Self-testimony

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A self-testimony is a record in which a person gives testimony about himself in mostly written form on his own initiative. She appears “acting or suffering” and thus “explicitly refers to herself”.

Concept history and categorization

The term self-testimony found its way into linguistic usage in the 19th century at the latest and, from the point of view of today's history, belongs to the source group of ego documents , which has developed since the early modern period due to the increasing importance of the individual in society. While initially the “God-relatedness of the individual, at least with regard to the 16th and 17th centuries, represented a fundamental aspect of the individual's self-experience”, the process of secularization had serious effects on the role of the individual in later centuries Individual. Religious authorities lost their status and ensured that the individual no longer saw himself exclusively as a member of superordinate social associations, but also as an autonomous entity.

The collective term “ego document”, introduced by Jacques Presser in 1958 , has since expanded its definition by Winfried Schulze - in contrast to self-testimony - to include involuntary recordings of “interviews or expressions of will in the context of administrative, judicial or economic processes”. Attempts at a definition like this are, however, controversial in historical studies.

Most important criteria and writing motivation

Although the form and style of writing allow conclusions to be drawn about the author of a text, in addition to content-related statements, the author's self must be explicitly revealed in self-testimonies. However, the author can take different standpoints: In addition to egocentric texts about the writer's directly perceived experiences and experiences, reports about events not personally experienced can also provide information about the interests and feelings of the author and thus contribute to the development of an ' emotional story '. Especially in Pietism, the inner workings of the author moved more into focus. The reason and trigger for writing a self-testimony were often drastic negative experiences. Exceptional situations (in the early modern period, for example, the Thirty Years War) could arouse the need in contemporaries to record painful experiences for posterity - as a memorial, or to give advice to later generations on how to deal with grief. Often natural spectacles such as celestial phenomena or earthquakes are thematized in personal testimonies, which were understood as threatening omens and divine warnings. However, the reason for writing down such events could also be the simple “fascination with the extraordinary and the strange”.

Manifestations

The best-known and clearest form of self-testimony is the autobiography , but chronicles , household books , diaries , travelogues or letters can also be assigned to this type of source - depending on the extent to which the writer himself makes himself the subject of the remarks. Especially with regard to the early modern period, however, when assessing the expressiveness of such texts, their often conventional character must be taken into account. Often the role of the individual was given more consideration in public life than private feelings. But even stereotypical modes of representation can - viewed in a source-critical light - lead to valuable insights, as they allow conclusions to be drawn about values ​​and ideal images of the time. While ego documents can also be understood to include third-party records from illiterate layers, self-testimonies come primarily from the bourgeois milieu.

Significance for historical science

Due to the clear focus on the individual, the preoccupation with self-testimony is an example of the growing interest of historical science in private everyday life, the noticeable change from structure- oriented macro- to anthropological micro- history.

The approach of this historical anthropology or history of mentality, the lack of attention to which Lucien Febvre criticized as early as the 1930s, gained theoretical and practical importance in historiography, especially since the 1970s and 1980s. Depending on the background, it provides different gains in knowledge for modern historiography. Early modern self-testimonies (and ego documents), for example, usually provide less information about the “personality as such” than about “a person's relationship to their environment”. Nevertheless, research hopes that the analysis of self-testimonies will provide insights into the milieu of the respective author, his everyday life, his hopes and desires, his inclinations and fears. In addition, self-testimonials can offer an interesting introduction to the history of body awareness and medicine, for example when writers talk about the symptoms of illness and their treatment.

Since the 18th century, and especially in the century after Freud , the egos in the sources have increasingly also addressed their personality and thus bring about a “psychologization” of self-testimonies, which can also provide insights for psychohistory.

Example: Hermann von Weinsberg

The detailed autobiographical writings of the Cologne citizen and councilor Hermann von Weinsberg can be named as an example of a personal testimony from the early modern period . In 1559 he finished the “Book of Weinsberg” and in 1560 he began recording three “memorial books”. In the more than 2,500 pages addressed to his descendants, Weinsberg provides detailed information about himself and his surroundings in Cologne - without ever having intended publication. As voluntary records in which an “explicit self” appears, they meet the criteria of a self-testimony and can be classified as such.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Krusenstjern 1994, p. 463
  2. ↑ Fabian Brändle et al.: Texts between experience and discourse. Problems of self-testimony research , in: von Greyerz et al. 2001, pp. 3–31 (here: p. 3)
  3. ^ Winfried Schulze: Ego documents. Approaching the People in History? Preliminary considerations for the conference “Ego documents”. , in Schulze 1996, pp. 11–30 (here: p. 21), see also ( article as PDF )
  4. ↑ cf. Fabian Brändle among others: Texts between experience and discourse. Problems of self-testimony research , in: von Greyerz et al. 2001, pp. 3–31 (here: pp. 11–16)
  5. ↑ cf. Fabian Brändle among others: Texts between experience and discourse. Problems of self-testimony research , in: von Greyerz et al. 2001, pp. 3–31 (here: p. 7)
  6. ↑ cf. Lucien Febvre: The Rhine and its history. Edited, translated and with an afterword by Peter Schöttler . Frankfurt / New York 1994, pp. 176-177
  7. ↑ Andreas Rutz: Ego Document or Ego Construction? Self-testimonies as sources for research into early modern man. In: Elit et al. 2002 ( online edition )
  8. ↑ cf. Fabian Brändle among others: Texts between experience and discourse. Problems of self-testimony research , in: von Greyerz et al. 2001, pp. 3–31 (here: pp. 20–24)
  9. ↑ Liber iuventutis (1518–1577), Liber senectutis (1578–1587) and Liber decrepitudinis (1588–1597)
  10. ↑ cf. Manfred Groten: On the work of Hermann Weinsberg. In: The autobiographical notes of Hermann Weinsberg ( digital complete edition )
  11. ↑ Krusenstjern 1994, p. 463

literature

  • Andreas von Bähr, Peter Burschel , Gabriele Jancke (eds.): Spaces of the Self. Transcultural self-testimony research . Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-23406-5
  • Stefan Elit, Stephan Kraft, Andreas Rutz (eds.): The “I” in the early modern era. Autobiographies - personal testimonies - ego documents from a historical and literary perspective . (= Zeitblicke. Online journal for the historical sciences; 1 (2002), No. 2). [20. December 2002] ( online edition )
  • Kaspar von Greyerz, Hans Medick, Patrice Veit (eds.): From the depicted person to the remembered self. European testimonials as a historical source 1500-1800. (= Personal testimonies of modern times; 9). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2001, ISBN 3-412-15100-9
  • Benigna von Krusenstjern : What are personal reports? Concept-critical and source-related considerations based on examples from the 17th century. In: Historical Anthropology. Culture. Society. Everyday , 2 (1994), pp. 462-471
  • Sebastian Leutert, Gudrun Piller : German-speaking Swiss testimonies (1500-1800) as sources of the history of mentality. A research report , in: Swiss Journal of History , vol. 49, 1999 ( full text )
  • Winfried Schulze (Ed.): Ego documents. Approaching the People in History. (= Self-testimony of modern times; 2). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-05-002615-4 , pp. 11-30

Web links

Wiktionary: Self-testimony  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations