Does Lack of Representativeness also Mean Lack of Historicity? – Robert Musil and his Work Grigia, a “Microhistorical” Short Story

Abstract

This work moves from a reflection on the concept of microhistory according to several significant historians (Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, István Szijártó, Otto Ulbricht …) and puts a question about the status of historicity of “little” (in a macrohistorical sense) subjects like individuals or marginal people groups: “does lack of representativeness also mean lack of historicity?” It attempts to answer the question by using a Robert Musil's short story as a literary example of microhistory about an ethnic minority in Trentino at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1921 the famous Austrian writer (1880-1942) revises observations he had made in the Fersina Valley during the First World War and publishes Grigia, a short story set in this unknown valley of Trentino, an alpine region in the Northern Italy (at that time part of the Habsburg Monarchy), where the ancient German population of Mócheni has been living since the Middle Ages. Through the point of view of the Austrian author we are able to get, between ethnography and literature, “microhistorical” pictures of a minority people whose historical status was completely ignored or denied in the past. With the assistance of Musil's work the text suggests that also cultural and social marginal subjects and events can get a historical “dignity” valuable in itself.