Volume 36, Issue 1

The paper analyzes the difficult relationship between modern conceptions of childhood, which developed in the late 18th century, and theories of anthropology during the Age of Enlightenment. It claims that anthropological thought both helped in the development of modern conceptions of childhood and hindered this development. To show this, the text focuses on the works of Johann Karl Wezel, who is generally regarded as the pioneer of anthropological thought in Germany and who considered himself a founder of pedagogics. The paper discusses Wezel's anthropological and educational works and several of his novels. It also examines problems regarding the history of childhood and its exploration.

This article endeavors to bridge the gap between ›material‹ text philology, interested in manuscripts, and empirical writing research. Since terminology suitable for describing writing processes (in contrast to the description of the genesis of texts) is missing altogether in the current state of the art, the author aims at an empirically ›informed‹, but philologically embedded model of writing. This model in turn is implemented in order to delineate writing strategies Jean Paul could plausibly have utilized for his literary production. In this context the autograph of the third preface to the novel Hesperus is presented here for the first time. That argument is framed by general remarks on the ›going science‹-program in the philologies (first section) and on Jean Paul's intimate enemy in Weimar, who nevertheless serves as a paradigm for writing authorship (final section).

In Holocaust fiction, narrated children act as catalysts for adult behaviour, which reinstates agency and thus responsibility in the persecuted and largely powerless adults. Since child figures help reclaim an ethical dimension for human interaction, they point to the ethical foundations of the texts. Thomas Scanlon's contractualist approach to moral philosophy in his What We Owe to Each Other (1998) is used to compare two German Holocaust novels: Bruno Apitz's successful Nackt unter Wölfen (1958) and Edgar Hilsenrath's Nacht (1964), a book with a far more protracted and conflicted reception history. Exploring the relationship between (1) the role of child figures in these books, (2) the ethical issues thus raised, and (3) the publication and reception history of the texts concerned, shows that the radically different responses to the novels are rooted in their fundamentally different ethical cores: while Apitz reassuringly uses his communist Buchenwald prisoners' heroic saving of an infant boy to demonstrate that moral motivation is rationally grounded and that the demands of rational choice do not conflict with those of morality, in Hilsenrath's dire ghetto Prokov, chances for making ethical choices such as those posed by children in need are recognized as such – but mostly not heeded in the inexorable struggle for survival, so that the ethical is equated with the irrational, and the unethical with the rational. Child figures create opportunities for adult characters to respond to moral dilemmas, which is more significant than their potential as generic, iconic figures of suffering in the service of the Holocaust ›industry‹.

The main intention of this paper is to bridge the gap between an understanding of historiography as a work of literature and as a work of scholarly research. The topical emphasis in meta-history on representation darkens the insight that interpretation is a methodological procedure of historical cognition. Both aspects of the historian's work are mediated by each other.

Debates surrounding the ›linguistic turn‹ in the humanities have been seen by German historians (of all kinds) as a challenge. For example, members of the ›Bielefeld School‹ of social history have responded with heavy polemics: from ›Alltagsgeschichte‹ to ›New Cultural History‹, both tendencies have often been associated with ›irrational‹ movements in science and society. This essay tries to recapitulate and contextualize these controversies, looking for ways to explain the angst behind them. It suggests, as well, that at least some of the provocations generated by the ›linguistic turn‹ could be adopted and implemented, especially its idea of an historical discourse analysis.

The following paper discusses ›history of knowledge‹ as a new approach in the field of historical research, and especially cultural history. First of all, employing Foucault's notion of ›les saviors‹, the paper shows that the concept of ›knowledge‹ enables us to conceive knowledge as always circulating back and forth, without hierarchies, between different societal spheres and institutions, through media, between scientists and the so called public. Secondly, the paper proposes to use ›knowledge‹ as a vantage point for the historical gaze into the field of modern history. It therefore asks the question whether it is sound to promote ›knowledge‹ to a rank comparable in importance to the concept ›society‹ for social history, or ›nation‹ for political history. Since the very idea of ›the‹ society has lost a lot of its influence in the last two decades, my paper investigates the possibility that the new ›history of knowledge‹ can become an heir to the already rather ›old school‹ social history approach.

Focusing on the 83rd chapter of The Man without Qualities – »Seinesgleichen geschieht oder warum erfindet man nicht Geschichte?« – this essay suggests a new reading of Musil's narration of history. It argues that Musil avoids the Scylla of causal necessity and the Charybdis of the law of large numbers by means of a micrological method of ›smallest steps‹ aimed at motivating contingency. The narration does not ›make up‹ history, as Sophie Wilkins' English translation suggests (»Pseudoreality prevails; or, Why don't we make history up as we go along?«); rather, it invents history both in the sense of an ›ars inveniendi‹ and in the sense in which Ernst Mach defined scientific ›invention‹ as opposed to ›discovery‹.

This essay discusses the distinct features of memory fiction, a new genre that has emerged during the last two decades. It works through memories of the Nazi past and traumatic episodes of the Second World War within new literary frameworks. In this orientation towards the past the memory novel maintains distance from the research of historical reconstruction, as well as from the popular presentation of the past in the visual mass media. With respect to the new literary genre, various questions arise concerning its status and quality. One of these concerns the distinction and interplay between fictional and documentary features in the new format. Another one has to do with the emphasis on biographical experience that in many cases has become an important trigger and source for the text, endowing it with the stamp of authenticity or moral authority. It is also true, however, that war-related experience, trauma and suffering can no longer be claimed by members of the second and third generation who either write their own lives into the chain of generations connected with the Second World War and the Holocaust, or create a new access to central events of the traumatic national history from the perspective of a fictional private family. In both ways they testify to the aftermath of the traumatic past which, as they show, is still part of the present.

This paper outlines a proposed project on the concept of »similarities«. While difference, alterity and identity have until recently dominated the theory and practice of cultural studies, the alternative, complementary tradition of thinking on similarities, and deriving a secular social practice based on this, has been insufficiently examined for its relevance in contemporary, complex societies. This project envisages an historical reexamination of the traditions of thinking about similarities in various fields relevant to cultural studies. The paper argues that increasing attention to the question of »similarities« is important for dealing with pluricultural situations and societies characterized by migration, multilingualism, and overlapping traditions which require a flexible conceptual approach and an openness to an asymmetric narrative of modernity.