from History and Memory volume 8, number 1(Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections
of Personal History and Collective Memory with
Hans von Aufsess*Susan A. Crane
Permission to CopyYou may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:
Copyright Clearance CenterFor other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923 FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com
There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.
Paul Valéry 1
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
"History" is an ambiguous term because it refers generally to both "what happened" as it was experienced in a former time and what has been thought and said about "what happened" ever since. "History" also tends to be a collective noun, whether in referring objectively to a group's experience or to the collected recollections which inform personal history subjectively. "History" is further ambiguous in regards to narrative: in the German tradition, only around the end of the eighteenth century did the distinction between history as story (Geschichte, which also co-existed in the plural, "histories") and history as corroborable collective memory (Historie) collapse in historiography and common use. 2 The ambiguities of history always refer to that slight rupture which characterizes the perception of the past, its simultaneous distance and presence which fascinate the present. This moment of rupture is historical consciousness, which, although perceived individually, is signified collectively in the various forms of historical representation. In this essay I want to refocus on the initial moments of historical consciousness, at the level of the person/al desire for and sense of history. In this rethinking of the intersections between personal history and collective memory, historians are seen as producers of narratives about their relationship to the past. 3
"Personal" and "historical" seem to be antithetical categories, implying a distinction between private and public, opinion and fact, individual and collective. "Personal" connotes idiosyncrasy, trivia, lack of relevance and, above all, the juicy details so suitable for biography, those criteria Nancy Miller sardonically points out in her essay on autobiography as cultural criticism: "is it personal only if it's embarrassing?" 4 The personal sense of the historical is here defined not as psychological affect, nor as representative of a private sphere; it is self-reflexive, individual historical consciousness, and it may be expressed in places other than written histories. My interests in this subject are also personally historical, having to do with my desire to understand what it is that I do, as a historian, and what relationship I can maintain to my own work once it is written. I want to question the ways in which individuals experience and produce history, and whether history is a kind of memory that can belong to individuals as well as collective entities such as a nation. Secondly, I am considering which forms of narrative might be best studied or produced, which will reflect the personal desire for an understanding of history. 5 Personal memory, personal history, collective memory and history were already conflated and integrated during the formative years of the historical profession in nineteenth-century Germany. 6 By enquiring into the formation of historical consciousness in this era, I hope I can also speak reflexively about my own involvement in the production of history and think about a problem that continues to puzzle me: namely, how it is that my personal memories become historical ones through writing and, even more, become representative of ideas that no longer belong only to me, but have been given up to an audience, offering them the possibility for historical consciousness, to which they too may wish to respond by writing. The paradox of publishing, it seems to me, is the separation of yourself from your own knowledge.
Hans von Aufsess's Historical Passions
Germany in the nineteenth century is famous for the development of historicism, a philosophy of history that stressed the distance between the past and the present, the uniqueness of the past, and the need for the historian's Verstehen of that difference. But the nineteenth century also witnessed the discovery of the passion for historical preservation, a movement interested in collecting and saving the visible remnants of the past. This new form of historical consciousness permitted more men and women, whether historians or not, to participate in the creation of collective historical memory. One of these collectors was Hans von Aufsess (1801--1872), who began in his youth to excavate the hills of his native Frankish Aufsess, in search of local artifacts to call his own. 7 Failing that, as he grew older he began to collect the kinds of documents and objects of medieval German material culture which had begun to interest his Romantic contemporaries, such as the Brothers Grimm, philologist Josef von Lassberg, the art-collecting brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisseree, Prussian state architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and statesmen such as the Baron von Stein and Hardenburg -- to name but a few representatives of the new historical consciousness during the post-Napoleonic era. 8
With these artifacts, Aufsess augmented his family archive and created a collection which represented both his family history and that of the German cultural nation. Aufsess is better known, though hardly famous, as the founder of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg (1852), the first major, national historical museum in Germany, which continues to present the artifacts of medieval German history to the public. 9 He also founded an association for the study of medieval Germany, one of many contemporary historical preservation associations which flourished locally throughout Germany in the pre-1848 era. However, his career as avid historical collector and passionate advocate of historical preservation was marked by conflict with the professionalizing tendency of the historical discipline. The prominent historian Leopold von Ranke, when asked to review Aufsess's museum collection and his plans for a general "Reportorium," a catalog that would inventory the contents of all the archives in Germany, responded:
It's clear that Herr von Aufsess has never worked seriously in a large German archive; otherwise he would realize that the collected relics of just a few years fill entire rooms.... The schema of materials, as Herr von Aufsess presents it, may well have its value for your average curiosities and rarities, but for practical, living knowledge it is deadly.... As a collector, Herr von Aufsess may deserve all our credit and attention, but as the founder of a national institution, he seems not to be up to the mark. 10Though Ranke condescended to mention that Aufsess's proposals were "well intended," he made it clear that Aufsess's collecting passions were those of a mere collector of curiosities, not a professional historian. The Brothers Grimm, students of the legal historical scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny, also wanted nothing to do with Aufsess. Jakob Grimm did not acknowledge Aufsess's letter requesting assistance with family genealogical collecting. Grimm also had some harsh words for Aufsess regarding his proposal for a national historical association, siding with a vocal opponent of Aufsess's, Carl Ritter von Lang. 11 The philologist Lassberg was one of Aufsess's few intellectual supporters, but he was not a professional historian.
