Workshop at the GHI, September 1011, 1999. Conveners: Jürgen Heideking and Marc Frey (both University of Cologne). Participants: Wibke Becker (University of Cologne), Henry W. Brands (Texas A&M University), Michael Hochgeschwender (University of Tübingen), Philipp Janssen (University of Cologne), Wilfried Mausbach (GHI), David S. Painter (Georgetown University), Ronald W. Pruessen (University of Toronto), Heide-Irene Schmidt and Gustav Schmidt (both University of Bochum), Peter Schwarzer (Singapore).
The international system of the post-World War II era was characterized by two major developments: the Cold War and decolonization. Whereas the history of decolonization has been studied mainly from the perspective of the colonizers and the colonized, historical research on the Cold War has concentrated on East-West relations and on alliance politics. The aim of this workshop was to assess American policies toward decolonization and the emerging Third World, thereby emphazising the important role the United States played with regard to the political, economic, and cultural transformation of large parts of the globe. Implicit in this analysis is the understanding that decolonization was a long-term process that did not end with the official transfers of power. The workshop also marked the start of a research project on decolonization at the University of Cologne, which is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The papers and discussions centered on the ways U.S. decision makers perceived, accompanied, and shaped these processes as well as on the methodological and theoretical problems involved in studying international relations.
In his introductory presentation Jürgen Heideking outlined the basic ideas of American Cold War politics and argued that decolonization posed a great challenge to the bipolar worldview and its accompanying policies. He identified six areas where research seems necessary: the question of American global and regional strategies and their connection to decolonization; the role of the United Nations and other multilateral organizations in U.S. policy; perceptions of decolonization as well as Third World economic nationalism and neutralism; the influence of American reconstruction policies in Europe on decolonization; the problem of traditional modes of exploitation versus new forms of dependence; academic and public discourses on the political and economic development of newly independent nations in the United States. Heideking strongly argued in favor of multidimensional approaches that combine corporatist analyses, world-system theory, and theories on culture and international relations.
Wilfried Mausbach took up the theme by reviewing the existing schools of Cold War historiography. He stated that U.S. policy viewed developments in the Third World largely within the context of the Cold War, and that policy makers tried to limit the role and importance of newly independent countries. This resulted in numerous conflicts because Third World countries regarded the Cold War as being of secondary importance. Gustav Schmidt continued this thought by analyzing the international state system after 1945. He argued that four aspects characterized the postwar international arena: the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union was fundamentally different from bilateral antagonisms of the past; the international political economy, developed long before the onset of the Cold War, was shaped by America's "option" for the rise of West Germany and Japan as subcenters of their respective regions; Britain's and France's quest for world-power status impacted on the structures of the Western system; the singular position of the United States in global and regional terms molded a new international system. Schmidt also contrasted American efforts at global integration with Third World countries' desire for local autonomy.
David S. Painter reviewed various approaches toward the study of third actors in decolonization and emphasized the role of Europe in shaping U.S. policy toward the Third World. He identified American interests in a capitalist world order, strategic considerations, and racist notions as the driving forces of U.S. foreign policy toward newly independent nations. Painter urged the participants to broaden their research by the inclusion of Third World perspectives, and he concluded by arguing that development policies and nonstate actors may have had a greater impact than political or military issues. Henry W. Brands argued that the term Third World is highly problematic because there was neither an effort on the part of the newly independent countries to arrive at common positions vis-à-vis the West and the East nor a single and coherent U.S. policy toward the Third World. Specific cases have to be evaluated on their own terms, and in connection with decolonization the United States preferred to work through allies, particularly Great Britain. In Brands's view, geopolitics played a larger role in the conduct of foreign policy than ideology. Ronald W. Pruessen, while not neglecting the importance of geopolitics, called for an analysis of individual and collective mindsets and belief systems. He used the example of John Foster Dulles to illustrate the ambivalence that characterized the American discourse on decolonization. Although very much concerned about decolonization, Dulles's "great power mentality" and his feeling of "superiority" vis-à-vis the rest of the world put limits on the U.S. policy of gradual and cooperative approaches to decolonization. In the end, Dulles sided with the European allies and not with the newly independent countries. However, he was well aware of the problems with this approach.
Wibke Becker presented the case of Ghana to outline basic
concepts of American policy toward decolonization in
Africa. Washington's policy was largely shaped by the perceived danger
of communist subversion of African societies. However, the
Kennedy administration acted more flexibly and tried to cooperate
with Ghana, particularly in the Volta River dam project. Philipp
Jansson pointed out that the struggle for civil rights in the United
States during the 1960s deeply influenced policies toward Africa.
Studying the decolonization process should therefore include research
on domestic forces that shaped foreign policies. Marc Frey argued
that U.S. policies toward the transfer of power in Southeast Asia
were modeled on the "Philippine example," which stressed gradual
development, the continued cooperation between the colonial
powers and the newly independent nations, and regional integration.
However, American notions of modernization and nation building
did not constitute a viable pattern for both the colonial powers and the Heide-Irene Schmidt analyzed the post-World War II
international economic system. She outlined basic American
approaches toward modernization and argued that the bulk of U.S.
economic assistance to Third World countries was transferred through
bilateral channels, rather than regional or multilateral institutions.
Bilateral channels, however, quite often contradicted regional needs.
In the 1960s the concept of "trade not aid" assumed greater
importance, and in the "Kennedy Round" of the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the U.S. demand for liberal access to
markets clashed with Third World options that favored economic nationalism.
The workshop allowed for extensive discussion. Concepts such
as modernization and Third World were questioned. The
participants agreed that world-systems theory provides a promising but not
all-encompassing framework for studying and understanding the
triangular relations between Europe, the Third World, and the United
States. Another aspect on which consensus could be established was the
observation that American relations with the Third World were
deeply influenced by its experiences with Latin America. Overall, the
informal atmosphere and extensive discussions proved to be enjoyable and
rewarding, and further workshops on the topic are envisioned.
Marc Frey
Panel at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association in
Atlanta, Georgia, October 710, 1999. Convener: Eckhardt Fuchs
(GHI). Presenters: Jerry Bentley (University of Hawaii at Honolulu),
Franz-Josef Brüggemeier (University of Freiburg, and Steffen Sammler (University
of Leipzig). Chair: Raimund Lammersdorf (GHI).
On the occasion of the 1999 meeting of the German Studies
Association in Atlanta, the GHI sponsored a session titled "Global
Human Experience, Capitalism, and Nature: The Construction of New
Grand Narratives in History." Organized by Eckhardt Fuchs, its aim
was to take up recent debates on one of the most important pillars
of modern historical scholarship, the idea of a comprehensive
historical synthesis, or to use another term, of the grand narrative. On
the one hand, the postmodern critique has not only made
historians aware of the role of texts, representation, referentiality, and
interpretation, but it also indicates an epistemological crisis of
academic history because for these critics the meaning of the past itself
has become obsolete. If there is not a single past, then there cannot be
a single history or, in other words, the grand narrative.
Alltagsgeschichte and cultural history have challenged the epistemological and
methodological basis of grand narratives written from a
social-history perspective and embedded in the Weberian tradition. On the
other hand, postcolonialism has questioned the Eurocentric
interpretation of history that is still dominant in German and international
historical scholarship. Its rejection of European domination in writing
and constructing history includes a critique of the theoretical
foundation of modern historical science.
However, context and narrative are two aspects of the
historiographical undertaking of a majority of professional historians.
