Mary Fulbrook
I start with a conundrum: For most laypeople, history is concerned with telling the truth about the past: countering propaganda, myth, and legend with an honest, objective, unbiased attempt to tell it "as it really was" (or, to use the famous Rankean dictum, wie es eigentlich gewesen). For most lay visitors to historical museums and exhibitions, or lay viewers of television documentaries, or if there still are any lay readers of academic history books, there is an implicit assumption that what they are consuming is an accurate representation of some facet of the past as it actually happened. But even the briefest glance at the last ten or fifteen years of historical controversy and theoretical debate will suffice to show that this confidence in the objective representation of past reality is not shared by large numbers of academic historians. Quite the opposite, in fact: Reading some historians, particularly those engaged more with theory than practice, one might gain the impression that history is just another form of fiction; reading others, one might suppose that history is essentially a form of politics (even warfare) by other means.
Here I introduce some of the elements of skepticism that - although far from new - have in part been brought to a head by recent debates. I shall argue that an "appeal to the facts" is not an adequate solution to the postmodernist challenge: There is no way that allegedly "traditional" empiricist notions of history can be salvaged (even if one could find any real historians to stand in for the strawmen who are often lampooned by postmodernists). Nor do we need to take postmodernist refuge in "celebrating" history as fantasy or diversity of equally plausible fantasies between which we cannot make a rational choice. Instead of resting content with analyzing the polarization between those who reiterate that the past is out there, what really happened, and those who look at the gap between that past and our capacity to know it in the present, I suggest ways of bridging this gap. I shall try to rescue some notion of historical truth or at least argue the case for spending our time trying to talk sense about the past, rather than nonsense about the impossibility of knowing the past.1 I do this with particular reference to that most controversial of histories - the "past that will not pass away," characterized by more-or-less perpetual disagreement about the often disagreeable namely, German history.
The Problem: Facts and Geschichtsbilder
To the layperson, what distinguishes history from fiction is that while fiction can create figments of the imagination, history must be based on facts that are true. For some historians or historical theorists influenced by postmodernism, this distinction has collapsed.
Because postmodernism seems currently to be widely perceived as the major challenge to the practice of history as the pursuit of the truth about the past, we must clarify the nature of the beast.2
How should we define postmodernism? For some postmodernists, it simply is our contemporary condition, the nature of the age in which we live. As one particularly extreme exponent puts it, "postmodernity is not an 'ideology' or a position we can choose to subscribe to or not; postmodernity is precisely our condition: it is our fate."3 Whether one accepts this claim or not (and I do not), there clearly is an element of all-pervading zeitgeist: In the latter quarter of the twentieth century, in a wide range of endeavors, there was what might be characterized as an aura of uncertainty, but not necessarily pessimism; the rejection of old (Enlightenment) certainties about progress, understanding, and control, of single truths and definitive accounts, was often associated with a celebration of multiple perspectives, of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, or a reveling in the free play of the imagination. As far as the discipline of history is concerned, however, there are some far more specific things that can be said.
Postmodernism essentially is a theoretical development (or perhaps better, fashion) of the last few decades that has restated an age-old skepticism about the possibility of historical knowledge.4 Postmodernist challenges to what might be called empiricist, or traditional, views of history range from the less to the more skeptical, and are rooted in a variety of philosophical positions.5 I want here to focus particularly on two major lines of attack that have been mounted on what are assumed to be "traditional" or "empiricist" notions of history as a craft designed to uncover the truth about the past.6
One line of attack, exemplified by F. R. Ankersmit, Keith Jenkins, and to a somewhat lesser extent Patrick Joyce, focuses on the impossibility of ever gaining real access to a real past.7 There is no unmediated "reality"; all we have are Derridean texts commenting on texts, discourse layered on discourse. Because there is no way that unmediated access to a real past can serve to assist in adjudication between competing accounts of the same historical phenomenon, different representations can only be judged on aesthetic or political grounds. In this view, history functions as a substitute for, rather than an attempt at faithful (if partial) representation of, the past. This version thus collapses history into art or politics (or both).
The other line of attack does not dispute the reality of the pastor at least the reality of surviving traces of a real past but rather focuses on the imaginative ways in which these surviving traces are actively selected, combined, and shaped by the historian to produce an essentially imagined account in the present. The classic exponent of this point of view is of course Hayden White, with his notion of "emplotment."8 White claims that stories are not simply "given" in the past, to be "discovered" by historians, but rather are imposed on selected tidbits the flotsam and jetsam, the floating debris of the past to construct a narrative that is more akin to the work of a novelist than a scientist. This version, then, collapses history into a form of creative literature.
Irritating though this sort of relativism, verging in some cases on nihilism, may be for practicing historians, there are as yet no fully adequate responses.9 Little light is shed on fundamental theoretical problems by didactic primers on "the historical method" (source criticism, etc.), such as that by John Tosh (who remains remarkably unperturbed by the postmodernist challenge, classifying it merely as yet another "new approach").10 A theoretically more sophisticated attempt to rescue some notion of "telling the truth" about the past by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob ends up providing a somewhat Whiggish overview (and implicit celebration) of the development of a diversity of voices, failing to address questions of mutual incompatibility, a topic to which I return subsequently.11 An "appeal to the facts" is often used to argue the case for an empirically rooted history that is true. Richard Evans, for example, enters a plea against confusing the bigotry of Holocaust denial with real scholarship, irrespective of a formally comparable scholarly apparatus that serves to create the "reality effect." And in the somewhat different case of David Abraham's interpretation of the Weimar Republic, Evans points out that there appeared to be a broad consensus irrespective of theoretical or political persuasion concerning what is held to constitute "sloppy scholarship."12
The facts of the matter clearly are important.13 Consider the case of "Binjamin Wilkomirski" (or Bruno Grosjean), whose claim to be a child survivor of Auschwitz has been challenged. The argument hinges on the question of whether his best-selling account, Fragments, is true or not; even those now convinced of its fraudulence concede that it is a moving read, a potential "classic" of Holocaust literature.14 It thus is not so much the reality effect which clearly is something of a success but rather the claim of authenticity that is at stake here. The identity of the author, in other words, mattersand we read the book in a different way, depending on whether we think it is genuine autobiography (and hence authentic historical witness) or realistic novel (the accuracy of which can be tested against some model of what the experience of a child survivor would "really" have been like).