Aufsess did not shy away from the identity with which the professionals castigated him: he was a self-proclaimed amateur, a dilettante, "kein Gelehrter." Though he had studied law at Erlangen, his university life appears to have been focused on his membership in a fraternity, as was still typical for young men of his social standing. The early death of his father took Aufsess away from even this brief contact with the learned world, and at the age of 20 he became lord and master of Aufsess, tucked away in the Franken hills between Bamberg and Bayreuth. Easily acknowledging his lack of training, Aufsess explicitly left historical writing to the historians. He was in favor of a division of labor, with the members of the historical associations doing the footwork, collecting and assembling the sources, making them available to the scholars, and the scholars doing the studying and writing. Unfortunately, the scholars were skeptical about the capabilities of such passionate dilettantes, dubious about their methods and trustworthiness, and errors in the first edition of Aufsess's historical journal, Anzeiger für Kunde des deutschen Mittelalters, begun in 1831, left him wide open to justifiable, though often petty, criticism.
In addition to editing the journal, Aufsess wrote articles on contemporary political events, social problems and particularly on the role of the nobility in the post-Napoleonic era; he was also a prolific, if not, in my opinion, tremendously successful, poet. For Aufsess's decidedly individualistic personality, the personal and the historical passions were difficult to separate. While he produced some short pieces on the nature of history, the closest Aufsess ever came to actually writing a history was a family history project which he never completed. He did, however, produce the curious and massive Ein Lebens- und Leidensgeschichte (A Story/History of Life and Suffering), in ten handwritten volumes of assorted length, composed in 1841. Formally, he separated them into an 89-page introduction and a 689-page main story with appendices. This was not, as the title might suggest, a life of a saint, but an autobiography and biography combined. The introduction was his own story, the Lebensgeschichte, if you will, and the main story, the Leidensgeschichte, was dedicated to the life history of a young woman. His introduction begins, "Yesterday was her birthday" -- his personal history beginning by commemorating hers -- and immediately contracts and expands to intertwine his history further with her/story: she "will remain remarkable in the history of our family, only later to be appreciated." 12 She is Margarethe Leicht, who died in 1839 at the age of 17, and this combination autobiography/biography/
love-story/penance is the closest Hans von Aufsess ever c ame to writing a history.The title he chose struck me as ambiguous: was this going to be an autobiography of someone who has suffered, or a story about the life and suffering of another? But the author was relying on the ambiguity. I expected this text to be an autobiography of Aufsess. It was an unexpected find, presented to me from among his unordered papers by the archivist of the Schloss Aufsess family archive, the Baroness Dr. Alex von Aufsess, during my stay with her. She was concerned about how I would interpret his story, although she understood that my interests lay primarily in his historical work; she knew that the text dealt with a chapter of family history they would rather not advertise. I expected him to discuss how his collecting career up to that time had been perpetually thwarted; how the attempts at founding a museum in Nuremberg in the early 1830s had failed, how he had entered into bitter debates with stronger, more "gelehrten" opponents -- these surely would constitute a Leidensgeschichte in Aufsess's mind. Instead, throughout the introduction, not one word about collecting, history, or museums: except when he mentions his wife Charlotte, who did not support him.
What does a young man do who cares passionately about history, who conducts archaeological digs around his own castle in hopes of finding antiquities, when he finds himself far removed from the world of learned discussion and reading circles -- how does such a man create a means for carrying out his ambitions, already outlined in his freshman notebooks, for collecting and preserving the sources and objects of medieval Germany and family history? He marries -- too quickly, or so he explains in the Lebens- und Leidensgeschichte. Aufsess's introduction describes how his rash decision to marry a woman he had barely met, a relative, was quickly followed by disappointment. He had, he writes, placed an extremely high expectation on the institution of marriage. He had expected that a wife would lovingly support him in all his pursuits, even if she was not capable of sharing in them or understanding them; instead, he complained, Charlotte had sided against him. "Anything that did not bear monetary interest, my opponents took to be the mere hobby of an idle mind, and they got Charlotte to side with them in trying to turn me away from it." A wife, Aufsess argued, ought rather to support the interests closest to her husband's heart, namely, "my dearest subjects, the history, customs and art history of the fatherland, and old German poetry." 13 That his wife might see his collecting passion as a hobby which cost considerable amounts of money and would eventually deplete the family inheritance, Aufsess considered a lack of true understanding. "It was not easy for someone like me to set the entire framework of my life (Lebensfassung) on marriage," he wrote, 14 but in fact he had, and he had imagined an ideal world in which his wife would create the setting for the pursuit of his life's goals. Perhaps it is not so surprising that he was disappointed. His wife, he notes, complained that he was fickle, to which he responded, "that was rather the misfortune, since I'm not fickle at all, but rather stuck to the ideals that I expected to find in Charlotte, without testing her." 15
Precisely because these ideals were "good and beautiful" he felt depressed, for he could not see how he could reach them from within his marriage:
... it had become almost impossible for me to think myself out of this circle, when at the same time, between 1827--31, I was practically at the end of my moral strength and could look neither forwards nor backwards, but only lived for the moment. I grasped at the new, because the old had fallen into ruin; I went to extremes, wanted to leave Aufsess altogether and bid the civilized world farewell, go abroad, colonize; but I stayed, realizing that the source of my problems was not the external situation, but internal.... 16Which is to say, he had turned thirty. At this juncture, he re-channeled his internal dissatisfactions outward, and decided to do something, anything, which would be of significance in the world ("colonizing," in this sense, seems to have referred simply to the grand ambitions of a provincially bound man, but it is a striking choice nonetheless). He describes how he founded a local historical association and its publication, the Anzeiger, and entered into the public world of historical preservation.