Modern historiography only makes sense if one assumes that there is
a past that can - at least partly - be comprehended as a unified
flow of events organized by historians in narratives. It is the search
for unity in the diversity of the past that characterizes the work of
modern historians. However, there are different ideas about the
narrative, and historians use them in two ways to transform the past
into history. First there is the assumption that there is a "total" past,
the "Great Past" that can be understood as history. The
historiographical consequence of this idea is a "great narrative" that claims
the past can be completely told. The epistemological assumption
that there is a general history that can be conceived of as a single
story, which has always been central to the historical profession, has
recently come under attack from different angles. Whereas
in postmodern thinking such a Great Past does not exist and
therefore nor do great nor grand narratives, modern historians agree the
Great Past exists, but they reject the idea that it can be told in a single "great narrative." The acceptance of the possibility of a grand
narrative is, therefore, the second assumption. Grand narratives are
historical syntheses aimed at revealing parts of the Great Past
using theoretical assumptions as their basis. However, historians who
accept grand narratives differ on the question of which parts of
the Great Past can be transformed in historical narratives and how
to do it. The multiplicity of subject matters challenges old grand
narratives but seems to make new grand narratives impossible.
The three papers presented at the session were situated
within this larger context of recent debates. The speakers introduced
new or suggested to rethink traditional theoretical concepts and
showed how they can be used in different grand narratives of history. In
his talk on "World History and Grand Narrative" Jerry Bentley
offered a persuasive, non-ethnocentric concept of grand narrative based
on three facts of global human experience - the rising human
population, expanding technological capacity, and increasing
cross-cultural interaction - as an alternative to the teleological Enlightenment
narrative of human progress and postmodern critique. Steffen
Sammler asked "Is the Theory of Capitalism Still Useful to
Conceptualize World History? The Case of the German Historical School of
National Economy," and called for a revival of traditions in
German economic history focusing on the Historical School of
National Economy. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier introduced in his paper on
"History and Environment: Global Thinking of Empirical Research?"
the most recent debates on environmental history.
Looking at the key terms of the three talks,
world, economy, and nature, it is striking that all three concepts have long
historiographical traditions. During the Enlightenment world history gained
new momentum in the eighteenth century, and the writing of world
history became an integral part of the arsenal of historiography.
Whereas in the course of the nineteenth century national histories
dominated the profession, in the twentieth century a more professional
world historiography developed. Early writers, such as Oswald
Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, established concepts of large and complex
civilizations before world history became an influential subdiscipline
in the 1980s. The same is true for environmental history. Even if
the term is a more recent invention, the relationship between nature
and history has been a part of historical
writing - although marginalized - since the eighteenth century. Montesquieu and Buckle are prominent examples. And, as Sammler demonstrated,
economic history arose at the end of the nineteenth century and became
very influential in Germany, as well as in England and France. The
analysis and early critique of capitalism based on a close connection
between history and social sciences helped to illuminate the mechanism
of modern society.
Why, then, do we celebrate a revival of these approaches?
What are the conceptual and theoretical differences and innovations?
Does, one might polemically ask, historiography go in or through
circles regarding topics and concepts? Do we repeat classical
dichotomies, such as economy versus politics, explanation versus narration,
idiographic versus nomothetic, man versus nature, local versus
global, to mention just a few, time and again without ever solving them?
As the papers and the discussion showed, the answer to these
questions might not only be found within historical epistemology
and methodology itself. Historians have always demanded the
authority over the past in the way that they determine which voices are
to be heard. But as the three examples showed, it was the new
voices that forced historians to listen to them: the voice of the
decolonized, the revenge of nature, and the rise of the global market. The ideal
of historical impartiality becomes obsolete when the knowledge
and engagement of historians are needed to provide solutions to
social and cultural problems. The myth of the objective ideal of
historical research that has led to an impartiality and to an alienation
between the historian and society is a dead end. One key word is
Eurocentrism, a worldview that goes back to the late eighteenth century. In
the nineteenth century, European history was elevated to the level of
a world history in which certain peoples and societies came to be
excluded from world history. This concept has to be challenged for
the last two decades. Postcolonialism is the political background
for world history. The responsibility of the historian is to transform
the curriculum. The historian has not only to illuminate the
ideological basis of Western civilization courses and to overcome their
limited scope but to bring world history and global history into
contemporary consciousness.
The same holds true for nature. Mankind has become more
and more aware of the fragility of the environment. In order to come
to terms with the mutual relationship between man and nature on
equal terms we need to change our attitude toward nature. Whereas until the early nineteenth century nature was perceived as a model for
society, with industrialization and modernization nature became
more and more the vehicle of progress that could be exploited in the
interest of the human species. A history of how humans and nature
interacted, with merits and shortcomings, can contribute to a wider
awareness of the fact that humans are part of nature and not separate
from it. As Brüggemeier made clear, environmental history has
developed in connection with the general debate about nature and
environment in contemporary societies. Society became the agent and
regulator for environmental history. For Brüggemeier it is the moral
authority of society and not the one of the historian's grand narrative that
is demanded. So he claims that what we need are new debates
rather than new narratives. It is the dialectical relationship between
history and politics that can initiate debates and find solutions.
As Sammler tried to show, a comparative historical analysis
of different forms of industrial activity can reveal alternatives for
economic politics. Just how much older concepts, such as
Werner Sombart's, can be revitalized is a question that can be answered
only on a case-by-case basis. For example, radical world historians
such as Gunder Frank neglect entirely the notion of capitalism in favor
of world economics. But what is important here is Sammler's
argument that economic developments demand an analysis that can
only be done by the combined efforts of different disciplines.
Sombart's psycho-genetic analysis of capitalism, for example, not only
combined theory and history but seemed to anticipate the
relationship between history and anthropology of our day.
Fuchs noted in his comment that there are two main
consequences of new grand narratives: The demystification of
assumptions that were previously given in historical scholarship and
the dehierarchization of the discipline. In the most pessimistic view,
the epistemological consequences of a radical new history can be
devastating, as the example of Eurocentrism demonstrates.
If Eurocentrism is inextricably linked to modernity, then the
rejection of Eurocentrism must also entail surrendering concepts of
modern provenance. Ultimately, this means giving up the concept of
history as a science. But if modernity is historicized and thus no longer
interpreted as a universal valid project, it opens the door to
competing narratives of history. However, this raises epistemological
questions. As the speakers showed, neither world history, nor
environmental history, nor economic history are based on a single theoretical
concept. How, then, can we construct new grand theories? Can the
plurality of grand narratives be reconciled with the singularity of
the Great Past presumed in theory? Are different versions of the
same subject equally valid? What criteria do historians have to judge
the merits and values of a grand narrative?
Some of these questions were picked up in the discussion,
and the session itself seemed to offer an answer to some of them.
Because all three papers were completely related to each other, the
much regretted fragmentation of the discipline seemed to be overcome
at the session. Concepts of world history are based on economic
models, such as world-system theory or the concept of diffusion that
is based on trade and economic integration of large regions.
However, not only large-scale economic history but large-scale
environmental and ecological history are central parts of world history. All
three papers emphasize interdisciplinary cooperation, which is not
only grounded in personal cooperation with scholars from other
disciplines. This interdisciplinarity also means opening up toward
other concepts, methods, and findings. Incorporating anthropological
and ethnological approaches or getting inspiration from other issues,
such as gender or power, benefits historiography because it also
breaks down the hierarchy of the discipline. Not interdisciplinary
competition over the ultimate competence of interpretation, that, as
Sammler showed, led to a break in German historiography after 1945,
but rather cooperation seems to be the most challenging task in the
future, namely, the knowledge and acceptance of different
conceptions of history and historiography without hegemonic claims in
a nonhierarchical academic environment. This might result in
structural changes of the institutions of historical production.
The session made evident that historians need new grand
narratives and that they might affect the profession - epistemologically,
institutionally, and morally. It is the historical synthesis that helps to
overcome the alienation between the historian and the public and the
fragmentation of the discipline. Only when historians bridge this gap
can they act responsibly - world history, environmental history, and
economic history are ways to do so. All participants shared the
conviction that the "great narrative" as the only valid "great story" is a myth.
