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(x H-German)
This response to two recent reviews is from James Van
Horn Melton of Emory University <jmelt01@emory.edu>:
I am grateful to the Editor for offering me the
opportunity to respond to Rita Krueger's review of H.M. Scott,
ed., _The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries_ [HABSBURG, March 20], and Gordon Mork's
review of Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Melton, eds.,
_Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from
the 1930s through the 1950s_ [cross-posted from H-GERMAN,
March 16]. Having contributed to both works, I was of course
pleased with their favorable reception. I have little to add to
Rita Krueger's thoughtful review except to say that I look
forward to reading her own dissertation on the Bohemian
nobility. In the case of Gordon Mork's review, I would like
to expand on one of the more controversial themes explored in the
volume.
Professor Mork rightly underscores a central theme of
the Lehmann/Melton volume, namely the continuity between
pre- and post-1945 historical scholarship in Germany and
Austria. My own interest in this question arose out of my
work on Otto Brunner, a scholar compromised by his Nazi
involvements but undeniably important for the development
of social history in Germany and Austria. Scholars since
Hans-Ulrich Wehler had assumed that the writing of social
history was an inherently "progressive" undertaking, one
that had been stymied by reactionary scholars in the Kaiserreich,
driven into exile by the Nazis, but would ultimately prevail in
the historical social science of the Bielefeld school. Yet as
several of the essays in the Lehmann/Melton volume demonstrate,
the development of social history in Germany and Austria can
also be traced back to the "folk history" (Volksgeschichte) of
the Weimar and Nazi periods (on Volksgeschichte see also the
recent study by Willi Oberkrome, _Volksgeschichte. Methodische
Innovation und voelkische Ideologisierung in der deutschen
Geschichtswissenschaft 1918- 1945_ [Goettingen, 1993]). Often
racialist and chauvinistic in tone, Volksgeschichte was
"denazified" after 1945 and rechristened as "structural
history" in the work of Werner Conze and Otto Brunner.
Strukturgeschichte then proved to be an important impetus behind
the development of German and Austrian social history during
the 1950s and 1960s.
Here I want to emphasize that my goal in organizing the
Emory conference (from which the volume originated) was
not to rehabilitate Nazi historical scholarship, but rather to
challenge the notion that social history was somehow an
intrinsically progressive and virtuous exercise. That idea
informed much the work of the so-called Bielefeld school, as
well as Anglo-American social history ca. 1968 to the present.
In its crudest, most self-righteous form, this attitude holds
that only those who write about "the people" (i.e. peasants,
workers, and other marginalized and oppressed people of all
races and sexes) are engaged in significant work. Everyone
else -- e.g. diplomatic and military historians,
historians of political thought, writers of traditional political
and institutional history -- is engaged in work that is at best
irrelevant and at worst elitist. I confess that I always hated
this attitude, not only for its unbearable smugness but
also for its naive populism and romanticism. Even at its
best -- say, in the brilliant scholarship of the late E.P.
Thompson -- this social history was and is marred by an
anti-modernist master narrative in which everything always
seems to get worse as history approaches the present. Here
the present is invidiously contrasted with the sense of
"wholeness" and community that putatively pervaded peasant or
artisanal societies of the past. Subaltern groups habitually
"resist," upholding their "autonomy" and identity.
In the course of my own research on German historical
scholarship of the interwar period, I was struck by the extent
to which a similar kind of populist, anti-modernist
discourse also informed the Volksgeschichte of the Nazi
period. Volksgeschichte called on historians to study the
Volk, not just the state; demographic and ethnographic methods
were employed to reconstruct peasant communities of the past;
German ethnic enclaves in the east were portrayed as having
preserved their autonomy and ethnic identity; German peasant
communities were shown resisting the twin evils of capitalism
and urbanization. The point of course is not to suggest that
the new social history was somehow fascist, but rather that it
incorporated elements of an anti-modernist discourse also
found in the Volksgeschichte of the Nazi period. It is also
worth noting -- and I am hardly the first to make this point --
that this romanticizing discourse now reigns supreme in
post-colonial studies (cf. the work of Homi Bhabha, now the
flavor-of-the-month in post-colonial theory).
All of this is simply to say that much of the social history
(and social theory for that matter) produced in our time
continues to find its inspiration in a critique of the
present that celebrates the past. Viewed in this light, the
new social history was less a progressive wave of the future
than it was a romantic lament for the "world we have lost" --
or perhaps more accurately, a world that never existed.
James Van Horn Melton
Emory University
<jmelt01@emory.edu>