The Future of the German Past Transatlantic Reflections for the 1990s

1. Benz, Wolfgang, ed., Die Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1989) esp. vol. 3: Gesellschaft and vol. 4: Kultur. Bark, Dennis L. and Gress, David R., A History of West Germany, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford, 1989).

2. Maier, Charles S., The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German Identity (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988), 168–72. To be sure, Maier leaves the issue undecided. Behind the mask of the carnevalesque lurks Baktin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, H. (Cambridge, 1968), and the rediscovery of alterity.

3. Especially Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Masumi, B. (Minneapolis, 1987). On the (very different) German turns against hyperrealist theories see van Reijen, Willem, ed., Die unvollendete Vernunft: Moderne vs. Postmoderne (Frankfurt, 1982).

4. Jolles, André, Einfache Formen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz, 2d ed. (Halle, 1956).

5. During a memorable lecture on film and memory Anton Kaes (see n. 53) showed a film clip from Monty Python's “Holy Grail” in which Lancelot is lost in the fog of a medieval forest only to end up on a modern English street. Lancelot is frisked by two policemen who find a character dressed up in medieval clothes highly suspicious. Is this the fate of the Rankean historians' search for veracity, asked Kaes.

6. Stürmer, Michael, “Mitten in Europa: Versuchung und Verdammnis der Deutschen,” Dissonanzen des Fortschritts: Essays über Geschichte und Politik in Deutschland (Munich and Zurich, 1986), 314, in which the (cultural) conditio becomes the (geographic) site and vice versa.

7. Kocka, Jürgen, Geschichte und Aufklärung (Göttingen, 1989).

8. See generally Maier, Unmasterable Past, passim. Merkel, Reinhard, “Wahnbild Nation,” Die Zeit (16 03 1990), 18, is a gloss on recent publications. Our use of the “imaginary” (l'imaginaire social) reflects the oeuvres of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort who both emphasize the creative/constructive core of the social historical world. See the brief summary in Thompson, John B., Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley, 1984), 16–41. The most powerful recent statement on this issue is Meszaros, Istvan, The Power of Ideology (New York, 1989). The most successful historiographic rendition of the social imaginary is Veyne, Paul, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Moore-Riuvolucri, M. (Middletown, Conn., 1984).

9. Taylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), and his The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954), are good examples of this older national historiography. The debate on the Taylor thesis shows how this paradigmatic view is replaced. See Louis, William Roger, ed., The Origins of the Second World War: A J. P. Taylor and His Critics (New York, 1972). The most popular alternative text was Stern, Fritz, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1961). The rediscovery of “national character” since the late 1970s is a German preoccupation. See among the “makers” of such imaginaries Weidenfeld, Werner, ed., Die Identität der Deutschen (Munich, 1983), and among the dissectors Drews, Axel, Gerhard, Ute, and Link, Jürgen, “Moderne Kollektivsymbolik: Eine diskurstheoretische orientierte Einführung mit Auswahlbibliographie,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (1985), Sonderheft 1, 256–374. By far the most successful analysis of this syndrome is the special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988), no. 3: “Postmodernism and Japan.”

10. Stern, Fritz, “German History in America, 1884–1984,” Central European History 19 (1986):131–63, and the basic assessment by Krieger, Leonard, “European History in America,” History, ed. Higham, John (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 233–313.

11. Berghahn, Volker, “Deutschlandbilder 1945–1965: Angloamerikanische Historiker und moderne deutsche Geschichte,” Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg 1945–1965, ed. Schulin, Ernst (Munich, 1989), 239–72.

12. Geyer, Michael, “Deutsche—Europäer—Weltbürger: Eine Überlegung zum Aufstieg und Fall des Modernismus in der Historiographie,” Deutschland und Europa in der Neuzeit: Festschrift für K.O. Freiherr von Aretin, ed. Melville, R. et al. (Stuttgart, 1988), 27–47; and the introduction of Jarausch, Konrad H. and Jones, Larry Eugene to In Search of a Liberal Germany: Studies in the History of German Liberalism (Oxford, 1990).

13. Schulze, Winfried, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989); Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “Historiography in Germany Today,” Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age,” ed. Habermas, Jürgen, trans. Buchwalter, A. (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1987), 221–59. Faulenbach, Bernd, ed., Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 1974); Mommsen, Wolfgang J., “Gegenwärtige Tendenzen in der Geschichtsschreibung der Bundesrepublik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7 (1981): 149–88.

