The Shadow of Versailles: Interwar Europe 1918-39: Dr David Kaufman
Hello, I’m Dr David Kaufman and I am Co-Programme Director of the Online MSc in History and I also teach
‘The Shadow of Versailles: Interwar Europe 1918-39’.
Now I’ve called the course the shadow of Versailles because the peace settlement that attempted to end the
First World War was so important for everything that happened in interwar Europe afterwards. It didn’t only
set the borders but it set the tone of politics. It affects the culture, it affects society, it effects quite obviously
the politics going on as well as of course determining the actual fate of the continent itself with the slide
towards the Second World War.
The way that we are going to study inter-war Europe isn’t on a country by country basis. What we are going to
do is a rigorously comparative approach. Now what this means is that we cannot look at one country in
isolation, what we have to do is view events that take place in the individual countries but in the wider picture
of what’s going on in the continent as a whole. And what I’ve done with this course is I’ve tried to make sure
that students themselves can follow their own interests and they can move beyond the traditional
assumptions of much of the historiography but also many of the interpretations the historians have of the
inter-war period where they tend to actually just look at countries on an individual basis.
While it’s impossible to reconstruct a complete history of the past, I think it’s important for us to try and get as
fully rounded a picture as we possibly can and this is one of the aims that we are going to try and do in this
course. What we are doing is we’re having a look at themes, we’re having a look broadly across countries, but
also what we are trying to do is we’re trying to ensure that we move beyond some of the rather lazy
assumptions about the interwar period and also the inevitability or not of the second-world war breaking out
after the first and try and examine the interwar period within the context of those who actually experienced it
themselves.