This thesis focuses on the question how literary writers intervened in the debates about the nature and history of the GDR in the period following unification by publishing their autobiographies ...Show moreThis thesis focuses on the question how literary writers intervened in the debates about the nature and history of the GDR in the period following unification by publishing their autobiographies (1990-1997). The examination of four writers’ autobiographies by separating their epistemic, moral and political relations to the past, while also considering the emotions expressed in them, reveals the underlying, leading arguments in these texts by shedding light on individual, implicit claims. The writers took varying but concrete stances in the debates. The perspective of the writers' relations to the past reveals their arguments and demonstrates that these were primarily based on epistemic and moral claims instead of on direct political suggestions. It shows the variety of the writers' 'political' arguments and explains in which ways the writers made political points or took a stance in these texts, namely by (epistemically) explaining or showing and by (morally) judging, ridiculing or lamenting certain aspects of their lives, thus differentiating the ‘political’ nature of the interventions and the strategies to convey these. Moreover, the thesis' approach reveals and explains the texts' contradictions. These inconsistencies reveal the issues in which the writers' present interpretations cannot be applied to the construction of their pasts, demonstrating where these ‘weak points’ lie and that autobiographies are not as free as fiction. The analysis furthermore reveals strong correlations between the autobiographies’ styles and conceptualisations. Overall, the thesis complements historiography in various ways. For one, it proves the value of studying the autobiographies of literary writers, of whom other scholars of autobiography assumed that they could easily frame their lives around their art and hold back on political questions. The historical approach furthermore contradicts and complements interpretations by literary scholars. It is original in its use of the perspective of relations to the past in combination with comparing expressed emotions in the texts. Ultimately, this analysis sheds light on the ways in which individuals can deal with historical changes impacting not only their present, but also their past lives.Show less
My primary aim in this investigation is to trace the history of the invention of the Marxist historian’s persona in the Communist Party Historians’ Group, and thereby reveal its specific...Show moreMy primary aim in this investigation is to trace the history of the invention of the Marxist historian’s persona in the Communist Party Historians’ Group, and thereby reveal its specific configuration. This is to be an exercise in the recently emerging research program of what I have termed the empirical philosophy of history, as developed by Herman Paul. I supplemented this framework with certain Bourdieusian insights, adopting analytic tools — concepts like forms of capital and fields — that were specifically constructed to reveal more clearly the social elements and forces at play in the development of the dispositions or embodied commitments to goods that constitute personae. After elaborating my methodological framework, I move to outlining the basic elements that went into the making of the Marxist historian’s persona; the primary commitments to epistemic, moral and political goods that were embodied by the Historians’ Group’s founders — Dona Torr, A. L. Morton, Maurice Dobb and Christopher Hill — who played a primary role in its making. These consisted of the epistemic commitments to obtaining a dialectical and historical view or understanding of history, the moral commitment to the emancipation of the proletariat and the political commitment to Communism of the Soviet variety as espoused by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The obtaining of these commitments required the exercising of the appropriate virtues like employing the dialectical and historical materialist methods, engaging in class analysis and maintaining loyalty to the Communist Party. These virtues in turn implied an opposition to vices that consisted of their lack in other historians’ scholarly personae, pejoratively referred to as ‘bourgeois’. However, there was also a struggle internally regarding the proper interpretation of these commitments and virtues, one that played out both within the Historians’ Group itself and the wider Party. The contours of this struggle and the practices of contestation it involved —abounding in virtue and vice language — is clarified through the prism of dispositional variations that existed among the Group’s members, which I distinguish as the academic and non-academic. However, these are not presented as discreetly definable entities, but rather as consisting of a common network of commonalities (as in a family resemblance concept), thereby allowing for consideration of the variations that existed among members of each, while also allowing for the role of contingency that had a major effect on the making of the Marxist historian’s persona.Show less
