History and Theory, Theme Issue 47 (May 2009), 1-4 Wesleyan University 2009 ISSN: 0018-2656

Truth and Authenticity in Contemporary Historical

Culture: An introduction to historical representation
and historical truth

Christoph Classen and Wulf Kansteiner

Keywords: authenticity, historical consciousness, historical culture, Holocaust, realism,

digital media, traumatic memory

The contributors to this Theme Issue analyze the construction of historical truth
and authenticity in five different types of historical representations that play an
important role in contemporary historical culture. The six genres/media in question
are historical novels, historiography, photography, feature films, video games, and
museum exhibits. Since it is always easy to deconstruct other peoples historical
truths, the contributors focus on a representation of the past that they themselves
find particularly compelling and truthful. Thus all authors play a dual role. On the
one hand, they show us how a particular text or visual representation works and
what sleights of hand are employed to fabricate reality-effects in different cul-
tural settings. On the other hand, they celebrate the success of a text and its creators
who have influenced the historical consciousness of many consumers, including the
authors themselves. As a result, the contributors are not offering smug deconstruc-
tions of historical representations produced by allegedly theoretically nave histori-
ans and other practitioners of history. Instead, the essays engage in probing, open-
ended, and self-reflexive dialogues on the question of historical truth that are based
on sympathetic, close readings of a wide range of cultural artifacts. In an attempt
to foster interdisciplinary intellectual interplay, all essays focus on representations
of historical events that have often served as benchmarks in theoretical discussions
about historiography, historical culture, and the ethics of historical representation.
Five essays deal with representations of World War II and the Holocaust and one
with representations of the history and legacy of slavery in the U.S.
Ann Rigney discusses the extraordinary success of Kurt Vonneguts Slaugh-
terhouse Five in shaping cultural memories of the bombing of Dresden. Rigney
highlights the novels generic hybridity and its innovative narrative design.
Slaughterhouse Five is part fairy tale, part autobiographical testimony; it com-
bines elements of science fiction with passages that read like childrens literature.
The resulting ontological potpourri undermines chronological and logical lin-
earity and provides exceptional insight into the sensual experience of war through
a literary performance of traumatic memory. In this fashion the novel has become
We are grateful for the financial support of the Zentrum fr Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in
Potsdam, Germany.
 Christoph Classen and Wulf Kansteiner

a powerful mediator of historical understanding for a number of generations. To

date, Slaughterhouse Five remains an influential point of reference for all types
of historical knowledge, including historiography, despite the fact that the book
contains factual errors (for instance, concerning the number of victims killed in
Dresden).
Rigney categorizes Slaughterhouse Five as an early example of the genre of
historiographical metafiction, that is, fictional works that combine a narrative
about the past with reflection on the nature of historical representation. Follow-
ing Rigneys terminological lead, the next case study in the issue deals with a
piece of literary metahistory, that is, a factual account about the past that con-
veys important insights into the limits of historical representation through its in-
novative narrative design. Wulf Kansteiners analysis of Saul Friedlnders com-
prehensive history of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany
and the Jews, 19391945, shows that the book succeeds as an ethical intervention
because Friedlnder integrates the discussion of questions of historical causality
into a narrative performance of the victims point of view. As a result of the books
experimental, modernist structure, Friedlnder manages to capture key aspects of
the reality of Nazi persecution that have never been featured in previous synthetic
histories on the subject. Consequently, the books unusual design and extraordi-
nary success highlight important aesthetic interdependencies between historical
writing and other forms of cultural knowledge.
In her analysis of successful Holocaust photos, Judith Keilbach demonstrates
that photographic reflections of the events of the Final Solution attest to the ex-
istence of past actors and objects. But the photos are capable of transporting his-
torical knowledge only once they are integrated into discursive settings and nar-
rative frameworks of interpretation. In such contexts, photos can very effectively
trigger and reinforce preexisting historical knowledge, including knowledge that
does not correspond to the depicted circumstances. Keilbach cites the example of
the famous post-liberation photo of a bulldozer pushing piles of corpses into mass
graves in Bergen-Belsen. The image has come to symbolize the industrial mass
murder of the Nazis despite the fact that it depicts sanitary measures undertaken
by the Allies. Keilbach also illustrates that the success of Holocaust photostheir
ability to attain the status of symbolic imagesdepends on their compatibility
with different interpretive and emotional preferences. In the Third Reich, photos
of the victims were intended to reinforce the Nazis sense of their own racial su-
periority. In postwar Germany, some of these photos evoked feelings of empathy
with the suffering of Jews. The photos served this purpose particularly effectively
if they did not contain, or had been stripped of, any references to the historical
perpetrators thereby permitting postwar Germans to evade reflections on concrete
historical responsibility.
The Holocaust iconography described by Keilbach represents one of the
many aesthetic registers that Steven Spielberg handles with great virtuosity in
Schindlers List. Christoph Classen identifies these registers in considerable de-
tail, and attributes the movies extraordinary success to Spielbergs ability to cast
the vectors of memory that structured Western culture after the end of the Cold
War into a visual, narrative artifact of great commercial as well as considerable
 Truth and Authenticity in Contemporary Historical Culture 
critical appeal. Schindlers List is a conventional, romantic fairy tale played out
in the well-known narrative universe of Jewish sacrifice and rescue. It enshrines
the memory of the Holocaust as a key component of the Western civic religion of
human rights at a time of transition when contentious communicative memories
of World War II were transformed into more stable consensual cultural memo-
ries. But Classen demonstrates that Schindlers List turned into a media event of
extraordinary credibility only as a result of a number of very unusual aesthetic
choices. Spielberg combined narrative conventions of U.S. Westerns and authen-
ticity effects of Vietnam war movies with the auratic documentary appeal of black
and white footage; whenever possible, he shot in original locations throughout
Europe. The canonization of Holocaust history in Schindlers List is accomplished
through extensive yet seamless gestures of intertextuality and hybridity.
After four essays, the contributors to this special issue, and presumably also
their readers, have settled into a nice rhythm. Western historical culture is very
complex, unfolds in a transnational cultural context, and teems with intergeneric
and intermediatic references. Despite this diversity, similar patterns of facticity
and verisimilitude seem to repeat themselves in different realms of contemporary
historical culture. Most history products, be they novels, photographic exhibits,
or docudramas, strive for a certain degree of factual accuracy; in this respect they
take their cues from professional historiography. But the same products derive
historical legitimacy, as well as entertainment value, primarily from a careful ad-
aptation to and manipulation of contemporary media aesthetics. The real block-
busters la Vonnegut, Spielberg, and Friedlnder appear to take considerable
risks by committing well-gauged, yet radical, transgressions of the conventional
limits of historical taste. They attain an extra degree of authenticity by breaking
and readjusting the rules of the game within one media package. The result is a
historical novel peopled by extra-terrestrials, a 1990s runaway movie success shot
almost entirely in black and white, and a prize-winning historical study that flouts
the rules of academic historical writing. These blockbusters derive a lot of their
innovative zeal from their ambition to cast the emotions of the contemporaries of
war and genocide into narrative-visual formats that render these emotions intel-
ligible and meaningful to subsequent generations.
But just when we have developed a pleasant sense of critical control over an
often confusing cultural scene, Claudio Fogu pulls the rug out from underneath
our reassuring dialectic of past and present and truth and reality. Fogu argues that
the digital revolution, and especially video-game culture, mark a turning point of
similar proportions to the invention of modern historical consciousness at the end
of the eighteenth century. As new generations are enjoying the immersive qualities
of digital interactivity, they are literally losing their sense of time. Video games are
no longer designed to construct meaningful relations between past and present in
terms of narratives of progress or causality. In the digital world of video gaming,
the verisimilitude of historical settings, be they Roman antiquity or Auschwitz, are
no longer measured against concepts of history that are more or less compatible
with historiographical notions of the relations between past and present, as we as-
sume has generally been the case in linear cultural settings. Instead, video games
offer attractive sensory simulations of the experience of space in an ever-expand-
 Christoph Classen and Wulf Kansteiner

