The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility

By Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson

At a time when rapidly evolving technologies, political turmoil, and the tensions inherent in multiculturalism and globalization are reshaping historical consciousness, what is the proper role for historians and their work? By way of an answer, the contributors to this volume offer up an illuminating collective meditation on the idea of ethos and its relevance for historical practice. These intellectually adventurous essays demonstrate how ethos—a term evoking a society’s “fundamental character” as well as an ethical appeal to knowledge and commitment—can serve as a conceptual lodestar for history today, not only as a narrative, but as a form of consciousness and an ethical-political orientation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781805394334

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Towards a New Ethos of History?

ALEIDA ASSMANN

Historiography has seen many developments, changes and experiments in its long history. Many things have affected the representation of the past and shaped a modern ethos of history: political transformations and historical ruptures, the shift of cognitive frames and emotional sensibility, together with new projects, values and methodologies. Changes in the ethos of history, however, are not to be confused with the ongoing search for new techniques, orientations and paradigms that are part of an inherent dynamic of an academic discipline. From its very beginning, (professional) historiography has also produced a specific ethos. Metaphorically speaking, this ethos may be called the conscience of the profession, a critical form of metadiscourse, self-reflexion and self-evaluation evolving in an ongoing process that is triggered by external issues and challenges, demanding new responses, reactions and changes. The ethos of history is therefore not (only) an intrinsic part of historiography but arises from an intersection between historiography, social reality, cultural history and political orientation.

The following contribution to this topic attempts to sketch some transformations of the ethos of history. It goes back to the beginnings of historiography in early modernity and its professionalization in the nineteenth century, but focuses mainly on more recent shifts that have emerged as new responses to the ongoing impact of violent pasts.

The Critical Ethos: Probing the Authenticity of Sources (Fifteenth Century)

As early as the fifteenth century, a new ethos of history was developed by sceptics and independent thinkers of early modernity. They were the first to challenge old historical records that had served sacrosanct institutions as a basis for their legitimation. The paradigmatic case illustrating this new spirit of rigorous analysis was the document of the Donation of Constantine that was scrutinized in 1440 by Lorenzo Valla, an Italian Catholic priest and Renaissance humanist, who exposed it as a forgery. This proved to be a revolutionary event for the political authority of papacy that had been built on this document, but also for the reputation and self-image of historians. While throughout the Middle Ages historians had acted as carriers and preservers of an age-old memory, they now turned into critics of ancient documents, carefully probing the validity of traditions. In his History of the King Alfonso of Naples (1445), Valla stressed the new empirical spirit of his profession when he compared the skills of the historian with those of a judge and a doctor. Valla was not the only one, but according to Peter Burke, his approach was ‘the most elaborate and systematic’, creating an effective critical tool for humanist historians by applying an elaborate tradition of rigorous philological standards to written sources.¹

The Objectivist Ethos: Establishing the Rules of the Game (Eighteenth Century)

It took four more centuries before this new critical ethos of history was inscribed into an academic institution and protected against external influences. The modern universities of the nineteenth century created the new discipline of historiography on a set of rules that were henceforth transmitted, monitored and developed by a growing international community of scholars. The central aim was a commitment to truth underpinned by a new methodology. In this context, the value of ‘objectivity’ arose as the most important claim and standard, requiring the strict independence and distance of the researcher from the matter of his research.

Reinhart Koselleck has elaborated this definition by adding distance in time from the investigated event as an important factor of objectivity.² Seen from this perspective, historians of contemporary history are in a problematic position because they are still close and to some extent part of the events that they aim to describe and analyse. According to Koselleck, the historian has to wait for time to pass before they can start to study a historical event without being influenced by personal bias, stakes and issues. On this basis, Koselleck distinguished between an impure and a pure past. The impure past is still mixed with elements of the present, such as ‘moral concern, apologetic gestures, accusations and impositions of guilt’, which he sums up by the term ‘strategies of mastering the past’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigungstechniken). Temporal distance, he hoped, would provide an undistorted view of the past, similar to the clear and transparent view of the bottom of a pool after the muddied waters of contemporary issues have settled.

It is quite obvious that in the humanities, rigorous standards of truth are much more difficult to define and apply than in the natural sciences. Historicism is a new kind of scholarship that was established in academia together with new disciplines in the wake of the Enlightenment. In these new contexts, historiography emerged as a new profession with its autonomous rules and independent methodological standards. The nineteenth century, however, was also the century of nation-building, with a high demand for reconstructions of the collective past and gripping narratives that served the new states and their societies. In this context, many historians embraced their political mandate and mixed scholarly erudition and literary style in order to shape the past for new imagined communities.³ Outside the national framework, when relating to ancient states and foreign cultures, the scholarly tools of historicism were applied with more empirical rigour and self-effacing objectivity, filling the shelves of libraries with volumes and volumes of dry erudition, and the archives of knowledge with endless neutral data. Nietzsche intensely disliked this vast output of historicist scholarship, chiding it as a dangerous undermining of an affective relation to one’s past that destroys the possibility of identifying with one’s cultural heritage.

