Master narrative

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A master narrative or meta narrative ( French : méta récit ; English : grand narrative ) is a narrative perspective about the past that has remained predominant for a long time.

definition

The term was introduced into the discussion by philosophers in the late 1970s and has since gained relevance for all disciplines in which the past and modern are discussed. The pioneering study by the American historian Hayden White was internationally influential . He pointed out that nineteenth-century historians' accounts not only provide scientific explanations, but are also designed in a narrative style. In his research on colonialism in Central and Latin America, the French cultural critic Claude Lévi-Strauss used the narratives of the colonial rulers ( master narratives) juxtaposed with the oral traditions of the underprivileged ( slave narratives ). He had noticed that the written documents were written almost exclusively from the ruler's perspective. The French historians of the Annales School generally branded the narrative character of historiography as pre-scientific or unscientific. Marc Bloch contrasted the “narrative” of traditional historiography with the text types of “analysis” and “comparison”. Jacques Le Goff had proclaimed that “traditional political history” was a “cadaver to be killed”.

According to Frank Rexroth , master stories are "codes for all kinds of truths of faith that are accepted without questioning". Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow understand a master narrative to be a "coherent, with a clear perspective and usually oriented to the nation-state history, whose formative force not only has an internal educational effect, but gains public dominance". This means “the narrative style of the past that is dominant in a cultural community at a given time”. With seriality, linearity, one-dimensionality of the narrative and teleology, Thomas Haye names four axioms of the master narrative that form structure . According to Jörn Rüsen , master stories provide answers to the question of cultural identity. In recent times there have been attempts to “turn the combat instrument into a tool for the scientific study of the practice of historiography”.

When deconstructing a master story, whole topics and problems have to be discussed again. Often the previous phenomenon is assigned a more modest place in a larger whole.

Examples

The “archaic early Middle Ages” was claimed on the one hand as the origin of the nation or Europe, on the other hand as a contrast to the civilized, state-organized present. A common master story is that of the early Middle Ages as an archaic, dark and uneducated time. The word Middle Ages was invented by the humanists . They want to capture the period between antiquity and renaissance , which they interpreted as the "dark Middle Ages" in a negative way. According to a widespread view, the monasteries were the last islands of the written culture. Jacques Le Goff presented an extreme example of this in his classic work, The Intellectuality of the Early Middle Ages, published in 1957. He fundamentally denied this. In his view, books were written as an exercise of penance and not to be read. Rosamond McKitterick has used 7000 surviving Carolingian manuscripts to make it clear that writing was already widespread among lay people . According to Otto Gerhard Oexle , the Europeans' images of the Middle Ages had an "instrumental character" because they were "not statements about the Middle Ages, but rather statements about modernity".

The early Middle Ages were also characterized as a time of national origins, such as the use of “the making” or “the birth” or “la naissance” already made clear in the book title. The search for national origins often concentrated on the time of the Great Migration .

The national liberal historians of the 19th century asked about the reasons for the delayed emergence of the German nation state and looked for the reasons for this in the Middle Ages. In this master story, the empire of the Ottonians , Salians and Staufers was extremely powerful and played the dominant role in Europe. The rise of the princes had weakened the king and with him the central power so that from the 13th century the decisive political developments took place in the territories. The late Middle Ages were perceived as an era of disintegration and a dark time of powerlessness. Up until the first decades of the Federal Republic of Germany, historical studies described the Roman-German imperial period until the end of the Hohenstaufen as a glorious and glorious past. This picture has only been put into perspective in the last few decades. The princes had an interest in the existence of the empire. The idea of ​​princely responsibility for the empire intensified in the 10th and 11th centuries. Gerd Althoff's research on conflict management and settlement has shown that early medieval society had developed instruments (“rules of the game”) to avoid violence in conflicts. In these "rules of the game" the coexistence of king and great took place. He relativized the image of the “dark” Middle Ages as a time of archaic violence and barbarism. The consensus between the king and his followers was sometimes constitutive for royal rule. Bernd Schneidmüller spoke of consensual rule in this context . In doing so, he corrected the one-sided image of the nationally-minded constitutional history of the 19th century of a strong German kings and emperors. In medieval studies, the rule of kings and emperors has since been described as a consensual rule with the nobility. As Schneidmüller himself admits, the “interest in the cooperative organization of rule” is in turn guided by the current situation. As a result of the loss of influence of state power through supranational organizations, the nation state has fallen on the defensive.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 at the latest, a new story was added to the old master story about the Western Christian Middle Ages. Since then, the story of the Middle Ages has been told as the coexistence and opposition of three monotheistic cultures. Numerous dissertations and habilitations were created in the process. The advertisements for professorships and appointments to professorships in German Medieval Studies also take this new perspective into account.

