[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

Introduction

Benjamin Ziemann and Miriam Dobson

Since the late 1980s, heated debates about the nature of historical knowledge have at times unsettled our profession. As in every controversy, this is in part a conflict about reputations and material resources, situated in the context of an ever more specialised, differentiated and ultimately also fragmented academic discipline. On the surface, however, the issue is presented as a conflict about the ‘truth’ historians can expect to establish about the past. In the United States and in Great Britain (less so actually on the European continent, where different and more diverse intellectual traditions come into play), it is labelled as the opposition between postmodernism and its critics. Proponents of the former declare their interest as being to liberate the engagement with the past from what they call ‘empiricist’ notions of knowledge and truth, i.e. the notion that the truth can be easily established through a focus on the empirical facts without any further theoretical or conceptual ado.1 Advocates of the latter rush to the ‘defence of history’ as they understand it. They refer to the seemingly both pivotal and eternal ‘rules of verification’ which have been come down to us unscathed from the 1820s, when they were first laid down by the German historian Leopold von Ranke. These saviours of history have no doubt that the postmodernists are ‘simply . . . unrealistic’, and that their assertions are ‘self-evidently’ wrong.2

Strong language indeed in both camps, an indication that the stakes are big and emotions are running high. And language is actually at the core of this controversy. It is basically an epistemological conflict (from the Greek word episteme=knowledge) over the nature and the possibilities of knowledge about the meaning of language and of written texts in particular. The debate between postmodernists and the defenders of a ‘realist’ conception of historical research is largely focused on the way primary sources or historical texts should be handled, read and interpreted in order to make true assertions about the past. As one would expect from the fever-pitch nature of this controversy, it has led to a veritable theory industry which has no precedent in Anglophone historical scholarship. In recent years, a growing number of monographs have attempted to outline the epistemological foundations of the study of history and the possibilities of knowledge about the past. Most of these books can be fairly labelled as belonging to the ‘realist’ camp. They engage with what they perceive as postmodernism and its twin, literary criticism, acknowledge some of its questions but hardly any of its answers. Ultimately, these books defend the position

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that history is based on the proper reading and weighing of sources. Altogether, they explain the rules of a methodological toolkit that amounts, in the words of John Tosh, ‘to little more than the obvious lessons of common sense’.3 Moreover, none of these books provide a detailed example of the actual practice of textual interpretation for the purposes of the historian.4

The rather abstract nature of declarations regarding historical study is the point of departure for this volume. In presenting these chapters, we are guided by the idea that the distinction between realist and ‘postmodern’ positions outlined above also determines the way we handle primary sources. The chapters of this volume aim to introduce the peculiarities and possible interpretations of different source genres, in a combination of methodological reflection and practical example. The contributors to this volume share the assumption that controversies about the nature of textual interpretation are at the core of the debate on postmodernism in the historical profession, and that these controversies can be solved not by abstract deliberations, but only by a serious effort to reflect theoretical differences in the light of the actual empirical work of the historian. Whatever their individual take on these issues is, they agree that at the heart of an historian’s work is her reading and interpretation of texts, and that any theoretical assumptions must make a tangible difference to these interpretations to be at all relevant.

This is the aim of this book: to introduce anyone who is interested in the interpretation of primary documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to some of the most important textual source genres, their history, forms, implications and possibilities, and thus to inform, expand and differentiate the interpretation of these texts. After we have explained the scope and organisation of this volume, the following section of this introduction intends to provide a comprehensible checklist with some general rules and practical hints for the interpretation of sources. In doing so, the chapter also highlights the plurality of possible reading strategies historians can pursue nowadays, without necessarily subscribing to the assertion that such a position has to be labelled as ‘postmodernist’.

Organisation and scope of this volume

The first part of this volume will explore different approaches to the interpretation of texts. In the first chapter, Philipp Müller demonstrates how the interpretation of primary sources became the very basis of historical research as professional standards for scholarship in this discipline were developed from the late eighteenth century onwards. Here the focus is usually on Leopold von Ranke, whose image as the inventor of the ‘historical-critical method’ of source criticism seems to be set in stone. In fact he did not actually invent the repertoire of techniques for the verification, collation and documentation of sources. Rather, he refined and summed up a tradition of textual criticism dating back to sixteenth-century humanism.5 More important, source criticism in nineteenth-century German historicism, which set the standards for professional historical scholarship, was bound up with the notion of understanding (Verstehen) as the means to access the meaning of texts from the past. And in this respect, not Ranke, but Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884) was

