Biography Between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography

by Volker R. Berghahn (Editor)

While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling “life-and-letters” biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or―more recently―with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume―all well known senior historians―offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old “structure-versus-agency” question in their own work. Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone Lässig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. Röhl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.

288 pages, Library Binding

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Volker Rolf Berghahn is Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor]

The 4-star rating for this book is based on Simone’s Lässig’s superb introduction in which she clearly outlines the challenges associated with writing historical biographies and the new methodological approaches that are being used to address these problems. Subsequent essays with a few notable exceptions offer minimal new insights beyond those that can be gleaned from the introduction. However, the introduction alone is well worth reading as are the accompanying notes which point the reader to numerous methodological studies of the genre available in English and in German.