As a reaction to the master story of the High Middle Ages as the heyday of the Roman-German imperial state, Althoff presented the idea of ​​an Ottonian "royal rule without a state". The Ottonian royal rule managed largely without written form, without institutions, without regulated competences and instances and, last but not least, without a monopoly of force. According to Althoff, rituals, gestures and rules of the game were core elements of medieval statehood and ensured the cohesion of the empire. Johannes Fried took a different approach . He noted a lack of state awareness among rulers and scholars of the Carolingian era. Walter Pohl argued that the early Middle Ages should not be explained in terms of its relationship to another epoch, but rather "to understand it from within, in all its diversity and contradictions".

Ever since Edward Gibbon's epoch-making work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , historians have asked about the reasons for the fall of Rome. In a work published in 1984, Alexander Demandt bundled all the reasons given in the research for the "fall of Rome".

In research on the Hanseatic League , Rolf Hammel-Kiesow drew attention to the foundation of the Hanseatic League : In the first years of the German Empire as "governor of the empire and forerunner of the German nation-state in the north", at the time of Wilhelm II as the epitome of "German naval glory at sea" , in Nazi historiography under the sign of the "expansion of German living space to the east" in GDR historiography as an example of the "history-forming role of the masses".

After Mikhail A. Bojcov , in the Soviet as in the post-Soviet era, the depiction of the Russian history of the basic structure of a magical fairy tale followed . Russian historians adopted this fairy tale pattern from France in the 19th century.

The literary historical master tales of the 19th and 20th centuries linked various large-scale interpretations with Latin literature of the Middle Ages. The Latin literature of the Middle Ages was seen as a source of ideas for vernacular literature, as part of a new epoch, as the basis of European unity or as an obstacle on the way to an enlightened modernity. According to Thomas Haye, master narratives often operate on textual objects with juxtapositions such as “modern” versus “archaic” or “progressive-innovative” versus “conservative-traditional” or “antique” or “classicistic” versus “genuinely medieval”. Medieval Latin literature is judged according to the norms of classical antiquity or whether it was able to free itself from antiquity. The literature of the late Middle Ages is measured according to whether it has supposedly modern characteristics of the early modern period. In the history of literature, the biologistic metaphors of growth, blooming and withering are often used, or literature is described in terms of ascent, descent or resurgence. After Wilhelm Scherer's history of German literature from 1863, German literary history alternated at regular intervals of 300 years in phases of prosperity and times of decline. For the course of literary history, Scherer noted a high point in 600, 1200 and around 1800. Scherer's modeling remained powerful for a longer period of time.

literature

  • Frank Rexroth : Master Tales from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of medieval disciplines (= historical journal. Vol. 46). Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-486-64450-5 .
  • Frank Rexroth: The Middle Ages and the Modern Age in the Master Tales of the Historical Sciences. In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics , Vol. 38 (2008), pp. 12–31.
  • Frank Rexroth: The scholastic science in the master tales of European history. In: Klaus Ridder, Steffen Patzold (Hrsg.): The topicality of the premodern. Berlin 2013, pp. 111-134.
  • Konrad H. Jarausch, Martin Sabrow (Hrsg.): The historical master story. Lines of interpretation of German national history after 1945. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-525-36266-8 ( digitized version )
  • Gabriel Motzkin: The End of the Master Tales. In: Joachim Eibach , Günther Lottes (Hrsg.): Compass of historical science. A manual. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-8252-2271-3 , pp. 371-387.

