Essay Why Should Historians of Modern Europe Read Novels?

INTRODUCTION

History of the Present
Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches From Europe in the 1990s
By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
Random House

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Even at one minute past midnight on 1 Jan 1990, we already knew that this would be a formative decade in Europe. A forty-year-old European gild had just collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone was hailing a "new Europe." But no one knew what it would look similar.

Now we know: in Western Europe, in Germany, in Central Europe, and in the Balkans. Of course, in all these parts, the time to come volition exist full of surprises. Information technology e'er is. But at the end of the decade nosotros tin meet the wide outline of the new European order that we have already ceased to call new. Only in the vast, ethnically checkered territory of the one-time Soviet Marriage is fifty-fifty the basic management of states such as Russia and Ukraine still hidden in the fog. And perhaps also, at Europe's other end, that of the decreasingly United Kingdom.

This book does non pretend to be a comprehensive account of the 1990s in Europe. It is a drove of what are rightly called pieces-in other words, fragments-that reflect my own interests, expertise, and travels. However, a chronology running through the book not only supplies missing links between the pieces but also records pregnant European developments not covered in any of them. Into this time line I have inserted some curt, diarylike sketches, drawn mainly from my own notebooks and recollections. In that location are as well several longer sketches in the main text. The largest part of the book consists of analytical reportages, mostly published in The New York Review of Books, later on the skilled attentions of the editor to whom this book is dedicated. Finally, at that place are a few essays in which I attempt an interim synthesis on a larger subject area, such as the evolution of the European Union, Britain'south troubled relationship with Europe, or the way countries deal with the legacy of a dictatorship.

Equally befits "history of the present," everything in the main text was written at or shortly later the time it describes. The pieces have been edited lightly, mainly to eliminate repetition, only nothing of substance has been added or changed. I compiled the chronology and brusque sketches more than recently. Occasionally, I take besides added a comment at the end of a slice.

Here I want to reflect on writing "history of the present." The phrase is not mine. It was, then far every bit I know, coined by the veteran American diplomat and historian George Kennan in a review of my book about Primal Europe in the 1980s, The Uses of Arduousness. It is, for me, the best possible description of what I have been trying to write for twenty years, combining the crafts of historian and journalist.

Yet it immediately invites dissent. History of the present? Surely that's a contradiction in terms. Surely history is by definition almost the by. History is books on Caesar, the Thirty Years State of war, or the Russian Revolution. It is discoveries and new interpretations based on years of studying documents in the athenaeum.

Let's put aside straightaway the objection that "the nowadays" is merely a line, scarcely a millisecond wide, between past and future. We know what we mean here by "the present," fifty-fifty if the chronological boundaries are always disputed. Call it "the very recent by" or "current affairs" if you would rather. The important bespeak is this: Not just professional person historians but most arbiters of our intellectual life feel that a certain minimum menstruation of fourth dimension needs to have passed and that certain approved kinds of archival source should be available earlier anything written about this immediate past qualifies as history.

It was not ever thus. As the formidably learned German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck has observed, from the time of Thucydides until well into the eighteenth century, to have been an eyewitness to the events described or, fifty-fifty ameliorate, to have been a participant in them was considered a major reward for a winter of history. Contemporary history was thought to be the best history. It is only since the emergence of the idea of progress, the growth of critical philology, and the work of Leopold von Ranke that historians have come to believe that you sympathise events better if you are farther abroad from them. If you cease to think about it, this is actually a very odd idea: that the person who wasn't there knows better than the person who was.

Even the near austere neo-Rankean depends upon the witnesses who make the first record of the by. If they exercise not brand a record, there is no history. If they exercise it badly or in pursuit of a quite different agenda (religious, say, or astrological or scatological), the historian will non notice answers to the questions he wants to ask. It's therefore all-time to take a witness who is himself interested in finding answers to the historian's questions about sources and causes, structure and procedure, the private and the mass. Hence, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville's personal account of the 1848 revolution in France is worth 20 other memoirs of that fourth dimension.

