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

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.