In his book That Noble Dream, Peter Novick has offered a remarkable metareflexion on the principle of objectivity from within the historical profession.⁴ This is how he defines it: its assumptions

include a commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and, above all, between history and fiction. Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of interpretation: the value of an interpretation is judged by how well it accounts for the facts; if contradicted by the facts, it must be abandoned. Truth is one, not perspectival. Whatever patterns exist in history are ‘found’, not ‘made’. . . . One corollary of all of this is that historians, as historians, must purge themselves of external loyalties: the historian’s primary allegiance is to ‘the objective historical truth’, and to professional colleagues who share a commitment to cooperative, cumulative efforts to advance toward that goal.⁵

In his analysis of objectivity, Novick does not use the term ‘ethos’ but speaks of a ‘morale’, of an ‘objectivist creed’. An essential article of this creed is the promise of ‘a unitary convergent history which would correspond to a unitary past’.⁶ The unitary past corresponds to Koselleck’s definition of modern ‘history’ as a term in the singular that replaces the plural of ‘histories’ in the sense of ‘Geschichten’ (narratives). In his discussion of objectivity, Novick introduces the word ‘myth’ in an interesting way. Drawing on the functional approach of anthropologists, he defines myth as the pragmatic charter of a social institution. In stark contrast to Roland Barthes’ use of the term, Novick’s approach ‘implies nothing about the truth or falsity of what is being discussed. Rather, it is a device to illuminate the important functions which historical objectivity has served in sustaining the professional historical venture; and, since myths are by definition sacred, the tenacity, indeed, ferocity, with which it has been defended’.⁷ In the words of Malinowski, a myth ‘expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficacy of ritual and enforces practical rules for the guidance of man’.⁸ What Malinowski claims for the relationship between myth and ritual, Novick claims for the relationship between the ‘myth of objectivity’ and the notion of ‘truth’ within the academic discipline of historiography. This pragmatic charter allows to set up institutions of learning and to separate the professional historians from the unprofessional ones, such as partisans, amateurs, gentleman historians or pamphleteers.

While the ‘noble dream’ of objectivity serves to constitute the discipline as a whole, it remains among historians an essentially contested concept.⁹ There are many that have raised doubts about the standards of objectivity; the sacrosanct dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ has been deconstructed, and there is even the question whether the aims and standards of historical objectivity were ever truly fulfilled. Although many tenets of the objectivist credo have become untenable for many historians, it is unlikely that they would willingly part with the core vision of the concept. While ‘positivism’ has been dismissed as boring and even as a dead end for historical practice, the noble dream of objectivity – in the sense of distance, adherence to verified sources, arguments on the basis of evidence, balance and even-handedness – is still widely accepted as the basis of the historian’s practice. This dream continues to organize the academic profession of historiography in a self-critical manner, producing new visions and revisions, new theses and their polemical contradictions, constantly calling in question established assumptions and introducing new perspectives. What is perhaps most important about the scholarly ethos of objectivity is the institutionalized doubt that keeps historiography in flow as a self-conscious process of self-correction.

The Social Ethos: Criticizing the Archive and Enlarging the Scope of the Past (1970s and Onwards)

Changes in historiography do not only occur silently in a continuous process of self-correction and readjustment, but also more conspicuously due to cultural ruptures and changes in political orientation. One example is a movement that started in the 1970s as an alternative approach to established academic historiography. This new ethos of history emerged together with a new generation of baby-boomers and 1968ers born at the end of or after World War II. Leftist movements reverberated not only in pop culture and political activism but found expression also in new approaches to history. These were grounded on the awareness that what was dealt with and transmitted as ‘history’ was but a ‘miserable defective shred’ of the reality and lived experience of the past.¹⁰ The new generation of historians started to criticize the official sources as the sole and sacrosanct basis for historical research, showing that the archive is itself an historical institution that is severely limited, reproducing automatically the bias and power structure of the rulers and the hegemonic class as the agents of history.

Johan Galtung has created a term for this invisible motor of the reproduction of social injustice, calling it ‘structural violence’. Structural violence finds its manifestations in various forms of institutionalized inequality such as elitism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism or sexism.¹¹ In patriarchal societies, for instance, women had little or no access to writing and printing, which led to their effective exclusion from archives and libraries. The same applies to rural populations, religious or racial minorities and other oppressed social groups who occupy the lower rungs of society. ‘Structural violence’ creates a political and cultural frame of power that allows some voices to be heard while others are notoriously silenced.