But the story the historian tells must be a grand narrative in order to
provide orientation in a complex world. So the message of the session can
Eckhardt Fuchs
Panel at the Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association in
Atlanta, Georgia, October 9, 1999. Co-Sponsored by the
German-American Academic Council. Conveners: Donna Harsch (Carnegie
Mellon University) and Christine von Oertzen (GHI). Presenters: Christine
von Oertzen, Carola Sachse (Technical University of Berlin), Karin
Zachmann (Technical University of Dresden). Moderator: Mary Nolan (New
York University). Commentator: Donna Harsch.
This panel was the result of the GHI's Collaborative Research
Program on "Continuity, Change, and Globalization in Postwar
Germany and the United States" (see
Bulletin no. 24, Spring 1999). It featured the research of three German scholars of women in the
two Germanies in the 1950s and 1960s. Karin Zachmann presented
a paper titled "Technikpolitik als Geschlechterpolitik:
Der tayloristische Ansatz der Frauenförderung im ersten
Fünfjahrplan als Achillesferse des staatspolitischen
Gleichberechtigungsprojekts." Zachmann addressed a major question about the initial phase
of economic reconstruction in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR): How and why were women integrated into the burgeoning
industrial labor force of the early 1950s? Female integration,
especially into skilled technical positions in factories, proceeded more
slowly and at lower skill-levels, Zachmann argued, than economic
planners, much less ideologues of the Socialist Unity Party (SED),
initially intended. Rather than being trained in courses that
qualified them for skilled positions, women by and large became
semi-skilled workers while on the job. Zachmann attributed this trend to
the microeconomic industrial
organizationTaylorismthat accompanied the first five-year plan's macroeconomic goals - rapid
development of a heavy industrial base in mining and metals
production. By directing managers to divide industrial tasks into their
component "efficient" parts, Taylorism both allowed
inexperienced women to move into positions in "male" industries while
freeing men for skilled labor in priority industries and, ironically,
allayed the need to train them to do skilled work. In consequence,
Taylorism, the paper convincingly showed, undermined the socialist project
of accomplishing women's emancipation through equal
participation in the labor force.
In her paper "Normalarbeitstag und Hausarbeitstag: Zur
Politik der Doppelbelastung in der DDR" Carola Sachse picked up the
story of East German female workers on the job - or rather followed
them as they took advantage of their monthly paid housework day.
Sachse discussed the origins and evolution of the
Hausarbeitstag from the 1940s through the 1970s. The housework day became, she
argued, viewed as an entitlement by East German women, the vast
majority of whom worked for wages. Although the GDR, the SED, and
the trade union federation wanted to dismantle this concession
almost as soon as they introduced it, they did not dare eliminate it
and, indeed, eventually had to extend it to include all workers who
had an independent household. Until the late 1970s, however, the
state was able to define the Hausarbeitstag along lines that
discriminated against women according to their marital status: It was available
to all married women but only to those single women with
dependents under sixteen years of age. Sachse discussed the quite
militant discourse of the many challenges, both individual and
collective, by women workers to this version of the housework day.
She concluded that by the 1960s women used if not feminist,
then "womanist" arguments that maintained that, because of the
demands made on them at home, women deserved to deviate from the
"normal workday."
Christine von Oertzen maintained the panel's focus on
women in wage labor but turned the spotlight toward women's work in
the Federal Republic. In "Sonderrechte für den weiblichen
'Sonderfall': Die Einführung von Teilzeitarbeit in Westdeutschland
19551969" she considered the economic, political, and cultural background
to the rise of married mothers' part-time work. The extremely
tight labor market since the mid-1950s constituted the economic context of the increasing reliance on women's part-time labor, von
Oertzen argued. In the face of the extraordinary demand for labor,
public discourse about married women's waged labor became
noticeably more tolerant than in the early 1950s. Simultaneously, married
mothers were eager to enter the labor market, both to escape the
confines of the home and to allow their families to participate fully in
the new consumer society. Part-time work was a solution that met
employers' demands for labor and married mothers' demands for
jobs and income while not challenging the gendered division of
domestic or waged labor, nor husbands' understanding of themselves
as the primary breadwinner. In her paper von Oertzen also
discussed the legal integration of part-time work into the West German
benefits and tax system. The legal anchoring of part-time work, she
argued, grew out of a complex process of negotiation among
state agencies, trade unions, and workers - both male and female. On
the one hand, part-time workers, like women workers in the
GDR, gained legally secured status as employees despite their
divergence from the hours of the "normal workday." On the other hand,
husbands refused to relinquish their tax status as "main provider"
and preferred to pay higher taxes than accept a tax bracket that
accorded separate-but-equal status to each spouse in a working couple.
Taken together, the papers stimulated listeners to think
about similarities and differences in the rates and kinds of female labor
in antithetical political and economic systems that impinged on an
originally shared culture of gender. Comparison was made all the
easier because each panelist approached her theme from a similar
methodological angle: the interaction between labor market, state
law, and popular behavior in the shaping of postwar gender
relations. The papers suggested that the extraordinary demand for labor
in both East and West Germany not only changed married
women's rate of participation in the workforce but also affected the
social understanding of this phenomenon. The panelists agreed,
however, that politics and ideology also made a difference.
Both the social-market state and the state-socialist regime adopted a gendered
labor policy, but the GDR remained consistently favorable to the
full-time workforce participation of wives, whereas the
Federal Republic of Germany evolved from a deeply hostile stance to an
ambivalent, even friendly, attitude toward wives' part-time work. Each
paper demonstrated, finally, that neither a booming labor market nor state policy transformed ingrained cultural notions about what
women should work, what jobs and hours they should work, and how
their paid labor fit within the family budget.
Donna Harsch
Panel held at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association
in Atlanta, Georgia, October 9, 1999. Chair: Andreas Daum
(GHI). Participants: David Ehrenpreis (James Madison University), Michelle
Facos (Indiana University), and Corinna Treitel (Harvard
University). Commentator: Paul Lerner (University of Southern California).
In recent years historians of the modern era have taken a fresh
look at cultural phenomena that have long been dismissed as obscure
or marginal. In particular, increasing attention has been paid to
those topics that are difficult to place in a narrative that tells a
success story about how "modernity" has risen from
"premodern" times and how a scientific, rational view of the world has pushed
alternative ideologies aside. Today our pictures of modernity are becoming
more nuanced and ambivalent. For example, historians are tracing the
persistence of religious attitudes well into the twentieth century. In
addition, they now take many of those ideological currents seriously
that contributed to a new enchantment of the rationalized world and
tried to counterbalance the rigidity of scientific analysis at the fin-de-siècle.
A session at last year's annual meeting of the German
Studies Association devoted itself to deepening this revisionist view of
the modern era by focusing on the "culture of hypnosis." Not
limiting themselves to viewing hypnotism as a minor cultural
phenomenon, the panelists rather used it as a starting-point to opening
different windows onto turn-of-the-century society, to shedding new light
on gender roles, the development of bourgeois psychology, and the
meaning of subjectivity in Europe before World War I. This panel took
hypnosis as a cultural practice that, in itself and in its attraction for a wide
range of societal groups, needs further explanation. The
presenters attempted to carefully observe these practices and their
representations - in art, for example - and to look at what role hypnosis
played in different contexts and what meanings it assumed in these contexts.
