Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 10:15:21 -0500 Reply-To: H-NET List on German History Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: Re: Postmodern theory in German history Submitted by: Jonathan Sperber I read with interest Diethelm Prowe's comments on the contributions of Ken Barkin and Konrad Jarausch/Michael Geyer in the latest issue of the GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW and I quite agree with his evaluation of the articles and also with his suggestion about the desirability of a discussion of the interaction between postmodern theory and German history. However, drawing a contrast between "great man" biographies on the one hand and post-modernism on the other rather mis-frames the debate, or at least points out once again the peculiarities of German history. In the historiography of France or the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the use of and influence of post-modernism is much greater, it (and related intellectual movements, such as the "race, class and gender" school of American historians) has not been as a reaction against "traditional" modes of historical study, such as diplomatic history or great men biographies. Rather, the target of post-modernism has been above all social history in the mode of E.P. Thompson, with its interest in elucidating, with sympathy and empathy, and via intensive research into primary sources, the experience of the oppressed and inarticulate in the past. Insisting on the primacy of discourse, post-modernists have denied the very existence of a socially grounded experience; emphasizing the deconstructive reading of texts, they have rejected the idea that historians need to reconstruct past reality (indeed, insisted that there is no past reality to reconstruct) via extensive research into primary sources. Often, they have seen the whole Thompsonian project as one that implicitly justifies racist, sexist and heterosexist oppression. If anyone thinks I am exaggerating about this, I would suggest that they flip through the works of, say, Joan Scott, Dominick LaCapra, Jacques Ranciere or David Roediger, they look at the June 1995 issue of the AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, or, the next time they attend an AHA meeting, they skip the German history sessions and try some of the others. Although I have just presented a rather hostile version of post-modernist historiography, there are many elements of its critique of social history that deserve to be taken seriously, even if one does not agree with them. When it comes to German history, though, we have a peculiar situation. The whole version of historiography that the post-modernists are attacking, rather than having an important and influential place in historical studies, as was and still is the case in France, the USA or the UK, occupies a marginal position and is still met with hostility and suspicion, whether from the traditionalist biographers of great men or the practicioners of Geschichte als Gesellschaftswissenschaft. To be sure, there has been the practice of Alltagsgeschichte--but it has largely been (with a few exceptions, such as Alf Luedtke) outside the university and serious, intellectually rigorous historical studies. Probably the one major German historian who has worked in this Thompsonian vein is Lutz Niethammer, whose marvelous oral history projects have, I think, never received the praise and scholarly attention they deserve. Some of the work in the huge Bayern in der NS-Zeit ran in this direction, but much of it did not. I can think of a few other examples, such as Carola Lipp and Wolfgang Kaschuba--both folklorists by training--or Dieter Langewiesche and his students, but the whole social history from the bottom up approach has just never played the same role in German history that it did in other countries. It is really no coincidence, then, that the discussion of post-modernism in German historiography has been taken up by historians in English-speaking countries, since it is there that Thompsonian-style social history has flourished, and post-modernist historiography has arisen as a challenge to it. Both of these, though, are intellectual movements that have had relatively little influence on the study of German history, whether as practiced in German-, French- or English-speaking circles, thus giving the debate something of an insubstantial, or perhaps, more precisely, a transposed character. Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri, Columbia histjs@showme.missouri.edu .