The new ethos of history called for a broadening of the knowledge of the past. An important new approach was the introduction of oral history in order to tap new sources and to access hitherto concealed and forgotten aspects of everyday life, the history of workers, women and the rural population.¹² This ethos was oriented towards inclusion and aimed at enlarging the scope of the past. By interviewing and giving a voice to people that had not been heard so far, the themes of historiographical research were radically enlarged and an important segment of the society was for the first time represented and presented as an actor of history.

Carlo Ginzburg and, later, the movement of ‘new historicism’ revolutionized historiography by discovering and digging up sources in the historical archive that had been ignored. ‘Dig where you stand!’ also became an influential slogan that stirred communal local history projects against the mainstream of academic history. Among the younger generation of historians, selecting and interpreting neglected sources of nondescript persons and telling their individual stories in an anecdotal manner became an important way to reconstruct forgotten worlds and to complement the historiography of great men and great events. Regina Schulte, for instance, has retrieved the legal documents of the circuit court in Munich to reconstruct the daily life and sorrows of the rural population in upper Bavaria in the second half of the nineteenth century. Up till then, such sources had not been part of historiography of mentalities and everyday life.¹³ In the same year appeared the three-volume edition of interviews conducted by Schulte’s husband, Lutz Niethammer, and Alexander von Plato, who reconstructed the recent past of the workers in the Ruhr area from the workers’ point of view.¹⁴ They found none of their sources in the archives but produced them themselves in long processes of interviewing, transcribing, publishing and interpreting. From the start, these historians met with strong objections against their alternative history of mentality and its methodology. Critics condemned this approach to history as subjective and rejected its theoretical foundation. The new search for ‘ego-documents’ (Winfried Schulze) and ‘ego-history’ (Lutz Niethammer) privileged the individual against larger collectives and structures, but now this individual was no longer a notable bourgeois ‘subject’ but one that had not yet had a chance to appear on the stage of history.¹⁵

The Postcolonial Ethos: Changing the Point of View (1980s and Onwards)

‘How much past is needed to understand the present?’¹⁶ When asking this question, Jürgen Osterhammel argued for enlarging the stretch of the past that is under investigation. Another variation of the question could be ‘which forgotten or repressed history is needed to understand the present?’. This brings us to a fourth change of the ethos of history, which consists in a change of perspective. Not every change of perspective, of course, introduces a change in the ethos of history. Changes of perspective have occurred frequently and are obviously highly consequential for the writing of history. There is, for example, the difference between the point of view of the victor and that of the loser; their historical accounts will differ considerably, emphasizing contradictory aims, experiences and lessons. There is also the difference between bourgeois and Marxist historiography as institutionalized, for instance, in former East and West Germany during the period of the Cold War. In this case, two contradictory and rivalling perspectives existed side by side in a perpetual strife for supremacy.

A consequential change in perspective that ushered in a new ethos of history was the postcolonial perspective. This perspective was part of the process of decolonization after World War II and was developed by intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon who drew on Marxist and existentialist theories. When this discourse was taken up by a generation and adopted into mainstream Western historiography in the 1980s and ’90s, it involved a radical transvaluation of values in response to the enduring aftermath of racism. This led to a self-critical reshaping of the hegemonic historical narrative. Step by step, former empires started to adopt the perspective of the colonized victim into their own self-image, and acknowledged racial structures of violence and exploitation in their national past. Instead of relegating the trauma of the colonized other to those who had been impacted by racial violence, the former colonizers worked through the pernicious cultural legacy of racism and its continuing effects in democratic societies, thus acknowledging and embracing their share in the traumatic past. The postcolonial ethos of history creates a ‘dialogic memory’ in which the experience of the colonized is integrated into the official narrative of the state and supported by self-critical historians, new history textbooks and museums.¹⁷ A shift in the ethos of history is not only manifested in historical writings but also in the opening of museums. To illustrate how difficult and tormented such a project and process might be, I take as an example the attempts at establishing a national museum of slavery in England and the United States.

In 2007, England commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of slave trade in England in 1807. This dark chapter of history focusing on racist violence and exploitation was presented to the general public in the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. The perceptions of this museum and its exhibition were mixed. John Darwin, for instance, renowned historian of the British Empire, and a vocal opponent of a ‘new imperial history’ that reduces the building of empire to ‘a brutal, coercive, exploitative, racist and sometimes genocidal enterprise’, was impressed by the museum. He affirmed that ‘the central importance of slavery in Britain’s global expansion before 1800 has begun to receive its proper share of attention.’¹⁸ The message of the slave-trade museum in Liverpool is clear: it adopts the point of view of the former slaves, acknowledging their suffering under antihumanitarian circumstances. It tells a now shameful chapter of one’s own history in clear words and striking images, thus demonstrating that this chapter has been closed and belongs now literally to the past. By telling the story, the museum confirms that it is ‘history’ and no longer exerting its influence on the present. The museum, in other words, is a public statement by the former colonial power that is distancing itself from this chapter of its racist past. In doing so, it also acknowledges that the fight for the abolition of slavery had been a political project that had united members of the colonizers and the colonized in a common cause. In other words: the Liverpool museum is also a monument to abolition as the joint victory over slavery. An important function of a museum is thus to confirm that historical events are no longer part of the present.

