Interview with Peter Fritzsche, author of “1942”

Peter Fritzsche is the W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of History at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has written numerous history books, including Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Basic Books, 2020). This September, Basic Books is publishing his newest work, 1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe. He was kind enough to do a Zoom interview about that book and some broader topics.

I'll start with a traditional question about your new book, 1942. What are you hoping readers get from the book?

Well, World War II was really the biggest man-made event that has ever occurred and it involved a billion people of the 2 billion who were alive on Earth. So, it was an extraordinary event, mobilizing people, displacing people, inspiring people, destroying them. Three percent of the world population was killed.

It's an absolutely extraordinary event, and 1942 itself does not resolve where it's going to go and how many outlying stories it's going have. It's like a bomb that keeps fragmenting into more and more pieces, and we don't know what actually is going happen. And if we think of the main protagonists, the Axis and the Allies, for most of 1942, the Allies are losing. And the Axis looks like it's winning. At the very end of 42, it seems that Germany can't win, but, for most of 42, it's not clear.

So, I can focus on the war. And I can focus on the experience of the war, and I can focus with using one year on a really global scale without trying to be comprehensive about the entire war. So, it's a deep snapshot that allows me to recover some of the… much more of the experiences, the uncertainty. But also the huge percussive impact of this war on military forces as well as civilians.

When you're thinking about this book and the other things that you've written, do you think of this book as a continuation of conversations started in earlier books, or do you see it as something new, or both?

Well, I've never tried a huge canvas like this before, and tried to tie it together, both with the theme of displacement as well as the narrative of freedom, and self-rule. But in all my books, I've taken ideas seriously. And it goes back to the idea of, are people just operating in a contingent way, based on circumstances? Or are there deeper ideas that drive them, and that, create loyalties that are both liberating and deadly?

And I'm on the side of the ideas. I believe in true love. And I respect people who believe in God. And I think those are very, very fundamental, motivating forces, and one cheapens experience just to see it in transactional terms. Or just in terms of people's scary, contingent circumstantial situations. So I try to look at the big picture, not the globe, per se, though I'm doing that, but the larger picture that people inhabit for themselves as full characters and personalities. And in that sense, there's a kind of continuity.

But I was very much drawn to the… just the terms of the drama, where so much is happening, both tragically and heroically. And this is a mass event, involving half the world's population in a really clear-cut way. And there are other man-made events coming. That will involve all of humanity. And how is this subject of humanity going to respond? How is it going to split, divide, and find bonds of solidarity and cooperation? And 1942, I think, is kind of a scary warning, that there are bonds of loyalty, and you have to take that very seriously. But the fragmentation is also very evident.

So the book, it's built around this year, 1942, as a significant year, having some standalone significance, even in World War II. There are other years that some historians have really thought of as big years. 1917 is thought of as a big turning point for World War I. A lot of cultural historians talk about 1968. Why are some years, do you think, better than others for drawing conclusions from? And what does focusing on a single year do for a historian?

Well, in the end, I focus on 1942, but it's really Pearl Harbor to the end of Stalingrad. So, it's the 7th of December, 1941, until the 2nd of February, 1943. So, I think I'm allowed to say 1942. 1942 is the year that the war becomes truly global, all the major belligerents are at war with one another. The only exception is, is that the Soviet Union is not at war with Japan. But otherwise, the United States has been drawn in. Britain is also now a belligerent against Japan. The Soviet Union has been on the Allied side since June 1941. So, at that moment, it becomes truly global.

At the same time, with the Japanese advance against the British and the American empires in the Pacific, one sees that underneath Japanese imperialism, there's also a huge anti-imperialist decolonial struggle going on, whether in Malaysia, or the Philippines, or India. They give some aid to the Japanese, but ultimately not. But that's a second front that suddenly opens up. A whole new front of vulnerability and possibility as the colonial world is revolting against empire.

In 1942, we have the implementation of genocide, a deliberate state policy on the part of Nazi Germany. And that begins in March 1942, and becomes known to the West in the fall of 1942, so we have a new knowledge about humankind, when we think about the Holocaust, most of which was understood at the end of 1942.

We have the first, bombing, major bombing of civilian cities, deliberate bombing of, civilian neighborhoods with the British attacks against Germany. We have an all-out war against, so-called fifth column civilians. So, along the entire Pacific coast, from Peru all the way to Canada, Japanese citizens of their respective countries are targeted, rounded up, incarcerated, taken away. At the same time, you have the terror of submarine warfare, which is exacting a real price on civilian shipping along the east seaboard of the United States.