Introduction 3

the key figure.6 Droysen carefully distinguished between the rather technical aspects of ‘source-criticism’, and the more substantial ‘interpretation’ of past ideas and meanings. In making this distinction, the idea of understanding through interpretation and thus the concept of hermeneutics (from the Greek hermeneuein=to interpret) was central, and became pivotal for the ‘elevation of history to the rank of a science’.7

For Droysen, verifying the authenticity of a source or its exact date was only the first, preparatory step. His core interest was to decipher the meaning of utterances from the past through hermeneutical means, famously stating that ‘the essence of historical method is understanding by means of research’.8 One of the problems of this approach, however, was that the possibility of understanding was only partly provided by appropriate techniques of textual interpretation. It rested rather on the ability of the historian to empathise with past actors or to ‘feel into’ (Einfühlen) their mindset. Droysen thus imagined that the historian would feel a certain empathy towards the aspirations and fears of historical actors. He argued that this ability was ultimately guaranteed by the overarching continuity of Western civilisation since Greek antiquity. This rather questionable assertion reveals the deeply ethnocentric nature of classical historicist scholarship, and is one of the reasons why recent cultural historians, often dealing with premodern or non-Western cultures, have stressed the opaque and alien nature of past utterances. In order to gain access to these cultures, they often rely on the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, who has described the starting point for his reflections on a new, semiotic hermeneutics succinctly in the question: ‘What happens to verstehen when einfühlen disappears?’9 Geertz is thus questioning whether we really have the necessary bonds or shared heritage with people from the distant past (or indeed distant lands in the present) to make this kind of instinctive understanding possible.

As an alternative to hermeneutics, a growing number of historians have shown an interest in theories of discourse since the 1970s.10 With both the older, historicist and the more recent, anthropological hermeneutics these approaches share the idea that historical research is based on the interpretation of meaningful utterances from the past. But they disagree with regard to the idea that understanding can be based on empathy, and that it is possible to unearth the ‘true’ intentions of the author. Based on various and sometimes diverse semiotic and linguistic theories, discourse analysis seeks to interpret a text not with regard to the meaning an author has invested in it, but rather as a result of the interplay of the various linguistic elements within the text. In the second chapter, Christoph Reinfandt provides an accessible account of the ‘linguistic turn’ and some of the myths and controversies which tend to cloud its significance. From the perspective of a literary scholar, he reflects on the connections between theories of textual interpretation and practices of reading, and gives a state-of-the-art introduction to recent debates on these issues.

In the second part of the volume, each chapter provides an in-depth discussion of one particular source genre. After an introduction to the definition and history of the particular genre, the contributors explore the ways historians have used and interpreted these sources, using examples. The authors of these chapters are experts in modern European and North American history, and will introduce the reader to

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the tradition and usage of documents in various countries, including Austria, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each chapter discusses at least one example in detail, and explains if and how recent theoretical debates have affected the actual interpretative strategy with regard to a particular type of primary source.

In our selection of genres, we do not aim for a comprehensive coverage of all widely used textual sources. Rather, we have decided to present a mixture of traditionally and more recently used genres. Some of them, for example newspapers, memoranda, speeches and also autobiographies, have been part of the staple diet of both political and social historians for quite a long time. Others, for example opinion polls, court files or surveillance reports have been widely used only in the past two decades. Some of these genres have been particularly important in motivating historians to expand the boundaries of textual interpretation and to experiment with more sophisticated reading techniques. But all of these genres can be approached with a variety of different strategies, as the chapters in this part demonstrate in detail.

Some crucial omissions should at least be mentioned, though.11 One of them is petitions, in which subjects appeal or complain to their rulers or political representatives and voice their individual and collective grievances. They are essentially an early modern genre, situated in the context of a hierarchical society and political representation through estates, as the most prominent example, the Cahiers de Doléances which were presented to the French Estates General in 1789, indicates. But as hierarchical patterns of deference faded away only gradually, petitions were filed also in many nineteenthand even twentieth-century contexts, and they offer crucial insights into the political languages and the experiences of ordinary people.12 Another more recently used type of documentation about the past is patient records. Since the 1980s, historians of medicine have used these sources in order to get a more vivid picture of the social relations within hospitals and asylums and to analyse the experiences of patients. Beyond their context of origin, these sources have also a bearing on the wider cultural history of modern societies.13

