Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

This shift later inspired the development of a modern cultural and
social history in post-war Germany.
Under communist rule, a completely renewed system of historical
thinking was introduced with its own professional standards for
evaluation and interpretation. This bound history developed its own
scientific mechanisms for selecting research questions and its own
procedures for verifying and falsifying historical interpretation. Inside
the GDR, professionalism and political interpretations of history
were not regarded as contradictory, but as harmonious. Belief in
the neutral objectivity of historical research was denounced as
bourgeois blindness. Inside this historiography it became accepted
to understand the decisions of the Politburo for example as scholarly
considerations, and to interpret political changes of direction as
scholarly progress. Historians from the East had to operate within
a concept of historical truth that deprived empirical evidence of its
status as an autonomous element of the process of historical
discovery and understanding, and diminished its meaning by binding
it to the criterion of political utility and ideological partisanship.
The communist approach to historical thought declared the
necessity of ideological and political partisanship as a conditional
and constituent part of scholarly objectivity. 2 Historical knowledge
that met the basic scholarly standards of research could be rejected
as objectivistic or factological without any room for academic discussion.
Even inside the ruling discourse in GDR historiography
this approach should not be seen as a mere victory of politics over
historical facts, but should be recognised as a fundamental belief
in the idea of a structural unification of partisanship and objectivity.
In summary, belief in a basic difference between history and politics
has not always been the case. It is not super-historical. It is part of
our present mental framework, but not automatically part of historical
discourse in the twentieth century as a whole. In my view this
means that in times when the danger of politicisation grows, the
professional historian has perhaps already lost the means and the
methodological instruments with which to recognise it.
2 Eckermann/Mohr 1966, p.40
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