14. Rüsen, Jörn, Grundzüge einer Historik, 3 vols. (Göttingen, 1983–1989); Koselleck, Reinhart, Hermeneutik und Historik (Heidelberg, 1987).

15. Krieger, Leonard, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago and London, 1977), and his Time's Reasons: Philosophies of History Old and New (Chicago and London, 1989). From within Germany, it looks as if the two were radically opposed. See Weber, Wolfgang, “The Long Reign and the Final Fall of the German Conception of History: A Historical-Sociological View,” Central European History 21 (1988): 379–95.

16. Kocka, Jürgen and Nipperdey, Thomas, Theorie und Erzählung in der Geschichte (Munich, 1979); Koselleck, Reinhart, Lutz, Heinrich, and Rüsen, Jörn, eds., Formen der Geschichtsschreibung (Munich, 1982).

17. Compare Hans-Ulrich Wehler's old with his new magnum opus: Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne and Berlin, 1969) and his recent Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vols. 1 and 2 (Munich, 1987). See also Habermas, Jürgen, Kleine politische Schriften, I-IV (Frankfurt, 1981), Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit: Kleine politische Schriften V (Frankfurt, 1985), with discussions on politics and modernity, culminating in “Geschichtsbewusstsein und posttraditionelle Identität:Die Westorientierung der Bundesrepublik,” EineArt Schadensabwicklung: Kleine politische Schriften VI (Frankfurt, 1987).

18. Hildebrand, Contrast Klaus, “Geschichte oder ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte’? Die Notwendigkeit einer politischen Geschichtsschreibung von den internationalen Beziehungen,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 328–75, with Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus (Düsseldorf, 1971). A polemical record of the academic wars informing this division is Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum “Historikerstreit” (Munich, 1988).

19. See the outline of a discipline by Kocka, Jürgen, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff, Entwicklung, Probleme, 2d ed. (Göttingen, 1986), and the germanocentrism of comparative history in idem, ed., Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich (Munich, 1988)—a project which could take its intellectual premises from Stern, Fritz, A German-American Century: Complementarity, Conflict, Collaboration, a speech delivered on the occasion of the German-American day, 10 6, 1988 (New York, 1988).

20. Rüsen, Jörn et al. , Die Zukunft der Aufklärung (Frankfurt, 1988), and his earlier “Geschichte als Aufklärung? Oder das Dilemma des historischen Denkens zwischen Herrschaft und Emanzipation,“ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7 (1981): 189–218. Most recently, Iggers, Georg G., “Rationality and History” (Buffalo, 1990, MS).

21. One can follow this trend both in journals like Freibeuter with its strong Italo-French leanings (including the Italo-French undercurrents of Americanism) and in the delayed reception of historians like LaCapra, Dominick, Geschichte und Kritik (Frankfurt, 1987), or Geschichte Denken: Neubestimmung und Perspektiven moderner europäischer Geistesgeschichte (Frankfurt, 1988). The German focus is still on mentalité. See Sellin, Volker, “Mentalität und Mentalitätsgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 241 (1985): 556–98. The subjectivist notion of consciousness hovers on the margins of literary-historical analysis. See Schöttler, Peter, “Sozialgeschichte, ‘Erfahrungsansatz’ und Sprachanalyse,” KultuRRevolution 11 (1986): 56–60.

22. Niethammer, Lutz, ed., “Die Menschen machen ihre Geschichte nicht aus freien Stücken, aber sie machen sie selbst”: Einladung zu einer Geschichte des Volkes in Nordrhein-Westfalen (Berlin, 1988); and especially the three-volume series on the Ruhrgebiet: “Die jahre weiss man nicht, wo man die heute hinsetzen soil”: Faschismus-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Bonn and Berlin, 1983); “Hinterher merkl man, dass es richtig war, dass es schiefgegangen ist”: Nachkriegserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin and Bonn, 1983); (together with A. von Plato), “Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten”: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern (Bonn and Berlin, 1985); Brüggemeier, F. J., Leute vor Ort: Ruhrbergleute und Ruhrbergbau 1889–1914 (Munich, 1983). For the contrasting strategies of scientification see Kocka, Jürgen, “Klassen oder Kultur: Durchbrüche oder Sackgassen in der Arbeitergeschichte,” Merkur 36 (1982): 955–65; Tenfelde, Klaus, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn, 1977). Compare further the Volkskunde approach of Kaschuba, Wolfgang and Lipp, Carola, Dörfliches Überleben: Zur Geschichte der materiellen und sozialen Reproduktion ländlicher Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1982), with Mooser, Josef, Ländliche Klassengesellschaft 1780–1848: Bauern und Unterschichten, Landwirtschaft und Gewerbe im östlichen Westfalen (Göttingen, 1984).

