For the last month, the history book club's feature book has been Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution, a collection of essays by Ian Kershaw, a giant in scholarship on Nazi Germany. The book presents his works over a period of nearly 30 years and, in the process, sums up some of the debates that rage over all three eponymous topics. In the course of reading it, though, I found myself thinking of another history giant, AJP Taylor, and his extremely provocative book, The Origins of the Second World War. In a sense, to understand how a book like Kershaw's exists today requires understanding just how upsetting Taylor's book was.

These books loom in the imaginations of academics because of something called historiography. While history is the study of what happened, historiography is the history of, well, history. It's an exploration of how our understanding of the past changes with new perspectives or new information. The historiography of Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust has always been fraught with strong opinions and frankly a lot of anger. What Taylor did, essentially, was play around with it. If his work were written today, a generation of historians raised on the internet might dub him the first historical "troll." (Although this would be intended with respect for the wit and probity of the provocation; not for crass button pushing.)

As the aftermath of the Second World War segued into the Cold War, it became necessary for the United States, Britain and other western countries positioning themselves against the Soviet Union to get Germany back on its feet to act as a bulwark against any Soviet land invasion. In doing so, it behooved the west to rehabilitate the view of Germany, to depict Germans as a people not complicit with the crimes of their leadership but instead held within the thrall of a totalitarian madman.

Western historiography on the Third Reich spent roughly 15 years painting Hitler as a monolithic force. Why did this happen? Hitler. Why did that happen? Hitler. Why anything? Hitler. In short order, Hitler came to be portrayed as such a comprehensive evil that almost nothing could be beyond his purview or fail to represent an extension of his will. What Taylor did was toss all this on its ear.

Taylor was a career contrarian, and while careful to affirm that Hitler was a wicked man, he otherwise describes him as a rank opportunist not much different from other cynical leaders. His interpretation of the events of 1933-1939 is of a man essentially playing chicken with the west and being continually emboldened by winning without difficulty. In 1935, Germany began openly re-arming, resulting in no action from Britain or France. In 1936, Germany re-militarized the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Although Britain was obligated under the Treaty of Locarno to intervene militarily to aid France, it again did nothing. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria, violating the Treaty of St. Germain. Again the west did nothing. Of the United States, he says in the preface for the American reader:

there is very little [in this book] about American policy. This has a simple explanation: American policy had very little to do with the British and French declaration of war on Germany. Perhaps it would be truer to say that what it had to do with their declarations of war was of a negative kind, like the significant episode of the dog in the night, to which Sherlock Holmes once drew attention. When Watson objected: "But the dog did nothing in the night," Holmes answered: "That was the significant episode."

(This passage illustrates something else about Taylor's books: he's eminently readable. Taylor's style always seemed like the product of an Oscar Wilde protégé who got lost in a history lecture on the way to a poetry reading.)

Wit aside, the point is powerful. Even at the beginning of the 1939 invasion of Poland, the Wehrmacht was not the indomitable fighting force we tend to envision its being. Three years earlier, it was much weaker. Yet Hitler found no opposition and was thus emboldened, responding opportunistically to any new development that enabled him to expand German territory without conflict, while reducing the new, neighboring states of Europe to clients. Had he been checked once by any of the great powers, the results might have been quite different.

Of Hitler's grand plans, Taylor dismisses the famous Hossbach Memorandum used at the Nuremberg trials to demonstrate Hitler's "intentions." The minutes of a 1937 meeting, the Memorandum supposedly outlines Hitler's plans for a future war. But almost every detail of invasion or conflict doesn't accord with what subsequently happened. Taylor interpreted the Memorandum as Hitler's attempt to leverage Economics Minister Schacht into handing over funds for more aggressive remilitarization. "Look at these inevitable wars," it seems to say. For Taylor, though, the importance is that the conflicts took different shape and that the Memorandum seemed to have little direct impact on later military planning. Instead, it suggests to Taylor that even Hitler's militarism was as opportunistic as his diplomacy.

With that interpretation, Taylor exploded the extant "Hitler Was Pure, Focused, Omnipotent Evil" historiography and instantly created the academic crisis that led to the splintering of Reich historiography into Functionalist (or Structuralist) and Intentionalist camps. The Functionalists follow a kind of Taylorite model, interpreting Hitler and Reich decisions as taking advantage of the possible and responding to circumstances. The Intentionalists, meanwhile, view Hitler's rise and the history of the Reich as an inevitable progression from his blossoming anti-Semitism following the German surrender in 1918. For them, each event is seen through the prism of the Final Solution, which, in its form, was Hitler's final goal all along. A fascinating book like Kershaw's Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, which pragmatically unites Functionalism and Intentionalism to varying degrees, would not exist in its form at all today were it not for Taylor's Origins.

That aside, Taylor's book is still a powerful piece of scholarship. He wrote in a style that suggested he could spontaneously string together a five minute speech on any topic and put a unique and remarkable fact in each sentence — which, as a matter of fact, he could. (Taylor was so popular on British television that he was even satirized on Monty Python's Flying Circus.) Though many of his interpretations are widely considered incorrect (even sometimes inappropriate) today, the readability of the book and the background information are still first rate. Even if his scholarship is in question now, he's still probably the only serious modern historian people can read simply for his fluidity, wit and epigrammatic style. The book can be read for the pleasure of language or the pleasure of knowledge — or, ideally both. And even years later, the provocative conclusions should provide ample incentive for readers to go looking for more comprehensive and current scholarship.