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DOI: 10.1177/0022009411404583 2011 46: 506Journal of Contemporary History

Kristina Spohr ReadmanFuture of Writing the World

Contemporary History in Europe: From Mastering National Pasts to the

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Article

Contemporary Historyin Europe: FromMastering National Paststo the Future of Writingthe World

Kristina Spohr ReadmanLondon School of Economics, UK

Abstract

Debates surrounding the approach to and distinctiveness of contemporary history qua

history that had been simmering ever since the professionalization of history in the late

nineteenth century re-emerged with vigour after 1990. This article attempts to identify

what characterizes and distinguishes (the history of) our present time, by comparing

the evolution of what has been labelled contemporary history in France, Germany

and Britain over the last 90 years. In discussing some of the conceptual problems and

methodological challenges of contemporary history, it will be revealed that many in

Europe remain stuck in an older, national (and transnational) fixation with the second

world war and the nazis atrocities, although working in medias res today appears to

point to the investigation of events and phenomena that are global. The article will

seek to make a fresh suggestion of how to delimit contemporariness from the older

past and end with some comments on the significance of the role of contemporary

history within the broader historical discipline and society at large.

Keywords

contemporary history, global, transnational, Zeitgeschichte

. . . it is the business of the historian, looking back over events from distance, to take a

wider view than contemporaries, to correct their perspectives and to draw attention to

developments whose long-term bearing they could not have expected to see. For the

most part, they have made little use of their opportunity; indeed, it seems as

though they are in danger of being frozen forever in the patterns of thought of the

years 193345. Georey Barraclough1

Corresponding author:

Kristina Spohr Readman, International History Department, LSE, London WC2A 2AE, UK

Email: [email protected]

1 This quote contains Geoffrey Barracloughs handwritten amendments to p. 27 of the original editionof his Introduction to Contemporary History (London 1964) which he wished to make for the 1967


The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire saw the declassicationof decades of archival material from many Eastern European countries, most nota-bly East Germany, as well as the release of selected Western documents. Thisopening of the archival oodgates had a major impact on historical scholarship.History had rapidly moved into real-time. The sheer volume of literature pub-lished during the rst post-Cold War decade and beyond shows that many took theopportunity to study the most recent past.2 Yet this development also brought theproblematique concerning historians distance temporal and ideological fromtheir object of research to the fore, just as it had been debated after the rst andsecond world wars.3

Furthermore, the social, political and cultural repercussions of such majorchanges as the events of 198991 and the technological revolution of the1980s and 1990s (digitalization and the internet) meant that historians in thenaughties could look upon the twentieth century at large from a new perspectiveand study it in new ways. This context of a world and discipline in ux fosteredthe re-ignition of the much older and wider professional controversy amonghistorians as to what contemporary history actually was, how it should bepractised and what its ends were. Were the new ruptures of 198991 or subse-quently 2001 relevant for the elds periodization? And in which ways shouldcontemporary history today relate to the historical discipline at large, to societyand to politics?

It is signicant that the institutionalization and acceptance of contemporaryhistory within the academy was still a relatively recent development and that,especially in Europe, these processes had been tied to very specic national circum-stances and trajectories. Indeed, contemporary history (on the continent especially)had served many states postwar political projects of fostering democracy and thushad a purpose: political and individual decision-making was to be informed by athrough understanding of the recent past. Since the 1950s, then, the subjects of thesecond world war and nazism in particular had come to dominate the works ofthose who called themselves contemporary historians. Over the past 20 years, how-ever, the theme of the national mastering of the past has been superseded as themost immediate political and public concern by the growing sense of an evolutiontowards an intensifying and accelerating integration of the worlds societies andstates. And, I would argue, it is this phenomenon contemporary historians ought tograpple with.

Pelican edition, but which were not permitted by his publishers C.A. Watts & Co. I wish to thank N.N.Barraclough for lending me the annotated book.2 Journalistic books, official histories and memoirs form the bulk of this literature. See Michael Cox,Another Transatlantic Split? American and European Narratives and the End of the Cold War, ColdWar History, 7, 1 (2007), 12146; Kristina Spohr, German Reunification: Between Official History,Academic Scholarship and Political Memoirs, Historical Journal, 43, 3 (2000), 86988.3 Particularly after the second. See Astrid M. Eckert, The Transnational Beginnings of West GermanZeitgeschichte in the 1950s, Central European History, 40, 1 (2007), 66.

Spohr Readman 507


The present article, with Britain, France and Germany as its central Europeanreference points, has three aims: rst, to set the scene, I will briey trace the evo-lution of the nature and position of contemporary history in the context of thehistorical disciplines professionalization in the nineteenth century. Second, thecircumstances in which contemporary history emerged as a recognized sub-disci-pline after 1945 will be explored, along with how and why the eld evolved sostrictly within and remained for so long wedded to very nationally-conceivedparameters. Finally, by examining Charles Maiers and Geo Eleys dierentattempts at re-dening the fundamental global changes that aected the twenti-eth-century world and by re-evaluating the thought of Georey Barraclough,which is now almost 60 years old, I seek to re-conceptualize the terms of refer-ence for contemporary history. I propose that contemporary European historianstoday ought to attempt to transcend the institutional stickiness tied to the obses-sion with particular, now already older, national pasts and turning points.Instead, their focus should be on the implications of truly working in medias res;and in doing so and by employing all new tools available to them, the emergingtask is to write the world as it presents itself today by which I mean producingmore transnational or global, and distinctly less Euro-centric, narratives of con-temporary aairs.

Scholars scepticism towards contemporary history rst originated in the move toprofessionalize the historical discipline in the nineteenth century, when Leopoldvon Ranke pushed for the establishment of history as a Wissenschaft. Rankeargued that the proper business of the historian was not judging the past, . . . [and]instructing the present for the benet of future ages, as the semi-professional his-torians had previously done, but rather establishing how it actually was (wie eseigentlich gewesen ist). The strict presentation of the facts . . . is undoubtedly thesupreme law, he wrote.4 This emphasis on objectivity to establish authority led tothe creation of a common standard for historical scholarship, which in turndemanded certain qualications from the historian.5 Writing scholarly historycould not be about ones own experiences and eyewitness accounts, but the meth-odological breakthrough was seen to be in the systematic examination of survivingwritten sources from the past. The new professional history, as promoted byGerman scholars (including Ranke, Barthold G. Niebuhr and Johann G.Droysen), then, excluded contemporary history in its truest sense. Indeed, evenHeinrich von Treitschke, considered by many as the nineteenth-century Germancontemporary historian par excellence, was no exception: at his death in 1896 hisHistory of Germany in the Nineteenth Century only reached up to 1847. Still, this isnot to claim that Droysen, Treitschke and others were not at all presentist in their

4 See Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History (London 1956), 5462, esp. 57.5 J.L. Gaddis, On Contemporary History: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University ofOxford on 18 May 1993 (Oxford 1995), 911; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ObjectivityQuestion and the American Historical Professsion (New York 1988), 218, 5160.

508 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3)


writing. While they took their professional legitimization as serious scholars ofhistory from the archives, they were nevertheless commenting on contemporaryaairs not least by using some of their studies of the past as a means to inuencethe direction of present-day politics, as, for example, Droysen intended with hisGeschichte der preussischen Politik in support for the Hohenzollerns rule. Theproblem that arose from such presentist works was twofold: the openly politicalagenda and outlook coloured the interpretations of the past, while none of thehistorians in question were actually experts in contemporary history per se.6

In general, serious historical research in Germany now had a rm orientationtowards the past and past politics and the relations between states, in particular.The focus on the critical study of primary sources, especially government papers,conrmed this trend towards the predominance of political and diplomatic history.To be sure, while private archives remained mostly inaccessible, post-Rankeanhistorians beneted from the opening of state or royal archives, which were bothgrowing in numbers and increasingly professionally run, as well as from the boomin the publication of selected (but hardly ever contemporary) government docu-ments by Royal Commissions. But governments were obviously driven by a polit-ical self-interest in histories that fostered their nation-building drive.7

