Apology of the science of history or the profession of the historian

Apology of the science of history or The Profession of Historian is a book by the French historian Marc Bloch . In it Bloch discusses modern historical research with its goals, limits and methods, but also the self-image of historians and their way of thinking.

The work was written between 1941 and 1943. It was left unfinished because Bloch was shot by the Gestapo in 1944 . The first edition, entitled Apologie pour l'Histoire ou Métier d'Historien , was published in 1949 by Lucien Febvre , who was one of Bloch's friends. Not all manuscripts were available to Febvre, however, and he made some changes to the text. For the fiftieth anniversary of the book, Étienne Bloch , a son of Marc Bloch, published an edition with newly emerged documents and without Febvre's intervention. In 2002 Peter Schöttler published a new German edition based on the edition by Étienne Bloch.

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Chapter 1: History, People, and Time

In the beginning was the word . Bloch begins his first chapter in a similar way. The word Geschichte or Historia is a word that has constantly changed its meaning in the two thousand years of its existence and yet still means the same thing. As the chapter progresses, Bloch discusses the different types of history and states that there is, for example, a history of volcanic eruptions which, while of great value to geophysicists, has nothing to do with the profession of historian. However, there is overlap where one area of ​​research can complement another. He brings the example of a gulf that reached deep into the coast of Flanders in the 10th century, but later silted up and shaped the history of geology and people there. And there it becomes an interesting development for the historian. Such examples are intended to show how interdependent different disciplines ultimately are. So Bloch gives a vague definition of history: " History is the science of people ".

Another important aspect is time. Anyone who researches people is more of a sociologist than a historian. Only when the person is embedded in a time and one takes into account these temporal differences in which a society lives or has lived, one can speak of history as such. The definition expands as follows: " History is the science of man in time ".

With the concept of time, however, comes the question of origin , a concept that Bloch considers problematic. The very definition of the word causes difficulties: is it the beginning or is it the causes? Regardless of what you choose, it gets even more complicated because where would you start? How do you date a beginning that you don't know? The causes are the same. We cannot go back so far in time that we can explain the origin of the universe , and even if so, who says there weren't other causes and beginnings at work before that? And yet the two possible interpretations go side by side.

Bloch again illustrates this with a word example, namely the change in the meaning of timbre and bureau . The former was originally the word for a drum and not a stamp. In Bloch's view, too many people are content with knowing what the original meaning of the word is. The development itself is skipped, although this change has to be explained. Which brings us back to the beginning , cause and above all time . These terms have changed over time, and there lies the key to find the beginning and the cause for further development: namely the consideration of the thing and the people in time .

Starting with time, Bloch comes to another problem, namely the relationship between the present and the past. If you want to be petty, there is practically no present because it keeps passing. Here, however, Bloch accepts a compromise and extends the present to the “immediate past”. The problem quickly becomes apparent when historians examine a section of time in history, they are forced to look at the past of that time as well. Some historians make it easy for themselves and limit themselves to the thesis that the present arises from itself and can also be explained from itself. However, Bloch counters this by the ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus or Thucydides , who would not even have assumed in a dream "that knowledge of the morning is completely sufficient to explain the afternoon". As already mentioned several times, the difference to the ancient Greeks lies in time. Bloch blames the rapid technological development, at least in part, for the fact that the differences between the generations have become so great that one might share the view that they cannot be explained from previous ones.

Chapter 2: The historical observation

In the second chapter Bloch wants to devote himself to research into the past. He compares the task of the historian with that of a judge who tries to "reconstruct a crime that he himself did not see ...". Access to the object of investigation, the past, is therefore "indirect". Accordingly, information we draw from the past is necessarily second, if not third or fourth hand. This suddenly makes the detailed reporting very imprecise and questionable. In addition, today we only get what the people at that time wanted to show us. We may know different views, but they all have one thing in common: They are written subjectively. History cannot do without them, because if we only look for traces of people, we will find skeletons and clay pots, but that only tells us that people were there and next to nothing about the beginnings and reasons of their existence.

Bloch also goes into the sources that we use today to reconstruct history. These are in particular the narrative testimonies and the "unwilling witness". With narrative are meant documents that only serve to disseminate information. They are intended to inform current or future readers of events. According to today's view, the unwilling witnesses are the more reliable sources. These are public documents such as court rulings or construction plans, the original purpose of which was informative but not intended to be addressed to anyone.