23. Rather than fastening on Hans-Ulrich Wehler's legendary footnote on Frauengeschichte in his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Munich, 1987), 1: 553, it is worth pointing to the rift between Koonz, Claudia, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York, 1987), and Bock, Gisela, “Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem Buch von Claudia Koonz,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 563–79, which reflects the distance between two academic cultures.

24. This is not necessarily the agenda of every-day history, but it is surely the aim of Lüdtke, Alf, Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt and New York, 1986). The “classic” German text on this issue is quite unrelated to Alltagsgeschichte. It is Kluge, Alexander and Negt, Oskar, Geschichte und Eigensinn: Geschichtliche Organisation der Arbeitsvermögen; Deutschland als Produktionsöffentlichkeit; Gewalt des Zusammenhanges (Frankfurt, 1981).

25. The most formidable example of an integral approach is Maier, Charles S., Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton, 1975). See also Feldman, Gerald and Winkler, Heinrich A., ed., Organisierter Kapitalismus: Voraussetzungen und Anfänge (Göttingen, 1974). In his contribution to this volume Feldman already indicates his turn to a historiographic hyperrealism which becomes overwhelming in his Iron and Steel in the German Inflation (Princeton, 1975). It is a most telling exercise to compare the latter with his Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966) as one the foremost examples of a postwar American historical narrative. Note especially the economy of documentation and the paradigmatic quality of the narration in the earlier work.

26. Jarausch, Konrad, “German Social History—American Style,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 349–59, and his introduction to German Professions, 1800–1950, ed. Cocks, Geoffrey and Jarausch, Konrad (New York and Oxford, 1990), 9–24.

27. Evans, Richard J., ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London and New York, 1978); Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (New York and London, 1984).

28. Evans, Richard J., Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich (London and Winchester, Mass., 1987).

29. Eley, Geoff, From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston and London, 1986).

30. Blackbourn, David, Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London and Boston, 1987).

31. Kennedy, Paul, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London and Boston, 1980); Faulenbach, Bernd, Ideologie des deutschen Weges: Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1980).

32. “Debate: Abraham's, DavidThe Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” Central European History 17 (1984): 159–293.

33. Stern, Fritz, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York, 1987), and Craig, Gordon, The Germans (New York, 1982). For Germany the same issue appears as a revival of museums and historical exhibitions. See Boockmann, Hartmut, Geschichte im Museum (Munich, 1987); Frei, Alfred, “Der neue Museumsboom—Kultur für alle,” Neue Politische Literatur 32 (1986): 385–97; Zacharias, W., ed., Zeitphänomen Musealisierung: Das Verschwinden der Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinnerung (Essen, 1990). As alternative interpretation: Lübbe, Hermann, “Der Fortschritt und das Museum,” Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 1 (1983): 39–56 against the background of his analysis of contemporary culture Zeit-Verhältnisse: Zur Kulturgeschichte des Fortschritts (Graz and Vienna, 1983).

34. We have no desire to complicate an already complicated debate (summarized in Huyssen, Andreas, “Mapping the Postmodern,” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism [Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1986], 179–221), but it seems appropriate to think of the historicist multiplication effects and the “universal abandon” of postmodernism (Ross, Andrew, ed., Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism [Minneapolis, 1988]) as only one trend in the process of the reorganization of cultural capital. The other is very much a discussion with our ancients, partly because their agenda has become visible again, partly because this discussion helps formulating the difference of the present. The problem with this strategy consists in the dual challenge of (a) going back critically to the European sources for knowledge and (b) critically assessing the American organization of European cultural capital in the 1930s and 1940s. The fatal flaw of the postmodernist debate consists in its unwillingness to deal with the American configuration of cultural capital. The result is an evasive historicism.

35. On the German-French intellectual debate see among others Raulet, Gerhard, Gehemmte Zukunft: Zur gegenwärtigen Krise der Emanzipation (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1986), and especially Welsch, Wolfgang, Unsere Postmoderne Moderne (Weinheim, 1987); Huyssen, Andreas, “Postmoderne-eine amerikanische Internationale?” Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels, ed. Huyssen, Andreas and Scherpe, Klaus R. (Reinbek, 1986); and Welsch, Wolfgang, “Vielheit oder Einheit? Zum gegenwärtigen Spektrum der philosophischen Diskussion um die ‘Postmoderne’: Französische, italienische. amerikanische, deutsche Aspekte,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 94 (1987): 14–142.