In at least one important way, this development towards the professionalizationof history was revolutionary. Since the beginnings of what has been consideredserious historical writing, history had been indissolubly linked to the present andhistorys use had always been seen as being a means to improve the understandingof the present. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War8 provided the arche-type. It had been written with the conviction that future generations would betterunderstand their own times if they knew as much as possible about the authorsown. This was signicant because, as much as Thucydides work is praised as themost ancient example of serious history, he wrote about events through which helived. Ironically, Thucydides work can hence also be used as a prime exemplar ofcontemporary history, as advocates of the eld have always pointed out.9 Similaranalogies can also be made with, for example, Guiccardinis, Macchiavellis orGibbons works. In fact, in the centuries between Thucydides and Ranke manyconsidered contemporary history to be best history.10 With the rise of the German

6 On the professionalization of history in Germany and its wider consequences for the disciplineacross Europe, see John Burrow, A History of Histories (London 2009), 45366. See also the essaysby Sebastian Manhart and Friedrich Jaeger in Horst Walter Blanke (ed.), Historie und Historik: 200Jahre Johann Gustav Droysen (Cologne 2009), 3872, 10629.7 Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, Leopold von Rankes Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in ModernHistoriography, Modern Intellectual History, 5, 3 (2008), 42553. See also, for example, HaroldTemperley and Lillian M. Penson, A Century of Diplomatic Blue Books, 18141914 (Cambridge 1938).8 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Chicago 1989). See also Bernard Williams, Truth andTruthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, NJ 2002), ch. 7.9 R.W. Seton-Watson, A Plea for the Study of Contemporary History, History, 14 (April 1929), 4;Gavin Henderson, A Plea for the Study of Contemporary History, History, 26 (June 1941), 523;Gaddis, Contemporary History, op. cit., 6.10 Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the1990s (London 1999), x; Seton-Watson, Plea, op. cit., 4. See also Matthias Peter and Hans-JurgenSchroder, Einfuhrung in das Studium der Zeitgeschichte (Paderborn 1994), 1920, 26.

Spohr Readman 509


historical school, for the rst time, scholarly history became largely detached fromthe present. Following Rankes philosophy, achieving sucient insulation fromcontemporary concerns had emerged as the historians highest endeavour.Crucially, this standpoint was not only a matter of the overall historiographicalethos of Rankeans. Their understanding of the role of reliable sources in histor-ical research and hence their xation with written archival documents, which weresimply not to be had for the most recent past, explains why contemporary historydeveloped the way it did. The export of these German ideas on the nature andpractice of academic history across Europe and to the United States during thenineteenth century meant that contemporary history was pushed to the fringesof historical scholarship. Until well into the twentieth century it was conned tothe areas of popular memory and historians political engagement, as well as to theworks of popular historians and journalists.

And while the size of the historical profession was to grow, and university syllabithematically and methodologically were to diversify,11 many, even today, considerit precipitate and over-hasty to write history while it is still smoking, to quoteBarbara Tuchmann. A glance at the list of articles published in some of the maingeneral history journals in Britain, France, Germany and the USA during the lastone and a half decades (19902005) reveals that the tendency of virtually ignoring

Table 1. Contemporary History Articles in the main History Journals between 1990 and

2005

No. of all

Articles

Articles on the Periods

Other190045 194670 19712005

English Historical Reviewz 277 41 11 1 224Historical Journaly 565 122 29 3 411Historyz 219 32 10 1 176Past and Presentz 395 62 5 1 327Historische Zeitschriftz 296 44 6 2 244Revue Historiquey 328 33 13 0 282American Historical Reviewy 276 70 12 4 190Journal of Modern Historyz 226 83 12 1 130The table is based on the authors own research and calculations.

y articles and historiographical reviews (no review articles, notes and documents, debates, and fora)z articles only (no review articles, notes and documents, debates, and fora)The article category Other denotes that these articles span other centuries and/or span parts of all three

periods indicated. It is also noteworthy that the majority of articles in the 19461970 column appeared mostly

during the early 2000s.

11 Tosh, In Pursuit of History (Harlow 2000), 7190; John Catterall, What (if anything) is Distinctiveabout Contemporary History?, Journal of Contemporary History, 32, 4 (1997), 446; Peter Steinbach,Geschichte und Politik nicht nur ein wissenschaftliches Verhaltnis, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte,B28 (2001) [web-archive], 15.



the most recent past is widely spread (see Table 1). Of course, one might expectmore contemporary research on the 1950s than the 1980s, given that these jour-nals are dedicated to covering the breadth of the historical profession both interms of elds and epochs. Yet, it is the scale of the decline in article numbers thecloser we move to the present that is striking, and crucially this slide becomes allthe more evident when looking at the contents of specialist journals on contempo-rary history (see Table 2).

As Eric Hobsbawm argued in 1992, retrospective is the historians secretweapon, because retrospective is the chronological distance which stabilises hisperspective.12 This was very much in line with R.G. Collingwoods view, expressedin 1924. He wrote that it is only after close and prolonged reection that we beginto see why things happened as they did, and to write history instead of newspa-pers.13 Yet, crucially, Hobsbawm also pointed out that historians today needed as he himself did to write about the most recent past, too: to provide futurehistorians with a good picture of our time, and with a view to preserving sourcematerial that, while abundant and varied, is increasingly ephemeral.14

Contemporary history rst began to re-establish itself in the European andAmerican historical professions after the rst and second world wars. With bothscholars and governments looking for explanations of the events of the previoustwo decades, the eld soon became institutionalized as a sub-discipline of history inWest Germany, France, Britain, America and elsewhere in the western hemisphere.Yet the label contemporary history denoting a sub-discipline as much as being areection of a particular epoch was inconsistently used, and its multiple

Table 2. Contemporary History Articles in the specialized European Contemporary History

Journals between 1990 and 2005

No. of all

Articles

Articles on the Periods

Other190045 194670 19712005

Journal of Contemporary Historyz 463 282 112 16 53Contemporary European Historyz 200 94 76 24 6Contemporary British Historyz 311 41 144 93 33Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichtez 231 108 81 18 24Revue dHistoire Moderne et 486 68 41 11 366

ContemporainezThe table is based on the authors own research and calculations.

z articles only (no review articles, notes and documents, debates, and fora)The article category Other denotes that these articles span other centuries and/or span parts of all (or at

least two) periods indicated. It also includes biographical and methodological articles.

12 Eric Hobsbawm, Un historien et son temps present, in Institut dHistoire du Temps Present[IHTP] (ed.), Ecrire lhistoire du temps present En hommage a` Francois Bedarida (Paris 1993), 102.13 R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis or: The Map of Knowledge (Oxford 1924), 82.14 Hobsbawm, Historien, op. cit., 102.

Spohr Readman 511


interpretations only added to the conceptual and methodological confusion aboutthis eld qua history that has persisted until the present day.15

In dierent countries, historians allocated very dierent meanings to what theycalled contemporary history. Evidently these denitions were bound up withnational histories and traditions. In France, even if quite serious scholars wroteabout the 1789 revolution relatively soon after the events and thus deed Germanhistoriographical trends, lhistoire contemporaine became established (and institu-tionalized) in historical scholarship with Ernest Lavisses Histoire de France con-temporaine, published in 192022. His ten-volume edition covered the period fromthe French Revolution of 1789 to the Peace of Versailles in 1919.16 The currentEditions du Seuil series Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine likewisereaches from the French Revolution to the late twentieth century.17 And asRobert Gildeas and Anne Simolins 2008 volume Writing Contemporary Historyproves, the events of 1789 are considered by many French historians as a majorhistorical caesura still aecting contemporary France, and specically as the start-ing point of Frances modern or contemporary era.18 Indeed, if we considerthe recent controversies in French politics, including criticism of former colonialpolicies or the policies vis-a`-vis ethnic minorities in the hexagon, the signicance ofthe institutional and normative heritage of the revolution for Frances self-imagebecomes obvious. Or as Serge Bernstein put it: Pour la culture politique repub-licaine, tout commence en 1789.19 This explains why the concept of contemporari-ness in France embraces some two hundred years. Yet over the last 30 or 40 years,Vichy France and de Gaulles presidency have equally installed themselves asnarrower temporal and thematic bounds for the study of French contemporaryhistory.20 The classication lhistoire contemporaine has hence increasingly beenrelated to two very dierent stretches of time, a practice which FrancoisBedarida criticized as ambiguous and misleading. Bedarida however directed hiscriticism less against the above-mentioned contemporary periods in French historyas such, but against the distortion of what he believed to be the true meaning of theword contemporary.21