This mixture of personal passions and worldly achievements belongs to the source material of history. Autobiography would be an under-utilized source if it were mined only for its biographical details and Zeitgeist references rather than examined as an artifact of historical consciousness. The personal situation, as well as the personal emotion, is the ground for the historical event, just as for Aufsess the ideal marriage as well as the actual marriage was the context for the description of his entry into the enterprise of historical preservation. But this autobiography is only a prelude to another story, and it is worth thinking about why he believed that in order to tell her story, he had to go back to his childhood. The other, whom he refers to as the "poor girl" and the "holy child," was not only someone important to his family, the servant who looked after the children and who died tragically young: she was also someone he was in love with. It is her history he intends to write, but as biography it is difficult to separate from his auto-biography, since he sees her life as a tragedy shaped by the impact of his love for her. And this is why both the Lebensgeschichte and the Leidensgeschichte take on the tone of penance: his love for her became oppressive to everyone concerned, and certainly distracted him completely from his historical activities.
Margarethe came to the Castle Aufsess as a 15-year-old serving girl and looked after Aufsess's eight children. From 1837 to 1839 she remained with the family, well-loved by all, although Aufsess's attentions were becoming ever more obvious in the small society. In 1839, at the insistence of his wife Charlotte, Margarethe was sent to the family of a pastor in Augsburg. Aufsess followed. During that year, Margarethe was moved from house to house, at her own insistence and with Charlotte's encouragement, to avoid Aufsess. In the course of such a move, she became ill with what was diagnosed as Nervenfieber and died shortly thereafter. Aufsess was devastated and held himself as well as his wife personally responsible for Margarethe's death. They separated and divorced before her death in 1839, but were reconciled and remarried shortly thereafter. Rumors of an actual love affair, and of Margarethe's having becoming pregnant, did emerge, but Aufsess steadfastly maintained the purity and innocence of Margarethe and of his love for her. The psychological and emotional toll of this unrequited love and tragic death, however, brought Aufsess to a crisis of faith.
The title of Aufsess's text is heavily freighted with religious overtones, referring to the lives of saints and the suffering of Christ. The questions of religious faith and the nature of sin are threaded throughout the introduction. Aufsess was Protestant, and his pastor was also a personal friend with whom he corresponded throughout this difficult time. His love for Margarethe, her untimely death and his mourning became a testing ground for how he understood his faith. The manuscript could not serve the comfort or relief of a mere confession; it was not only the unburdening of his soul but a documentation. God, he wrote, already knew everything and understood, and if it was God's will, He would "awaken sympathy in another soul on earth" and permit Aufsess this earthly comfort without his having to write the history. 17 What then, he reflected, was to be the purpose of this text? Why not destroy it, rather than run the risk of its falling into the hands of a more general, less sympathetic public? The story had already cost "bloody sacrifice," too much to be taken as a story for mere curiosity and entertainment, "like a novella." 18 Fully aware of the melodramatic (and, in modern terms, definitely filmic) potential of his story, he prefers not to advertise his misfortunes, not to "buy friends" through an appeal for sym-pathy. 19 The history is written with a very specific audience in mind, namely his pastor and a select few friends who have themselves either sinned or understand what it means to sin, not those who might find Schadenfreude in his pain. It is, then, self-consciously written for others: a presentation of personal memories as autobiography and history.
These memories are not innocent. They are fully burdened with guilt: the guilt of a married man in love with a young girl, the guilt of a nobleman in love with a servant, the guilt of a man who has sinned in the eyes of God, who has divorced and remarried his wife. And yet rather than excuse himself, and rather than wallow in the guilt, Aufsess, true to his historical interests, collects and presents the evidence of Margarethe's history: source materials, her letters and poems, his own letters and poems, and letters from the pastors. With this collection he will create a text to preserve the memory of Margarethe as history. But, he claims, he is not a historian: the text is not properly historically ordered, it is rather "written from the pressing needs of the heart, without the slightest outline or plan." 20 Defensively aware, as ever, of his dilettante status, he nevertheless perfectly mirrors historical research practices and writes a history which is chronologically ordered according to Margarethe's life.
