the public sphere (GSA 2004)
Date: 20 October 2004

Report:   German Studies Association, 28th Annual Conference, Washington, D.
C., October 2004
Session #89: "Making it real: intellectual exchange, virtual space, and the
public sphere," GSA Roundtable

Moderator: Konrad Jarausch, University of North Carolina/Zentrum fuer
Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam

Paul Steege, Villanova University
Andrew Bergerson, University of Missouri, Kansas City
Harold Marcuse, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dirk Schumann, German Historical Institute

This conference report is different than most because it is itself part of
an on-going experiment to alter the nature of public discourse about the
past. It reports on a roundtable that revisited longstanding questions of
the public role of historians: how academics can more effectively engage a
wider public sphere in critical reflection about the past. At stake in this
question were not simply the roles of market forces and culture industries
in adulterating the past: falsifying it out of hand, "dumbing it down" for
mass consumption, "sexing it up" to attract mass audiences, or simply
creating an atmosphere that makes it challenging for a critical public
intellectual to thrive. Rather, the panelists explored the possibilities for
engagement beyond the ivory tower in spite of those circumstances. Panelists
raised questions about the potential contributions of such media as online
discussion networks, websites, conferences, and museums. The discussion that
followed was lively, challenging these proposals in terms of their
pragmatics, ethics, and intellectual legitimacy. By summarizing these
debates, this conference report seeks not to "conclude" them but to evoke
responses from the members of H-German in an on-going discussion about the
critical issues to our profession and discipline.

As the moderator, Konrad Jarausch introduced the issues by recognizing that
historians have had mixed relations with the wider public sphere (interest
and appreciation as well as hostility and criticism), but that this
roundtable represented an opportunity for self-reflection. He argued that we
face multiple audiences: Germans and North Americans (with very different
attitudes about the centrality of the past in contemporary politics),
colleagues and students (whom we train), academics and a general public
(with varying degrees of special interests and educational backgrounds). For
each, he argued, we need different goals: advancing scholarship among
colleagues requires debating truth in a limited public sphere, but engaging
in memory politics over identities (for instance, with "witnesses") raises
less familiar challenges given its largely emotional component and requires
a different language and strategies for dissemination. We have a large
arsenal of methods at our disposal, he insisted. The question is simply: in
which of these do we wish to make ourselves proficient? We are comfortable
with and will continue to publish monographs, articles, textbooks and the
like, he argued, but we are now faced with public media (like interviews,
newspaper articles, exhibitions, and films) as well as online media (as
devices for both teaching and publication) that have laws of their own. If
he believed that we do need to have a larger public presence, he warned of
considerable pitfalls.

Focusing on his service to us as an editor of H-German, Paul Steege
described how the current editorial board does not see H-German simply as
a "virtual" sideline to our scholarship but as part and parcel of
intellectual public discussion about the German past more generally.
Educated in an era in which email had already become standard and H-German
already served as a preferred medium for job searches, he recalled, somewhat
romantically, the "glory days" of that medium when it served as a vehicle
for extensive, spontaneous, public debate by academic historians: in 1995
around the issue of postmodernism, and in 1996 around Hitler’s Willing
Executioners, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Today, in contrast, there are few
spontaneous debates on H-German. Even when prompted—for instance, as part of
fora of solicited comments: "Hitler: the Rise of Evil" in May-June 2003,
WWII Bombing in the Fall of 2003, or the Rosenstrasse protests in the summer
of 2004—he was saddened by the fact that responses are now more rare
(perhaps because historians are so overwhelmed by email) and so carefully
articulated that they are more like published articles rather than online
discussions (perhaps because of the very success of H-German as a medium for
online publication). In an effort to craft spaces in which such engagement
can effectively take place, the current H-German editors have been working
hard to expand the nexus between real and virtual public spheres. They see H-
German as a way to reach a variety of different publics: academic
historians, public historians, independent scholars, historians in training.
Yet they trouble over the fact that multiple users have multiple intentions
and that these many kinds of historians are unable (or unwilling) to engage
in spontaneous, serious discussion online. They see it as their task to find
manageable ways to make H-German more useful and more relevant to its users.

To that end, they published our comments online before this roundtable in
the hope, once again, of inspiring online debate about these issues.
I (Drew Bergerson) changed my comments even before the roundtable in
response to what I read from the other three panelists, in the hopes of
modeling the kind of dynamic discussion, and learning, that is made possible
by coordinating online-virtual media with traditional conferences. That was
my first argument. I still see an important role for classic panels at
conferences where each scholar presents scholarship in "lecture" format, but
I also see a place for roundtables, workshops, and the like which afford
more audience participation. Germans call this engagement (Begegnung).
Particularly when coordinated with online dissemination, it can extend well
beyond the scope of the relatively few people who attend these academic
conferences. Here, I agreed with ethnographers, oral historians, and self-
styled "postmodernists" who have been arguing to demystify the culture of
professional expertise in which historians claim sole authority over the
past, in part through the myth of individual authorship. There are many
models already in use for shifting the focus of our interaction from the
defense of ideas "owned" by individual academic egos to an open,
constructive, self-critical discussion of ideas: team teaching in
interdisciplinary combinations, pre-circulating brief thought
pieces, "gagging" authors temporarily, as well as group efforts as
collaborative essays. Most of them do not preclude publishing finished
products later under individual names; but most of them do involve taking
risks in the public sphere. My second point was that virtual media can make
these discussions both easier (by providing a way to exchange ideas
informally prior to that "finished" product, particularly when coordinated
with face-to-face encounters at conferences and workshops), as well as
available to a mass public.