15 Rene Remond, Quelques questions de portee generale en guise dintroduction, in IHTP, Ecrire,op. cit., 2733.16 Ernest Lavisse, Histoire de France contemporaine, depuis la revolution jusqua` la paix de 1919 (Paris192022). Cf. Pierre Nora, Lhistoire de France de Lavisse, in Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, vol. I (Paris1986), 31575.17 Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine (Paris 1972), the first volume being by MichelVovelle, La chute de la monarchie, 17871792 (Paris 1972) and the currently last (19th) volume beingby Jean Jacques Becker in collaboration with Pascal Ory, Crises et alternances: 19741995 (Paris 1998).18 Robert Gildea and Anne Simolin (eds), Writing Contemporary History (Oxford 2008).19 Serge Bernstein, Les cultures politques en France (Paris 1999), 114.20 See Pieter Lagrou, De lactualite de lhistoire du temps present, in Dossier: Lhistoire du tempspresent, hier et aujourdhui, (July 2000), 5, http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/spip.php%3Farticle470&langfr.html (last accessed 9 January 2011).21 Bedarida, France, in Anthony Seldon (ed.), Contemporary History: Practice and Method (Oxford1988), 12930. Cf. Rainer Hudemann, Histoire du temps present in Frankreich: Zwischen nationalenProblemstellungen und internationaler Offnung, in Alexander Nutzenadel and Wolfgang Schieder(eds), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa[Sonderheft Geschichte und Gesellschaft] (Gottingen 2004), 175200.



In eect, Bedarida was a strong defender of Hans Rothfels idea that onesown time should be synonymous with what is considered to be contemporary.22

A forceful advocate of studying truly contemporary aairs, in the 1970s, Bedaridaintroduced a new classication: lhistoire du temps present (history of the present),with which he wanted to indicate a much shorter time-frame of the recent past.23 Yetin practice the new term has merely been used as a synonym for what others calllhistoire contemporaine. The French Institut dhistoire du temps present (IHTP),founded by Bedarida in 1978, is a case in point. Its research, though intended tofocus on the years after 1945, especially decolonization, has centred primarily onVichy France (and the questions related to French resistance and/or collaborationwith nazi Germany).What is hence predominantly associated with lhistoire du tempspresent is an epoch starting with the second world war as a major historical rupturethat is seen as inuencing present politics and society. In terms of methodologicalinnovation, it is noteworthy that research on the Vichy syndrome brought to the forePierre Noras concept of the lieux de memoire, a concept which has signicantlyinuenced and shaped historical scholarship both at home and abroad.24

As in France, thanks to Lavisse, in Germany contemporary history wasalready practised during the 1920s, where the eld unfolded specically as a criticalresponse to Germanys asserted war guilt (as it was ocially stated in the VersaillesTreaty). Public demand for better knowledge and the political elites interest injustifying their own actions before and during the rst world war had led to anearly declassication of selected diplomatic correspondence by Germany (as well asthe Soviet Union, France and England) which spawned an unprecedented surge ofhistorical literature, especially of ocial histories.25 Despite methodological ques-tions over the issue of proper distance in their very contemporary research, theunprecedented access to archival documents seemed to satisfy traditional historiansof the validity of their colleagues work, not to mention the acceptability of thehistorico-political motivation of those contemporary historians who wrote aboutthe Weimar Republic.26

22 Bedarida, Le temps present, Espaces Temps, 29, 1er trimestre (1985), 11. As to the concept of onesown time, cf. Serge Bernstein La lacune du present, in IHTP, Ecrire, op. cit., 589; Timo Soikkanen(ed.), Lahihistoria: teoriaan, metodologiaan ja lahteisiin liittyvia ongelmia (Turku 1995), 1068; Peter andSchroder, Einfuhrung, op. cit., 1517, 314.23 Michel Trebitsch, La quarantaine et lan 40: Hypothe`ses sur lethymologie du temps present, inEcrire, op. cit., 65.24 Nora, Les Lieux de memoire, op. cit.25 Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Friedrich Thimme (eds), Die grossePolitik der europaischen Kabinette 18711914 (Berlin 192227); E. Adamov (German edn by K.Kersten and B. Mironow), Die grosse Politik der Machte im Weltkrieg aus den Geheim-Archiven derEntente (Dresden 193032); A. von Wenger (ed.), Bibliographie zur Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges(Berlin 1934); G.P. Gooch, Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy (London 1940); and earlier,Idem, History of Modern Europe, 18781919 (London 1923); H. Temperley and G. P. Gooch (eds),British Documents on the Origins of War, 18981914 (London 192638); Documents DiplomatiquesFrancais, 18711914 (Paris 192959). Cf. W. Pick, Contemporary History (Oxford 1949), 757; Seton-Watson, Plea, op. cit., 910.26 See Peter and Schroder, Einfuhrung, op. cit., 23. Cf. Arthur Rosenberg, Die Entstehung derdeutschen Republik (Berlin 1926).

Spohr Readman 513


As a scholarly term, the designation Zeitgeschichte (re-)appeared with vigourafter the second world war in (West) Germany, and Hans Rothfels in 1953 putforward the now classic denition of contemporary history as the epoch of thoseliving and its treatment by academics. But he also designated 1917 as the startingpoint for contemporary history, for a universal-historical epoch27 an epoch inwhich foreign policy was driven by domestic, especially societal concerns. Hefurther specied the present as a time of coexistence of two ideologicallyopposed political camps in East and West, yet with this antagonism simplyfollowing from other longer-term historical antagonisms.28 Thus, from the outsetRothfels denition embodied a conicting dualism: the idea of uid temporalboundaries (with a generational component and an openness to constant rejuve-nation) versus the idea of a new universal (or global) epoch from 1917 onward.This embodied an international, or rather transnational, not purely Germannational, outlook.

The establishment in 1947 of the Institut zur Erforschung der nationalsozia-listischen Politik (Institute for Research on National Socialist Politics) inMunich, renamed in 1952 as the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (IfZ, Institute ofContemporary History), institutionalized Zeitgeschichtsforschung (research oncontemporary history), specically research on the nazi regime and the secondworld war. The IfZ, as a separate research institute, acted initially on theperiphery of the universities, and only by the early 1980s had the number ofWest German university chairs in Zeitgeschichte or neueste Geschichte risen fromone in 1954 to 31, thus reecting the sub-disciplines solid establishment in theuniversity sector.29

From its inception, West German contemporary historical research bore a polit-ical purpose, as the young Bonn Republic tried to build a democratic civic culture.Indeed, this postwar political culture was to be shaped by lessons learned from thepast. They searched for answers, initially to how the 1945 catastrophe had comeabout and how to rise from it, and then later on why and how the fall of democracyand the ascendancy of Hitler, the second world war and the Holocaust had beenpossible. With these questions in view, West German contemporary historiansincluding Rothfels, Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze and later Martin Broszatand Hans-Ulrich Wehler investigated the politics and society of the WeimarRepublic and the Third Reich. They pointed to the law of objectivity in thestudy of archival sources, while avoiding any discussion or even explicit expressionof their own involvement and contemporariness in the nazi era. Only from the1980s did historians of contemporary aairs also begin to explore West German

27 Hans Rothfels, Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe, Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 1, 1 (1953), 18,esp. 2, 6, 7.28 Jan Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie des 20. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen 2005),3013.29 Ralph Jessen, Zeithistoriker im Konfliktfeld der Vergangenheit, in Konrad H. Jarausch andMartin Sabrow (eds), Verletztes Gedachnis: Erinnerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt(Frankfurt a. M. 2002), 156, 168.



postwar politics; and from German unication in 1990, the entire East Germanpast.30 This is not to say that after the 1950s the study of truly contemporary aairswas not considered desirable in principle. Indeed, Rothfels himself, in spite of hisdual denition, had been keenly urging the necessity of studying and analysingevents that lay only ve, ten, fteen or twenty years in the past.31 Over the lastcouple of decades popular history has certainly engaged with current aairs; andover the last few years scholarly history has in important and original ways evenbegun to explore the major domestic and international socio-economic and polit-ical shifts of the 1970s and early 1980s, not least as new socio-cultural researchtrends have led to studies of westernization and modernization.32 Nonetheless, his-torical practice shows that those who consider themselves as contemporary histo-rians in (West) Germany have primarily tended to keep their research topics in linewith the declassication of archival material. And here, leaving aside GDR andreunication history which is possible due to exceptional circumstances, a lot ofresearch remains concentrated on nazism, the second world war and WeimarGermany as pivotal, if not dening, twentieth-century moments and developments.This, compounded by Hitlers omnipresence in the media and in national memorypolitics, might be seen as paralysing the evolution of German contemporary historyto some extent. Considering that even the recent dual reappraisal of the past (brownand red, as well as Eastern and Western) has kept German historians essentiallyfocused on their nation-state and perhaps inadvertently promoted an inward-lookingapproach, the discipline of Zeitgeschichte in Germany has perhaps not moved for-ward as much in time and scope as it ought to have done.33

