German Yearbook of Contemporary History

1

Sometimes we are forced to use a term that is logically and philologically unsatisfactory, simply because it already exists and gives the general sense of something important. Indeed, this observation applies to the German word Geschichte with its well-known double meaning, referring both to past events as well to the intellectual visualization of past events. And it certainly applies to a number of its compounds. In the introduction to his Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Jakob Burckhardt complains that Geschichtsphilosophie is a "centaur"—yet he goes on to philosophize at considerable length about history. While Burckhardt criticizes the contradiction between the two component words—and thus within the thing they name—as "contradictio in adjecto," Benedetto Croce calls the combination a "tautology." All history, Croce declares, is philosophy, although this belief did not inhibit him from rooting his reflections, as befits a historian, in a very concrete description of events. Sometimes [End Page 13] language itself appears to know, better than the contemplative mind, what is needed.

The comparison is perhaps overstretched, and I do not intend to extrapolate it further here. The word Zeitgeschichte [literally "time-history"] directs us to a simpler and, at first glance, very unphilosophical realm. The term is open to similar and indeed better-founded objections, both in the sense that it is logically contradictory (or lacks clear differentiation of its two components) and in the sense that it connects two words that belong to the same category. Surely history always has to do with time? One might be tempted to clarify by replacing "Zeit" with "Gegenwart" [the present]. But that only draws us deeper into difficulties. It is generally understood that the historian is interested in "the past," which is "no longer the present."¹ The title of the well-known reference work Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart [Religion in History and the Present] exemplifies the distinction. And if one objects that the historian is, justifiably, particularly interested in the present in history, and in the historical in the present, this only makes the problems with the substitute term clearer. What is "our" present?² Certainly not the latest simply for the sake of the new, "a ripple in the river of time." The English language has coined the accidentally apposite term "current history" or "current events" for this passage from past to future. The task of accompanying that passage with a "running" commentary based on an awareness of historical context should certainly not be dismissed, but it is not what we are talking about here—nor is it the purpose that the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is intended to serve. The term "Neueste Geschichte" [the most recent history] would therefore be equally misleading, or at least point in the wrong direction.

One might be more easily tempted to follow the example of another well-established term borrowed from a foreign language, namely "contemporary history" or "histoire contemporaine." In German the term would be "zeitgenössische Geschichte" [the history of current times] or "Geschichte unserer Zeit" [the history of our time]. If only the word "Zeitgenosse" [a current-day person] were not so misused, and if only the term "unserer Zeit" [of our time] did not, aside from its imprecision, suffer the embarrassing undertone of claiming that we "own" the age or have reason to look with special pride at "our" achievements. If we are to understand Zeitgeschichte as the epoch of contemporaries and its scholarly treatment, we should do so in the sense that, for us, this is about an age of crisis-ridden shocks and the universal constellation essentially determined by it.

If we take that as the determinant—a point to which we will return—it makes sense that the word Zeitgeschichte exists, and that it is no accident that [End Page 14] it appeared when it did. It is not as old as its foreign alternatives.³ It was originally used only as a formal term for chronologically narrated history, and the meaning we know today only appeared properly in the 1790s. It is unambiguously connected with the revolutionary events in France, and thus with a specific moment of being affected by history. This reference to the origin of the word may serve as a legitimation, and also as an indication of the general thrust of what we understand as the task of Zeitgeschichte.

2

Before we follow up on the question of our own affectedness, we should circumscribe the practical significance of the task, its organizational side, and thus the immediate purpose of this journal. We see the obvious need to catch up in a field where much greater progress has been achieved elsewhere. There are certainly reasons to wonder whether things have perhaps been overdone here and there, for instance where more than half of the 1,300 PhD dissertations currently in preparation in the United States are dedicated to questions of the twentieth century.⁴ The American discussion rightly identifies the dangers and misunderstandings involved in "presentism." I should not need to point out that the founding of this journal should in no way be understood as encouraging a "short-windedness" of historical interest, and still less a neglect of deeper historical roots. But it would be equally wrong to overlook the relative shift in the center of gravity, which corresponds to the practically undeniable needs of school and university teaching, civics, etc., and probably also springs from the momentum of epochal change and a real need for self-understanding.

In any case, the outcome is certainly a diversity and convolution of research, amid which, in Germany, the tasks of stocktaking, catching up, and clarifying future orientation are the most obvious and most urgent, if unnecessary repetition and wasted effort are to be avoided. The often-scattered German contributions to international discussion in the field of contemporary history also need a technical collecting point of the kind that only a specialized journal can offer. To promote the effort of stocktaking, its scope should encompass, in particular, systematic bibliographical compilations and periodic research reports.