36. The Holocaust as test for any and all postmodern strategies is discussed by Friedlander, Saul, “Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism,” Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Baldwin, Peter (Boston, 1980), 88–101, and Dan Diner, “Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National Socialism,” ibid., 135–44.

37. Iggers, Georg, “The ‘Methodenstreit’ in International Perspective: The Reorientation of Historical Studies at the Turn of the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century,” Storia della Storiografia 6 (1984): 21–32, contains a very condensed summary of the arguments that reappear, enriched with a heavy dose of American pragmatism, in Hollinger, David, “The Return of the Prodigal: The Persistence of Historical Knowing,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 610–21.

38. On the simulacrum see Deleuze, Gilles, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (1983): 45–56, and the ever provocative Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations (New York, 1983).

39. Derrida, Jacques, The Postcard from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Bass, A. (Chicago and London, 1987).

40. For the American critique see White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973), and his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1978). Among the newer interpretations see Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879–907; Berkhofer, Robert F., “The Challenge of Poetics to (Normal) Historical Practice,” Poetics Today 9 (1988): 435–52; Orr, Linda, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18 1986): 1–22.

41. Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, G. and Massumi, B. (Minneapolis, 1984), xxiv.

42. Ibid.

43. Smith, Paul, “The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism,” Dalhousie Review 62 (1982): 17–25.

44. Following Leonard Krieger, Time's Reasons, we put two traditions together as expressions of a singular (modernist) conjuncture, which, in Germany, are professionally and politically hostile.

45. On posthistoire and its tradition see the reflections by Niethammer, Lutz, “Afterthoughts on Posthistoire,” History and Memory 7 (1989): 25–54.

46. Turner, Henry A. Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York, 1985).

47. Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, 1800–1866 (Munich, 1986); Stern, Dreams and Delusions; Wehler, Gesellschaftsgeschichte.

48. On this Foucaultian strategy see White, Hayden, “Foucault Decoded: Notes From Underground,“ Tropics of Discourse, 230–60; Veyne, Paul, “Foucault révolutionne l'histoire,” in his Comment on écrit l'histoire (Paris, 1979); Megill, Allan, “The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 117–41; Goldstein, Jan, “Foucault among the Sociologists: The ‘Disciplines’ and the History of Professions,” History and Theory 19 (1984): 170–92.

49. With a strong psychohistorical bias, Weinstein, Fred, History and Theory after the Fall: An Essay on Interpretation (Chicago and London, 1990), is one of the first to discuss the problematic of historical heterogeneity beyond relativism and historicism. See also the brief and informative philosophical discussion by Norris, Christopher, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London and New York, 1985), and Hayles, N. Katherine, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca and London, 1990). A concrete application is Terdieman, Richard, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London, 1985).

50. Among the most recent American discussions see Kellner, Hans, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, Wis., 1989). About German-French approaches, Schöttler, Peter, “Sozialgeschichtliches Paradigma und historische Diskursanalyse,” Diskurstheorie und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Fohrmann, Jürgen and Müller, Harro (Frankfurt, 1988):159–99 is informative.

51. Märthesheimer, Peter and Frenzel, Ivo, eds., Im Kreuzfeuer, der Fernseh film “Holocaust”: Eine Nation ist betroffen (Frankfurt, 1979); Ahren, Yizhak et al. , Das Lehrstück “Holocaust”: Zur Wirkungspsychologie eines Medienereignisses (Opladen, 1982); Knilli, Friedrich and Zielinski, Siegfried, eds., Holocaust zur Unterhaltung: Anatomie eines internationalen Bestsellers (Berlin, 1982).

52. Hugo, Richard, The Hitler Diaries (New York, 1983).

53. See Kaes, Anton, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

54. An interpretation of this crisis is presented in Jameson, Frederic, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodern Debate,” in his The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 2: Syntax of History (Minneapolis, 1988), 103–13, as well as his two essays on “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 52–92, and “Marxism and Postmodernism,” New Left Review 176 (1989): 31–45; see also the summary of Kellner, Douglas, ed., Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (Washington, D.C., 1989). Last but not least, the catalogues of two exhibitions discuss history: The Art of Memory: The Loss of History (The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1985) and A Brokerage of Desire (Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, Los Angeles, 1986), the latter with a plea for “ruinism.” A German echo is Böhringer, H., “Die Ruine in der Posthistoire,” in his Begriffsfelder: Von der Philosophic zur Kunst (Berlin, 1985): 23–37.

