Although it seems ages ago, it was only in October 1989 that a group of historians, who teach at North American universities, gathered for a conference on postmodern challenges to German History. The symposium was meant to reflect on the changing tempers of the Germans and their (re)appropriations of the German past and on the temperament of those who make German history their living on this side of the Atlantic. What appeared to be a good idea back then, proves to be an even better one after the events of November 1989. German history is being remade and, with it, interpreters as well as their interpretations on both sides of the Atlantic. The call for the conference was a testament to the fact that tremors of this impending earthquake could be felt for some time, although none of the conference participants had any particular foresight into the unfolding events. Already then it seemed that the past had begun to change much faster than historians could remake the written record. History had come unstuck from all sorts of framing devices that historians had devised in order to nail it down.

The central purpose of this essay is to clarify some of the terms in literary criticism that are being employed in current historiographical debates, and to comment on some of their possible implications for German history. As interdisciplinary theoretical debates proliferate beyond their immediate sources, contested positions often come to be built on misleading, heavily derived, or partisan versions of the concepts and practices drawn from the other side. Once battle has beenjoined, the issue of more exacting definitions and distinctions may go by the board. On the other hand, my modest attempt to provide a glossary for others' arguments may mask a more presumptuous claim to both the knowledge and the distance needed to set a tangled record straight. But although I want to suggest which insights might be valuable to historians, and which may be more problematic or unhelpful, I cannot pretend to adjudicate between currently competing theories of knowledge-production. For the German context, that undertaking would require at least some discussion of late nineteenth-century idealist historiography, and of the debate about modernization and modernity that can be traced through Marx, Weber, and Habermas. This will have to await another occasion.

The purpose of this essay is not to provide a review of the extensive literature on women's history, gender history, or feminist scholarship, but to reflect on the implications that these three vantage points have for the practice of writing German history. The framework for these reflections is the charge of the conference at which an earlier version of this paper was presented, namely, to consider the interdisciplinary, theoretical, and methodological challenges to historiography raised by “postmodernism.” These challenges are roughly similar for all national historiographies, though Germany's historians, it could be argued, have distinguished themselves by their especially intense focus on state institutions, national events, aggregated socioeconomic structures, large organizations, and the theories and methods appropriate to these concerns. Such foci stand in particular danger of being dissolved by alternate historiographic interests, like feminist, women's, and gender history. When the center no longer holds, that is the “postmodern” condition; their part in dissolving the center is what links feminist, women's, and gender history to “postmodernism.” Rather than rehearsing specific examples of how, say, women's history has challenged the received picture of German history, and thereby implicitly to suggest methods of damage control, this essay instead attempts to discuss some of the broader theoretical and methodological issues that feminist scholarship poses to historians and to do so within the context of the “postmodern.” References to the specific German context are mostly in the footnotes.

The dual assignment of this presentation was to review some of the issues facing historians of Austria as they try to situate Austrian history within the wider cultural and social realm of “Central Europe” and to present some brief reflections to my colleagues who study Germany on the possible role of Austrian history in shaping the interpretive choices they may make in the future. Since these remarks were offered in a self-consciously “German” symposium (organized with the support of the DAAD), I took it as a given that internal interpretive problems of Hapsburg and/or successor state history peculiar to those arenas would not necessarily be relevant, even though they did intrude in any event. Although these brief comments were conceived in September 1989 and presented the following month, the events of November 1989 and October 1990 have only enhanced my concerns, and subsequent revisions to this text have not changed the basic character of my remarks.

Masterplots of national history are now commonly criticized for the univocal and unilinear nature of their narratives.1 Such narratives are increasingly seen as only one, and not necessarily even the most important, approach to understanding the modern European nation state. The study of the internal heterogeneity of nations as expression of a conflicting diversity of subnational identities, the emphasis on the peculiar place of nation-ness in the process of modern societalization (Vergesellschaftung), and the political role of integral nationalism as a contentious strategy of homogenizing difference and inequality—all this has supplanted nation- and state-centered approaches which treated the modern (nation-)state as allegorical subject.