Remarks

  1. ^ Hayden White: Metahistory. The historical imagination in 19th century Europe. From the American by Peter Kohlhaas. Frankfurt am Main 1991 (American original edition 1973)
  2. ↑ Konrad H. Jarausch, Martin Sabrow: "Master narrative" - ​​On the career of a term. In this. (Ed.): The historical master story. Lines of interpretation of German national history after 1945. Göttingen 2002, pp. 9–31, here: p. 14.
  3. ↑ Frank Rexroth: Master Tales and the Practice of Historiography. An introduction sketch. In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 1–22, here: p. 9. Cf. Marc Bloch: Apologie der Geschichtswwissenschaft or the profession of historian. Stuttgart 2002, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Jacques LeGoff: Fantasy and Reality of the Middle Ages. Stuttgart 1990, p. 351.
  5. ↑ Frank Rexroth: Master Tales and the Practice of Historiography. An introduction sketch. In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 1–22, here: p. 4.
  6. ↑ Konrad H. Jarausch, Martin Sabrow: "Master narrative" - ​​On the career of a term. In this. (Ed.): The historical master story. Lines of interpretation of German national history after 1945. Göttingen 2002, pp. 9–31, here: p. 16.
  7. ↑ Konrad H. Jarausch, Martin Sabrow: "Master narrative" - ​​On the career of a term. In this. (Ed.): The historical master story. Lines of interpretation of German national history after 1945. Göttingen 2002, pp. 9–31, here: p. 17.
  8. ↑ Thomas Haye: The periodization of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages - literary master narratives as axiomatic and narrative patterns of object constitution and structure formation. In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 43-55.
  9. ↑ Jörn Rüsen: Introduction: For intercultural communication in history. In: Jörn Rüssen, Michael Gottlob, Achim Mittag (ed.): The diversity of cultures. Frankfurt am Main 1998, pp. 12–36, here: p. 23.
  10. ↑ Cf. with further references to this Frank Rexroth: Master narratives and the practice of historiography. An introduction sketch. In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 1–22, here: p. 1.
  11. ^ Frank Rexroth: Tyrants and good-for-nothing. Observations on the rituality of European deposition of kings in the late Middle Ages. In: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 278 (2004), pp. 27–53, here: p. 29.
  12. ^ Jacques Le Goff: Les intellectuels au Moyen Âge. Paris 1957.
  13. ^ Walter Pohl: Original narratives and counter-images. The archaic early Middle Ages. In: Frank Rexroth (ed.): Master stories from the Middle Ages. Munich 2007, pp. 23–41, here: p. 36.
  14. ↑ Otto Gerhard Oexle: The divided Middle Ages. In: Gerd Althoff (Ed.): The Germans and their Middle Ages. Topics and functions of modern historical images from the Middle Ages. Darmstadt 1992, pp. 7–28, here: p. 12
  15. ^ Carlrichard Brühl: Germany - France. The birth of two peoples. Cologne et al. 1990; Herwig Wolfram: The Birth of Central Europe. History of Austria before its creation. Vienna 1987; Florin Curta: The Making of the Slavs. History and Archeology of the Lower Danube Region c. 500-700. Cambridge 2001.
  16. ^ Walter Pohl: Original narratives and counter-images. The archaic early Middle Ages. In: Frank Rexroth (ed.): Master stories from the Middle Ages. Munich 2007, pp. 23–41, here: p. 26.
  17. ↑ Gerd Althoff: The reception of the empire since the end of the Middle Ages. In: Matthias Puhle, Claus-Peter Hasse (ed.): Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation 962 to 1806. From Otto the Great to the end of the Middle Ages. Dresden 2006 pp. 477-485.
  18. ↑ Bernd Schneidmüller: Consensus - Territorialization - Self-interest. How to deal with late medieval history. In: Early Medieval Studies. Vol. 39, 2005, pp. 225-246; Frank Rexroth: Researching History or Writing History? The German Historians and their Late Middle Ages 1859–2009. In: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 289 (2009), pp. 109–147.