Aufsess deliberately stated that he did not see himself as a historian -- whether because of his personal relation to the subject or because of his sensitivity to professional requirements. In an extraordinary passage, he describes himself not as a historian, but rather as a condemned man whose last wish is to confess his sins:
Just as a convicted man might draft a plea for amnesty, in which he tries to plead for a reduction or lifting of his sentence through a [palliation] of his crime, but then recognizes the justice of the sentence and takes back the amnesty plea and awaits his sentence, which the amnesty plea might have saved him from -- he might then preserve this text in memory of himself, or even, on condition of his honesty (unter Verwahrung seiner Ehrlichkeit), impart the written story to a worthy friend.... Apart from this proviso of honesty, which for me as historian is naturally less necessary to mention than it is for me as a human being (Geist), who demands moral judgment -- apart from this, I still must bid for leniency from my readers (whom I certainly cannot imagine as a stranger, or an unknown public, or anyone who does not recognize themselves as sinners before God). 21As bell hooks has suggested, autobiography can be like a hope chest, where certain memories are stored for safekeeping. 22 Aufsess also reflected on the attraction of storing stories. Both the autobiography and the honest friend become repositories for the condemned man's memories. Aufsess calls himself "Historiker" only in reference to the honesty of readers, not to himself as researcher. This curious proviso (that honesty is less crucial to his status as historian than it is to his humanity) actually reminds the reader that Aufsess is conducting historical research, while simultaneously distancing Aufsess from the historical requirements by bringing the discussion back to morality. Aufsess doubts that many readers would understand that his personal history could be honest in both senses (personally and historically), and he is alert to the probability that readers will judge him strictly as a sinner. Thus his selected audience, chosen for its "safekeeping" ability, understands the dual purpose of historical preservation and moral judgment. In Aufsess's consciousness as a sinner, moral judgment is as necessary as it is painful; but for the historian, it is more important to conduct the preservation, regardless of the pain, and this necessity is also visible in the meticulous cross-referencing and citation Aufsess makes within his own text to his assembled sources. The documentation of guilt is necessary for the fuller understanding and continual reworking which is required of his Protestant consciousness, in hopes of a redeemed future.Ever since Augustine's Confessions the genre of autobiography has been understood in terms of the confessional mode. However, the mode of confession suggests that once the story is told, all is forgiven and life moves on; it is a temporary mode of self-reflection. For Aufsess, confession is not sufficient; he feels compelled to gather the historical evidence, preserve the memory of Margarethe despite the sinful nature of his connection to her, and publish the history. Augustine wrote with pedagogical purpose, to instruct other potential converts; Aufsess's project is more essentially archival. The collected and preserved evidence functions more like a museum than a confessional, where the experience can be visited and revisited, mourned and remembered. He also referred to the text as a Sehnsuchtsgeschichte, a (hi)story of desire or yearning which has not ended even though the immediate object of that yearning is gone. In discussing Augustine, the critic Mark Freeman noted that confessional autobiography begins from the unstated assumption that something has transpired which has also ended, that "the ends lead to a beginning" and that therefore the quest for self-knowledge or self-understanding is a search for origins. 23 But for Aufsess, and indeed in an important sense for historical consciousness in general, it is not the ends which lead to a beginning; it is the present, the moment of historical production, which is the in media res in which pasts, presents and futures are generated. Aufsess wrote, not at the end of his life, but in the middle of his pain.
Personal History and Collective Memory
Aufsess repeatedly claimed that he would not write history, that he would leave this task to scholars. He worked throughout his life on a history of his family, but never completed it, and therefore I refer to the auto/biography as the only history he ever produced. Philippe Lejeune has suggested that autobiography is a disguised desire to write, almost an excuse needed to permit oneself a luxury, or perhaps the excuse for literature, for one who does not feel welcome in the field. 24 Aufsess certainly did not feel at home among the historians. Although he collected significant historical objects and served the historical community by publishing documents which were otherwise dispersed and difficult to find, his historical consciousness was never officially represented in a text. It was expressed instead through a lifelong collecting passion, Sammelnlust, passionately conducted and passionately defended. Part of the reason this field was so contested was that Aufsess collected objects which had a dual relevance: to his own family history, and to national history. It was the transition, that ineffable slide into collective memory, which created problems for Aufsess's personal expression of historical consciousness.
Margarethe's history may have belonged to Aufsess emotionally and morally, but the family history of Aufsess belonged to a larger public, namely the newly developing national state. Aufsess primarily collected documents and material related to family history, elaborating on an existing archive. His interest in medieval art and antiquities likewise stemmed from the certainty that he was connected to this period through his own family, whose nobility dated back to the fourteenth century. He grew up with history, just as he lived amidst his collection of furniture, books and art before donating them to the museum; history was not only a school subject for him, it was a fact of life. As a member of the nobility, his family history belonged to the sort of history which at that time got written about, the history of kings and statesmen, wars and castles -- the kind of history one of his favorite novelists, Sir Walter Scott, was romanticizing.
In a brief essay from 1847, Aufsess deliberated on the nature of "What Can Be the Object and Subject of History?" The object is man, and what man does is the subject. He believed that only a Volk, not a country or an Idea, could have a history because history consists of the actions of men. The discovery of gunpowder, to take his example, belonged not to history in general, but "to the biography of the discoverer":
Theory, art etc., have no history as such; they only develop historically through human energy.... One cannot therefore use the word and concept "history" for the representation of the historical development of knowledge and art, unless one intends to take a completely different sense of the term than is its essence. 25
The essence of history is biography. As far as I know, Aufsess never read Hegel, but the world-historic individual is already present in his conception of history (in another essay from 1847, he names Napoleon, Weber, Schiller and Jean Paul as famous men worth remembering). Aufsess also considered the noble family to be a kind of collective world-historic individual, and its biography not only served the family members but also performed a social, educational role in historical memory:
The history of noble as well as bourgeois families has shown that the Good (gute Geist) in each, the moral and well-ordered upbringing (Erziehung), as well as the mem-ory of great or worthy forefathers, greatly enhances the preservation of the Good in the descendants, even when hundreds of such families have shown themselves to be unworthy of their name. When the noble has such great and worthy memories and has held onto his property, so he takes care of and preserves both and makes his house into a ... safe haven (Asyl) for worthy descendants. 26
Memory resides in the family, within the "safe haven" (safekeeping) of family history; it also resides in the physical property, the land, the possessions of the family which create an inheritance. Aufsess, along with his fellow historically awakened collectors in the early nineteenth century, experienced historical consciousness as a direct connection with physical places and the objects found there, whether artifacts from the Franken hills or ruined churches and castles. He speaks about historical documents and family property in exactly the same way, because for him they were in fact one and the same. He connected the physical ruins, documents and artifacts metaphorically to the inheritance of the family via the "biography of the discoverer," which implies both the history of the noble family and that of the historian, namely himself. Similarly, to tell her story (Margarethe's), he had to tell his: autobiography, like history, is about other people.
