The Tweets of War
Hitler spent decades plotting his campaign for world domination. Alwyn Collinson, 24, a recent graduate in Renaissance history from Oxford University, hatched his own plan to invade Poland in a mere five days. On Aug. 26 Mr. Collinson was just a marketing manager at a magazine in Oxford toying with the notion of starting some kind of a real-time Twitter project that would get people’s attention — maybe something like Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, but that wouldn’t scare them to death.
Then suddenly he hit on the idea of tweeting the biggest terrestrial war of all time, and on Aug. 31 — roughly 72 years to the hour after Hitler’s tanks moved across the frontier — the Twitter feed RealTimeWWII was under way. By Nov. 9, the same date in 1939 that two British spies were captured by the SS at the Dutch border town of Venlo, the total followers had hit 45,000. Last week Mr. Collinson had more than 140,000 followers, dwarfing the numbers for similar feeds like@ukwarcabinet (based on documents from the National Archives in Britain detailing Winston Churchill’s cabinet debates in 1941). “Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it,” declares the tag line of TwHistory, an educational Web site that began in 2009 with a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg in salvoes of 140 characters or less. So, apparently, are those who remember it.
One can hardly spend an hour on Twitter without getting caught up in a blow-by-blow account of theCivil War, Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1911 polar expedition or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, not to mention a welter of biographical offerings from the likes of Paul Revere, John Quincy Adams, Churchill and Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century London diarist, who has amassed more than 22,000 followers. Pepys’s maid, Jane Birch, even has a feed — or at least she did until last March, when she abruptly quit after posting complaints about her employer’s incessant snoring and incontinent dog.
Mr. Collinson puts an appealingly modest face on his wildly immodest project. Last Tuesday, while Hitler was berating his generals for their lack of faith in his ultimate triumph — “dramatic irony stuff,” Mr. Collinson said — he was busy putting the finishing touches on a marketing schedule for Daily Information, the magazine where he holds down a job while pumping out up to 40 war-related tweets a day, timed as much as possible to the precise hour. (The social media tool SocialOomph helps him schedule posts for times when he’s supposed to be working or sleeping.)
When the project began, Mr. Collinson relied mainly on “a few authoritative books,” he said, along with whatever he could find via Google. But over time his readers have led him to some far-flung and obscure sources. One reader sent him an article from a Polish newspaper describing an assassination attempt against Hitler in Oct. 1939 that went unmentioned in the timelines he was consulting. Others sent links to relatives’ wartime diaries, posted on little-read blogs.
Professional historians have been mostly sympathetic to Mr. Collinson’s approach. Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale and the author of “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin,” said “These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present.”
Other blow-by-blow historical Twitter efforts have run aground. @PatriotCast, a feed devoted to the Revolutionary War with some 2,600 followers, abruptly ceased operations last January with the rather anticlimactic announcement that “a large shipment of gunpowder has arrived in Egg Harbor, N.J.” @MonticelloTJ, a feed based on Thomas Jefferson’s diaries, went silent in Sept. 2010, following weeks of bland remarks about the weather and the state of Monticello’s millet field. More controversially a 10th-anniversary Sept. 11 feed put together by The Guardian in Britain shut down after a mere 16 tweets, following a public outcry.
Mr. Collinson said he is mindful of issues of taste as he approaches the Holocaust. But he’s also determined to stick to his neutral, just-the-facts approach, even as the internationalization of the feed has opened his eyes to the limitations of his own British perspective. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, points out that that bias was evident from Mr. Collinson’s first tweet. The Chinese, after all, date the beginning of World War II not to Hitler’s invasion of Poland but to the Japanese invasion of North China in 1937.
Edited from an article by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER Published in The New York Times onNovember 27, 2011
