Abstract
Ranke’s description of the task of the ‘scientific’ historian in 1837 had sounded so simple: just describe the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist],’ or in plain English: just describe the past ‘how it essentially was’. Ranke was no naïve empiricist, as many later took him to be, but an idealist who thought that God’s ‘ideas’ (Ideen) were present in history and that history in its kernel was therefore a benign process, evident appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.1 Given the emphasis Ranke simultaneously put on the critical method, the relationship between the ‘scientific’ or epistemological aspects of history and its political aspects have been problematic ever since the beginning of ‘professional’ history in Europe.
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Reference
6 P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–25, esp. 8–9.
12 For the literature, see C. Lorenz, ‘Comparative historiography: Problems and perspectives’, History and Theory 38, 1 (1999), 25–39, and C. Lorenz, ‘Towards a theoretical framework for comparing historiographies: Some preliminary considerations’, in P. Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto, 2004), pp. 25–48.
13 See Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison: Histoire croissée and the challenge of reflexivity’, History and Theory 45:1 (2006), 30–50; A. Dirlik, ‘Performing the world: Reality and representation in the making of world history(ies)’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C, 37 (2005), pp. 9–27.
18 K. Jarausch and M. Geyer (eds), Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ, 2003); see also C. Lorenz, ‘Beyond Good and Evil? The German Empire of 1871 and Modern German Historiography’, Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 729–67.
20 See C. Lorenz, ‘Won’t you tell me where have all the good times gone? On the advantages and disadvantages of modernization theory for history’, Rethinking History 10:2 (2006), 171–200.
23 For the notion of ‘consciousness of catastrophe’ in twentieth-century history, see J. Torpey, ‘“Making whole what has been smashed”. Reflections on reparations’, Journal of Modern History 73 (2001), 333–58; J. Torpey, ‘The future of the past: A polemical perspective’, in P. Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto, 2004), pp. 240–55. I have argued the German case before in ‘Der Nationalsozialismus, der Zweite Weltkrieg und die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung nach 1945’, in F. Wielenga (ed.), 60 Jahre Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Deutschland und die Niederlande – Historiographie und Forschungsperspektiven (Münster, 2006), pp. 159–71.
26 See, for the relationship between history, memory and trauma: A. Phillips, ‘Close-Ups’, History Workshop Journal 57 (2004), 142–5; and P. Hutton, ‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History’, The History Teacher 33:4 (2000), 533–48.
35 Reinhart Koselleck has observed that historians have not reflected on the notion of space and have traditionally taken it for granted. See his ‘Raum und Geschichte’, in Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt/M., 2003), pp. 78–97. For the politization of time and space in Asian historiography, see S. Conrad, ‘What time is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography’, History and Theory 38:1 (1999), 67–83; and J.-H. Lim, ‘The configuration of Orient and Occident in the global chain of national histories: writing national histories in Northeast Asia’, in Berger, Eriksonas and Mycock (eds), Narrating the Nation, pp. 290–308.
36 See Heidi Bohaker and France Iacovetta, ‘Making Aboriginal People “Immigrants Too”: A Comparison of Citizenship Programs for Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples in Postwar Canada, 1940s–1960s’, Canadian Historical Review 90:3 (September 2009), 427–62.
46 M. de Certeau, The Writing History of History (New York, 1988); R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA, 1985); E. Runia, ‘Burying the Dead, Creating the Past’, History and Theory, 46, 3 (2007), 313–26; F. Hartog, ‘Time, History and the Writing of History: The Order of Time’, in R. Thorstendahl and I. Veit-Brause (eds), History – Making: The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline (Stockholm, 1996), pp. 85–113.
49 See Francois Hartog, Régimes d’Historicité. Présentisme et Expériences du Temps (Paris, 2002). Bevernage and Aerts have reached a similar a conclusion along a different route in Berber Bevernage and Koen Aerts, ‘Haunting pasts: Time and historicity as constructed by the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo and radical Flemish Nationalists’, Social History 34:4 (2009), 391–408.
50 See S. Berger and C. Lorenz, ‘National Narratives and their ‘Others’: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and the Gendering of National Histories’, Storia della Storiografia 50 (2006), 59–98. Given their ‘catastrophic character’, the cases of Polish and Irish history also seem fit for a comparison with Quebec.
52 A. Rigney, ‘Time for visions and revisions: Interpretative conflict from a communicative perspecti ve’, Storia della Storiografia 22 (1992), 85–92, here 86–9. For the role of inversion in history writing, see C. Lorenz, ‘“Won’t you tell me, where have all the good times gone?” On the advantages and disadvantages of modernization theory for historical study’, in Wang and Fillafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio, pp. 104–27.
58 H. White, ‘The public relevance of historical studies: A reply to Dirk Moses’, History and Theory, 44:3 (2005), 333–8, here 334. I have argued along similar lines against the splitting of the notions of historical identity and practical identity in C. Lorenz, Konstruktion der Vergangenheit (Cologne, 1997), pp. 400–36.
60 White cited in A. D. Moses, ‘White, Traumatic Nationalism and the Public Role of History’, History and Theory 44:3 (2005), 311–32, here 320. For White’s position, see H. Paul, Masks of Meaning: Existentialist Humanism in Hayden White’s Philosophy of History (Groningen, 2006), esp. ch. 2.
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Lorenz, C. (2010). Double Trouble: A Comparison of the Politics of National History in Germany and in Quebec. In: Berger, S., Lorenz, C. (eds) Nationalizing the Past. Writing the Nation: National Historiographies and the Making of Nation States in 19th and 20th Century Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292505_3
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