Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography (review)

In writing about Theodor Herzl, Schorske reasoned, "His concept of nationhood helped Herzl to transform his longstanding fear of the masses into hope. Heretofore, as a liberal and a Jew, he had faced them—anarchists, socialists, nationalists, anti-Semites—as threats to the liberal order." 1 Schorske's historical analysis of Austrian politics, culture, and art would have most probably been labeled as a blend of cultural and intellectual history, or Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte. The dimension of biographical writing in his studies, however, makes him also a representative of "contextual biography," a particular method of biographical and historical writing that analyzes a historical epoch, its institutions, political atmosphere, and power relations by referring to prominent personalities, using them as a "window" or "prism." Their ideas, texts, memories, and agency allow readers to experience the past in a more authentic fashion than structuralism could offer. Unlike U.S. and Anglo-Saxon academia, which had been more tolerant toward such new methodological approaches as micro-history, oral history, and biography, German historians, mostly of the Bielefeld School, adhered until the 1970s to the method of structuralism, refusing biographical writing as "unscientific personalization" (Berghahn, 234–235). Historians, in particular those studying the Nazi state, were to investigate institutions, demography, and geographical and administrative factors that shaped historical events, relations, powers, and decisions; biography focusing on individuals could never explain the past satisfactorily.

Berghahn and Lässig's collection of essays includes texts by such distinguished historians as Ian Kershaw, Joachim Radkau, Angelika Schaser, and John C. G. Röhl. The volume's strength lies in presenting the methodological problems that biographical writing poses to historical analysis. Kershaw, in "Biography and the Historian: Opportunities and Constraints," for example, describes the value that his interdisciplinary usage of Max Weber's theorem of "charismatic leadership" had for his biography of Hitler (34). In "Women's Biographies–Men's History?" Schaser, focusing on gender in historiography, laments the lack of adequate research about the female leaders of the women's movement from Wilheminian Germany to the National Socialist period (78). The detailed introduction into historical methodology by Lässig ("Introduction: Biography in Modern History—Modern Historiography in Biography") and Berghahn's outlook on biographical writing ("Structuralism and Biography: Some Concluding Thoughts on the Uncertainties of a Historiographical Genre") are of immense value for younger historians who plan a historical and/or political biography.

In spite of the academic excellence of the volume, however, two minor points of critique remain. First, the geographical locale of Central Europe in the subtitle is misleading; none of the contributions discusses Austrian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian biographical writing. Most of the essays focus on German history; two are dedicated to Dutch history. Second, the volume would have benefited from a contribution dealing with intellectual history and the importance of political thought and philosophical analysis for a biography.2 Researching the philosophical ideas of a Central European politician, for example, would offer new insights. Such an interdisciplinary approach would assess not only the limits and possibilities of individual political agency within the institutions and structures of the region's states but also enlarge the methodological dimension.