The general point is that we do appear to share very widely accepted conceptions of factual truth and falsity; but, important though this is, it is not an answer (or at least not a complete answer) to the postmodernist case. Most paid-up postmodernists would in any event agree that it is possible to make singular statements about the past that are true (or not, as the case may be); strung together in chronological order, they make up what White has identified as annals and chronicles. He focuses rather on what is subsequently done to these discrete facts in order creatively to transform them into (an invented) historical narrative. And even those postmodernists who wish to suggest there is an impenetrable veil over the "real" past and that all "evidence" can in principle be interpreted in a multiplicity of equally valid ways actually operate in their own academic communications as though historical "texts" are open to a single, accurate interpretation.15
We can, therefore, say with some certainty when a particular historical account appears to be wrong; we can make negative points about distortion, inaccuracy, and falsehood with a considerable degree of certainty. But, for a variety of reasons, there are serious difficulties beyond this level of the falsifiability of individual statements of fact. And the most dramatic and heated historical disagreements are often not about what actually happened on which there is general agreement but how it should be characterized, explained, and inserted into a wider interpretive framework or "historical picture."16
Take, for example, the forever controversial questions surrounding the Third Reich. With the exception of those Holocaust denial revisionists who are beyond the historical pale (and the scope of this essay), we do not on the whole dispute the known dates and facts. The chronicle (give or take some quibbles about selection for inclusion or exclusion, and some agreement over crucial gaps in the evidence) is more or less uncontested. We do, however, have an extraordinary variety of conflicting contextualizations and interpretations, with radically divergent political and moral implications in each case.17 Consider just a few:
Is Hitler's rise to power best explained in terms of factors intrinsic to German history, as, in different ways, both the Sonderweg thesis and a variety of cultural approaches would suggest? From medieval "failure" to unify, through Prussian absolutism and militarism, to "belated unification" and rapid industrialization; from Lutheran quietism through the German Aufklärung to deutsche Innerlichkeit combined with Gründlichkeit; in this sort of approach, premised on the need to identify long-term malignancies, there is always something to complain about in this most "difficult history."
Alternatively, should we frame Nazism not as something specifically German but rather as a consequence of "modernity," inaugurated by the French Revolution with its collapse of traditional authority and the unleashing of the masses, comparable to (even in partial response to) communism? Or, by contrast, as something to do with capitalism, captured by the generic notion of fascism rather than totalitarianism? Or should we perhaps reject such larger patterns altogether and present the rise of Hitler as a purely contingent event, explicable only in terms of a detailed narrative of individual actions and historical accidents; or as the charismatic takeover of an unwitting population by a uniquely potent individual, akin to a magician, thus leaving Germans innocent of anything other than falling prey to his powerful spell? Each of these Geschichtsbilder presents quite a different interpretive framework for understanding the same chronology, the same set of "facts"; and each carries with it quite different political implications and morals.
The same is true of controversies focusing more specifically on the Holocaust. Is it best explained by primary emphasis on Hitler and a small gang of evil henchmen, as many historians from Ritter and Meinecke to recent "intentionalist" accounts would have us believe and as many politicians, from Konrad Adenauer onward, continue to suggest, thus effectively exonerating the vast majority of the German people?18 Or should a wider circle of social groups be brought into the frame, and if so, who? Indicting bureaucrats and technocrats renders modernity problematic, whereas involving the Wehrmacht affects the sensibilities of those who want to be able to cling to some notion of honorable service to the Fatherland. Or should we accept the invitation to indulge again in collective self-flagellation or national character assassination by reference to an allegedly distinctive German "mentality" characterized by a peculiarly rabid anti-Semitism persisting over centuries?
As the heated controversies over, for example, the Wehrmacht exhibition and Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners reveal, the reception of any explanatory framework is affected as much by its broader attribution of guilt and innocence as by what one might call "purely academic" criteria although it is notable that in both these cases historians have scurried away to check the accuracy of the facts and to critique points of detail. What was interesting about the notorious Historikerstreit of 19867 was that the political implications of different interpretations appeared to take total primacy over any notion of empirical adequacy. This was amply demonstrated both by Nolte's "method" of posing rhetorical questions and by Hillgruber's awkward confusion between personal sympathy for a particular group and historical empathy as a tool for understanding different mentalities.19
All these sorts of accounts at least seem to have actors at whom the finger can be pointed, and in part the heat of the debates is explained by the shock waves unleashed each time a new culprit is framed. But behind them all lie larger historical pictures of the ways in which regimes should be classified, how they function, and what role individuals are or are not able to play in them (the notion of Handlungsspielraum). One of the reasons why Goldhagen appeared to score easy victories over Hans Mommsen during his media tour of Germany, for example, was that Mommsen's more complex structural or functionalist account appeared to shift too much causal weight into the passive voice, with its emphasis on the "increasingly chaotic functioning of the regime" as the prime culprit. Goldhagen gave us both a collective culprit and a happy, if illogical, solution (the allegedly enduring mentality of centuries was transformed overnight by the introduction of democratic structures after 1945).
These diverse underlying Geschichtsbilder are not questions of purely academic importance. Much historical work is very closely related to practical consequences for the protagonists.20 Historical interpretations were germane to the practical tasks of denazification and reconstruction immediately after the war in dramatically different ways in East and West Germany and in subsequent Nazi war crimes trials. More recently, historians have been called upon to give evidence to the Enquetekommissionen of the parliament in the newly unified Germany about structures of power, complicity, and opposition in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Analyses of the "second German dictatorship" have had major implications for those East Germans who have lost their jobs or been "restructured" out of their careers because of assumptions about complicity and guilt in another Unrechtsstaat. They have also had unsettling implications for large numbers of East Germans who cannot recognize their own mundane biographies, their "perfectly ordinary lives," in the black-and-white histories written after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or who resent the notion of an authoritarian East German social psychology that allegedly is the product of collectivized potty training.
