Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 08:38:56 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Michael Geyer on Postmodernism Please find enclosed a contribution to the ongoing debate on postmodernism and German history. M Geyer Re: Postmodern Thought and German History Diethelm Prowe highlighted a basic problem with our essay which was subsequently reiterated by a number of readers. He was disappointed that we neither spelled out the benefits of postmodern thought for German historiography nor answered Ken Barkin's objections. He has a point there. Let me explain why we did not adhere to the conventions of a rebuttal, and then restate the reasons for what we did. FIRST, it seemed to me that the issue at stake in Ken Barkin's paper was not postmodern thought in any of its varieties. I could not find much that would lead me to engage in a debate on that particular issue. However, I took his reading of postmodernism to be a foil against which he defended not really Great Men and their biographers, but a German history about which we mostly learn what it is not. Is this an appropriate reading? We thought so. You judge. Now, we could have argued that this negated, "other" history is not as bad as it is made up to be -- and, maybe, that postmodern thought is not that terrible either. We could have argued that it is not romantic or that being a "romantic" comes naturally at certain times. This is more or less what some of the comments about the H-Net interlocutors brought up. We did none of that. We even insisted that the postmoderns can fend for themselves. But that's another story, which we could spell out at some other time. Instead, we decided to argue that the kind of disenchantment that is in evidence in Barkin's paper (as well as in a number H-Net comments) should be understood as an indication of an epistemic shift. German historiography is no longer where it once was. This shift has little to do with postmodern thought which in our opinion is affected by this shift as well. But it has a great deal to do with the changing position of Germany and, in this context, with a changing scene of approaching the German past. Obviously, this argument is affected by the events of 1989/90, but it cannot be limited to them. We then asserted that holding on to the old "paradigm" (to slip into another, more conventional idiom) reminds us of the anti-modern move of German intellectuals a century ago, in the face of another "acceleration of time." I have since discovered that Ken Barkin thinks that this means that we put him on the Right, but this is a rather narrow understanding of antimodernism which goes back to 1960s historiography and its peculiar difficulty to reflect on what it means to be on top of the world. The German BILDUNGSBUERGERTUM was neither reactionary nor necessarily on the Right for pursuing antimodern(ist) values -- and a good part of it surely would have insisted on its progressive credentials, including its benevolent attitude toward women's issues. But that does not make it any less anti-modern(ist). However, the antimodern stance deliberately removed the BILDUNGSBUERGER from the world around them -- for example into History or Art or Culture. They paid a very high prize for that. That's what we argued. This part of the argument seems to me the upshot of a whole new wave of literature on the subject among which Nipperdey figures prominently. It is a historiographic symptom of the shift, we were talking about, but it says nothing about the nature of that shift yet. Let me track back. In order to make our own argument, we made use of well-documented strategies of interpretation which might be associated with postmodern thought. Following one interpretative strategy, which Edward Said popularized, we saw in the attack on postmodernism an act of "othering" or, if you like an older language with somewhat different implications, scapegoating. Following another strategy, which is commonly associated with Foucault, we argued that knowledge is power -- and that German history in the United States was, at one point, invested with a great deal of power: German history carried universal meaning as the history of the modernization that failed. It seems to me that you have here a historical argument which deals with knowledge, power, and change -- and it is a case of applied postmodern thought. Now, I was surprised that our rather "easy" conflation of knowledge and power did not raise more heckels. So, let me ask you: Are you that Foucaultian (or is Foucault that German) that you take this conflation rather as a matter of course than as an exception (which is the way an Americanized Max Weber would treat it)? This argument, in any case, takes Ken Barkin's essay seriously. It may, in fact, invest it with a bit too much meaning, but that's one of the drawbacks of the power/knowledge approach. We took the essay as a defense of an intellectual configuration. We contended that this configuration is, for better or worse, becoming a matter of the past. I would add (and Konrad holds this view even more strongly than I do) that this configuration was altogether beneficial in its prime which corresponded to a very specific international and national situation. It got Germany out of an extraordinary catastrophe. I would add that it also got the Germans Wisconsin cheddar from Army surplus, rock 'n' roll (and bluegrass and country 'n' western) on AFN, and a new culture of the body for which I like it a great deal. But I now learn from Ken Barkin that this kind of America is not what moved American historians of Germany. In fact, I begin to suspect that they may have done German history, because they didn't like what they saw around them. Janet Wolff suggests this much for art history in her RESIDENT ALIEN. SECOND, I did blink because I wanted to avoid a certain kind of debate which is not Ken Barkin's problem. I did not want an "all new" approach dumped upon the