History without Strings

Been reading Lord Acton over winter break, something I have wanted to do since grad school. He is one of those ancient nineteenth-century British historians who always seem to have a clever quote. You still find him cited in mid-twentieth-century histories of Europe and his principles clearly continue to influence senior historians today, the ones who eschew all reference to theory.

Acton explains why historians so wish to avoid methods that require some sort of moral judgment. He explains the need for autonomy in scholarship with a clarity and vigor I had no seen before. In reviewing German schools of history, he credits Leopold von Ranke with writing as a dispassionate, detached, apolitical story teller.

Now Ranke, and his brand of historicism, is often denounced in a few swift, familiar moves. A quote from Benjamin here and a few "don't you know" statements about Prussian nationalism, then he is finished.

On the question of autonomy, however, Acton explains what an innovation it was for an historian to write with automatically being in the service of the state, politics, or church theology. Ranke was different from his predecessors for they wrote history as "applied politics, fluid law, religion exemplified, or [in] the school of patriotism." Today we would add the free market to the list of institutions which demand obedience in writing history. Write history so that it will sell well, reads the injunction.

Now impartiality is often an excuse for allowing prejudices to remain unchallenged, and surprisingly Lord Acton acknowledges just that--Ranke refrained from judging history so as to not disturb German patriotic allegiances to historical figures, such as Martin Luther or Frederick the Great, who clearly could be subject to moral criticism.

Autonomy in historical scholarship is sometimes open to political critique, but really these days it is much more challenged by market forces. How many times have we sat on committees where we discussed whether a potential dissertation topic was saleable? The job market and the reading market and the dean's market shape our conversations much more than any supposed drive to know.

Surely this was true for Ranke, as well. He sold gobs of books to the general audience. Acton does not mention the importance of this market, it is still invisible to his academic eyes, yet his argument for autonomy, for writing without serving an immediate end, applies brilliantly to our own neo-liberal institution.

History departments jettison fields because they don't want to hire faculty to teach in them. European history no longer matters in a global, post-colonial world, it is sometimes said, so some departments stop teaching in it. Surely there is no scholarly justification for tossing out entire fields of history, but in a budget driven, enrollment-oriented university, it takes just a few meetings to put an end to an entire field of knowledge.

This is the new threat to autonomy, far more serious a concern than the intrusion of theory into history. It is an entirely different pressure on scholarship than the ones Acton and Ranke recognized.

source: Acton, Lord, "German Schools of History," English Historical Review, 1 (1886): 7-42.

Childhood Revenge

Back in the 1970s, boys still played war games that re-enacted the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. Our block was transformed into an urban battle zone, in the imaginary sense only. Life in my working-class Jewish neighborhood was pretty safe. That's my most people had moved there from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan. So the battle zone was in our heads, but real enough.

As the only German kid around, I was always asked but never agreed to play the Nazi. There was nothing worse than being the target of a dozen machine gun totting kids who all wanted to make up for the horrors of the War and the Holocaust. Speaking German made me a Nazi anyway, and I got beaten up for it lots, but in war games I was always an American, and as such we all wanted to kill Hitler.

"What would you do if your saw Hitler?" Standard question in the back yards and play grounds. "I'd shoot a million rounds of ammo into him with my machine gun." "I'd blow his head off with a grenade." I had the same answers as all the other kids to this rather transparent loyalty test, the trick was coming up with another way to destroy the Führer. And in my day dreams I imagined running into Hitler and firing away at him with my machine gun. In the hail of bullets, I remember discovering a rage that went far beyond the normal play ground combativeness. I hated Hitler not just cause he was the number one evil guy in the world, but because he had ruined my life, made me the object of daily scorn, burdened me with a guilt I would never wear off. So as I fired clip after clip into his writhing body, I discovered the real reason I hated Hitler, he had fucked up my life.

All this came back to me as I watched Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, a movie my students recommended to me after a semester of showing them Emil Jannings, Leni Riefenstahl, and Bruno Ganz movies.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Süss

I have to admit that I never have watched Jud Süss, despite that it is the most notorious anti-semitic film made in German. Of course, it was never on late night television when I was growing up in Queens, but ever since grad school it gets shown, discussed, footnoted enough so that I might have gotten around to seeing it. Certainly, I have gotten used to teaching Riefenstahl, even talking at length about her technique without worrying that I was getting sucked over to the dark side--Afterall what Super Bowl halftime show is not indebted to Frau Leni.

Jud Süss always seemed different because it did not seem to offer an intellectual side door from which to elude the melodramatic inevitability of a mob attacking a lone Jew. Felix Moeller's documentary film Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss provides just such an historical framework to analyze the movie. The documentary interviews the children and grandchildren of Jud Süss director, Harlan Veit. It quickly presents the political and legal consequences Veit faced after the war for having made the film, and then it intelligently walks through the different experiences and judgments of the Veit's offspring, from the eldest son whose entire career seems defined in opposition to his father to the nimble genealogical narrative of the youngest French grand daughter.

The different wings of the family have strikingly antithetical positions, from the daughters who married into and converted to Judaism after the war, which results in a generation of grand daughters who point out that their one grandfather was responsible for the murder of their other grandparents. The documentary is not only an Auseindandersetzung with the evil things you did during the war, daddy. By taking the view across three generations, the film shows how the post-sixties grandchildren inherited both their grandfather's guilt and their parents' confrontations with him.

The documentary takes a long view, in which the layers of reconciliation and antagonism produce children both wise and naive in the horrors of the genocidal campaigns. Tellingly it is the children living outside Germany who have the smartest things to say, whereas the German grandchildren are often wide-eyed and speechless. The interspersed shots from Jud Süss, and Harlan Veit's other 1930s films, made it clear to me that it is time to confront them from the security of my historical distance.

Kafka reading Hegel on China

Dabei gilt in China kein Ansehen des hohen oder niedrigen Ranges. Ein Feldherr des Reiches, der sich sehr ausgezeichnet hatte, wurde beim Kaiser verleumdet, und er bekam zur Strafe des Vergehens, dessen man ihn beschuldigte, das Amt aufzupassen, wer den Schnee in den Gassen nicht wegkehre.

Vorlesung ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte

Crawling out from Under

Soon the grading will be done and reading will commence, perchance a little writing, too.

Until then a philosophical thought from a fashionable source

Die Zeitung für die elegante Welt 1805

"Wohl sind die Philosophen die größten Egoisten! Denn steckt nicht Jeder von ihnen das Lehrgebäude seines Vorgängers in Brand, um sein philosophisches Ei dabei zu sieden?"