Date: Sun, 15 Oct 1995 19:30:07 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Postmodernism: Fritzsche Submitted by: Peter Fritzsche Kind words should not keep me from trying to offer more precise ones. I would like to respond somewhat in the tone of Susan Crane who refers to the problems generated by postmodernist applications, problems which should remain exposed and which are indeed troubling. I don't think postmodernism creates disquiet for its own sake (well, not all time). To William Schrader, I would respond that my declaration that narrartives "attempted to erase any trace that this or that version was just a version" is less directed at an individual historian or an individual work of history than 1) to the historiographical traditions in which historians work and teach and lecture--i.e. to the master narratives that inform how historians approach subjects and how they justify them. This should not suggest that individual historians willfully suppressed data. Moreover, insofar as historians emphasized the "objectivity" of their works and let those works be used as "proof" that would enable certain world views, I think it is possible to refer to an effacement of the traces of the manufacturing process. I'm not sure how far I would go with this line, however. And I am certainly not the right person to analyze the whole apparatus of objectivity--footnotes, authoritative rhetorics--and its relationship to effacement, but one might want to think about the "ideology of objectivity" and how it has operated in the profession. But 2) my main point was not historians or historiography, but ideologies which institutions and elites use and the stories that nation-states have constructed and told about themselves: these do, I believe, deny that they are just a version. In any case, it is true that my muscular imagery-- manufacturing, construction--suggests a person in a workshop, and I really wanted to conjure up a more socially complex and uncalculated, almost effortless, operation. I also think we as historians can productively critique each other on what is a more or less valid on the basis of facts deployed and descriptions crafted, partially because lesser versions are less useful, are less resonant, and go against the grain of the facts so that they become fantasies. But we should also ask why do those facts become those fantasies and why do people manufacture and circulate them--what is going on with that student and is s/he possibly more interesting than we might at first imagine? Why is the only adjective "devoted," why the uncomplicated description? In the name of historical objectivity or the class on the Reformation, might we be missing one person's very interesting, very different relationship to the past (not to take midterms too seriously)? This asked, I do not mean to suggest that historians can work against the facts or should evade precision so that Luther becomes "a devoted Lutheran minister." Postmodernism does not want, at least I don't think it does, to evade this level of critique; it does want to deter us from thinking it is the only level or keep us from thinking, also, about the extent to which histories are fashioned in other ways, and more importantly other ways of using the past (and ways in which the past has been used) which historians would not recognize as professional history. I am not sure about the willful construction of histories, as Schrader asks: did people before, say, the Nazis manufacture a past to suit their ideology? I do not know, but I suspect that the self-consciousness of past History as invalid and therefore the future as very up-for-grabs increased at the end of the 19th century and particularly after World War I. Perhaps one might suggest for Europe: to the extent that History as a Story of Progress in which the future was well understood in terms of the recent past had been derailed, the future was approached much more adventurously and the past recreated much less carefully. My question would be: can a philosophy of history revise the way we think of the inertia or mobility of social material and thus have profound poltical consequences? I think maybe yes, and I would direct us all to Modris Ekstein's very provocative book, "Rites of Spring" and also to the profound, scary conclusion in his article in Sander Gilman and Chamberlain, eds., Degeneration. To Jonathan Sperber's lively response, I would like to broaden my definition of the aesthetic process, which is not confined to beauty but includes also the sublime (the horrible, the terrifying) and our political passions, and would also include the satisfactions of reconstructing the past as well as of explaining its meanings. And it is pleasure (or satisfaction) for the writer, not the reader that I am trying to put my finger on. In any case, postmodernism made more clear to me the aesthetic factors, which I'm glad to have realized. But this aesthetic process does not mean that I like the ending of the books I write. For me, if I can reconstruct it, the aesthetic dimension to "Rehearsals for Fascism," which ends with the Nazi breakthrough in 1930, which I lament, is twofold: on the one hand, I resisted the theories of conspiracy or status- deprivation by which so many unlikable