[In the following essay, Kansteiner discusses the different historiographic perspectives of Marwick and White, and suggests that a new historiographic approach is needed to deal with questions raised by popular visual media, notably films and documentaries.]

The exchange of arguments between Arthur Marwick and Hayden White, published in recent issues of this Journal, is certainly not remarkable for having introduced new perspectives into the debate about the relationship between academic historiographical practice, postmodern theory, and the possibility or threat of a vaguely conceived postmodern historiography. During the two decades that historians and critics have discussed these issues, little progress in terms of clarification and mutual enlightenment has been made. Most of the exchanges are noteworthy for their polemics and imprecise terminology, in the present case as pronounced as ever.¹ Obviously, any short interjection cannot displace these frustrating continuities of twenty years. Nevertheless, I would like to offer a new perspective on one of the issues under debate, a perspective which leads away from the history/fiction dichotomy and its discursive focus and raises the question of the representation of the past in different media.

The intensity of past and present debates about postmodernism and academic history suggests powerful motives, one of which is the concern for the integrity of the discipline as reflected in the works of future historians. For Marwick and many other critics of poststructuralist anti-epistemology, the responsibility for teaching the next generation of historians is one of the touchstones of their critique. Marwick shares this concern with theoreticians like Christopher Norris and Lionel Gossman, who have qualified their support for postmodern theories and White's structuralist critique of historical writing in light of their teaching experiences and responsibilities.² Considering that there are few history departments which give credence to poststructuralism as a historiographical tool, it is improbable that the next generation of historians will be markedly influenced by postmodern theory. But the concern with the discipline's future reflects a more serious problem. In my opinion, the polemics about postmodern historiography are partly fuelled by a growing awareness of the social and political insignificance of historical scholarship in contemporary Western societies. Since the end of the second world war, the social task of orienting society and especially its élites vis-à-vis the past has passed from the historical profession to other ways of imagining the past, most importantly to the electronic media. In this sense, I would like to challenge what Marwick repeatedly argues in his piece and what he considers common ground, that is, that we ‘only know the human past through the works of historians’ (JCH, January 1995, p. 28, see also pp. 8, 9, 11, 12, 29).

Unfortunately for us historians, few members of contemporary Western societies derive information about the past from sources based upon or compatible with professional historical scholarship. From our perspective the discipline of history might ‘fulfil a necessary social function'—as Marwick puts it—(p. 9) but today it is hardly a popular one. More than ever before, ‘society's need to understand particular aspects of the human past’ (p. 8) is met by visual media, such as television, the tabloids, and historical museums, which are not rivalled by scholarship's widespread but not necessarily popular nor influential derivative, the textbook. Unlike textbooks, media representations of the past are mostly produced without the involvement of historians and they distribute information about the past in ways incompatible with academic, discursively-fixed scholarship. These sources might not provide what Marwick calls ‘serious knowledge’ of the past (p. 11). They might be closer to ‘family gossip, old photographs, folk memories, old buildings, museums, pageants’ which Marwick lists as non-professional sources of historical information (p. 11). He mistakenly assumes, however, that these sources merely attest to the existence of the past. In their own way they provide interpretations and orientation, especially if we add the electronic media to the list. I want to illustrate this point by referring to an example which I witnessed recently.

During the first half of 1995, German society was swept up in a wave of anniversary festivities which commemorated the end of the second world war fifty years ago, mostly in terms of the liberating effect of this event on German society but at times also mourning the defeat of the German army and state. In the wake of this media outpouring, a generation of Germans who had had, thus far, little exposure to the history of nazi Germany—being too young to remember media events like ‘Holocaust’ and the debates surrounding it—were confronted for the first time with images of the liberation of the camps, the German capitulation, and the immediate postwar period. Few of these representations in documentaries, TV films, and movies can live up to scholarly standards and all of them function on levels outside the scope of even the most popular history books.