This need for the historically minded witness has become more acute in recent times for a elementary reason. In Ranke'south day, politics was put on paper. Diplomacy was conducted or noted immediately in correspondence. Politicians, generals, and diplomats wrote extensive diaries, messages, and memorandums. Fifty-fifty then, of course, much that was vital was non written down-murmured private understandings in the corridors of the Congress of Vienna, the pillow talk of queens. So, as at present, most of human experience was never recorded at all. Only nigh of politics was.

Today, nonetheless, loftier politics is more and more than pursued in personal meetings (thanks to the jet plane) or past telephone (increasingly past mobile telephone) or by other forms of electronic advice. Certainly, minutes of meetings are fabricated afterward and, at the highest levels, so are transcripts of phone conversations. Just the proportion of important business actually put on paper has diminished. And who writes narrative letters or detailed diaries any more? A dwindling minority.

To be certain, researchers tin can lookout man television footage. Sometimes, they can listen to the telephone tapes-or taps-of those conversations. Perhaps in future they will as well read the eastward-mails. The signal is not that in that location are fewer sources than there were. Quite the reverse. Where the aboriginal historian has to reconstruct a whole epoch from a unmarried papyrus, the contemporary historian has a roomful of sources for a single twenty-four hour period. It is the ratio of quantity to quality that has changed for the worse.

On the other paw, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, and businesspeople accept never been so eager to give their ain version of what has simply happened. Iraqi crises famously unfold in "existent time" on CNN. European ministers tumble out of European union meetings to brief journalists from their own countries. Naturally, each gives his own twist and spin. But if you put the different versions together, you take a pretty adept instant picture of what occurred.

In short, what yous can know shortly afterward the outcome has increased, and what you can know long later the event has macerated. This is particularly the case with extraordinary events. During some of the dramatic debates between the leaders of Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution," in the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in Nov 1989, I was the only person nowadays taking notes. I remember thinking, "If I don't write this down, nobody will. It will be gone for ever, like bathwater down the bleed." So much recent history has disappeared similar that, never to exist recovered, for want of a recorder.

Ii objections remain strong. Outset, since those things governments and individuals effort to keep secret are oft the most important things, the eventual release of new sources volition change pictures substantially. This is not a conclusive argument for waiting-in the meantime, other equally important things, well understood at the moment, may be forgotten-but information technology is a major take chances of the genre. In the preface to my beginning "history of the present," an account of the Solidarity revolution in Poland, I observed that I would not accept attempted to write the book had it seemed likely that the official papers of the Soviet and Smoothen communist regimes would get available in the foreseeable futurity. That, I continued blithely, seemed "as probable as the restoration of the monarchy in Warsaw or Moscow." Eight years later, the Soviet bloc had collapsed and many of those papers were available. Fortunately, I also quoted Walter Raleigh'south alarm, in the preface to his History of the World, that "who-so-euer in writing a modern Historie shall follow truth besides neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth."

The second strong objection is that we don't know the consequences of current developments, then our agreement of their historical significance is much more speculative and liable to revision. Again, this is plainly truthful. Every high-school senior studying ancient history knows that the Roman empire declined and fell. Writing about the Soviet empire in the 1980s, none of u.s. knew the terminate of the story. In 1988, I published an essay entitled "The Empire in Decay", but I nevertheless thought the empire'due south fall was a long style off. In January 1989, I wrote an article pooh-poohing suggestions that the Berlin Wall might shortly exist breached.

Yet at that place is also an reward here. You record what people did non know at the time-for instance, that the Wall was almost to come up down. You dwell on developments that seemed terribly important and so just would otherwise be quite forgotten now because they led nowhere. You thus avoid peradventure the near powerful of all the optical illusions of historical writing.

I of the real pleasures of immersing yourself in the archives of a closed menstruum is that you gradually, over months and years, see a pattern slowly emerging through the vast piles of paper, like a message written in invisible ink. Only and then you outset wondering, Is this pattern really in the by itself? Or is it just in your own head? Or possibly it is a pattern from the fabric of your ain times. Each generation has its own Cromwell, its own French Revolution, its own Napoleon. Where contemporaries saw but a darkling plainly, you discern a tidy park, a well-lit square, or nigh often a road leading to the next historical milestone. The French philosopher Henri Bergson talks of the "illusions of retrospective determinism."