But when Aufsess attempted to create a museum which would represent this auto/biographical property to a larger public, he was initially unsuccessful. The property became contested, its ownership sought by historians, politicians, nobility, and others interested in creating national historical consciousness. Not until after the revolutionary tide of nationalism had ebbed and flowed in 1848 -- and after the initial years of mourning Margarethe had passed -- did Aufsess's project find favor, in particular from the Duke of Saxony and an assemblage of the first national German historical association. What most impressed those in attendance was the passionate fervor, "the warmth and confidence," with which Aufsess presented a coherent, well-thought-out museum conception, "which anyone could see he had been working on for over 20 years." 27 The motto that Aufsess chose to place over the entry to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum read "Property of the German Nation." His personal passion and fervor had brought the collection to the museum; the personal property passed over into national property.
Initially, this is what Aufsess believed he had wanted: to use family history to represent national history. He considered his personal sacrifice -- which included selling his collection to the museum as well as having "sold the farm," as it were, in order to assemble the collection in the first place -- to be worthwhile in its service to the nation and the nobility. He tried to encourage his fellow members of the nobility to join him in supporting the museum out of a similar sense of duty and destiny. In leaflets sent out to potential donors to the museum in 1855, he addressed "My dear and honored Ständegenossen (fellow nobles) in all German lands," and called to their attention a recent statement by Wilhelm Riehl, who had characterized the class-based nature of historical consciousness in his 1851 book, The Bourgeois Society:
[Riehl wrote that] "historical consciousness is to be preserved by the bourgeois estate, which has a particular calling for this task." And I submit it to you: if a member of the bourgeoisie can feel this, should not the same, indeed even more lively feeling exist in the breasts of those who belong to a historical lineage (Geschlechte) and who have their forefathers to thank for their names and their favored existences? 28
By virtue of the fact that his estate, the nobility, had a special, personal connection to the history of their lands, Aufsess argued, they were best and most naturally suited to the task of historical preservation. In an attempt to further personalize both his appeal and the nature of historical preservation, in the same leaflet Aufsess also offered the resources of the museum and its staff to produce "family albums and histories" for any noble family.
Aufsess's savvy appeal to the "real estate" interests of the nobility (a double pun: he claims, on behalf of the "real historical" [noble] estate, ownership of the property of historical consciousness, which itself comes from the land or real estate of their Heimat) is more than a marketing ploy. The success of historicism within the historical profession, which ostracized dilettantes like Aufsess, had been sealed by the rising nationalism and eventual unification of the German states. With the professionalization of history, the rise of historicism and the collapse of the distinction between Historie and Geschichte, history came to be understood not only as the property of the nation, but also as the property of the historical profession. Aufsess's attempt to rally the nobility was seen as a challenge to the dominance of the profession on the very grounds ("real estate") that it now sought to claim for itself: the soil of the Nation, the very entity that for historicists defined the historical actor (whereas for Aufsess, we will recall, the "subject of history is man" or the Volk). Local nationalism such as Aufsess's, which permitted each locality to represent the totality, stubbornly persisted in thwarting the unifying nationalist intentions of historical scholars. When Ranke and the philologist and historian of philosophy Friedrich A. Trendlenburg were called in by the Prussian state to evaluate Aufsess's museum, academia voiced its unanimous condemnation of the dilettante's historical competence -- while crediting his historical consciousness, historical instincts, and even service to the state. 29
Aufsess's attempts to make the museum the personal property of a representative national class marked the second movement in the transition of his collection from personal property to collective memory. Within 10 years of the museum's founding, Aufsess experienced the final alienation from his collection, which had begun the moment he made it the property of the German nation: he was ousted from his position as director of the museum because the scholarly members of the directing committee convinced state authorities that Aufsess's plans for the museum and its inventory were impossible to achieve, too unscholarly. Aufsess's personal ambitions for his collection in the form of the museum, its character as the collective, national repository of family history, and the post-1848 nationalist claims to a collective identity for all Germans to be determined by professional historians, combined to cause Aufsess's complete separation from his own historical memories.
When Is the Personal Historical?
The ambiguities of "history" persist in confusing the ways in which we talk about the "personal" aspect of historical consciousness. How does history become "personal" -- only when it is survived, or only when private lives become public knowledge? What constitutes an "experience" of history -- "being there," being told about it (telling it), being taught it (teaching it), reading about it, writing it? Or does history become "personal" when an individual cares about it? The production of history is fully integrated into its transmission; history does not exist apart from our thinking it. Clearly, there are as many ways of experiencing history as there are histories to experience. But if "history" is considered as the professional, scientific production of a text based on research, discussion and interpretation, then the personal experience of "history" is limited to producing or reading a text. Personal "history" is thus limited to two possibilities: when an individual participates in historical events -- "historical" because they qualify as the subject of later history -- and the individual can refer a personal memory to collective memory; and secondly, when an individual writes, teaches or otherwise transmits historical knowledge. In both cases, the personal experience of "history" is framed by historical representation practices.