The publication of source materials is subject to the same fragmentation as the field of research itself. Except for the major published document collections, original source documents and collections tend to be located in very remote and random places. Postwar conditions have made many documents homeless, in particular German historical documents of the very recent past. Nevertheless, Germany does possess very considerable stocks of official and [End Page 15] private materials, which can be significantly enriched through interviews. Systematically pursuing such augmentation while the eyewitnesses of important decisions and events are still alive is another urgent task for contemporary historical research. That undertaking will require cooperative efforts of the kind already underway in multiple quarters.⁵ The journal will have a special responsibility to report on such "secondary" archival materials and their associated problems, as well as on published document collections. At the same time, the journal can itself serve as a repository for documents of manageable length, meaning that at least a significant proportion of the individual sources that become available in Germany will be so in one place.

The question of sources is associated with another task for the Vierteljahrshefte, and for Zeitgeschichte as a whole. Zeitgeschichte must scrutinize the very foundations upon which its academic treatment rests. More than in any other modern epoch, Zeitgeschichte, and in particular its study of politics, is vulnerable to the often-misleading character of official material, the fallacy that "Quod non est in actis non est in mundo" [What is not in the records is not in the world]. The techniques of record management require careful investigation, especially when dealing with a totalitarian state, where formal responsibility is fragmented but actual responsibility is concentrated. The influence of modern news media, propaganda, and mass communication must be diligently examined. Similarly, methodological principles for using specific types of sources such as interviews, questionnaires, and court files need to be developed, and technical means need to be provided for exploiting them. However much we might wish to resist further division of labor, which we know must be counterbalanced, it is undeniable that "the task of contemporary history" will necessarily involve a considerable degree of specialization. That requirement alone is justification for a specialized journal.

3

Given that the above touches on questions of organization as well as labor, two objections are to be expected. The first would be that history is a whole: each of its parts is subject to the same epistemological preconditions, and thus there can be only one historical method. This is certainly correct in principle. One of the essential duties of the historian is to subject the sources to rigorous examination of authenticity and trustworthiness, the principles of which have been fully developed during the last 150 years. Neither these methods nor the striving for objectivity that is inherent to them permits any kind of relativism. But that does not mean we are not dealing with very specific applications and [End Page 16] very specific difficulties, adapting and at the same time preserving inherited principles under conditions that are simply unprecedented.

This is where the second, more general, objection comes in, which is essentially that Zeitgeschichte is simply not "ripe" for consideration as history because it lacks the necessary documentation and the necessary distance—all the more so that it now operates in a global framework, where some of its sources have grown to immeasurability while others are largely lost or withheld, and where it is so deeply riven by fundamental contradictions. One could counter the general objection with a plaintive assertion that the challenge is unavoidable, while citing great examples of historical scholarship. And indeed, outstanding examples of scholarship on contemporary history have emerged in particularly tumultuous times, sometimes precisely because of an awareness of the crisis. It suffices to recall Thucydides and his objectification of the Peloponnesian War. But we should not hide behind general axioms and great men. And the dilemma of limited insight will doubtlessly remain, with the proviso that it applies to all history and not only to particularly recent or insufficiently illuminated periods.

This is not the place to get into the epistemological weeds. While such questions certainly lie within the remit of a contemporary historiography that is conscious of its responsibility, they fall outside the scope of these introductory remarks. There certainly is no place for naive realism, as if history in the sense of intellectual visualization, ever represents history in the sense of "what happened." We know that, alongside other contingencies, there is a subjective aspect to all historical insight. But we also know that this is not simply a symptom of the limitations of our abilities, but rather reflects the essential fact that history itself is by no means value-free. It has meaning for people; it represents an encounter with their past and their future. The worthiness of such scholarly efforts resides in the possibility of such interaction between people and history. Objectivity in this field therefore means a disciplined search for truth, setting prejudices aside wherever possible, but not remaining neutral in questions that are essential to us. It is always about truth in the sense of both "correct" and "valuable."⁶

In those terms the task of Zeitgeschichte is not a special case. It faces special difficulties, but also benefits from special impetus. It shares with all forms of historical consideration the risk of error, indeed, it shares with human life itself the characteristic proportional relationship between risk and reward. The closer we are to events, the easier it is for us to overlook their essence and be led astray by preconceived opinions. But we are all the more likely to possess possibilities of correction and of access to the hinge points. [End Page 17]

This question of proportionality also applies, to a certain extent, to the question of "lacking documents." Scholars will certainly encounter enormous gaps in the record and will often have to accept not knowing. But it could also be argued that, for some areas at least, a hitherto unprecedented wealth of material is available, to which Zeitgeschichte possesses a unique "divining rod." The danger will lie, often enough, in the suffocating mass of documentation. Dealing with that will require innovative technical resources, but above all an intensity of questioning that echoes the methods historians have developed specifically for sparsely documented epochs. Contemporary history has at its disposal, as one may well say, methods of unusual effectiveness for approaching this problem correctly, i.e. not arbitrarily, but rather according to the substance and structure of the situation.⁷

The objection of "lack of distance" is thus two-faced. Nobody would deny the danger of proximity or hasty updating. Evidence of these is plentiful. But it can also be demonstrated, for example, that the task of historical understanding, in the sense of feeling oneself into the position of the doers or the victims, can be considerably facilitated by personal experience. That position must be embraced with mental discipline if it is to manifest its objectifying effect in the context of war, whether between or within nations.