trends were explained. Sitting in Berkeley in November 1980 (on Haste and Telegraph, right by People's Park) is a good place to respond negatively to all the highminded dismissals of Reagan's victory. Not that I understood it: I had $100 on Carter and voted for Commoner. But I knew that the reason Reagan won was more complicated than national humiliation in Iran or status deprivation in the New South (that's what would explain Christian Fundamentalism back then). Remember the graduate students' social historical disdain for ideology, or belief, or culture in 1980? In effect, I began to resist structural-functionalist and Marxisante explanations (the key text for me was Sahlins' "Culture and Practical Reason"--I think that's the title, read for the same Randy Starn class that assigned Hayden White), and it gave me a kind of satisfaction to do so because the rejection opened the way for more ideological, more recuperative explanations which I shorthanded into populism. The explanations were more politically problematic, I agree, but they also appeared to me a more generous, less highminded, and elitist, view of the world. What also gave me pleasure with "Rehearsals" was my sense of going into the world of the provinces into which all too few graduate students--presumably sitting in Germany's pleasant university towns, in all sorts of interesting seminars--had ventured. This feeling was laced with some uncharitable resentment and lots of loneliness, but it was also fun to go to Aurich, Stade, Celle, Uelzen, and all sorts of other improbable places, get a room, pick through the Stadtarchiven, read the local paper, walk along Breite Strasse, and get closer to the voters themselves. This gave me satisfaction, and it is reflected in the thesis of the book, which argues for a less contingent, less desperate, more ideological appraisal of national socialism. In any case, I agree with Sperber that we are constrained by facticity-- marble doesn't bend; wood doesn't chip--but that still leaves lots of room for admitting the manufacturing process--our politics, our ax to grind, our pleasure, our horror--and this admission is, I think, the only way to recognize the past's vulnerability to social conversations and social conventions. I don't agree that there is no context outside the text. I still use WordPerfect, not WordDerrida, but we should recognize the extent to which the text does not speak for itself, that it might be read in different ways, and that the interpretations it gathers as it moves through social life. I don't think the most historians' "pleasure" or "politics" should or does mishandle in any naively willful way the text itself, but they configure the way we approach topics, bundles of texts, and what we do with the text (reading for content, style, strategy). As for Sperber's point about the Communist Barthel Gilles: I am once again very indebted to Sperber, because I couldn't dredge up any information on him. In any case, Gilles' portrait of the gas-masked man was circulated and thereby came to my attention in one of the air-defense journals. He had therefore been appropriated by "civil defense discourse" and had been recognized as exemplary. For civil-defense experts Gilles illustrated their point, and their point was made more compelling by my reproduction of the painting. So, I'm not sure it matters whether Gilles was a Communist. And there are those who would assign to the Communists many of the same technologically inflected postliberal ideas ordinarily attributed to the fascists or the Nazis. Things are not all equal, but how are values assigned and why do we attach ourselves to certain values, and how is value used to stabilize (not necessarily deny) validity, or what Sperber calls the "self-evident"--this is what postmodernism helps to operationalize without, I think, denying facts, without unhitching meaning from facts, or dismissing other genres of criticisms. I would not say that a postmodernist historian would feel free to invent any meaning, but rather that s/he looks for traces of the construction of that meaning (which the facts did not conjure up all by themselves), not least in order to retrieve past characters, intentions, from the constricting ideologies and narratives in which they have been embedded until the arrival of the historian. Maybe we can't re-embed them in a truer setting. But to have shown the violence of the context onto the text, the muffling of so many of the past's many voices, is already of great value. Maybe the way to think about is in fact archeologically: facts are not pristine things, they are artifacts, broken, cast off, set apart, memorialized; they are embedded in cultural horizons; serrated by wind and weather; stumbled upon accidently or in great university projects with grand justifications; then they are distorted by the fallacies of anthropological analogies. Let's look more closely at the abrasions that have created the artifact. Quick switch back to the Humanities: Allison Lurie once said that politics is the recognition that what is is not necessary, and it is the shifts from "is" to "necessary" back to "could have been" and "was also" that postmodernism seeks to unravel--in content and form--with its attention to artifice. .