American journalists writing books of recent history sometimes modestly refer to them equally "the commencement draft of history." This implies that the scholar's 2nd or tertiary draft volition always be an improvement. Well, in some ways information technology may exist, having more sources and a longer perspective. Just in others it may not be, because the scholar will non know, and therefore will find information technology more hard to copy, what it was really like at the time; how places looked and smelled, how people felt, what they didn't know. Writers work in different ways, merely I can sum up my own experience in a doggerel line: There is zilch to compare with being at that place. <br><p>Kennan observed that history of the present lies "in that small and rarely visited field of literary effort where journalism, history and literature ... come up together." Again, this seems to me exactly correct. The corner of Europe where Germany, France, and Switzerland come across is known in German language as the Dreiländereck, or Three Country Corner. "History of the present" lies in a 3 State Corner between journalism, history, and literature. Such frontier areas are ever interesting merely ofttimes tense. Sometimes working in this one feels like walking in a no-man's-land.

The shortest and best-marked frontier is that between history and journalism on the 1 side and literature on the other. Both skillful journalism and skilful history have some of the qualities of good fiction: imaginative sympathy with the characters involved, literary powers of option, clarification, and evocation. Reportage or historical narrative is always an individual author's story, shaped by his or her unique perception and organisation of words on the page. It requires an effort not merely of research but of imagination to get within the experience of the people you lot are writing about. To this extent, the historian or announcer does work like a novelist. We acknowledge this implicitly when we talk of "Michelet's Napoleon" as opposed to "Taine's Napoleon" or "Carlyle's Napoleon."

Yet there is a sharp and fundamental difference, which concerns the kind of truth existence sought. The novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who played fast and loose with all facts, including those about his own life, defended himself aggressively. "I'thou interested in truth not facts," he said, "and I'm old enough to know the divergence." In a sense, every novelist can say that. No journalist or historian should. In this, nosotros also differ from the father of gimmicky history. Thucydides felt gratis to put words into Pericles' mouth, as a novelist world. Nosotros practise not. Our "characters" are real people, and the larger truths we seek have to exist fabricated from the bricks and mortar of facts. What did the prime minister say exactly? Was it before or after the explosion in the Sarajevo marketplace, and whose mortar actually fired the fatal beat out?

Some postmodernists disagree. They suggest that the work of historians should be judged like that of fiction writers, for its rhetorical ability and capacity of imaginative conviction, not for some illusory factual truth. Eric Hobsbawm'due south given a finely measured response: "It is essential" he writes, "for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, existence literary compositions, the raw material of those fictions is verifiable fact."

That applies equally to journalism. Nosotros all know about fabrications at the bottom end of journalism, in the gutter press. Unfortunately, the frontier with fiction is also violated at the superlative end of journalism, especially in reportage that aspires to be literature. Any reportage worth reading involves rearranging material, highlighting, and, to some extent, turning real people into characters in a drama. Merely the line is crossed when quotations are invented or the order of events is changed. There is 1 genre of modern journalism, the "dramadocumentary" or "faction," which does this avowedly. Faction is, so to speak, honestly dishonest. But more frequently this is done behind a mask of spare actuality.

The precedents are distinguished. John Reed's account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, is probably one of the almost influential pieces of reportage ever written. Even so he spoke most no Russian, regularly made up dialogue, offered secondhand accounts as immediate, mixed up dates, and added imaginative particular. As Neal Ascherson observes, in a fine essay on his work, Reed "gives a thrilling account of Lenin'south appearance at a airtight Bolshevik meeting in Smolny on 3 November, allegedly communicated to him outside the door by Volodarsky as the coming together went on. No such meeting took identify. "

To salve us from Reed's affliction and to spoil our all-time stories, great American journals such as The New Yorker employ fact-checkers. As they drag their fine combs through your text, information technology is horrible to observe how many pocket-sized errors of fact take slipped into your notebook or intruded on the path from notebook to text. But sooner or later you come to the passages, often the most of import ones, that they comment in the margin, "On writer." This ways y'all are the simply source for the fact (if fact it exist) that, for case, a church door in the Krajina was stained with blood, or a Kosovo rebel leader said what your notebook records that he said. And so you are solitary with your notebook and your conscience. Did he really say that?