  19. ↑ See Gerd Althoff: Staatsdiener or heads of the state. Prince's responsibility between imperial interests and self-interest. In: Ders .: Rules of the game of politics in the Middle Ages. Darmstadt 1997, pp. 126-153; Hagen Keller: Swabian dukes as applicants for the throne: Hermann II (1002), Rudolf von Rheinfelden (1077), Friedrich von Staufen (1125). On the development of the imperial idea and the responsibility of princes, understanding of voting and voting procedures in the 11th and 12th centuries. In: Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins , Vol. 131 (1983), pp. 123-162; Stefan Weinfurter: Reform idea and royalty in the late Salian empire. Considerations for a reassessment of Emperor Heinrich V. In: Ders .: Lived order - thought order. Selected Contributions and King, Church and Empire. Helmuth Kluger, Hubertus Seibert, Werner Bomm. Stuttgart 2005, pp. 289-334.
  20. ↑ Gerd Althoff: Limits of violence. How violent was the “Dark Ages”? In: Horst Brunner (ed.): The war in the Middle Ages and in the early modern times. Wiesbaden 1999, pp. 1-23. Gerd Althoff: Rules of the game of politics in the Middle Ages. Communication in peace and feud. Darmstadt 1997.
  21. ↑ Bernd Schneidmüller: Consensual rule. An essay on forms and concepts of political order in the Middle Ages. In: Paul-Joachim Heinig (Ed.): Empire, regions and Europe in the Middle Ages and modern times. Festschrift for Peter Moraw. Berlin 2000, pp. 53-87. ( online )
  22. ↑ Bernd Schneidmüller: Consensual rule. An essay on forms and concepts of political order in the Middle Ages. In: Paul-Joachim Heinig (Ed.): Empire, regions and Europe in the Middle Ages and modern times. Festschrift for Peter Moraw. Berlin 2000, pp. 53–87, here: p. 64 ( online )
  23. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard: History of State Authority: A Comparative Constitutional History of Europe from the Beginnings to the Present. 2nd, revised edition. Munich 2000, pp. 508-536.
  24. ↑ Steffen Patzold: Garth Fowden's “First Millennium” from a medieval perspective. In: Millennium 13 (2016), pp. 47–52, here: p. 47.
  25. ↑ Wolfram Drews: The Carolingians and Abbasids of Baghdad. Legitimation strategies of early medieval ruling dynasties in a transcultural comparison. Berlin 2009; Jenny Rahel Oesterle: Caliphate and royalty. Representation of power of the Fatimids, Ottonians and early Salians at religious festivals. Darmstadt 2009; Almut Höfert: Empire and Caliphate. Imperial monotheism in the early and high Middle Ages. Frankfurt am Main 2015.
  26. ↑ Steffen Patzold: Garth Fowden's “First Millennium” from a medieval perspective. In: Millennium 13 (2016), pp. 47–52, here: p. 48.
  27. ↑ Gerd Althoff: The Ottonians. Royal rule without a state. 2nd, extended edition, Stuttgart a. a. 2005.
  28. ^ Gerd Althoff: Relatives, friends and faithful. On the political significance of group ties in the early Middle Ages. Darmstadt 1990, p. 226.
  29. ↑ Johannes Fried: Why the Franconian Empire did not exist. In: Bernhard Jussen (ed.): The power of the king. Rule in Europe from the early Middle Ages to modern times. Munich 2005, pp. 83-89.
  30. ^ Walter Pohl: Original narratives and counter-images. The archaic early Middle Ages. In: Frank Rexroth (ed.): Master stories from the Middle Ages. Munich 2007, pp. 23–41, here: p. 40.
  31. ↑ Alexander Demandt: The Fall of Rome. The dissolution of the Roman Empire in the judgment of posterity. Munich 1984.
  32. ^ Rolf Hammel-Kiesow: The Hanseatic League. Munich 2000, p. 7.
  33. ↑ Michail A. Bojcov: Magic fairy tales, myths and symbolic figures in the Soviet and post-Soviet historical meta-narrative. In: Frank Rexroth (ed.): Master stories from the Middle Ages. Munich 2007, pp. 87-105.
  34. ↑ Thomas Haye: The periodization of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages - literary master narratives as axiomatic and narrative patterns of object constitution and structure formation. In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 43–55, here: p. 48.
  35. ↑ Thomas Haye: The periodization of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages - literary master narratives as axiomatic and narrative patterns of object constitution and structure formation. In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 43–55, here: p. 50.
  36. ↑ Klaus Grubmüller: Seasons, blooming times. Master stories for the history of literature? In: Frank Rexroth: (Ed.): Master narratives from the Middle Ages. Epoch imaginations and progressive patterns in the practice of mediaeval disciplines. Munich 2007, pp. 57–68, here: pp. 65–67.