Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 15:24:00 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Postmodernism finale 1) Submitted by: Gerald D. Feldman I'm glad to see that we are about to engage in "closure." Let me make a final brief comment. I really do not think that the D-mark has anything to do with Deutsches Wesen, whatever that is. It has to do with all sorts of things that postmodernists do not pay much attention to, and it is a representation of those things. As in the increasing unintelligibility of the contributions make clear, "pomo" is horribly unclear, and I would like to think that German historians should strive for clarity and there are deep reasons in the history of Germany--intellectual, social, political, and economic--why they should do so. We need desperately, for example, to study the role of the media in our society and understand how views are disseminated. To do this, however, we need to discover what the real "facts" are. To give a current example, we have heard for a number of years now about "Greater Serbia," but we have ended up with "Greater Croatia." It would be useful to know how this very dubious miracle transpired, and I do not think "pomo" is either of much use or much interest in helping us. Gerald D. Feldman 2) Submitted by: David Lindenfeld The debate on postmodernism has taken an interesting turn of late in raising the issue of the relation of historical fact to interpretation. As the conversation draws to its close, no clear delineation of positions has emerged, as many have pointed out. This leads me to inject a distinction which I've harbored for some time. I hope it can help to clear up such confusions and provide a more differentiated view of the way "postmodernism" is being used--both by its adherents and its detractors. It might serve as a fitting concluding remark. The distinction is this. We historians go about our daily business using two quite heterogeneous conceptions of "fact", switching back and forth between them as suits our purpose. The first, which prevails in political and diplomatic history, refers to events which are localizeable in time and place with a reasonable degree of precision. These would include such things as elections, German unifications, Machtergreifungen, the outbreaks and conclusions of old-fashioned wars, peace treaties, as well as deportations and acts of mass murder. Now it is true, and not particularly controversial, that these facts don't speak for themselves, that they are lifted out of the flux and density of human events because of their significance for us as subjects, and that this shapes the labels we give them and the connotations we attach to these labels. This was Carl Becker's message back in 1955, and I doubt that anyone since, whether labelled postmodernist or not, has said it better. But these points obviously do not exhaust the questions of how to interpret these events--i.e. in what broader framework, whether it be moral, aesthetic, or otherwise, to place them. Hayden White said as much when he compared Michelet, Ranke, and Tocqueville in the French Revolution. The localizeable facts of the revolution, or even their labels, were not at issue as much as the interpretive contexts to which White attached his literary/rhetorical labels. This also seems to me that Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch are concerned about in reinterpreting German history in the light of the events of 1990. And by their invocation of postmodernism as Quellenkritik in the service of this project, they are not saying anything--as I read them--that would have unduly disturbed Leopold von Ranke. Nor do I see that Sperber would have much to quarrel about with this project, partly because the particular genre of localizeable historical fact involved here exercises a limiting influence on the flights of fancy in which postmodernist historians might care to indulge. The situation is different with the second type of "fact", which predominates in social and intellectual history. This refers to trends and tendencies which occur over an extended period of time and place and admit of no precise boundaries. Examples would include: the rise of the bourgeoisie, the renaissance, enlightenment, romanticism, not to mention modernism and postmodernism. Now I think most of us would be most uncomfortable in denying any and all facticity to these trends. We would not put them in the same category as, say, the Marxist interpretation of history or the Sonderweg thesis. But it is clear--to me, at least--that their lack of localizeability puts them into a very different genre of "wie es eigentlich gewesen" than the facts of the first type. And because of this, the questioning of labelling becomes much less separable from the act of interpreting. To be sure, one can and should try to be "objective" about such trends by piling up empirical instances of attitudes, behaviors, texts, institutions, etc. that might be assignable to such trends. Perhaps one could say that the validity of such labels depends on the probability that such instances will occur within a given expanse of space and time in comparison to adjacent expanses. But the very act of making such a case forces us to deal with questions such as: are these instances typical or representative of the texts, attitudes and behaviors of this period? And to what other "facts" are we comparing "renaissance-like" or "post-modern-like" texts, attitudes, and behaviors? All of this just to ESTABLISH the facticity of these trends! It seems obvious to me that more than Quellenkritik is involved in these enterprises; they involve decisions on sorting and classification of data--the very sort of thing which Foucault called archaeology. In fact, in