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?"

Innovation does not equal high enrollment

There are just so many examples of how institutions undermine themselves, despite their best intentions. In the era of budget cuts, administrators have become more concerned than ever with maintaining high enrollments. So now some universities have begun a review of courses in order to eliminate the “under-enrolled.” Missing in much of the discussion about course enrollment is a consideration of course content.

A common distinction, in graduate courses, is made between courses that are listed, and often required, by the department bulletin and “special topic” courses which are taught by faculty interested in developing a new research topic. These “special topic” courses have been targeted increasingly because they are under-enrolled. However, the low enrollment in such courses does not indicate that these courses are unimportant or uninteresting. In fact this year’s special topics course may become a requirement in five years, it’s just that no one can predict that today.

Special topic seminars are, in my experience, where the new research happens. Every literature department can fill a course on Romanticism, but not everyone is willing to take a course on race theory in German Idealism. Just wait though a few more years, and those handful of students who took the race theory course will be publishing up a storm. The Romanticism students will probably be following in their tracks. Yes, its more pleasant to discuss Wordsworth crossing the Alps than the Haitian Revolution. But if we pause a little, we will find that of course Wordsworth has a few things to say about slavery in the Caribbean and before you know it we have dissertations on race theory in Romanticism—here’s the point though. The race theory class was first presented as a “special topics” course, something outside the mainstream curriculum, an innovation, an experiment, a professor’s first attempt at laying out a long and complex argument. Someday we may all think Wordsworth’s most daring poem was dedicated to Toussaint L’Ouverture. But you heard it first in a “special topics” seminar.

So if you want a university that innovates, that does not fall back on the familiar, a university that grows and develops new research, please, dear high-level administrators, do not cut the special topics seminars, just because they are under enrolled.

Global Encyclopedia

Globalization operates as an encyclopedic form of knowledge of which the internet is of course the ideal media. With globalization, we all get to rove around uncovering and learning tidy bits of knowledge from faraway places without putting them into any grand historical context.

We get to talk about one or two moments in history, connect them through a network and then draw some striking conclusion about a different previously unrelated matter. The kind of dialectical juxtaposition Walter Benjamin nurtured in his Arcades Project, where the commodities sold in nineteenth-century Parisian side streets revealed something about the rise of Hitler, is now acceptable across the globe, so long as one has a theoretical model that allows us to make an article about Kojak reruns in Thailand explain post-Vietnam War economic relations in South East Asia.

The other side of encyclopedic knowledge is the potential for fakery. You don’t have to be an elaborate forgery to assert knowledge. You just merely need to have read an article or two on the subject. Expertise feeds the encyclopedia. Without some scholars who know the particular field, you would not have a convincing article on Wikipedia, but once the article is on the internet, there is room for endless circulation and appropriation. We can claim knowledge of Shanghai city planning while sitting in Illinois.

Eighteenth-century Europe was full of such armchair experts. Everyone who could read devoured travel literature about places far from Europe. Immanuel Kant lectured for years on anthropology without having left his hometown. Christian Wolff could generate treatises on a host of subjects not just one or two. Being learned meant knowing a lot about many things. We are again floating into such an encyclopedic phase. It is refreshingly interdisciplinary. We all get to hold forth like a contemporary English professor, who can teach a seminar on Hitchcock or Kafka. We get to spin historical connections like a German philosopher of old, compare Chinese history to Egyptian in 22 deft pages.

As an old Medievalist once told my multilingual friend—you’re either brilliant or a fraud. Alas the majority of us will just be panting to keep up.