Wesleyan University

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945-1990
by R. J. B. Bosworth
Review by: Chris Lorenz
History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 234-252
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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234 REVIEW ESSAYS

the combination of determination and openness of action that arises from the
interplay of complex physiological, personal, and historical conditions? How
can we even conceive this sort of "mix"?Surprisingly, in Margolis's discussion,
the issue of causation in history does not even arise. But it must, as part of
the entire matter of how we embodied beings determine and are determined
in time. Much in how we understand historical events, and in how we understand
"radical history," will depend on what is learned, over the next years, by the
scores of folk, in the sciences and in philosophical psychology (and elsewhere),
who are intent on examining this question.
Joseph Margolis has given us a strikingly original and compelling book.
Clearly, no one expects that, at the present moment, any single person will
face, much less resolve, all the issues at the intersection of history and nature.
For all I know, with his remarkablephilosophical insight and prodigious energy,
Margolis has already dealt with some of them or is already at work on them
in his next book. My concern is, simply, that we see how crucial it is, in order
to complete the work of The Flux of History and the Flux of Science, that they
be addressed.

JOHN J. COMPTON
Vanderbilt University

EXPLAINING AUSCHWITZ AND HIROSHIMA: HISTORY WRITING AND THE SECOND

WORLD WAR 1945-1990. By R. J. B. Bosworth. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Pp. xv, 262.

Although historians usually claim to describe the past "as it really was," the
variety of their descriptions and their changes over time is one of the most
outstanding features of historiography. From the eighteenth century onwards
this feature of historiography has been explained by the variety of cultures
to which historians belong and their different and changing points of view.'
Huizinga's definition of history as "the mental form in which a culture accounts
for its past" catches this feature of pluriformity nicely.2
His definition is also useful because it focuses our attention on the plurifor-
mity of ways in which a culture can handle its past. In this respect Nietzsche's
distinction between the monumentalistic, the antiquarian, and the critical stance
vis a vis the past and the corresponding ways of accounting for it is still funda-
mental. His idea that all historiography is led by a mixture of these three impulses

1. Cf. R. Koselleck, "Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Erschlies-
sung der geschichtlichen Welt," in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten
(Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 176-211.
2. J. Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken (The Hague, 1950), VII, 102.

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 REVIEW ESSAYS 235
and that these change through time has been refined by authors such as Rusen,
Angehrn, and Nagl-Docekal.3 Like Nietzsche they stressed the practical, norma-
tive dimension of "doing history" because historical knowledge -as a type of
self-knowledge -is never disinterested. That is, historians construct individual
and collective identities while reconstructing the past, and identities always
possess a factual and a normative character at one and the same time. Because
this insight collides with the objectivistic self-understanding of "scientific"histo-
rians, analyses of this sort have never been popular in the historical profession.
Another fundamental reason for the unpopularity of philosophical reflection
on the practical dimension of history is undoubtedly its lack of historical con-
creteness -a weakness that in principle could be remedied by bringing in con-
crete forms of historical knowledge, that is historiography. Now this lack of
historical concreteness cannot be attributed solely to the professional interest
of philosophers in the general rather than in the particular or to a "blind spot"
in their vision. The simple fact is that historians do not produce the type of
historiography most needed in philosophy, that is a comparative historiog-
raphy. Since the notion of mixture (of the impulses behind "doing history")
is a relative one, it can only be analyzed fruitfully in a relative-that is, a
comparative -way. The typical Dutch way of "handling"WWII through time,
for example, can only be analyzed if compared to non-Dutch cultures and vice
versa. Historiography should therefore be comparative par excellence and the
fact that most historiography is studied within the framework of one culture -
usually the nation-state - constitutes a huge handicap for historians and philos-
ophers alike.4

I. THE "LONG SECOND WORLD WAR," "AUSCHWITZ," AND "HIROSHIMA"

The analysis of the historiography of World War II in Explaining Auschwitz

and Hiroshima is a welcome exception to the rule because it is explicitly compar-
ative. It therefore offers an excellent opportunity to bridge the gap between
the historical and the philosophical way of analyzing historical knowledge and
to fill the formal philosophical analyses with concrete historical substance.
Bosworth's study aims at a comparative analysis of the ways in which En-
gland, West Germany, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan handled
their wartime experience between 1945 and 1990. Although his focus is on
historians his study also comprises others who forge historical consciousness,

3. E. Angehrn, Geschichte und Identitat (Berlin, 1985); J. Rfisen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien
historischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); H. Nagl-Docekal, Die Objektivitat der
Geschichtswissenschaft: Systematische Studien zum wissenschaftlichen Status der Historie (Vienna
and Munich, 1982). Contrary to Nietzsche these authors never identified the perspectives on history
with history itself.
4. For the rudimentary state of comparative historiography see Grundlagen und Methoden der
Historiographiegeschichte, ed. J. Rilsen et al. (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), and I. Veit-Brause,
"Paradigms, Schools, Traditions: Conceptualizing Shifts and Changes in the History of Historiog-
raphy," in Storia delta Storiografia/Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung 11 (1990), 50-65.

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236 REVIEW ESSAYS

such as novel writers and filmmakers. So we encounter not only A. J. P. Taylor,

Robert Paxton, and Fritz Fischer in this book, but also Spike Milligan, Marcel
Ophiils, and Gunther Grass. This inclusion is apt because in our multimedia
age it is far from obvious which profession and what medium is most successful
in forging the historical consciousness of the general public. The fact that in
West Germany one American TV-soap (Holocaust) was far more successful
than the entire German historical profession in presenting a Jewish perspective
on World War II, as Martin Broszat observed in 1979,5 illustrates my point
and might warn historians against an undue complacency in historicis (although
this soap, to my surprise, seems to have escaped Bosworth's attention).
"The long Second World War," "Auschwitz," and "Hiroshima" constitute
the central concepts of Bosworth's study. The "long Second World War" refers
to this war together with its immediate prehistory and aftermath, which of
course are different for every country. So for Italy, 1922 is the logical starting-
point and for Germany it is 1933-the year the fascists and Nazis came to
power. For Japan, Bosworth pinpoints 1931 as the starting-point-with the
invasion of China- and for England and France, 1938 -with the Agreement
of Munich. For the Soviet Union the "long Second World War" begins in 1929,
for reasons less obvious to me.
The "long Second World War" ended when postwar arrangements in Europe
finally collapsed and this war lost its function as a yardstick in postwar politics.
1990 was undoubtedly this major turning-point, with German reunification and
the dissolution of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Between 1945 and 1990
World War II was transformed in the historical consciousness of both victors
and defeated, from a political and moral monument into a historical antiquity
without any specific practical lessons for life. As was to be expected, this monu-
mental quality manifested itself in different ways: for the victors World War
II was a "good war," the memory of which was to be handed down to succeeding
generations; for the losers it was a "bad war" whose memory was painful and
to be avoided.6 Repression of memory therefore always indicates the negative
monumental value of the repressedhistory. For most nations the war experience
was a mixture of good and bad, albeit in different proportions.
So, contrary to Nolte's infamous 1986 diagnosis,7 World War II history did
"pass away," although it took almost half a century for this "hot" history to