The ambiguities of "history" only increase when the question is redirected to the issue of what distinguishes personal memory from historical memory. Modern, professional historians such as myself rarely refer to private, personal memories in their texts. But I would redefine a historian as an individual for whom remembering takes the form of the production of some kind of artifact, which is often a written one, or, as in the case of Aufsess, a collection and an auto/biography. Historians are typified by nothing so much as by the fact that they actively engage in remembering and producing texts based on memory. History "happens" because individuals do or do not act; but it is also a text, because someone such as myself has produced something which took memory, made it interpretation, and externalized it into a representative artifact for others. In our genre distinctions, we tend to segregate the self-referential from the historical, yet nobody would deny that history is written by distinctly personal individuals. Professionally competent history seems to be produced by individuals who struggle hard -- admirably or ridiculously, depending on your perspective -- to hide the fact that they were ever involved in the writing; or else they strive to make their personal mark through narrative style rather than self-reference. The first-person narrator speaks only in the preface or acknowledgments. This is not to suggest that all history should be written in the first person; but why cannot history be written in the first-person voice? 30 It may be time to reconsider the relation of personal experience to historical consciousness and collective memory by paying attention to those historiographical struggles which mask and unmask the ways in which historians care about the past. If, as I am suggesting, history is the product of historians' memories, what is left to distinguish history from autobiography as the most appropriate form for the content of memory?
The distinction between self-referential historical writing and written history seems to hinge on the extent to which individuals attempt to represent memory as the property of more than a single mind. History is a form for collective memory, valid for more than any single subject/ive individual; malleable and revisable, within professional boundaries, it is common property rather than personal memory, national rather than personal. Personal memory is commonly perceived (since Freud at least) as deeply flawed, or at least as unreliable, and it may be that historical memory is preferred as a stable referent, even when it may not exactly jibe with personal memory. But the personal memory acquired from studying, thinking and learning is ultimately as much a "source" of historical writing as the official sources, the artifacts and documents which historians use in research; and if personal memory is thus as much the source of history as of autobiography, then the personal is historical in a way quite different from what we might assume.
Readers of biographies as well as autobiographies are often attracted to them by the potential for "juicy" details. They may also be seeking some kind of "truth" about the person's life or about related historical events. But eye-witness and autobiographical testimony, it is acknowledged, can be flawed, and the "truth" of these accounts lies as much in how the author chooses to tell them as it does in the historically verifiable "past." 31 Equally, and particularly in regard to contemporary history, the historical actor confronted with written history may find that personal memories of "historical" events become supplemented or supplanted by the collective memories supplied in the historical texts. And the reader with no direct connection to the history other than heritage/ tradition, curiosity/fascination, or the requirements of education, accepts that multiple versions of the history may exist, but expects that what is written is itself an aspect of the preservation without which history could never have been transmitted to him/her at all -- and without which they would never have become participants in the preservation, and possibly in the history itself. Reading (or visiting and viewing historical objects, exhibits, films) is a historical act not only because it can be studied by historians of literacy and publishing, or by reception theorists, but because reading produces subjective historical memories and extends the cycle of historical memory from archive to writer to reader and back again. As Susan Rubin Suleiman notes, "the autobiographical imperative applies not only to writing about one's life but to reading about it; reading for it; reading, perhaps, in order to write about it." 32
When is the personal historical? Whenever one is thinking about oneself historically. Not only the biographical material that finds its way into the narrative, nor only the subjectivity or positioning of the author, constitutes the personal in the historical; it is rather the condition in which self-reflection occurs historically, when history is the mode of literary or museal production which best suits the personal needs of expression. My reading of Aufsess's auto/biography reflects my current interests in considering how it is that I produce history, and where it is "allowed" to speak in the first person, and where it is not, and why. As bell hooks wrote, "autobiography is a very personal story telling -- a unique recounting of events not so much as they happened but as we remember and invent them." 33 I would say this is also a definition of history, were it not for that dangerous word "invent," knowing the implicit anti-professional connotations. But we do not have to resort to Auschwitz lies and Stalinist revisionism in order to permit the idea that historians' imaginations are at least as significant as their sources. What historians "remember" is what they have read: their personal experiences are reading, learning, and thinking about what they have read and learned. The professional side of this is that they are supposed to read as comprehensively as possible; the personal side is, historians remember selectively, finding or focusing on certain themes and not others in what they read.
