Submitted by: Thomas Schmitz Quote: "Auf dem deutschen Buechermarkt finden sich - in zunehmend groesserer Zahl - historische Buecher, die kein deutscher Historiker schreiben wuerde, die in deutschen respektablen historischen Zeitschriften auch nicht rezensiert werden, die aber offenbar in Uebersetzung von deutschen Lesern verschlungen und von Zeitschriften wie dem Hamburger Nachrichtenmagazin DER SPIEGEL auch besprochen und angepriesen werden." - "Indem solche Werke nun auf dem deutschen Markt vordringen, treffen sie in eine neue Lage: Zwar ist das Publikumsinteresse an kulturgeschichtlicher, ethnologischer und mentalitaetsgeschichtlicher Literatur unvermindert anhaltend, ... doch wird es von einheimischen Fachvertretern nicht entsprechend bedient, so dass den Verlegern jeder Import willkommen ist." These sentences, which Robinson/Gallagher probably would have described as 'The Imperialism of Free History-Book Trade, I have found in the respectable historical journal 'Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht' (Michael Maurer: 'Geschichte und Geschichten', GWU vol. 42 (1991), pp.674, 689). This may convey to foreign historians an idea about the present level of historiographical debate in Germany and at the same time serve as a brilliant illustration of Bourdieu's concept of the 'symbolic capital' that is at stake, when academic generations change. I don't know what the editors of GWU had in mind, when they allowed the printing of such a narrow-minded and indeed telling book review essay, that was not even directed against the latest postmodern trends but rather attacked more modest microhistorical and feminist books by C. Ginzburg, N.Z. Davis, and J.C. Brown. It is, of course, legitimate to criticize multicultural works (as I myself would have done back in 1991), but one should neither apply the economic argument ("auf dem deutschen Markt vordringen") nor attempt to drive a wedge in between so-called "foreign" and "national" historiography. There is a second incident to report that sheds light on the belatedness of German historiography: Whereas J.F. McMillan (in JMH 66 (1994), p.755), referring to new historiographical trends, correctly claims that "France, home of the Annales school and host to legions of enthusiastically Francophile researchers from America and the U.K., has long been at the cutting edge of pioneering scholarship", H. Kellner even went so far as to actually start his book 'Language and historical representation' (p.3) with his negative impressions he had got in Germany: "It was the last morning of a conference in West Germany on narrative and history, sponsored by the journal 'History and Theory'...[Someone having said that] 'After all, what counts is to get the story straight.' Across the huge table...shot back the retort:'Oh, but you see, the point is precisely to get the story crooked.' Around the table, the facial responses to Stephen Bann's remark seemed ... to divide the international gathering in half: on the one hand were the smiles of those who had a sense that they had just heard something as true as it was clever, ...on the other hand, exasperated grimaces of those who, even if they could accept a fundamentally rhetorical description of the processes of historical representation, could not accept the...apparent abdication of epistemological responsibility and perhaps of reality itself." (Also reported in 'History and Theory', vol. 30 (1991), p. 359, where the book reviewer attests: "I was there, and confess to an exasperated grimace." We may very well assume that these were primarily German grimaces that belonged to historians trained either in the Rankean or classical social historical mode of scholarship. This is more or less the academic atmosphere that anybody interested in discussing new research trends has to face in Germany; there is certainly no incentive for trying new methods when one is constantly being reminded about not to deviate from hardcore "historische Normalwissenschaft", is being regarded as a snob, and not taken seriously - as happened to Stephen Greenblatt's latest book 'Marvelous Possessions' that was indeed reviewed positively in 'Die Zeit' - in its travel section, however!!! It has been, it is true, a long-standing German academic prejudice against some Anglo-American styles of historical scholarship, esp. against essayist studies which, due to their sheer easy readability and lack of monstrous footnote-apparates, are suspected to be 'feuilletonistisch' and 'unwissenschaftlich'. There are, I think, still a number of 'old' (and not so old) German historians who are deeply rooted in such reasoning and use their own historiographical methodologies and concepts - which I do tolerate - to combat both 'foreign' and young colleagues with the unfair reproach of not being "wissenschaftlich", and by so doing not even concede them the status of opponents. Some of them seem to me to belong to the generation that has subscribed to the idea of a 'herrschaftsfreier Diskurs', whereas others have more political aims in mind, when they, like the Zitelmann-group, try to cut off German scholarship from its 'Westbindung' and nationalize it - an effort that would take German historiography virtually back to the 1920s, when indeed historiographical boundaries more or less coincided with national boundaries. Gerald Feldman is right when he asks for actual results of postmodern thinking: Any 'new' trend ought to be finally judged not according to methodological theorizing but rather by its fruits. In the case of German history, however, it is, I think, still too early to expect postmodern studies in the strong sense to have been finished. (Feminist etc. and microhistorical research might be better labelled as 'multicultural', whereas the latest books by Eksteins and Zygmunt Bauman have a postmodern 'Weltanschauung', but do not apply postmodern methodologies). Eager to attack postmodernism, Kurt Sontheimer had so to classify poor Friedrich Lenger's Sombart-biography as postmodern - certainly a very good book, but a far cry away from being 'postmodern' in any sense. There seem to be some studies on the way, e.g. by Thomas Childers; instead we may consult K. Baker's linguistic-turn study on the French revolution as well as the new-historicist essays by St. Greenblatt. One of the first dissertations applying linguistic-turn methodology is Drohr Wahrman, Imagining the middle class: Language and the politics of representation in Britain, 1780s-1830s, Ph.D. Princeton 1993 (Order number DA9311217 from DAI; one copy at Bayer. Staatsbibliothek). - True, they all seem to me to suffer from a certain amount of 'overinterpretation', however, it is common to all 'new' trends that they tend to exaggerate their own methodology: Classical social and marxist historians may want to be reminded that in the heyday of their methodology one West German unorthodox marxist historian even went so far as to explain Auschwitz with the "Verwertungsmechanismen des Kapitalismus". So my advice would be: Live and let live. Coming originally from a Rankean point of view, I have long since changed over to social history, first to the classical, then to the new multicultural one, and am now slowly coming to terms with postmodernism. I don't think there is, as Kenneth Barkin supposes, a middle ground to be found, however, it might be possible for the respective historian - as indeed the term 'postmodernism' seems to suggest - to choose out of a wide variety of equally legitimate (instead of 'old' and 'new') methods one or several that suit both her/him personally and the respective 'Fragestellung' and the source material available. Some work with models, others with a spread-sheet concept of historical reality, still others with symbols or textual strategies; they all seem to address different aspects of the same enterprise called historiography, and should rather be happy that they supplement each other instead of practising methodological infighting. So why not - to say it with a slightly postmodernized quote from Karl Marx - write a Rankean-style biography on Foucault in the morning, do a quick microhistorical study at lunch-time, spend the afternoon with an elaborate statistical investigation into the social condition of avant-guard historians in the 1990s, make a linguistic-turn study on the changing meaning of 'wissenschaftlich' at dinner-time, and end the day with an essay on the mentality of the mentality historian - "ganz so wie es mir beliebt"? Thomas Schmitz (Munich/Duesseldorf) .