So: The facts alone are not enough. We can agree, against the more extreme postmodernists, that the facts are important and can exercise a form of veto power. But there is or has to be more to the defense of history than an appeal to the facts can deliver. There has, in short, to be some means of combining fact and fantasy, that which can be said to be true or false as an individual statement, and the larger pictures that do not appear to be firmly anchored in the facts. We need now to take a closer and more direct look at the nature of history as a discipline.
Bridging the Gap: The Parameters of Historical Inquiry
There are in fact two sorts of gap that I seek to bridge: first, the gap between "knowledge of the past in the present" (historical consciousness, the products of history as a discipline), and "the past as it actually was" (history as that which has gone forever); and second, the gap between "the facts we are more or less agreed on as true" (fact) and "that which is contributed by the play of human creativity or imagination" (fantasy). I seek to bridge these gaps not by looking for some (allegedly typically British) fudge or compromise, the "middle way"or now even "Third Way"but rather by focusing on the character of the constructions we devise, whether consciously or not, to make transitions from one side to the other. I also seek, in the process, to break through the current impasse between those historians who want to adopt the attitude of "business as usual, just get on with the job, we can do it even if we don't know how," and those who adopt the opposite attitude that runs, "when you come to look at it in detail you can't provide firm foundations for what you are doing and therefore your interpretation is no better than anyone else's."21
My broader argument is that historical knowledge is made up of a combination of fact and fantasy, using the latter term in a wide sense to embrace a range of aspects of the human imagination and capacity for intersubjective communication (in other words, understanding fantasy in the Germanic sense of Phantasie, rather than what one might call the rather specific English literary notion, with its veiled connotations of untruthfulness). A fuller account would need to look in detail at such questions as empathy, interpretation, and representation, which cannot be explored further here.22 The point, however, is to look at the ways in which the play of the imagination is not as free, as arbitrary, as postmodernists appear to think; to look at why, or indeed how, "fantasy" can be constrained by "facts," as captured through the activities of the creative, inquiring mind; in other words, to look at the interplay between fact and fantasy, seeking to explore different positions on a spectrum in which the one is anchored, to a greater or lesser extent, by the other; and, in the process of this exploration, to achieve greater clarity about the kinds of choices we unavoidably have to make. We cannot necessarily devise shared criteria for deciding which approach is "better" or -"worse" than another; but we can at least hope to clarify our grounds for agreeing to disagree. It is worth noting at the outset that there are patterns to the way we imagine the past. We are not talking about individual, private fantasies here, but about collective sets of conceptions and approaches. I therefore focus, in this context, on some aspects of these collective ventures, considering specifically the questions of the interrelations between paradigms, concepts, and politics.
Paradigms23
Any cursory glance at substantive historical writing and historiography will reveal a startling array of alternative approaches, or what, to borrow a term from Thomas S. Kuhn's now classic analysis of the natural sciences, we may wish to call paradigms.24 Actually, if we were truly Kuhnian, we would call these "paradigm candidates" because none has as yet attained true hegemony. The point here, however, is that in the field of historical inquiry, for reasons that we need to explore, none of them are ever likely to achieve hegemonic status across the field as a whole, although they often dominate particular institutional or intellectual corners at different times.25 I would contend that, irrespective of some spurious sense of a need to be faithful to Kuhn's stimulating original definition, it would be extremely fruitful to explore the nature of these candidates for paradigmatic primacy in history. It is in this spirit that I elect to adopt the term paradigm, as follows.
Paradigms, for my purposes here, are defined not by the essentially external criterion of success, that is, unchallenged hegemony over an intellectual field as a whole, but rather in purely internal terms, that is, in the ways in which they shape general approaches to a topic of inquiry.26 Paradigms in the sense in which I use the term here are made up of certain general components: basic presuppositions about what to look at (and what to look for); a framework of given questions and "puzzles"; a specific set of analytical concepts through which to capture and reproduce the "evidence"; and a notion of the types of explanation that will in some way satisfy curiosity or answer a particular question. It seems to me that analyses of "approaches" in history have not as yet distinguished sufficiently between different kinds of historical paradigm, and I would like to present a more differentiated framework for thinking about different approaches here.
Historiographical works often trace the development from "traditional" approaches (political and diplomatic history, history of "great men") to a multiplicity of perspectives - social history, labor history, economic history, women's history, "new" cultural history - allowing a diversity of previously repressed voices to be heard. The view often appears to be that the more spotlights are cast on different parts of the past, the more the cumulative illumination there will be.27 However, it seems to me that some "new approaches" in history are actually not so much new approaches to old questions as old approaches to new questions. These are what I call "perspectival paradigms": paradigms looking at topics or "segments of reality" that had hitherto been partially ignored or completely neglected. Such perspectival paradigms are often simply subject specialisms that may serve to complement previously dominant histories (irrespective of the curious prevalence of personal animosities across these subfields).28
But perspectival paradigms are cross-cut by other kinds of more fundamental, underlying paradigm. These are what I call "paradigms proper," mutually conflicting approaches based on prior assumptions that cannot necessarily be reconciled with one another. Recent examples include the difference between "women's history" (a perspectival paradigm saying we have not yet looked enough at the history of a particular group, defined biologically, namely, women); and "feminist history," a paradigm proper that treats gender as socially constructed and embodies a whole set of principled stands on a range of moral and political issues that can just as well be applied, for example, to the behavior and beliefs of men. One might want to elaborate a similar distinction between "social history" ("with the politics left out") and "societal history" (at the root of politics).
Classic examples of paradigms proper obviously include approaches deriving from Marxist or psychoanalytic roots (the nonfalsifiable "belief systems" identified by Karl Popper); or the strong forms of structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss rather than Émile Durkheim and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown) and poststructuralism (Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault). These paradigms proper are rooted in irreconcilable metatheoretical assumptions: They are premised on different philosophical anthropologies (views on the construction of the subject, the relationships between society and the individual), on different assumptions about the nature of historical causes and about what it is that the historian is trying to do. At their most explicitwhen they become a major "-ism" - they develop into comprehensive thought systems capable of repeated exegesis and elaboration, and often quite different patterns of institutionalization. They pose the biggest headache as far as any attempt to develop any notion of a single, objective "historical method" is concerned. Germans have had to think particularly hard about fundamentally conflicting paradigms with the legacy of East German Marxist historiography, premised as it was on quite different assumptions about the nature of the past and the purposes of historical inquiry.
