2005, Vol., No.54

Journal of Humanities, Seoul National University 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.89

pISSN : 1598-3021 / eISSN : 2671-7921
https://journal.kci.go.kr/snu-ioh

This paper aims to examine the various discussions about the nature of Stalinism among Russian writers, particularly historians, during the Gorbachev era. Enjoying almost unlimited freedom of speech under glasnost', Russian writers tried to rewrite the history of Stalin's era overall. They sought to find the origins of Stalinism, reexamined the causes and results of the forced collectivization of agriculture and industrialization, and wrote about the Stalin's crimes of which almost most of the Soviet people did not know until then. Moreover, they challenged the traditional interpretations of the Soviet-German War through which the Soviet Union emerged as one of two superpowers in the postwar era. The enlarged freedom of research of the Soviet past, however, did not always produce good works. This is because rewriting Soviet history has been begun mainly by the nonspecialists such as publicists and journalists who were less familiar with historical research. In analysing the main aspects of Stalinism, they tended to put certain fixed conceptions over the empirical facts in order to serve a political purpose. Therefore, for them, Stalinism was not the complicated social and political phenomena whose mechanism was to be explained, but a historical deviation from "normal course" which was to be refused. Such a low quality of the debate was aggravated by the fact that most of Russian writers still kept traditional Soviet Marxist views of history as their main methodology, which has tended to emphasize political and economic history. They failed to reinterpret Soviet history with new historical methodology emphasizing social and cultural views of history. Some researchers, however, showed their capability sufficient for rewriting Soviet history seriously. Their works made much contribution to the development of the Russian historiography after Gorbachev.

The purpose of this article is to survey the changes of German historiography after the World War II and to reflect upon the relationship between the representation of the German past in historiography and the social and political culture. The survey of this article clearly shows that the changes of the dominant version of presenting German development were closely related with the dominant tendency of political culture: The cold war system not only strengthened the Marxist interpretation in East Germany, but also facilitated the continuation of the Nationalist version of German historiography in West Germany. The predominance of the Critical History of Society in the 1960s, 70s in West Germany can be engendered by the reform phase of the German politics at that time, just as the predicament of the social history and the methodological shifts toward the postmodernism were coincided with the political reunification and the strengthening of the European Union.

Es wird im Allgemeinen zugestimmt, daß die Geisteswissenschaften in Deutschland zur Zeit einen bedenklichen Niedergang erleiden. Diese Verfallserscheinung ist schon lange spürbar, obzwar man darüber erst heute im Ernst zu diskutieren anfängt. Z. B. der englische Physiker, Ch. P. Snow, hat vor ca. 50 Jahren eine Prognose vorgelegt, daß man in der Zukunft vornehmlich deshalb nicht mehr eine wahrhaft menschliche Kultur genießen werde, weil sich die Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften und die der Naturwissenschaften gleichgültig gegeneinander verhalten. Da das Besorgnis Snows für uns bedauerlicherweise Realität ist, sollten die Geisteswissenschaften ihrerseits nach einem Ausweg aus dieser Krise suchen, indem sie die Einheit von Geist und Natur erneut begründen und dadurch eine neue Perspektive für die zukünftige Kultur bieten. Und insofern es das ist, worum es bei der modernen deutschen Kulturwissenschaft geht, kann man konsequent sagen, daß ihr Geist ein synthetisierender ist. Nun ist der gleiche Geist in der Ästhetik vom deutschen Idealismus wieder zu finden, denn sie bestimmt sich primär als eine Wissenschaft, welche die Idee des modernen Geistes, nämlich die Einheit von Natur und Geist ästhetisch erkennen will. Die neue Kulturwissenschaft und die Ästhetik vom deutschen Idealismus haben also im synthetisierenden Geist einen gemeinsamen Nenner. Die Tatsache, daß die Fakultät für die Kulturwissenschaft in Berliner Humboldt-Universität sowohl Kulturwissenschaft als auch Ästhetik lehrt, gilt als einen geprüpften Beleg für die immanente Beziehung zwischen der Ästhetik und der Kulturwissenschaft.