Bloch goes from the testimonies of the past to dealing with them. It contradicts the common idea that historians would simply read old texts and documents and check them for authenticity in order to then draw conclusions and evaluate them. “No historian has ever proceeded like this,” says Bloch. At the beginning of a historical research there is already a question, even if it is ideally posed very openly in order to be able to address different sources. These different sources are essential for dealing with a historical topic in more detail. Meanwhile, the pool of different types of certificates is huge and difficult to understand. Everything that has ever come into contact with people can inevitably say something about them. The trick is to ask the right questions and be flexible in the methodology.

Now Bloch comes to an indispensable part of the historical work, collecting the right documents, that is, those testimonies that are considered important. Nowadays this is preferably done with all sorts of aids such as library catalogs, etc., without which historical work would have been a lot more difficult in Bloch's time, even if technological progress has simplified it a lot since the book was first published.

Chapter 3: The Criticism

At the beginning of the third chapter Bloch goes into the difficulty of judging. An eyewitness report can be just as false as a forged document. This problem remained unsolved in historical studies for a long time. Not until the 17th century with the invention of document criticism and Montaigne , who said that the task of historians is not to check for authenticity, but to present the past as the sources show it, regardless of its authenticity. Nevertheless, criticism is establishing itself as a method in almost all disciplines. Descartes was also familiar with doubt as a path to knowledge , but Bloch emphasizes that these doubts are not the same. Descartes' doubts are mathematical, while in historical studies critical doubt tries to approach the truth through probabilities.

Bloch also explains how the historians “tripped themselves up” by viewing criticism as a miracle tool and only in the 19th century brought the historical profession back to the workbench and away from theoretical doubts. Even today, if we are to believe Bloch, we do not seem to have completely found the right level of criticism.

Bloch's next topic is the footnotes in historical literature. He explains the need for footnotes, which confuses some outsiders, by re-emphasizing that an assertion can only be made if it is verifiable, and that is precisely why footnotes and a bibliography are needed, because every claim is risky to be immediately refuted.

Back to the criticism. Even if a document has a date, you have to use the font, language, content and impression to check whether the document even fits the time from which it is supposed to originate. Working with sources therefore requires a high degree of doubt and acumen in order to also see things that the author wanted to conceal or represent differently. On the basis of these data, Bloch shows two types of fraud, the content-related one and the one about the date and author. If one turns to the second type of fraud, it remains to be investigated whether it is really a fake. Then it can be assumed that the content is also wrong. However, if it is a copy to replace a lost original, things are different. In this case, the forgery is telling the truth. But even if there is a forgery, the relevant source can be very revealing if the historian can decipher the motives behind it. So a new question begins, but one based on the old one.

On the other hand, there are the less obvious deceptions that a reader can fall victim to. These are embellishments or insertions that falsify what is actually correct and ultimately turn it into a lie. Added to this is the simple imperfection and ignorance of a person who writes the truth in good faith and to the best of their knowledge and belief, but which is simply based on false information. These are sometimes the most insidious errors in the science of history. Such misjudgments, however, can in turn provide valuable information for the historian, because errors and misconceptions arise above all when they coincide with the general opinion of that time. So they can say a lot about the general mood in the population, if you can only decipher them correctly.

At the end of the third chapter, Bloch comes to what remains the most important method in historical studies: source criticism . He immediately starts with an elementary part, the comparison, which, as Bloch writes, "forms the basis of almost every criticism". As already mentioned before, one checks the writing, language, impression and knowledge of the time from which an object of investigation is to come. You compare the things you already have over time with what you have in front of you. If this comparison is correct, the testimony is reliable. At the same time, too close a similarity can prove exactly the opposite. Bloch cites the example of two identical sculptures that depict an act of war. Now you automatically assume that one of the two is a fake or a replica of the other and only stamps one as real. There was only the possibility of looking for mistakes that a forger might have made out of ignorance.

Finally, Bloch returns to estimating the probability and shows with various examples that a probability cannot theoretically be calculated in the past, but that historians often resort to it in order to get a little closer to the possibility of the "true story".

