History Writing as the Return of the Repressed (original) (raw)

Abstract

When, in 1994, a very close friend, the German historian Gunnar Hering, died, I looked again through his writings in order to prepare an obituary. Between books with voluminous documentation and thorough analysis, I found a little essay on a topic rather uncommon for him: the history of the Estonian artist Count Otto Magnus von Stackelberg (1788-1837), who had left his northern country to come south to Italy and Greece and paint landscapes and portraits. 1 Between the lines of his text, the thing that jumped out was how my friend, in writing the history of the artist, had written his own history. He himself had been born in Dresden and gone to study the history, languages and cultures of Southeast Europe, soon becoming a specialist on the region and specifically on Greece. The similarity did not stop at external analogies, but was also there in the description of the experience and the interpretation of the behaviour, mentality and psychology of the artist. Knowing Gunnar well, I realized that in the plot, just as in the phrasal texture and as well as the style, there was something that connected him with the actions and events of this artist's life. Hering had written a faithful history of the artist and did not use it as a pretext to write his own history. If I could read his own history between the lines of the artist's history, it was because I recognized the phrases in which he described it, the same phrases which he had used, during our discussions, to describe his own experience. Then, I wrote a text with the title "Gunnar Hering Writing His Own Autobiography," in which I tried to show how Gunnar had written his own intellectual biography while writing the history of the artist. 2 My conclusion was rendered through a metaphor, taken from painters' experience. History Writing as the Return of the Repressed Writing history, I argued, is like whitewashing a wet wall. At the end of the effort, instead of pure whiteness, a map of rising damp has surfaced. Our own experience is like the dampness of the wall. It is coming through, even as we write the experience of historical otherness. I used this metaphor because writing our own history through the history of others is not a conscious process. The more we try to separate our sympathies and antipathies, the more we try to distance ourselves from our experience, the more this comes out from us in the writing of history.

Figures (2)

| came out of prison in 1973 and continued to be politically active until 1977. Nevertheless | ha a feeling of frustration, of political stagnation, or better, of political suffocation. This might seer strange, because the years after the fall of the junta were years in which democracy we established in Greece, and certainly a democracy of better quality than had existed before th dictatorship. However, few of us in the resistance against the junta went on to pursue a politic career. The new world which we faced coming out of the prison door seemed strange to us. Mo: returned to their jobs and were sunk in psychological crises of varying depth and intensity. Ther was a diffused feeling that the expected revolution had not come and its time had passed. Th social hierarchies were restored. Our own efforts and plans had failed. A comrade and clos friend, Tasos Darveris, who later committed suicide, wrote a book on the experience of th dictatorship years entitled History of a Long Night 1967-1974." In the conclusion, he wrote thi in the period of the dictatorship we felt freer because we could freely plan our hopes. Thi freedom to imagine the future has been restricted ever since. In what has been written in the fort of memoirs of this period, there was a certain irony towards our experience itself. The basic ide was that those things for which we had sacrificed years of our life had happened without us, bt also in ways different than we had expected. In the last paragraph of his book, Darveris wrote “We are living with the past. The past is projected and depicted in the present and even in th future, it gives us a raison d’étre. Is it inconsistency? Living without purpose, it is not what w are going to do in the future, but what we have done in the past, that burdens us. The pa: replaces the future. We had been dramatis personae in History’s theatre company! Let’s drink t

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