Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 11:24:05 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Meaning of "Postmodernism" Submitted by: Jonathan Sperber Since Thomas Schmitz has mentioned my name in conjunction with historians' fears about post-modernism, it might not be inappropriate for me to use his explanation of this intellectual movement as an example of what I had in mind. It seems to me that Schmitz's brief statement illustrates two of the major problems I (and many other historians) have with post-modernism in historical studies: (1) its proponents attributing to themselves ideas and practices long common in the profession; (2) these same proponents making provocative statements, whose logical consequences they are ill-prepared to face. To point one, concerning the necessity of studying the past exclusively through texts authored by other human beings with a different view of the world. Schmitz, following many post-modernists, makes fun of historians who naively believe that the texts provide a clear window into the past, who think that one need merely go to the archives and let vanished reality proceed from the documents through the researcher's eyes into the brain ("the all too easy assumption that one can go directly from presently available old texts to a uniform past"). He describes this as "Rankean reasoning," and contrasts it with the work of post-modernists, who "focus on intermediary forces, the chronists and the language used," only it was Ranke himself, that Prussian dinosaur, who initiated the practice of "Quellenkritik," of a critical investigation of the historian's sources, before they can be assumed to shed any light on a past reality. Schmitz also suggests that post-modernists "attempt too recapture. . .the original meanings of old vocabulary and to apply. . .the values and 'Weltanschauung' of former times. . . to help the modern reader in better understanding past cultures and in realizing the gap in between our way of life and theirs." This sounds to me suspiciously like "historicism," another one of those linear, nineteenth century ways of thought, practiced by figures such as Ranke or Wilhelm Dilthey--in more recent years, the late Thomas Nipperdey--and rejected by post-modernists. Dilthey, at least, posed a problem about such practices that Schmitz has evaded in his comments. If these past modes of thought/past uses of language are so different from our own, and if there is nothing but language--itself self-referential, and open to an infinite variety of interpretations (or, as Schmit says, "as many perceptions of things past as there were human beings")--to connect them with us, how can we hope to connect to these past forms of discourse, to understand them, and to reveal the cultural gap between the past and the present? The second point I would make concerning post-modernism is the assumption that there is no objective historical reality. If all that Schmitz knows "is the world of the here and now, the world of present archives and libraries, the world of texts and other symbols," then how does he know that between 1941 and 1945 the Nazis murdered some five to six million Jews (to say nothing of the Romany, Soviet POWs and millions of other miscellaneous civilians and combattants)? There are an infinite number of interpretations of the past, so why should we privilege this particular one, over, for instance, the one proposed by the neo-Nazis in the USA, the Federal Republic and elsewhere, who assert that the murder of the Jews was the "hoax of the twentieth century," that all the supposed victims or their descendants are still living in Bielorussia or Israel? This point, given its moral significance (although one can easily think of many other, morally less loaded aspects of past reality for which a similar certainty might be claimed), has been an enormous embarrassment to historical post-modernists. They come up with a number of peculiar formulations to deal with it, such as Dominick LaCapra's notion (in the latest *American Historical Review*) that while all we know of the past are its traces in texts and there are an infinity of readings of such texts, there are also "misreadings" of these texts, that historians should not use. Of course, if a text is "misread," then there must exist some objective standard, some non-arbitrary knowledge of that text, by which one could judge whether it is being read properly. In making such an assumption, though, one abandons the basic point of post-modernist historiography, as Schmitz has explained it in his account. I make these remarks, not to beat the drums for a Lockean historical epistemology, nor to denounce all the intellectual insights offered by post-modernist thinkers, some of which I really do find helpful and engaging (additionally, I am sure that these thinkers' defenders will have a word, accusing me of misreading, distorting or caricaturing post-modernist texts, although how I could do such a thing in a world in which there are no objectively fixed meanings of texts is hard to understand), but to point out that the problem of the nature of historical knowledge is a complex and difficult one. Simplistic solutions, whether coming from Foucault or Hempel, or from their popularizers and defenders, will not do. Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri, Columbia .