An era that began with the defeat of Germany in 1945 ended with the unification of Germany in 1990. Through the decades that separate these two events, the German-American relationship evolved dramatically and rapidly as the Cold War became the dominant determinant of geopolitics. In 1945 the United States was a conquering power occupying a defeated Germany. In rapid sequence it became protector, patron, and partner with the developing West German state in a struggle between West and East. The partnership continues between the two countries, but unique aspects of the relationship have ended. Never again will the two countries be so intimately entwined as they were during the Cold War.
In studying aspects of this historically unprecedented relationship over the last eight years, we have conducted more than 120 oral history interviews with German and American civilians and with American military officers. We have also used interviews that U.S. Army historians had conducted. Our experience as both generators and users of oral history interviews convinced us that oral history has a special potential for enriching historical studies of Germany and the United States in the Cold War period.
The experience also impressed upon us that this is a resource that diminishes with each passing year. The German and American survivors of the war, who lived through the early years of occupation and the Cold War, are dying. It is distressing that their knowledge and experience may disappear with them. Oral history offers a singular opportunity to capture and preserve as source material the perspective of this generation.
Consider but one facet of the recent past where oral history offers a unique advantage. In successive rotations between 1945 and 1990 the United States stationed some sixteen million American soldiers and their families in Germany. The official records of the occupation and its transformation into cooperative defense tell us about the bureaucratic and political concerns of officials in governmental and nongovernmental agencies for both countries. The American presence, however, is more than the sum of these bureaucratic parts. It also constituted a massive cultural exchange program. Official records offer only second-hand perceptions of this aspect of German-American relations because the American men and women and the German citizens they interacted with on a day-to-day basis did not write the documents.
Recent research that incorporates oral history has shown that the official documents often present a picture at odds with the experiences as described by the participants themselves. Moreover, the institutional records often ignore factors that the participants consider essential dimensions of their experience.1 In these projects oral history interviews complement and balance the written documentary record.
It may well be that the cultural implications of the German-American interaction, and the ramifications for politics and society in both countries, are best explored by adding oral history interviews to traditional documentary evidence. In political, economic, and military relations as well, one can enrich and expand the documentary record by using interviews with the Germans and Americans who had daily contact with one another in the garrison towns and hamlets of West Germany.
In our own research, oral history interviews have provided insights into complicated situations and have furnished guidelines for sorting through the mass of paper documentation characteristic of the era. Interviewees have recounted with drama moments whose excitement disappears in bureaucratic reports. Interviewees have also furnished documents that are unavailable from any other source, as well as personal photographs and artifacts that enhance the historical record.
In spite of its apparent advantages, many traditionally trained historians view oral history with antipathy, skepticism, or, at best, indifference.2 This attitude frequently accompanies a remarkable lack of familiarity with the origins of oral history or with what has happened in oral history as a disciplined methodology over the past thirty years.
The pervasive negativism toward oral history is all the more surprising when one considers that, at its origins, all history was oral. Historians have come to acknowledge the value of the record that preliterate peoples preserve of their communities through spoken recitations. Where the written word developed organically, or where these oral traditions came to be transcribed, they form the basis of our histories of these cultures and societies. Embracing the value of both traditions, a Chinese proverb asserts that a drop of ink is worth a thousand years of memory.
Few historians in the western cultural tradition would dispute attributing the paternity for seriously researched analytical histories to the ancient Greeks. Yet the historians who crafted the earliest written prototypes of such histories depended on oral sources. In the opening pages of his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides explains his critical methodology:
With regard to my factual reporting of the events of the war I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions. . . . Either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I heard of them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories.3
Thucydides' practice of honoring - but verifying - both written and oral sources held sway throughout Greek and Roman history. In medieval Europe the Benedictine monk Bede speaks of the same approach in his histories of the English church and people. He supplemented his careful examination of the available documents with the testimony of his eighth-century contemporaries, those "countless faithful witnesses who either know or remember the facts."4
Even the invention of printing did not immediately displace oral testimony as a useful form of historical evidence. In writing his biography of Sweden's King Charles XII, Voltaire claimed that he had "not ventured to advance a single fact without consulting eyewitnesses of undoubted veracity." The practice continued into the nineteenth century. In the History of England, written between 1848 and 1855, Thomas Macaulay used oral tradition to describe the social status of highwaymen because "a great part of their history is to be learned only from ballads." A French contemporary, Jules Michelet, gathered oral evidence for over a decade from witnesses and participants before he wrote his History of the French Revolution. The works of English social historians such as Charles Booth, Beatrice Potter, and Sidney Webb carried on the practice of using oral testimony as evidence. All three combined a wealth and variety of oral resources with the growing body of written and printed documentation.
