Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 08:23:46 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Pomo and Historical Writing Submitted by: Heikki Lempa On Pomo and Historical Writing In the debate on pomo and its assumed implications on German historical writing there has been several insightful contributions. The problem is, however, that most of these contributions seem to insist on conceptual unities which to me are all but self-evident. First, most of the protagonists as well as the opponents seem to think that there is something called postmodernist theory or theories which only are to be validated or rejected in the forth-coming research. Secondly, several contributors presuppose that historicism and hermeneutics are identical. I think that both of these assumptions are not true but certainly apt to lead us to a more confrontational and even hostile debate. Postmodernist theories. I certainly agree with Charles McClelland and Gerald Feldman who quite correctly take some instances which show the shallowness of the so-called postmodernist "methods". But the point is that postmodernism cannot be analyzed exhaustively as a method or a bunch of research techniques. In reading carefully Michael Geyer's reply to his critics we can detect a further step which to me seem to be a more adequate notion of this academic phenomenon. Postmodernism is a situation. It is a situation which evokes and has been evoked by the decreasing credibility of the modernization theory, in its all variations. At the same time the unhappy consciousness of German historians has been accentuated by the fact that there is no way back to the old (pre-modern, so to say) modes of historical writing. Historicism is politically as well as methodologically unacceptable. In this situation postmodernism provides an aporetic--but not a methodological--sounding-board for German historical writing. Historicism and hermeneutics. I am happy that Thomas Schmitz brought up the hermeneutic underpinnings of the recent German historical scholarship. To be sure, the Bielefeld school never rejected hermeneutics as a sort of pillar of historical working in general. Furthermore, they even carried on some strong Droysenian elements in their politics of historical writing. More important, however, is that in the Anglo-Saxon tradition the postmodern criticism was directed against the Collingwoodian version of hermeneutics, as Jonathan Sperber indicated. But there are, I think, components in hermeneutics which are more sensitive to current needs and less vulnerable to the postmodern criticism. Gadamer has emphasized in his philosophical and non-romantic or post-romantic hermeneutics negative aspects of (historical) understanding. Understanding consists always and also in realizing what something is not. I don't want to interpret Gadamer as the prophet of postmodernism. His theoretical confrontation with Derrida would make that kind of statement less credible. Still, a shift in emphasis is allowed. In historical understanding there is always an insight into the limits of the phenomenon considered, in the first place, and also into those of our concepts and ways of life. I think this is the methodological basis of what Thomas Schmitz called taking seriously the past worlds. In and by taking seriously those past experiences historians are sensitized to the discontinuities of the past worlds and to the shortcomings of modern conceptualizations. Only on this hermeneutical basis become possible all those more or less Foucauldian approaches of rupture analysis. But there is nothing specifically postmodern in this methodology, as far as I can see, simply because postmodernism is not a well articulated methodology. Rather, we could call this approach radical hermeneutics, hermeneutics of limits. Heikki Lempa, Universitat Tuebingen .