Harold Marcuse was also convinced of the importance of the web as a medium
for engagement with a wider public. He noted the strong interest in
historical websites, not only among a new generation of web-savvy
undergraduates but also among those members of the global public who have
access to the web. Indeed, he noted that some producers of historical
documentaries use web sources to get their ideas and information. Yet he
regretted the fact that professional historians by and large abandon this
critical source of public information to often untrained or uninformed
amateurs. The creation of websites is not recognized as part of our
obligations as professional historians (for instance in tenure and
promotion), yet it is relatively easy to learn how to set up a website, he
insisted, with a learning curve of no more difficulty than learning to word
process (which many of us successfully mastered later in life). And because
of the way that search engines work, even a relatively simple website can
attract attention away from websites conveying more myth than fact, a
phenomenon that is particularly common in the case of modern German history,
where self-proclaimed revisionists and deniers abound [see the conferences
panel on "Self-Delusion in Germany" at the same GSA]. Even easier than
creating our own sites is to assess books on Amazon and historical films on
the Internet Movie Database imdb.com. Marcuse also described his experience
with publishing student research projects on-line. (A hyperlinked thesis
paper of his remarks is available at
www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/present/.)

In his remarks from his perspective as both an academic historian and Deputy
Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington D. C., Dirk
Schumann agreed with Harold in two ways: that there is a tremendous popular
interest in history in spite of falling budgets and job losses, and that
academic historians should not abandon this audience to journalists and
other public intellectuals. He noted the large number of exhibitions in
national and regional museums, the large audiences for historical films (e.
g., "Das Wunder von Bern" in 2003), the growth of interest in aspects of
German history beyond the Third Reich, and even the benefits of having
professionally trained historians in leading positions at newspapers. Still,
he troubled over the problem of how historians are to produce a nuanced
discourse that can also reach a broad audience. First, he called on us to
tailor our narratives, venues, and language to at least three different
audiences (colleagues, an educated elite, and a general public) and to
participate more actively in the "visualization" of history, by which he
meant the production of historical documentaries, movies, image archives,
exhibitions, and the like. He then described the lecture series in Spring
2004 at the GHI cosponsored with the Goethe Institute on "History in film—
Film in History" as an example, though he admitted that it is not really a
model because of the particularities of the D. C. audience. Second, he
called for a reduction in the number of highly specialized journals,
conferences, and books, which would enable us to be read more widely. In
both recommendations, however, he recognized that existing market
conditions, doctoral programs, and tenure and promotion guidelines place
precisely the opposite pressures on academics: to ignore "public history"
and produce more "scholarship".

The audience responded to us with diverse, strongly held convictions. On the
one hand, discussion focused on what Helmut Scherer called "the self-
organization of the sciences [read broadly as: Wissenschaft] as social
organizations." From the "outsider" perspective of cultural studies, Jeffrey
Peck argued that historians need to rethink their sacred notions of
professional authority and the historical monography. Jarausch recognized
that "historical journalists" help translate scholarship to a wider audience
and are therefore in many cases better known than academic historians (e.
g., Guido Knopp); but if we abandon our privileged position as
professionally trained historians, he wondered, why should anyone listen to
our narratives over others? Jonathan Sperber agreed. Undergraduate students
do not like it when their professors give up their claim to speak
authoritatively and objectively about the past: politics do not belong in
the lecture hall. Karen Hagemann disagreed about the place of politics in
history but reminded us of just how difficult it is to speak out in a
critical voice when one is not yet tenured. A sharp voice of dissent,
Scherer argued that the web has been overestimated in its impact: only
people who are interested in a particular topic search the web for
information on it. By contrast, film, television, and newspapers reach a
truly modern-mass audience.

On the other hand, we discussed the role that academic historians play in
the wider public sphere. From his perspective as a freelance historian in
Poland, Joachim Neander concurred that Holocaust education is very much web-
driven these days, and yet there is considerable work to be done simply in
correcting errors, even on the websites of established institutions. With
reference to sources, Sperber insisted that there is no universal set of
sources; all historians tailor their sources to their interests. Yet the
problem for most of his undergraduates at the University of Missouri is that
they do not read German. By contrast, Heide Fehrenbach challenged the
fetishization of the document, though she worried that most of us are not
trained as public historians. Jarausch reminded us that we need to teach
students to critique sources found on the web. David Imhoof suggested that
we vet the work of our students by trained historians in a sort of peer-
review for the web. The problem of false information is not new to the
historical profession, he reminded us; the new technology just makes it
easier to disseminate those falsehoods. Annette Timm gave an example: in
December 1999 she responded to a posting on H-German about Lebensborn and,
even though she is not a specialist on it, her message became the top result
for that keyword on google [in Oct. 2004 that H-German discussion is the
15th result]. As far as Hagemann was concerned, historical information is
already on the web (accurate or not), so it is our responsibility to help
students navigate this new medium (and to set up our own websites to correct
those errors). Skye Arndt-Briggs concurred; and yet it is hard for her, in
her work digitizing the Defa Film Library, to get academic historians to
encapsulate their ideas in the form of short film reviews for a general
educated public.

Noting that Germanists had just held a very similar panel, Peck called for
more interdisciplinary collaboration at the GSA: too many panels still limit
themselves to a particular academic epistemology, or are at most
multidisciplinary in scope, rather than focusing on phenomena that are
interdisciplinary in "real" life. Arndt-Briggs made a similar call for
multivocality: formal digitization projects (with content for teaching) are
helpful for some purposes, informal spontaneous discussion for others. This
reviewer would have to agree. Some audiences are modern, divided in terms of
elite and mass cultures. Some are postmodern: spontaneous, temporary, and
conditioned by a highly individualized set of interests. Each in our own
ways, professional historians of Germany can participate in all of them.

For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2004 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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