The libel case known as Irving v Lipstadt and Penguin Books, which wound its way through the law courts near the Strand in the dank spring of last year, had all the trappings of a world-historical event in the guise of a made-for-television drama. The trial was about one very unusual cove, David Irving - half gentleman, half scholar but, alas, the wrong halves - and his doomed effort to reconcile a career as a historian of the Third Reich with a passionate admiration for the person of Adolf Hitler. In books and speeches in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Irving cast varying degrees of doubt over the conventional picture of the Third Reich, the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the role of Auschwitz as an extermination camp.
In the process, he made innumerable enemies, was banned from Germany (among other countries) and lost his commercial publishers. In an attempt to rehabilitate his career, in 1996 he sued Dr Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of religion from the US academic bush leagues, for calling him a Holocaust denier.
He failed. In a Rhadamanthine judgment on 11 April 2000, Mr Justice Charles Gray ruled that Irving was an anti-Semite and pro-Nazi who deliberately falsified and distorted the historical record of the Third Reich in the service of his ideology. Justice Gray awarded costs against him and refused him leave to appeal.
In retrospect, the case was open and shut. As Lipstadt's solicitor, the celebrated Anthony Julius, used to argue at the time, defending such a client (the Lipstadt team's argument rested on a plea of justification) was an expensive but routine piece of community service, necessary every generation - or more often.
D D Guttenplan, in the first book about the trial to appear, but surely not the last, sees far more in Irving v Lipstadt than mere legal sanitation. In its 32 days of evidence, he says, Irving v Lipstadt raised questions about the rights or obligations of the Jews to defend themselves against anti-Semitism, about the historicity of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, about the legal regulation of public utterance, about the writing of history itself.
For British readers to engage with such themes, they must be bought off with a good narrative, and that Guttenplan provides. Here is Irving, erect, pinstriped and lantern-jawed, balled up in aggression or relaxed in ingratiation, entranced by his eloquence, enraged by his misfortune, a British Faust:
Zwar bin ich gescheiter als alle die Laffen,
Doktoren, Magister, Schreiber und Pfaffen;
Mich plagen keine Skrupel noch Zweifel,
Furchte mich weder vor Holle noch Teufel . . .
Here was a man not just writing the history of the Third Reich, but living it in all its bureaucratic chaos and violence, somewhat in the manner that Ronald Reagan managed to convince himself he had spent the Second World War under arms. Here, too, is Courtroom 73, in all its britisch-komisch detail: the vagrants in the public galleries, the boorish historians paraded by Julius through the witness box, the shameless hamming of the lead counsel for the defence, the peppery Richard Rampton. Here, too, is the beautiful Lady Renouf, whose presence at Irving's back is a bitter and permanent affront to all the men of gallantry in the courtroom, Gentile and Jew. She fidgets implausibly with her Asprey's notepad and pencil but, as Guttenplan murmurs, is "suspiciously alert to Jewish peculiarities".
An American living in London, Guttenplan displays a startling familiarity with British social form. He notes, for example, how Irving puts on his somewhat inexact Clubland manner to align himself with Mr Justice Gray and to distinguish himself from the intellectual and physical skinheads who are more usually his constituency. Though Guttenplan is accurate in his reporting, in one or two places he seems to me to be straining at the courtroom drama. He reports that Irving's cross-examination of Julius's chief expert witness, the sour and learned Welshman Professor Richard Evans, scored a number of points. In reality, Irving infuriated the judge with his diffuse and pettifogging questions.
Turning to Irving's enemies, Guttenplan invokes the privilege of Jewishness to say some wounding things about the Jews. He cannot disguise his unease at the official or compulsory commemoration of the Holocaust and the strong-arm tactics of such groups as the Anti-Defamation League, "in their efforts to police public discussion, not just of the Holocaust but of American and Israeli policies". If the Jews have a right to special recognition of their historic persecution, he says, they have a duty of sympathy to the victims of persecution in the present.
Irving's pusillanimous British and US publishers are beneath contempt. As for Lipstadt, she emerges from this account as illiberal, pious and dim. For what it is worth, having covered the trial myself, I thought her an admirable person, brave and long-suffering, and the only person in the court not in thrall to his or her own brilliance.
Guttenplan does not attempt to emulate Hannah Arendt. Irving in London was not Eichmann in Jerusalem. The problem in London was not evil, but knowledge. While covering various fashionable philosophical bases, Guttenplan believes, like Justice Gray, that there is such a thing as fact. The evidence for the gas chambers at Auschwitz could be much more extensive, which is why what evidence there is should be handled with scruple. To deny the systematic gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz, Irving arbitrarily excluded such categories of evidence as eyewitness reports and war-crimes hearings. Meanwhile, in the course of the libel trial, Irving repeatedly changed his position or was forced by Rampton to retract statements. In such circumstances, one does not need to be profound, or a philosopher of knowledge, to be sceptical of Irving's arguments.
If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside. Thucydides could write history as it was made, but, in our fallen times, it will take much longer. Meanwhile, a public long educated in the superiority of the First Amendment to the US Constitution suddenly saw how a plea of justification in a British libel case could be a force for truth. British law also had its day on 11 April 2000. Guttenplan simply does not address that argument, which is a pity, because he surely would have attacked it.
What Guttenplan does not do, and for this we are in his debt, is reproduce the authentic mental atmosphere of the trial. It is impossible to exaggerate how depressing Irving v Lipstadt was to its denizens. Even the reporters emerged from the courtroom with their spirits crushed. One felt the universe had been twisted out of true, not just in respect of events in central Europe 60 years ago, but in the traffic in Fleet Street and the pedestrians fleeing before the February squalls. It was as if one had been plunged back into the nightmare of Alexander Pope:
Hence, from the straw where Bedlam's Prophet nods
He hears loud Oracles, and talks with Gods.
Into this historiographical madhouse, Guttenplan lets the calm sunshine of the mind: the existence of facts and the duty to try, where possible, to find them out.
James Buchan's latest novel is A Good Place to Die (Harvill, £10.99)
