Why the historian who survived Buchenwald believed history is an endless argument

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 2 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Pieter Geyl lived through the darkest chapters of the twentieth century, including thirteen months in a Nazi concentration camp. Yet, his greatest battles were fought not with weapons, but with ideas, challenging the very notion that we can ever reach a final, definitive truth about the past.

A Dutch historian of immense resilience, Pieter Geyl (1887–1966) experienced the visceral impact of political ideology firsthand. During the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940, his work on Napoleon was suppressed by publishers fearing comparisons to Adolf Hitler. This period of upheaval led to Geyl being taken hostage by the SS in October 1940. He endured thirteen months in the Buchenwald concentration camp and was later held at Kamp Sint-Michielsgestel until his release for medical reasons in February 1944.

Geyl’s scholarship was defined by a rigorous, revisionist spirit. He famously contested the 'Sonderweg' theory, which suggested Nazi Germany was an inevitable outcome of German historical development, and defended the legitimacy of Leopold von Ranke. He also engaged in high-profile intellectual combat with British historian Arnold J. Toynbee. Geyl attacked Toynbee’s 'laws' of history and the 'challenge and response' framework as overly simplistic and prone to selective evidence, specifically opposing Toynbee's claims regarding the terminal decline of Western civilization.

Central to Geyl’s philosophy was the belief that all historical writing is transitory because every age interprets the past through its own lens. In his work *Napoleon, For and Against*, he illustrated how French historians shifted between viewing the Emperor as a destroyer or a hero depending on their era. He viewed history as a 'progress of argument without end.' While he rejected the idea that 'anything goes,' he urged historians to critically examine their own biases, arguing that the pursuit of a definitive, final account of history is an impossibility.

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