This volume focuses on textual sources (bearing in mind that before technology allowed for the easy recording of sound, speeches and testimony – although oral sources – only survived when turned into text). Such a focus may seem obsolete when we consider the massive expansion of the foundations of historical research since the beginning of the twentieth century. Marc Bloch, the co-founder of the French history journal Annales in 1929, was one of the first historians to massively expand the repertoire of sources on which historical research is based. In his main field of expertise, medieval agricultural history, he investigated evidence from field-names, maps of settlements, technical artefacts and even aerial photos, as well as more traditional documents. These efforts were a deliberate challenge to the dominant position of philology (the discipline for the interpretation of texts) that at the time forced historians to focus on written texts.14 Since then, historians of the modern era have also discovered and used a variety of non-textual source genres such as films, photos and cartoons, but also uniforms, architecture and material culture more generally.15

Introduction 5

We have chosen to focus on written documents in order to give coherence to this volume. Firstly, it can be argued that the bulk of the primary evidence used in current research on European and American history since 1800 still falls under the categories tackled in this volume, despite the diversification of historical subdisciplines in the last three decades and the subsequent pluralism in the definition of what constitutes legitimate sources. Secondly, the issues raised here can be of relevance when working with other kinds of sources. It is not true that ‘tools of literary analysis are of little use’ for historians because they use genres which cannot be put under the scrutiny of these approaches. Even sources such as ‘statistical series’ of criminal offences which, Richard Evans argues, ‘bear little resemblance to any form of literature’, can, we argue, qualify for a textual reading.16 Discourse theory has transformed our understanding of what constitutes a text. From this perspective a list of criminal statistics can be read as a text. Such a reading is not primarily interested in the actual figures it contains, but rather in the categories and distinctions it uses, and in the set of meaningful assertions criminal statistics allow about the social ‘reality’ of a society.17

Finally, it should not be forgotten that the idea of ‘facts’ to be found in archival sources is in itself fictitious, since the management and storage of information in archives has an important bearing on the selection of those texts which can actually come under the scrutiny of the historian. From 1800, the individual subject has been constituted through records about his or her employment, marriage, tax returns and so on, meaning that knowledge about the people who make up the ‘nation’ is recorded and preserved in archival collections of state papers. In the nineteenth century, the formalisation and differentiation of administrative techniques came together with the preservation of certain documents in newly established national archives, on which the historical profession mostly relied. Although these structures could accommodate new types of documents, provided they were of concern for the nation – for example after the First World War, many national archives started to collect war letters of their citizen soldiers – they favoured a strictly statecentred canon of documents. Only in recent years, along with the expansion of their interpretative techniques and interests, have historians tried to build up or identify alternative archives that give us access to neglected or even suppressed documents, such as the diaries of ordinary people or the testimony of survivors of genocides.18

How to interpret primary sources – a basic checklist

How do all these ideas and theories affect the way we read and interpret a particular primary source, one that we might encounter in the context of a history module at university or in private reading? Are there some rules of thumb which render a service to those who need to come to grips with texts from the past? The following section aims to offer some practical guidance. It does not provide a ‘catechism’ for the analysis of sources, comparable to one the late Arthur Marwick has suggested.19 Firstly, the plurality of possible readings renders problematic the idea of a fixed set of rules to be memorised and heeded, suggested by religious connotations of the term ‘catechism’. Secondly, the following list of possible approaches is not

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concerned with the verification of sources, with issues of authenticity and veracity, but focuses instead on the interpretation of the meanings a text carries. Thirdly, this list does not focus on the intentions and interests the author might have possibly had, as a hermeneutical reading would encourage. Rather, it builds on the insights of a variety of more recent approaches to the interpretation of texts, and tries to explain and apply their potential with reference to practical examples.

1 What are the key concepts of the source and their connotations?

This analytical strategy follows the idea of a history of concepts, developed by J.G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck in slightly different ways.20 The common denominator of these approaches is the assumption that every time a person speaks or writes they use terms that carry a complex set of meanings (called semantics), developed over a long period of time. For example, politicians may talk about the role of the state and about the liberty of the people they represent. The use of these terms is pragmatic and unique, specific to the current context in which it is used. But ‘state’ and ‘liberty’ are not only words or technical terms with a single meaning. They are also concepts, nouns which aggregate and accumulate different meanings over time. ‘Welfare state’ or ‘nation state’ are key connotations of the state in recent times, whereas ‘liberty’ could refer to the liberties (in plural) of early modern estates, but also to a modern catalogue of human rights. Every pragmatic usage of concepts is embedded in these historical semantics. In order to capture the richness of a text, we should analyse not only how meanings have evolved over time (called a diachronic perspective), but also the different and often competing connotations a term can carry at any given historical moment (synchronic perspective).

