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For a Differently Centered Central European History: Reflections on Jürgen Osterhammel, Geschichtswissenschaft Jenseits des Nationalstaats

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Helmut Walser Smith
Helmut Walser Smith
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University
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Type
Review Article
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Central European History , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 115 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2004

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References

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4. Cited in Dillard, Annie, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York, 1982), 47.Google Scholar

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11. See the essays in ibid.

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18. See Ther, Philipp, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe, Central European History 36, no. 1 (2003): 45–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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28. Osterhammel, Jürgen, “Alexander von Humboldt,” in Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 81 (1999): 120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The full title of Humboldt's work is, Relations historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales due nouveaux continent.

29. Osterhammel, , “Alexander von Humboldt,” 131.Google Scholar

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33. We might consider as a starting point of this reception, Medick, Hans, “Missionäre im Ruderboot,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 295–319Google Scholar, and the negative reaction, first circulated as a kind of underground, unpublished manuscript, by Hans Ulrich Wehler, and later published as “Alltagsgeschichte: Königsweg zu neuen Ufern oder Irrgarten der Illusionen,” in Wehler, , Aus der Geschichte lernen (Munich, 1988).Google Scholar

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37. For an extended review of this literature, see Osterhammel, Jürgen, Sklaverei und die Zivilisation des Westens (Munich, 2000).Google Scholar

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40. On Augsburg, François, Etienne, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Profestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg (Sigmaringen, 1991)Google Scholar; on upper Silesia, see the pathbreaking dissertation of Bjork, James Edward, “Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Ambivalence in Upper Silesia, 1890–1914,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; on Lodz, Winston Chu, “Volksgemeinschaft unter sich”: German Minorities and Regionalism in Poland, 1918–39,” forthcoming in German History from the Margins, ed. Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman; for the nineteenth century, see Schlögel, Karl, Promenade in Jalta und andere Stadtbilder (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 126–38.Google Scholar In 1830, German speakers still constituted 74 percent of the population of Lodz.

41. Milosz, Czeslaw, A Treatise on Poetry, trans, by the author and Hass, Robert, (New York, 2001), 21.Google Scholar

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44. Ibid.

45. For the initial discussion, which has since taken on ever larger proportions, see Schöttler, Peter, ed. Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1997)Google Scholar, especially Schöttler's introductory remarks, 7–30.

46. Underlined in the original. Published in Ebbinghaus, Angelika and Roth, Karl Heinz, “Vorläufer des ‘Generalplans Ost’: Eine Dokumentation über Theodor Schieders Polendenkschrift vom 7. Oktober 1939,” in 1999, vol. 7, no. l (1992): 86.Google Scholar On this aspect of Conze's thinking, see Etzemüller, Thomas, “Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Die Etablierung der Sozialgeschichte in der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft,” Comparativ 12, no. 1 (2002): 27.Google Scholar

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48. Ibid., 184–85.

49. For the influence of an essentially American assimilation theory, see Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “Zur neuen Geschichte der Masuren,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 11 (1962): 147–72Google Scholar; Klessmann, Christoph, Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet, 1870–1945 (Göttingen, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. On the necessity of integrating cultural perspectives into the history of migration, see the learned and ambitious synthesis of Hoerder, Dirk, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millenium (Durham, N.C., 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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53. “The point,” write Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “is that colonial historiography has been so nationally bound that it has blinded us to those circuits of knowledge and communication that took other routes than those shaped by the metropole-colony axis alone.” Stoler, and Cooper, , “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick (Berkeley, 1997), 28.Google Scholar For a sense of the insights that this approach may yield, see Deborah Neill's forthcoming dissertation at the University of Toronto on French and German colonial doctors.

54. On the significance of the margins for twentieth-century European history, see Diner, Dan, Das Jahrhundert verstehen: Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 12, 199.Google Scholar On the expellees and ethnic complexity in German and Central European history, see now Ther, Philipp, Deutsche und polnische Vertriebene: Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ/DDR und in Polen 1945–1946 (Göttmgen, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, with respect to religious complexity, Dark, Joel, “Religion and Refugees in postwar West Germany” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998).Google Scholar

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57. Ibid.

58. Schlögel, , Die Mitte liegt ostwärts, 44–45.Google Scholar

59. For an introduction, Herbert, Ulrich, Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945 (Frankfort am Main, 1998).Google Scholar

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62. See, however, the alternative program, which is to use the margins and fragments to understand the center in a new light. See Joan W Scott, “After History?,” in ibid., 85–103. In its essence, this is also the mending tone of Jarausch, Konrad H. and Geyer, Michael, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German History (Princeton, 2003).Google Scholar Their individual contribution to international history aside, the frame of this book remains a national frame. “For the coming generation of scholars, the challenge,” they write, “consists of constructing a new kind of cultural history of German politics” (p. xi). The cultural approach “consists in the exploration of how a sense of self and bonds of belonging are formed, and when and why they are torn” (p. 19).

63. For the American discussion, see the excellent collection, with an incisive introduction, by Bender, Thomas, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for France, Werner and Zimmermann, “Penser l'histoire croisée;” for a startling work that employs this way of seeing in the British context, see Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (New York, 2003).Google Scholar

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