Preliminary Programme

This paper is part of my ongoing research dealing with the role of history textbooks for civic education of the future generations European citizens. In Part 1 of my presentation, I argue why textbooks have a crucial role in civic education. Part 2 of the paper mentions the general situation of the field of Women’s/Gender History today as this is an important precondition for the possibility to include the knowledge about women’s past and history of gender relations not only into the present mainstream narrative but in the history textbooks, as well. In Part 3, I look at the attempts of reforming textbooks, especially in the EE since the fall of communism (as this is an example of how political changes have influenced the historical research and the writing of textbooks, i.e. it emphasizes the politics of history). In Part 4, I discuss the results of the gender sensitive research done on the Japanese textbooks. In Part 5, I present the major interim results from my research on the representations of women and gender in the history textbooks. Part 6 concludes.
My research is based on various types of sources. To begin with:
1) the textbooks for high schools and middle schools from about 10 countries from Western and Eastern Europe (EE), which I studied not only for both textual and visual representation of women and gender, but also for use of gender sensitive language;
2) research articles, dealing with the topic of gender representations in the history textbooks from various countries around the world: from the EE (Romania, Russia, Greece, Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia) but also - for comparative purposes - from countries such as the UK, Austria, the USA, Syria, and from Japan;
3) interviews and informal conversations with researchers working on textbooks who belong to different national traditions;
4) I have used various international sources dealing with the state of the art of women’s and gender history worldwide which gave some – though not always explicit - idea about the topic into consideration. I also followed some of the historiographical debates regarding the development of the historical field;
5) my participation in the editorial boards of several international journals and research projects also gives me additional information about the developments and research in the field. (Show less)

Memory, nostalgia, and mediation have played a large role in German cinematic production since the Holocaust. Many German films produced in the latter part of the last century can be linked to a much larger socio-cultural process that involves the collective memory of a nation in a process that has focused on remembering and remediation. During the process of historical and personal transition in a post-unified Germany and in a transnational era of filmmaking, many German filmmakers have re-examined their own positions within the discourses that have shaped personal and national identities. Since the Wende (unification), there has been a continuous debate on issues such as identity, memory, guilt, and nostalgia and how these are negotiated in a re-united Germany. This has also been the case for women filmmakers from the former East Germany, for example Helke Misselwitz, and Sibylle Schönemann. This paper investigates, first of all, how East German women filmmakers—using the example of Sibylle Schönemann--locate themselves in a unified Germany and how the concept of memory, nostalgia and mediation have played a role in their cinematic production.
Some key questions for example are what role media plays in the production and circulation of cultural nostalgia and memories? How do mediation, remediation and intermediality shape objects and acts of cultural remembrance? How can media redefine or transform what is collectively remembered? What is particularly significant about the works of Schönemann is the fact that as a filmmaker she also had to make a transition from making films for the East German DEFA (film studio) to a free market economy after unification. When the GDR ceased to exist, the studio system that had defined the life, politics, and culture of its citizens vanished. Consequently, the East German past became part of a new national/transnational, if not broader, European history forging, perhaps, new national and cultural memories/identities. In the post-Wende context—issues such as “collective memory” and the “process of recollection” need to be re-examined in the context of what constitutes a collective cultural memory and how it becomes reconfigured in terms of the larger historical discourse. (Show less)

During the scientification of German historiography since the late 18th-century not only the progress of professionalization were perpetuated, but also the inclusion of modern gender norms. They where synchronically established and became an essential part within the discipline. This unconsidered implementation of the bourgeois gender polarity was extraordinary effective in the sense that 19th-century German historiography appears as highly gendered, much more than just in relation to the social origins of its – male – professions.

While the male dominance of 19th-century scientific investigation is a quite well-known fact, the differences within and their deep semantic groundings are less researched. Additionally the bodies involved and the body politics related to them in theorising historiography has hardly been addressed. Therefore, my paper will show how gender and bodies become highly political issues during the shaping of the emerging discipline.

In the first part my presentation I will focus on men/women-differences and on differences between hegemonic – which are claimed as scientific – and subordinated masculinities. Using sources creating the discipline’s self-dis¬closure, I discuss the function of bodies and body politics in defining historiography as hegemonic masculine practice as it occurs on different levels, e.g.: anthropologically by characterising female bodies as in deficit in terms of intellect and declaring male bodies as proper scientific bodies; culturally by fetishization of archival practice as satisfying, pleasurably activity of men; heuristically by definition of sources as female and sexual attractive (Ranke entitles them »kleine Prinzessinnen« [little princesses]); methodologically by the direct sexualisation of historiographical techniques (Droysen uses in this context terms like »Penetration« [penetration] or »Befruchtung« [fertilisa¬tion], and calls his opponent’s method »eunuchisch« [eunuchish]).

The second part of my presentation describes the focussed semantics as product of a historiographical habitus (Bourdieu) and tries to give an answer to the question, why there is an increase in the use as well as in the intensity of these highly sexualised discourse during the 19th-century. I will argue firstly that this is related to an inner-discipline development (enhance of the dis¬cipline’s social prestige, which have to be marked as masculine) and secondly to an inter-dis¬cipline trend (competitive situation to the rising natural sciences). (Show less)