I want to begin by suggesting that to speak of a linguistic turn in the writing of modern German history is premature. It may be true that intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic has taken “the” linguistic turn, in the sense that, more than ever before, much current research involves “a focused concern on the ways meaning is constituted in and through language.” The formal properties, degree of sophistication, and utility for historians of these studies vary greatly. They encompass by now almost classical poststructuralist perspectives, methodologically more conservative discussions of cultural representation, and the influential works of Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock. Yet history writing on twentieth-century Germany, considered broadly, stands very much before rather than after a linguistic turn, if there will be a turn at all. Scholars of modern German cultural, social, or political history who engage current debates on language and rhetoric in truly innovative ways are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, considerations of a linguistic turn in modern German history take place at a time when some historians criticize poststructuralist thought more forcefully than ever before.4 This makes for an interesting confluence of tensions, especially when one considers that disciplines such as literary criticism and anthropology have turned anew to the study of history.

Various attempts have been made to bring to the attention of a wider historical audience the debates that have taken place among intellectual historians over the past decade. Such summaries may soon be in need of some updating. Insofar as many of these discussions have been inspired by developments among our colleagues in departments of literature, it is worth noting that those scholars likewise have engaged in heated exchanges. Since those debates seem to have resulted in a triumph of “history,” we may be looking forward to new modes of argument among intellectual and cultural historians as well. This essay will attempt to present a summary of the issues within poststructuralism that induced this turn to a “new historicism” in departments of literature, and it will conclude by offering some suggestions about the ways in which this tendency might be useful to the study of the German past.

As we enter a new decade, it is virtually impossible to pick up a historical journal, browse through a book store, or attend a scholarly conference without confronting the growing presence of “language” or “discourse” in historical inquiry. Explications of, disputes within, and challenges to various literary and linguistic theories, especially poststructuralist approaches, ring out from virtually every corner of scholarly endeavor. Yet, while our counterparts in French, English and, increasingly, American history have taken up poststructuralist theories and methods in dealing with the past, those of us writing German history have remained for the most part caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to follow familiar, proven routes or fight through the resistant professional traffic and to take the “linguistic turn” into uncharted territory.

There is an insatiable demand in the Federal Republic for accounts of the past that allow contemporary Germans to identify with the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary people. Just about anything “thrown onto the (book)market” may include the word Alltag in its title. Trade union and SPD adult education programs, Volkshochschulen and youth associations teach “lay historians” how to retrieve the traces of their “lost past.” “History workshops” (Geschichtswerkstätten), inspired by the leftist-populism of the Greens and often dedicated to a politically subversive reconstruction of forgotten local histories, have sprung up all over West Germany. But despite this wave ofpopular enthusiasm, Alltagsgeschichte has not degenerated, as some critics feared, into an “entertaining, but naive and sentimental, low-German mini-series” Serious practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte have never been cintent to engage in the unexamined retrieval of the most obscure details of the everyday lives of the masses (die Vielen). Indeed, Alltagsgeschichte has challenged the theoretical and methodological hegemony of Strukturgeschichte within the German historical “guild” (Zunft) and it has campaigned for the construction of a radically new paradigm of social historical research. Alltagsgeschichte originally emerged from the dissatisfactions of a younger generation of social historians with the ”structural” social history (Strukturgeschichte) constructed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, and the Bielefeld “school” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

During the last generation the writing of social history has taken an ironic turn. In the 1960s and much of the 1970s, it literally exploded across the scholarly landscape as the most dynamic and innovative form of historiography. Many competing conceptions including the French Annales school, the American quantitative social science history (QUASSH), the British Marxist history of society, and the emerging German Gesellschaftsgeschichte combined to overthrow the Rankean paradigm. These diverse programs, nevertheless, showed broad agreement in exploring the mute masses, expanding the scope of inquiry to new topics such as family and education, seeking a theoretical orientation, experimenting with fresh methods such as quantification or oral history, and supporting some form of progressive politics. This agenda was even reflected in T-shirt slogans such as “history from the bottom up,” showing a fat behind, or “bottoms-up history,” depicting raised beer steins. For many of the participants, there was an exciting sense of fresh departures and of camaraderie in an effort at once intellectually daring and politically committed.

This quotation fits the conference only if we agree that “still” connotes sitting, not silence. The “Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique” were voiced with only hints of controversy. All who might have disagreed were outside the room, though not necessarily excluded from the debate. Participants seemed to agree that old “fixities” had to be re-evaluated in the light of postmodern challenges. “Past and future” met in the guise of Young Turks and older veterans. Sessions of redefining and rethinking, as these were, hardly “ascend” to action, but neither were they content with “arrest” or “decline.” Eliot, the modernist, speaks to postmodern issues.