Ambivalence of Identity: The Austrian Experience of Nation-Building in a Modern Society

3. The Writing of History and National Imagery: The Intellectual Foundations of Austrian Nation-Building

3 The Writing of History and National Imagery The Intellectual Foundations of Austrian Nation-Building istorical interpretations provided essential images for the formation of Austrian national consciousness after 1945.1 As it illustrates the political capacity of history, the Austrian national debate becomes of particular interest in the fundamental metahistorical discussion about the nature of the discipline. The place of history in the system of coordinates delineating scienti¤c and creative production has been the subject of an ongoing theoretical debate ever since the appearance and advance of the (new) social sciences began to undermine the scienti¤c foundations of historical methods. Critical scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that historians do not discover facts but produce them, that they choose and arrange information and do not merely present it. In its most explicit form, this viewpoint implies that history consists exclusively of interpretation.2 History as a discipline borders on the social sciences on one side and on (imaginative) literature on the other. It distinguishes itself from¤ctional literature through its obligation to strive for truthful representation and to adhere to methodologies that support this goal; it distinguishes itself from the social sciences by not asserting to make human behavior predictable and explicable by systematic laws. As a consequence, history has come under attack from two opposite directions. On the one hand, it has been accused of being speculative H 52 The Ambivalence of Identity and lacking scienti¤c rigor. If the ¤eld wants to stand its ground academically , it needs to be able to legitimate itself on scholarly—some would say, scienti¤c—grounds vis-à-vis ¤ctional literature. One group of historians has tried to accomplish this by adopting the methodologies and theoretical paradigms of the newer social sciences. These disciplines attempt to discover prognosticative, generally applicable structural patterns . The multifaceted and often unpredictable course of historical developments, however, will not always ¤t into such rigid structures. Moreover, the methodologies of sociology and political science may themselves face questions as to whether their claim to scienti¤c rigor is built more on technique than on results; in other words, as to whether the main focus of these disciplines has been on the internal conclusiveness of the theory and the proper application of the methodology rather than on the actual soundness and signi¤cance of the empirical ¤ndings.3 At the same time, there have been attempts to incorporate historical writings conceptually into the body of creative literature. With regard to form, traditional history books resemble works of creative literature —indeed, the historical novel can be seen as literature’s counterpart to textbook history—and the development of the motion picture industry has further obscured the differences between ¤ctional and scholarly dissemination of historical knowledge. One can safely surmise that the general public’s view of history is shaped to a larger extent by ¤ctional than by academic accounts. The integration of history into literature has been advanced further by its gradual adoption of literary theory and similar more speculative modes of analysis. Cultural historians have proven particularly receptive to literary paradigms. The introduction of research tools that focus on semantics and textual structure could, as a self-ful¤lling prophecy, contribute to the assimilation of historiography into ¤ctional literature. In an interesting twist, theorists who reprove history for being but a form of ¤ction frequently advance theoretical propositions that might indeed result in such a resolution. Hayden White has drawn attention to the role of literary techniques in historiography.4 One can observe a continuum ranging from historical evidence via the narrative interpretation of such evidence to imaginative literature inspired by such evidence. This continuum demysti¤es the distinctions between different styles of history-based discourse, but does not justify the reversal of its logical direction: it still does not permit the treatment of academic historiography exclusively The Intellectual Foundations of Austrian Nation-Building 53 as literature. While historical writing can pro¤t from the strength of its narrative, it distinguishes itself from imaginative literature through its special responsibility toward historical evidence. Historical writing that does not suf¤ciently re¶ect this responsibility, however, indeed blurs the distinction between academic history and creative literature. In this light, the intertwining of historical writing and national mythology deepens the crisis of legitimacy faced by contemporary historians . In postwar Austria, this universal dilemma was exacerbated when historians were entrusted with the task of validating a new national...