Ronald Fraser (historian)

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Ronald Angus Fraser (born December 9, 1930 in Hamburg , † February 10, 2012 in Valencia ) was a British historian who dealt in particular with the history of Spain and made a significant contribution to establishing the so-called oral history as an independent method of historical studies .

Life

Fraser, son of a Scottish father and an American mother, spent his earliest childhood in Hamburg, where his father was employed by a shipping company . After the seizure of power by the NSDAP the family left Germany and settled in Burghfield in Berkshire down where they with the legacy of the mother a mansion had bought. After the divorce of their parents lived Fraser with his mother, the second wife with a New Zealand doctor , and after his unexpected death with a bomber pilots of the Royal Air Force was married.

After attending the local preschool and public schools, he worked for the news and press agency Reuters for some time in the mid-1950s after completing his military service . Already at this time he felt great interest in Spain , which was triggered by reading the books of the historian Gerald Brenan , who later became a close friend of his.

In 1957, after the death of his mother, he traveled to Andalusia and found agriculture there at a level before the civil war. The city of Mijas , where he lived, had slowly recovered from the events of the war. During his stay, he met the young French social philosopher and journalist André Gorz , who had recently published the autobiographical and philosophical theoretical book Le traître . Fraser came to Paris through his relationship with Gorz, who was working as a journalist for L'Express magazine at the time . There he came into contact with the political left and became a staunch socialist through the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and those around him .

In 1963 Gorz put him in contact with journalists from the New Left Review magazine , the most influential publication of the New Left in Great Britain. Fraser became the economic manager of the magazine, which was then in flux. He was also on the support of political books of the New Left in the publisher Verso involved.

He was also a pioneer in the field of interviewing ordinary people from the working class , describing what their work is and what it meant for their lives before Studs Terkel's interviews in The Studs Terkel Program . A summary of these interviews, unique at the time, was published in 1968 by Penguin Books under the title Work: Twenty Personal Accounts .

In 1979 his best-known work Blood of Spain appeared , an incomparable representation of the Spanish Civil War , which was carefully constructed from interviews with participants from both sides. By conducting the interviews with a steady and always polite voice, this book made a significant contribution to establishing the so-called oral history as an independent method of historical studies based on letting contemporary witnesses speak .

In his autobiography In Search of a Past (1984) he described his own childhood and the extensive servants who looked after him in his parents' mansion, which he moved to Amnersfield, Hampshire .

His last work, Napoleon's Cursed War (2008), a textbook-like reconstruction of the Napoleonic wars on the Iberian Peninsula , also followed the principle of oral history, although here he was forced to carry out in-depth research in archives in order to find the statements and actions of ordinary people .

Fonts (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Miller : Poor Boys , London Review of Books , September 18, 1986
personal data
SURNAME Fraser, Ronald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fraser, Ronald Angus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 2012
Place of death Valencia