This approach marks a new step in the historiographical
discussion of hypnotic practices, a topic that for obvious reasons has
always been difficult to tackle. First, "hypnosis" and "hypnotism"
are diffuse terms in themselves. The Encyclopedia
Britannica captures the common ground by describing hypnosis as a "special
psychological state with certain physiological
attributes." According to this definition hypnosis marks a "functioning of the individual at a level
of awareness other than the ordinary conscious
state." This state is characterized "by a degree of increased receptiveness and
responsiveness in which inner experiential perceptions are given as much
significance as is generally given only to external reality. The hypnotized
individual appears to heed only the communications of the hypnotist."
The latter aspect, mentioning the hypnotist, already
indicates that hypnotic practices take place in certain social settings that
deserve precise analysis. This second aspect also has contributed
to the difficulty of clearly assigning hypnotism to specific
cultural genres or intellectual disciplines; its location often shifts
between science and popular culture, medicine and superstition,
psychology and the esoteric. Many historians have solved this problem by
putting the history of hypnosis into a vast Pandora's box of things
difficult to identify: The so-called pseudosciences. Here, hypnosis
and mesmerism (with which it is often equated), astrology and
spiritism, phrenology and natural magic come together.
In treating pseudosciences such as these historiography has
paid considerable attention to what might be called the mechanics of
inclusion and exclusion, and the often subversive role
pseudosciences are said to have played: Was animal magnetism, for example,
the vehicle for popular radicalism or rather an endeavor of elitists?
What happened to magnetism when modern medicine and science,
"hard" science, began to dominate institutions and discourses treating
body and soul? The panelists tried to go beyond perspectives such as
these. They addressed the third fundamental problem in studying
hypnotism, that is, the crucial question of how to deal with hypnotic
practices as an integral part of, rather than a deviation from, what
characterized modern culture around 1900: Does the study of hypnosis mean to focus on what many have called antimodernism or a
counterculture? Or do the practices and societal uses of hypnosis
rather have a place in the center of modernity itself, not as its negation
but as its companion?
The first speaker, Corinna Treitel, who had organized the
panel, based her paper on recent findings documented in her
dissertation on "Avatars of the Soul: Cultures of Science, Medicine, and the
Occult in Modern Germany (18841937)." Her paper dealt with
"The Creative Unconscious: Occultism, Hypnotism, and Art in
Imperial Germany." Treitel focused on the Psychologische
Gesellschaft, founded in 1886 as a research group in Munich. She traced the
changing understanding of the creative powers of the unconscious
among leading members of this group. In the 1880s and 1890s
the Psychologische Gesellschaft first turned to the intensive study
of hypnotized female mediums, whose ability to express their
innermost emotions in facial and bodily form provided vast material
for intellectual curiosity as well as new artistic topics. Treitel
concentrated on Carl du Prel, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and
Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, who each represented different ways of
utilizing hypnotic practices for pragmatic interests in fields as diverse as
philosophy, parapsychology, medical therapy, and theosophy. Also,
artists such as Albert von Keller joined the group to use mediums
as artistic tools. By the turn of the century, however, the
expressive abilities of the mediums were emerging not only as topics
appropriate for the group's artists but also as a highly effective method
of producing modern art itself. Treitel demonstrated this shift in
the case of Keller, who by 1900 helped to stage appearances of a
female "dream dancer." He now allowed artistic models to turn
themselves into active expressers of their own creative urges. Rather than
simply using hypnotized women as models, the men of
the Psychologische Gesellschaft began to present and represent
the mediums as artists - albeit still unconscious ones - in their own right.
Michelle Facos, an art historian, followed the traces of
hypnotism in art in her paper, "Hypnosis, the Occult, and the
Symbolist Movement." She took as a starting point French physician Jean
Martin Charcot (182593), who worked at a renowned psychiatric
clinic outside Paris. Charcot provided hypnotism with some of its
much needed scientific legitimacy. Through numerous sessions and
observations Charcot developed a three-stages model of hypnotic states encompassing lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism. The
first hypnotic stage, lethargy, became the topic of French artist
André Brouillet in his painting "Charcot's Lecture," which was
exhibited in the Paris salon in 1887. According to Facos, the high degree
of realism in Brouillet's painting conferred a false aura of
scientific objectivity to the scene, which contains a clear subtext about
masculine control and feminine feebleness. Facos followed this theme
along examples by various European artists, ranging from Swedish
painter Richard Bergh and Paul Gauguin to Swiss symbolist
Ferdinand Hodler, Max Klinger, Odilon Redon, and Belgian artist
Ferdinand Khnopff, and finally to Gustave Adolph Mossa. With the
dawning of the Symbolist movement in literature in the mid-1880s, the
aspects of hypnotism that attracted artists shifted from an
ostensibly objective attitude to an unmistakably subjective one. It
was not merely the outward, physical manifestations of hypnosis that fascinated
artists, but also the inner, subconscious ones. For many painters
working in the late 1880s and 1890s hypnotism provided scientific proof
of the truth and vitality of the human imagination. It substantiated
their assertions that a real, if unseen world existed beyond the
limited boundaries of the senses and that access to this world was
granted only by the suspension of rational intellectual processes.
Hypnotism inspired the Decadents, who sought escape from the
oppression of modern industrial society through solipsistic
withdrawal. And it influenced the Symbolists, whose efforts were directed
more optimistically toward educating society about the syncretistic
character of human thought and the universality of human experience.
David Ehrenpreis pursued a similar avenue but focused
more on the ambiguities inherent in representations of hypnosis. He
began by looking at the work of Charcot, who, during the 1880s
in Paris, helped to familiarize the broad public with hypnotic
practices but could never escape from critics who stigmatized his efforts
as pseudoscience and quackery. Critics also pointed to the sexual
appeal that evolved from Charcot's treatment of hypnotic
women. Charcot constructed a kind of circular medical discourse in his
systematic investigation of hypnosis. Patients - exclusively
women - learned to act out their symptoms and were then rewarded
with attention and privileges for their theatrical and highly
sexualized performances. Hysterical attacks therefore represented a rare
cultural moment in which female sexuality could be made completely manifest. Those representations of women in anomalous,
sexualized states were easily popularized, for example, in artistic
images and in Charcot's photographs documenting the different
hypnotic stages of his patients.
In a subtle twist, however, Ehrenpreis demonstrated that
the image of the inequitable relationship between the masterful man
of science and his passive female patient, who acted as a tool to
evoke sexual desires, could also undergo ironic changes. As an example
he used a cartoon from the Munich satirical weekly
Simplicissimus. This cartoon depicted a doctor who hypnotized his female assistant
only to seduce and rape her. Later overcome with remorse, this
formerly powerful man of science acts like a helpless child and becomes
a hapless domestic figure who must care for the baby that
resulted from the encounter with his assistant - his desk now serves as
the baby's changing table. Here, the power relationship at work in
hypnosis served as a vehicle to represent contemporary fears of the
loss of masculinity and male power.
In his comment Paul Lerner rightly praised the
complementary nature of all the papers, which were remarkable examples of
interdisciplinary work. The papers demonstrated that hypnosis and
the occult permeated the intellectual climate and popular culture at
the turn of the century; the authors emphasized that both
movements inherently belonged to modern culture rather than revolted
against it. This becomes particularly clear when looking at the ways in
which contemporary researchers used the tools of science and reason
in their attempts to decipher and give coherence to the irrational,
as Treitel emphasized in her paper. At the same time the popularity
of hypnosis always raised questions about how and where to
negotiate the boundaries of "legitimate" science. Quite obviously,
issues of gender and gendered power relationships were
conspicuously present in all three papers, among which those of Treitel
and Ehrenpreis went beyond the by now conventional
characterization of the dichotomy constructed in hypnotic practices by male
control and female passiveness.