5. M. Broszat, "'Holocaust' und die Geschichtswissenschaft," in Nach Hitler: Der schwierige

Umgang mit unserer Geschichte (Munich, 1988), 102-119. One might of course ask if German
historians ever wanted to present Jewish perspectives on World War II history, as they left the
history of the Jews to Jewish historians. Cf K. Kwiet, "Judenverfolgung und Judenvernichtung
im Dritten Reich: Ein historiographischer Ueberblick," in Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?
Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit, ed. D. Diner (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), 237-264.
6. See for the US and England P. Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second
World War (Oxford, 1989). See for Germany H. Mommsen, "Aufarbeitung und Verdrangung:
Das Dritte Reich im westdeutschen Geschichtsbewusstsein" and L. Niethammer, "'Normalisierung'
im Westen: Erinnerungsspuren in die 50er Jahren," in Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus
Geschichte?, 74-89 and 153-185.
7. E. Nolte, "Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will," in "Historikerstreit".Die Dokumentation
der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich,
1987), 39-47.

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 REVIEW ESSAYS 237
cool down. Bosworth explains this long time-span with "Auschwitz"and "Hiro-
shima." "Auschwitz" stands for the unprecedented industrial mass murder of
6 million Jews by Nazi Germany and for the practical lesson that Germany
should never be allowed to be united gain. "Hiroshima"was the political symbol
for total nuclear destruction from 1945 onwards and for the practical lesson
that the next war between the super-powers would be the last. The "ThirdWorld
War"between the two postwar superpowers therefore became a cold war instead
of a hot one. Bosworth in fact tells us how these two monumental lessons from
World War II history fell into oblivion between 1945 and 1990.

II. THE CONTROVERSIES IN ENGLAND AND GERMANY

As a true comparativist Bosworth not only highlights the differences between

the national historiographies, but also the agreements. Major national differ-
ences were to be expected, since in the aftermath of wars historiography is
often a continuation of warfare by other means. Such was the case after both
the First and the Second World War. After 1945, for English historians such
as Namier, it was more or less obvious that Germany, with its militaristic and
undemocratic traditions, was responsible for both world wars; in their eyes the
Prussian-German Sonderweg (special path) represented the major problem of
modern European history. West German historians, of course, were of a
different opinion: the German national state of 1871 did not constitute a
problem, but the hostile reaction of the other great powers towards the German
verspatete Nation (belated nation) in the center of Europe did. Neither Prussia
nor a Prussian-German Sonderweg, but the Prussia-cliche'had produced tragic
consequences for peaceful international relationships.
In both England and Germany, postwar orthodoxy came under attack by
two historians after the "thaw" of the Cold War had set in. These attacks
instigated the long-lasting controversies that were named after their initiators.
In England, A. J. P. Taylor threw an intellectual hand grenade among his
colleagues with his Origins of the Second World War in 1961. His thesis, that
Hitler's foreign policy was not very different from the foreign policy of other
states, was regarded as an outright provocation. The same went for his thesis
that England and France were as much to blame for the war as Nazi Germany.
In West Germany, Fritz Fischer's Griff nach der Weltmacht exploded 1961
orthodoxy in much the same manner. Fischer argued that there was a strong
continuity in Germany's foreign policy, from Bismarck to Hitler, that consisted
in its will to dominate at least Europe and preferably the world. With this goal
in mind, Fischer went on, Germany had deliberately caused the First and the
Second World War. These theses were regarded as a kind of high treason by
many of his colleagues who had invested considerable energy in exonerating
Germans from just this accusation. The bitter and vitriolic reactions neverthe-
less indicated that Fischer had touched a very sensitive nerve of German histor-
ical consciousness. However, the times they were a-changing, and Bosworth

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238 REVIEW ESSAYS

links the public resonance of the Fischerites in the late 1960s to the growing
power of the SPD and its new Ostpolitik (that initially infuriated so many
conservatives because of its acceptance of German partition and of Soviet he-
gemony in Eastern Europe). In the roaring 1970s conservative orthodoxy was
damaged beyond repair by the attacks of left-liberal and social-democratic
historians (inspired by Ralph Dahrendorf and led by the Bielefeld School).
According to them there had been a Prusso-German Sonderweg up until 1945,
whose cause had been the feudal, premodern character of German society in
general and the absence of modern political democracy in particular. They in
their turn came under attack in the 1980s by Anglo-Saxon neo-Marxists such
as Eley, Blackbourn and Evans, and Alltagshistoriker such as Detlev Peukert
and Lutz Niethammer who rejected their global diagnosis of "German feu-
dalism" and especially their exclusion of the perspective of "ordinary people."
In the aftermath of both controversies the orthodoxy gave way to a plurifor-
mity of perspectives and Bosworth makes no bones about the fact that he prefers
it that way, although he does not give this preference any philosophical defense.
Like the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, he simply regards history as "an endless
discussion," although he is right to call attention to the fact that Geyl's practice
did not match his theory. Bosworth explains Geyl's inconsistency by the tension
between liberalism and nationalism that has manifested itself in historiog-
raphy -and not only within Dutch borders (14).
Bosworth devotes special attention to the influence of the Cold War on histo-
riographical developments in Germany and England - a war he aptly labels
"the Third World War," because in a meaningful sense it was a continuation
of the Second. For the Cold Warriorsin the West, the main ideological difference
between the Second and the Third World War was that in the Great Battle
between Democracy and Dictatorship, West Germany and Russia had changed
sides, putting communism back in its traditional place as Public Enemy Number
One. Bosworth interprets the "Historikerstreit" of 1986-1987 as conservative
German historians' last attempt to reanimate the Cold War in order to put
"Auschwitz" into perspective and to restore the German national past as a
historical monument. Germans, their argument ran, should be allowed to iden-
tify themselves again with their history and to "step out of Hitler's shadow."
National socialism was therefore again construed as the totalitarian twin of
communism, as it had been in the heyday of the Cold War. The major difference
between the "brown fascists" and the "red fascists" was that the latter were still
alive and kicking at the eastern gates of Europe. This "revival"of totalitarianism
in German historiography was part of the international conservative upsurge
of the Reagan/Thatcher era, though in Germany it also served the specific
German purpose of purging its traumatic past.
Although Bosworth is right to say that the conservative historiographical
offensive in Germany failed to achieve its direct objectives, it escapes his notice
that in hindsight it also can be regarded as a partial success. After the dust of
this struggle had settled, "Auschwitz" had lost much of its special status as an

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 REVIEW ESSAYS 239
object of historical investigation. The drive towards relativization had in any
case given a strong impetus to the process of "historicization," a process that
also increasingly drew support from historians on the left side of the political
spectrum, such as the Strukturhistoriker Martin Broszat and the Alltagshistor-
iker Detlev Peukert.A
With regard to England, Bosworth devotes special attention to the rise of
social history after World War II and to E.P. Thompson in particular. This
rise is interpreted as a historiographical correlate of the rise of the welfare state,
in turn explained as the unintended democratic effect of World War II. England,
according to Bosworth, a country formerly split into "two nations," was united
by the blitz and by the war effort; "the people" were accorded a stake in the
postwar state in return for their role in the "People's War."
Bosworth fails to notice the fact that the conservative reinterpretation of
Germany's role in World War II was also a remarkable attempt to interpret
this war as a "people's war"- with the qualification that according to this conser-
vative interpretation the German "people"included its elites. Hillgruber identi-
fied the German population explicitly with the Wehrmacht and Nolte resisted
all attempts to exclude any social category - such as the workers - from the
war effort made by the German people - an exclusion which he accused "the
Left" of practicing, allegedly on political grounds.9
Like E. H. Carr, Bosworth invariably sees all intellectual history as social
and political history; and like Carr he studies the historians before he studies
their historiography. His book therefore contains a wealth of biographical
sketches that give it a surprisingly lively character. His study testifies to the
abiding fruitfulness of this approach, in spite of the postmodern penchant
for regarding all authorial and social approaches as passe and for regarding
"discourse-analysis" as the only legitimate avenue to intellectual history. 1

III. FRENCH AND ITALIAN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DILEMMAS

AND THE ROLE OF OUTSIDERS IN THE HISTORICAL PROFESSION

In France and Italy, historiography after 1945 was more complex than in Ger-
many or England because it was not obvious whether Italy and France belonged
to the winners or the losers of the war. Next to De Gaulle's France there had
existed Vichy-France and next to Mussolini's Italy the Italy of The Resistance.
The end of the war had therefore been a complex affair, accompanied by civil
war just as in Yugoslavia and Greece. French and Italian historians long identi-

8. M. Broszat, "Plddoyer fuireine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus," in Broszat, Nach

Hitler, 266-282; D. Peukert, "Alltag und Barbarei: Zur Normalitat des Dritten Reiches," in Diner,
ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, 51-62.
9. Cf. my "Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for 'Internal Realism,"' History
and Theory 33 (1994), 299-302.
10. Bosworth's study can be seen as part of the recent counteroffensive against postmodernism
in history. For an apt analysis of the battlelines, see J. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about
History (New York, 1994).

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240 REVIEW ESSAYS

fied their countries with the victorious Allies, as did their political parties, from
right to left. (The French, of course, possessed the better credentials; France
had been allowed an occupation zone in Germany and a role in the Nuremberg
trials.) The reasons for this identification were the same reasons why Germans
collectively fled to their "refuge of amnesia" (183), their much-lamented Gesch-
ichtslosigkeit, that was to be legitimized by conservative intellectuals such as
Hermann LUibbein the 1980s as a necessary condition of postwar German
society. I"Rebuilding the national economy and society was simply much higher
on the postwar political agenda than historical truth and justice; even in 1995,
French President Mitterand's contacts with Chancellor Kohl still clung to this
priority. In France it was the 1970s before this identification - and the myth
of La Resistance could even be questioned. 12
It is not without significance for the societal role of the historical profession
that it was a filmmaker, not a professional historian, who broke the public
silence on this subject. Ophuls' film Le chagrin et la pitie (The Sorrow and the
Pity) portrayed the widespread French collaboration with Nazi Germany - a
collaboration that Gaullist France, too, preferred not to remember.'3 Neither
is it accidental that the two historians who documented the zeal of Vichy France
in carrying out German anti-Semitic policy- R. Paxton and M. Marrus- were
North-American and not French.
The French collective trauma that followed their unexpectedly rapid defeat
and the massive scale of their collaboration seemed to prevent French historians
from doing what Fischer and Taylor had done for their countries: to question
the national orthodoxy in historiography and to reflect on the painful issues
that had been repressed since 1945. Instead, the French intelligentsia developed
a conspicuous preference for la tongue duree in history and a striking aversion
towards political history as such (which was discredited as merely evenementiel
and inherently superficial). Bosworth convincingly interprets this French outil-
lage mentale as the intellectual repression of a national trauma, contributing
to the explanation of the miraculous success of the Annales approach in postwar
France. The same goes for the relativistic pose of postmodernism (with its
indifference to all moral differences), that more recent French success story of
postwar intellectual history. '4

11. H. Libbe, "Es ist nichts vergessen, aber einiges ausgeheilt," FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung
(January 14, 1983).
12. The remarkable consensus within the French political class to avoid conflicts on World
War II is also emphasized by Claus Leggewie in "Frankreichs kollektives Gedachtnis und der
Nationalsozialismus," in Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, 123-126. Even the
Dachau survivor Joseph Rovan and the Jewish politician Simone Veil, who had barely survived
the war, were part of this consensus.
13. Leggewie aptly labels the later capture of Klaus Barbie and his transport to France a Danaerg-
eschenk (a gift from the Greeks, like the one in ancient Troy) for the French political class, because
his trial forced them to confront their own conduct during World War II. It is no accident that
Barbie had not been pursued by the French state but by two French citizens, the Klarsfelds. Ophuils
thematized the Barbie trial in his fascinating and monumental documentary Hotel Terminus, but
this film falls outside the scope of Bosworth's study.
14. For a dispassionate analysis of postmodernism see E. Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and
Religion (London, 1992).

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 REVIEW ESSAYS 241

In Italy, historiography encountered the same type of problem as in France

and developed along similar lines. As in France, the official interpretation of
the war after 1945 was the myth of The Resistance, although the Italian version
was distinctly more left-wing. While fascism was evil, "the people" were good,
as depicted by Rossellini's famous 1945 film Roma, cita aperta (Rome, Open
City), and had struggled against fascism. The PCI (Italian Communist Party)
tapped much of its postwar political legitimacy from this interpretation of
World War II history, as did the communist parties in the other countries of
formerly occupied Europe. The conspicuous eclipse of communism as a political
force in western and southern Europe - both in its orthodox and its "Euro"
forms -from the 1970s onwards could plausibly be interpreted as strong addi-
tional evidence for Bosworth's central thesis of the "waning"of the long Second
World War.
As in France, in Italy it was a foreign historian -the Englishman Dennis
Mack Smith-who was the first to question the historiographical orthodoxy.
His Storia dell'Italia (History of Italy) (1959) argued that there was considerable
continuity in Italy's foreign policy before and after fascism came to power, as
Fischer was soon to claim for Germany. As in Germany, the disconcerting
message was that fascism had not been brought to the country by extraterres-
trials and that fascist policy, including the cruel colonial war in Abyssinia, had
been widely applauded, especially by the elites. The discussion about Smith's
book threw Italian historians into a tumultuous crisis for two decades that ran
parallel to the general political crisis of Italy. In the 1970s the Marxists seemed
to gain the upper hand with their equation of fascism and reactionary capitalism
on the one hand and of anti-fascism and leftism on the other. With the help
of Gramsci's theory of "cultural hegemony," Marxist historical explanation of
history was simply a matter of spending enough years trawling through the
archives. But at that time most Italian Marxists were too busy changing the
world to investigate and interpret the historical record.
The historiographical tide, however, changed dramatically from the late
1970s onwards when the Red Brigades tried to implement their version of "peo-
ple's history." The most important historian in this change was Renzo De Felice,
who had taken his time in the archives preparing his multivolume biography
of Mussolini that was published from 1962 onwards. He disconnected the fascist
movement and the fascist state from German Nazism -and therefore from
"Auschwitz"-and presented fascism as a popular movement with outstanding
modernizing features. In interpreting fascism in this way he demolished the
leftist image of the anti-fascist struggle as "the people's war" and its equation
of anti-fascism with anti-capitalism. He neutralized the monumental moral
value of World War II history, as other conservative historians, like Gionac-
chino Volpe and Emilio Gentile, had done before him with another conceptual
strategy. They had labeled the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism a "civil
war" and thus obfuscated the moral issue of right and wrong (as Nolte had
done in Germany). This was no accident, since it was De Felice's stated intention

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242 REVIEW ESSAYS

to "historicize"fascism in order to enable an "objective" and "scientific"way

of handling it. According to De Felice, the Left had blocked scientific "detache-
ment" because it had molded the history of fascism and anti-fascism into its
own political monument. Analyzed more "scientifically," however, it became
apparent to De Felice that communism and fascism "were made from the same
pasta" (139). This view exactly matches Nolte's view in the Historikerstreit, but
unlike Nolte, De Felice did not meet serious opposition within the profession,
according to Bosworth. 15The conservative interpretation of World War II that
suffered serious setbacks in both Germany and England, by contrast, came out
victoriously in Italy. The moral of this interpretation is that no moral conclu-
sions can be drawn from World War II and that it was no "people's war" but
just the same bloody mess as any other war with right and wrong distributed
equally between both sides.16

IV. THE JAPANESE "SONDERWEG"

Because of the hegemony of the conservative paradigm, claims Bosworth, these

days the historiography of Italy more closely resembles that of Japan than that
of countries such as England and Germany. In Japan, too, historians saw
themselves confronted with the less agreeable aspects of their recent past and
had to cope with them. According to Bosworth the conservative majority
adopted the notion of an "eternal Japan" that had been developed in the late
nineteenth century as the main interpretive solution to this problem. In contrast
to other nations Japan had always been one nation united under an emperor -
for the last 2600 years, at any rate. In this sense Japan was and always had
been a case apart. The conflict over the Pacific with the US also dated back
to the nineteenth century and therefore World War II was just one more episode
in a continuing story of conflict. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan were
the only novelty in international relationships, as they constituted a hitherto
unimaginable act of barbarism and a breach of international law - with the
Japanese in the role of victims.
Bosworth sees this notion of eternity fulfilling the same function for the
Japanese intelligentsia as the notion of the tongue duree for the French: the
repression of a recent and traumatic wartime experience. In these terms, Japan's
unprecedented defeat by the US was exceptional because it made the deaths
of two million Japanese utterly pointless and, moreover, was followed by the
only -and humiliating-foreign occupation in Japanese history.

15. According to another commentator, Italian historians offered more resistance to conserva-
tive revisionism than Bosworth acknowledges; cf. G. Rusconi, "Italienund der deutsche Historikers-
treit," in Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, 102-106.
16. The problematic relationship between understanding and judging the Nazi mass murder is
discussed by Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander in "A Controversy about the Historicization of
National-Socialism," in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians'Controversy,
ed. P. Baldwin (Boston, 1990). See also S. Friedlinder, Memory, History and the Extermination
of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 64-102.

