Historiography and research

The third year of my degree rolled around with all its intensity. We had been warned by students of previous years that it had the toughest classes and they were not exaggerating.  While the first year had been a year of adapting to the new system the second year had flown by with the now known rhythm of the classes but the third year brought a change in what was expected of us. We were now being taught how to produce history, how to use the archives and the methods to be used. All other disciplines have a history of how they developed but how do you write a history of history? It seems a bit redundant but it is not. The best way to understand it is through the philosophy of history. The history of the debates and theories that formed the discipline of history. History's history can be traced to Herodotus, a greek historian that lived in the Persian empire in Halicarnassus, it can be said that there has always been someone writing down the history of what is going on. Now the modern day discipline was born during the same period in which so many disciplines were born, the 19th century. History as we now know is germanic in origin, founded at the University of Bielefeld in modern day Nordrheinland Westphalen (NRW) spurred on by Leopold von Ranke who wrote very much in the roman strain of writing a world history of the world, trying to document everything out there. The discipline would become influenced by positivism and an impossible pursuit of total objectivity that would last the first half of the 20th century. Then came the Annales school in France to change all of that and add some interesting proposals to how we write history. 

The best way to understand it is to think of that Mayan wheel of time. Best way to think about it is of a layered wheel with each layers moving a different speeds. So too Annales saw the events of life, the evolution of live moves along different speeds. It retained the goal of a total history in line with the earlier German school but it allowed for micro-histories of villages and towns. It was a move away from politics history to that of ordinary people and more geographic history. Political history was seen as moving at a faster pace than the change that occurred to the mentalities of ordinary people. While the influence of Annales has waned a bit it paved the way for micro-history and a history of mentalities amongst several other strands that have developed since then that have diversified the field of history moving it beyond the study of events. 

Another aspect of the third year was my crash course in Latin. It turns out I should have continued with Latin after that crash course but that is a story for another day. To pass my epigraphy and palaeography classes I needed Latin and my housemate who had been more classically trained kindly offered to tutor me. We sat for hours in the cafeteria going over declensions and conjugations, which I have since for the most part forgotten. What I can say is that they were useful when it came to learning the genitiv in German as German declensions follow the same pattern as Latin declensions. Since I focus on post 1700 history most of this palaeography in Latin has not been used, much less the epigraphy. For a time it helped in  deciphering cryptic handwriting. What would have been useful and still could be is a palaeography in old high German but there only seems to be one course in the entire world: during  the summer in London. The question for them would be, what type of paleography is German Palaeography? Considering the many different  scripts depending on what part of Germany you were in and what German you were using how is one day enough to really cover the whole of German palaeography. It was no until the 1830s that work began on a comprehensive study of the German language as a unified language and it wasn't completed until 1854. Fun factoid is that most of its massive early work on historical linguistics was done by the Brothers Grimm of folkloric glory. Not so fun factoid is that this makes studying anything in German prior to the 19th century a challenge. Even transcribing German handwriting from the pre- WWII period can be tricky. 

This simultaneous ability and lack of ability put me in an interesting position a few years ago when a friend asked me to transcribe a letter she had from the sister of one of the nuns from her congregation that had passed away. It was a fascinating letter in terms of understanding the situation of regular Germans directly after the end of World War II. I couldn't transcribe it all but what I did transcribe showed the difficulties in finding housing, food, and clothes most civilians in Germany had who had survived the war. It also became clear that they had the impression that things were much better in England and of course given that rationing in England lasted until 1954 that couldn't be further from the truth. The saddest part was the writer of the letter waiting in vain to find her husband who had dissented and had been forced to join the worst part of the military mission in response to his resistance to the Nazis. I recently was asked about the war and no matter how many times I visit the topic the feeling of it being a very complicated matter always comes back. Everything was grey because such darkness was witnessed by the whole human race and that changed things forever. No clear answer can be given to this particular question.