So, everything is just exploding in 1942, and the terms of the conflict have to be understood in wildly new existential terms. When one has to think about the bombed cities, you have to think about Treblinka and Auschwitz, you have to think about all the incarceration camps, the trains that are taking civilians here and there, and the mobilization of 100 million soldiers and the biggest battle fought is at Stalingrad, where just millions and millions of men are involved. And it's the biggest grave in World War II. So 1942 is just saturated with this new knowledge of what war is, and a kind of sneaking suspicion that the only winner is the war. The war just keeps going on and metastasizing in all of these new forms, and it becomes all you know and all you think about. And at the same time, all throughout is this drumbeat of music, patriotic tunes and swing music, blaring from radios, all across the world.

To follow up on one of the things you mentioned, and I appreciated this in the book, too. You mentioned how, basically, for the Holocaust, there's a lot of “didn't know” rhetoric after the war. But that, really, it's there. There's a lot that's there in 1942 that can be found, even in mainstream newspapers. It's just not always the center thing. But people still say “didn’t know,” why is that so popular?

Well, it didn't fit into a heroic narrative, and so it wasn't an index of winning and losing against the Germans and the Japanese. And in American newspapers, that was what was on the front pages. And the headlines throughout the fall of 1942 involve Guadalcanal and Stalingrad. Stalingrad's the biggest newspaper story in the war. And unless victims can be enrolled in this struggle, and are somehow an index of its back and forth, and of its progress and advance, or retreat, it's a hard story to tell.

It also involves the neglect of the Americans, of the British--who set up refugees to become victims by not letting them in. But I think mostly it's that the civilian victims, mostly women and children, are simply not heroic, romantic militant fighters who occupy the front pages, and who occupy our imaginations, and are the register of when will the war end. When will our troops return victoriously? So, it's in the newspapers, but it's misunderstood and it's sidelined because it's not part of the immediate drama.

That said, certain aspects of the Holocaust are not known. The systematic nature, the meticulous timetables of the trains, the relentless drive of Germans to find each and every Jew. And gas chambers were kind of understood, but not really. So that's post-1945 knowledge. But if we cared to look, we could. And there were Broadway theaters and novels and essays that examine the neglect of this issue in 1942, as well.

This book really centers the civilian experience in many ways. Why was that so important to you?

About 10 years ago, one of the poignant experiences that a lot of history teachers had was the 100th anniversary of World War I. And there were a lot of commemorations, some great books were written. I taught a standalone class on World War I, and one still has the footage of the soldiers, but they're not…they're not living anymore. The last veteran had died, you know, before. But my grandfather was in World War I, so it's still a part of a kind of living memory, and the horrors of the trenches. The people just were there in the war. You didn't come back. It wasn't 6 months of service. You didn't rotate--you rotated to the rear, but you didn't rotate back home. And 90% of the victims of World War I were soldiers, and we feel very empathetically with them. And that seems to be the modern military experience. World War I really stands as a model for that.

However, in World War II, 70% of the dead are civilians.

Most through famine, but also through deliberate genocide, through bombing. What do we take away from that? Most were civilians, in Russia and China. But, 10% of the civilian dead are Jewish, half of the Jewish population of the world is murdered. What do we make of that? And that, I think, is a greater mystery than the soldiers and their horrible experience in World War I. At the same time, soldiers in World War II also had experiences very similar to civilians. They also felt like refugees, they felt displaced, they didn't want to be where they were. Many became quite ill, mentally ill, after weeks and weeks of fighting. And it's a very different and deeper experience that I think touches on many of the non-military catastrophes that face us, whether they're economic or climate or ecological in some way. But that 70% makes World War II completely different from World War I. It has some origins in World War I, but it's a very, very different war, and that's what I wanted to explore.

Now, so much of your book, 1942, is about the movement of people, refugees, deportations. And why do you think that that's been kind of downplayed? I mean we've kind of talked about this a little bit already, that so much of the focus has been on soldiers rather than civilians, but also the mass movement, I think, has been downplayed a lot.

It's extraordinary. In many ways, this is a people's war. It required the consent and mobilization of people. It therefore targeted people's morale. When we talk about, strategic air campaigns against German cities, the victory… victory seemed to be about liberation for a group of people. For Poland against Germany, that makes sense, but it was also India against Britain. But in India, then, there were divisions about what kind of India it would be. Would it be a federated India that gave more power to Muslims, or would it be a unitary state that would give more power, almost all power, to Hindus? And so suddenly, who's the “us?” What kind of self-rule are we talking about? And civilians become targets. Are we going to cleanse territories? Are we going to make them safe? Safe for whom? Who's the enemy? Who are the fifth column, dangers that have to be eliminated? So the idea of liberation becomes very, very multivocal, to put it blandly. It's not simply Poland against Germany, but it also means, perhaps, territories free of Jews, territories for one ethnic group, but not another. And those are the explosions that one sees all across the world, from India to South Africa to Europe to the United States. And those are civilians. And it is civilian populations that are the subject of how you imagine the post-war future. So people fought amongst themselves, neighbors fought among themselves, to create different versions of self-rule. All of that is a civilian conflict.