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The millions (mainly Chinese) who were killed directly or indirectly by the
Japanese also added their weight to the Japanese collective conscience. The
bloodbath of Nanking in particular-Chinese figures put the number of dead
at over 200,000, the total of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and the extensive bacte-
riological experiments carried out by Unit 731 on prisoners of war represented
amazing cruelties that demanded a historical explanation.
In contrast with their German colleagues, Japanese historians did not have
to confront these nasty issues in the open, thanks to the Japanese system of state
censorship with regard to history education. The state-sponsored nationalist
historical orthodoxy could therefore remain unchallenged outside the academy
and outsiders could not play the unsettling role that they did in Europe. This
system was kept intact during the American occupation: as in West Germany,
the economic and social reconstruction of the former fascist enemy was deemed
far more important vis a vis the new communist threat than peacetime luxuries
such as justice or truth. The trial of Tokyo was therefore the end and not
the beginning of the short democratic "lesson in history," just as the trial of
Nuremberg had been in Germany. The refusal of the Japanese elite to acknow-
ledge any responsibility for the war until today has been the unintended conse-
quence of this American policy.
The fact that in 1957 a convicted (A-category) war criminal - Hobusuke -
could be elected as president of Japan illustrates the moral insensibility of the
Japanese political class towards its war victims. The fact that both emperor and
government honor every "soul" that died "for Japan"-all wartime casualties,
including war criminals -points in the same direction, as did the infamous
"textbook-issue"of the 1980s when all references to Japanese aggression against
China and Korea were banned from history books. In Japan, then, the ill-fated
"Bitburg-programme"'of German conservatives (that was meant to include even
SS casualties in the category of war victims and that had ignited the Historiker-
streit) was a political reality. This situation lasted until very recently, when the
Liberal-Democratic Party, the party that had embodied the Japanese political
establishment since the war, was ousted from government. This change, which
falls outside the scope of Bosworth's book, is aptly described in Ian Buruma's
The Wages of Guilt.17
Not all Japanese historians were happy with this quasi-collective amnesia.
A few historians of liberal and leftist persuasions especially, like Maruyama
Masao and lenega Saburo (whose book Japan's Last War: World War II and
the Japanese, 1931-1945 resembled Fischer's), did try from the 1960s onwards
to confront openly Japan's "fascist" period and to explain it. Some expected
the concept of fascism to play a major explanatory role -as it had among
Marxists in the West in the 1960s and 1970s -but in the 1970s serious doubts
crept in because of the lack of corroboration in the comparative historical

17. I. Buruma, The Wages of Guilt (London, 1994). Buruma gives a thorough analysis of the
ambivalent love-hate relationship between the Japanese Left and the US: although the Left was
thankful for the liberation from Japanese militarism, the US was at the same time blamed for
allowing the old elite to remain in political and economic power and for thwarting Japanese pacifism.

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record. In contrast to Italy and Germany, Japan had known no fascist move-
ment, no fascist leader figure, no fascist takeover, no clear-cut fascist ideology,
and therefore no break with a pre-fascist past. Scrutinized more carefully the
most disquieting feature of Japan's modern history appeared to be the amazing
continuity of its authoritarian and nationalistic political system - before,
during, and after the war. The militaristic heritage was the only one not handed
down in the same form after 1945; Japan was no longer allowed an official army.
According to Bosworth it is this political continuity that explains why there
has been no clear "paradigm-shift" in the Japanese historiography of World
War II in contrast to England, Germany, France, and Italy. The dissenters
from the orthodoxy simply found (and still find) themselves more or less shut
out of the public sphere: they are only allowed to voice their "opinion" on
World War II in private or in the innocuous playgrounds of academe. Renewed
attempts in the 1980s by conservative politicians and historians to cleanse the
bloody spots of modern Japanese history -that even resulted in the unautho-
rized censoring of Bertolucci's film The Last Emperor, as Buruma describes -
have not therefore been effectively checked by a Japanese Historikerstreit, as
was the case in Germany.

V. THE SOVIET UNION: ANOTHER CASE APART

The almost complete continuity and hegemony of a state-promoted orthodoxy

in Japanese World War II historiography has been matched only by the former
USSR. There the Marxist-Leninist paradigm reigned supreme from the 1920s
until glasnost reached Soviet historiography. According to this paradigm, his-
tory passes through specific phases with the socialist phase as the final one.
Miraculously it was the working people of Russia -a relatively backward and
predominantly peasant society -that finally managed to stage the Revolution
that made an end to all exploitation and so reached the end of history. This
had been facilitated by the Russian Communist Party, led by Lenin, whose
genius had fathomed the dialectics of history. All other interpretations of history
usually were dismissed as "ideological," "bourgeois," or both.
Although the CP tried to impose this Marxist-Leninist view (codified in 1938
in the Short Course: The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
[BolsheviksJ) on the population by every possible means, it could not ignore
the existing (predominantly peasant) images of history and therefore tried to
use them for its own political purposes. The most important of these was the
peasant belief in extraordinary individuals with magical power, which culmi-
nated in the cult of the Tsar. This tradition was exploited in the cult of Stalin.
Films such as Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (1942-1943)- who, according to
this film at least, had also depended on "the people" and had therefore won
all his wars -illustrate what this blend looks like in cinema.
After the crushing German invasion of 1941 the Communist Party also began
to tap traditional Russian nationalism for its purposes. The Great Patriotic
War, as the gigantic bloodbath at the eastern front was labeled, was linked to

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earlier Russian wars against foreign intruders: this time, however, the Holy
Russian Fatherland was to save itself, guided by the genius of Stalin and the
Party.
According to Bosworth this interpretation of history is one of the two factors
that explain why the "long Second World War" lasted so much longer in the
USSR than anywhere else. It lasted so long because this undisputed image of
World War II history effected a legitimation of the Communist Party and State
that had a stronger hold on the people than the founding myth of The Revo-
lution and the rest of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of history. This effective
legitimation was badly needed because the USSR harbored many very different
nations and different readings of history, every one of which embodied a poten-
tial source of conflict - especially because of the imperialistic origins and charac-
teristics of the immense state the Bolsheviks inherited from the Tsar. The history
of the former USSR territories since 1990 amply testifies to this fact.
The other explanatory factor of the length of the "long Second World War"
in the USSR is the immense trauma caused by this war. The sheer number
of Russian dead -estimated at 20 million, compared with 300,000 American
casualties - and the sheer scale of the destruction - some 1710 towns and 70,000
villages were completely destroyed by the Wehrmacht according to Soviet fig-
ures - reduced the western, southern, and Pacific fronts to "gentlemanlike side-
shows," as Bosworth so succinctly puts it (142). So the duree of the "long Second
World War" in the USSR had firm roots in actual events.
The only element of the official image of World War II that was subject to
change after Khrushchev's "thaw" of 1956 was the role Stalin had played, but
this discussion-in which Isaac Deutscher's Stalin biography (1949), Roy
Medvedev's Let History Judge (1971), and Solzhenitzyn's books on the Gulag
system played a major role-took place outside the USSR until perestroika
dislodged Stalin definitively. So in Soviet historiography, too, the actual ques-
tioning of historical orthodoxy was left to those outside the profession. Since
perestroika it has been unclear which interpretations of World War II history
will replace the old orthodoxy because chaos reigns supreme. The question of
how Stalin's war against his supposed internal enemies relates to the war against
his real, external enemies is, in any case, still waiting for answers.
Bosworth makes the interesting observation that perestroika reached histori-
ography comparatively late, long after novelists and filmmakers had taken the
lead. It confirms the international picture of the historical profession as predom-
inantly conservative in a very literal sense, that is, committed to the conservation
of the political status quo, whatever its color - brown, red, or purple. The
probable explanation for this inherent conservatism lies in the fact that most
professional historians are attached to, and fed by, the state. We ought not to
be too surprised that, to all historical appearances, such lofty intellectuals as
professional historians also obey the general rule of "Erst kommt das Fressen,
dann die Moral" (meals before morals)."8