A century before Macaulay and Michelet wrote, the balance between oral testimony and written documentation had begun to shift. Increasing quantities of written and printed documentation fit nicely with the empiricism that characterized the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enlightenment skepticism called into doubt the veracity and reliability of oral accounts of events. A growing concern with the preservation of documents in state repositories such as the National Archives in France, and with the use of materials such as the Doomsday Books in England, emerged as the central focus of a new, professionally organized study of history. The tradition of honoring oral sources continued in the collection of folklore and in concerns with autobiography and constructed memory, but it moved away from history.
In history, a new methodology developed for establishing the credentials and standing of practitioners. In a sixty-year career at the University of Berlin, Leopold von Ranke embodied the new methodology and, through his historical seminar, made it the standard of accomplishment. Meticulous examination of documents collected in archives became the measure of professionalism. The test of a historian's mastery of his craft became the completion of a monograph that used original documents to expose some new facet of the past. The command of a rigorous method lent a mark of validation and exclusivity that typified the professional status of new academic disciplines. Archaeology had its digs, anthropology had its field trips, sociology developed its survey forms, and history had its documents. Citing sources in footnotes gave the historian a claim to scientific rigor. His use of the documents could be verified by revisiting the same archives, just as any scientific experiment could be replicated and thereby verified or challenged in the laboratory.
Ranke trained scores of prominent German historians, and by the end of the century his method came to dominate throughout Europe and America. In 1898 two eminent French historians at the Sorbonne in Paris, C. V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, published their Introduction to the Study of History, in which they declared categorically: "The historian works with documents. . . . There is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history."5
Langlois and Seignobos wrote with no thought of the emerging technology of sound recording that would give oral history a new opportunity. One of the objectives of research informed by the scientific method is to allow verification of results by others. Oral history testimony had never been susceptible to verification. No one but Michelet heard what his witness-participants had to say about the French Revolution. The development of sound recording has nullified this objection.
The phonograph first made possible the recording of sound in 1877. By the end of the century the technology had advanced to steel wire recorders. Improved versions of recording devices made broadcast recordings possible by the 1930s. In another decade magnetic tape brought tape recorders, and the first reel-to-reel machines became available. In the early 1960s less-expensive cassette recorders came onto the market. Today miniaturized recorders and microphones have vastly improved the quality of taped interviews. Digital recording of sound is now almost as inexpensive as high-quality analogue recording. These electronic devices make the collection of oral histories both practical and precise.
In spite of Ranke's triumph, oral history and the use of oral sources never totally disappeared. The tradition persisted, particularly among folklorists, anthropologists, and urban sociologists, a group of whom studied immigrant ethnic communities in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the progressive development of sound recording equipment opened a new prospect for oral history. Whereas oral testimony had been used only by the individual researcher who could sit down with the witness, recorded interviews could be used by succeeding generations of historians. Oral histories began to be collected for their archival value as well as for their value as evidence in preparing particular historical studies.
In the 1930s the Federal Writers' Project created an archival record of the lives of black slaves, workers, and homesteaders. During World War II, the U.S. Army launched a substantial oral history program. It assigned professional historians to collect and preserve oral testimony from participants and combatants at all levels and ranks to supplement paper records for an official history of the army in the war. One of the founders of the Oral History Association, Forrest C. Pogue, spent D-Day in a landing ship off the coast of Normandy interviewing wounded soldiers who had assaulted the beaches. Historians in the European theater alone conducted over two thousand interviews between D-Day and the end of the war. The National Archives still holds the notes and transcripts from these interviews.6
After the war the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Allan Nevins, embraced oral history for its potential to create valuable new documentation. In 1948 Nevins established the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, the first program explicitly dedicated to recording oral history interviews on tape. In so doing, he extended to the professional community of university scholars the practice pioneered by the Federal Writers' Project and the U.S. Army. The testimonies recorded and transcribed by the Columbia office (the original recordings were discarded after being transcribed) served no immediate research project. Nevins saw them as primary source material, a supplement to the written records, useful in projects that would be launched by any number of historians.7 Nevins' undertaking marked a new phase in the development of oral history the conscious creation of an oral history archive.