I really enjoy the way that you use literature in the book. Through your own reading, but also because so many of the figures you mentioned, they're thinking really consciously about literature that they've read. Do you think this book kind of makes a case for literature as, like, a good tool for interpreting the world around us?

Well, literature is a miniature of the stories we tell each other. But they are completed and resolved and set off as one interpretation, that's the novel. And we don't find documents of real people who do that, except in diaries and letters and in fragmentary form. But people fought through their experiences through literary images, beginning with, Shakespeare, usually five acts, and five acts… the fifth act resolves the tensions opened up in the first two, and then it's thought about where, what act are we in? And how will it get resolved? War and Peace was probably the most important text that people thought through. It showed many lessons. It showed the bitterness of war, the toughness of war… It showed civilian mobilization against foreign occupation. It showed the difficulty of ascertaining what was going on, if you're a military tactician or strategist. So people read through novels as aids and models and precursors. Literature also indicates what could be said, and what was known. And so it's a handy, very handy source, along with newspapers. I read newspapers in Manila, I read them in Calcutta, I read them in Bombay, I read many in Johannesburg, Richmond, Virginia, Detroit. Newspapers are extraordinary, sources, and they come together. They're not at war with each other, these sources. But literature I find very important and very useful, because it's already a narrative. You can push against it, but these narratives have influenced people tremendously.

So I'm curious, we could argue people today are probably less well-read than they were in the 1940s. I'd say maybe fewer people at war today have read War and Peace. Does that put us at a disadvantage today? Maybe we have, I don't know, Marvel movies or video games providing our metaphors and our narratives for interpreting the world around us? Do you think that that's an issue, or no?

Well, I personally think so. I don't think that the novel is the only way to represent. You could have theater, you can have movies. Movies are extremely important in World War II. But the novel is a very capacious form. There are many windows and doors and walls in novels. It's a very flexible form to explore circumstance and fate. You can foreground the characters, or you can emphasize, you can emphasize the situation which people are in and leave them without choices. It's a remarkably flexible form in the hand of an artist, who then sends his book to us to appreciate or dismiss. Most books that are read in World War II are not War and Peace, but are very naive or simplistic, or black and white versions of the fight.

But novels place ordinary individuals onto a global or national political stage. And that's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to show how you deal with circumstances that change. That's why there's a beginning, and then there's an end. Something has changed. And that's all fundamental to a novel. And it's a great way to narrate our way through the world, and all the different ways that we do try to negotiate, and the misunderstandings and missteps. And people aren't always right, but you understand them, you understand them more deeply. So you have a huge cast of characters, there's all sorts of things you can do with stage, with background and foreground. And to lose that is to lose a lot. I'm sure a film can also do great things, but these are subtle and, both subtle and inflammatory forms that startle and also invite you to understand people.

I appreciate in this book that you emphasize a lot about the war being about principles, right? So, kind of the people's war, this idea of self-governance and Home Rule, as you mentioned. And I think a lot of Americans have pretty much kind of just flattened the narrative of the war to be, you know, you have aggressor countries, Germany and Japan. And then it's other countries kind of pushing them back, and less about, I don't know, something in the Atlantic Charter. What do you think would be different if more Americans thought of the war in terms of these bigger principles and these bigger ideas, instead of just, you know, beating Hitler or something?

And Roosevelt thought a lot about that. The Atlantic Charter in August 1941 outlined the war aims or, I guess, war hopes of Britain and the United States. About restoring, of course, free trade and that means also no empires, free access to the world, but also that people would have the ability to choose the kinds of rulers and government they wanted. And it was taken up very quickly in ways that were unexpected, not only by Poles under German rule but by people in Nigeria and South Africa and India as a call for freedom, and that this was going to be a war against any foreign aggression that ends in occupation.

The Germans were only the most preposterous or audacious example of what had occurred in the last two or three centuries. That was the major interpretation of the Atlantic Charter. Of course, Hitler and Japan, we’re engaged with Hitler and Japan, not because they were bad, but because they were aggressive. And that aggression was not simply against U.S. interests, but it was illegitimate against our ideas of good government and a well-regulated global order. You can't just go around conquering people. And so very quickly, you move up from a military threat posed by Germany and Japan to ideas about fighting for freedom.