German past which promises yet another "new and improved German history." This was the case with quantitative history, economic history, social history, and it is going to happen with cultural history. It will be interesting to see if it will also be true for gender history, minority and diaspora history, ALLTAGSGESCHICHTE (and on the horizon: history of religion) which have a little more self-will and pride-of-place. Suffice it to add that these new approaches have regularly also produced a class of experts who advise a wider audience on the merits of the new product. My colleague Leora Auslander calls these people taste professionals. Mitchell Ash reminded me that one might usefully interpret this jostling of new approaches in terms of a market place for "cultural capital." This is a wonderful American adaption of Bourdieu who had something slightly different in mind -- but, then, capital has always been a bit more real in the United States than it was and is in France. It seems to me that this academic strategy of permanent upscaling and/or remodelling, a perfect rendition of a Fordist strategy, is taken for granted by a number of contributions to the H-Net debate (both pro and con). Well, it is not our venue. Incidentally, I also think that there is nothing gained from supporting, say, gender history in a general way. The question is how gender ends up in your course on German history or industrial society. How do you address difference? That was one of the questions that launched us into a debate which more dogmatic postmoderns may find surprising. The question was: With all the critique of master narratives, how do you organize a course on German history that takes difference seriously? So, how do you go about it? We suggested the beginnings of an answer, but there must be more good suggestions "out there" in cyberland. Once we had made this point, the argument ran off on us in a direction that took us a bit by surprise and, hence, may not have been as transparent as we would like it to be. Konrad and I suggested two things which seemed to us quite hazardous, but had the potential for creating new knowledge. The question was what do you do with the very facticity of postmodern thought. I mean, for all its claim to ephemerality, it is a pretty massive bulk of thought(s) and practices. That it is a very diverse mix has been pointed out by a number of commentators. THIRD: We argued that postmodern thought(s) and practices are, indeed, an object of study within German historiography, because this thought pertains to German history, even though after World War II it was mostly generated in France, the United States and, increasingly, among transnationals. As Ken Barkin rightly stressed, postmodern thought is inconceivable without its German genealogy. But while this is the end of the matter for him, it is the beginning of an exploration for us. What interests me is the migration of a complex of thought (much of it indebted to German thinkers), its local and national appropriations in various European countries as well as in the United States and among diaspora writers like Homi Bhabha. In order to begin this exploration we should be clear about one point. This German genealogy creates an "anxiety of influence" (Harold Bloom) of its own. I understand this anxiety quite well, because I do get exercized when it comes to this tradition. What romanticism is for Ken Barkin, it seems, is the notion of ESPACE for me. I get extremely vexed when people go about using RAUM, LEBENSRAUM, RAUMPOLITIK (in any one language), as if nothing ever had happened. And I agree, Hayden White would have done well remembering Gentile, although his forgetting may actually be a Bloomian case of the "anxiety of influence." Let's not mince words, there is a tainted tradition -- so much so that I stumble over certain words and concepts and gasp. Now, this is a generational experience and it may be a German one, but I write as a German historian of a certain age. You may call this subjectivism. I call it character -- and in bad days it is a temper tantrum. This "anxiety of influence" does not keep me from seeing a number of problems with the argument on influence, as it stands. First, Kant is a key author for postmodern thought, a referent even when his texts are not present -- and it would be difficult to make him a romantic. One could do more damage in this fashion, but ultimately looking for the "good Germans" or the good things bad Germans did (think Wagner in New York and Chicago, think Riefenstahl in the NYReview of Books) is not a productive line of argument. The more useful strategy is to explore how scholars and intellectuals worked off a tainted heritage (and why they engaged it in the first place). Being very deeply influenced and, indeed, moved by Heidegger does not make Hannah Arendt a tainted thinker -- and I do think Heidegger is. Before we presume influence, we might want to study the appropriation of the German heritage among postmoderns which is, in my reading, altogether more careful and thoughtful than their critics would allow. In fact, it is very much for its critical appropriation of the German intellectual heritage that German historians ought to familiarize themselves with postmodern thought. It is a working through and a working off the German past -- and I find it disconcerting when this labor (where and when it actually takes place) is discounted. This has not kept me from finding some of these labors insufficient or outright inappropriate. The most notorious and most complex case in this respect is Paul de Man. And, turning to America, I had always thought that feminist or ecological thinking would greatly profit in clarifying its own stance if it looked more carefully at the German heritage. But then again, where were the German historians to do the work of actually explaining this heritage, when feminist or, for that matter, environmental movements came to the