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A growing international interest in history, often referred to as the "history boom", has been evident since the 1970s. This is reflected in a quantitative increase in the demand as well as the supply of a range of products communicating history, products aimed at a broad public and not at a limited readership with specialist training. The number of visitors to historical exhibits is increasing as new museums and memorials are opened and new monuments are dedicated. Historical movies – feature and documentary films as well as docudramas – are aired on prime-time television, and cinema is rediscovering historical themes. The number of scholarly historical publications is growing, alongside works for general readers as well as historical novels.
How are people made into subjects, and how do they make themselves into subjects? - asks Wiebke Wiede and presents in the article the most important theoretical approaches to the functioning of "subjectification" in the 20th century. Subjects constitute themselves in historical space and are subject to institutional structures and subject definitions that are historically contingent. Accordingly, the cultural orientation needs of our present are also reflected in subject theories.
Klaus Nathaus and C. Clayton Childress convincingly argue that cultural and symbolic objects are produced before they are consumed and that therefore cultural historians should take a closer look at the social and economic conditions of cultural production. Instead of taking it for granted that mass reception inversely indicates the existence of a demand already ‘being there’, historians should dig into the production processes influenced (among others) by individual taste, material interest, and arbitrary decisions – or, as Nathaus, Childress and the often cited Richard A. Peterson would call it – contingency. While most of Nathaus and Childress’s examples stem from the field of music, I will in my response apply the cultural production concept to a non-musical field, namely documentary photography in the first half of the twentieth century. Further, I will raise some questions that still seem to be unanswered. Given that the causal relation between production and consumption by and large equals the chicken and egg problem, what sense does it make to shift attention from reception to production – especially when dealing with modifications of objects, commodities, or genres rather than inventions in the sense of ‘there was nothing like this before’? I will suggest to extend the concept beyond the study of ‘classical’ cultural objects – like novels or records – and to include commodities like food, clothes, or cars. Finally, I will raise the question of how to apply the production of culture perspective to socialist economies after 1945, which to my knowledge has not been tried yet.
During the Holocaust 5.8 million people were killed; most of the victims did not leave behind any record that could help reconstruct their experience. While survivor history has been well studied in the last decades, how millions of voiceless victims experienced their persecutions has remained a terra incognita. Generally, while perpetrator history is well-documented, the voiceless victims’ perspective has resisted any form of documentation; their emotional and mental experiences conveyed through novels and memoirs have remained fragmented and they have often been dismissed as subjective and unreliable. Today Digital History and Digital Humanities offer new forms of inquiry and representations; they can unlock the emotional, mental, and physical realities which voiceless victims of the Holocaust or other genocides were forced to live in.
The article traces the collective term “living history” in its various definitions, forms and manifestations, offering an overview of this widespread phenomenon. It will consider developments in the United States and Europe, as well as taking a look at historical precursors of present-day forms. Whereas living history in the Anglo-American world has long been a well-established part of the educational and cultural work of museums, in Germany there is still a great deal of skepticism towards this form of historical representation. Finally, it asks how the fields of history and cultural studies might best engage with living history and which theoretical approaches exist for investigating and analyzing living history.
Marketization is a broad term with a wide range of meanings. It encompasses measures of deregulation and privatization as well as the perceived increase of an ›economic‹ logic in social relationships. For historical purposes, the term should not be narrowly defined, and nor should the concept of marketization be used in an ahistorical manner detached from contemporary usage. However, there are two questions which the historical analysis of marketization needs to address. First, what is the conceptual understanding of the market mechanism to which the term marketization is linked? Second, what is the relationship between marketization and economic theory?
Anthropocene
(2024)
The “Anthropocene” has garnered much attention since the turn of the millennium, being widely and controversially discussed in the natural sciences and the humanities as well as in the media and the arts. Ariane Tanner explains the history of the term and shows how the concept enables contemporary historians to rethink temporality and agency in history, allowing them to expand their research questions, methods and narratives.
By the late 1970s, it was technologically possible to manufacture microcomputers – very small, stand-alone computers for personal use – in very large quantities. Selling them, however, meant creating a mass market where none existed: conventionally, only trained professionals, and a few devoted enthusiasts, interacted directly with the machines. Designers, marketers, retailers and other promoters therefore sought to build meanings into the design and presentation of computers which would connect them with new audiences. Such meanings reflected – and might themselves modify – the prevalent hopes, fears, desires and expectations of the users’ cultures.
The multi-faceted concept of authenticity became a ubiquitous catchphrase and a widely-recognised phenomenon in cultural studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly important in contemporary historical studies in methodological terms and as a research subject. But what does "authentic", or the attribution of authenticity, mean? The following article by Achim Saupe aims to investigate these aspects in greater detail.
Dieser Text ist eine Verschriftlichung des Eingangsstatements von Lyndal Roper bei der Diskussionsreihe "Geschichtliche Grundfragen". Die von Rüdiger Graf (ZZF), Matthias Pohlig (HUB) und Ulrike Schaper (FU Berlin) initiierte Veranstaltung fand im Wintersemester 2022/23 im Online-Format statt. Zeitgeschichte|online veröffentlicht die Eingangsstatements der Veranstaltung in einem Dossier. Die Vorträge wurden bis auf wenige Ausnahmen von der Audioaufnahme transkribiert und überarbeitet, dabei wurde Wert darauf gelegt, die rein sprachliche Form der Statements beizubehalten.