18. For intellectual historians this should not come as a surprise anyway because in Europe
the institutionalization arid professionalization of history has gone hand in hand with the rise of

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246 REVIEW ESSAYS

VI. COMPARATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE REDUCTION OF COMPLEXITY

Comparative historiography of the breadth and depth of Bosworth's study

leaves the reviewer in an uncomfortable position. On the one hand it is difficult
not to be impressed by the richness of the book, the erudition and the wit
of the author (and a witty author is quite a rare bird in the sober field of
historiography). Although this book contains, as do all historiographical books,
a profusion of authors' names and publication titles, its composition and style
make it fascinating reading. On the other hand it is difficult to forbear from
discussions about lost nuances and reduced complexities. The image, for in-
stance, of historiography going through consecutive orthodox and pluralist
phases -an image derived from Thomas Kuhn's theory of "paradigm shifts"
and very popular among leftist intellectuals in the 1970s- forcibly reduces the
complexities of every national historiographical landscape (just as Kuhn did
with the history of science). In West Germany, to give one example, Gerhard
Ritter's view may legitimately be presented as "theorthodoxy" in historiography
before the Fischer controversy, but besides Ritter there was Ludwig Dehio's
quite different and influential view - and Ritter and Dehio were not known as the
best of friends. Even Soviet historiography was not as monolithic as Bosworth
suggests, because the official Marxist-Leninist formulas exacted most of their
toll in the introductory and concluding chapters.
The use that Bosworth makes of the concept of crises and controversy shows
the same defect, and one that springs from the same Kuhnian source. If Italian
historians suffered from a crisis for two long decades, as Bosworth would more
or less have it, one wonders how anybody survived (131-141). Like Kuhn's
theory that inspired him, Bosworth's conceptual apparatus has the tendency to
dramatize history in phases of "normal"(orthodox) science and "revolutionary"
(crisis) science and so to stress discontinuities (in the form of "paradigm shifts")
at the cost of continuities.'9 Thus, notwithstanding the fact that Bosworth is
openly hostile to postmodern discourse analysis and Foucauldian history, his
own type of history-writing shares with them an unacknowledged preference
for the "caesural mode."20

VII. A METHODOLOGY OF COMPARATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY?

This brings me to Bosworth's methodology and his main explanatory devices.

Reflecting on his method he himself states: "I have often demonstrated how

the nation-state and the nationalization of the masses through education in the nineteenth century.
The dependence of salaried intellectuals on the state was intended and recognized by the state.
Cf. F. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890-
1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) for Germany, and P. den Boer, Geschiedenis als beroep: Deprofes-
sionalisering van de geschiedbeoefening in Frankrijk (1818-1914) (Nijmegen, 1987) for France.
19. The same criticism has been put forward against G. Iggers's famous New Directions in
European Ilistoriography (Middletown, Conn., 1975), which was also inspired by Kuhn.
20. The explanation for this surprising commonality is, again, to be found in Kuhn, whose
discontinuous conception of science has much in common with that of Bachelard and other French
historians of science. Cf. D. Lecourt, Pour une critique de l'e1pisteimologie
(Bachelard, Canguilhem,
Foucault) (Paris, 1974).

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turning points in historical explanations are inextricably linked to changes in

broader politics and society, just as I have shown, in spite of some post-
modernist assumptions, that the authors of major history books usually 'author-
ized' them. History books, it seems, will excite most controversy and ensure
paradigm-shifts in understanding when the books are themselves 'time-bombs.'
Historians will play their most useful social role when they seek to understand
both the present and the past" (195).
Bosworth's methodological statement leaves much to be desired, because
the problem is exactly how his explanations proceed in "linking" individual
historians to "broader political trends and society." The problem here is of
a general nature, because the global linkage of individual historiographical
contributions to politics and society explains too much and too little at the
same time.
Take, for instance, his explanation of the success of the Annales conception
of history in postwar France (with Braudel in the role of a historiographical
De Gaulle) (104ff.). Although Bosworth's explanation is plausible, it is partial
and needs additional explanations (Bosworth would probably be the last to
deny this). The concept of "structural," tongue dure'e history, for instance,
predates World War II by several decades at least and thus cannot be explained
by it, though its postwar success may be. In that case we would like to know,
if we accept that the structural concept of history was such a success in France
because of its "repressive"potential in relation to World War II traumas, why
German historians resisted it for so long and why they clung to traditional
political history. In the same vein we would like to know why social history
became a success outside England, where "the people" were not united by the
blitz and not "rewarded"for their collective war effort-those factors which
Bosworth adduces as explanatory in the British context.2'
In short, Bosworth's explanations are in need of more systematic and more
specific comparisons.22More system is required because the preference for one
explanation over others can only be argued by the analysis of the "contrast-
classes"of the cases under explanation (compare the success of structuralhistory
in France and the absence of this success in Germany). More specificity is needed
because, for the explanation of change in a discipline, it is never sufficient to
identify the causes of change in the wider sociopolitical Umwelt:there are
always causes working within the specific disciplinary field itself. When one
has discarded, as has Bosworth, the "internal"ideology of disinterestednesss"
of historians and has identified their "external"interests, the new problem is
how to avoid an external reductionism of disciplinary to political developments.
The only way to avoid a global and thus unsatisfactory external reductionism

21. That Bosworth's explanation for the origins of the British welfare state in the war experience
has to be questioned on the basis of the international comparative record is another matter, not
addressed here. Cf. G. A. Ritter, Der Sozialstaat: Entstehung und Entwicklung im internationalen
Vergleich (Munich, 1991).
22. The most adequate recent treatment of comparative methodology is found in C. Ragin,
The ComparativeMethod: Moving beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley, 1987).

