|
View the H-German Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-German's September 2004 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-German's September 2004 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-German home page.
Introduction and perspective: I'm sitting writing this in a café outside of Philadelphia. I just came from another table where, in the course of our conversation, a free-lance journalist showed me the digital images he collected on the streets of New York City during last week's Republican National Convention. These photographs of stifled protest (particularly of the Tuesday march from Ground Zero that ended abruptly in the face of mass arrests) offered a provocative commentary on the ways in which politicians, the press, and the public more generally have sought to make sense of those events. The explanations that have been made variously available deployed implicit and explicit historical references, many drawn from our particular subject areas. Thus fringe protesters wore T-shirts festooned with swastikas equating everyone from Republican Party members to the New York Police to a Nazi past; and former California governor Pete Wilson, in turn, denounced the protesters as "fascist." While insisting on or pushing for a historical context for such rhetoric runs the risk of reducing (German) history to a limited moment of relevance (a Nazi past), these unconsidered public references at the very least posit a potential value for historians' expanded public engagement. But how might that engagement be managed? If you go back and examine the H-German logs from 1995, you'll discover a number of intense, spontaneous discussions that energized participants at the time and have earned a place in subsequent scholarship.[1] But perhaps even more telling than the level of intellectual discourse is, in retrospect, the ways in which participants' excitement for this new medium's possibilities emerged as a vital subtext to the scholarly exchange. One post exulted in the novelty of the e-mails the writer was sending, an enthusiasm that most current e-mail users would find difficult to match. At H-Net, the umbrella organization of which H-German is a part, editors continue to celebrate the proliferation of new lists and expanded participation. H-Net has proved itself a vital part of intellectual life in this country (not least in the online job postings, which during peak seasons garner more than 40,000 weekly hits and increasingly function as the resource of first resort for job-seeking graduate students), but its successes have demanded that more and more attention be focused on securing revenue streams (including new agreements with Amazon.com and other on-line booksellers whose sites can now be accessed from H-Net book reviews, earning H-Net a percentage of all purchases made following that click through) and coping with cumbersome technical and logistical management issues. In a way, this process finds a parallel in the growing pressures exerted on academic departments, who need to compete for students and "sell" the major for its instrumental value. Thus, my history department feels compelled to explain to potential majors and concentrators, what they can _do_ with a history degree. The market of ideas matters only to the extent that it provides access to or facilitates participation in the (economic) market with its highly desired consumer accouterments. History as a discipline seems, at best, tangentially relevant to these endeavors. For most consumers, history remains--as in the recent Old Navy jeans ad--a subject for which enthusiasm can only be imagined ironically. But this is not entirely true either. My course on Hitler and Nazi Germany--and I suspect this is the case in almost all North American universities--is always oversubscribed. I wonder, though, whether even the most enthusiastic students, arriving with History Channel images firmly in mind, enter the classroom with what amounts to a pathological fascination for all things Nazi (a pathology whose only parallel might be found in popular obsessions with the American Civil War). In the classroom over the course of the semester, it is possible to offer a critical challenge to this vision of an alluring, pornographic past. But for all their appeal, these courses reach only a minute fragment of the broader public that continues to consume ahistorical denunciations of Hitler-like enemies and rhetorical reprisals of Munich 1938. If we as historians, particularly historians of Germany, wish to interject our nuanced perspectives into a broader public discourse, we must acknowledge that we will not enjoy the luxury of our explanations spilling over into the next lecture. The point is thus not that history has been dismissed entirely but rather that the kind of history that can find a public voice too often does little to provoke the critical imagining of the present, which the best work in our discipline manages. All who saw the insipid commentary offered by the expert historians that PBS trotted during the party conventions will not find it hard to fathom the Philadelphia _Inquirer_'s media reporter, who characterized them as "yawn—historians."[2] The _New York Times_ recently discussed the extent to which the documentary film-maker, Ken Burns, has become the premier historical voice in the United States, a declaration which essentially reduces history to the Civil War, baseball, and jazz.[3] This contrast is telling. Three Theses with which to begin a conversation: 1) It is highly ironic that in this era in which media discourse is dominated by the vicious verbal sparring of antagonistic partisan experts, the historian has value only as the arbiter of an objective past. The reduction of history's public face to "objective" talking heads from which all critical vigor has been removed limits our potential impact. While historians must avoid the trap of raw partisanship (and the risks of marginalization that that also entails), we must find a voice for our arguments. 2) We need to develop the flexible ability to move between intellectual spaces: from the café to the chat room to the lecture hall. Here, moving back and forth between Germany and the United States offers one useful model for (often literally) translating our work for diverse contexts. If nothing else, we should increasingly learn to write, as well, in the abbreviated paragraphs of op-ed columns. 3) We need to democratize our conversations about history by searching out new participants and new languages with which to communicate. Ultimately, we must acknowledge some responsibility for our own marginalization and move beyond the walls that comfortably frame the intellectual significance of our professional endeavors (one model might be found in the History News Service, which seeks to provide historical contexts for current events: <http://www.h-net.org/~hns>). Paul Steege Villanova University Notes: [1] E.g., Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, _Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), x. [2] Jonathan Storm, "TV personalities muddy waters at convention," _Philadelphia Inquirer_ (2 September 2004), D1. [3] Virginia Heffernan, "America's Arty History Teacher," _New York Times_ (11 September 2004) at URL: <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/11/arts/television/11note.html> (11 September 2004).
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|