Lerner also addressed various questions that would enable
historians to go even further. Undoubtedly, we need to know more
about why the paranormal became so acceptable and attractive to
heterogeneous strands of society and how this increasing interest can
be linked to what historiography has described as the birth of modern subjectivity and the fin-de-siècle's lust for immersing in and
exploring the subjective, invisible, and irrational. Proceeding from
here, the relationship between hypnotism and the occult needs to be
clarified, as does the problem of the role of women in both fields.
Finally, our definitions of "culture" will require further sophistication to
be more precise in delineating the resonance of both hypnotism
and the occult in socially diverse societal segments and in highbrow
as well as lowbrow areas of sociability, education, and entertainment.
The close focus on interrelated problems and the broad range
of problems addressed in this session attracted a large audience at
the GSA conference and stimulated a very lively discussion. Both
can be seen as an encouragement to proceed in the attempts to
address key questions of modernity through the prism of what is too
easily dismissed as anti-modern. This session demonstrated that the
culture of hypnosis may serve surprisingly well as a platform to
continue this discussion.
Andreas Daum
Conference held at the GHI, Washington, D.C., December 34,
1999. Convener: Christine von Oertzen (GHI). Presenters: Eileen Boris
(Howard University), Elizabeth M. Cox (Washington D.C.), Donna
Harsch (Carnegie Mellon University), Lora Knight (University of Utah, Salt
Lake City), Wiebke Kolbe (University of Bielefeld), Maria Mesner
(University of Vienna), Sonya Michel (University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign), Christine von Oertzen, Irene Stoehr (Berlin), Emilie Stoltzfus
(Washington, D.C.), Anja Schüler (Free University of Berlin), Angelika von
Wahl (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Maren
Wichmann-Siegfried (University of Kiel). Moderators: Rebecca Boehling (University
of Maryland at Baltimore County), Eileen Boris, Daniel Letwin
(Pennsylvania State University), Christof Mauch (GHI), Christine von Oertzen.
This conference resulted from the GHI's Cooperative Research
Program on "Continuity, Change, and Globalization in Postwar
Germany and the United States" (see
Bulletin no. 24, Spring 1999). The conference aimed to explain how societies produced hierarchies
of gender, ethnicity, and race during periods of rapid social and
economic change; its objective was to present the results of new
comparative research to a transatlantic audience.
The exchange of ideas proved to be highly stimulating. We
began with a comparison of women's experiences in both the
United States and German-speaking Europe in the early twentieth
century. Anja Schüler shared her insights concerning a famous
German-American friendship in early twentieth century. A close
examination of the lives of two women, Alice Salomon and Jane
Adams, allowed Schüler to illustrate the transfer of ideas among female
social workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas
American progressives such as Adams debated the value of German social
reform programs such as medical and old-age insurance or
protective labor laws, the political activism of American women inspired
German counterparts such as Salomon. In her presentation Lora
Knight brought to our attention the ethnic and racial components of
the transatlantic discourse about women and discussed how
German and American eugenicists during the 1920s and 1930s
described women and assigned them roles in maintaining and improving
the race. Eugenicists in both countries, she showed, used a new
ethic based on biological science to underscore a traditional image
of women's only "natural" avocation as mother in the home and
to limit women's paid labor and academic activities.
Comparative analysis in this work clearly shows that class, not only race,
played an instrumental role in German eugenic thinking.
Comparative history of women brings to the fore new
understandings of traditional social historical themes such as class
and race. Our collective exploration of gender history in a
comparative perspective also shed new light on the relative importance of
the nuclear family. In Maria Mesner's essay, for example, the
participants discovered that - in sharp contrast to Germany - ideas
about the family did not primarily occupy the thoughts of Austrian
social planners until the end of World War II; after 1945, however, an
ideology of domesticity found fuller expression in the Alpine
nation than in either Germany or the United States. Both Eileen Boris's and Sonya Michel's work demonstrated that the history of gender in
the United States casts new light not only on questions of welfare
but also on race, citizenship, and labor. Sonya Michel drew our
attention to the importance of the American state in the formation
of America's postwar "social citizenship." After 1945, Michel
showed, the growth of welfare offered by employers (as opposed to
welfare offered by the state) reduced pressure for the public provision
of child care and pensions. Denied access to good jobs, white
women and women and men of color were excluded from the
American system of welfare.
From our examination of gendered welfare and social
citizenship in the capitalist society par excellence we turned our attention
to arguably the most successful socialist state of the twentieth
century, the German Democratic Republic. Whereas Western policy
makers insisted on seeing women first and foremost as mothers, East
German authorities viewed women as both mothers and laborers.
Yet "social citizenship" was not extended to men and women alike.
As Donna Harsch showed, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) defined
men as subjects of history only, whereas the party defined women as
creatures of nature and history. As a result, the (potential) motherhood
of women workers was always a determinant of policy toward
them, whereas the parental status of male workers never was.
The Third Way, the model of the Scandinavian welfare state,
was the focus of Maren Wichmann-Siegfried's examination of
single motherhood in Denmark and West Germany. In her view,
during the 1950s the achievements of the Danes were modest yet
important: Although a conservative social climate in both countries
meant that single motherhood was, in the most limited sense of the
word, "tolerated," in Denmark the legal code offered single women
with children the same rights as their married counterparts.
Socialist and social democratic societies on the whole have
offered women more formal protection as workers and mothers in
the second half of the twentieth century. But in her examination of
child care in the most American of states, California, Emilie
Stoltzfus showed that even in postwar America welfare rights advocates
enjoyed real, if limited, successes. Because California women
linked their need for child care to their wage work in the public
economy, parents there could justify the need for the public finance of
child care. Although efforts to provide state-sponsored child care in
the United States were ultimately unsuccessful, American society in
the postwar era was not without its own share of innovation. As
Christine von Oertzen showed, this observation is particularly true in
the realm of women's employment. Introduced during World War II
as a measure to bring mothers into the work force, after 1945
part-time labor became an important means by which women of the
middle classes gained access to the world of peacetime wage work.
Laggards in other fields of welfare, here the Americans showed
Germans the way: Beginning in the late 1950s West Germans, too,
revised ideas about women's employment outside the home.
They came to approve women's part-time employment, a form of
occupation that became a source of positive self-affirmation to
women, particularly married women, hitherto excluded from the world
of wages.
How did women as political leaders react to the postwar
world? In her essay titled "Citizens in High Heels: Female Citizenship
and Feminist Anticommunism in West Germany During the 1950s,"
Irene Stoehr reminded the audience of the importance of the imperial
period to a full understanding of how West German women's
organizations talked about women's politics. Because East German
women appropriated the discourse of motherhood/mothers - as
staunch advocates of an international peace - West German women
turned to a new concept of women's role as citizens. In Stoehr's view,
West German women forged close bonds with men in the struggle
against communism and thus abandoned assertions of gender
difference during the Cold War.
Detente, as Wiebke Kolbe and Angelika von Wahl
demonstrated, brought dramatic changes in policy toward the family and
women's rights as workers in western Europe and the United States.
Kolbe's analysis of parental leave in Sweden and West Germany (enacted
in 1973 and in 1986, respectively) established the social context in
which the new policy emerged. In both countries, the state took the lead
in the formation of new welfare initiatives. Still, as von Wahl
argued, welfare, perhaps especially for women, is well and truly in the
eye of the beholder. For all its patent negligence, the American state
has pioneered initiatives aimed to promote women's equality as
workers, namely, the concept of affirmative action. As von Wahl
illustrated, the corporatist structure of German society - and here she drew attention to big business, the public sector, the political
parties, and the trade unions - means that no institution exists to
champion the right of an individual to full access to the labor market.
