Making Sense of History Series

The Weimar era in Germany is often characterized as a time of significant change. Such periods of rupture transform the way people envision the past, present, and future. This book traces the conceptions of time and history in the Germany of the early 20th century. By focusing on both the discourse and practices of the youth movement, the author shows how it reinterpreted and revived the past to overthrow the premises of modern historical thought. In so doing, this book provides insight into the social implications of the ideological de-historicization of the past.

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written by professional historians. Drawing on studies from a number of different European nation states, the contributors to this volume present a systematic exploration, of the representation of the national paradigm. In doing so, they contextualize the European experience in a more global framework by providing comparative perspectives on the national histories in the Far East and North America. As such, they expose the complex variables and diverse actors that lie behind the narration of a nation.

History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes history: memory and historical thinking are the door of the human mind to experience. At the same time, it transforms the past into a meaningful and sense bearing part of the present and beyond. It is these complex interrelationships that are the focus of the contributors to this volume, among them such distinguished scholars as Paul Ricoeur, Johan Galtung, Eberhard Lämmert, and James E. Young. Full of profound insights into human society pat and present it is a book that not only historians but also philosophers and social scientists should engage with.

As one of the premier historical thinkers of his generation, Jörn Rüsen has made enormous contributions to the methods and theoretical framework of history as it is practiced today. In Evidence and Meaning, Rüsen surveys the seismic changes that have shaped the historical profession over the last half-century, while offering a clear, economical account of his theory of history. To traditional historiography Rüsen brings theoretical insights from philosophy, narrative theory, cultural studies, and the social sciences, developing an intricate but robust model of “historical thinking” as both a cognitive discipline and a cultural practice—one that is susceptible neither to naïve empiricism nor radical relativism.

The growing interdependence of the local and the global demand innovative approaches to human development. Such approaches, the author argues, ought to be based on the emerging ethics of global intelligence, defined as the ability to understand, respond to, and work toward what will benefit all human beings and will support and enrich all life on this planet. As no national or supranational authority can predefine or predetermine it, global intelligence involves long-term, collective learning processes and can emerge only from continuing intercultural research, dialogue, and cooperation. In this book, the author elaborates the basic principles of a new field of intercultural studies, oriented toward global intelligence. He proposes concrete research and educational programs that would help create intercultural learning environments designed to stimulate sustainable human development throughout the world.

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today. Qualifying the ‘non-historian’ as an ‘able’ interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between history and theory within the current epistemological configurations and refigurations. He asks how history transcends the obsessive ‘linguistic’ turn, which has been hegemonizing literary/discourse analysis, and focuses greater attention on historical experience and where history stands in relation to our understanding of ethics, religion and the current state of global politics that underlines the manipulation and abuse of history.

A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project.

In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust—and, by extension, any past event—as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.

A vast amount of literature—both scholarly and popular—now exists on the subject of historical memory, but there is remarkably little available that is written from an African perspective. This volume explores the inner dynamics of memory in all its variations, from its most destructive and divisive impact to its remarkable potential to heal and reconcile. It addresses issues on both the conceptual and the pragmatic level and its theoretical observations and reflections are informed by first-hand experiences and comparative reflections from a German, Indian, and Korean perspective. A new insight is the importance of the future dimension of memory and hence the need to develop the ability to ‘remember with the future in mind’. Historical memory in an African context provides a rich kaleidoscope of the diverse experiences and perspectives—and yet there are recurring themes and similar conclusions, connecting it to a global dialogue to which it has much to contribute, but from which it also has much to receive.

The cultural borders of Europe are today more visible than ever, and with them comes a sense of uncertainty with respect to liberal democratic traditions: whether treated as abstractions or concrete realities, cultural divisions challenge concepts of legitimacy and political representation as well as the legal bases for citizenship. Thus, an understanding of such borders and their consequences is of utmost importance for promoting the evolution of democracy. Cultural Borders of Europe provides a wide-ranging exploration of these lines of demarcation in a variety of regions and historical eras, providing essential insights into the state of European intercultural relations today.

