Word: abrahamisms
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...first David Abraham, assistant professor of history at Princeton, was rightly proud. Initial reviews of his book, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, had sung high praise. "Intellectually and stylistically weighty," declared the Library Journal. This "book's strength is its thought-provoking interpretation," wrote a second critic. And a reader of the manuscript, judging it for publication by the Princeton University Press, rated the work as "the most important book on 20th century Germany written in the past 15 years...
Such accolades are tough to come by in academe, where scholars guard their intellectual turf and rarely show kindness toward a contrary thesis. Abraham's volume laid a measure of blame for the failure of the post-World War I German government upon German businessmen, who came to favor Hitler, a view that scholars have squabbled about for decades. The book, with its Marxist perspective, was respected even by uncompromising Gerald D. Feldman, a University of California expert on late imperial and Weimar Germany. Feldman had critiqued an early draft and pronounced the volume "imaginative and interesting...
...this commendation, back in 1981, was deeply gratifying to Abraham. Then 34, with only a short-term teaching position at Princeton, he was anxious for tenure, the guarantee of lifetime job security. To publish with such laudatory notices could provide insurance against perishing in the limbo of the untenured. But tenure never materialized. Instead, Abraham became caught up in a running storm of accusations about his book. The charges, ranging from sloppiness to fraud, continued to buffet him a fortnight ago at the American Historical Association convention in Chicago, where he found himself walled in by controversy. Commented A.H.A. Executive...
...Abraham's problems began when he was attacked, 18 months after the publication of his book, by patrician Henry Turner of Yale. Turner, who has little or no use for Marxist history, wrote a testy review in the Political Science Quarterly. He charged that Abraham had rewritten quotations and selected only portions of source documents that suited his purposes...
...Rise of Hitler. That volume, scheduled for publication by Oxford on Jan. 20, attributes the Weimar Republic's demise to an array of historical causes. "Only through gross distortion," writes Turner, "can big business be accorded a crucial or even major role." Privately, he now comments, "If Abraham's right, I'm wrong...