Sometimes these major paradigms proper spawn what I call "pidgin paradigms" or "magpie theories." These are created when a historian appropriates particularly fruitful individual concepts or insights but does not necessarily wish to buy into the full theoretical gamut. We have many examples of such magpie theorizing being put to illuminating effect: Witness, for example, the widespread adoption of Weberian concepts beautifully exemplified by Ian Kershaw's use of "charismatic authority" to explore the interplay of individual and structure in Hitler's power (in the process helping to resolve some of the issues between intentionalists and functionalists already mentioned); or Richard Evans's occasionally rather eclectic selections from Foucault and others in his Rituals of Retribution; or the very widespread, often unwitting absorption of certain Marxist assumptions. (Who nowadays really thinks a focus on social and economic structures is not at least a better place to start than the Hegelian notion of "world spirit realizing itself"?) Similarly, Freudian notions of repression, or the subconscious, have widely entered into our subconscious vocabularies.
The importance of magpie theorizing is that it underlines the possibility of dislocating specific concepts from their original theoretical - and political - contexts. Deployed badly, it has to be said, magpie theories just masquerade second-rate or even shoddy work in the opaque guise of supposed cleverness (or obscurity). Deployed well, they seem to permit a degree of openness, of "interparadigm communication," while explicitly recognizing the need for a vocabulary of analytical concepts at one degree of abstraction from the empirical material itself. I shall return to this later.
Many historians prefer to ignore theory and claim it is
infinitely more profitable to "just get on with the job of doing
history." But no historian is entirely innocent of theory and ignorance is no
Consider, for example, the conflicting implicit paradigms of
those who focus on individual motives and actions versus those who
prefer to look at structures and conditions. To return to the example
of Weimar: Even among supposedly "atheoretical" historians, there
are those who tend to emphasize structural problems - such as
long-term sociopolitical legacies, the consequences of war, the
incomplete revolution and ambiguous compromises of 191819, the
constitutional flaws, the ambivalent and divided political culture, and
the inherent economic weaknesses; there are those who would focus
on the alleged charisma and organizational brilliance of Hitler and
the NSDAP; and there are those who would rather emphasize the
decisions and mistakes of key individuals in the closing years and
even weeks and days of Weimar democracy, or even the chain of
chance events and accidents.29 These differences in implicit paradigms
lead to radically divergent interpretations among historians who can
in no way be accused of sloppy scholarship; the debates over
Weimar are far more deeply problematic than a concentration on the
Abraham affair alone would have us think. Implicit paradigms, not facts,
are what are at issue here.
What is the evidence? The problem of concepts
Cross-cutting all these forms of paradigm is the problem that
there is no generally shared set of concepts, or "theory-neutral data
language," with which to capture the evidence of the past and to use
in assessing the relative merits of different interpretations in the
present. Historical concepts do not neatly correspond to (or at least seem
to account for) elements and attributes of the "real world out there,"
as they appear to do in the natural sciences. Even though concepts
in the natural sciences are imposed by the observer (such as quarks or
neutrons), they do seem to correspond, in measurably better or
worse ways, to an objective outside reality in a way that historical
concepts do not.30
Max Weber, who devoted considerable attention to this
problem, came up with a typically ambiguous double answer.
Unfortunately for us, he got it wrong on both counts. First, we cannot
agree with Weber that historical concepts are broadly shared across
"the culture of an age" for several reasons. They may be what I
call "theory-drenched" concepts: deeply rooted within different
paradigms, meaning quite different things within different
frameworks. The classic examples here of course are concepts such as class
or power, which may be defined quite differently depending
on whether one is a Marxist, a Weberian, or a follower of Foucault.
And, unless we are prepared to develop and speak in an inaccessible,
even arcane vocabulary (easily dismissed as "jargon"), historical
concepts also are very often the situated and loaded concepts of
everyday life, further cross-cutting differences in theoretical definition.
Consider, for instance, concepts of gender or race, construed
variously as either essentially biological or socially constructed; or
consider the different lived understandings of "nation" in Germany
and America, or, at a theoretical level, between an Anthony Smith and
a Benedict Anderson.31 It is in the nature of the subject matter
that some will be "essentially contested," deeply controversial,
carrying considerable emotional freight and significance. Furthermore,
far from being universally shared, there may be very little
correspondence between the concepts of the observer and those observed
(see "anachronistic concepts"), or even among members of either of
these communities (as in debates over the class designation of oneself
and others).
The other (and at first sight very promising) part of Weber's
proposed solution was the quite explicit construction of clearly
defined concepts for purely heuristic purposes, which he called
ideal types. Despite his view that all historical inquiry was but a product of
its age, doomed to be superseded as new questions emerged,
Weber's endless elaboration of ideal types in Economy and
Society suggests that, nevertheless, he thought he could come pretty close to
defining a kind of provisional Periodic Table of the Elements for
history and society; and he certainly used certain concepts as the basis
for his systematic comparative historical studies of, for example, the
More noise: politics
Why do historians opt for one paradigm or another? First, an
observation: There is an unsettling correlation between certain
theoretical approaches and corresponding patterns of political or
moral identification. In some cases - Marxism, "identity" history - this
correlation is both obvious and intentional. But even among those
historians who claim that they alone do "objective" history there is
a remarkable correspondence between theoretical preferences and
political leanings.