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248 REVIEW ESSAYS

is to locate the agents of change in their specific disciplinary fields and to analyze
their specific dynamics, as is the case in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of science.23
To put it in a nutshell: the only way to locate the effects of politics on science
is to analyze the politics in science. And these two types of politics cannot be
reduced to one another because every field (economics, culture, science, or
politics) is characterized by its own set of rules or logic. Since Bourdieu's theory
of scientific fields specifies the basic rules of the game called science, including
a systematic explanation for the role of outsiders and "revolutionaries"in disci-
plines, this could help Bosworth to avoid the "incidentalistic"overtones of his
biographical approach. Although he is right to defend the importance of the
author vis a' vis postmodernism, his explanations would be strengthened, in
my opinion, if authors were systematically related to their positions in the
scientific field. Fritz Ringer's recent comparison of the German and French
academic communities could serve as an example of such a systematic inquiry,
including its use of Bourdieu's sociology of science.24
Another methodological problem is Bosworth's explanation of the historio-
graphical situation in a country -for instance, the hegemony of conservative
historians in Italy and Japan in the 1980s-by referring to the absence of a
factor that was present elsewhere (in this case, major historiographical contro-
versies, as in Germany).25This argument resembles the explanation of the
German Sonderweg by the absence of parliamentary democracy and can be
criticized on the same basis.26

VIII. CONCEPTUAL PROBLEMS

Next to the methodological problems there are two conceptual problems in

Bosworth's study that deserve closer scrutiny. These two problems hinge on
Bosworth's central concepts. First, there is a remarkable imbalance between
two of the central organizing concepts, that is, "Auschwitz" and "Hiroshima."
In fact the book tells us a lot about the first and too little about the second.
Bosworth's concept of "Hiroshima"'remains a kind of mixed bag, in which he
simultaneously deposits postwar fears of total destruction, imperialism, and
fundamental doubts about historical progress (5-6). These phenomena may
plausibly be connected, but Bosworth is not very explicit on this score.
The second conceptual problem centers around Bosworth's notion of the
"long Second World War," a problem he indicates himself. Although he recog-

23. P. Bourdieu, "The Specificity of the Scientific Field," in French Sociology: Rupture and
Renewal since 1968, ed. C. Lemert (New York, 1981).
24. F. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective
1890-1920 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992).
25. With regard to Italy he suggests that there had been a "historians' quarrel," but that the
Right had won it, unlike in Germany. The explanandurn then is, of course, why the Right won
in Italy in contrast to Germany. With regard to Japan he simply observes the absence of controversies
A la Taylor and Fischer (184) and the absence of "paradigm-shifts" (186).
26. Cf. D. Blackbourn and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society
and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford, 1989).

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nizes that the end of the First World War can plausibly be interpreted as an
important origin of the Second, he prefers to locate the beginning of the "long
Second World War" for every country -outside the few parliamentary democ-
racies that functioned as such -"at that moment in which the various states
required their peoples' liberties be subordinate to their nationality" (6). His
apologies for the imprecise character of this definition do not obscure the fact
that this definition is based on the questionable premises that in the good old
prewar days "the people" were free, and the contradiction between nationality
and liberty was absent. One does not have to be a specialist in nationalism to
acknowledge that the principle of nationality, as it developed in the nineteenth
century from its cosmopolitan to its imperialist and xenophobic phase, had
everywhere been based on the exclusion of numerous ethnic and social groups.27
So although there undoubtedly is a marked difference between Italy before and
after 1922, and Germany before and after 1933, this difference should, in my
opinion, be characterized in terms other than those of a contradiction between
nationality and liberty, because nationalism had been illiberal for quite some
time.

IX. COMPARATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WORLD WAR II

AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

What "lessons" does Bosworth's comparative historiography contain for the

philosopher of history? I think there are several and I will try to spell them
out in this last section.
The first conclusion might be that this comparative analysis of historiography
instructs the philosopher of history that the Nietzschean conception of historical
knowledge as interested, practical knowledge possesses better empirical creden-
tials than the classical Rankean conception of historical knowledge as a mirror
of the past.28 This analysis confirms, as Bosworth himself observes, that the
transformation of the real past into realistic histories tells us as much about
the present of a culture as about its past. In that sense all history is indeed
contemporary history, as Huizinga and Croce stated in the distant (and as
Gadamer argued in the more recent) past.29
In view of the recent renewed attempts of conservatives in historiography
to rehabilitate the ideal of "objectivity"and to discredit pluralism, it is probably
not superfluous to point out that comparative historiography has had, on bal-
ance, a very sobering effect on this classical ideal. In this respect Bosworth's

27. Such diverse authors as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm have stressed this "exclu-
sive" character of national communities. Cf. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), and E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990).
28. Cf. R. Vierhaus, "Rankes Begriff der historischen Objektivitdt," in Objektivitat und Partei-
lichkeit, ed. R. Koselleck et al. (Munich, 1977), 63-77.
29. This position has recently been elaborated by T. Ashplant and A. Wilson, "Present-centred
History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge," Historical Journal 31 (1988), 253-274.

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250 REVIEWESSAYS

study resemblesother studies of the objectivityissue, such as Georg Iggers's

analysisof the Germanhistoricalprofession in The GermanConceptionof
History,Peter Novick'sanalysisof the Americanhistoricalprofessionin That
Noble Dream, and Jo Tollebeek'sanalysisof the Dutch historicalprofession
in De toga van Fruin.0 These authorsalso expose the claim to objectivityas
being the shield of orthodoxyand the intellectualimmunizationof one set of
politicalprejudices.Reanimationof this ideal thereforecan only be regarded
as a renewedbid for an intellectualmonopoly with regardto the handlingof
history. Bosworth aptly labels this move in Germany,Italy, and the US as
"neo-Rankeanism" and noticesthat the sameideologistswho advocatethe free
marketin everysocietalspheredo not, apparently,trustthe open competition
of ideas in history(197).
This does not mean, as we have observed,that Bosworthsubscribesto the
view that "anythinggoes"in history:that is, to skepticismand relativism.The
alternativeto naiverealism- or objectivism,as it is often named- is a sophisti-
cated realismand that meanspluralism.AlthoughBosworthappreciatesplu-
ralismas a necessaryattributeof healthydemocraciesI have arguedelsewhere
that this point of view can also be defendedby philosophicalmeans.31
We can also drawa secondconclusionfrom Bosworths analysiswith regard
to the Nietzscheandistinctionbetweenthe monumental,the critical, and the
antiquarianimpulsesbehind"doinghistory."The historiographicalanalysisof
WorldWar II seems to suggestthat with the passageof time the monumental
value, whetherpositive or negative(critical),of an episode tends to decrease
whilethe antiquarianimpulseincreases,but not necessarily,and not in a linear
manner,as historicismsuggested.Germanhistoriography,with its hot contro-
versy in the late 1980s, refutesthe idea of linearity;the same goes for Soviet
historiography,with its sharp kink in the line from 1990 onwards.Japanese
and Soviet historiographyrefute the idea that this decreaseis a necessaryor
an automaticprocess,as a kindof historicalhalf time. Japanesehistoriography
indicatesthattherepressionof an episodethatatteststo its negativemonumental
or criticalvaluedoesnot automaticallydecreaseovertime;andSoviethistoriog-
raphyup to 1990seems to indicatethat the monumentalizationof an episode
does not automaticallydecreasewith the distancein time. It is not the unifor-
mity, but the pluriformityof the shapes and effectsof time that leap to the
historiographer'seye.32And although the overall WesternEuropeanpicture
appearsto confirmthe historicistidea that with the passageof time the "par-
tisan"views die out and historyis "depoliticized,"one could also reasonably