Concepts are not only indicators or reflections of historical change, but can also be factors causing change. An example from a period of accelerated change might illustrate this. In 1970, the Catholic Church in West Germany organised an opinion poll among its members. The analysis of 21 million questionnaires, distributed to all adult Catholics, was meant to reflect the attitudes and expectations of the laity. But it was also intended as an outlet for the growing discontent among many progressive Catholics, frustrated with the snail’s pace at which the reforms promised by the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 were being implemented. The wording of the questionnaire, however, proved controversial – and highly revealing. Throughout the 14 questions of the survey, the term ‘Church’ was synonymous with church officials and the church hierarchy and thus reflected a very traditional conception of the hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church. These semantics stood in a stark contrast to the constitutions of the Vatican Council, which had just promulgated the concept of the church as the ‘people of God’, implying that the hierarchical offices had only a servant role and that all church members would have a call to holiness.21

A focus on the concepts of the questionnaire can thus reveal important reasons for the inner strife in the Catholic Church during these years, when the meaning of the term ‘church’ was the object of intense conflict. Within this one institution,

Introduction 7

we find significant differences in the way this key concept was being used, and this tells us something significant about the reforms and the uneven, contested nature of their implementation.

2 Does the text use imbalanced binary distinctions?

The analysis of historical semantics is a key avenue to reconstruct the meaning of primary sources. There is, however, a separate category of concepts that deserves special attention: binary concepts which distinguish between social groups or collectives in an imbalanced manner.22 The distinction between Gentiles and Jews is perhaps the best example for the exclusionary consequences of binary concepts, and the study of antisemitic discourse has indeed been a trailblazer for this line of enquiry. When nineteenth-century antisemites talked about the differences between the French or German people and the Jews, they implied an imbalance and indeed a strong preference. Gentiles and Jews did not simply represent two different poles, as North and South Pole, where no one would indicate a preference for either of the two. Antisemitic texts used the concept ‘Jews’ and its connotations rather to portray them in a derogatory manner as the very opposite of French and Germans, and as the most dangerous enemy of French and German national identity. These texts had a clear preference for the national in-group, bearing in mind that most of the Jews they scorned were also French or German passport-holders.

The Jews were, for example, characterised as lazy idlers who generated income only through speculation and money-lending, whereas Germans were portrayed as hardworking, industrious and honest people, to such an extent that just the mention of the lack of these qualities could be read as allusions to ‘Jewish’ people even without naming them explicitly. With the accumulation and repetition of a whole catalogue of differences between the two groups, the semantics of antisemitism cemented the asymmetry between Gentiles and Jews, but also the internal coherence of both groups. A vocabulary of prejudice thus relied on asymmetrical binary distinctions, which prepared the ground first for exclusionary legislation and later for violent action against Jews.23 Sometimes, then, a text in fact includes commentary or reflection on concepts (or groups) that are not even mentioned. Condemnation of the Jewish ‘other’ tells us also something about the identity and values of their binary opposite (e.g. the French, German etc.), even if there is no reference to the dominant group. This can also work for other kinds of binary pairs. By defining women in certain ways (for example, as hysterical and neurotic), texts also tell us something about men in a patriarchal society, namely that they are the polar opposite (rational and controlled) – and as such, they are of course worthy of political, social and economic power.

3 Does the text employ metaphors, and what is their specific function for the argument of the text?

Metaphors are the most widely used and important tropes in various textual genres. They do what the term (from the Greek meta-pherein=carrying over) literally indicates: they carry meaning from one semantic field to another, help to express

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meaning that could not easily be articulated with other textual means, and thus create resonance in the receiving field. For example, a prime minister might be described as the ‘helmsman of the state’; Stalin liked to see himself as a gardener, Mussolini as a sculptor.24 In each case, the metaphor used reveals something about how political power is imagined: the helmsman takes over responsibility for directing the course of the nation (seen as a vessel), where in contrast Stalin had a far more seminal, indeed intrusive role, for he must plant seeds, nurture the small saplings (i.e. shape and educate the future citizens) and pull out the ‘weeds’ that endangered the wellbeing of the nursery. (Weeding was a metaphor used in Soviet rhetoric and referred to the arrest, banishment, death of allegedly ‘unhealthy elements’.) Of course metaphoric language is not limited to the political domain. Some of the most intriguing and innovative studies on the uses of metaphors have focused on the history of the humanities and sciences. They make clear that the distinction between concept and metaphor is not absolute, but dependent on the situation. Even in the sciences, the metaphorical use of language is inevitable. It does not simply add something to the ‘true’, proper meaning of a text, but is rather part and parcel of the terrain on which the significance of social action is constituted.25