The situation is different in the United States that, to date, does not have a state-sponsored museum of slavery. The absence of such a central site of commemoration does not mean that the history of slavery is unmemorialized in the United States. There are a number of local places where the history of slavery is presented. A remarkable exhibition on the history of slavery, for instance, was opened by President Obama in 2016 in Washington at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This federally funded museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, exhibits the history of slavery alongside Black folklore and pop culture, including a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali. Paul Finkelman, historian of slavery, commented on the exhibition: ‘It has to be said that the end note in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful. We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.’¹⁹

The first attempt at a national museum of slavery opened in 1984 under the name America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM). It was not a state enterprise but emerged from a private initiative in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dr James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching, acquired a spacious freestanding building, collected memorabilia, displayed exhibitions, employed staff and organized guided tours for local, national and international visitors led by ‘griots’ who interpreted the exhibits and facilitated dialogue. The backbone of the museum was the testimony of Dr Cameron himself, who shared his embodied experience with visitors from different countries, acting as an impressive witness and example of ‘living history’. His death in 2006 and the economic crisis forced the museum to give up its building in 2008. But it did not disappear altogether. In 2012, the ABHM went online and was reinstalled as a virtual museum. ‘This 21st century, cost-effective format makes ABHM available to people around the world who would otherwise have no access to its information and resources.’²⁰ In a video message, Dr Cameron presents the aim of the museum as an effort to promote and support ‘the unity of our sacred nation’.²¹ This mission statement is also expressed on the homepage: ‘ABHM builds public awareness of the harmful legacies of slavery in America and promotes racial repair, reconciliation, and healing. We envision a society that remembers its past in order to shape a better future – a nation undivided by race where every person matters equally.’²² As one of the white supporters of the virtual museum points out, the message of the museum conveyed to its visitors is ‘gift’, not ‘guilt’. It is not an indictment but an appeal to empathy and thus a gesture enabling reconciliation. Another member refers to it as a safe place and a framework to talk about this troubled history for which there is as yet no common language available.

In 2001, another museum project on American slavery was started in Fredericksburg, Virginia, by Douglas Wilder, a former grandson of slaves and the first elected black governor in the nation. He bought the ground on which he hoped to build the first ‘United States National Slavery Museum’. In spite of ambitious visions and initial support, the project crashed together with the economic crisis in 2008. Around the same time, another national slave museum project had been started on the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, a ‘genuine landmark built by African slaves and their descendants. As a site of memory and consciousness, the Whitney Plantation Museum is meant to pay homage to all slaves on the plantation itself and to all of those who lived elsewhere in the US South.’²³ This project is in the vigorous hands of two collaborating actors who work on the site together: John Cummings, a white neighbour, financial sponsor and committed organizer, and Ibrahima Seck, a black scholar from Senegal who works in close contact with sources and archives. The latter comments on the project of the former: ‘If one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John’s head in doing this, that word would be reparations. Real reparations. He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes.’²⁴

David Amsden sums up his article on ‘Building the First Slavery Museum in America’ with the comment, ‘One hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, no federally funded museum dedicated to slavery exists, no monument honoring America’s slaves.’ Although not state-funded, the Whitney project comes closes to such a project. ‘As Americans’, writes historian Eric Foner, ‘we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.’²⁵

The Post-Traumatic Ethos: The Testimonial Paradigm (1980s and Onwards)

The post-traumatic ethos entered history also in the 1980s and 1990s. It is similar to the postcolonial ethos in many ways and interacts with it frequently in a multidirectional framework.²⁶ It is also based on a change of perspective and the building up of a more inclusive dialogic memory, this time relating to the post-traumatic experience of the Holocaust. This new ethos is backed up by what I want to call the ‘testimonial paradigm’, which, in the meantime, has also been applied to other historical traumas such as slavery, the extermination of indigenous people, or to forced disappearance as perpetrated by Argentinian State terror. In all of these cases, the state archives do not yield any or not enough sources to arrive at a full account and understanding of these events, because they happened under the condition of ‘normative violence’ (Judith Butler), meaning political circumstances that had not only condoned but even legitimated them. We are dealing here with historical events that were reinterpreted in the 1990s in terms of gross violations of human rights. The new historical genre of testimony was created in this framework to compensate for repressive forgetting, ignorance and a lack of sources. Its amazing career in the 1990s was exacerbated by the awareness that the voices of the victims had remained outside the official archive and were muffled by the national narrative. The new ethos of history consisted in listening to these voices, recognizing their validity and establishing their