ABSTRACT
At the very end of the epilogue to The Unmasterable Past, Charles Maier wondered whether the Historikerstreit represented the final arrival of ‘post-modern historiography’ in (West) Germany. Basically he thought it did. Nolte and his colleagues, he said, had launched ‘a sharp attack on history as a would-be social science and a critique of any implicit theory of progress or redemption’. ‘Post-modern historiography’, he added, following Habermas:
is attempting to fill a void left by the erosion of the earlier social-democratic premises of post-1960 [post-Fischer] history and politics. Fill it with history as ritual, discourse, or carnival. Sometimes the purpose has been to explore the hitherto neglected ways by which actors without formal power could nonetheless contest the hierarchies that regulated their everyday lives. In such a case the new history still presupposes a world of real power and struggle. But in some historical and anthropological reconstructions, politics loses any instrumental rationality. It no longer embodies socially purposive aspirations, whether for emancipation or for domination, and appears only as ritual or theater, the state as cinema. Whatever the new and allusive subject, the major thrust of postmodern historiography is the unmooring of politics from any unambiguous correspondence with social structure.1