If we survey the pre-1990 West German historical
landscape, for example, we notice that the more conservative spirits
tended to opt for "traditional" historical approaches (high politics,
great men, narrative mode); left-liberals tend toward societal or
social-structural history (the "Bielefeld school" exemplified by
Jürgen Kocka and Hans-Ulrich Wehler) with or without the new
culturalist overtones; and those slightly further to the left could not quite,
in the context of the divided Germany in the Cold War period,
risk allegations of GDR sympathies by adopting one or another
variant of the arcane neo-Marxist debates prevalent at the time in
Britain and the United States, but tended rather toward underdog
history (Alltagsgeschichte, historical anthropology). There is, of
course, no complete overlap between paradigm choices and political
sympathies, but tendencies are notable nonetheless. The same is
true of Anglo-American historians of Germany, although without
the German obsession with (or at least built-in institutional bias
toward) political nominations to established chairs and
directorships - nor the need to make such hard decisions about firing
former exponents of a discredited
historical paradigm in a semi-colonial takeover.
This raises rather pointedly the question of whether there is
a rational way of adjudicating among competing approaches.
Some paradigms, it is clear, are more open than others; the different
types of paradigm I have already outlined also cross-cut each other to
some extent. Perspectival paradigms, for example, seem to me more
akin to language communities within which one has been socialized,
feels comfortable, and wants to participate in an ongoing and
usually relatively open conversation characterized by a substantive
concern with certain questions and issues. Pidgin paradigms may be
found in all these approaches as the conversations about the topics
develop in what are often heralded as "new directions"implicit
paradigms are not incapable of revision on the basis of argument - at least,
when this is appropriately presented as "new evidence," without
drawing too much attention to the conceptual net in which the
evidence is captured. However, in all these somewhat more open
paradigms there still is a degree of what might be called "background noise"
or "contamination" by political and moral views that surrounds
some implicit paradigms (as illustrated previously), and some
historians simply do not want to listen to certain arguments that would
shift the ground entirely. The position is most problematic in what I
have called paradigms proper, where serious metatheoretical
choices about fundamental philosophical and anthropological
questions have to be made, often entailing acts of faith or personal
commitment to following a guru.32
So, to revert to Kuhn, we appear to find ourselves in a
distinctly "pre-scientific stage," a very uncomfortable position indeed for
someone who believes that historical enterprise should seek to
uncover the truth about the past and who believes that the validity or
otherwise of the historical account produced at the end of the long,
hard slog of research should be judged on something other than
political or aesthetic criteria. This also may ultimately seem to be an
untenable position with respect to educational establishments and
funding bodies, which may expect a little more for their investment.
The easy answer to this is claiming that, in a democratic
system, there is a free market for ideas. I am not sure that this
view - which verges on intellectual Darwinism - is entirely satisfactory. Clearly,
a degree of pluralism is an essential precondition for genuine
intellectual debate; but the equivalent of a majority vote, or a dominant
position in the popularity stakes for ideas, is not necessarily an
appropriate measure or sufficient proof of greater intellectual
adequacy.33
Politics, Truth, and History: Reinterpreting Modern Germany
It might by now appear as if, by exploring some of the
parameters of the gap, I have merely dug a deeper hole than that uncovered
by postmodernists. But I believe, in fact, that explicit analysis of
the parameters helps us rather to construct ever better ladders
down into that hole, or to drop sounding devices at the right points, and
to design buckets and nets of the right size and shape to bring up
useful evidence.
This section is based on two premises: It is always easier to
criticize than to do, and it is always exceedingly tempting, when
returning to a historical question of considerable interest, to relapse into
a business-as-usual mode, ignoring not only postmodernist
cautions against the possibility of doing it at all but even one's own
theoretical tenets. Let us return to consider some illustrations from
very recent German history and take the contested territory of GDR
history as our final example. The beauty of this as an example is
that, although some older intellectual fronts have simply moved
forward to colonize this new historical terrain, the contours of
controversy are still more fluid, more inchoate, than are the well-trodden
stomping grounds of Weimar and Third Reich history. I focus here on
the interplay of politics and paradigms, and take two particular
issues, that of grand conceptualization of the whole and that of
specific narratives of unique developments, as my examples.
The problem with East German history is certainly not one of
a dearth of facts. A paranoid regime amassed literally miles of
files and mountains of reports on every aspect of what was going
on: from acts of sabotage and
Republikflucht at one end of the spectrum
to problems of toilet paper provision in hospitals or outbreaks of
rabies among pet golden hamsters at the other. However, the very
richness of archival and oral history sources only serves to underline the
point that, in history, we cannot try to "let the facts speak for
themselves." Exposure to the East German archives may even tempt the
daunted student to take refuge in White's cautions about the impossibility
of discovering, rather than imposing, a historical narrative. But in fact the need for criteria for interpretations we feel we
can trust is thrust upon us; for many people, East German history
is above all about at last finding out the truth behind the
ideological and repressive facade of an often deeply manipulative, cynical,
and secretive regime. It thus is all the more important to be quite
clear about the relations between politics and paradigms.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Wall, major
public attention was focused on the extent and scope of Stasi
surveillance, with almost daily revelations about individual Stasi informers
or Informelle Mitarbeiter (IM). A morally and politically engaged
historiography grew exponentially: Whereas environmentalists,
Christians, and human rights activists were aghast at what the files
held, and engaged in a public reckoning with the past, former
communist BonzenErich Honecker, Günter Schabowski, Egon Krenz,
Kurt Hager, and others - were not slow to capitalize on public interest
in the collapse of the dictatorship.34 Even the tone of many
academic analyses of topics such as the role of the Protestant churches, or
of general histories of the GDR, was highly charged with political
and moral intent. Whether by East Germans such as Armin Mitter
and Stefan Wolle, or West Germans such as Gerhard Besier, there was
a message, often not so much implicit as stridently and explicitly
expressed in historical analyses.35 And there were angry public
exchanges over who should even be "allowed"or given
institutional and financial support to do GDR history, as the debates over
the Potsdam Center for Contemporary History Research (Zentrum
für Zeithistorische Forschung or ZZF) in its earlier incarnation (as
the Forschungsschwerpunkt Zeithistorische Studien, or FSP)
illustrate all too clearly.36
This phase of acute politicization - or at least of frequent
public anger - appears to have subsided to some degree. Conferences
are on the whole somewhat more temperate gatherings than they
were a few years ago. But there are still massively different general
paradigms of interpretation. In particular, the notion of
"system-immanent" analyses, widely prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, in the
1990s came under vicious attack from certain rather stridently
triumphalist conservative quarters.37 There has, in their place, been a
dramatic and securely institutionalized resurrection of totalitarianism as
a concept designed not only to characterize but also to explain and
to denounce the GDR.38 This has been explicitly countered by those
who argue that one should rather look with a more open mind
at the social history of the GDR, proposing instead the notion of
a durchherrschte Gesellschaft as a means of exploring the variety of
ways in which state and society interacted in the
GDR.39 Not surprisingly, these theoretical battle lines roughly (although not entirely)
correspond to the well-trodden political fronts of
yesteryear.40
The lazy way to locate oneself within this clash of
paradigms would of course be to gravitate toward that approach that seems,
on the face of it, the language community or the political/moral nexus
in which we feel most at home. But let us see if the points developed
so far can be of any help in adopting a potentially more fruitful
approach.
