Cross-posted from H-GERMAN

Der Beitrag befindet sich auch auf der WWW-Prasentation von H-German, unter: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~german/books/reviews/melton-reply.html

I am grateful to the Editor for offering me the opportunity to respond to Rita Krueger's review of H.M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [HABSBURG, March 20], and Gordon Mork's review of Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Melton, eds., Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s through the 1950s [cross-posted from H-GERMAN, March 16]. Having contributed to both works, I was of course pleased with their favorable reception. I have little to add to Rita Krueger's thoughtful review except to say that I look forward to reading her own dissertation on the Bohemian nobility. In the case of Gordon Mork's review, I would like to expand on one of the more controversial themes explored in the volume.

Professor Mork rightly underscores a central theme of the Lehmann/Melton volume, namely the continuity between pre- and post-1945 historical scholarship in Germany and Austria. My own interest in this question arose out of my work on Otto Brunner, a scholar compromised by his Nazi involvements but undeniably important for the development of social history in Germany and Austria. Scholars since Hans-Ulrich Wehler had assumed that the writing of social history was an inherently "progressive" undertaking, one that had been stymied by reactionary scholars in the Kaiserreich, driven into exile by the Nazis, but would ultimately prevail in the historical social science of the Bielefeld school. Yet as several of the essays in the Lehmann/Melton volume demonstrate, the development of social history in Germany and Austria can also be traced back to the "folk history" (Volksgeschichte) of the Weimar and Nazi periods (on Volksgeschichte see also the recent study by Willi Oberkrome, Volksgeschichte. Methodische Innovation und volkische Ideologisierung in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1918- 1945 [Gottingen, 1993]). Often racialist and chauvinistic in tone, Volksgeschichte was "denazified" after 1945 and rechristened as "structural history" in the work of Werner Conze and Otto Brunner. Strukturgeschichte then proved to be an important impetus behind the development of German and Austrian social history during the 1950s and 1960s.

Here I want to emphasize that my goal in organizing the Emory conference (from which the volume originated) was not to rehabilitate Nazi historical scholarship, but rather to challenge the notion that social history was somehow an intrinsically progressive and virtuous exercise. That idea informed much the work of the so-called Bielefeld school, as well as Anglo-American social history ca. 1968 to the present. In its crudest, most self-righteous form, this attitude holds that only those who write about "the people" (i.e. peasants, workers, and other marginalized and oppressed people of all races and sexes) are engaged in significant work. Everyone else -- e.g. diplomatic and military historians, historians of political thought, writers of traditional political and institutional history  -- is engaged in work that is at best irrelevant and at worst elitist. I confess that I always hated this attitude, not only for its unbearable smugness but also for its naive populism and romanticism. Even at its best -- say, in the brilliant scholarship of the late E.P. Thompson -- this social history was and is marred by an anti-modernist master narrative in which everything always seems to get worse as history approaches the present. Here the present is invidiously contrasted with the sense of "wholeness" and community that putatively pervaded peasant or artisanal societies of the past. Subaltern groups habitually "resist," upholding their "autonomy" and identity.

In the course of my own research on German historical scholarship of the interwar period, I was struck by the extent to which a similar kind of populist, anti-modernist discourse also informed the Volksgeschichte of the Nazi period. Volksgeschichte called on historians to study the Volk, not just the state; demographic and ethnographic methods were employed to reconstruct peasant communities of the past; German ethnic enclaves in the east were portrayed as having preserved their autonomy and ethnic identity; German peasant communities were shown resisting the twin evils of capitalism and urbanization. The point of course is not to suggest that the new social history was somehow fascist, but rather that it incorporated elements of an anti-modernist discourse also found in the Volksgeschichte of the Nazi period. It is also worth noting -- and I am hardly the first to make this point -- that this romanticizing discourse now reigns supreme in post-colonial studies (cf. the work of Homi Bhabha, now the flavor-of-the-month in post-colonial theory).

All of this is simply to say that much of the social history (and social theory for that matter) produced in our time continues to find its inspiration in a critique of the present that celebrates the past. Viewed in this light, the new social history was less a progressive wave of the future than it was a romantic lament for the "world we have lost" -- or perhaps more accurately, a world that never existed.

James Van Horn Melton

Emory University

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