fore? They have come around long after the fact. This is what Konrad and I ment when we argued that there is a high prize to be paid for hanging on to the powers of German history. FOURTH: This is also to say that postmodern thought has historicity. It is a changing and passing intellectual configuration (and I think its heyday is over). No worry, there will be other intrepid thinkers and actors, but this particular cast and this particular challenge is "history" as it were -- and will have its main impact on the present as History which is where we historians come into play. This rather bold presumption raises the question where to put this thought and the practices that are associated with it. I would suggest that we understand postmodern thought in all its diversity (including its failures) as a recuperative move, a series of specific local and national responses to the destruction wrought by World War II with its transnational consequences. (I have long been tempted to write something on Austrian DADA after World War II.) Thus, it seems to me quite significant that Foucault wrote some of his most consequential treatises in the fifties and sixties (and I would assert that this historicity matters in understanding his texts) -- much as it matters that the Germans of Foucault's generation began to launch their second enlightenment which eventually was encapsulated in the writings of Habermas on post-nationalism or in Wehler's GESELLSCHAFTSGESCHICHTE. The denial of the German past, its distantiation by means of a Western master narrative (modernization) is a key element of that story. Among the few who reflect on this matter among the postmoderns is Derrida who has begun very hesitantly to embrace the recognition that writing from the margins (using tainted Germans) and making it as an Algerian Jew in Paris are connected (much as the fact that his success with those Germans came much later in the United States). By the same token, I am also intrigued by the fact that postmodern thought flourished in the United States in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. It will be fascinating to hear more about the ways seemingly incongruent elements were imbricated under the aegis of a PAX AMERICANA. As far as Germany is concerned, Petra Kelly (as opposed to the very German Ulrike Meinhof) comes to mind as example for this mixture of elements under an American sky. I leave it at that, but would like to add that key elements of this thought (thinking about difference, for example) transcend place of origin and time of inception. Key practices (like Greenpeace) have gone global. So, what we did not say is this: let us do the work of genealogy (and, perhaps, start with reading Foucault on genealogy) that German historiography has not done so far. Once we get under way, we will encounter our scapegoat "romanticism" soon enough. Homi Bhabha suggested where we might find it. Romanticism taken out of its context, he said, turns into the "question of romanticism." The latter is always about the alternative of either being mad or bad (He used Lord Jim as an example; you remember Stein the Bavarian 1848er). So, instead of talking about romanticism, we should talk about the madness in and of Foucault and, if you permit, the problem of evil in German history. As a secular (and, hence, historically accessible) problem, the latter is a Kantian thought which has its echoes, for example, in Lyotard's THE DIFFEREND which is about history, about difference, and about evil. It is about a very "real" problem of German industrial society, isn't it? FIFTH: There is another and more difficult argument in our paper which I would want to raise again, because I think it is worth rescuing from oblivion. We saw postmodern thought not only as a way of thinking and, hence, as a province of intellectual historians, but also as a reflection of the German past that is of interest for the rest of us. It seemed to us that postmodern thought had a German genealogy for good reasons. We wanted to suggest that postmodern thought reverberates and addresses key problems of the German past which are effaced in the predominant paradigm of an American history of Germany. This is the problem of repeated and violent breaches both of local and national traditions at key junctures of the German past. It is also the problem of a nagging difficulty of reconciling differences of gender, religion, and ethnicity without obliterating them. It is the desire for homogeneity and a perennial fear of the impending collapse of society. It is a certain apocalyptic sentiment -- or, perhaps, a fusion of apocalypse and sentiment that puzzles us. Now, much of this can be shown in ALLTAGSGESCHICHTE as Konrad suggested in his CEH article (1989) which pleads for a reflexive (social) history. And this project is really only conceivable with a central European agenda for reasons that I explained in my CEH article (ibid.). Moreover, much of this history will depend on exploring new types of sources, literary ones among them. But neither ALLTAGSGESCHICHTE nor central European history nor new sources are the answer. What we need is a German history that explores and explains these ruptures and the sense-insecurity in their wake that shook German society; that can make sense of the "cultures(s)" which they generate and of the identities that were shaped by them. This kind of thinking about crises has been is so alien to much of American historical thought on Germany and it is so familiar to German and central European thinking. It is not false consciousness of a modernity rejected, but modern consciousness running amuck. How about that as an argument? Do you think this is a promising start? Now, before we call this past (and its history) mad and/or bad, we should take it for what it is: a working through the peculiar condition of modernity in central Europe. Konrad and I would proceed from here to argue that postmodern thought and practice