By expanding historical image research, visual history has in the recent past established itself as a field of research in late modern and contemporary history, which considers images in a wider sense both as sources as well as independent artifacts of historiographical research and likewise looks at the visuality of history and the historicity of the visual. Its exponents advocate understanding images beyond their pictorialness as a medium and as an activity with an independent aesthetic that condition the way of seeing things, shape perceptual patterns, convey interpretations, that organize the aesthetic relationship of historic subjects to their social and political reality and which are able to generate own realities.
Historians have analyzed films, novels, records, theater plays etc. primarily in reference to their meaning and reception. This article makes a case for moving the focus to the actors, structures and processes that shape symbolic objects before these are consumed. To this end, we present a framework established in US sociology to study the fabrication, distribution and evaluation of symbolic content. We discuss the production of culture perspective as an approach that appears to be particularly useful for historical research and, by reviewing selected works from the sociological literature, demonstrate how this perspective can be applied to phenomena like popular music and literary fiction. We focus on genres as bundles of conventions as one lens through which historians may analyze the creation, reproduction, evaluation and consumption of culture.
Thinking About Empire
(1997)
Common sense tells us that empires rise and fall. We know that the Roman, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov realms were called empires, and we know — from history or, more precisely, from historians — that they had temporally identifiable beginnings and ends. Not surprisingly, we conclude that the history of entities called empires must hold the explanatory key to the rise and fall of empires.
The supposedly commercial products of the culture industry are increasingly facing sales difficulties because growing numbers of self-assertive consumers are downloading products at will, thus no longer following the given rules of the market. Not only multinational record companies, but also representatives of ‘high’ culture are adamant in their criticism of the current ‘culture for free’ tendency. The latter can hardly be characterized as profit-oriented – nor would they describe themselves that way – but they contend that bootleg copies are a threat to their livelihood, and that the culture of piracy paves the way for harebrained mass products. The discussion encompasses copyright laws and the ways consumers are appropriating cultural products as well as the question whether or not these tendencies will fundamentally change the production of culture. Such debates are charged with cultural criticism, but in essence of economic nature. In addition, the cultural sector is faced with the accusation of waning societal relevance. In the arts and features sections of newspapers and magazines, journalists and essayists bemoan that pop culture is no longer ‘the voice and mirror of political and social change, like twenty or thirty years ago’. Although popular culture may have evolved from its original return and distribution strategies as well as its constitutive (at least for some) connection to youth and protest movements, a medially conveyed, market-driven culture that is accessible to a wide audience remains a characteristic feature of modern societies and their self-perceptions.
Migration has been a constant feature of human history – "homo migrans" has existed ever since "homo sapiens". Moving away from the traditional nation-based dichotomy of emigration – immigration, the less specific term migration allows for many possible trajectories, time spans, directions and destinations. It can be temporary or long-term, voluntary or forced. It can occur in stages or in cycles, and can be mono-directional or more varied. Generally speaking, however, human migration can be defined as crossing the boundary of a political or administrative unit for a certain minimum period.
(Version 2.0, siehe auch Version 1.0) The field of Migration History looks at both ends of human mobility and the complex and diverse processes of migration. In her article Barbara Lüthi defines human migration, which can be either international or internal, and gives a short overview of the history of migration in the 20th century. After a discussion of the approaches and perspectives on the research field Lüthi closes with an examination of the current topics in Migration History: refugees and so-called illegal migrants.
Eigen-Sinn. This word – commonly rendered in English as "stubbornness" – has since become a key concept in German and even international scholarship for a specific approach referred to collectively as Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life. Eigen-Sinn nowadays is a useful historiographic concept for understanding individual behaviors and actions that impact on the sphere of power and domination: submission and revolt, resistance and dropping-out. How this came about will be explained in this article by Thomas Lindenberger.
Infrastructures
(2021)
Since the middle of the 20th century, the term “infrastructure” has been used to describe facilities for supply and disposal, communication and transport, and in a broader sense also those that interconnect our society economically, socially, culturally or medially. Dirk van Laak recapitulates the current status of the term, looks at its recent history and concludes by outlining selected fields in which infrastructures are currently being researched or could be further analysed.
African American History
(2023)
America’s past and present cannot be understood without taking into account the history of African Americans. Christine Knauer traces the genesis of African American historiography and points out the close link between historiography, the fight for freedom and the civil rights movement in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century. She describes the current trends and research approaches in African American historiography, ones increasingly being adopted in Europe and Germany in the context of American studies.
The fiftieth issue
(2021)
At first glance, the seventeenth year of this journal’s publication would not appear to mark any particular anniversary. And yet the present edition is quite special for the editors and the editorial team: it is the 50th issue overall. (There was a double issue in 2007, otherwise there have always been three issues each year.) This milestone is the occasion for a brief review of the original objectives and of developments thus far, as well as a (self-)critical look at what the future may bring. Scholars in the nascent field of the cultural study of periodicals have rightly observed: ›The production of periodicals is often accompanied by reflections on the value, conditions, and promise of producing periodicals.‹