Konrad H. Jarausch
Regime ruptures as well as ideological struggles have shattered conceptions of the German past to a greater degree than the national histories of other European states. At the end of the twentieth century, the conjuncture of the collapse of communism and the linguistic turn has once again thrown accepted modes of narrating and interpreting Central European history into turmoil.1 How are we to explain the frequent system changes from Empire to Republic to Third Reich to German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)? What are the procedures for finding out the truth in a field marred by urban legends, Holocaust denials, and Ostalgie? In order to cope with such uncertainties, the informed but not partisan effort to restore order by eminent scholars like Mary Fulbrook, long-time editor of the journal German History, writer of leading textbooks and monographs on the GDR, is especially welcome.2 Although I agree with many of her observations, in the following comments I would like to emphasize some of my reservations in order to tease out the implications of her statements and then present some alternative proposals of my own.
The Fulbrook Perspective
The debate about postmodernism has been curiously delayed among German historians, many of whom have remained committed to a neorealist position due to the overwhelming presence of the Holocaust. When Michael Geyer and I attempted to initiate a more systematic discussion of the theoretical ferment in French or American historiography in 1989, Kenneth Barkin, the editor of the leading journal in the field, censored us for abandoning the Enlightenment, although we simply presented a different understanding of its legacy.3 During the last half-decade the efforts of Ute Daniel, Christoph Conrad, and other younger scholars have triggered an intensive discussion about the possibilities and limits of a new cultural history in Germany as well. Some of the excitement of their discoveries has even penetrated into the pages of the social history mouthpiece Geschichte und Gesellschaft and exercised the subscribers of the electronic forum H-Soz-u-Kult.4 Curiously enough, this intellectual confrontation seems only just to have arrived among German specialists in Britain, as the recent volume by Richard Evans and the forthcoming book by Mary Fulbrook attest.5
This delay would not matter if it did not have strange consequences for the shape of the argument. To an outside reader, especially of the footnotes, the British version of the debate seems largely self-referential, centering on Keith Jenkins or Patrick Joyce, while largely ignoring the earlier American and German statements. This surprising parochialism leads to a distorted representation of the advocates of the linguistic turn, focusing only on the radical postmodernist (Fred Ankersmit) and narrativist (Hayden White) positions. Unfortunately, it slights the broad middle ground that has emerged after a decade of heated discussions among feminists, former Marxists, and post-colonialists that welcomes postmodernism as an exciting opening but rejects some of its extreme epistemological consequences.6 Recent essays by Geoff Eley, as well as the survey by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob (which Fulbrook dismisses too quickly), not to mention the arguments put forth by Michael Geyer and myself, are representative of this view.7 This is not an attempt to cavil about priorities but a question of pointing to the existence of a more discriminating reaction that seeks to benefit from the methodological impulses of deconstruction, discourse analysis, or narratology without necessarily succumbing to their ethical relativism.
Because the Dutch theorist Chris Lorenz has laid the issue of referentiality to rest, the key problem does, indeed, revolve around the larger interpretative constructions that assign meaning to the past, be they frameworks or Geschichtsbilder.8 As the central explanatory concept Professor Fulbrook offers the Kuhnian notion of "paradigm," spinning it out by introducing "perspectival paradigms" as different from "paradigms proper" and subdividing these even further into "pidgin paradigms" and "implicit paradigms." At first blush this taxonomy appears suggestive, but on closer look the distinction between these various paradigms is not always clear, and feminist historians or partisans of Gesellschaftsgeschichte might be unhappy to be consigned to one subcategory or another. The notion of metahistorical constructs that precede scholarly investigation and are therefore resistant to empirical falsification is certainly helpful in pointing to the underlying theoretical assumptions of Marxists, Weberians, Foucauldians, and the like. But perhaps because I have myself been criticized for its misuse, I am more skeptical about applying the natural-science concept of "paradigm" to historiographical developments because the latter do not show a clear succession of ruling explanations but rather a contested contemporaneity of incompatible claims.9
Concerning the elective affinities between certain implicit frameworks and "patterns of political or moral identification," Professor Fulbrook is more likely to be right. Beyond the Eurocentrist limitation of Weber's cultural concepts, I am not quite sure what provoked her strictures against the ideal-type method.10 However, I can only underline her conclusion of a general correspondence between conservative politics and traditional methodology on the one hand and more critical views and various methodological innovations, such as the "social history of politics" or everyday history, on the other hand. Within the German context, there does seem to be a good deal of generational and ideological identity politics involved in the respective choice of such political commitments and interpretative stances,11 but I am skeptical of finding a set of criteria that will allow one to evaluate such competing approaches in general and rather trust in the competition of different empirical investigations and interpretative explanations of the past in an open market of ideas.