And those ideas created many fronts, as Great Britain found out in India. But it also brought people together and created immense solidarity and the willingness to fight over all these years. And it is then the binding glue that we have in memory about why World War II occurred. There are a lot of crimes in World War II, but there is a good war. There is an anti-fascist effort. The war did summon many of our best hopes about ourselves and they were then inscribed into a post-war order. I don't want to be naive about NATO, but I also don't want to be cynical about it. And then much of who we are can, at least in America, we can talk about our struggle against the British, and about autocratic rule and taxation without representation, and move on out, and see ourselves in the struggles of other people. And that acquired purchase in World War II because the struggles of these other people was also about defending American global interests and not living in a world dominated by Germany and Japan, which would have… We would have survived, but we would have been a much more constricted nation contained to the Western Hemisphere.

So this book is written for a broad audience. Why is it important to you to write for a broad audience, and not just academics?

Well, because our ideas and stories about World War II belong to everybody. And then to do that, you have to make your subjects, you know, in every sentence, in the paragraphs, in the chapters, about dramas and about people. But that doesn't keep you from exploring how people interpret things. And to read a letter, and to see all the different meanings that a letter might hold. That sounds sort of like what English classes do at a university, but that's how people read letters. That's why they re-read letters. That's why they were reluctant to open certain letters. Because they contained incendiary meanings, or very important meanings, or disappointments. So how do we understand, the soldier's experience in a battle? Letters are one way, it's not the only way. And reading them carefully, they're filled with clichés, but they're also filled with cries, and I've read letters that are stained with tears, they're stained with blood. I've read letters in archives that had never been opened before. I’ve found wedding rings in letters. All of these things can be closely analyzed and yet are very poignant to our general experience.

And the other answer to your question is more straightforward. I think of 1942, I don't play this up in the book, but there are major catastrophes, and challenges coming. And climate change, that's going to change the face of the world. It's going to propel people around the world. There are many different ways of reacting and dealing with this. But if, on the one hand, we succumb to… they're not going to cross our border no matter what… And on the other hand, oh, we can pull together like we did in World War II, then we're going to miss the reality of the last man-made disaster, which was 1942. So I send out a warning with a little bit of hope.

You've written a few other books. When your book is coming out, are you excited? Are you relieved? Are you already kind of moving on to the next project? Because at this point, you've been living with this book for a long time. It's new to other people, but it's not new to you.

The biggest excitement is when you see the galleys. So that is laid out as it will appear on the page. And so you see how many sentences, how many lines are going be on the page. You see how many words are going to be on a line, you see the font. You see how spacious or not, the layout was. Basic Books was very generous with this book. That's why it's longer than it seems, because it's airy. It's physically--there's lots of space. And so the galleys are, for an author, the most exciting moment, because, you know, we see what we've typed, but now it's laid out like it's actually going to get published. And that came in January. So that's the most exciting moment.

But the actual book brings it all together. The cover, I've seen it. The advanced praise, I've seen it. But now it's all wrapped together. And so it is wonderful. You hold it, and this is the thing you can send to your mom. This is what you can send to your second grade teacher. This is what you can send to your daughter, and only when you get it. And it’s supposed to come, either tomorrow or on Friday [interview conducted 8/13/25]. And then you re-read it one more time. You flip through it, and it's the only time you allow yourself to say, actually, that's not so bad. I am deep in the next project, though.

Do you mind… what is the next project?

Well, I'm deciding between two things. One would be a book about the weekend. In Weimar, Germany, at the very end, before Hitler comes to power, Sundays were the big day of leisure. And, how important was that day of leisure versus work? How did people spend it? Was it more mass leisure, or was it ethnic and class and status-based leisure? Did people go to the movies, or did they go to their clubs? That kind of thing? How did they view themselves as modern individuals on these Sundays? Sunday is also the day of political activism. Sunday is also the day you pull on your uniform and you go out by train and you canvas neighborhoods, or you get into fights with communists and Nazis, or whoever the case may be. So, Sunday's kind of an interesting way to open up what is a modern society in crisis, and how does it think about itself? How does it talk about itself? So, Sunday, Monday, in a way is the tension at the very end of the Weimar Republic. So that's one idea, based in Berlin for the most part.

