Historical perspective
A historical perspective can mean two things:
- On the one hand, the perspective opened up by the story , i.e. the destination of the story (see historical image , philosophy of history ),
- on the other hand, the perspective, the point of view from which history is perceived .
This article is about historical perspective in the second sense.
Views of history
General
One can story from the perspective of the rulers and the ruled see from that of Reich and arm , from indigenous and foreign , from the interior of a group or the projector outside here, from the perspective of men or women , the majority or the minority . It can be very fruitful to choose a single perspective as a heuristic approach, but a differentiated view of history must be multi- perspective (see also historical awareness ).
Making sense from the end point
Another aspect of the historical perspective is that historiography always looks at history from its end point (the attempt of historicism , according to the word Rankes, “Every epoch is directly to God.” To understand history entirely from its time must always remain imperfect, because we the knowledge of the progress of the story cannot hide.). Therefore history has to be rewritten from each new end point, because it gets a different meaning for each new epoch. Important cuts such as the Thirty Years' War , the division of Germany , the fire in the library in Alexandria or the library of Duchess Anna Amalia take on a different weight when one knows which changes were caused permanently (over centuries) and which only comparatively short-term. The introduction of nuclear weapons and the peaceful use of nuclear energy , before and after a nuclear war or a catastrophe , but also at the beginning of a storage period for nuclear waste or after millions of years of storage will have to be assessed differently. Every sense of history therefore remains tentative and can only be identified for the respective end point, i.e. H. indicate the starting point of the review. (Of course, the different perspectives of the people living then with their classes, ethnicities, genders, etc. apply here as well.)
Examples of perspective restriction
Eurocentrism
If the events of the French Revolution are completely excluded in a school book and only their effects on the country in which the school book is used are presented or if the Holocaust or the genocide of the Armenians is presented as a legitimate defense measure of the German or Turkish people the perspective distortion is evident.
On the other hand, epochs such as “Age of Discovery” or antiquity , the Middle Ages and the modern age seem relatively unsuspicious at first. The Eurocentrism is only visible when embarking on the perspective of a non-European culture.
enlightenment
History in today's sense is a result of the development of science in the 19th century, which, despite some delimitations, is based on the basic ideas of the Enlightenment . A fundamentalist view of history therefore appears just as inappropriate as the idea that history has been in decline since the Neolithic period because the cultivation of nature brought about a permanent destruction of the previously existing natural stock (see historical policy ). However, the principle of multiple perspectives is not adhered to.