The intense debate surrounding the meaning of East German history is, indeed, a major proving ground for the various approaches because it revolves around the incorporation of an alien element into the Western-dominated collective memory of the united Germany. Professor Fulbrook's comments on the evolution of the debate from sensationalist accusations to more scholarly efforts are well taken.12 Moreover, her sharp criticism of the revival of totalitarianism (such as Klaus Schroeder's ugly neologism durchmachtete Gesellschaft) is an important contribution to arguments for more differentiated approaches to the contradictions of the GDR's past.13 And I can only agree with her emphasis on "the ambiguities of more complex realities" that she sees in the various social provisions of the communist regime, which resemble the British welfare state. But her objections to Kocka's notion of durchherrschte Gesellschaft fail to appreciate the stress on contestation between the regime and the population in some of the most recent work of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam.14 Moreover, her own conceptual contributions seem still somewhat unsettled, varying from "participatory dictatorship" or "police welfare state" to "modern party absolutism" and do not take into account the latest coinages, such as Konsensdiktatur.
As a result of these problems, Professor Fulbrook's final ruminations on "the nature of history" remain oddly inconclusive. One can only agree with her insistence on the ideal of "a community of scholars more committed to engaging in honest debates about the past than scoring political and personal points in the present." Moreover, the metaphor of "looking through a glass darkly" is as poetic as it is fetching. Also, her description of history's resemblance to interpretative anthropology, an art form, a kind of geography, a version of detective work, and a legal brief is illuminating. But what are the standards by which an admittedly "partial . . . creative, argumentative, or rhetorical" writing about the past can be judged so as to be sure that it will be neither "invented [n]or untrue"? There she leaves her audience without an answerbut this is precisely the crucial point! Although she clearly sets herself off from such neorealists as Geoffrey Elton, I hope not to do her too much injustice by supposing that when all is said and done, Professor Fulbrook would counsel us to use our "common sense." But is that really enough?
Conceptual Alternatives
In order to sound a more constructive note let me share with you some potential alternative solutions to the conundrums elaborated so well by Fulbrook. The following remarks draw on my collaboration with Michael Geyer, with whom I have for several years been engaged in a concerted effort to rethink the basic pattern of German history in the twentieth century.15 I also briefly refer to some of the heated discussions taking place in and around the ZZF in Potsdam, on how to deal with the history of the GDR and incorporate it into a joint postwar history of the Germans.16 These ruminations therefore try to bring American perspectives as well as German points of view more strongly into play in order to supplement the British vantage point. Instead of presenting post-modernism as the problem, I try to see whether its impulses might not also be part of the solution.
When attempting to describe the fundamental metahistorical orientations in German historiography, I find the concept of the master narrative more useful than the dated notion of a paradigm. Taken from Jean François Lyotard, this term refers to a set of central stories told about a country that legitimize its identity through a certain representation of its history. Master narratives determine the content of such tales, the theoretical grounding of their presentations, the semantic methods of their retelling, and finally their basic discursive structure that creates a past reality.17 For instance, the story of the foundation of the American republic by freedom-loving colonists seeking to overthrow British repression is one such foundational narrative. One of the many advantages of this notion is the assertion of a systematic connection among historical interpretation, methodological approach, and political orientation that Professor Fulbrook has posited so eloquently.
In the postwar period three such master narratives have competed with each other for dominance within the German successor states. First, traditionalists such as Gerhard Ritter continued with a chastened version of the national master narrative, created by the Borussian school to justify Prussian-led unification, in order to prepare the restoration of a national state in the future. Second, East German historians such Ernst Engelberg elaborated a Marxist counternarrative to this bourgeois conception, based on social class, that focused on the progress of the labor movement and intended to legitimize the GDR. And finally, progressive social historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, sometimes called the Bielefeld school, elaborated in West Germany a narrative of modernization that emphasized the Sonderweg, the German deviance from the West. At the turn of this century, all of these master narratives have become discredited due to the excesses of nationalism, the collapse of communism, and the postmodern shift. The current confusion about how to present German history is a result of the eclipse of these master narratives, which creates an unprecedented degree of freedom for maneuvering.18 If one concedes the postmodern claim that historians reconstruct the past rather than produce scientific truth, the task of historical writing becomes both more complicated and easier at the same time. Although Hayden White is right in stressing the literary aspects of imagination and stylistic presentation, most practitioners agree that the writing of history is constrained by what actually happened in the past, which is accessible through memory or evidence. A historian also is limited by preceding debates about the interpretation of events because he approaches his subject with the baggage of previous arguments. Finally, historiography as a scholarly endeavor insists on certain "rules of the craft," regarding the handling of evidence and the presentation of material that are shared in the guild, regardless of ideology. But postmodern critics are correct in suggesting that writing about the past is a dialogic enterprise, approaching what happened before from a shifting present that establishes questions and often influences interpretations. The previous sketch of a moderate constructivism will hardly satisfy philosophers of history, but it represents the current practice of a post-postmodernist consensus. Whereas this approach cannot produce "truth" in the abstract, it can offer a degree of intersubjectivity that goes beyond "common sense."19
What would a history of the GDR look like, if it were
written from the point of view of such a new sociocultural history?
Taking my recent volume on Dictatorship as
Experience, which summarizes the work of the ZZF in English, as an example, it would, much
like Mary Fulbrook, reject totalitarianism theory and stress the
many tensions and contradictions of East German society. But it
would also go a step further in exploring the paradox between the
dictatorial character of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) system on the
one hand and the relative normalcy of many individual lives on the
other hand. In order to explain both the long existence of the second
German state and its rapid collapse, a differentiated approach
would seek to investigate the countless interactions between the rulers
and the ruled as well as probe the degree to which the population
actually controlled itself through language, discourse, and
symbolism. As theoretical formulations to describe this contradiction I have
therefore suggested the concept of a
Fürsorgediktatur, which highlights both the compulsive and caring aspects of the regime, and the
notion of a Gegengesellschaft, which stresses the communist attempt
to replace bourgeois society.20
When looking back at the entire twentieth century it seems
that a limited openness to post-postmodern opportunities might
provide clearer insights into its twisted course than a more
traditional, unilinear narrative. The unparalleled catastrophes of the world
wars and the Holocaust have shattered Whiggish notions of
human progress and dramatized modernity's potential for barbarism
instead.22 Yet the painful learning processes of the second half of
the century have also produced the more positive outcomes of
replacing dictatorship with democracy, creating security and
prosperity through a social market economy, and overcoming nationalism
with European integration, which appear to support greater
optimism.23 How well can such extreme fluctuations and stark
contradictions be represented by conventional event narratives and analyses
that stress structural continuities? Or does all this personal
suffering and collective upheaval not need a historical approach that
takes seriously collective experiences of rupture and incoherence?
Before they start putting the pieces back together again, German
historians ought first to face up to the incredible disorder of their past!