Metaphors should not be interpreted with respect to the alleged intentions of the author of the text, not least because we cannot determine these intentions from the source itself. Rather, they have to be situated in the semantic repertoire of a given thematic field, and their functional effects need to be deciphered. Let’s take the memorandum written by Sir Eyre Crowe in 1907 as an example (for background on it, see the more detailed discussion in the chapter on memoranda). The text displays two key metaphors. The first is the description of the international system as a ‘balance of power’. This metaphor refers to Newton’s mechanics, and has been traditionally used to justify the necessity of adequate measures to maintain an ‘equilibrium’ between the European nation-states.26 The second and perhaps more important metaphor describes Germany as a ‘professional blackmailer’. Crowe introduces the metaphor as such, as an ‘analogy and illustration’. But the function of this metaphor is not merely illustrative, but rather heuristic (from the Greek verb heuriskein=to find, i.e. allowing to develop and pursue a new perspective on a known topic).27 By portraying Imperial Germany as a ‘professional’ – and not only an occasional! – crook, the metaphor offers a substantially new perspective on the already established topic of Anglo-German antagonism, and floated this idea among the British foreign policy elites. As a criminal, Crowe concluded, Germany would need to be treated with ‘determination’, and this pivotal conclusion to the memorandum is reached by associating Germany with utterly unlawful activity. Whether or not Crowe hated Germany, the use of this metaphor raised the stakes and injected a sense of urgency into the British perception of German power ambitions. As with every trope, it was not only a stylistic ornament, but a persuasive rhetoric device.

4 Does the source include references to the narrator and the reader?

Historians usually try to establish the author of a source not only in order to determine his identity, but also because they want to extrapolate possible motives,

Introduction 9

interests or prejudices which may have affected or biased the source. We suggest an alternative strategy, one that focuses on the position of the narrator and the reader in the text itself.28 The best way to grasp the implications of this strategy is to think about your own undergraduate essays. Usually, the seminar tutor will advise you to write in the third person and to avoid the ‘I’-form. This narrative technique is meant to create an air of scientific objectivity, since the individual subject is perceived as the very opposite of objectivity. Also, you would usually not use a phrase like ‘About this topic, dear reader, I am going to tell you more in a moment’ (though many nineteenth-century novels do address the reader directly in this way). Read as a source by historians in the twenty-second century, what would your essays tell them about you as an author? Almost nothing, even though your name appears on the title page. What they do reveal, however, is the prevalence of an epistemological discourse in early twenty-first century university teaching that understood objectivity as the erasure of narrative subjectivity – in other words, the disappearance of the ‘I’. In the 1970s, the situation was rather different; in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1968 and when feminism declared that ‘the personal is political’, student essays and even academic books often had a very personal narrative, and feminist authors declared: ‘All I want is my voice.’29

While reading a source, check to see what kind of presence the narrator has: what is her function for the text? Does she erase herself, act as story-teller or offer more generalised commentary on it? Or does she perform a reflective function, i.e. comment on her own narration? These are not only narrative strategies you might find in genres such as novels, autobiographies, diaries or newspaper reports. The author of a memorandum could stress her own experiences and expertise with the subject matter, or refer to the topic in an impersonal tone (as Crowe for example did, even though he had extensive first-hand knowledge of Imperial Germany). In all belligerent nations, soldiers of the two World Wars have often reflected on the difficulty they encountered telling their gruesome experiences in the letters to their friends and relatives, rather then recounting them directly.

Connected to such issues is the status of the reader and her relationship with the text’s narrator. The reader often seems to be beyond the reach of the historian. We often struggle with the question of how the texts we study were read and received at the time because the act of reading is after all a silent – or at best spoken – one and escapes the historical record. Yet writers can be deeply curious about the impact of their text, and narrators often comment on what they hope or imagine the reader’s response to be. When the importance of the reader is flagged in the narrative itself, this needs special attention. A good example are again letters from the two World Wars, in which many soldiers directly addressed their wives, tried to anticipate their reactions, and to embed these reactions into their account of life at the front. Such a narrative strategy helped to foster a fictitious consensus between the spouses, and possibly helped them to reassure one another of the continuing relevance of their marital relation even over extended periods of separation. Not only their content, but also the narrative form of these letters was an important part of their communicative function.30