It is undeniable of course that nazism had a signicant impact on the post-war (West) German nation just as East German communism has had since1990 on unied Germanys society and politics. The culture of remembrance on

30 Norbert Frei, The Federal Republic of Germany, in Seldon, Contemporary History, op. cit., 1229; Idem, Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries: National Socialism and Its Historical Examination EnRoute into History, History and Memory, 9, 12 (1997), 5979; Hartmut Kaelble, La Zeitgeschichte:lhistoire allemande et lhistoire internationale du temps present, in IHTP, Ecrire, op. cit., 838. On therelationship between the first generation of German contemporary historians, studying nazi Germanyas an object of research and the place of the nazi era in their own, personal biography, see Mathias Beer,Der Neuanfang der Zeitgeschichte nach 1945: Zum Verhaltnis von nationsozialistischerUmsiedlungs- und Vernichtungspolitik und der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ostmitteleuropa, inWinfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds), Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurta. M. 1999), 274301; Mathias Beer, Wo bleibt die Zeitgeschichte? Fragen zur Geschichte einerDisziplin, 20 March 2003, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/typediskussionen&id293(last accessed 9 January 2011).31 Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die neueste Zeitgeschichte: Geschichte schreiben, wahrend sie nochqualmt, Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 51, 1 (2003), 6.32 See Konrad Jarausch, Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Gottingen 2008);Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit1970 (Gottingen 2008). Cf. Andreas Rodder, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 19691990 (Munchen2003).33 Christoph Klessmann and Martin Sabrow, Contemporary History in Germany after 1989,Contemporary European History, 6, 2 (1997), 21922, esp. 221; Konrad H. Jarausch and ThomasLindenberger (eds), Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New York andOxford 2007), 119.

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a societal and political level to take the public controversy over the Holocaustmemorial in Berlin in the 1990s or over Gunter Grass revelations of his SS pastin his autobiography of 200634 as two examples has been and still is a clearreection of this. It also shows that the past, history, is seen as something thatcould and should be brought into the service of contemporary aairs.35

Yet it is a paradox that German historians and the IfZ, being increasingly dis-tant from their object of research, should still refer to the nazi era as contemporaryhistory. It would perhaps seem more logical to classify 19331945 as part of therealm of general (or modern) history, while pointing however to its ghostly pres-ence within contemporary politico-cultural debate.36 And this historicizing mayalso deal with the problem of the early 2000s tide of retrospective self-victimizationof Germans as suerers of war and expulsion, arising from the recent fashion ofanalysing personal recollections and recovering authentic visualizations of thepast that seem to have swept away the critical confrontation with the nazi past.37

Hans-Peter Schwarz has attempted to come to grips with this specicallyGerman denitional muddle of Zeitgeschichte that is so deeply entwined with insti-tutional frameworks. In 2003 he suggested the introduction of a new term neuesteZeitgeschichte (newest contemporary history) to denote the most recent past, bywhich he meant the (post-Cold War) epoch, starting in the late 1980s. With this heseemed to follow Karl Dietrich Bracher, who in 1978 had supported an epochalview with reference to German practice, labelling the period 191445 altereZeitgeschichte and the post-1945 era neuere Zeitgeschichte.38 But thus far,Schwarzs proposal seems to have made no wider impact, with the label neuesteZeitgeschichte failing to become institutionalized among the historical profession.39

It is unsurprising, then, that the IfZs journal Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte(founded in 1953 by Rothfels), like the institute itself, continues to shy awayfrom publishing any research GDR and reunication history apart beyondthe magical archival threshold of 30 years.

In Britain, contemporary history as a eld of academic study also came intoexistence after the rst world war. Before then, neither contemporary Englishpolitical history nor general history (meaning European history) was taught atuniversities. In 1914, the Oxford modern history syllabus still excluded post-1837

34 Gunter Grass, Beim Hauten der Zwiebel (Gottingen 2006).35 Martin H. Geyer, Im Schatten der NS-Zeit, in Nutzenadel and Schieder (eds), Zeitgeschichte alsProblem, op. cit., 2553.36 On historicism and historicization, see Martin Broszat, Nach Hitler: Der schwierige Umgang mitunserer Geschichte (Munich 1986); Dan Diner, Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierungund Historikerstreit (Frankfurt a. M. 1987); cf. Philippe Burrin, Lhistorien et l historisation, inIHTP, Ecrire, op. cit., 7788; and Jorn Rusen, The Logic of Historicization: Metahistorial Reflectionson the Debate between Friedlander and Broszat, History and Memory, 9, 12 (1997), 11344.37 Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (Munich 2005), 722.38 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London 2000), 40; Tosh, In Pursuit, op. cit., 33; Schwarz,Die neueste Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., 25, fn. 99. Hans Gunter Hockerts, in turn, has defined GDRhistory as dritte Zeitgeschichte: see Hans Gunter Hockerts, Zeitgeschichte in Deutschland: Begriff,Methoden, Themenfelder, Historisches Jahrbuch, 113 (1993), 127.39 Schwarz, Die neueste Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., 8.



British political history and post-1878 European history. Contemporary Britishand European history simply lay outside the scope of exact scholarship.40 YetEnglish university historians did not use the strict classication rules of the archivesas a pretext for their reluctance to study more recent topics. Rather, as LlewellynWoodward pointed out, they defended their view (following Rankean lines ofargument) by claiming that recent events could not be seen in the proper perspec-tive; it was necessary to know what had happened next, and next meant then atleast two or three generations.41

This is not to say that no English historians wrote about the most recent past.Sir John Seeleys The Expansion of England (1883)42 had connected current aairsand history, covering English colonialism from the eighteenth century up to the1870s. But Seeley was something of an exception, at least within the academy.Moreover, he was less a historian (despite holding the Chair of Regius Professorof History at Cambridge University) than a classicist. Overall, during the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a professional objection to contemporary(British) history was predominant. As R.W. Seton-Watson argued, it was an[un]worthy subject for the true historians pen because of its incompatib[ility]with the detachment and calm of academic life.43

The two world wars pushed the Rankean doctrine rapidly into the back-ground at least for a short time. With the early release of archival material, aswell as oral evidence by many witnesses, the issue of necessary distance seemedforgotten. Shelves of government-sponsored ocial histories, as well as other con-temporary histories were published after 1919 and also after 1945. Regarding thelatter caesura, it is signicant to note that British historians, together with theirAmerican counterparts had the unique opportunity to be rst in sifting throughnazi papers that Allied troops had seized in 19445, before they were returnedto the West German government in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As AstridEckert has explained, by writing German Zeitgeschichte contemporary British(and American) historians were actually involved in a transnational, ratherthan national endeavour that was to last for decades to come.44 Crucially, inboth postwar eras historians such as Hugh Seton-Watson, Gavin Henderson andJ.W. Pick45 wrote about the methodological problems and denitions of, as well asjustications for, writing contemporary history. In 1950 the Recent History Group,with A.J.P Taylor and Alan Bullock, was founded in Oxford. Soon, however, acertain traditionalism was to dominate again within the academy: the scienticand objective approach of studying the past in isolation from the present regainedprestige and inuence among professional historians. This meant that research

40 Llewellyn Woodward, The Study of Contemporary History, Journal of Contemporary History, 1,1 (1966), 12.41 Ibid., 4.42 Sir John Robert Seeley [ed. and with an introduction by John Gross], The Expansion of England(Chicago 1971).43 Seton-Watson, Plea, op. cit., 2.44 Eckert, The Transnational Beginnings, op. cit., 87.45 See F.W. Pick, Contemporary History: Method and Men, History, 31 (March 1946), 2655.

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on the rst world war, as well as the 1920s and 1930s became taboo, at least until anumber of years after 1945.