ing range of virtual environments. As a result, the authenticity effect of the gaming
experience depends on the players and the softwares ability to conjure up experi-
ences of space that reflect, expand, and dialectically improve upon similar previous
virtual and real experiences. In the digital world anticipated by Fogu, history as we
know it will cease to be an important vector of human consciousness.
In her review essay Bettina Carbonell illustrates that the digital technologies
discussed by Fogu have revolutionized museum environments and transferred to
museum visitors an active role in the construction of historical exhibits. Carbonell
reviews three exhibits on the history of slavery in New York organized by the
New-York Historical Society in 2006 and 2007. The unusual occurrence of a
series of three exhibits on the same topic and based on the same collection of
artifacts offers valuable comparative insights into the semantics of the staging of
historical objects. In the course of the three exhibits, the same objects, for instance
slave shackles, have been displayed in different aesthetic contexts and subjected
to different degrees of narrativization ranging from display at degree zero, that is,
the absence of narrative context, to elaborate explanations that contain complex
historical knowledge. In each setting the objects developed different truth and
ethical effects. Carbonells analysis reveals that extensive contextualization is not
always the best display strategy, especially in the case of a topic like slavery.
When objects receive the full museum treatment through careful staging and
narrativization they are inadvertently reduced to the role of authentication devices
that give credibility to specific interpretations of the past. In contrast, at degree
zero, an object attests to its own existence as relic, and visitors can more easily
integrate the object and its weak redemptive power into their own visions of the
past, especially if they have interactive technologies at their disposal.
We will find out in due time if Fogus predictions about the spatialization of
historical culture are correct. His insights certainly explain the success of digital
interactive technologies in contemporary museum culture. After all, historical ex-
hibits have always been in the business of spatializing the past. In the meantime,
Fogus analysis of video-game culture calls into question the conceptual vantage
point from which academics and especially historians have observed their cul-
tural contexts. A lot of the texts and images, including possibly the blockbusters
mentioned above, that we have conveniently subsumed under the sign of history,
may well be experienced according to very different parameters by other audi-
ences. From an interactively trained point of view, for example, the historical
docudramas la Schindlers List that continue to appear in large numbers on con-
temporary film and TV screens may simply constitute rigid and quaint simulations
of alternative universes that provide little immersive entertainment and have no
bearing on the present. If this speculation turns out to be correct, the generational
divide between the contemporaries of World War II and their descendants, a di-
vide that people like Vonnegut and Friedlnder, among others, have bridged so
successfully, will soon be overshadowed by the generational abyss that separates
people who grew up in a linear cultural environment from those who have devel-
oped fully interactively shaped forms of cultural consciousness.

Zentrum fr Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany

State University of New York, Binghamton