Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 14:24:25 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Reply to: H-NET List on German History To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Postmodernism Submitted by: Jonathan Sperber I wanted to respond to Peter Fritzsche's comments on post-modernism that were sent to H-German last week. His remarks, unlike many others on the subject, are insightful and perceptive, raising important questions about the role of subjectivity in the process of historical investigation. Moreover, they are made in a moderate and sensible way, designed to evoke a broad positive response from historians with many different points of view, avoiding exaggerated claims or provocative statements made largely for the sake of being provocative. However, precisely because Fritzsche's comments are so sensible, they also serve to delineate areas of disagreement, places where the even the more moderate claims of a post-modern sensibility might clash with the viewpoints of historians advocating a different attitude toward the past. If I may briefly summarize one general tendency of Fritzsche's remarks (the one with which I would like to take issue), he seems to be asserting that while "facts" about the past do exist--the Nazis, for instance, really did murder some 5-6 million Jews--ascertaining such facts is less important for the historical enterprise than providing an interpretation of them, that is, explaining their meaning. There are, necessarily, an enormous variety of such interpretations, many different and equally valid ways of creating such meanings. As Hayden White has suggested, this process of creating meanings is an aesthetic one, with historians using the tropes of fictional narrative to create meanings out of a past teeming with an enormous number of disparate and inherently unconnected "facts." Fritzsche would like us to embrace this fundamentally aesthetic process, to become aware of the role of pleasure and beauty in the creation of meaning from the facts of the past. This separation of "fact," of objectively existing past ,from "meaning," from the interpretation of it, is not unique to Fritzsche. A few years back, at an AHA plenary session devoted to this problem, Peter Novick, author of a well known study of historical objectivity, made exactly the same point. However, I find this lack of connection between facts and their interpretation a questionable one, or one where post-modernists and others might have to part company. To illustrate this point, let me take a concluding passage from Peter's excellent study, *A Nation of Fliers* (as it happens, a book I am going to discuss with my graduate readings course this afternoon). In it, he comments on an image, an artistic text, the artist Barthel Gilles's "Self-Portrait with a Gas-Mask." Fritzsche, dealing both with this text in itself and as an exemplar of a broader cultural attitude, describes it as representing "the new air-age man . . . persuaded by the virtues of discipline and authority . . the Darwinian renunciation of both despair and hope . . . the fitting fascist answer to Munch's haunting wartime vision, The Scream." (p. 215) Here is an interpretation of a particular kind of text. Now, let me add a fact about its creator, Barthel Gilles. He was a member of the KPD and during the Nazi era was prohibited from exhibiting his work publicly. (Biographical details about this fascinating but obscure artist are taken from the catalog of the retrospective of his work, mounted by the Koelnisches Stadtmuseum in 1987-88.) Now, the question is, should this fact cause us to wonder about (not necesarily to reject, just to wonder about) the validity of Fritzsche's interpretation? A post-modernist would say that it should not. Interpreting texts (for historians, those texts that are traces of the past) is the province of the interpreter. As Jacques Derrida noted in his celebrated remark, "There is nothing outside the text." Neither the original intention of the author of the text, nor the context in which the text appeared (since context is itself a text) are relevant to the interpretation of a text. Interpreters are free to interpret as they please, to invent, for aesthetic and/or pleasure-seeking reasons, a multitude of meanings, in particular deconstructive meanings, that demolish the idea of a text or texts with just one, self-evident, transparent and consistent meaning. Many historians, including the author of these comments, would have a problem with that point of view. Even without believing that there is just one valid interpretation of the past, even accepting the legitimacy of a plurality of different meanings emerging from the same set of facts, one can nonetheless believe that all interpretations are not created equal, that some explain the past better--better in the sense that they create a more valid map or model for the understanding an objectively existing past reality. One might object here, following Hayden White, that historians' maps use the same literary techniques (narrative, for instance), that are employed by writers of fiction, thus showing that at some level there is no difference between the two intellectual enterprises, that choosing between historians' interpretations is ultimately a matter of aesthetic preference. Such an argument--historians use the same literary techniques as novelists, ergo they are doing the same thing--strikes me as dubious. Consider the following parallels. Historians write essays using word processing programs; Wall Street bond analysts write reports using word processing programs: ergo, historians are doing the same thing as bond analysts, or at least should be paid as much. How about: biomedical researchers subject their data to tests of statistical significance; sociologists subject their data to the same statistical tests: therefore, we should look to sociologists for an AIDS vaccine. If I may take another of Peter Fritzsche's excellent books, *Rehearsals for Fascism,* I can illustrate this point. When I contemplate twentieth century German history, I would get a lot more pleasure out of it, had his book ended with the Buerger of northern Germany during the Weimar Republic being converted to democracy and republicanism, or, if that is too much to ask for, being driven off the streets and defeated at the polls by a united workers' movement. In fact, that did not happen, which is why Peter's book has the title that it does. Novelists can arrange the lives and circumstances of their characters for maximum aesthetic effect, to provide what they hope will be the most pleasure for their readers (once upon a time, this meant a happy ending; that is not necessarily the case today). Historians cannot do that--at least, I think most practicing historians would still agree that they cannot do that. Historians' interpretations of the past, for all their variety, diversity and frequently mutually contradictory character, for all the narrative techniques used in constructing them, are nonetheless constrained by facticity. To put this point in Kantian terms, which seems to me to be the best way to formulate it: the existence of a past, at least in theory objectively ascertainable, is a presupposition of the historical enterprise. It does not follow that my particular interpretation of the past is the right one, the one that portrays it most objectively (a common problem of historians who assert the objective existence of a past, one that Peter Novick effectively skewers in his history of the objectivity question, *That Noble Dream*), or even that any one such version can ever be ascertained. But without such a presupposition, the historical enterprise is difficult to imagine. Post-modernists might disagree, but when one considers how they constantly complain about their texts being misinterpreted (a complaint apparent in certain contributions to this debate on H-German), they seem to affirm such a proposition as well. Jonathan Sperber University of Missouri, Columbia .