Interestingly, economic historians, and specically the new breed of businesshistorians that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, were less worried about makingcontemporary issues their object of research, as a closer look at articles publishedin the Business History Review reveals. Scholars working in the dominant sphere ofpolitical or diplomatic history, by contrast, had to consider not only the righttemporal perspective a necessity for good history, but also the practical obstacleof the classication rules that governed the release of archival sources. In the1940s, the latest British documents available for consultation in the PublicRecord Oce were dated 1885 (with the exception of the selected pre-releasedsources on the rst world war); during most of the 1950s the date was 1902.With the Public Records Act of 1958, most documents 50 years old were to bereleased on a year-by-year basis; and it was not until 1967 that the Wilson gov-ernment amended the declassication rule to 30 years. Although a distance of threedecades remained, the new Act brought the front line of history closer to thepresent.46 In this light, it does not seem very surprising that discussion on contem-porary history as a respectable sub-discipline of history arose among British his-torians during the 1960s.

Apart from the less stringent classication rules of British archives, the declineof the British Empire, the rise of new political actors such as the EuropeanCommunities and the changes in the political, social and technological environ-ment of the Cold War world also played a major role in the evolution of thediscipline of history, and especially in reawakening an interest in contemporaryhistory in Britain, as new circumstances needed to be explained. Notably, a newpostwar generation of academics in Britain and abroad increasingly conductedresearch in the social sciences (sociology, political science, international relationstheory, government studies and others). Borrowing from their ideas and methodsand inuenced by the developments in the world around them, historians alsoembarked on new types of history. These new fashionable branches includedsocial history (or the history of social structure), gender history, history of science,urban history and intellectual history.47 It was in the context of these developmentsin the historical discipline and in the context of social sciences dealing legitimatelywith the very recent past and even current aairs that contemporary history andin particular contemporary social history was (re-) discovered by historians.48

Indeed, in this epoch the Institute of Contemporary History was founded (1965)and the Journal of Contemporary History (1966) launched. Both seemed to give theeld of contemporary history more weight and credibility though it is noteworthy

46 Brian Brivati, Julia Buxton and Anthony Seldon (eds), The Contemporary History Handbook(Manchester 1996), xixii; Seldon, Contemporary History, op. cit., 120.47 Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History: Knowledge, Evidence, Language (Basingstoke 2001),12444; Steinbach, Geschichte und Politik, op. cit., 3.48 Peter and Schroder, Einfuhrung, op. cit., 28. See also Donald Cameron Watt, ContemporaryHistory in Europe (London 1969); Bernard Krikler and Walter Laqueur (eds), A Readers Guide toContemporary History (London 1972).



that Institute and Journal had their roots in the Wiener Library in London, whichhad grown from the personal library of a Jewish immigrant, Dr Alfred Wiener.Signicantly, from the outset the Institutes and Journals focus was on Europesfascist past and specically nazism.

Bearing in mind the dierent implications of Zeitgeschichte and histoire contem-poraine, what did historys contemporariness really mean to the British? Accordingto Arthur Marwick in 1968, British contemporary history was dominated by anotorious colourlessness. There were no Soviets, no concentration camps, noresistance movements to be explored.49 Or, to put it another way, Britain andBritish society did not seem to have endured a similarly disruptive and trenchantnational caesura in 1945, if compared with the traumas the Germans and Frenchhad gone (and were still going) through. In the UK, there was simply no need afterthe war for contemporary historians to engage in a process of confronting andovercoming an illiberal political system or in (re-) building the nation and publicmemory. Britains development as a polity had, after all, remained largely unaf-fected. Thus, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, British contemporary historylived something of a wallower existence.

At a time when the social sciences were in ascendancy and when the very natureand practice of history was the object of intense debate among historians mostprominently E.H. Carr and G.R. Elton50 Georey Barraclough wrote the nowclassic study An Introduction to Contemporary History (1964). For Barraclough,contemporary history was synonymous on a content-level with a history of achanging world, because as he put it the forces shaping [contemporary history]cannot be understood unless [one is] prepared to adopt worldwide perspectives.Interestingly, Barracloughs point of departure was the realm of politics, which hecombined with socio-economic discussions of industrialization and technologicaladvancements and ideas on the decline of the West. Focused on broad structuralchanges as he aimed for a universal perspective, he eectively conceptualizedglobal history as contemporary history as opposed to contemporary historyin a national framework. He insisted that his approach was not about supplement-ing our conventional view of the recent past by adding a few chapters on extra-European aairs, but re-examining and revising the whole structure of assumptionsand preconceptions on which that view was based.51

Barraclough then suggested that contemporary history had to be understood asdierent in quality and content from what historians commonly referred to asmodern history.52 He advocated a great divide of two ages the modern andthe contemporary believing that, following a period of transformation orwatershed after 1890, the start of a new contemporary or post-modern era (not

49 Arthur Marwick, The Impact of the First World War on British Society, Journal of ContemporaryHistory, 3, 1 (1968), 55.50 E.H. Carr, What is History? (Basingstoke 1961); G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (London1967).51 Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (2nd edn, London 1967), 10.52 Ibid., 10.

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to be confused with the concept of postmodernity in philosophy) began in late 1960or early 1961.53 Barraclough chose this precise date because the onset of JohnF. Kennedys presidency indicated to him that a new generation, not involved inpre-1939 politics and not conditioned by pre-war attitudes and experiences, wascoming into power.54 Unfortunately for Barraclough, his perception was prema-ture: after Kennedys assassination, a series of men born early in the twentiethcentury, not least Ronald Reagan, won US presidential elections. Apart fromBarracloughs chronological divisions, what is astonishing about his concept ofthe new contemporary age is that he considered the term contemporary historycolourless, as he expected this new, contemporary age to be renamed ex post factoat a major turning point sometime in the future. Thus, although used to indicate anage, or epoch, he did not introduce contemporary history as a permanent labelfor one specic period.55

Historians have mostly disagreed with Barracloughs equation of contemporaryhistory with the new post-modern age, as well as the latters precise startingdate(s). Yet Barracloughs book was a pioneering work for the eld; and in theBritish context it created a theoretical prole for the subject. In hindsight, his peerseven credited him with contextualizing the fundamental change of world politicsin the twentieth century. Even if his concept of a new contemporary age, withreference to the conventional threefold division into ancient, medieval andmodern has not found support, historians today tend to treat the decades between1945 and 1990 as a period of its own with very distinct and novel features. Formany in Britain, the Cold War and beyond, coined by some also as the postwarera, rather than nazism and the era of the second world war, became associatedwith the eld of contemporary history; indeed, a new specialist Institute ofContemporary British History (established in 1986) was to focus on postwarBritish domestic and foreign policy, the Commonwealth and decolonization.

Interestingly, a number of eminent European historians have made theirtake on contemporary history synonymous with a specic classication of thetwentieth century: Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Extremes referred to the shorttwentieth century (19141991) which is marked by signicant historical ruptures;Henry Rousso wrote about the hypothetical long twentieth century (19502020),which he dened in relation to the idea of ones lifetime; and Tony Judt in hisPostwar pointed to an era of memory construction and remembrance (19452005) whilst proposing for Europe, 60 years after Auschwitz, nally to historicizeits past.56

Following such epochal logic, British (as much as German and French) univer-sity courses have increasingly referred to history since 1945 or twentieth-century

53 Ibid., 10, 2930.54 Ibid., 29.55 Ibid., 21, 23.56 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London 1994); Henry Rousso,Lhistoire du temps present, vingt ans apre`s, in Dossier: Lhistoire du temps present, hier et aujourdhui(July 2000), 45, http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/spip.php%3Farticle471&langfr.html (last accessed 9 January2011). See also Jordanova, History, op. cit., 128; Peter and Schroder, Einfuhrung, op. cit., 37.



history as contemporary history.57 The undergraduate and postgraduate historypapers that include such a contemporary component do indeed go up to Thatcheror even Blair (for British history) or up to the end of the Cold War and evenfurther, to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, or the decision-making pro-cesses in the run-up to the second Iraq war in 2003 (for International or Europeanhistory), although the weighting of course bibliographies tends to lie with the pre-and immediate post-1945 decades.

Curiously, a similar tendency can be observed when looking at the majorJournals dedicated to contemporary history (see Table 2). The Journal ofContemporary History, which subscribed to the broader Rothfelsian idea of con-temporary history, announced in its rst issue (1966) that The eld of study anddiscussion of the Journal will be Europe in the twentieth century, and has contin-ued to publish primarily work on the two world wars and the interwar period. Thispattern can also be detected for the German Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte,and even the Revue dHistoire Moderne et Contemporaine, most articles from whichadmittedly cover the fteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The newer British jour-nals Contemporary European History and Contemporary British History (launchedin 1992 and 1987 respectively) fare somewhat better, with near-equal numbers ofarticles on topics from the 19141945 era, and the early Cold War period in theformer and the majority of articles in the 194670 bracket in the latter.