and its antecedents not only reflect critically on this condition, but that they also contain antidotes to the descent into violence. Granted, this is a risky wager. But the main point of arguing this case is to say: Let us be serious about the repeated breaches in the German past and make them a central part of studying German history. Indeed, we suggested that they may form the pivot from which to rethink German history (and to rethink it after 1989!). Let us see how the Germans coped with them and where and why they failed. Let us then see where and when and why the antidotes became poison. In case you wonder: Yes, I do place the Nazi genocide of the European Jews in this history of repeated, violent ruptures of community and solidarity and of the "cultures" that supported them, creating a COMMUNAUTE DESOEUVREE, an inoperative community, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it. But I have also come to approach this genocide as a breach that transcends history, because I see it as a genuine ZIVILISATIONSBRUCH, a destruction, literally, of human civilization. In the face of such transcendental challenge history falls back on its most basic task: AUFSCHREIBEN. I have more on this and the resulting dangers of mythologizing (or sacralizing) the Holocaust in the forthcoming Festschrift for Hans Mommsen. I had thought that this protracted argument was an answer to Barkin's paper, but obviously the majority of readers expected a one-on-one rebuttal. So let me briefly address the issue of romanticism and of referentiality respectively -- really more as suggestion where and how to look than as a rebuttal. SIXTH: It would not be too difficult to criticize the peculiar turn-of-the-last-century juxtaposition of art and science that informs the charge of "romanticism" as we had it before us. But it also seems to me that this approach to the issue obscures the more interesting debate. Because the current revival of charges of romanticism is, above all, about the German SONDERWEG. That is to say, they have little to do with postmodern thought, but a great deal with the fear of a Germany going "romantic" on the rest of Europe. In any case the idea of the SONDERWEG has returned with a vengeance. You will find it addressed in the turn to a normative liberalism, particularly in political thought, which has created romanticisms left and right. Francois Furet is one of the converts in this debate. Stephen Holmes's work is also a good example for this revival (which I encountered first in his seminar debates with Reinhart Koselleck on Carl Schmitt). Second, I was most intrigued by the success of last year's exhibition on "German Romanticism" in London which subsequently moved on to Munich (and changed the British curatorial concept in the process). This exhibition charted a course of an unabashed "irrationalism" of German thought from idealism to Hitler. I was taken aback by the blatant negative teleology of the (Munich) exhibition as much as by the irrational and quite Anglophobe German response to it. Both the exhibition and the German response suggest to me that with the end of the Cold War there is much repetition happening everywhere in Europe (and in the United States). This might be enough to drop the subject, if it were not for a simultaneous, quite extraordinary surge of German interest, across disciplines, both in German intellectual traditions and in the Germanness of these traditions. This is a trend worth studying. The appropriation of Hannah Arendt as a German thinker may stand for the former. The de-Americanization of Max Weber is one of the instances for the latter. The reappreciation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory before Habermas in the pages of the FAZ is surely one of the most curious features of this turn. And nobody can overlook the explosion of a secondary literature on Carl Schmitt and the celebration of Ernst Juenger as the true praeceptor Germaniae (after Mann and Brecht as the respective icons of the two post-war states have been demoted). So, my hunch is that the postmodern moment has only now arrived in Germany. It has come as the return of a German tradition -- and it has come to inform conceptions of aesthetic or mythical (but not: critical) counterworlds that once were the hallmark of "romanticism". This tradition has come as it always did in Germany -- not as an idea, but as the remaking of the German state. The antidote: Cornelia Klinger's FLUCHT, TROST, REVOLTE: DIE MODERNE UND IHRE AESTHETISCHEN GEGENWELTEN is a good start. The book does justice to Ken Barkin's concerns and answers most of his queries. It also suggest that the recuperative and critical potential of romantic counterworlds has been exhausted which is what more critical postmoderns have claimed all along when they postulated the collapse of all master-narratives. But as romanticism may be exhausted, the "question of romanticism" is not and that's what Klinger does not see. Is the nascent intellectual and cultural configuration mad or is it bad -- or is it "normal"? Well, you choose. I hope American historians of Germany and the CEH make this choice one of their concerns. SEVENTH: All this seems a long way from the issue of referentiality. But it is not, if you manage to get it out of the hands of committed ideologues on the one hand and GESCHICHTSTHEORIE on the other. The issue of referentiality is closely related to the discussion of romanticism, because one might well argue that history as a science was another instance of the effort to create a counterworld-- this one based on Truth rather than on Beauty. How Truth transmogrified into objectivity is a story that mostly concerns the nineteenth century. How "objectivity" could ever be read by historians as a stable and representational relation between text and world has bothered me ever since I enountered the reaction to Peter Novick's book. It is as if there had never been a POSITIVISMUSSTREIT. Why