Chapter 4: The Historical Analysis

Again Bloch starts with one or two problems: "the impartiality of the historian and the writing of history as an attempt at reproduction or analysis". The impartiality is problematic in that the historian has to almost forget himself in order not to make a hasty judgment and to obscure the facts in that direction. Bloch comes to the conclusion that the historian has to "understand".

In order to understand, one first has to order, that is human nature, without which writing history would not even be possible. Nevertheless, with the order of things comes the danger that one loses sight of the whole, namely the consciousness of the human being, and tries too clearly to separate the blurred boundaries. After this explanation Bloch turns to the subject of the nomenclature . Everything has a name, and what has no one is given one. Although the objects change a lot, the name remains the same. Bloch gives the example of the "wagon". When we use this term today, most people think of a car, but it could also be a horse-drawn carriage. Another problem of the science of history shows itself here: language. When historians work with old documents, they increasingly come across old, sometimes even dead languages . Now the historian explains with language, his own. As long as everyday things appear in old documents, there are no problems. These arise only where the culture and thus also the language of the historian no longer corresponds to that of the source. Not all sources survive such a language and culture break unscathed.

Bloch goes on to the epochs and their classifications. As he writes, one type of structure has been preserved for a long time: The Chronicle of the Rulers. Conquests of great empires limited epochs and within these empires the succession of monarchs formed the division of time. It was practical in that such a dramatic event as a coronation or a revolution could be precisely timed.

A more recent type of division are common characteristics of a certain time, for example the time of feudal rule . On the other hand, Bloch calls division into centuries a bad fashion, which for him seems incredibly nonsensical, since a society does not change from one day to the next just because a new century is dawning. Bloch also has a hard time dividing up with the help of generations. Generations mesh too often, and one event can shape different generations. At the end of the fourth chapter, Bloch states that history needs a kind of time measurement that can adapt to its unsteady rhythm and, in this sense, will never match the time.

Chapter 5: Untitled

In the last and incomplete chapter, Bloch goes into the categorizing thinking of humans, which is also a fruit of our “rational” nature. Humans seem to prefer causal relationships , but not everything can be embedded in such a cause-and-effect network, and all too often the questions of why are lost. In history, causes are not only motives, but also external changes that can shape a society, as in the example of the Gulf mentioned at the beginning. Consequently, no generally valid causal relationships can be established, since people do not always react in the same way to the same thing.

Criticism and Reviews

According to Michael Stürmer , the book remains a torso. He sees it as "a balance sheet of historical thinking, the dialogue between a creative historian and his subject or, as Bloch wrote at one point in the farewell past tense: 'The notebook of a craftsman who loved to think about his work.'"

The Unfinished Book is sometimes considered to be one of the best introductory books to the methods of history today. It has so far been translated into eight languages ​​with a total print run of 450,000 copies.

"This unfinished book is at the same time a masterpiece of historiography and a historical act."

- Jacques Le Goff

"For students and everyone who would like to find out what this science is about [...] an excellent, perhaps the best introduction."

- Neue Zürcher Zeitung

expenditure

• Apologie pour l'histoire ou métier d'historien . Une nouvelle édition critique, prepared by Étienne Bloch. 1993.
• Apology of the science of history or the profession of the historian. Based on the French edition edited by Étienne Bloch, edited by Peter Schöttler . Foreword by Jacques Le Goff . Translated from the French by Wolfram Bayer, Stuttgart 2002.

Reviews

• Marie Theres Fögen : The historical book. Professional cannibals. Marc Bloch on the profession of historian. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 21, 2002, p. 54
• Peter Fuchs: Review of Apology of the History of Science or The Profession of the Historian . In: Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 276, H. 3, 2003
• Stefan Rebenich, milling cutter and violin maker: Marc Bloch's Apology of History in a new edition , In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 10, 2002
• Rudolf Walther: History for Man. In: Tagesanzeiger, July 8, 2002, p. 42.

Web links

• Review at perlentaucher.de
• Apology, reception history, French text
• Online publication (critical summary / book review) "Apologie der Geschichtswwissenschaft" of the historical seminar of Leibniz Uni Hannover, March 2016 [PDF ]

Individual evidence

1. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 21, 2002
2. ↑ perlentaucher.de
3. ↑ Michael Stürmer: Review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 7, 1975, p. 6, accessed on June 26, 2014.
4. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from February 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.