It should also be noted, when assessing the gures in the second-to-last column,that most articles in this category published in the JCH, CEH, VfZ and RHMCfocus on Eastern European and Soviet issues and specically the collapse of com-munism; the exception is CBH, where British electoral politics and Thatcherismseem to be the dominant theme. Of course, the exceptional early availability ofdocumentary evidence from the former Soviet bloc was justication enough for theobjectivists, and gave history and historians an excuse to study these recent polit-ical events soon after they had happened. The usual second Rankean objection tocontemporary history, the issue of (sucient) temporal distance, was overridden.Yet it could be argued that, in spite of their position as witnesses of the events,scholars have been comfortable researching the era, of the Cold War and the evenlonger period of Soviet communism because these had become history in theconventional sense, in that as historical phases or phenomena they could be con-sidered over.58 Of course, the same argument has been turned on its head, as inthe case of Germanys nazi past, and even today the second world war era isperceived as not over, because contemporary witnesses survive and those eventsstill aect present-day German aairs. How, then, do we characterize the contem-porariness of contemporary history today? What are its distinguishing features?

57 See Vanessa Ann Chambers, Informed By, but Not Guided By, the Concerns of the Present:Contemporary History in UK Higher Education Its Teaching and Assessment, Journal ofContemporary History, 44, 1 (2009), 89106. Cf. Anthony Seldon, The Theatre of ContemporaryHistory, in Idem (ed.), Contemporary History: Practice and Method (Oxford 1988), 11718.58 See Juhana Aunesluoma and Pauli Kettunen (eds), The Cold War and the Politics of History(Helsinki 2008).

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And what does this mean for how we think about and might do contemporaryhistory in the twenty-rst century?

The end of the Cold War prompted numerous historians across Europe to catego-rize the events of 198991 (the fall of communism and of the Soviet empire,together with the new Maastricht Treaty) as constituting a historically importantrecent rupture and indicating the beginning of a new historical epoch:59 the post-Cold War phase qua contemporary history. For some today this post-Cold Warphase the beginning of which US president George H.W. Bush had originallyheralded with his speech on a new world order on 11 September 199060 hasalready ended, too. John Gaddis stated:

We have never had a good name for it, and now its over. The post-Cold War era let

us call it that for want of any better term began with a collapse of one structure, the

Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and ended with the collapse of another, the World

Trade Centers Twin Towers.61

As the post-Cold War phase recedes into the postwar era or the even longerduree of twentieth-century history, for Gaddis at least the naughties seem toepitomize the contemporary time. These recent denitions of contemporary his-tory, derived from a specic chronology, can be seen as growing out of the tradi-tion in which other, earlier caesurae, such as the now famous Stunde null or 1917,have been identied as starting points for new, contemporary ages. To be sure,dierent national traditions have tended to date contemporary history according tospecic circumstances in their national pasts. But we have to accept that, for thelast few decades, there has existed among contemporary historians across(Western) Europe a strong 1930s and 1940s, if not to say nazi-centric, historio-graphic xation.

Other attempts to frame the contemporary in terms of chronology, but refer-ring to more generic features of any recent age which only acquires a clearer labelby hindsight, have ranged from Finnish historian Yrjo Blomstedts rather rigid,indistinctive sources-bound idea of a no mans land that keeps rolling on betweenthe present and what is traditionally considered (in political history at least) thedocumented (archival) past,62 to the more ambiguous or looser statements with anemphasis on uidity, dynamism and open-endedness.63 The latter were impliedin the interpretations of Rothfels, Laqueur, Bedarida and others, who as part

59 Soikkanen, Lahihistoria, op. cit., 11112; Lagrou, De lactualite, op. cit., 3.60 George Bush, Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and theFederal Budget Deficit (11.9.1990), http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id2217&year1990&month9, (last accessed 19 September 2008).61 Quotation from Schwarz, Die neueste Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., 9.62 Soikkanen, Lahihistoria, op. cit., 105; Yrjo Blomstedt, Historian rintama, Valvoja, 16 (1964),346; Lauri Hyvamaki, Uusimman historiamme tutkimuskysymyksia: Oman ajan historia ja politiikantutkinta (Helsinki 1967).63 Dominique Schnapper, Le temps present entre histoire et sociologie, in IHTP, Ecrire, op. cit., 50.



of their broader denitions (including also epochal vantage points) determined thetimeframe of contemporary history as ones own time. This lifetime obviouslydiers from individual to individual depending on their age, and generations over-lap. Or, to use Hans Gunter Hockerts metaphor: contemporary history isa ausgedehnter Bahnhofsbereich, in dem kurze und lange Zuge aus verschiedenenRichtungen nach sehr unterschiedlich langer Fahrtdauer eintreen.64 Hockertsrened conception of ones own time by denition an un-datable period thatembodied by default a certain conict of [multiple] contemporary histories, asKarl Dietrich Bracher had put it two decades earlier could be expanded to includenumerous past events, structures and experiences that aect or are part of ourpresent-day lives, and are anchored in the consciousness of the contemporary wit-ness, in the personal and cultural memory. Today, this would indeed mean (in theGerman case, which incidentally both Hockerts and Bracher use as their referencepoint) the inclusion of the rst world war, Weimar, the nazis and the Cold War,with the turning points of 1945 and 198990. Not only are some still alive to havewitnessed the earlier events, but (say) the current teenage generation may just stillbe a secondary witness via rst-hand accounts of contemporary witnesses.Moreover, the latter is certainly also being aected through the societal cultureof memory (as reected in exhibitions, new memorials and memorial days, lmsand broadcasts) and the governments Geschichtspolitik.65

This particular generational approach, then, poses a problem. Apart frombeing in its conception, and with reference to its starting point, very personaland national at once, it eectively covers most of the twentieth century, much ofwhich (especially research on fascism, nazism and communism) historians now alsostudy as serious Vergangenheitsgeschichte, the history of the past. (A look back tothe 1980s Historikerstreit and the question of historicization [Historisierung] which of course equally aects Cold War or, here, East German History servesas a reminder.)66 To put it another way, the older (pre-1945) contemporary his-tory keeps breaking into the newer, ensuring that the past is part of the present.And even if we leave this conundrum by itself, it is worse that those who callthemselves contemporary historians at present have, in practice, tended tobecome stuck in the early phases of their lifetime and even in a time prior to it,instead of exploring the unfolding events and developments at the front line of theirtime (as Rothfels had suggested). In other words, rejuvenation has come to a halt.This is not solely based on a particular understanding of (the nature of) contem-porary history, given the elds specic postwar political mission which, over time,has created a certain institutional stickiness. It is also linked perhaps to a certaindedication to the Rankean rules of historicism: temporal (and implicitly ideo-logical) distance and the use of traditional (written) sources. Such methodological

64 Hockerts, Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., 127. (Translation of quote: an extended station concoursewhere short and long trains arrive after very varying journey times from different directions.)65 Christoph Klemann, Zeitgeschichte als wissenschaftliche Aufklarung, Aus Politik undZeitgeschichte, B5152 (2002), 10.66 Rusen, Logic, op. cit., 11344.

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conservatism needs revising if we are to rebalance the early lifetime and to widenthe elds thematic scope.

This is not to suggest that historical research on truly current aairs has beennon-existent. A glance at recent publishers lists of new historical monographsand history textbooks proves the opposite. However, these works, the majorityof which have been undertaken in the area of contemporary political and interna-tional aairs, reect the rather traditional approaches of political and internationalhistory. It is possibly easier and more tempting to study recent wars and certainrelatively closed episodes in current political aairs (such as the First and SecondGulf Wars, Yugoslavian Wars, Thatcherism, Blairism and New Labour, transat-lantic relations, activities of the international institutions (EU, NATO and UN),the evolution of post-Soviet Russia)67 where there appear to be more obviouslydetectable starting, turning and end points; indeed, where a specic shorter-termsequence of events can be identied, isolated and treated as a closed episode; andfor which sources (including ocial documents, oral history and memoirs) arepossibly more easily identiable. By contrast, there are signicantly fewer studiesexploring ongoing cultural, social, economic and other (longer-term) phenomena,where tendencies of development might be more dicult to detect and where it ismore dicult to seek to establish the signicance and direction of emergent trendsand evolutionary processes, or possibly to identify them as recurrent patterns.