is it that significant debates in the German past are not entering the scholarly discourse? How far can one go in effacing the German intellectual past? In any case, the crux of the matter for historians is not, whether there is reality beyond the text and whether there is a past beyond history. These are problems with a very long philosophical pedigree -- and the least one can do is to acknowledge that they did not come into existence with the translation of Derrida into English or an essay by Hayden White. The main, unanswered question for every historian rather seems to me, what "text" we are actually talking about. I read the controversy between Ginzburg and White in the Friedlander volume on PROBING THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTATION as an indication that neither of the two has a very good idea reagarding the problem of text and evidence in twentieth century (German) historiography. I have looked long and hard and, although I may have missed something, I do not think that twentieth century historians have a good idea either. That is, I know of no serious, scholarly QUELLENKRITIK that would live up to its name and that would support the claims that are made in the name of truth/reality in history. Classic history or medieval history may still have a leg to stand on, but I do not think that this is true for the modern history most of us do. This deficiency is a concern for intellectual historians who have lost a clear sense of their texts after the demise of canonic certainties about authors and genres. It is surely a concern for political historians (say of the Third Reich) who lack crucial evidence and simultaneously face an overabundance of administrative records (which are texts only in the most metaphorical rendition of the word; that is, these records gain their discursive or rhetorical structure only when pieced together by historians). This has been a notorious issue for social historians whose sources are not so readily collected in archives and whose actors are often enough rendered mute. And it is an issue for all those historians who have chased after the notion of experience only to discover that it is a thoroughly mediated process -- and mediated means anything from gossip to television. So, the question of QUELLENKRITIK is one about the very nature of evidence in and for the study of industrial society. One might add that the gap between what historians do and what has evolved as a discussion of "regimes of perception" (which is where the "reality" issue is worked out) would be less difficult to bridge, if the historical profession had a more rigorous and more (self)-critical sense of what it is doing when it comes to the question of evidence in and of our age. What are the regimes of perception in an industrial age? Are there peculiar national regimes? What happens when such regimes break down (as they did in the first quarter of our century) and create an extraordinary sense-insecurity? What kind of sources should we use to get at this issue? This labor is yet to be done. It may lay to rest at least some of the fears about visual and oral cultures (film and radio, for example) that percolate through some of the more entertaining quibs against postmodern thought, although no amount of scholarship will be able to dispel the fear of ZERSTREUUNG (S. Kracauer) that adheres to the study of these cultures. Suffice it to say, that I appreciate the Reichsbank and its mass-production of money and would argue, pro domo, that the military (as in mass-destruction) should not be left out from the study of industrial society. But it would also be very strange and inappropriate to set either one of these institutions against the mass-consumption of images and the analysis of image worlds. It would be very strange, if we did not, for example, engage in the study of regimes of mass-consumption or, for that matter, regimes of industrial design -- and that is not only what these regimes are, but how they are produced, and by whom and for whom, in the concrete circumstances of the German past. There is much to do. My sense is that the sooner we take postmodern thought seriously as a reflection of and as a critical and transnationally refracted comment on the German past, the more German history will regain some of the cultural capital that it has lost. Once we get this project under way, we should turn to the issue of biography and to the biography of very powerful men at that -- which, as Shelley Baranowsky has rightly suggested, is a debate about agency in modern industrial society and that means, who has it and who does not. The question of agency, of course, will get us right back at the issue of difference and how we deal with it in German history courses. EIGHTH: Let me add a postscript about the very practical consequences of the "epistemic shift" with which I started my comment. It has to do with the fact that ever more relevant German history is written in German -- and I wanted to inquire how you, graduate students and faculty, deal with this problem. I find it increasingly difficult to introduce first-year graduate students to nineteenth-century historiography in a responsible manner. (The twentieth century historians face similar problems, when it comes to the GDR.) I am perfectly ready to chase graduate students through Sheehan, the two Boyer volumes, and quite a number of other sizeable books in English. But I also find it necessary that they be familiar with Gall, Kocka, Koselleck, Nipperdey, Wehler -- which amounts, quite literally, to a ton of reading in German. How do you achieve a balance without shortchanging historiography on the one hand and without overtaxing students on the other? How do you cope with the expansive nature of some of the best of recent historiography and, specially, how do you deal with the necessity of having to assign an ever growing number of German books? September 17, 1995/Michael Geyer .