30. G. Iggers, TheGermanConceptionof History: TheNational Traditionof Thoughtfrom

Herderto thePresent(Middletown,Conn., 1968);P. Novick,ThatNobleDream:The"Objectivity
Question"andtheAmericanHistoricalProfession(Cambridge,Eng., 1988);J. Tollebeek,De toga
vanFruin:Denkenover geschiedenisin Nederland1860-1960(Amsterdam,1990).
31. Cf. my "HistoricalKnowledgeand HistoricalReality,"304ff.
32. One could of coursetry to rescuethe idea of uniformityby introducing"the long run,"
but-as Keynesremarked-"inthe long run we are all dead."

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argue against this view.33 One could question with Bosworth, for instance,
whether the "historicization" of World War II in Germany and Italy since the
1980s has not amounted to a victory for the conservative, "nihilistic" view
instead of a victory of scientific reason over the emotions of partisan contempo-
raries, as is usually suggested (137-141).
Bosworth's analysis of World War II historiography can also be used to
elucidate the pragmatic dimension of history. One could say that all history
of World War II is contemporary history because the primary interest of this
branch of history appears to be the presentation of acceptable historical identi-
ties. Moreover, the acceptability of historical identities related to World War
II appears to revolve around the moral question of guilt and responsibility, as
Bosworth has also noticed.34This relation between historical identity and ethics
explains why the questions of whether modern German history in general and
"Auschwitz" in particular were "unique"were so intensely debated in German
historiography; the same goes for the question why, in France and Italy, collabo-
ration with Nazi Germany was so long denied and why conservative Italian
historians were eager to dissociate fascism from Nazism (and thus from "Ausch-
witz"). At a more general level it explains why historians belonging to different
nationalities have produced such widely different reconstructions of World War
II and why so many foreign historians (such as Paxton and Marrus with regard
to France, and Smith in Italian historiography) have played a revolutionary
role in the Kuhnian sense. All these characteristics of World War II historiog-
raphy are explicable if we presuppose that the guiding principle of historians
is not truth per se, nor indeed the whole truth, but an acceptable truth.35
The limits of acceptability of statements, then, appear to be dictated not
only by factual considerations of an autonomous historical discourse, but also
by the normative considerations and expectations of the audiences addressed -
more specifically, of the expectations of the national political elites who "run"
the state and its education system. The crudest techniques for imposing a specific
"audience rule"36-direct censorship and appointments-can be observed in
Japan and the USSR, but the Germany, England, and France of the Cold War
also readily provide less crude (though no less effective) examples. Bosworth

33. According to Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen 1960), partisan, "false" preju-
dices are filtered out over the passage of time. Therefore time is the carrierof truth and (as it was for
Hegel) time is productive of truth. Cf. C. von Bormann, "Die Zweideutigkeit der hermeneutischen
Erfahrung," in K-O. Apel et al., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt am Main, 1973),
93-94. For Dutch historiography this historicist "standard view" is argued by J. C. H. Blom, In
de banvangoedenfout? Wetenschappelijke overde bezettingstijdin Nederland
geschiedschrijving
(Amsterdam, 1983).
34. Bosworth notes that the primary motor for historical revisionism in Germany and France
came from the postwar generation asking their fathers "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"
35. Cf. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History. I have analyzed this problem with
regard to modern German historiography in "Beyond Good and Evil? The German Empire of
1871 and Modern German Historiography," Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 729-
765, and in "Einige Anmerkungen zum 'Historikerstreit'aus den Niederlanden," Zeichen 17 (1989),
8-12.
36. See my "Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality," 323-326.

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has produced impressive historiographical evidence for the view that the open
competition of interpretations has been the only effective counterweight to this
practical problem of "doing history."

CHRIS LORENZ
Free University Amsterdam! University of Leiden

LEARNING HISTORY IN AMERICA: SCHOOLS, CULTURES, AND POLITICS. Edited by

Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William L. Barney. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pp. 225.

This collection of essays derives from a set of conference papers "concerned

with historical understanding in the contemporary United States" (vii). The
editors have sought to organize a diverse and wide-ranging collection of essays
around issues of "ethnic diversity and national unity" in the teaching of history
in high schools and universities, the presentation of the past in popular culture
and national politics, and the objectivity of the "categories of historical
meaning" used by academic historians.
Some contributors remain within and others self-consciously step outside
traditional academic conventions and formats. Some essays are relatively paro-
chial, focusing upon Western Civilization courses at Stanford University, or
the state-mandated curriculum in North Carolina high schools, while others
address such universal and enduring issues as the status and nature of "master
narratives" or the links between "myths of origins" and national policies. In
their excellent introductory essay, two of the editors, Kramer and Reid, strive
to impose unity upon the disparate concerns and approaches of the essayists
by representing the volume - and the conference from which it originated - as
a national forum to which people from different walks of life and with different
concerns could contribute. They intend the volume to serve as
an extension of a dialogue that began by crossing the normal boundaries of academic
life (graduate students/faculty) and expanded by asking people to move outside their
normal intellectual circuits (university professors/high school teachers/journalists). The
diverse perspectives, methods, and professions that we have brought together here repre-
sent both our intentions and the differences between people who are thinking out the
importance of history in various spheres of American society." (2)

In fact, however, with the notable exception of Rosenstone in his essay about
filmed representations of the past, few contributors can be said to have moved
"outside their normal intellectual circuits"; and the diversity of "perspectives"
and "methods" is as evident in the questions posed and values asserted as in
the arguments developed and conclusions advanced. It follows that views about

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