Yet, the problems of studying near-un-discernible long-term trends should notcause historians to avoid even trying, not least because multidimensional macro-level phenomena such as climate change, the globalization of marketized economicdevelopment, the international banking crisis, terrorism, mass migration and themulti-ethnic society, human rights and pop culture, are crucial in characterizingour contemporary time.

Most prominently, Charles Maier and Geo Eley have recently advocated whatcould be called a thematic-chronological approach, with globalization as its cen-tral theme, in an attempt to identify from todays perspective what makes thecontemporary era (and thus implicitly its history) stand out. Charles Maier hastaken issue with existing temporal delimitations, in particular the periodizationexpressed with the label twentieth-century history. In its stead he has proposedan alternative chronological narrative: one built around territoriality. Lookingback, he has suggested that what we have been witnessing for the last two to threedecades is the contemporary dissolution of structural order. This allows

67 See for example, Kenneth Dyson and Kevin Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht: NegotiatingEconomic and Monetary Union (Oxford 1999); Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and theDestruction of Bosnia (London 2001); Steven Fielding, The Labour Party: Continuity and Change inthe Making of New Labour (Basingstoke 2002); Antony Seldon and Dennis Kavanagh, The BlairEffect, 20015 (Cambridge 2005); Richard English, The Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA(Basingstoke 2003); Kristina Spohr Readman, Germany and the Baltic Problem after the Cold War:The Development of a New Ostpolitk, 19892000 (London 2004); Geir Lundestad, Just Another MajorCrisis? The United States and Europe since 2000 (Oxford 2008). For textbooks, see E.H.H. Green,Thatcher (London 2006); Stephen Lovell, Destination in Doubt: Russia since 1989 (London 2006);Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (London 2006); Ilan Pappe, TheIsrael/Palestine Question: A Reader (London 1999).



researchers to glimpse trends formerly so ubiquitous they had not been perceived asissues in historical investigation. Maier argues that it was between 1860 and 1970that spatially anchored structures for politics and economics were taken forgranted. Now this territoriality is disappearing. And this might mean two thingsfor how we understand and look at the present: rst, that way has been given to therise of culture or civilization as a replacement for space, and here internationalor community conict will be at stake. Indeed, with the collapse of the territorialwe are all virtual neighbours, and culture might thus end up as the trope for allgroup frictions that can never be transcended. Or, second, that there might be thedesire to deploy political regulation to control the globalized economy. In otherwords, supranational agglomerations like the EU might provide the territorial basefor political intervention; though this might dilute cultural cohesion and hencecause a populist backlash, expressed through the longing for a smaller andclosed identity space.68

Geo Eley in turn has taken the language of globalization as a starting pointand reection of our time; he has identied two ways in which the term is currentlybeing used: as a category of ordinary language which circulates in the publicsphere as a claim and as a demonstrable social fact (the supposed structural pri-macy of global integration) that really exists. Eley himself is most interested in ananalysis of the ideology or discourse of globalization, by which he means theinsistence on globalization as the organizing reality of the emerging internationalorder and the crystallizing of specic practices, policies and institutions aroundthat insistence. Indeed, he refers to his undertaking as historicizing the global.While fully accepting the critique of some, that globalization in the sense of inte-grating dierent parts of the world into one can be traced all the way to thefteenth century and, we could add, this process did not at all stages originatefrom Europe he rst highlights the frequent use of the term in the current policydiscourse. Secondly, he posits that we are witnessing new (post-1960s) forms ofexploitation of labour in what he has identied as our globalized, post-Fordisteconomies of the capitalist world. Yet he also points to the signicant developmentof the demise of the global option for the colonial, neo-colonial and post-colonialnon-Western world of anti-imperialist sovereignty that disappeared with the USSRin 1991, and to the subsequent (and parallel) developments of an acceleratingand intensifying integration of the worlds societies and states. Finally, he takesissue with globalization as a political project that brings to the fore the followingtensions: global governance versus global civil society, US hyperpower versusanti-globalization (even anti-capitalist) Leftist grassroots lobby, Europe orWestern civilization versus the Muslim world, to name but a few.69

68 Maier, Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,The American Historical Review, 105, 3 (June 2000), 47 pars, at par. 43, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.3/ah000807.html (last accessed 19 September 2008).69 Geoff Eley, Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name, HistoryWorkshop Journal, 63 (2007), 15488. On cycles of globalization from the sixteenth century onwards,see Adam McKeown, Periodizing Globalization, History Workshop Journal, 63, 1 (2007), 21830.

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Both Maier and Eley in their dierent ways have grappled with the notion ofglobalization in describing what they consider the distinctive feature of the pre-sent. There is, however, the danger of over-emphasizing one single aspect, such asglobalization, as the sole characteristic of our present time. Firstly, globalization as presented by Maier and Eley cannot simply be isolated as the general themeand generic feature of, and by implication denition for, todays or tomorrowscontemporary history although at present this aspect might seem to stand out inour lives, and thus appear more real to publics, scholars and political elites than itwas even in Barracloughs time. Secondly, there is the problem that the simpleprocess of globalization is not new: it can be interpreted as one of the key com-ponents of the making of the modern world (Christopher Bayly). Either way, it isultimately problematic to derive an overarching denition of contemporary historyprimarily from the character of an epoch; just as the choice of a precise startingpoint (related to specic historical ruptures, such as 1917, 1945, 198990 or 2001)to circumscribe what is actual seems too rigid.

Despite these caveats, I would like to advocate a more global or transnationalnarrative of contemporary aairs, given the fresh impulses that the recent growth ofthese historiographical trends (intended as approaches overcoming national as muchas methodological boundaries within a fragmented historical discipline and acrossrelated social sciences) have oered to historians. Barraclough, and to some extentRothfels, developed their denitions in rather dierent circumstances from those ofthe present, but both sketched the outlines of a contemporary history that wasglobal in scope and universal in approach avant la lettre, so to speak. It was, how-ever, a vision that European contemporary historians failed to fully embrace.

In terms of conceptualization, let us revisit Barracloughs musings. He had heldthat Contemporary History begins when the problems which are actual in the worldtoday rst take visible shape.70 What are we to make in 2011 of this statement?From his vantage point in the early 1960s, Barraclough identied 18901960 asmarking a watershed period between the modern and contemporary ages, andthus eectively delimited the historical hinterland of contemporary aairs andframed a distinctive contemporary period. His statement can, however, be seenas carrying useful insights into how contemporary history might be thought aboutand practised today, and dened for the future. Leaning on Barraclough, I want topostulate, rstly, that the principal distinguishing feature of contemporary history(in the truest sense of the term) is surely that its practitioners will write in medias resabout events and developments that are perceived as actual and central to present-day life, as perceived by publics and political elites, and the outcome of whichmight still be uncertain. It is this denition of instantaneity that forms thechronological core of recentness. Secondly, in order to illuminate this uncertainpresent, contemporary historians need not only work from a certain startingpoint forward, exploring temporal causalities, contingency and agency of theirobject of research. They must also look backwards for explanatory depth to

70 Barraclough, Introduction, op. cit., 12.



said historical hinterland of events and the roots of developments indeed, as farback as necessary.

If, in this vein, we then really concern ourselves with what our actual problemsare, I propose that the contemporary historians long obsession be it in Britain,France or Germany with the second world war or nazi Germany as the beginningof our present concerns has to be left behind (allowed to simply grip us . . . asmemory,71 as Charles Maier put it). Looking at the nature of our highly intercon-nected and increasingly globalized contemporaryworld in terms of communication,human interaction, economics, politics and culture contemporary historians willhave to move beyond their Euro-centric perspective and their xation on themes ofthe past so deeply entwined with a national mastering of the past, that seems to havedominated contemporary historiographies in Europe for the last few decades. Forexample, the internet has had wider implication for society at large. It has broughthumans across the globe together in a virtual environment, as a global community.This raises questions about the categories of locality, identity, citizenship and state, aswell as about power structures, and how real and virtual environments and identi-cations can co-exist. While the global context, with its emphasis on interactions atall levels, perhaps matters more today than in the past in our shrunk worldwideterrain, the above does not mean that we should discard studies of the local,regional or national, or micro-processes in favour of macro-approaches.72

Rather, our horizons must be broadened to engage in innovative ways with thewide range of issues in the present, which also means confronting the reality of thegrowing speed with which things have been changing since the 1970s and certainlysince the 1990s, and considering the new ways in which history is being recorded.

