Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices (review)

It seems, in the era of the Internet and the History Channel, that we are all historians now. Information technology and digitalization, combined with the disseminative power of social media, have opened the possibility of infinite reconfigurations of evidence and narrative to legitimate all manner of obsessions, prejudices, and ideologies. Academic historians thus confront a challenging question: can the empirical ethos of conventional scholarship engage popular historical consciousness in this postspecialist age? Or, as Sylvia Paletschek puts it somewhat differently in her introduction: “History, what is it for?” (4).

Although it addresses this larger issue, this volume of essays primarily frames the presence (and effect) of the past in our social and collective memory as a problem in the study of historiography. Paletschek conventionally points to the modern professionalization of the historical discipline as the beginning of a trend toward specialization that created the capacity to ask more and more questions, at the expense of the ability to answer them satisfactorily. Outside the walls of academia, the reaction has taken the shape of an “expanded historiography” within popular culture, which, as Jörn Rüsen explains, integrates “the functions of instruction, entertainment, criticism, diversion, [and] education . . . into the comprehensive unity of historical commemoration” (8). In other words, the limiting of the history of history writing to the study of academic historiography, i.e., “objective and scientific” history, tended to marginalize what it considered the simplistic and teleological conclusions of what Wolfgang Hardtwig calls “history for readers” (73). The essays in this book challenge that prejudice, and usefully propose a more ecumenical analytical approach that can encompass the multifaceted productions of social, gendered, material, and popular historical and memory culture.

The lines of demarcation emerged gradually. Chapters by Paletschek, Angelika Epple, and Sylvia Schraut examine how women historians, beginning in the nineteenth century, established popular biographies, commemorative feuilletons, and “light” historical literature appearing in illustrated mass media (such as Die Gartenlaube) as important components of a rising civic historical literacy. Yet, as a professionalized historicism based in the universities acquired a hegemonic methodological authority over what Ottokar Lorenz called the “rational construction” of the past, the moral judgments, characterological focus, and antiquarian narrowness of congenitally “nonscientific” historians (such as women and Catholics) were increasingly dismissed as subjective dilettantism.

With one exception (Claudia Lenz on the popular memory of World War II in Norway), eight of this book’s twelve chapters (including the contributions of Paletschek, Epple, and Schraut) deal with specific case studies analyzing various aspects of the popular, or nonacademic, presentation of history in Germany: Helmut Bergenthum on the writing of world histories in 1900; Christoph Classen on the presentation of history on East German radio; Frank Bösch on film depictions of the Third Reich in the 1970s; Beate Ceranski on the mythmaking surrounding Albert Einstein and Marie Curie; and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier on the canonization of West Germany’s victorious 1954 World Cup team. The core of this volume, however, lies in two theoretical essays by Wolfgang Hardtwig and Dieter Langewiesche. These chapters address, respectively, the market-driven “history boom” beginning in the 1980s and the “democratization” of history within “communities of remembrance” (127). Both betray a characteristic German anxiety about “the unmasterable past,” and, in so doing, overcomplicate the challenges that historians of history writing face. Another problem is that they shy away from fully engaging with an already established interdisciplinary approach to the study of historical culture.

Hardtwig, in looking at what he calls “audience-oriented modes of representation” (74), points out that the mass media’s selling of personality-based history has always blurred the line between the imprimatur of scholarly rigor and marketability. He further acknowledges the danger of the “degradation” of the historical consciousness of an uninformed audience. But he also realizes that academia’s justified fear of simplification has led to a fear of simplicity and literary and narrative representations...