Introduction: History and Its Discontents
Notes Introduction: History and Its Discontents 1. Compare Bain Attwood’s comments in ‘In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance”, and Public History’, Public Culture, 20, 1 (2008), 94–95. My thanks go to Becky Jinks for reading – and greatly improving – an earlier version of this Introduction. 2. See, for example, Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches HandelnimDrittenReich(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999). 3. On the distinction between historicism in the sense of the speculative philos- ophy of history and historicism in the sense of setting events meaningfully in their historical context in the tradition of Ranke, see Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). 4. See my discussions of these issues in Chapter 12 and in ‘History, Memory, Testi- mony’, in Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds.), The Future of Testimony (London: Routledge, 2013). 5. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2012). That does not mean I agree wholeheartedly with their partic- ular contextualisations; for example, Judt and Snyder suggest that the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the West has buried an awareness of the sophistica- tion of Central and Eastern European history and thought, which is now regarded as interesting only insofar as it illuminates the background to and possibility of the Holocaust. Other, positive traditions have been forgotten (237). I would suggest that things are a little more complicated than that, both with respect to Holocaust consciousness – which has hardly been a uniform process in ‘the West’ – and to Western knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe.
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