All this is supposed to be obvious: historians have biases, they bring emotional and personal baggage into the archives and into their writing. So why is it we make no mention of this in our historical texts? Was there a brief trend, signified by such writers as Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dominick LaCapra, Alice Yeager Kaplan, Natalie Ward Jouve, or William Reddy, which constituted self-reflexive historical or critical writing, but which is already past? 34 Or is it possible to combine the insights gained from the reconsideration of testimony and witnessing, with a relocation of authenticity from the sources to the historian's writing, so that historians need not be apologetic for speaking explicitly of the (redefined, not "embarrassing") personal in the historical? Can we talk about historians as writers -- leaving veracity in the sources as well as in the historical text, which also becomes a source/artifact; but recognizing that authenticity also lies in the moment of "blindness" which Derrida cites, the moment of creativity at which the writer translates information, study, or inspiration into a concrete production, a text or work of art? 35
Jane Tompkins, in her controversial essay "Me and My Shadow," tries to define what "personal" might mean in the context of literary criticism: "What is personal is completely a function of what is perceived as personal ... what we are talking about is what is important, answers one's needs, strikes one as immediately interesting. For women, the personal is such a category." 36 For Aufsess, for me and for History, the personal is such a category. We write or collect in order to express our sense of historical consciousness, and, in doing so, preserve that sense because it was personally significant, no matter how much we may project that significance, or the desire for it, onto transcendent collectivities such as Nation, Society, or Truth. 37 The conflict which perhaps remains, however, is the one between the personal grounds for historical consciousness and the professional products which alienate that personal emotion, offering it to a public. The "biography of the discoverer" presents a no-longer-active figure. Once a text is written or a museum is founded, it no longer belongs to the author/collector, but to a public, and the author/ historian herself now enters into a different relation to the artifact that she has produced: she too becomes a visitor to the site, or, a reader of a textualized artifact of her past.
Notes
*
I would like to thank Joe Fracchia, David Bates and Suzanne Marchand for their thoughtful critiques of earlier drafts. Portions of this essay were presented in a panel entitled, "Is the Personal Historical?" at the German Studies Association annual meeting, Dallas, Oct. 1994, and at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library workshop "National Character and Social Spaces," sponsored by the UCLA Center for 17th--18th Century Studies, Los Angeles, Nov. 1994.
I join here a long line of epigraph borrowers: I took it from Nancy K. Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York, 1991), 1, who took it from James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, 1980).
See Reinhart Koselleck, "Historia Magistrae Vita," in his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 21--38. The definitions provided in the text are my own. The fundamental shift in historical perspective is also what Michel de Certeau marks as "the [replacement] of the historical given by the historiographical process"; see his The Writing of History (New York, 1988), 30.
Collective memory, as a theoretical or analytical construct, is a 20th-century development which stems from Freudian psychology and Durkheimian sociology. The most useful theorist of the concept was a student of Durkheim, Maurice Halbwachs, whose fragmentary writings, published as The Collective Memory, trans. Francis Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (1950; New York, 1980), distinguished between historical memory and collective memory and provided a framework for understanding multiple group membership and the interwoven identities constructed among them. See also Amos Funkenstein, "Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness," History & Memory 1, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1989): 5--26; Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, VT, 1993); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982); and my "Loss vs. Preservation: The Differences between Historical Memory and Collective Memory," American Historical Review (forthcoming).
Miller, Getting Personal, 19. Miller had questioned earlier: "When you write in a personal voice 'in a professional context' about what is embarrassing, who is embarrassed? The writer or the reader?" (ibid., 5) in considering the essay by Jane Tompkins, "Me and My Shadow," which I will return to at the end of this article (see p. 23).
On the production of historical narrative, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987); Roland Barthes, "The Discourse of History," Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook 3 (1981); Mieke Bal, "First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology," New Literary History 24 (1993): 293--320. Philippe Carrard's Poetics of the New History (Baltimore, 1992) addresses issues of autobiography as well, in assessing the Annales school.
Karl Weintraub noted that historicism, or "the particular modern form of historical mindedness" appeared at the same time that autobiography assumed "a significant cultural function, around A.D. 1800." See his "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness," Critical Inquiry 1 (1975): 821.
There is little available in English about Aufsess. The recent collection edited by Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff, Museum Culture (London, 1994), contains an essay by Detlef Hoffman on "The German Art Museum and the History of the Nation," which briefly mentions Aufsess. See Hans Max Freiherr von und zu Aufsess, Das Reiches erster Konservator (Erlangen, 1971); Ludwig Veit and Bernward Denecke, eds., Hans Freiherr von und zu Aufsess und die Anfänge des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (Nuremberg, 1972); Rudolf Pörtner, ed., Das Schatzhaus der deutschen Geschichte: Das Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Düsseldorf/Vienna, 1982).
See my "Collecting and Historical Consciousness: New Forms for Collective Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1992).
See Bernward Denecke and Rainer Kahsnitz, Das Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, 1852--1977 (Munich, 1978).
Günter Johannes Henz, "Zu Leopold von Rankes Briefwechsel," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 54, no. 2 (1972): 308.
Aufsess's letter to Jakob Grimm is in the Archiv des Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Grimm--Schranke. The Ritter von Lang, also a local notable and amateur historian, nonetheless had professional support in his campaign against Aufsess, in which he criticized the historical association Aufsess founded and Aufsess's proposal, in 1833, for a national historical association. This bitter personal feud reflected an important contemporary debate on whether national history was locally based or transcendently non-provincial. The Grimms tended to shy away from the historical associations, acting as only honorary members and preferring to conduct their researches on their own and through literary correspondence. For Jakob Grimm's comments on the absurdity of amateur historical associations, see Archiv des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (hereafter GNM Archiv), Karton 1: Acta des GNM, Vorbereitung auf ein Museum in Nürnberg, Geschichtsverein, 1833-34, vol. 2: 13--15.