his introduction to his *Archaeology of Knowledge*, Foucault specifically addressed economic and intellectual history. As the debate on postmodernism itself shows, the subjective element is a lot greater here--and legitimately so. But it is not to say that the objective element is lacking completely--just more difficult to define--"like pinning jello to a wall", as one of my colleagues used to tease me. But I've found Foucault, at least, to offer some fruitful strategies in how to do so. David Lindenfeld Louisiana State University 3) Submitted by: Thomas Schmitz Since this message is going to be published at the same time as all the other messages will be published at the close of the debate, I can only reply to Flurin Condrau and Bill Schrader: Flurin, I don't think I said that anybody on this list had called the "Deutsches Wesen" a fact. However, respectable professors, encyclopedias, etc. seemed to me to have done so in 19th/early 20th C Germany. I assume that what is regarded to be facts by present-day scholars, lexica, etc. (including myself, of course), might by later generations or other cultures be so-to-say deconstructed as myths or wrong "facts". - And yet another and even later culture or generation might rediscover the same myth not as a wrong "fact", but as a real one again (they will think). And so on. "[T]he fact of several millions of jobless people in late Weimar" is one of my favorites for deconstruction: I don't want to make fun of them, but please follow my line of argumentation for a while: Let us assume I got unemployed. Well, according to German law I would have to register and regularly to report back at the job-exchange. Should I forget to report back, e.g. because I oversleep in my cosy, soft bed, I would automatically lose my status as an unemployed person, and - worse - the national unemployment figure will not be at (say) 2,000,000, but rather only at 1,999,999 - so my being in my soft bed for too long will have become (so Juergen Kocka tends to term it) a hard statistical fact ("fact") for social historians! Even "worse": A few years ago, I think, the German government changed the criteria for being unemployed - and lo!, suddenly there were hundred of thousands unemployed less: That would leave us with, say, 1,500,000 unemployed people - another hard fact. - It's all up for subjective construction and - accordingly - deconstruction. (Just in passing: a book by Hagen Schulze, not a postmodernist, I think: "Gibt es ueberhaupt eine deutsche Geschichte?", Berlin (1989)). William, "why should I care whether anyone else accepts" my definitions or interpretations of "facts"? - Because I want the "world", my "world" I have to live in, to be as "gemuetlich" for myself as I can have - or rather make - it. I have to live together with other people, people who might not share my subjective interpretations of how the "past" might have been, what that might mean for the present, and how it ought to look like in the future. When people define gypsies or homosexuals as "criminals", or when some people think that there was not a Holocaust, then I shall throw into political discussion my very own subjective interpretation of "the past" and "the real world", so as to prevent those others from winning the majority of votes, especially so, since I (subjectively) think that this has happened, is happening, and might happen again. I do not believe in an objective "common sense" - where was it, when, so I read in old texts and statistics, homosexuals were put into prisons by democratic decisions of democratically established courts, who based their correct sentences on democratically established laws sanctioned by the democratic West (!) German parliament? (My interpretation). In the Saar Area plebiscite of 1935, which was supervised by the League of Nations, 91 per cent of the electorate willingly voted for not remaining independent or French, but voted for a return to Germany, i.e. for Adolf Hitler (my own subjective interpretation of old statistics, of course). Following this reintegration of the Saar Area into the Reich, many persons and things, past and present, I suppose, were redefined and interpreted anew according to Nazi definitions. So it might happen again with our facts or "facts", albeit I hope not and actually would fight against it. Flurin, I don't want to "reeducate the whole scientific community"; I think I am rather an eclecticist myself. In my e-mail as of Aug. 9 I used a "postmodernized" quote from Marx saying: "So why not ... write a Rankean-style biography on Foucault in the morning, do a quick micro- historical study at lunch-time, spend the afternoon with an elaborate statistical investigation into the social condition of ... historians ..., make a linguistic-turn study ... at dinner-time, and end the day with an essay on the mentality of the mentality historian - "ganz so wie es mir beliebt"?" - I can live with that. By the way: "scientific community": As far as I know of, all (hard) scientific faculties, esp. so the natural sciences, have so-called fundamental "axioms"; and it is said that the "facticity" and "reality" of all their "research results" are based on the validity of these few axioms, which nobody has been able to prove. Accordingly, scientists are, so I would say, modest people: They assume that all their own research might be "wronged" some day in the remote future. Historians do not have axioms. Why should we not introduce a few axioms for ourselves, saying, for example, that our historical findings, including those tiny little "facts", might after all be deconstructed by other people(s)? Are we working on a "higher" and more pretentious "scientific" level than the scientists are? Let's be more modest. Thomas Schmitz .