Walter Laqueur
Historian of totalitarianism whose experiences led him to advocate a hawkish approach to diplomacy
WALTER LAQUEUR, who has died aged 97, was a historian of the recent past and of the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes. Deriving insights from his personal experience of ideology in action, he came to hold a pessimistic view of Western democracy’s prospects, advocating a hawkish approach to diplomacy which has influenced US neo-conservatives. By contrast, in Britain, where he spent much of his career, he was almost unknown.
Laqueur reflected that most of the people he had known when he was 16 had died a violent death. He himself escaped Nazi Germany, but later lived in Israel in its early years, spent much time in the USSR and worked in Britain and America in the shadow of the Cold War.
He also became one of the first scholars of terrorism. “My generation,” he said, “suffered from a surfeit of politics.”
Not an ideologue himself – and, he noted, a generalist in an age of specialisation – he was nonetheless able to straddle the two worlds of the library and of public policy. Described as having the lowest boredom threshold possible, he channelled his energy into almost 100 books on nearly as many subjects.
He summarised the conclusions of a lifetime’s thought in a compelling memoir, Best of Times, Worst of Times (2009). Among these was the value of personal knowledge of one’s field of study. Most younger American and European historians of the 20th century, he felt, strove too hard to find fault with the West and to be fair to dictators, having not themselves known what it was like to live under extremism.
Similarly, he felt that young diplomats and policymakers lacked the intimate knowledge of foreign cultures, and of their mindsets, that would allow them to realise that goodwill and dialogue were not the solution to every danger. Hence the importance of preserving memories of the past, although Laqueur accepted that the public rarely wanted to heed warnings.
He was sceptical about the ability of historians to predict the future, since each situation is different. His own forecasts, however, included stating after the fall of the Soviet regime that Russia would embrace nationalism rather than democracy, and three months before 9/11 observing that terrorists would make increasing use of technology.
He was gloomy about the future for European countries, including Britain, which he saw becoming a theme park for the nouveaux riches of globalisation. His own preference would have been to live at a time of greater optimism – in the Paris of the Belle Époque.
Walter Louis Laqueur was born on May 26 1921 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw in Poland). His earliest memories included seeing the Graf Zeppelin airship pass overhead.
Laqueur was in the last year of Jewish children permitted to graduate from school. His main interests as a boy were sporting, and he could remember running at an event watched by Hitler. The secret of the Führer’s appeal, he believed, was that he tapped the innate desire of young Germans to serve.
His father managed a textile factory and Walter worked in the industry for a year before being offered a place at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This allowed him to get out of Germany, as it turned out on the day before Kristallnacht, the destruction of Jewish businesses and locations which occurred on November 9-10 1938. His parents felt they were too old to begin again and eventually perished in the Holocaust.
Laqueur’s studies only lasted three months before he went to work on a kibbutz as a mounted guard. When he broke a leg, he learnt Russian while recuperating; within a month he could read Pravda.
After a spell in a bookshop, he became a journalist in the post-war years, working mainly for the liberal international press. He contemplated specialising in the Middle East but thought it would take too long to improve his literary Arabic.
He was more attracted by Russia, especially its rich cultural history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before it was widely believed in Israel, he became convinced that Soviet communism was merely another form of fascism. In the mid-1950s he moved to London to edit Survey, a journal of Soviet studies spawned by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the anti-communist group of intellectuals secretly funded by the CIA.
In 1964 Laqueur became the director of the Wiener Library in London. This would become Britain’s leading archive of the Nazi era, although in the 1970s it had to surmount a funding crisis which Laqueur resolved with the help of Tel Aviv University. He was by then teaching there, and although he remained in post at the Wiener until 1994 his addition of other professorships increasingly meant he spent less time in London.
Never really in the swim in British academic circles, he began to attract notice abroad after co-founding, as an offshoot of the Wiener, the Journal of Contemporary History and its accompanying Institute. Devoted to the study of – by historical standards – recent events, it attracted criticism on the basis that official sources for these were still closed. (Kremlinology, too, was hampered by similar problems.)
Laqueur would respond by citing historians such as Thucydides, Xenophon and Burke, who had not let these concerns prevent them from writing about their own times.
His own output soon became vast, including Nasser’s Egypt (1957); Russia & Germany (1965), a study of a century of conflict; The Road to War (1967), which examined the roots of the Arab-israeli conflict; and Fascism – A Reader’s Guide (1976).
In 1968 (despite his never having taken a degree), Laqueur was appointed Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, and in 1976 moved on to Georgetown University, Washington, where he later settled.
For more than 30 years, he was a member of the university’s think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, although he had doubts about how effective such bodies were given that their resources did not always allow them to recruit the best minds.
What kept him most in demand were his histories, beginning in the mid-1970s, of modern revolutionary movements and terrorism. The first, Guerrilla (1976), hailed by the military historian Sir Michael Howard as combining “massive learning and brisk common-sense”, and its successor, Terrorism (1977), remain among the most cited works in a field tilled first largely by Laqueur.
Among his propositions which came to be proved was that terrorism did not stem, as was then thought, from poverty. Indeed, he held that future terrorists were likely to be well-educated, so that they could pass easily between different cultures and be able to master new technologies.
He later deprecated the notion that fanaticism could be combated with foreign aid and education programmes. Recalling that Mussolini had said his business was “cracking skulls”, Laqueur opined that Il Duce would “not have been deterred by soft power”. He continued writing into his nineties and his final book, The Future of Terrorism, was published this year.
He married, first, in 1941, Naomi Koch. She died in 1995, and he married secondly, in 1996, Susi Genzen Wichmann. She survives him together with the two daughters of his first marriage.