The Politics of Contested Narratives

Biographical Approaches to Modern European History

Ilse Lazaroms, Emily Gioielli, Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, Emily R. Gioielli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138806689
• eBook ISBN: 9781317615408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The twentieth century in Europe was characterized by great moments of rupture, such as two world wars, ideological conflict, and political polarization. In these processes, as well as in the historical writing that followed in its wake, the individual as an historical entity often appeared crushed. In line with contemporary theories about the precariousness of historical writing and the self, this volume seeks to understand the important developments in modern Europe from the perspective of the single, sometimes isolated, but always original viewpoint of individuals inhabiting the space at the other side of the traditional grand narratives. Including theoretical chapters as well as detailed case studies, this volume takes a biographical approach to dystopian events—the Holocaust, Fascism, Communism, and collectivization—by starting with the voices of unknown historical actors and relating their experiences to larger processes in modern European history, such as the emergence of the national, collective memory, and state formation, as well as changes in the understanding of modern identities and the (re)formulation of the self.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

The politics of contested narratives : biographical approaches to modern European history. Introduction

Ilse Josepha Lazaroms and Emily R. Gioielli

Department of History, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

We are all more like vast subterranean caverns, uncharted by even ourselves, than we are like holes dug straight into the ground.¹

The main theme that inspired the conference from which the articles in this special issue emerged was the relationship of biography to both ‘academic history’ and constructivist conceptualisations of identity.² The entanglement of identity and biography offers a pathway into a broader discussion about the role of biography in historiography, and in fact tackles the very definition of what biography is and what can emerge from a reconciliation between the genre of biography and more recent historical and social-science methodologies and approaches.³ The editors of this special issue share these concerns, among others, and have brought together contributions that not only explore the vast caverns of human identity, but also offer insight into the processes by which the cave itself came into existence.

Interest in biography as a genre and as historiography has gained increasing attention in the past few years. While never disappearing from the shelves of bookstores catering to a more popular audience, in the past three to four decades, biography, it seemed, had somehow fallen out of favour among academic historians, who may have written biographies as addendums to their broader research, but who otherwise distanced themselves from the lives of their individual subjects.⁴ However, while biography as a mode of historical writing waned in popularity, attention to identity and subjectivity emerged across the social sciences and humanities. In other words, individuals, who seemed to offer so little to historiographical interpretations, came to be understood as ever more complex, their characters and actions more difficult to pin down, and their ‘real’ identity elusive.

Attempting to grapple with this multiplicity became ‘institutionalised’, so to speak, in the ‘New Biography’ that emerged in the 1990s.⁵ Influenced, as Lois Banner recalls, by post-modernism, feminism, and critical race theory, ‘New Biography’ offered a path to understanding the ‘shifting and multifaceted nature of individual personality’.⁶ But despite a theoretical-conceptual apparatus on which to grapple with multi-faceted identities, the problem of which identities one will (or can) tackle in a biography that attempts to put forth a unified and coherent narrative remains. Furthermore, coupled with the challenges of a potential subject’s plural identity and historical context are those of the biographer herself. If, as has been said, history is the most political of subjects, it is not least because multiple interpretations of certain individuals make it so?

Creating a coherent story out of the chaos of a subject’s pluralistic identities constitutes perhaps the primary challenge to contemporary biographers and to the contributions in this issue. But the articles also tackle other fundamental questions at the very core of biographical and autobiographical writing, such as: What is a biographical subject? (that is, does it have to be human?) How does one balance context and subject? How does a biographer deal with the complex identities of individuals and collectives on their own terms? What is the role of the biographer’s context in the writing and creation of a biography? What role does the subject play in the narration of their own story? These questions on the nature of subjectivity and the role of narrative by both subject and author emerge in the present issue as a core theme on which many of the articles centre.

While each article in this volume seeks to answer the above questions in one way or another, all of the articles in this volume were selected because of their approach to the politics of biography and the biographical component of politics with a special concentration on the complex history of East Central Europe. The goal of this focus is to interrogate the concept of ‘marginalisation’ as it exists in biographical research in a region that itself has been marginalised politically and academically, no doubt because of its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, overlapping imperial nature. However, as the late Tony Judt pointed out in his magisterial history of post-Second World War Europe, the histories of both halves of Europe are not isolated from each other, though they have been distanced from each other in an on-going process that – as pointed out by Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe and Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans – was not initialised by the Cold War, but certainly was enhanced by the bipolarity of postwar political developments in the region.⁷ With a special focus on this complex region, it is our intention that this volume contribute to the project of de-essentialising the region and the concepts ascribed to it from the inside and outside. A focus on this region also offers an opportunity to address the dramatic reversal of identities (as in the case of Mitja Sunčič’s study of Slovenian industrialists or George Greskovits’s study on the ambiguities embedded within historical narrations of Pál Teleki and András Hegedüs) or even of life-cycles (Yana Georgieva Yancheva’s article on agricultural collectivisation in Bulgaria) that came as a result of radical political shifts that have characterised the twentieth-century history of the region.

The other dimension of marginality may be found in the choice of the (auto)biographical subjects themselves. Most of the articles in this volume discuss the tensions between being an ‘insider’ and being an ‘outsider’, and how the meanings of these categories change as a result of time, space, and political circumstance. In this sense, what better place to examine the entanglement of biography and politics than East Central Europe, whose last three centuries of history have been characterised by rapid and extreme shifts in their political-ideological underpinnings? Changes in people’s status such as those recounted by Mitja Sunčič, and their relative marginalisation in society, have often accompanied these wider political and ideological cataclysms. Likewise, politics has affected the ways that individuals themselves interpret and narrate their lives, assigning meaning to particular events, often in unexpected ways. Thus, biography offers an opportunity to read the diverse culture, the political upheaval, and ultimately, the multiple histories of the region itself.

The tension between history and politics, however, is not exclusive to East Central Europe. Daryl Leeworthy shows us that contemporary political concerns entangle with local concerns about national and family identity. Likewise, Anastasia Felcher shows the twists and turns of the biography of Alexander Pushkin as it moved through the course of Russian history from the imperial to the Soviet periods. Finally, while Pierre-Heli Monot’s article is focused on more theoretical concerns regarding biography, this article nevertheless suggests the role that politics plays in the creation of a biographical subject, especially as the very definition of the ‘subject’ has come to be questioned in academia.

A second core theme that unites all the contributions featured in this special issue is their concern with the role of narrative in both biographical and identity research. Catalina Botez, Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, and Yana Georgieva Yancheva centre their studies of Primo Levi, Joseph Roth, and (self)narratives on Bulgarian collectivisation on the role of the subject in the recounting of their experiences, and the techniques used to bring coherence to otherwise fragmented life trajectories. As Botez and Lazaroms show, the narrative challenges faced by the two men were tied to the broader history of European Jewry in the twentieth century, many of whom faced the challenge of ‘re-starting’ their lives just as Roth did in exile, and Levi did in the wake of the Holocaust. The role of the (auto)biographical subject in the narration of his or her life story is also an important dimension of the study on Welsh miners, whose oral histories linked their experiences of Labour struggle to those of their ancestors, their towns, and their country. In this case, self-narration creates a sense of national historical continuity defined by otherwise disruptive work stoppages.

Notwithstanding the role of the subject in narrating his or her experience, George Greskovits’s contribution addresses the role of posthumous narrative in the case of the debates around the memorialisation of Hungarian politicians Pál Teleki and András Hegedüs. In this case, the role of narrative exposes the clash of historical legacy and contemporary political concerns. Debates on the link between biographical subjects and (historical) memory also takes a slightly different form in the contribution by Pierre-Heli Monot regarding metabiography. In this case, Monot reflects on the problem of narrative integrity as it clashes with narratives of fame and the creation of the subject or bios.

One of the central concerns regarding biography as discussed earlier has been the potential for biography to enrich the historiography of a particular debate. Victoria Harms’s contribution on the interplay of the biographical narratives of those composing a network of Hungarian and West German intellectuals with the (re)emergence of the political-intellectual concept of Mitteleuropa offers a novel approach that effectively weds the concerns of intellectual history with biography. Finally, narrative plays a diminished, but nevertheless significant role in the article by Tünde Cserpes who investigates the potential for quantitative sociological methodology in the study of identity. In this case, Cserpes suggests that biography may be combined with quantitative methodology to reveal how social networks, and by extension, an individual’s sense of identity change over time.

Though thematically organised around the dual concepts of marginality and narrative, each of the papers offers a unique approach to the relationship of biography and identity. The first two selections address more theoretical issues. In the first article, Pierre-Heli Monot uses metabiography – that is, self-reflexive biography – in order to tackle what he regards as the central problem of biographical writing: the creation of the biographical subject herself (bios). Analysing three metabiographies on such larger-than-life persons as Marilyn Monroe and William Shakespeare, Monot ultimately argues that there is an unresolved tension between the literary genre of biography and the discipline of history that creates an ambiguous position for literary biography within historiography.

A concern for the relationship between biography and historiography also plays an important part in Victoria Harms’s article, which uses biography to reflect on the intellectual debates around the concept of Mitteleuropa in the 1980s. Focusing on the intellectual network of Hungarian and West German intellectuals, Harms argues that the contents of the concept reflected the biographies of some of its biggest proponents, particularly those who saw Mitteleuropa as a pathway out of a bi-polar understanding of the Cold War world. Thus, Harms shows how biography can be used to contribute to the history of ideas.

The link between intellectual history and biography is also taken up by Ilse Josepha Lazaroms. In her article, Lazaroms argues that writer and journalist Joseph Roth’s strategy of personal mythmaking as revealed in his writing was reflective of the instability of (Central) European Jewish identity in the interwar period. Rejecting the idea that Roth was an escapist, Lazaroms instead posits that Roth’s self-narration provides a path into interpreting his ideas about European civilisation, which, he believed, was at the precipice of destruction. She shows that his identity and experiences as a Central European Jew profoundly informed his sensitivity to destructive political movements and his turn to an imagined past to imagine a renewed European future.

A similar regard for the relationship of literature to life writing forms the foundation of Catalina Botez’s article on one o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The politics of contested narratives: biographical approaches to modern European history. Introduction
• 2. Personal epistemologies: historiography, self-reflexivity and bios
• 3. Living Mitteleuropa in the 1980s: a network of Hungarian and West German Intellectuals
• 4. The double bind of self-narration: Joseph Roth, Jewish identity and the undercurrents of European modernity
• 5. Contiguous spaces of remembrance in identity writing: chemistry, fiction and the autobiographic question in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table
• 6. Measuring identity change: analysing fragments from the diary of Sándor Károlyi with social-network analysis
• 7. Re-presenting moral ambivalence: narratives of political monologue regarding András Hegedûs and Pál Teleki
• 8. Public festivities and the making of a national poet: a case study of Alexander Pushkin’s biography in 1899 and 1937
• 9. Self-identification through narrative: reflection on the collectivisation of agriculture in Bulgaria
• 10. Biography and social change: industrialists and the Communist revolution in Yugoslavia
• 11. The secret life of us: 1984, the miners’ strike and the place of biography in writing history ‘from below’
• Index