The other book will be a book called War is Hell. So that's what Sherman said in 1865. He was speaking about the difficulty of sending troops to battle. But “war is hell” means many things. It is the hell of fighting. It's the hell of commanding soldiers to fight. It's the hell that soldiers recognize, that they've been through, but don't believe civilians will ever understand. So, it's a line that's created between soldiers' experiences and civilian estimation of those experiences.

“War is hell” is also a license, to do things that you can't and wouldn't do at home. So, atrocities? War is hell because of that, is also, well, you know, “war is hell,” said the German soldier in Russia in 1942. It's exculpatory if you hear a Wehrmacht soldier say, “war is hell.” Well, you can accept it from an American soldier, but the German soldier, suddenly it sounds quite different in his mouth, “war is hell.” Sounds exculpatory. “Of course there were murders, but war is hell.” And so there are a lot of different meanings about “war is hell.” Then there's the coming back. Maybe the hell is the coming back from war, and not being understood, and not being able to find a footing.

So it goes well beyond Sherman. And yet Sherman started us to think about this in these terms. And so I would say there are five or six different ways of interpreting “war is hell.” I would use different wars to do that and excavate the soldier's experience. So from command to experience to postwar to atrocity, to our own narrative about what war is about.

I have one last question for you. Isaiah Berlin, he's pretty famous for saying a lot of thinkers are either a hedgehog or a fox, right? The hedgehog, knows basically one big thing and the fox knows many things. Do you see yourself as more of one or the other as a thinker?

Yeah, I thought about that question, and I think Berlin meant, when he thought of, you know, the people in the university, do they know a little bit about astrophysics, as well as literature, as well as music, or do they just plunge their lives into their field? And I'm having a hard time putting myself into the one or the other. And I would say, well, I'm not a fox, but then I would say I'm not a hedgehog. So, I'm going to answer the question differently.

There's also the distinction between lumpers and splitters. And most historians are splitters. They make distinctions about time and space, about identity, about circumstance. And so you have a very fine-grained understanding of why so many people do so many different things, and take away so many different interpretations from a particular event. Let's say just a crime scene, or an argument among parents.

I'm a lumper. I see ideas moving in ways that constitute ourselves. I see memory as much more of a collective act. I think that through language, we are indebted to social concepts that don't have all sorts of meanings, but have restricted ones. And so I see people coming together, I see ideas pulling people together. I see certain events, like a revolution, as unifying… there's a mood. There's suddenly a new mood in the air, and you can just feel it everywhere. Not everybody agrees, but there's this new atmosphere. And so, in that sense, I'm a lumper rather than a splitter, and I always have been.

Have you read Robert Darnton's book, The Revolutionary Temper? It just came out, like, last year, I think.

Yeah, so he's discussing the run-up to the revolution in the sentiments of the people and in their traffic of images and caricatures and stories. And suddenly, you can imagine that the king is fallible, that the monarchical order is not there forever. And you start thinking about that also in your own life, and you think about your ability to change the world. It sounds awfully strange, but people thought they were stuck in their positions. They didn't even think about it. And then suddenly you start thinking about it. Yeah. And that percolates from below, not always, though, but then suddenly it does. And anybody in a revolution, whether you're in Iran in 1978, or you're in Germany in 1917, or you're in France in the spring of 1789, nothing's yet happened, but everything has already changed, and your whole terms of expression, how you sneer, how you smile, how you joke, is given a new latitude. And that's really, really interesting. And yet the revolution hasn't happened yet.

I think those are all my questions. Was there anything that you were hoping I would ask you that I did not ask?

No, I guess I would just want readers to just think of a moment like February 1942, when so many things are happening, I mean, the Soviets have recovered evidence of the murder of Jews in the towns that they liberated, as well as the evidence of the horrible oppression and murder of other Russian civilians. You have, you have ships, civilian, passenger liners being bombed off the coast of, torpedoed off the coast of Florida. You have Americans of Japanese descent incarcerated in California. You have the British Empire tottering with the Japanese occupation of Singapore, you have huge refugee streams throughout the Indian subcontinent fleeing the oncoming Japanese. It's a world that… then you have bombers beginning, really, in May 1942 over Germany, wrecking the cities. It's really an extraordinary moment, and you can say it's a kaleidoscope, but you have to put it together and try to figure out, what does this mean? For many people, it was that the war was going go on and on. It would hand you from one war to the other, as my father said. But the stories we tell also try to give a deeper meaning to the sacrifices, and try to foresee an end. And so the idea behind the Good War is the story of freedom and liberation and self-rule. But that's not unambiguous either. I mean, self-rule in Georgia in 1942 meant something very different to whites than it did to blacks.

Right, thank you. Thank you for your time.

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice