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Stefan Berger, History Sells: Angewandte Geschichte als Wissenschaft und Markt, German History, Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 686–688, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghr058
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Extract
History is popular, but the history of historiography has to date neglected forms of popular history-writing and we are only recently seeing volumes which address this lacuna. One of them is under discussion here. The book sets itself the task of surveying the terrain of ‘public history’ under the conditions of the contemporary information and media societies. Many of its authors are themselves public historians who provide glimpses of their own attempts to popularize history without necessarily abandoning all vestiges of scientificity.
The thirty-eight contributions are grouped under four headings. In the first section the functions, perspectives and debates surrounding public history are the focus of attention. Marianne Sommer reports on what could be seen as the rather worrying impact of genetics on the popularization of pre-history. Daniel Schläppi argues convincingly that popular and professional history-writing do not have to be at loggerheads. Christoph Kühberger talks about the practices of history consulting and argues in favour of an ethical codex for public historians. Mathias Berek reflects on the vital importance of the modern mass media for contemporary memory cultures. Achim Saupe sees a ‘detective narrative’ underlying many narratological constructions of both ‘scientific histories’ and more popular histories. Michaela Fenske examines the concept of time travel in popular forms of history, highlighting the desire of many people to experience the past first-hand. Edgar Lersch and Reinhold Viehoff analyse history on German TV, which is dominated by documentaries on the twentieth century, in particular the National Socialist period, and the 1960s and 1970s. Viktoria Urmersbach looks closely at the specific genre of the docu-drama and defends it against charges of being mere ‘histotainment’. Esther Maccallum-Stewart examines the place of history in the world of computer gaming, highlighting the fact that games deal with history on many levels—everything from providing mere background to battle games to allowing for a critical engagement with the past. In a separate article Rainer Pöppinghege is far more doubtful about the potential of history computer games to allow for the necessary complexity of any in-depth engagement with the past. Susanne Hilger introduces the notion of business history as public history. Professional business historians, she argues, have an important role to play in mediating between the professional ethos of history and the manifold possibilities for employing historical skills in a for-hire market of business histories. Janis Nalbadidacis looks at the diverse ways in which history is represented in comics, stressing that comics can often work in introducing historical themes to an audience that would otherwise not read history books. Wolfgang Hochbruck emphasizes the democratizing potential of history theatre, including historical reenactments, museum history and medieval markets. Kerstin Brückweh focuses on the market for schoolbooks and examines the way in which it seeks to guarantee quality standards that are in line with scientific practice.
