Review: Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History, by Christine Gundermann et al.

Abstract

Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History, literally “keywords of public history,” is a handbook written by a team of German historians, anthropologists, and education and media scholars. The key concepts under discussion are authenticity, emotions, memory, experience, heritage, historical culture, historical imagination, historical thinking, performativity, and reception—each discussed in about twenty pages. One could argue about the choice of the keywords, but the authors rightly claim that such lists are always controversial and never complete (16). Similarly disputable might be some decisions regarding the terminology (the explanation for writing about “emotions” instead of “affects” is not fully convincing, for instance), yet authors of handbooks usually face these kinds of unavoidable difficulties. Interestingly, the authors of Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History also offer an insight behind the scenes of their collaboration by informing the reader that they worked on the explanation of each of the keywords collectively so that there are no authors of the chapters mentioned, only persons “responsible.” A grant from the German Research Alliance enabled their collaboration, which is crucial to understand the handbook’s strengths and weaknesses. Currently, more and more German universities are offering courses and creating positions in public history so that there is a high demand for introductory publications among both students and academic teachers. These groups are therefore the main targets of the publication, as the authors explain.The point of departure of the handbook is the statement that public historians analyze their objects of study by means of different theoretical approaches, many of them much older than the concept of public history itself. Although this observation is rather unsurprising, it is worth mentioning that the authors consider public history to be a “field that deals with the science of the communication of history” (13). For them, public history is thus a meta-discipline to deal with various representations of the past in the present rather than a “reservoir of history in various media and institutions and…a description of best practices” (12). The ten keywords are “the theoretical basis of the science of public history” (13) meaning that public history should be studied rather than be a concept to study the past and its uses. Therefore, the handbook focuses on analyzing public history instead of doing it.The structure of the publication confirms the idea of public history as a meta-discipline built upon various theories. The authors assert that “for decades, many discourses have appeared largely in isolation from each another, even though the scholars involved have studied similar, even the same phenomena” (13). However, some of these discourses have meanwhile developed into their own autonomous academic fields, such as reception studies, heritage studies, or memory studies. They too claim a meta-disciplinary status. In this sense, Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History is a normative publication, suggesting that public history may be considered superior to fields dealing with the representations of the past in the present. On this point, however, the handbook fails to achieve its ambitious goal. Despite some cross references in the chapters, the explanations of the ten keywords are presented as ten different approaches; they do not break the barriers between the concepts contributing to public history. This notwithstanding, the publication is highly recommended for students and scholars seeking well-explained theoretical backgrounds in the otherwise rather practically oriented field of public history. The ten keywords help to interpret various kinds of references to the past in contemporary public spheres. Approaching different history-related phenomena by means of analytical notions such as authenticity, experience, or performativity makes them eventually readily understandable.To avert the danger of overtheorizing, all chapters begin with an example (among them descriptions of exhibitions, re-enactments, or activism), which is followed by the history of each concept, reflections on its usage (subsumed under the subheading of “operationalization”), and a conclusion about its relations to public history. The explanations refer to the introductory examples in a way that the keywords appear more as analytical tools for the analysis of different history-related phenomena in the public sphere and (contrary to the authors’ programmatic statement) less as instruments for dealing with public history as an academic field. In each chapter, there are “info boxes” with short explanations of related concepts, and a short list of further readings. It may seem questionable why the info box about nostalgia is placed in the chapter about authenticity instead of emotions, for instance. Similarly arguable is the definition of “public spheres” in the context of performativity—but it is only the placement of the info boxes that raises some critique, not their contents.Although the book would definitely deserve to have one, Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History will hardly reach an international audience. It primarily addresses German readers, and this is not only due to the language. The handbook is deeply rooted in German debates and German readings. A short glimpse at the list of the keywords reveals the difficulty: the English notions of “memory” and “experience” are equivalents of the German notions “Gedächtnis und Erinnerung” and “Erlebnis und Erfahrung.” Where in English we have one word, in German we have two, with relevant differences between them, especially in the latter case. In the chapters on memory, historical culture, and historical thinking there are even short comments about the usages of the notions in other languages. However, the authors do not generally elaborate on the linguistic limitations of their approach, hence it is hard to imagine a translation of the handbook into English or any other language. Yet with this disclaimer, Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History must be considered a very useful, well written, and impressively structured piece of collective work.