The revolution in information technology (the internet and digitalization) overthe last two decades is immensely signicant.73 Today a wealth of contemporarysource material, including ocial government documents (parliamentary debates,speeches, treaties, etc.), poll data, newspapers, magazines, lm and photo docu-ments, collections of personal testimonies, journals and so on is stored in electronicarchives and even accessible via the internet. Tracing, analysing and explaining thevery recent past imposes peculiar and novel challenges to historians, not least asmuch communication takes place online, via email, blogs, twitter and other elec-tronic means and networks. As much as access is instant and global, a drawback isthat web-(re)sources can be ephemeral. Moreover, contemporary historians do notsimply have to ask themselves which methods of source critique are to be applied inevaluating these materials, but, crucially, how the new media might have aected,for example, decision-making processes and whether decisions or events are still

71 Charles Maier, Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for theModern Era, The American Historical Review, 105, 3 (June 2000), 47 paragraphs, here par. 43,http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.3/ah000807.html (last accessed 19 September2008).72 Cf. Michael Gehler, Zeitgeschichte zwischen Europaisierung und Globalisierung, Aus Politik undZeitgeschichte, B512 (2002), 2335.73 Cf. Hartmut Voit, Voruberlegungen zu einer Didaktik der Zeitgeschichte, Zeitschrift furGeschichstdidaktik (2002), 717, esp. 9.

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adequately recorded in the traditional ways. Finally, while the internet has largelyemerged as a useful tool for contemporary historians research, they have barelybegun to grasp and identify the implications and consequences of using this tool fortheir own dissemination of knowledge, and for their engagement in public debateand with public policy in real time so central to their feat.

From the present vantage point, it may be a way forward that the Europeanmemory driven, and largely nationally oriented, contemporary history dealingwith the nazis or Vichy or Franco (or, since 1991, in the case of a liberated Centraland Eastern Europe, even with Soviet communism) should keep its label. Weshould, however, be mindful that Jarausch and Lindenberger in ConictingMemories (2007) have recently promoted the building of bridges between trauma-tized (European) memories and that scholars of such a European contemporaryhistory need to engage with cross-national periodization and trans- and suprana-tional thematic clusters as they Europeanize national histories.74

In turn, the historian studying actual, unfolding problems could be more sys-tematically referred to as writing the history of the present, or possibly the newcontemporary history. For a future history of the present or new contempo-rary history one that moves beyond the above-mentioned specic memories toemerge, overcoming the structural conditions (imposed by institutions, journalsand governments Geschichtspolitik) is, I believe, key for the historical profession.These conditions have held back contemporary historians from moving in moretimely fashion to new issues as they emerge. The impetus for the identication ofnew concerns and phenomena in the recent past will come from a major, immedi-ately visible rupture aecting societies and politics locally, nationally and globally,or from the emergence of longer-term evolutionary structural developments. Witha view to the universality of their approach, contemporary historians should bearin mind Fernand Braudels words: Lhistoire est limage de la vie sous toutes sesformes,75 which nicely complement Barracloughs and Rothfels appeals for amore universal approach. To this end, and as contemporary historians look backto the historical hinterland in search of explanations, they must also engage withnovel historico-methodological approaches (such as the recent rise of transnationaland comparative history or quantitative methods) which lead to a whole new webof questions. Crucially, a more global and universal history of our time must notbe looked at as a multidisciplinary mish-mash, as Antony Seldon and HenriRousso have seemed to imply.76 While ndings from other disciplines ought tobe welcomed, contemporary historians should continue to use the methodologiesof a historian. What the practitioners of contemporary history have to grapple

74 See Jarausch and Lindenberger (eds), Conflicted Memories, op. cit., Introduction and chs 3, 5and 6.75 Braudels quotation: M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado, Dust and Ashes: The History of Politics and War,in John A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of BraudelsMediterranean (Kirksville, MO 2002), 146.76 Rousso, Lhistoire, op. cit., 1.



with is less the ever-diversifying source base given the greater ease of undertakingoral history and the possibilities inherent in the digital revolution than the chal-lenges of temporal proximity and heuristic distance (linked to personal and collec-tive memory and cultural conditioning)77 as well as their public function and, tosome extent, moral obligation in engaging with and shaping political culture andsocietal memory. I shall end with a few comments on the last point.

It is signicant that, in contrast to other historians, contemporary historianshave to deal with instant interpretative conicts between themselves (as profes-sionals and contemporaries) and other contemporary witnesses, who often sharetheir views through oral history, memoirs, diaries and the media.78 Contemporaryhistories hence compete for interpretative monopoly against accounts of personalexperience, as well as with comments and reports on the same set of events bypublic intellectuals and (investigative) journalists.79 Given that one of the contem-porary historians purposes is to shape public consciousness, the potential of beinginvolved in or creating public political debates or controversies is high. Casting thepractitioners in the role of politically and culturally relevant voices, Germans havein fact dubbed Zeitgeschichte also as Streitgeschichte.80 Yet this, combined withconcerns over the historiographical independence and integrity of contemporaryhistorians, does not mean that contemporary historians should shy away frompublic and political controversies and arguments and come to perceive the inuenceof politics and ideology as potentially corrupting the historians ability to analyseand explain. On the contrary, as Hockerts has postulated, they should relish theopportunity to prevent the creation of myths and legends, which consolidate them-selves so quickly because of the varied layers of societal memory formation. Indeed,conventional historians are often forced into resolving competing memories longafter the event and when witnesses have died.

Contemporary historians, then, should regard themselves as being ideally posi-tioned and qualied to deal with this challenge of engaging with present-daystories, while also writing their history on the basis of the same research ethicsas their fellow historians of more distant pasts.81 In this vein, we have for instance

77 On distance and distantiation, see for example Mark Salber Phillips, Distance and HistoricalRepresentations, History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), 12341; and Adam Phillips, Close-Ups,History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), 1429.78 Hans Gunter Hockerts, Zugange zur Zeitgeschichte: Primarerfahrung, Erinnerungskultur,Geschichtswissenschaft, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B28 (2001), 19. See also Robert Frank, Lamemoire et lhistoire, http://www.ihtp.cnrs.fr/spip.php%3Farticle233&langfr.html (last accessed9 January 2011); Norbert Frei, Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries: National Socialism and ItsHistorical Examination En Route into History, History and Memory, 9, 12 (1997), 5979.79 Konrad H. Jarausch, Zeitgeschichte und Erinnerung: Deutungskonkurrenz oder Interdependenz?,in Idem and Sabrow (eds), Verletztes Gedachnis, op. cit., 25.80 Klemann, Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., 6; see the title of Sabrows et al. book, Zeitgeschichte alsStreitgeschichte: Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich 2003); Peter and Schroder, Einfuhrung, op.cit., 68.81 Hockerts, Zugange, op. cit., 19, 20, 30; Jarausch, Zeitgeschichte, op. cit., 367; Eric J. Engstrom,Zeitgeschichte as Disciplinary History: On Professional Identity, Self-Reflexive Narratives, andDiscipline-Building in Contemporary German History, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fur deutsche Geschichte,29 (2000), 416.

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recently seen contemporary historians practise the role of experts at major inter-national trials, ranging from the Irving trial to inquiries into the mass murders ofBloody Sunday or Srebrenica. Scholarly (contemporary) history has thus beenbrought once more into cooperation with public history and society. And now,more than ever before, historians have a political and moral responsibility not toleave the realm of the most recent past and of unfolding events to journalists,bloggers, or worst of all, polemicists.

Biographical Note

Kristina Spohr Readman is Senior Lecturer in International History at the LondonSchool of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Germany and theBaltic Problem after the Cold War: The Development of a New Ostpolitik, 19892000 (London and New York 2004); and the editor of Building Sustainable andEective Military Capabilities: A Systemic Comparison of Professional andConscript Forces [NATO Science Series] (Amsterdam and Oxford 2004). She iscurrently working on a monograph on Helmut Schmidt and Germany in interna-tional aairs, 197483, and researching Georey Barracloughs life and work.



Sphor, K. (2011). Contemporary History

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