★“[T]his is a scholarly, commendable biography and intellectual history. Lay readers will be challenged; psychologists and historians will be grateful.”—Library Journal, starred review First published in 1946, Viktor Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning remains one of the most influential books of the last century, selling over ten million copies worldwide and having been embraced by successive generations of readers captivated by its author’s philosophical journey in the wake of the Holocaust. This long-overdue reappraisal examines Frankl’s life and intellectual evolution anew, from his early immersion in Freudian and Adlerian theory to his development of the “third Viennese school” amid the National Socialist domination of professional psychotherapy. It teases out the fascinating contradictions and ambiguities surrounding his years in Nazi Europe, including the experimental medical procedures he oversaw in occupied Austria and a stopover at the Auschwitz concentration camp far briefer than has commonly been assumed. Throughout, author Timothy Pytell gives a penetrating but fair-minded account of a man whose paradoxical embodiment of asceticism, celebrity, tradition, and self-reinvention drew together the complex strands of twentieth-century intellectual life. From the introduction: At the same time, Frankl’s testimony, second only to the Diary of Anne Frankin popularity, has raised the ire of experts on the Holocaust. For example, in the 1990s the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington purportedly refused to sell Man’s Search for Meaningin the gift shop…. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Frankl became very popular in America. Frankl’s survival of the Holocaust, his reassurance that life is meaningful, and his personal conviction that God exists served to make him a forerunner of the self-help genre.

From consumer products to architecture to advertising to digital technology, design is an undeniably global phenomenon. Yet despite their professed transnational perspective, historical studies of design have all too often succumbed to a bias toward Western, industrialized nations. This diverse but rigorously curated collection recalibrates our understanding of design history, reassessing regional and national cultures while situating them within an international context. Here, contributors from five continents offer nuanced studies that range from South Africa to the Czech Republic, all the while sensitive to the complexities of local variation and the role of nation-states in identity construction.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Heritage, as an area of research and learning, often deals with difficult historical questions, due to the strong emotions and political commitments that are often at stake. In this, it poses particular challenges for teachers, museum educators and the publics they serve. Guided by a shared focus on these “sensitive pasts,” the contributors to this volume draw on new theoretical and empirical research to provide valuable insights into heritage pedagogy. Together they demonstrate the potential of heritage as a historical-educational domain that transcends myopic patriotism, parochialism and simplistic relativism, helping to enhance critical and sophisticated historical thinking.

Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the “Middle Ages” has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects—from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology—have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.

In cultural and intellectual terms, one of the EU’s most important objectives in pursuing unification has been to develop a common historical narrative of Europe. Across ten compelling case studies, this volume examines the premises underlying such a project to ask: Could such an uncontested history of Europe ever exist? Combining studies of national politics, supranational institutions, and the fraught EU-Mideast periphery with a particular focus on the twentieth century, the contributors to History and Belonging offer a fascinating survey of the attempt to forge a post-national identity politics.

For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.  

The last several decades have witnessed an explosion of new empirical research into representations of the past and the conditions of their production, prompting claims that we have entered a new era in which the past has become more “present” than ever before. Contemplating Historical Consciousness brings together leading historians, ethnographers, and other scholars who give illuminating reflections on the aims, methods, and conceptualization of their own research as well as the successes and failures they have encountered. This rich collective account provides valuable perspectives for current scholars while charting new avenues for future research.

Is there a “Nordic history”? If so, what are its origins, its scope, and its defining features? In this informative volume, scholars from all five Nordic nations tackle a notoriously problematic historical concept. Whether recounting Foucault’s departure from Sweden or tracing the rise of movements such as “aristocratic empiricism,” each contribution takes a deliberately transnational approach that is grounded in careful research, yielding rich, nuanced perspectives on shifting and contested historical terrain.

Since the 1960s, nations across the “developed world” have been profoundly shaped by deindustrialization. In regions in which previously dominant industries faced crises or have disappeared altogether, industrial heritage offers a fascinating window into the phenomenon’s cultural dimensions. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches and straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle.

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.

