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The Historian between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

E.J. Hobsbawm
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Extract

It might be best to begin this discussion of the historian's predicament with a concrete experience. In the early summer of 1944, as the German army retreated northwards in Italy to establish a more defensible front against the advancing Allied forces along the so-called “Gothic Line” in the Appenines, its units carried out a number of massacres, usually justified as reprisals against local “bandit” (i.e., partisan) activity. Fifty years later some of these village massacres in the province of Arezzo, hitherto left to the memories of the villages’ own survivors and the local historians of the Resistance, provided the occasion for an international conference on the memory of German massacres in World War II.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 42 , Issue 168 , December 1994 , pp. 51 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

Notes

1. G. Monod and G. Fagniez, "Avant-propos," in Revue Historique, I, 1 (1876), 4.

2. Michael Smith, "Postmodernism, urban ethnography, and the new social space of ethnic identity" in Theory and Society, 21 (August, 1992), 493.

3. Stephen A. Tyler, The Unspeakable (Madison, 1987), 171.

4. Stephen A. Tyler, "Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document" in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture, The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), 126, 129.

5. G. Monod and G. Fagniez, "Avant-propos," 2.

6. Romila Thapar, "The Politics of Religious Communities"in Seminar 365, (January, 1990), 27-32.

7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised edition, London, 1991).