In their attempts to assemble material for the current anniversaries, TV journalists sometimes consulted historians for prestigious projects—a co-operation which often ends in frustration—but most of the time their choices of how to represent the end of Nazism was determined by what historians would consider unfortunate factors, i.e. by what material is easily available in the station's archives, what copyrights the station holds at the moment, how many minutes and seconds are available in the evening broadcast, and what might be efficient ways of beating the competition in the ratings. As a result, the audience was often faced with the type of representations of the past which Marwick has rightly rejected for historians: simplistic, imprecise, abstract, metaphorical language combined with highly suggestive footage. Thus, for instance, the undue emphasis on Hitler's last days in the bunker, which have been the focus of many media stories during the commemorations, is certainly not a reflection of the historical discipline's most important or most recent achievements.³ Even more importantly, the many shows combined have assumed a life of their own. The sombre, at times listless faces of the German politicians who reflected upon the liberation of the camps in official, live broadcast ceremonies between January and April 1995, lit up when they commemorated 8 May in carefully crafted, tentatively optimistic speeches.⁴ In the same period, the gruesome images of the camps gave way to films about the peace celebrations which invariably ended with references to the imminent economic miracle. Although we still know very little about historical identity formation and the dynamics of collective memory—topics which have only recently begun to interest historians—I assume that these simple but powerful stories, produced collectively by the media within a period of less than six months, are very influential for the development of the historical consciousness of teenagers growing up in Germany today.

From this vantage point, the polemics between Marwick and White mark the differences between a particular kind of intellectual history and a particular, more widely-practised type of social history, both of which are located well within the parameters of the academic tradition for the study and representation of the past. Marwick's and White's concern for the future audience and social relevance of historical scholarship which, I suggest, has influenced the letter and the spirit of their exchange, has to be met by other strategies than ‘history as usual'—as proposed by Marwick—or the development of modernist historical writing in the tradition of literary modernism—which White favours. Rather, the growing insignificance of traditional historiography indicates the need to focus on different, in practical and theoretical terms more challenging questions, for instance on the problem of bridging the gap between scholarly historical narratives and the kind of sweeping, imprecise, visually-based narratives about the past that find the interest of larger audiences; or on the problem of how scholarly protocols for the writing of truthful histories can be transferred to visual media, that is, how histories can be responsibly narrated in images. Such projects would entail an understanding of the metaphysics and metahistories of the media and in this respect would make use of some of the more productive aspects of the discussions on postmodern historiography. Such projects are also more pressing and rewarding than attempts to unravel the intricacies of the discursive protocols of two relatively closely associated ways of doing history and providing historical knowledge, especially if these attempts are partly triggered by concerns about the discipline's marginality. Finally, they might help us ‘to conceive a way of doing history to meet the needs of our audiences’ (White [‘Response to Arthur Marwick’], JCH, April 1995, p. 244), or to find them in the first place.

Notes

1. The most recent in a long line of debates features a conventionally polemic critique of the perceived postmodern threat followed by an unusually thoughtful response. See K. Barkin, ‘Bismarck in a Postmodern World,’ German Studies Review, 28, 2 (May 1995), 241–51, and M. Geyer/K. H. Jarausch, ‘Great Men and Postmodern Ruptures: Overcoming the “Belatedness” of German Historiography,’ German Studies Review, 28, 2 (May 1995), 253–73.

2. For Norris's and Gossman's critique of White and the general reception of White's work see W. Kansteiner, ‘Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History,’ History and Theory, 32 (1993), 273–95, esp. 286–90. The question of teaching and graduate training in history is also an important reference point in the above-cited exchange between Barkin and Geyer/Jarausch. See especially Geyer/Jarausch, op. cit., 254–5 and 257–9.

3. The focus on Hitler was particularly apparent in two documentaries aired by the two German national public television stations, the ARD and the ZDF, on 23 April 1995. From a historiographical perspective the ZDF's ‘Hitlers Ende: Was geschah im Führerbunker?’ (23/4/95) and the ARD's more critical ‘Hitler und die Deutschen’ (23/4/95) still compare favourably with the few shows broadcast by the commercial stations; see, for instance, RTL's ‘Nachtjournal Spezial: Die Stunde Null: Hitlers Ende—Deutschlands Anfang’ (30/4/95 and 7/5/95). See also the cover story of Der Spiegel of 3/4/1995 entitled ‘Hitlers letzte Tage.’

4. In this respect, it is revealing to compare the official ceremony of the Federal Republic on 8 May which was broadcast live on a national public television station (ARD ‘Staatsakt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,’ 8/5/95) with the numerous ceremonies broadcast on the occasion of the liberation of the camps, most of which were aired live only on regional channels of the public broadcasting network of the ARD; see, for example, Hessen 3, ‘Gedenkveranstaltung live aus Ravensbrück,’ 23/4/95, and MDR, ‘Buchenwald—50 Jahre danach live,’ 9/4/95.