Telling Lives

In 1992 I published a biography of the eminent Danish pioneering educationalist Natalie Zahle (1827–1913). Doing so, I kick-started a process of what I have termed rehumanizing historiography. My book, titled Viljens Styrke. Natalie Zahle—en biografiom køn, dannelse og magtfuldkommenhed [Natalie Zahle—The Strength of Will. A Biography of Natalie Zahle] (Possing 1992a), questioned a structuralist historiography. This challenge sparked off a discussion among historians about the biography as a scholarly genre. In Scandinavian academia, the death knell had long-since tolled for the historical biography, given that structuralism and Marxism had deemed the individual character irrelevant as historical protagonist. To my surprise, the debate spread like wildfire through the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish specialist community in the early 1990s, and my biography of Natalie Zahle became highly popular with the well-read part of the general public. To my pleasure as a writer, the book, which was a published version of my doctoral dissertation, was read as both literature and scholarship. This great interest in the biography caused the chair of the adjudication panel, Danish professor of history Niels Thomsen, who had initially endorsed the work as doctoral dissertation, publicly to challenge its relevance to scholarship (!). Grand emotions were triggered, and the general public as well as the specialist academic public goggled at the professor’s inconsistent comments (Possing 1992b: 2, 1997a: 2, 1999: 2; Ambjörnsson et al. 1997). The reaction gave me the impetus to reflect further on the methodology of the classic life-and-times biography, this being the genre my biography of Natalie Zahle had introduced to a Danish readership. The purpose of professor Thomsen’s criticism had not been to pave the way for further insight into biographical methodologies, types, and tools and thus aid other ventures into this genre. However, following his crusade against the relevance of the historical biography to history as a discipline, research-based historical biographies flowed off the presses in Denmark and the other Nordic countries. ¹ I went on to write a number of biographies—long, short, and ultra-short ² —and also tried my hand with more methodological considerations of the analytic methods and typologies the biographical genre has presented in the past, has on its current agenda, and might offer in the future. ³