Giving a voice to the Oppressed?: The International Oral History Association as an academic Network and political Movement. 9783110561357, 9783110558708

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Giving a Voice to the Oppressed

Giving a Voice to the Oppressed The International Oral History Association, Between Political Movements and Academic Networks Edited by Agnès Arp, Annette Leo, and Franka Maubach With an introduction by Alexander von Plato With an afterword by Lutz Niethammer

Supported by printing subsidies from the Volkswagen Foundation, the IOHA, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and the Weichman Foundation.

The translation of this book was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International, Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany – a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association).

ISBN: 978-3-11-055870-8 e-ISBN (PDF): 978-3-11-056135-7 e-ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-11-055898-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965698 Bibliographic Information Published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://portal.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin / Boston Cover image: MissTuni / Kollektion: iStock / Getty Images Plus Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Alexander von Plato

Foreword: Thinking about Oral History Today I Departure An academic departure began in the mid-1970’s; it was international and it took place in various disciplines in the humanities, not only in historiography. There was a turn towards the subject, towards the importance of the individual in societal and political processes, towards an individual biographical history and its dynamics, to the relationships between individuals and societal structures, economic formations, educational institutions, etc. It took place in the social sciences, ethnology, social psychology, and literary studies, as well as in historiography. In contemporary history, this turn became associated with the use of qualitative interview methods, so that the personal, oral provision of information received special importance as a source. This new direction was called “oral history.” This book has to do with its emergence and the first 20 years of its impact; its authors made oral interviews one of the main sources of their research themselves, in order to describe this research and the oral historians’ own organizations. It was a time of lively methodological debates, research of extremely broad topics, international exchange, and international conferences. Those who are working with oral history at the present or would like to be inspired by its pre-history – even its organizational pre-history – should definitely have this book on their shelves or on their computer. Oral history came into being at approximately the same time in various countries, especially in North and South America and in Western Europe. If one asks its early representatives, like the authors of this book, it becomes obvious that oral history is closely associated with the offshoots of the student movement in the late 1960’s and, in addition, with the beginning of the new feminist movement. This is predominantly shown by its topics in which “the oppressed and all those should be given a voice,” which had been criminally neglected by the established historiography.¹ The close relationship to the offshoots of the student movement and feminism was also manifested in its representatives’ personal attitudes and habits. Almost from the very beginning, there were a lot of female researchers at the conferences; usually, they made up the majority of the participants. A certain relaxedness and a critical stance against the establishment dominated the conference scene. Furthermore, most of them had experi Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-001

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enced the limitations of the historical sciences, including social history. They had dealt with social topics, sometimes also biographies of “great men in history,” but in general, the personal dimension, the reasons for personal attitudes and the significance of individual experiences in historical processes were largely absent. In contrast, in most countries, oral history was criticized as being “subjectivist,” as “just subjective,” or “meaningless for great history.” Sometimes, for instance in Germany, oral historians were vilified as being “barefoot historians” or “grain eaters.” That was surely an additional reason why oral historians exchanged information and became close on an international level. And it was a time of big political changes all over the world: Former colonies had just received their independence or were fighting for it. In the USA, the antiracist African-American civil rights movement was fighting against the persisting racism or trying to implement appropriate laws against it. The apartheid regime in South Africa was being attacked at the national and international levels and was abolished in 1994. Military regimes, especially those in South America, ruled with a bloody fist and tried to eliminate all evidence of their deeds, until they were finally eliminated in the mid- to late 1970’s in El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, or the mid- to late 1980’s in Brazil, Argentina, Honduras, and Bolivia. And they were the decades of the beginning of the civil rights movements in Eastern and Central Europe, in which individuals tried to free themselves from the yoke of their regimes and Soviet dominance, especially in Poland, the Baltic states, or in Hungary, and later, also in the GDR. Finally, in 1989 – 1990, the Soviet-Communist single-party systems lost their power and even in the Soviet Union, a new period was illuminated. In 1989, an initial, still almost clandestine international conference with oral historians from all over the world took place in the Soviet Union. In 1990, for the first time, a focus on “oral history in the Soviet Union” documented the status of the oral history movement beginning there.² The later analysis of all of these conflicts did not just have to do with the history of politics in the respective, controlling systems, but also had to do with their after-effects in terms of beliefs, in thoughts, in the orientations and behavior of those involved after the fact. It almost always had to do with something other than the official archival tradition; specifically, with personal or family memories, with the witnesses of civil movements or resistance groups. Oral

 This took place at the oral history conference in Essen. In BIOS 1 (1990), there were contributions on oral history in the USSR from A. Aklajew, Darja Chibova, S.A. Inikova, Alexander von Plato (introduction), Sergej Sedelnikov, N.I. Starkow, and Sergej Tscheschko.