The construct of gender enables researchers to explore a
remarkably broad range of social and cultural change. This meeting
established another, perhaps less well-known fact: The study of
gender (a central tenet in historical discussions of topics as diverse as
citizenship, race, and labor) facilitates comparative analysis. The
discussion of gender in the transatlantic perspective led us to
conclude that if one wishes to gain a full appreciation of the nature of
social change in the twentieth century, one must study the network of
dense relationships not only within but also among Western societies
during this period of social transformation.
Christine von Oertzen
Panel held at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical
Association, Chicago, Illinois, January 69, 2000. Convener: Cordula A. Grewe
(GHI). Chair: Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University). Participants:
Cordula A. Grewe, Jörn Rüsen (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut des
Wissenschaftszentrums Nordrhein-Westfalen), and Jay Winter (Pembroke
College, Cambridge).
Situated at the interface of history, art history, philosophy, and
sociology, the focus of the session was an analysis of the construction
of meaning through historical representation, and on the limits
and failures of this process. Looking at modern Western society, the
papers examined the role of the visual arts in the creation of those
narratives that seek to imbue the past with sense and significance,
especially its dramatic or traumatic episodes such as
industrialization, social and political transformation, war, and revolution. The
session traced nineteenth-century strategies of constructing a
meaningful relationship to the past and their evolution, recreation, and final annihilation in the twentieth century. In so doing, the session aimed
to contribute to a new typology of modes of historical
representation in visual culture from the French Revolution to the recent
debates about the remembrance of the Holocaust.
Interdisciplinary in its approach, the session was grounded
in the assumption that images have played an important role in
the understanding of history and consequently have been
intimately related to it since the dawn of modernity. The increasing
importance of a visualization of history becomes evident in Leopold von
Ranke's remark that "History is distinguished from all other sciences in
that it is also an art. History is a science in collecting, finding,
penetrating; it is an art because it recreates and portrays that which it
has found and recognized."1 As Ranke's dual agenda indicates, the
nineteenth century not only witnessed the rise of
historical-mindedness as "a substratum to almost every type of cultural
activity,"2 it also was marked by the rise of the visual as a dominant cultural factor
in a society that had become inescapably visual, a world of
spectacle and entertainment. Visual culture began to play a decisive role
in shaping the discourse on history, and in creating those symbols,
signs, and markers that formed this discourse. Even to the present day,
we moderns comprehend the world, both the present and the past, to
a large degree aesthetically.
Reversing Francis Haskell's interrogation of the historian's
assessment of the visual image as a source of
evidence,3 the papers addressed the intrinsic formative power of art in the process of
shaping the modern historical imaginary. In so doing, they analyzed
art's role in and influence on the creation of memory and
commemoration. All three papers contested the pre-eminence of "the text"
and worked instead with the assumption of an interrelated and
fluctuating mutual sphere of influence. They emphasized the role of art
objects as agents of historical "writing" rather than mere illustrations
or historical documents. The papers thus inquired into the systems
of communication and the cultural production of history specific to
visual culture. The analysis of art's function within
commemoration and historical thinking thereby was based on the recognition of
the specific position of aesthetics in these processes. In this
sense, the aesthetic quality of artworks was interpreted as a significant part
of their ability to transform history's contingency into (allegedly)
meaningful time. This very capacity of art to transform contingency
into
Ever since 1945 this redemptive potential of visual
culture - especially of commemorative art - has been contested. It also
formed the core of the session's discussion. Although everyone agreed
that the Holocaust "not only denies but even more destroys every
sense of history instead of becoming integrated into it," as Jörn Rüsen
expressed it, he strongly differed with Jay Winter in his
assessment and valuation of the functions that art could and should fulfill
in any commemoration of the Holocaust. Rüsen contended that
the iconic quality of art enables modern artworks to integrate the
essential senselessness of the event of the Holocaust into the sense of
history without depriving it of its traumatic
character.4 "Modern art," he stated, "has its meaning and significance in presenting the
absence of sense in a sense-bearing way. . . . Eisenman's monument .
. . represents this sense-bearing absence of sense." In contrast to
the belief in the ability of artworks - such as Anselm Kiefer's 1975
painting "Unternehmen Barbarossa" (see Figure 1, to be inserted) to depict the
tension between the senselessness of the event it commemorates
and its own beauty, Winter rejected the redemptive processes that
underlies the attempt to give remembrance of the Holocaust an
artistic expression. He regarded the emotional relief that aesthetic
redemption can provide as unsustainable and inappropriate in the face
of "the most violent of centuries."
Although the papers could not provide inexhaustible
answers to the problems discussed, they clearly demonstrated the
importance of those processes immanent in aesthetic systems for our
understanding of historical culture and for our strategies of memory. They
also showed that the question of what role "aesthetic sense
generation" (Rüsen) could and should play in the remembrance of the
Holocaust and World War II will indisputably remain a central issue
in any debate about the possibility - or absurdity - of
commemorating the atrocities of the twentieth century.
In her paper "Presenting the Past: The Rise of History and
the Politics of Representation in the Nineteenth Century," Cordula
A. Grewe examined the crucial changes that occurred in the
construction of history through visual representation. Her paper called
attention to two sets of issues: First, it asked how the relation to
the past was redefined in the nineteenth century once the
exemplary role of historical knowledge as a source of moral values, of
history as a school of statesmen, or as "philosophy teaching by
examples" (Viscount Bolingbroke) had been replaced by a historicist view.
Second, it examined the ways in which nineteenth-century visual
culture constructed history as representation, given the shifting
ground of historical thinking. In this context, Grewe's paper focused on
the rise of two conflicting types of historical representation. On the
one hand, artists thematized the unbridgeable gap between
historical knowledge and the past itself. In order to fulfill this goal they
reduced the narrative to fragmentary indications, a strategy that
left narrative blanks to be filled in by the viewer's imagination.
This new approach found a paradigmatic expression in historical
genre painting - also known as genre
historique or charakteristisches
Lebensbildthat advanced in the first decades of the nineteenth
century. On the other hand, in competition to this open concept of
historical interpretation, a form of history painting developed
that sought to recreate history as congruent with reality and to
present the depicted as an eyewitness report. As a prime example for
this strategy, the paper analyzed academic history painting from
the Wilhelmine era.
With respect to the first decades of the nineteenth century,
Grewe identified two factors that were crucial to the development of
new forms of historical representation. One was a fundamental shift
in the understanding of the relations between past and present.
Formerly unquestioned strategies of representing history became
unconvincing once the topos of Historia Magistra
Vitae had dissolved into the perspective of a modernized historical process, and
once the assumption of a temporal quality peculiar to history itself
had begun to replace the apprehension of human possibilities within
a general historical continuum.5 The other factor was the collapse
of the traditional notion of a unified audience owing to the
disintegration of traditional patronage systems and the emergence of a
free-market economy. The particularity and fragmentation of the
audience at the salon, with its competitive atmosphere, exemplified
the new art public. Until today, this fragmentation of the audience
continues to be as Rüsen's and Winter's papers demonstrateda
critical issue in debates about "national art" and "national
memorials." The rapid dissolution of the exemplum
virtutis as the most distinguished area of history painting corresponded with the
formation of a modern sensibility oriented to and nourished by the
private sphere and its values. The dramatic shift in what Friedrich
Nietzsche called "the monumental relation to the past" forced artists and
historians alike to establish new links between past and present
that acknowledged the different temporal quality of the past while
still using it for the present, that is, as an exemplary model or as a
source of legitimization.