55. Weidenfeld, Werner, ed., Geschichtsbewusstsein der Deutschen (Cologne, 1987).

56. Jauss, Hans-Robert, “Der Gebrauch der Fiktion in Formen der Anschauung und Darstellung der Geschichte,” Formen der Geschichtsschreibung, 415–51. Typically, a history of realism in German historiography is missing. On rupture and history see Schulin, Ernst, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch: Studien zur Entwicklung von Geschichtswissenschaft und historischem Denken (Göttingen, 1979).

57. Much of the argument during the symposium centered on the issue of the limits of deconstruction that denies referentiality. See as critical introduction Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1982), and the exchange “Jacques Derrida's ‘Paul de Man's War,’” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989). See also Bennett, Tony, “Texts in History: The Determinations of Reading and Their Texts,” Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Attridge, Derek et al. (Cambridge and New York, 1987).

58. Particularly contemporary historians would do well to reconsider the issue of archives and their use, because these archives no longer fit nineteenth-century notions of collectors and collections. In imitating nineteenth-century practices and methodologies twentieth-century historians have lost their methodological ground long before the on-going information revolution has radically severed the link between originality-preservation-collection. If the central concern of a now past contemporary history has been a scarcity of information within an abundance of data (which is the modernist syndrome), today's contemporary history faces the issue of reincoding information (and thus annihilating the notion of originality) and of creating virtual pasts (and thus collapsing the distance between past and present). As a useful introduction see Poster, Mark, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago and London, 1990).

59. Niethammer, Lutz, ed., Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis: Die Praxis der “Oral History “ (Frankfurt, 1980).

60. The current debate on the geopolitical place of Germany in the authentic center of Europe (M. Stürmer) vs. the derivation of this “place in the middle” from (false) consciousness (H.-U. Wehler) is reflected in the essay by Schultz, Hans-Dietrich, “Deutschlands ‘natürliche’ Grenzen:‘Mittellage’ und ‘Mitteleuropa’ in der Diskussion der Geographen seit dem Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 248–81. On the history of Begriffsgeschichte see Oexle, Otto G., “Sozialgeschichte—Begriffsgeschichte—Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners,” Vierteljahrshefte für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 71 (1984): 303–41, Koselleck, Reinhart, “Begriffsgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte,” Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte: Aspekte und Probleme (Cologne, 1972), 116–31, and Koselleck, Reinhart, ed., Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1978).

61. For the German-French (para)academic discourse see the journal Geschichtswerkstatt (in history) and KultuRRevolution (in litcrit). See also the useful bibliography in Geier, Manfred and Woetzel, Harold, eds., Das Subjekt des Diskurses (Berlin, 1983). The Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies has been a guiding light for Great Britain and the United States.

62. Thompsen, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), and his The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York, 1978); Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, 1963), and his Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984). For the History Workshop movement see Samuel, Raphael, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London, 1981).

63. Ross, Andrew, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York and London, 1989). A good example is Kaschuba, Wolfgang, “Volkskultur und Arbeiterkultur als symbolische Ordnung: Einige volkskundliche Anmerkungen zur Debatte von Alltags- und Kulturgeschichte,” in Alltagsgeschichte (n. 24), 191–223.

64. Johnson, Eric A., “Quantitative German History in the United States and the United Kingdom,” Central European History 21 (1988): 396–420, and Jarausch, Konrad H. and Hardy, Kenneth, Quantitative Methods for Historians: A Guide to Research, Data, and Statistics (Chapel Hill, 1991), 199–208.

65. Medick, Hans, “‘Missionare im Ruderboot?’ Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als Heraus-forderung an die Sozialgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 295–319, or Cohen, Bernard S., An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Dehli, 1987). A less glamorous aspect of every-day history is the revival of Landesgeschichte as Regionalgeschichte. See Zang, Gert, Die unaufhaltsame Annäherung an das Einzelne: Reflexionen über den theoretischen und praktischen Nutzen der Regional- und Alltagsgeschichte (Konstanz, 1985).

66. The tantalizing remarks by Trommler, Frank, “Über die Lesbarkeit der deutschen Kultur,” Germanistik in den USA: Neue Entwicklungen und Methoden (Opladen, 1989), 222–59. Rethinking Benjamin, Walter and writing on historical performance is Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago and London, 1987). A different, practical aspect of performative history is discussed in Frei, Alfred and Baier, Ernst, Geschichte spielen: Ein Handbuch für historische Stadtspiele (Pfaffenweiler, 1990).

