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“It should be customary, it should be called culture,” observes the German writer Martin Walser, “that someone who makes a claim also refutes what he claims.”1Close Novelists are freed from this constraint because they are allowed simply to write down whatever their freely chosen narrative perspective yields. Historians weighing in on an issue, however, must present something that is also recognizable as scholarship. At least this is what readers expect when they look for truths in history books that promise to answer unsolved questions. Historians know, when they resolve to write a book, that they will be identified as advocates of certain theses and opinions and will thus be required to repeat what is already known. Apparently, there are also certain historians who have the tendency to cling to opinions and elevate them to the rank of eternal truths, merely because they wrote them down at some point in time. Having to be right is tedious. Having to be always right with the same opinion is even more tedious. Thus, I was glad when I was unexpectedly given the opportunity to say something new and discard some of my old ideas.
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