Let us first consider different approaches to general
characterization of the GDR. The concept of totalitarianism holds a
template premised on contrasts with Western conceptions of democracy;
it then plots, or highlights, those aspects in which the GDR is
found wanting. This is not, then, a politically innocent ideal type. Were
it used solely as a heuristic device, to be rejected once it has served
its purpose of highlighting contrasts, further concepts would be
required to explore other aspects of East German history not
captured by this selective focus on contrasts. But proponents of
totalitarian theory implicitly leap from the heuristic notion of an ideal type
to the more essentialist notion that the concept of totalitarianism
actually captures, reveals, the underlying reality of the GDR.
Because this was different from the West, the distinction must, for
political reasons, be sustained at all costs. And because the state in
modern Western democracies also affects what is therefore also
a durchherrschte society, one of the key exponents of the
totalitarian approach, Klaus Schroeder, argues that in the case of the GDR
we must speak rather of a durchmachtete
Gesellschafta society saturated with power rather than
authority.41
Now all this (actually somewhat muddled) thinking is
rather promising for our purposes, for we need not rest content with
pointing out the not-so-hidden political agenda behind this
approach. We can pick up on the empirical assertions being made, and
examine them against "the facts"on which, if we are using a
similar conceptual vocabulary, we ought in principle to be able to
agree. Schroeder has fortunately chosen to use the very clearly
defined concepts of power and authority in Weber's conceptual armory;
so let us play him on this terrain.
On my reading of the files, a picture posing stark contrasts
between state and society, and placing primary emphasis on
power and force on the one hand and the experience of repression and
fear on the other, does not do justice to some of the ambiguities of
more complex realities. We also have in some way to account for the
ways in which many East Germans felt they were able to lead
"perfectly ordinary lives."42
For example, at least some of those who held power did so
not (or not only) for power's sake but because they genuinely
wanted to achieve what they thought was a better, more equal and just
society; and they sometimes sought this in areas where we, as
Western democrats, can agree with their goals. A closer look at the East
German health service during the Honecker period will reveal, for
example, that the long-serving minister for health, Ludwig
Mecklinger, genuinely sought, in adverse circumstances, to find means of
tackling deteriorating conditions in health and safety at work, and
(unsuccessfully) tried to argue the case against ministerial
colleagues for shifting investment away from dangerous and polluting
heavy industry. Similarly, there is much evidence of concern to
improve rates of perinatal and infant mortality, and standards of care for
the elderly and dying.43 Another area that has received much more
extensive attention in Western academia is that of policies to
enhance equality of opportunity for women.
Remember, too, that even dictators would prefer at least
some of the apparent support for the regime to be real rather than
artificially orchestrated or the product of repressive indoctrination.
Thus, in some propaganda campaigns the East German public were
not only informed and influenced but also to a certain degree
consulted (such as in the run-up to the Abortion Law of 1972). The
constant monitoring of public opinion was designed not just for the
well-known purpose of instant suppression of signs of dissidence
and opposition, but also out of a concern to identify and respond
adequately to real problems. And if we examine, for example, the
evidence of citizens' petitions (Eingaben der
Bevölkerung) and related inquiries by committees of the Volkskammer, we find real
concern with meeting the needs of people in such mundane areas as
housing, child care, food provision, the introduction of shift work,
transport from residential areas to the workplace, and so on.
Discussions of these issues seem to have been remarkably open and wide-ranging; there is in any event little sign that people felt inhibited
from voicing their complaints and desires quite openly in these
areas. There is, in short, much that anyone with any experience of
local government in Britain would find depressingly familiar.
There was of course the use of power and repression in the
East German dictatorship; no-one would dispute this. But there also
was a high degree of participation (for whatever variety of reasons)
in the mass organizations and activities of this extraordinarily
collectivized society; and, among millions of people who were
neither committed communists in the service of the cause on the one
hand, nor beleaguered Christians, political dissidents, or human
rights activists on the other, there was over time an increasing degree
of "taken-for-grantedness" about it all. All of this is not well
captured by the vocabulary of power, oppression, and indoctrination
beloved of totalitarian theory.44
Nor, incidentally, is it well caught by the similarly
dichotomous state/society model underlying the durchherrschte
Gesellschaft approach. Ironically, this shares with totalitarian opponents a
common Geschichtsbild of the GDR as a pyramid of power. While one
focuses from the top downward, the other starts from the bottom up.
Even the latter's focus on "contested" areas or notions of
"self-discipline"
(Selbstbeherrschung) are perfectly compatible with the
totalitarian emphasis on "limits" and the possibility of "failure to
penetrate," "resistances," and so on.