67. LaCapra, Dominick, History and Criticism (Ithaca and London, 1985); Ginzburg, Carlo, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J., and Tedeschi, A. (Baltimore, 1989). But see also the unbound subjectivism of Duerr, Hans Peter, ed., Der Wissenschaftler und das Irrationale, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1981) and his Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, trans. Goodman, F. (Oxford and New York, 1985).

68. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Moore, W. and Cammad, P. (London, 1985).

69. For responses see Frei, Alfred, “Erinnern-Bedenken-Lernen: Über den Versuch das Unbeschreibliche zu beschreiben,” Erinnern, Bedenken, Lernen, ed. Frei, A. and Runge, J. (Sigmaringen, 1990), and his “Geschichtswerkstätten als Zukunftswerkstätten: Ein Plädoyer für aufklärerische Geschichtsarbeit,” Die andere Geschichte, ed. Paul, Gerhard and Schossig, Bernhard (Cologne, 1986), 258–80 on the one hand, andLübbe, Hermann, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsin-teresse: Analytik und Pragmatik der Historie (Basel, 1977), on the other.

70. It is intriguing to see how historians are fixated on the “high-cultural” film, while they neglect TV. However, more history “happens” on TV than anywhere else, notwithstanding the pretensions of the American Historical Review! See Dotterweich, Helmut, “Fernsehen und Geschichte: Die Bedeutung des Erzählerischen-auch das unterhaltende Fernsehspiel kann Historie vermitteln,” Die Zeit (11 01 1985), 14. On film see Aurich, Rolf, “Film in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft,” Geschichtswerkstatt 17 (1989): 54–66.

71. Among others Cohen, Sande, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, 1986).

72. For some sample reactions see Diwald, Helmut, Deutschland einig Vaterland (Frankfurt, 1990); Nipperdey, Thomas, “Die Deutschen wollen und dürfen eine Nation sein,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 07 1990; Gall, Lothar, “Bismarck-Preussen, Deutschland und Europa,” in the catalogue of the exhibition with the same name (Berlin 1990), 25ff.;Mommsen, Wolfgang J., “Die Idee der deutschen Nation in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte (Spring 1990).

73. For GDR responses see Wroblewsky, Clement von, “Die Lüge zur Weltordnung gemacht,” Temps modernes (Spring 1990); Schulze, Winfried, “Die zweigeteilte Geschichte,” Die Zeit, 7 09 1990; and Jarausch, Konrad H., “The Failure of East German Anti-Fascism: Some Ironies of History as Politics,” forthcoming in the German Studies Review, 02 1991.

74. Mearsheimer, John, “Why We Will Soon Miss the Cold War,” The Atlantic Monthly (08 1990), 35–50. See also Ash, Timothy Garton, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York, 1990), and Dahrendorf, Ralf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York, 1990).

75. Kocka, Jürgen, “Revolution und Nation 1989: Zur historischen Einordnung der gegenwärtigen Ereignisse,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 19 (1990): 479–99. In spite of constant references to the historicity of the changes, historians have been surprisingly reluctant to comment on the upheaval in the GDR.

76. Geyer, Michael, “On Sovereignty as a German Problem” (Chicago, 03 1990, MS).

77. Jarausch, Konrad H., “Old Fears and New Hopes: Historical Reflections on German (Re-)unification” (Chapel Hill, 04 1990, MS). For a first English-language summary see Pond, Elizabeth, After the Wall: U.S. Policy toward Germany (New York, 1990).

78. Gransow, Volker and Jarausch, Konrad H., eds., Die deutsche Vereinigung: Dokumente zu Bürgerbewegung, Annäherung und Beitritt (Cologne, 1991). Although there has been a tremendous amount of journalistic commentary on the recent events, the conceptual implications of the revolution of 1989 have been entirely neglected so far.

79. Leggewie, Claus, “Heimat Babylon: Über die Zukunft eines schönen Traumes: Politische Immigranten, Arbeitsuchcnde aus allen Erdteilen, offene Grenzen innerhalb des Kontinents: Europa ist auf dem Weg zu einer ‘multikulturellen’ Gesellschaft: Doch wie realistisch ist die Utopie von der bunten Völkergemeinschaft,” Die Zeit 32 (31 07 1987). See also Bocklet, Peter, ed., Aussiedler, Gastarbeiter, Asylanten: Zu viele Fremde im Land? (Düsseldorf, 1990).