Contemporary eyewitness accounts proved more accurate than later standard biographies

Evidence

It is one of the oddities of the literature on totalitarianism that very early attempts by contemporaries at writing its “history,” which according to all academic rules were bound to founder on the lack of impeccable source material and emotional overcommitment, have stood the test of time remarkably well. Konrad Heiden’s biography of Hitler and Boris Souvarine’s biography of Stalin, both written and published in the thirties, are in some respects more accurate and in almost all respects more relevant than the standard biographies by Alan Bullock and Isaac Deutscher respectively. This may have many reasons, but one of them certainly is the simple fact that documentary material in both cases has tended to confirm and to add to what had been known all along from prominent defectors and other eye-witness accounts. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 42

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the historiographic question of who gets to write authoritative history — relevant to the Islamophobia field’s questions about insider versus scholarly accounts of a regime.