It seems to me, however - as to many others currently
grappling with these questions - that we need a somewhat more
ambiguous concept for characterizing the GDR.45A better concept might be the notion of a participatory dictatorship, or a police welfare state. I
have also toyed with the idea of "modern party absolutism," which
has nicely anachronistic overtones. At least these concepts allow us
to escape from the inherited overtones and derogatory
baggage - of being lumped with the Third Reich in the cataclysmic debates of
the Cold War era that is part of the package of totalitarianism. They
also have the advantage of embodying within them certain
self-contradictory dynamics, helping to point us toward elements of
instability and change (for example, heightened expectations during
the early Honecker era, with its proclaimed "unity of social and
economic policy," and the Helsinki agreement on human rights,
which dashed hopes in the 1980s). I think we also need to develop some
notion that allows for the possibility of acceptance, as well as
rejection, of the GDR as it actually was, without implying that those
who accepted it, or who took it for granted, were in some way
either fellow travelers or dupes of indoctrination and ideology,
implicitly to be condemned as duplicitous, self-serving, mendacious, or
just plain dumb. We have to remember - against simplistic
comparisons of "the two dictatorships" - Third Reich and GDR - that the
latter lasted more than three times as long as the former and that, in
the process, new generations grew up seeing the world in quite
different ways.
The point here, however, is a more general one. Such
debates over broad concepts may, if we do not become too committed to
a particular, essentialist view of the world, be a fruitful
intellectual exercise, helping us - as active, inquiring minds exploring,
classifying, and shaping the historical material - to highlight points of
importance, elements of similarity and difference across a
carefully selected range of historical cases. At first blush, this might appear
to be a vindication of Weber's ideal-type method, applied with
appropriate finesse, clarity, and differentiation (rather than as a
blunt weapon of political denunciation, as in the a priori
assumptions embedded in totalitarian theory). However, we must remain
aware that there is no way of getting at
the reality, the essence of a
particular case: All accounts are phrased in terms of particular
concepts, rooted in particular frameworks of assumptions (or paradigms,
to revert to the previous discussion). Concepts at a more general
or abstract level are deployed to gather and account for material at
a more substantive, particular level. We then return to the
difficulties already introduced relating to the choice of paradigms and
concepts through which to investigate the past. My debate with
Schroeder was made easier by my willingness to adopt the Weberian
definitions of power and authority employed by Schroeder; had I
rejected these concepts (and insisted instead, for example, on a
Foucauldian definition of power), it would have been difficult, even
impossible, to engage in the same type of empirically rooted argument.
The problem, in other words, still remains that of finding
ways of agreeing on compatible routes for accessing "reality," which
in the ideal-type methodology is still (rather unclearly) posited as
in principle separable from, and capable of exerting constraints on
or influence over, willfully constructed ideal types. And yet, as the example of my own attempts (and those of innumerable others
working in this area) demonstrates, we happily do this all the
time - out of sheer interest in the subject matter.
Many historians, wearying of what often appears to be a
sterile and acutely overpoliticized search for
the concept, the approach, retreat instead into what they see as specific narratives of unique
chains of events. Let us set aside debates on grand conceptualization for
a moment and turn to our second substantive example. Let us
consider, with respect to a rather different type of historical account,
the ways in which not even would-be theoretical narrative
historians can evade fundamental theoretical issues.
A useful illustration could be spun out, for example, with
respect to explanations of the collapse of the GDR and the fall of
the Wall almost exactly a decade ago - which some have sought to
represent as a vindication of "events history"
(Ereignisgeschichte) over structural or societal history. The moment we begin to look at
the exponentially growing literature in this field, we notice that
implicit paradigms immediately come into play, with different prior
assumptions determining the focus, shape, and components of
different narratives. Some appeal to the constant need for suppression by
force, from at least 1953 onward, while others perceive a "golden
age" variously located in the later 1960s and/or early 1970s. Some
argue that the economic decline was an inevitable result of
communist central planning, whereas others see it as a contingent
consequence of Honecker's blinkered economic policies in a changing context
of world recession. And although one historian would emphasize
the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, another would stress the emergence
of dissident movements as an indigenous product of the GDR.
These differences in general explanatory perspective are at least in
part based in different prior political and anthropological assumptions.
Anyone who has seen Hans-Hermann Hertle's analysis of
the actual unfolding of events during November 9-10, 1989, might
even come to the conclusion that this must be a prime example of
chaos theory applied to history: Looking at counter-factuals, it seems
that had Krenz not handed Schabowski a draft of the proposed new
travel regulations, which he did not even take the time to read through,
let alone digest; or had the Central Committee of the Socialist
Unity Party (SED) not been in permanent closed session, totally out of
contact with what was happening at the Wall throughout the evening
(or had Krenz and Erich Mielke been equipped with mobile
phones!); or had world news coverage not run somewhat ahead of
events, reporting more than was actually the case at the time; or had any
one of the confused and beleaguered border guards lost their nerve
and started firing on the growing crowds of East Germans thronging
the border crossings; then events would have run quite differently,
and there might still have been a GDR today. Or it might have
collapsed in a quite different, probably more bloody and protracted manner.
Everyone who is actively involved in debates on GDR
history will very likely have their own views on these specific questions;
I certainly know where I stand on some; I still have an open mind
on, and am intrigued by, others; and this of course is the very
reason why we continue to engage in active research and debate. But let
us return from these particular illustrations to the more general
theoretical issues.
Does this rich choice of competing perspectives and
explanatory frameworks necessarily imply that all are equally
validor, put differently, equally invalid, equally a product of our
imagination, our imposition of narrative, and so on - as a
postmodernist might wish us to
believe?46 Or is there any way that some form
of "appeal to the evidence"however mediated through specific
paradigms and associated conceptual frameworks - can help us
choose between one or another?
In my own view, some frameworks of
inquiry - paradigms proper - will remain mutually irreconcilable, at least as far as
fundamental philosophical, political, and moral assumptions about
the relations between individuals and society are concerned. Other
apparently conflicting interpretations are more a matter of
emphasis and synthesis. It is perfectly possibly to combine, for example,
analysis of the "history of events," the often unintended consequences
of the actions and intentions of individuals and their at times
almost haphazard combinations under unique circumstances, with a
focus on long-term factors - on institutional configurations, social
and economic trends, key elements of structural and cultural
history - within which and against which individuals live their lives. It
is possible to write history with an acute awareness of the
complex ways in which human beings are both in part formed and
constituted by the circumstances in which they live - contributing to
the remarkable patterning of social behavior - but are at the same time extraordinarily capable of injecting new elements of creativity
and change. Let us return, then, to the wider questions about the
"nature of history."
