S. Tschopp, Kulturgeschichte (Lynn Hunt)

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Francia-Recensio 2010/2 19./20. Jahrhundert – Histoire contemporaine

Silvia Serena Tschopp (Hg.), Kulturgeschichte, Stuttgart (Franz Steiner) 2008, 250 p. (Basistexte Geschichte, 3), ISBN 978-3-515-09081-0, EUR 24,00.

rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par

Lynn Hunt, Los Angeles

Cultural history has always been an ambiguous if not misleading term. It can refer to »the linguistic turn«, »the new cultural history«, or »cultural studies«, especially in the United States. Many essays have been written to explain the reasons for its resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s and some attention is now being paid to its international diffusion¹. Silvia Tschopp is very familiar with this wide range of approaches, but rather than advocate any one of them in particular, she offers here an excellent overview of the field with an emphasis on its German language sources. Tschopp explicitly divides her authors into three groups: the forerunners from ca. 1900 (Jacob Burckhardt, Eberhard Gothein, Karl Lamprecht, and Johann Huizinga); the advocates in the 1980s and 1990s of the new kinds of cultural history (Roger Chartier, Rudolf Vierhaus, Otto Gerhard Oexle, and Peter Burke); and the contemporary German practitioners Ute Daniel and Thomas Mergel. The volume was designed to introduce German readers to cultural history as a field of inquiry, and it underscores throughout the ability of cultural history to incorporate an astonishing array of approaches and techniques.

Rather than provide concrete examples of cultural history of specific times and places, Tschopp chooses to focus on methodological and philosophical issues. Thus she excerpts Burckhardt on how he will approach Greek cultural history rather than a selection from his best known work »Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien«. Similarly, she opts for Huizinga on the unstable concepts of history and culture rather than pages from his earlier and most famous work »Herbst des Mittelalters«. As a consequence, the reader will get a very good sense of the conflicts over the concept of culture and its relationship to society, politics, the arts, popular culture, and daily life but less of a feel for how cultural history is actually practiced. For this, readers can turn to the other works by the authors presented here or to the works of Tschopp herself who has written extensively about print culture and its effects during the Thirty Years’ War as well as the cultural forms of Swiss nationalism in the nineteenth century.

Tschopp’s emphasis on the philosophical and methodological issues may be taken as reflecting either an enduring German interest in such questions or a dilemma that has proved central to cultural history more generally in its late twentieth-century incarnations. Both seem to me to be true. There are many more books in German about the field of cultural history and its variants (Alltagsgeschichte, historical anthropology, etc.) than in French or even English, or for that matter, in other language. Tschopp presents a useful bibliography that includes many of these works in German. Why have German authors been so concerned with delineating and justifying the field of cultural history? One reason, no doubt, is that they feel intense resistance to it from more traditionally oriented political, economic, intellectual, and social historians. This resistance is exacerbated by the structure of the German-language universities, which has made the accession of young scholars to professorial positions of influence very difficult, if not impossible. As a consequence, women’s history, the history of sexuality and the body, the study of political culture, the study of marginal groups, and the history of the environment have had to be practiced and defended by young scholars whose own careers are still works in progress.

Still, Tschopp’s concern with the methodological and philosophical issues reflects more than just the peculiarities of the German-language universities or the long history of German interest in foundational questions. From its reformulation in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural history everywhere has been preoccupied, for better or worse, with epistemological and methodological inquiries. Most work in cultural history has fallen into two main categories: empirical studies of specific times and places and foundational debates. Although empirical studies have been used by some to shed new light on epistemological issues (chiefly by deconstructing Western categories of truth and reality), what is too often missing is an account of how new methods have recast the traditional understandings of important historical events. Cultural history, as Tschopp’s collection shows, is concerned with every imaginable kind of human »Denkweise und Anschauungen«, as Burckhardt said long ago, but readers will also want to know how focusing on such concerns might change our view of medieval monarchy, the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolution, or fascism.

Cultural historians have long insisted that culture cannot be reduced to economic, political, or social structural factors. They have been less successful at showing what culture, especially culture as understood in such a protean fashion, can actually explain. Tschopp can hardly be criticized for failing to give a satisfactory answer to this kind of question, for it has only been possible to ask it now that cultural history has become established as a fruitful field for exploration.