Archiv Familie Aufsess, unordered papers of Hans von Aufsess, "Ein Lebens- und Leidensgeschichte" (manuscript in 10 vols.), i and vi. The foreword to the introduction is signed and dated by Aufsess, 16 Mar. 1841.
Ibid., l.
Ibid., li.
Ibid., liii.
Ibid., lvi.
Ibid., xi.
Ibid., x.
Ibid., xiii.
Ibid., xv.
Ibid.
bell hooks, "Writing Autobiography," in Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 1038.
Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self (New York, 1993), 1--45; for Freeman, the explanation of the search for origins can be found in hermeneutics. Jacques Derrida also suggests that the confessional aspect of autobiography is centrally figured in authorship/signification: "it is the ear of the other that signs." The ear of the confessor is present or implied, as well as the ear of the Other. Speaking/writing to be heard or to Be through a Hegelian Othering of your self, however, is a motive compatible with many forms of writing, not only autobiography. See Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation (Lincoln, Neb., 1985), 51. Derrida also returns to confessional autobiography in Memoirs of the Blind (Chicago, 1994) where he suggests that "In Christian culture there is no self-portrait without confession. The author of the self-portrait does not show himself; he does not teach anything to God, who knows everything in advance (as Augustine never ceases to recall). The self-portraitist thus does not lead one to knowledge, he admits a fault and asks for forgiveness" (p. 117).
See Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis, 1989).
Archiv Familie Aufsess, unordered papers of Hans von Aufsess, "Fliegende Blätter," no. 2, "Was kann Subject und Object der Geschichte seyn?" 28 Feb. 1847; 2 pp.
Ibid., "Fliegende Blätter," no. 12, "Aufgabe des Adels," 23 Jan. 1848; 2 pp. My thanks to Ingrid Knoblauch for assistance in transcription.
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 Aug. 1852, p. 1623. Additionally, the report on the Dresden assembly noted that Aufsess's passionate presentation was considerably more interesting and received a much more attentive audience than did the previous presentation, made by a certain Prof. Piper, which had been long and boring, "like a piece out of an encyclopedia," and not suited to the mixed academic and non-academic audience. Aufsess's personal passions and dilettante status certainly helped his public relations efforts outside of academia.
GNM Archiv, Karton 1a: Akten zur Geschichte des Museums; Drückschriften. Hans von Aufsess, "An meine lieben und verehrten Ständegenossen in allen deutschen Landen," Nuremberg, Mar. 1855; two-sided leaflet, unnumbered. Aufsess appears to have been a canny salesman, and indeed ahead of his time, in that he sent similar leaflets to noblewomen which emphasized not only the nature of the noble's duty toward historical preservation, but also that noblewomen had an additional, special connection to the museum's collection of documents and artifacts related to the "history of women's lives in German antiquity." These were presented in the "Frauenhalle" of the museum.
See Ranke's letter, pp. 7--8 above. Trendlenburg, representing the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, denounced Aufsess as crazy and as an "unscientific dilettante." GNM Archiv, Akten zu Vorgeschichte des GNM, Karton 1a, 5 May 1859. On the national tradition of historical thought, see Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (1968; Wesleyan, CT, 1983).
See Carrard, Poetics, 86--104, for an analysis of where the "I" of the historian appears in Annaliste histories.
The necessity of reading autobiography as testimony, and of bearing witness, is nowhere more powerfully argued than in recent critical reappraisals of Holocaust survivor narratives. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1992), and Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven, 1991).
Susan Rubin Suleiman, "War Memories: On Autobiographical Reading," New Literary History 24 (1993): 563.
hooks, "Writing Autobiography," 1038.
See Suleiman, "War Memories"; Dominick LaCapra, "On Grubbing in my Personal Archives: An Historiographical Exposé of Sorts or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Transference," Boundary 2 13 (1985): 43--67, and continued remarks in the American Historical Review (Apr. 1992); Alice Yeager Kaplan, French Lessons (Chicago, 1993); Natalie Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (London, 1991); William Reddy, "Denial and Historical Research: Honor in Nineteenth-Century France" (unpublished manuscript, 1994). The "vogue" for autobiographical writing has also drawn fire from critics of subjectivity; see Daphne Patai, "Sick and Tired of Scholars' Nouveau Solipsism," The Chronicle of Higher Edu-cation, 23 Feb. 1994, A52.
See Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 53: the artist/vision is "blinded at the point where it sees itself looking." This would be a way to define a self-portrait of memory, and this is why "witnessing substitutes narrative for perception" (p. 104): because you cannot see yourself looking, you can only describe the desire to see (or that you were forced to see), and what you saw. Cf. Felman and Laub, Testimony, and Langer, Holocaust Testimonies.
Jane Tompkins, "Me and My Shadow," in Warhol and Herndl, eds., Feminisms, 1089.
Weintraub used Goethe's autobiography as his primary example of a text in which an individual's self-understanding reflected the historical world: "by rendering his own life story as the history of his self in harmony with the history of his world, his autobiography was both the history of his own individuality and the history of an individual age." "Autobiography," 847. This evaluation, however, reflects as much the historian's desire for a universal or representative historical consciousness ("in harmony" suggests that the harmonic chord pre-exists individual historical consciousness), as it does Goethe's or any other individual's ability to embody a collective history.
IU Press Journals
Home PageMore about History & Memory
Library
RecommendationTables of
ContentsAdvance
InformationCopyright
Clearance