(A Somewhat Inconclusive) Conclusion: The Nature of History
What, if any, preliminary conclusions can we draw from these
ruminations? I would make absolutely no claim, in this brief essay,
to have resolved debates that have exercised many fine
minds - including the formidable Max Weber - over decades, indeed centuries.
I hope merely to have suggested some ways of thinking about
these issues, which will hopefully be helpful in moving the debates out
of certain sterile circles and at least somewhat forward, in some
respects.
I should perhaps emphasize quite explicitly that this essay
is more concerned with addressing certain perennial theoretical
issues that confront all historians (whether they are aware of them or
not) than engaging in particular substantive arguments within the
terms of recent debates about postmodernism (such as the focus on
allegedly new "sociocultural approaches," which seems to me to
be largely just another example of a perspectival paradigm). Hence
my attempt to develop new, and somewhat more abstract, ways of
talking about some of the problems relating to the gap between
past realities and present representations.
We will not be able to restore the notion of one hegemonic
"grand narrative" (if such a thing ever really enjoyed uncontested
status - which seems exceedingly dubious); but at least we can be
somewhat clearer about the interactions among different viewpoints
in the present and different substantive stories about the
past.47 We can also move from the substantive level of talking about
specific, substantive types of story (or "metanarratives") to a more
abstract level of analyzing the nature of competing theoretical
approaches (or "paradigm candidates"). And we can be aware of the
fundamental metatheoretical reasons why, in history, we have a multiplicity
of competing paradigm candidates rooted in different conceptions
of "human nature," different assumptions about the relationships
between the individual and society, and so on. At least we can attain
a degree of clarity about the bases for disagreements, and the
grounds for choosing one or another approach. Nor, I think, will we be able to salvage the concept of
"value neutrality" in the way that Weber defined it, simply because there
is not and cannot be a shared set of common, unchanging analytic
concepts to capture the constructed and changing realities of the
social world. We cannot therefore - metaphorically - just leave our
values at the door of the inquiry, to be picked up again when
evaluating the results, as Weber thought. But we can at the same time be
aware that this is not a matter of individual values (with the implied
prescription: declare at the outset that you are a white,
middle-aged male American conservative capitalist, or a young black lesbian,
or whatever, and all biases are signaled and neutralized, or seen as
"enriching") but rather a patterned set of (sub-)cultural values. Let
me emphasize this: The problem is precisely not the old-hat question
of personal prejudices at an individual level, to be declared and
taken into account (as in the old adage to students: know the
historian before you read the history); rather, the problem is a theoretical
one rooted in the multiplicity of competing paradigm candidates
and associated conceptual frameworks previously
described.48 One could say that, to a remarkable degree, individual biases are not in fact
an issue: The issue rather is the ways in which they are
institutionalized and filtered through the channels of specific theoretical
language communities. We thus cannot simply seek to declare
individual prejudices at a personal level and then hope to appeal to
(unspecified) common-craft procedures at some universal level.
The problem is precisely that there are no shared sets of theoretical
approaches and concepts across the profession as a whole.
But this does not mean that we need to take flight into
relativism nor resort to a notion of all history as ideology, nor even
stick our heads in the sands of blind empiricism because we will have
a greater awareness of the character, extent, and limits - the
parameters - of what we are doing. We will at least be able to
understand better the nature of competing communities of
scholars - without positing some vague notion of a universal guild that allegedly
shares certain unexamined craft practices - and be aware of what is
involved in opting for one or another theoretical approach or
paradigm candidate. Under the appropriate conditions (with
certain shared metatheoretical values and assumptions, and
institutionally sustained freedom of debate), we will be able to proceed with
intelligence and goodwill in a community of scholars more committed
to engaging in honest debates about the past than scoring
political and personal points in the present. We can make informed
choices about the theoretical languages we want to speak, in
communicating with each other and - however much it is a matter of
"looking through a glass
darkly"49trying to maintain lines of broken
communication between past and present.
How, finally, should we summarize the discipline of
history? There is a large and to my mind rather unprofitable industry in
elaborating two polarized comparisons: history and science on the
one hand, and history and fiction on the
other.50 But it seems to me that there are far more fruitful lines of comparison we can explore if
we really want to make some grand statement about the nature of
history.
All sorts of other human endeavors could be brought to bear
as points of comparison. History is a form of interpretive
anthropology, seeking to recover the lost languages and codes of
intersubjective communication of the past. It is a form of art, seeking to
depict - in words but also sometimes with visual imagery - worlds we
have lost. It is a form of geography, seeking to present reasonably
reliable maps of these lost worlds, with conventions for symbols and
signs to mark the salient points and features, showing how to find
our way around. (And we should never forget that some
maps - however artificial the conventions they deploy - are far more useful
than others.) History is a form of detective work, seeking to
follow hunches, uncover clues, and identify possible culprits. A
historian sometimes must also act as a lawyer, constructing a plausible
case and deploying all the arts of rhetoric to persuade judge and jury,
on the balance of the available evidence or even beyond
reasonable doubt (although the court of historical appeal is never closed to
new evidence). History is, in short, often partial (in both senses of
the word), creative, argumentative, rhetorical - but not necessarily
also, or only, invented or untrue. If we accept certain vocabularies
and conventions of enquiry, it is even (within the constraints of
these language communities) falsifiable.
Most of all, perhaps, history is fascinating. Let us not forget,
in the end, that we do history because history matters. At its most
basic, we do history because we are curious about other lives,
other societies, other worlds. We want to know how different types of
state and society were constructed and transformed; we want to know what people believed, why certain tragedies happened, what
effects human actions and aspirations have had on the lives of others.
We want to understand ourselves and where we have come from.
No amount of pointing out that we cannot do these things
perfectly, that nothing we say will be uncontroversial, that much relies
on shared conventions and assumptions, should prevent us from
continuing to explore the past with as much honesty and intelligence
as we can bring to bear on this universal human endeavor.