The key feature of historical genre painting was the
combination of the grand narrative of history painting with a
personalized mode of narration that allowed the artist to concentrate on the
psychological aspects of the story rather than on the story itself. In
contrast to positivistic approaches to history as essentially factual,
historical truth was sought in the merging of concrete historical
facts with a representation of characteristic yet imagined situations
in which a fictive, hermeneutic interpretation of the protagonists'
state of mind could convey authenticity. In reference to literary
art, Heinrich Heine formulated this concept in 1828: "History . . . is
not falsified by the poets. They faithfully convey its meaning even
when they invent figures and
incidents."6 True to the spirit of the
historical genre, Düsseldorf artist Carl Friedrich Lessing, for example,
did not depict the main trial of the fifteenth-century heretic Jan Hus
in his Hus Before the Synod in Constance from 1842 (see Figure 2, to be inserted),
but rather a preliminary hearing. The painting also expressed the
concept of an open interpretation of history in its emphasis on a
personal, emotional identification with the depicted personage. In
contrast to historicist antiquarianism, this empathetic
approach marginalized questions of historical concreteness. Following
Heine's argument, these imaginative options were left open for the
viewer not only because the subject called for it but because it was in
the nature of historical representation to preserve an open field for
interpretation, once the intrusive moralism of eighteenth-century
historiography had been conclusively dismissed. The renunciation of
a dominant moral message stressed the discursive character of
historical narration. The audience's active intervention not only
supplied those elements of the narrative withheld by the images
but also secured a personal identification with the depicted.
Whereas art historians of the twentieth century - puzzled by the
dichotomy of the contemporary interpretations - have mostly tried to
identify the one and only "true" reading, this very ambiguity belonged
to the specific qualities of historical genre painting in general. Only
its ambiguity secured a general accessibility as well as the
fascination of a wide public of varied origins and political leanings. It also
underlined the artists' references to the present in the content of
their works. The public recognized their own feelings, needs, and
aspirations in these paintings, whether as individuals or as a class.
On a structural level, the legibility of the new genre was
guaranteed by an effective appropriation of representational strategies
developed in religious art, thus reflecting the role of history as a
"new religion" on a semantic level. As Jay Winter elucidated in his
analysis of memorial art after World War I, this incorporation of
Christian iconography as well as the emplotment of patterns of
receptivity inherent in devotional imagery remained a significant device in
commemorative art until the end of World War II. In making
"profane devotion" possible, art gave the past an individual shape and
made it personally accessible to the spectator.
In contrast to these images, the hyperrealist history painting
of the Wilhelmine era closed off any blanks in its narrative. Despite
the appropriation of central features of historical genre painting,
such as the concentration on the psychological state of the
protagonists and the tendency toward sentimentalization, the character of
the viewer's participation were dramatically redefined. More than
ever the spectator is drawn into the picture as an immediate
participant. Anton von Werner's adaptation of Lessing's design for his
painting Luther at the Reichstag in Worms
1521, painted in 1870 (see Figure 3, to be inserted), demonstrates this process. A circular composition with
numerous repoussoir figures has substituted Lessing's parallel organization
of the pictorial plane. The spectator stands at the very bottom of
the circle, himself part of the crowd. The image pretends to show
history as reality, an illusion that is reinforced by the hyperrealist
mode of representation, with its excessive emphasis on
antiquarianism, historically accurate costume, and anecdotal detail. History is
presented as an eyewitness report. Yet by becoming an eyewitness,
an actor within the spectacle, the viewer paradoxically loses the
power of an independent, polyvalent interpretation. This nondiscursive, enclosed representation of history
accompanied and supported an approach that searched for a total
immersion in the past, that is, an unabashed historical mimetism.
As Stephen Bann has suggested, nineteenth-century relations to
history also included this border crossing between past and present, an
attempt at "living the past" instead of "bringing the past to
life."7 An example of this kind of merging past and present can be found
in the tableau vivant, the living picture in which the performer
completely assumes the role of a historical, literary, or mythological
persona. As Grewe argued in her paper, this boundary crossing
between staging and recreating the past - like any form of
historical mimetism - necessarily produces an unstable ideological
message. The theatricality of the performance - or, similarly, the
imaginary character of the modern theme park - unwittingly creates
ambivalence between a monumental and an antiquarian reading,
between the focus on the symbolic meaning of history's reenactment and
the simple enjoyment of its entertaining effects. Turning
historical-mindedness into historicist mimetism, the relation to history lost
its exemplary potential and became pure spectacle. It turned into
escapism, an alternative to the present rather than a model for it.
This problematic of historical mimetism as a means to
construct a meaningful relation to the past has not been restricted to
nineteenth-century culture, however. As Grewe pointed out, the
phenomenon has not lost any of its attraction and still plays a
significant role in the perpetuation of historical knowledge, the
modern theme park being just one of many examples. Grewe's critical
assessment of this form of spectacle and of its alienation from the
subject of the discourse in its overriding pursuit of intense,
illusionary effects corresponded with Winter's rejection of those practices
of commemoration that seek to relive the past through
"enveloping" experiences, such as the blitz experience of the Imperial War
Museum with its plaster displays and shaking floors. Winter
extended his criticism to the practice of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., which offers children a glimpse into the
world of the camps. Even though the museum operates on a much
more sensitive level than the Imperial War Museum in London,
Winter emphasized, the project of reliving the past nevertheless risks
turning Auschwitz into Alabama, that is, the American South during
the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.
Winter's critical stance on this concept of representing
history reflected the key thesis of his paper, "The Risks of Aesthetic
Redemption: Some Reflections on Twentieth-Century Commemorative
Art," that is, that World War II represented an epistemic break in the
commemorative culture of Western society. This break made it
impossible for the politics of meaning after 1945 to replicate those
after 1918. Winter explained this irreversible collapse of
commemorative strategies with three major characteristics of World War II. First,
more civilians died in this war than soldiers, and second, there were
civilians among the killers as well as among the victims. Third, the
war against civilians entailed crimes never before witnessed. In
Winter's eyes, these factors destroyed the possibility of aesthetic
redemption, that is to say, the symbolic exchange between the living and the dead.
Winter structured his analysis around four aspects of public
remembrance that he regarded as its crucial elements: its
embeddedness in political discourse, its character as business, its
dependence on aesthetic conventions, and its connection to ritual.
His analysis showed that two political forces come into conflict in
the production of memory, the interests of the dominant political
elements in a society and the multivocal accord of the regional,
local, idiosyncratic portions of that society. The overlapping of these
two different spheres, of national history and family history, is a
decisive presupposition for the continuance of public
commemoration. The merging of the two is what enables people born long after
the wars and revolutions to commemorate them as an essential part
of their own life. Public commemoration thrives only as long as
people assign meaning to the rituals surrounding commemorative
forms and keep them alive. But in the end, it is almost always the
ultimate fate of these structures to fade away, leading to the
transformation or disappearance of commemorative forms as active sites of
memory. The depth of commemoration thus depends on the intersection
of the macro- and microhistorical levels, of the private and the
public. He criticized the character of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial
project for transforming the fate of the victims into a prelude to
contemporary politics.
Yet Winter's questioning of post-1945 strategies of
commemoration was grounded not only in the political instrumentalization
of memory but also in its character as a business. Where does
pilgrimage to memorial sites stop and tourism take over? How to read
the
The epistemic break in commemorative culture after 1945
also expressed itself in a dramatic shift in style. Whereas
medievalism, neo-classicsm and the human form dominated artistic
production after World War I, art after 1945 tended to use abstract modes
of representation - with certain exceptions, such as in Soviet art.
Forms that suggested absence or nothingness replaced classical,
religious, or romantic notions in commemorative art. This aesthetic shift
had important social and political implications. "Great War
commemorative art had sought out some meaning," Winter explicated, "in
the enormous loss of life attending that conflict. 'Never again' was
the ultimate meaning of the monuments." Because this implicit
warning broke down less than twenty years later, its utopian
message could not, once destroyed, be repeated after 1945. Moreover,
the extreme character of World War II challenged the capacity of
art - any art - to express a sense of loss when it is linked to
genocidal murder or thermonuclear destruction.