Few would dispute that many Western industrial democracies undertook extensive deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this narrative, in its most familiar form, depends upon several historiographical assumptions that bely the complexities and pitfalls of studying the recent past. Across thirteen case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate this “deregulatory moment” from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War.

Empathy and History offers a comprehensive and dual account of empathy’s intellectual and educational history. Beginning in an influential educational movement that implanted the concept in R.G. Collingwood’s re-enactment doctrine, the book goes back to reveal the fundamental role that empathy played in the foundation of the history discipline before tracing its reception and development in twentieth-century hermeneutics and philosophy of history. Attentive to matters of practice, it illuminates the distinct character of the historical context that empathetic understanding seeks to capture and sets out a new approach to empathy as a special variety of historical questioning.

For all of the recent debates over the methods and theoretical underpinnings of the historical profession, scholars and laypeople alike still frequently think of history in terms of storytelling. Accordingly, historians and theorists have devoted much attention to how historical narratives work, illuminating the ways they can bind together events, shape an argument and lend support to ideology. From ancient Greece to modern-day bestsellers, the studies gathered here offer a wide-ranging analysis of the textual strategies used by historians. They show how in spite of the pursuit of truth and objectivity, the ways in which historians tell their stories are inevitably conditioned by their discursive contexts.

Contemporary historians have transformed our understanding of the German military in World War II, debunking the “clean Wehrmacht” myth that held most soldiers innocent of wartime atrocities. Considerably less attention has been paid to those soldiers at the end of hostilities. In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier. As Echternkamp shows, public controversies around these topics helped to drive the social processes that legitimized the democratic postwar order.

On the surface, historical scholarship might seem thoroughly incompatible with political engagement: the ideal historian, many imagine, is a disinterested observer focused exclusively on the past. In truth, however, political action and historical research have been deeply intertwined for as long as the historical profession has existed. In this insightful collection, practicing historians analyze, reflect on, and share their experiences of this complex relationship. From the influence of historical scholarship on world political leaders to the present-day participation of researchers in post-conflict societies and the Occupy movement, these studies afford distinctive, humane, and stimulating views on historical practice and practitioners

Presenting a new historical narrative on European integration and identity this title examines how the concept of Europe has been entangled in a dynamic and dramatic tension between calls for unity and arguments for borders and division. Through an in-depth intellectual history of the idea of Europe, Mats Andren interrogates the concept of integration and more recent debates surrounding European identity across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the post-war period. Applying a broad range of original sources this unique work will be key reading for students and researchers studying European History, European Studies, Political History and related fields.

Rudolf Kjellén, regularly referred to as “the father of geopolitics,” developed in the first decade of the twentieth century an analytical model for calculating the capabilities of great-power states and promoting their interests in the international arena. It was an ambitious intellectual project that sought to bring politics into the sphere of social science. Bringing together experts on Kjellén from across the disciplines, Territory, State and Nation explores the century-long international impact, analytical model, and historical theories of a figure immensely influential in his time who is curiously little-known today.

Even as the global economy of the twenty-first century continues its dramatic and unpredictable transformations, the landscapes it leaves in its wake bear the indelible marks of their industrial past. Whether in the form of abandoned physical structures, displaced populations, or ecological impacts, they persist in memory and lived experience across the developed world. This collection explores the affective and “more-than-representational” dimensions of post-industrial landscapes, including narratives, practices, social formations, and other phenomena. Focusing on case studies from across Europe, it examines both the objective and the subjective aspects of societies that, increasingly, produce fewer things and employ fewer workers.

As a pioneering volume to consider the impact of exile on historical scholarship in the twentieth century in a systematic and global way, looking at Europe, North America, South America and Asia, Dynamics of Emigration asks about epistemic repercussions on the experience of exile and exiles. Analyzing both the impact that exile scholars had on their host societies and on the societies they had to leave, the volume investigates exiles’ pathways to integration into new host societies and the many difficulties they face establishing themselves in new surroundings. Focusing on the age of extremes and the realms of exile from fascist and right-wing dictatorships as well as communist regimes, the contributions look at the reasons scholars have for going into exile while providing side-by-side examination of the support organizations and paths for success involved with living in exile.