Ideally, I suppose, one should be permanently wired for sound, like a superspy. Or, fifty-fifty better, take a miniature video camera implanted in one's skull. And certainly some of the very best contemporary history has been washed on television. I call up of documentary series such every bit The Death of Yugoslavia. Although the television set photographic camera tin can besides be fabricated to lie by tendentious selection and manipulative editing, at best information technology brings you lot closer than any other medium to how things really were.

For the writer, nevertheless, the conventional, handheld, visible tape recorder and television camera take major disadvantages. They are cumbersome, fifty-fifty in their latest, slimmed-downwards, loftier-tech versions. Try using one at the same time as taking notes during a fast-moving sit-in. It is, in exercise, very difficult to see simultaneously with both the camera'southward and the writer's eye. You lot're e'er liable to miss the telling detail that is vital to proficient reportage considering y'all're fiddling with a tape or lens. And so you keep worrying most whether and what they are recording. Record recorders and cameras put people off. Politicians and and so-called ordinary people speak less naturally and freely equally soon every bit the machines come out. Worse withal, cameras and microphones as well turn people on. Demonstrators or soldiers strike heroic poses and make portentous statements they would non otherwise make. So these apparently neutral, mindless recorders of reality actually change information technology past their mere presence. Nevertheless even the visible notebook does that.

I occasionally utilise a record recorder for an important conversation, but my inseparable companion is a pocket notebook. The notebook is oftentimes open up when the person is speaking, but sometimes, when I think they will talk more than freely or but when walking or eating or whatsoever, it is not. Then I write the conversation downward equally presently equally possible after. I am obsessed with accuracy and, subsequently xx years, rather well good in this kind of remembering. But as I look dorsum through my notebooks there is e'er this nagging business: Did he really say that?

Take the opening passage of my reportage from Serbia in March 1997: the student named Momcˆilo exclaiming "I only want to alive in a normal land," and then on. Now Momcˆilo said this, in his imperfect English, as we hurried through the streets of Belgrade toward a students' meeting. I wrote it down as soon as nosotros got in that location. If I had a tape recording of what he actually told me, it would probably exist slightly different-a scrap more awkward and less sharp. Simply I don't accept a tape recording. The verifiable historical truth of that fragment of the past is gone for adept. You lot just accept to trust me. A little later, I relate excited exchanges at the student coming together. These I scribbled downward as they happened. But I don't speak Serbian, so what yous read is my interpreter's version and we both have to trust her.

Altogether, the concern of language is crucial. Most of what is quoted in this book was said or written in languages I understand. Only some, particularly from Albanian and the southern Slav languages now called Serbian, Croation, Bosnian, and Macedonian, was translated for me past an interpreter, with the inevitable loss of accuracy and nuance. The first matter to ask of anyone writing about anywhere is, Does he or she know the language?

Finally, it seems to me, the key to trust is not the technical apparatus of audiovisual recording and sourcing and fact-checking, invaluable though that is. It is a quality that may best be described as veracity. No one volition ever be completely accurate. In that location is a margin of unavoidable error and, so to speak, necessary license if cacophonous, Babel-like reality is to be turned into readable prose. But the reader must be convinced that an author has a habit of accuracy, that he is genuinely trying to get at all the relevant facts, and that he will nor play fast and loose with them for literary effect. The reader should feel that while the author may not really have a video recording of what he is describing, he would always like to.

George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a model of this kind of veracity. The volume is a slice of literature. It is inaccurate in many details, non to the lowest degree because Orwell's notebooks were stolen by the communist goons who came to abort him equally a Trotskyist. Yet yous don't doubt for a unmarried moment that he is striving for the greatest possible accurateness, for the fact-based truth that must always set apart the plains of history and journalism from the magic mountains of fiction.