By contrast, Rüsen insisted on the historical quality of art, that
is to say, its ability to contribute to the construction of a
significant and meaningful temporal relationship to facts, before and after.
Prior to discussing the consequences that the notion of an
intrinsic "historical sense of art" contains for actual debates about the
representation of the Holocaust, Rüsen elaborated on a theoretical
framework for "The Visibility of History: Bridging the Gap Between
Historiography and the Fine Arts." The framework was
based on the assumption that "facts become 'historical' when they are interpreted in
the context of other facts. This happens by applying the mental
procedure of narrating a story." Building on this definition, Rüsen
then examined the possibilities of art to visualize the narrative
creation of historical sense. In so doing, he first questioned the concept
that objects of the past possess historical originality and authenticity
in and of themselves. Instead, he contended their immanent
historical senselessness. In their physical otherness, they can only indicate
a prehistorical that becomes historical only through
meta-aesthetical
In the next step Rüsen turned toward the successful
production of historical sense through art and in art itself. To him, art holds
the power to generate historical sense when pictorial
representation explicitly thematizes a meaningful historical relation between
times. The specific contribution of art thereby is the aesthetic
formulation of temporal difference, the visualization of the narrative bridge
between times that enables a sensual experience of this bridge.
Following Imdahl, Rüsen stressed the role of art's aesthetic quality
for constructing historical meaning. The historical function of
aesthetics derives from the analogy that exists between the inner logic
of creating aesthetic sense in art and of making sense of history in
the work of historical consciousness. Rüsen concluded his
theoretical deliberations with the challenge to "consider art seriously as a
source for and contribution to the sense and meaning, which we call
historical. Only in such a connection between the aesthetic value of
art and the historical sense criteria today can historical culture enforce
its own aesthetic dimension. Aesthetics would not deteriorate to a
mere means of presenting cognitive or political historical messages.
Instead, art would gain its own historical sense. Historical experience
would be aesthetically enriched and the memorial work of historical
consciousness would gain a new perspective and cultural richness."
The notion of art's essential value in the production of
historical meaning also informed Rüsen's approach toward the
remembrance of the Holocaust. Whereas Winter objected to artistic forms of
Holocaust commemoration because of the redemptive quality of art in
general, Rüsen stressed the unique ability of art to speak about the
unspeakable and to find ways to express the senselessness of the
events. For Rüsen, art thus plays an important, indispensable role in the
process of coming to terms with the atrocities of the twentieth century.
Reassessing the possibility of historical representation, the
session clearly laid out what is at stake in the contemporary debates
on
Cordula A. Grewe
Workshop held at the GHI on January 24, 2000. Convener/Chair:
Christof Mauch (GHI). Speaker: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (University of
Bielefeld). Commentator: Deborah Cohen (American University).
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt's thoughtful defense of comparative
history as a viable and extremely flexible instrument for the analysis of
history engendered a lively response from the commentator,
Deborah Cohen, and from the assembled group of fifty attendees. Haupt
developed his arguments both with a view to the historiography
of the Federal Republic of Germany, arising from an analysis of
the specificity of National Socialism, and against the negative foil
of Michel Espagne's assessment of comparative history as a
"dubious" methodological approach.
It is precisely the focus on the "national" that Espagne
attacks, along with comparative history's tendency to choose semantic
rather than functional equivalents for comparison and its "narrow
focus" on social groups. Haupt interpreted Espagne's writing not only as
a criticism of methodology but as a "symbolic conflict about the
legitimacy of approaches."
Having thus raised the stakes, Haupt then set out to
demolish Espagne's argument by showing comparative history's central
role in "enhancing mutual international understanding," in general
and the idea of a common Europe in particular. He pointed to the
fruitful interrelationship between history and the social sciences
after World War II, when "comparisons played a prominent part" in
the conceptualization of "historical social science." Above all, he
asserted that comparative history allowed for a shift away from static,
normative models - for example, England as a model for
parliamentary democracy - toward greater understanding of national and
regional peculiarities. Comparative history, according to Haupt,
is capable of making highly differentiated value judgments because
it remains aware of the historical relationship between
intellectual enterprise and political power. It is thus precisely in the
historiography of suppressed cultures that comparative history's light shines.
Example by example, Haupt affirmed comparative
history's heuristic, descriptive, analytical, and paradigmatic functions,
citing the work of Marc Bloch (English enclosure), A.
Rosenberg (French worker movement), and Frederick Cooper (comparison of
capitals under feudal rein) to strengthen his thesis. His appreciation of
comparative history as a flexible endeavor that can serve multiple
approaches culminated in his praise of its
Möglichkeitssinn, a term borrowed from Robert Musil. He concluded that the historical
comparison is an adequate though difficult means of
historical analysis that can - quoting Natalie Zemon Davis - "provide the
highest satisfaction of our craft."
Cohen's thoughtful and witty response, rich in irony and
peppered with metaphors, began with the self-incrimination of
comparative historians as the "evangelicals of the profession." She
focused immediately on the questions of comparability, advising
that historians must begin from a point of relation and referred to
comparative history's tendency to obscure distinctive histories of region.
From there she moved to the problem of causality and
the discipline's tendency toward reductionism. Why, then,
undertake comparative history? Cohen's answer was that it is capable of
providing glimpses into the paths not taken and can shed light on
phenomena that national historians take for granted. Comparative
history has a future if it begins from a point of relation and if it
remains realistic in its expectation of what it can achieve. She concluded
that the discipline must be capable of moving away from the nation
as the principle unit of comparison.
The audience was eager to comment on both speakers and
fueled the discussion for or against the viability of the discipline with
such enthusiasm that only the late hour could cut short its ebb and flow.
Malve S. Burns
Global Human Experience, Capitalism, and Nature: The Construction of New
Grand Narratives in History
Coming to Terms with the Female
Sonderfall: Women's Work and Gender Politics in East
and West Germany
The Culture of Hypnosis: Pseudosciences, Sexuality, and Art in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
Gender History in Transatlantic Perspective: Women, Motherhood, and Social Change
in Twentieth-Century Europe and the United States
Aesthetics and Politics: From Cologne Cathedral to the Holocaust Memorial
purposeful necessity through sensual perception also was seen
as the guarantor of its power of aesthetic redemption. That this
production of meaning could also be illusory, or could be used by
a society's dominant powers to cover up the evident
meaninglessness of certain historical events became apparent in the discussion
about the practices of commemorating World War II and the Holocaust.
message of Kiefer's art (Figure 1, to be inserted), with its multitude of references
to the German catastrophe, in the context of its circulation as a
high-priced and highly prized commodity in the world of the great
galleries? In his critical assessment of aesthetic redemption,
Winter implied the corrupting potential of the monetary exchange that
accompanies the narratives and symbols of remembrance.
processes, such as explanatory texts. Rüsen then analyzed
monuments to which he attested a semihistorical sense. He defined
them as semihistorical because they generate the presupposition for
historical meaning, that is, a temporal bridge. Yet this construction
is not historical in the strict sense because "it is a temporal bridge
in which from the past 'history' is made for the present, whereas
in fact history can only be constructed backward in time - from
the present into the past."
commemorative art and traced the roots for the modern
challenges back to the nineteenth century. The session thereby
demonstrated that we are far from a solution to our struggle with the memory
and heritage of World War II. How to relate to history, how to
construct our own self-understanding on the basis of this past? Although
the positions remained irreconciled, with Rüsen stressing that
"history is not the past. It is a meaningful relation to the past. It is a
narrative bridge between past and present" and Winter emphasizing that
"this narrative is broken; by the Holocaust," this session fostered a
dialog between the approaches that in itself is important. And it will,
undoubtedly, continue.
The Past and Future of Comparative History