the compilers assembled troves of documents as a form of historical proof. The focus then shifts from the first to the second half of the twentieth century by discussing instances in which historians are called upon to take the stand in legal cases. The chapter explores a range of cases related to the Holocaust in which historians played important roles as witnesses, particularly the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 in which historian Salo W. Baron was a key witness. The chapter concludes by discussing the libel trial brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt in London in 2000 in which a “dream team” of historians, including Richard Evans and Christopher Browning, served as defense witnesses. The victory of Lipstadt’s side proved to be a vindication for memory, as well as history, and, as such, an indication of the somewhat porous boundary between them.

With its centenary celebrations, interest in the truce has increased, as demonstrated by the plans for a commemorative football match in Belgium in December 2014. This chapter sums up the book, discusses the one hundredth anniversary of the truce, and reflects again on the attitude of the truce participants from 1914, demonstrating that they never viewed the episode as more than a wonderful, and happily remembered, day off in a war they believed worth fighting.

Part 1 Contemplating Historical Actors in Context This Part of the book takes seriously the historian’s imperative to do justice to different ways and circumstances of life in the past. One of the greatest obligations historians bear is not to caricature or traduce the historical objects of their investigations, and this obligation is honoured by care in depicting what one infers about the beliefs, motives, intentions, and situations of historical actors. The same obligation ought to be honoured for any actor under scrutiny, whether from a millennium ago or last year, whether Gulag guard or inmate. The discussion paves the way for greater clarity and consistency in contextual understanding by bringing into focus what the practice of contextualization implies and examining the logics of different sorts of contextualization. It is a guide to what it means to deliver on the commitment to take historical actors on their own terms, and it highlights the unavoidable evaluative implications of the process. It has implications for revising how certain historians have evaluated and how others might yet evaluate, but it is the general fact of evaluation rather than the direction of any particular evaluation that is central.