In other respects, too, proximity may offer a curious leverage. And this is where "Betroffensein" [being affected]—which is associated with the very origin of the word Zeitgeschichte and lends it a specific meaning—comes into its own. We need to think our way into the spirit of the epoch not from a distance and principally by way of historical intuition. That spirit has beleaguered us sufficiently to make us aware of the inner coherence and the novelty of a universal constellation, which followed a short and very unusual century of national differentiation that knew neither world war nor global revolution.

4

The concept of Zeitgeschichte, in the sense to which the Vierteljahrshefte is dedicated, is thus based on the view that a new epoch of world history began to emerge roughly in 1917/18. Its roots lie in the fundamental tendencies of imperialist policy and industrial society, which should not be excluded from discussion in these pages by any mechanical timeframe. But even the First World War, for all its attendant revolutionary collapse and shattering of feelings of security, can be said with good reason to have been simply a conflict between nation-states that expanded out into the world. Not until the peculiar simultaneity of the entry of the United States into the war and the outbreak of the [End Page 18] Russian Revolution did the constellation become truly universal, and at the same time the conflict between peoples and states became both permeated and crisscrossed by deeper societal contradictions. Essentially, the Washington-Moscow antithesis was already very real by 1918. In the following decades the three ideologies of democracy, fascism, and communism coexisted in a "triangle," until the bipolar division began to reemerge after 1945. What is new and universal here is that ideological and societal movements operate across national borders to a degree unknown in the age of nation-states. Vertical fronts have been succeeded by horizontal fronts, which were foreshadowed by the age of the French Revolution but resemble even more closely the "confessional age" of European history. This shift has created the possibility of a global civil war.

As this brief outline shows,⁸ the task of Zeitgeschichte must be handled in an international framework. This applies, for one thing, at the technical level. As set forth above, the Vierteljahrshefte will strive to catch up with research conducted abroad. By the same token, the editors would heartily welcome the participation of non-German historians who are attempting to clarify the central structures and processes of our epoch. But this desire for collaboration is about more than formal interaction, and also about more than the so-called "global situation," although the latter already lends Zeitgeschichte a universal orientation. There have also been internal shifts, which have manifested themselves in the disruption of familiar relationships, in the challenge to political sovereignty, in the emergence of new international movements (e.g. among agrarian workers), and in existential crises. One may say that humans are no longer as anchored in the realm of the national as they were at the time of Ranke's Weltgeschichte. Resistance and integration movements are thus central issues for Zeitgeschichte.

Just as it transcends national borders and must confront new loyalties and solidarities, Zeitgeschichte should also work to overcome the "sectoral divisions" of the political, the socioeconomic, and the intellectual. This goal would create a counterweight to the increasing specialization demanded by the task itself. Less than ever is it possible to distinguish between internal and external, state and society, interests and ideologies, human nature and nature itself. By making such integration an objective, Zeitgeschichte could both provide a methodological service to historical scholarship and also position itself to capture the structure and essence of an epoch that is in many respects totalitarian. With its modest means the Vierteljahrshefte wishes to contribute to this holistic perspective.

Of course that will remain an ideal toward which to strive. However much the wish for universal breadth and thematic diversity must remain [End Page 19] points of orientation, as a practical matter political and socioeconomic history, in particular from the realm of German history, will form the backbone. That is another task of Zeitgeschichte that must not be underestimated, and indeed in some respects is a priority. There is still a great deal to be done for the period of the Weimar Republic, which was long a stepchild of academic scholarship, and it is an absolute duty, especially for German academics, to engage the National Socialist years with all available energy.⁹ To date this has happened only sporadically—and already we are hearing from those who would prefer to wrap themselves in the cloak of concealment, the cloud of forgetting. We must respond with all due clarity that "the task of contemporary history"—conducted in a spirit of openness—must not be afraid of the "hot potatoes" (whether national or international) and leaves no hiding place for myths to lurk.

When discussing matters German, we must absolutely set aside any inclination to self-humiliation and apologetics. Only sober and candid exploration of the most emotionally charged questions can clear the air in Germany and abroad. The goal here, as elsewhere, must be maximum objectivity in recording the facts, but certainly not neutrality toward the traditions and principles of European civilization.

The unequivocal political value of Zeitgeschichte becomes apparent here. It will have to prove that proximity and profound involvement are compatible with distancing from the passions of the day, without leading to relativistic skepticism; that, to the contrary, it is an intellectual discipline that, as an accessory to understanding and self-education, ventures into the sphere of moral decisions, as the epoch so urgently demands. By serving scholarship, the Vierteljahrshefte also hopes to help clarify questions of values and intentions, which, while interesting but not necessarily sensational, concern a broader public.

It is a happy coincidence that both editors are faculty members of the University of Tübingen. May the endeavor of introducing "the task of contemporary history" into academic and political life be true to the motto of this university's founder:

"Attempto!"