Since Nevins began the collection of oral history interviews at Columbia, other carefully structured oral history programs have expanded our access to witnesses of the recent past. Presidential libraries in the United States have interviews with political decision makers and advisers. Historical studies of American politics and foreign policy often mention these resources, but many historians use the interviews "primarily for color, not for revelations."8
As oral history became more affordable, easier technically, and more prevalent, American practitioners established the Oral History Association. They wanted to share experiences and to apply to this new methodology the same professional rigor that conscientious historians traditionally apply in their research. Since its inception in 1966 the OHA has encouraged methodological discussion and scholarship on oral history through its journal, The Oral History Review, and its annual meetings. The OHA has devised and published a set of guidelines for the conduct of oral history and the development of oral history projects. The American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and other professional groups have endorsed these guidelines.
The number of published books and articles concerning or using oral history has grown over the past thirty years, creating a substantial body of theoretical and methodological literature. Scholars have explored a wide range of issues, such as narrative mode, conversational analysis, ideology, subjectivity, representativeness, the dialectical interaction between interviewer and interviewee, and the relationship between memory, history, and documentation in interviews. For more information consult the bibliography.
Unfortunately, many graduate programs and granting agencies that support oral history projects are unfamiliar with the guidelines and methods carefully developed over time by oral historians. Too many researchers proceed with no regard for legal considerations, with poor bibliographic control of interviews, and without making arrangements to deposit the interviews in archives. Not surprisingly, the resulting interviews are often less than satisfactory, thereby reinforcing the negative view of oral history. There are, of course, historians who treat traditional documentary sources just as carelessly, but they are seen as aberrations rather than as representative of the profession.
Creating oral histories and using oral history interviews as evidence are two separate exercises. Both can be as methodologically sound as any approach to gathering and using information as long as historians use the same critical skills that any other form of evidence demands. Properly conducted, oral history interviews can provide information as valid and as valuable as diaries, memoirs, correspondence, or official reports. Carefully analyzed, oral interviews can reveal as much about the witnesses as about the events in which they participated. Historians can examine how the interplay between memory and experience shapes both the identity and the historical testimony that interviewees deliver. This is a sharp and useful contrast to the bureaucratic documents that are devoid of any personal dimension and that report all events in the passive voice.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Maria Höhn, "GIs, Veronikas and Lucky Strikes: German Reactions to the American Military Presence in the Rhineland During the 1950s" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995); Harald Leder, "Americans and German Youth, 1945-1960: A Study in Politics and Culture" (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1997).
2 Writing about the possibilities of oral history for the diplomatic history of the Cold War, Jonathan Soffer documents a similar range of negative attitudes among American historians. See his "Oral History and the History of American Foreign Policy," Journal of American History 82 (Sept. 1995): 607-16.
3 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. by Rex Warner (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), 25. See also Stephen E. Everett, Oral History Techniques and Procedures (Washington: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1992), ii.
4 On Bede and the historians mentioned in subsequent paragraphs, see Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). His second chapter presents a rich exposition of the long tradition of honoring oral sources in serious historical analysis.
5 As cited in Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 51.
6 Everett, Oral History Techniques and Procedures, 5-8.
7 Oral History at Columbia (New York: Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 1992), 1; and Ronald J. Grele, Envelopes of Sound. The Art of Oral History (New York: Praeger, 1985), 1-2.
8 Quotation from Professor Lloyd Gardner, cited in Soffer, "Oral History and the History of American Foreign Policy," JAH 82 (Sept. 1995): 608. The article explores the reservations that American diplomatic historians hold concerning oral history as source material. Soffer counters the skepticism by presenting several methodological approaches developed by oral historians and suggests ways of viewing oral sources that may enhance their value and credibility in the eyes of traditional historians.