The frontier between journalism and history is the longest in our Iii Country Corner. It is besides the least well marked and therefore the about tense and disputed. I tin testify to this, having lived on both sides and in between. In journalism, to draw a piece as "rather academic"-meaning jargon heavy, irksome, unreadable-is the surest path to the fasten. In academe, it's a put-down to say that somebody's work is "journalistic," significant superficial, racy, and generally not serious. "Contemporary history?" sniffed an elderly don when I returned to my Oxford college from a chore in journalism at the terminate of the 1980s. "You mean journalism with footnotes?"

I think information technology's important to understand that the reasons why so much is made of the differences between journalism and academic or professional person history have at to the lowest degree as much to practise with the practical exigencies, cocky-images, and neuroses of the two professions as they accept with the real intellectual substance of the ii crafts. Granted, the qualities of bad journalism and bad history are very different: sensationalist, intrusive, populist tosh with millions of readers on the one side; overspecialized, badly argued, ill-written doctorates with no readers on the other. But the virtues of adept journalism and skilful history are very like: exhaustive, scrupulous enquiry; a sophisticated, critical arroyo to the sources; a strong sense of time and place; imaginative sympathy with all sides; logical statement; clear and vivid prose. Was Macaulay, in his essays for the Edinburgh Review, a historian or a announcer? Both, of course.

Withal, in modernistic Western societies, profession is a defining feature of personal identity, and the professions that are closest together take well-nigh pains to distinguish themselves. I say modern Western societies, incidentally, because this was not and so truthful in the communist world, where the about important social identification was with a wide course: intelligentsia, workers, or peasants. Ane of the interesting experiences of the last decade in formerly communist parts of Europe has been to run into friends apace becoming differentiated by profession, Western manner. Where once they were all fellow members of the intelligentsia, now they are academics, lawyers, publishers, journalists, doctors, and bankers, with diverging ways of life, styles of clothes, homes, incomes, and attitudes.

Now, considering of the ways in which the professions of journalism and history have adult and considering of the edginess between them, the writing of "history of the present" has tended to autumn betwixt the two. That no-homo's-land is perhaps wider and more tense than it was when Lewis Namier put aside eighteenth-century English politics to chart the European diplomatic history of his own times and Hugh Trevor-Roper turned from Archbishop Laud to write The Last Days of Hitler

Every profession has its characteristic fault. If I had to summarize in a word, I would say that the characteristic fault of journalistic writing is superficiality and that of bookish writing is unreality. Journalists have to write and so much, and they are and so pressed for time. Sometimes they are "parachuted" into countries or situations most which they know goose egg and expected to report on them within hours. Hence the famous, horrible line 'Anyone here been raped and speak English?" Then their copy is cutting and rewritten by editors and subeditors who are working to even tighter deadlines. And, anyway, tomorrow is another 24-hour interval, some other piece.

Academics, by dissimilarity, can take years to finish a single article. They can (and sometimes do) accept infinite pains to check facts, names, quotations, texts, and contexts, to consider and reconsider the validity of an interpretation. But they can too spend a life describing state of war without ever seeing a shot fired in anger. Witnessing existent life is not what they are supposed---or funded-to do. Methodology, footnotes, and positioning in some ongoing academic debate can seem as important as working out what really happened and why. Participants in the worlds they describe sometimes throw up their hands in laughter and despair at the unreality of what comes out.

Of class, I could equally dwell on the characteristic virtue of each side, which is the opposite of the other'south characteristic fault: depth in scholarship, realism in journalism. The interesting question is, Has it gotten worse or better? Well, some things have improved. If you lot read what passed for contemporary history in Great britain in the 1920s, you find a bluff amateurism unthinkable today. In journalism, the growth of globe television-news services such as CNN, Reuters, and BBC World Television and that of documentation on the Internet offers wonderfully rich new sources for nowadays history. But, on the whole, I think information technology has gotten worse.

In that location is even so a handful of keen international newspapers of tape. Tiptop of my personal brusk listing would be The New York Times, The Washington Mail service, and The International Herald Tribune, The Financial Times, Le Monde in France, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the German-speaking earth. Yous tin can generally believe what you read in these papers. Yet fifty-fifty with this select group, it is astonishing how many discrepancies you find if yous buy them all and compare their accounts of the same upshot. By and large, they practise notwithstanding separate fact and opinion, although there are exceptions. For case, the coverage of the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was for years distorted by the pro-Croat views of 1 of that newspaper's publishers.

In my view, the strange reporting in the leading American newspapers is the best in the world. Senior, highly educated American journalists are proud to describe themselves as a "reporter," whereas in Britain every twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college wants to be a "columnist" or "commentator. " Standards of editorial accuracy and fact-checking are second to none, and corrections are published when errors are fabricated. Moreover, all-encompassing space is given to foreign coverage. You have a definite sense that what happens almost anywhere in the earth matters, because the country in which the paper appears is a world power. What was true of The Times of London a hundred years ago is true of The New York Times today. For an Englishman, the contrast in quality of foreign coverage betwixt the New York and the London Times is now painful to observe.

Outside this small group, the value every bit historical tape of most other newspapers in almost other countries is slight, and diminishing. This is particularly true in Britain, where the fierce commercial competition for readers-to a higher place all between the groups headed by the Australian-American possessor of The Times, Rupert Murdoch, and the Canadian proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black-has resulted in a further erosion of the journalism of record. I'm talking non just about the quite astonishing levels of routine inaccuracy and distortion, for reasons of both sensationalism and ideology-although in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland this is especially apparent in anything to do with the European Union. As important are two other traits: featurism and futurism.

A large function of newspapers is now taken up not, every bit their name would suggest, with news, simply with features: lifestyle, dazzler, fashion, medicine, food, holidays, etc. This is what readers are said to desire. Meanwhile, in what remains of the news pages, there is the more subtle affliction of futurism. More and more than space is devoted to speculating about what may happen tomorrow rather than describing what happened yesterday-the original mission of journalism. When read any time after today, this stuff is useless, except every bit an illustration of what people did not know at the time. Reading my own pieces for this book, I am once more reminded that nada ages more rapidly than prophecy-fifty-fifty when it was prescient.

For all these reasons, the history of the nowadays gets written less in its first natural dwelling, the newspapers. But in that location are also problems on the academic side of the frontier. Some professional person historians do tackle subjects in recent history. Even the Oxford history kinesthesia; long accounted bourgeois (with a pocket-size c), now has a history syllabus that is open up-concluded toward the present. Nonetheless, in my experience, well-nigh academic historians are still reluctant to venture much closer to the present than the canonical thirty years later on which official papers are released in well-nigh democracies. They still incline to leave this territory to colleagues who have made it their own in subjects such as International Relations, Political Science, Security Studies, European Studies, or Refugee Studies.

Yet these relatively new specialisms often experience the need to constitute their academic credentials, their claim to the loftier proper noun of Science (in the German language sense of Wissenschaft), past a heavy dose of theory, jargon, abstraction, or quantification. Otherwise-horror of horrors-their products might be confused with journalism. Even when those involved have been trained to write history, the results often suffer from overspecialization, unreadable prose, and that characteristic fault: unreality. At the same time, the pressures of American-style "publish or perish" mean that a huge amount of academic work in progress is hastily thrown into book form. Here, likewise, the ratio of quantity to quality has surely inverse for the worse.

And then I maintain that, for all its pitfalls, the literary enterprise of writing "history of the nowadays" has e'er been worth attempting. Information technology is even more than so now because of the style history is made and recorded in our time. Sadly, it has suffered from developments in the professions of journalism and bookish history.

Notwithstanding yous can soon have enough of such methodological self-exam. Altogether, the habit of compulsive labeling, pigeonholing, and compartmentalizing seems to me a affliction of modern intellectual life. Permit the work speak for itself, In the finish, only one matter matters: Is the result true, of import, interesting, or moving? If it is, never mind the label. If it isn't, then it'due south non worth reading anyway.

T.G.A., Oxford-Stanford, March 2000

(C) 2000 Timothy Garton Ash All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-375-50353-6

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