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history played a significant role in the reappraisal of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes – in addition to dealing with all conceivable topics in which individual experiences or personal testimonies and progressive forms of biographies were significant in tumultuous times. In these first two decades of oral history, also in the countries governed by parliamentary-democratic rule, the focus was placed on the traditions of those who had not found a place in the official archives and should now receive a “voice” in the national culture of memory. In addition to this, especially in Germany and then also in Austria, there were the voices of the victims of National Socialism, the Holocaust in particular. Soon, the collaboration with the German occupiers during World War II and emigration during the 1930’s and 1940’s also entered the field of vision – or hearing – of oral historians in other European countries.

II Consolidation This book ends in 1996. In that year, at the International Oral History Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, it was decided that the period of having rather informal internal networks and meetings should end and that they should be replaced by an international academic organization with a constitution and elected leaders. On the one hand, it corresponded with the status of the developing oral history movement, but on the other hand, it grated upon the habits of many of its activists, which rejected hierarchies and associations. Periods of departure have a special charm and an intellectual livelihood that frequently disappear in the consolidation phases. But this time of consolidation in oral history also had a sense: the members from South and Central America immediately had more significance, the following conferences took place on other continents where they had not previously been hosted, i. e., in South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, on the Indian subcontinent or in Eastern Central Europe – an expression of the expansions that had taken place in the meantime. New oral history associations were founded in South America, Eastern Central Europe, Africa, India, or, in 2016, in China. Responsible parties from various continents as well as presidents and representatives were elected; newsletters and the bilingual journal Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios were founded. All of this had significance for the national and international expansions of oral history.

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III Contemplating Oral History Today Some of the questions with regard to content or methodology that had already been “touched upon” in the early, rather informal phase of the oral history association (prior to 1986) have since then either been left untouched or require debate once again.

a) The History of Oral History In 1989 – that is, approximately 10 years after the beginning of oral history – experts from 12 countries made an initial attempt at describing the development of oral history in their countries.³ In particular, it had to do with the decade prior to 1989. For the period of time after that, and in particular, for the years after 1996, after the end of the rather informal oral history association, to date, with few exceptions,⁴ there has been a lack of comparable examinations on the international development of oral history and its association, but they are pending. There are also suggestions for them in this book. But of course, the departure of oral history in the last third of the 20th century, the recent turn towards the “subjects of history” described here, had precursors which lie further back and which, to date, have been examined little.⁵ However, here are some highlights.

 “The History of Oral History. Development, Present State and Future Prospects: Country Reports,” BIOS Special Issue (1990), with essays from Lutz Niethammer (preface); Ronald Grele and Eugenia Meyer (the Americas); Yang Li-wen (China); András B. Hegedüs, Gyula Kósza, and Jerzy Holzer (Eastern Europe); Cristina Borderías, Giovanni Contini, Selma Leydesdorff, Jaap Talsma, Paul Thompson, and Danièle Voldman (Western Europe); and Gerhard Botz, Petra Clemens, and Karin Hartewig (German-speaking countries).  See Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, “The International Oral History Association and the new Tendencies in the Field of Oral History,” in Kritische Erfahrungsgeschichte und grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit. The Network of Oral History. Festschrift für Alexander von Plato, eds. Almut Leh and Lutz Niethammer, 43 – 51; Alistair Thomson, “Eine Reise durch das Gedächtnis unserer Bewegung,” in The Network of Oral History, eds. Almut Leh and Lutz Niethammer, 21– 29. Both essays were originally talks held at the International Oral History Conference in Sydney in 2006, as was my essay “Oral History on the Move.” See also Julie Boekhoff’s and Lutz Niethammer’s contributions to this volume.  Thomas L. Charlton, Louis E. Meyers, and Rebecca Sharpless, editors, History of Oral History: Foundation and Methodology (Lanham, Maryland: Altamira, 2007). In particular, see Rebecca Sharpless’s essay “The History of Oral History” (9) and Ronald J. Grele’s “Oral History as Evi-

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It is known that in European antiquity, oral sources were used by historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, or later, Plutarch, in his biographies. But the methodological problems that they had with these sources and whether they took into account how to compare oral sources with other types of sources has hardly become an object of oral history research. Even less is known about the corresponding precursors in non-European cultures. In literary studies and in ethnology, there is a long tradition of research about songs (sagas), which uses these song-histories, initially passed down orally, for historiography or biographical studies, especially in Central and Northern European countries. In oral history, however, they are seldom used, not to speak of such “songs” from other countries. The history of the churches also offers a wealth of material, especially for biographical research. Eulogies, that is, talks about the deceased, also provide information about what was considered important in life, and are different at varying times and cultures. The chronologies of town clerks contain a wealth of eyewitness reports, especially those from town clerks in cities with a growing middle class. So far, for the pre-history of oral history, these sources have also not been examined yet. The personal reports from sea captains and conquistadors, the discoverers of new worlds – at least from a European perspective – could be a gold mine for the pre-history of oral history as an empirical science. It seems that the first instances of the academic use of oral sources by professional historians appeared in works on the French Revolution. One famous example of this is the interviews with eyewitnesses by one of the founding fathers of modern French historiography, Jules Michelet. In the framework of his claim to the universal writing of history, he used personal reports as sources, “narratives of the lips of old men,” as Michelet put it in the introduction to his History of the French Revolution. In his aforementioned essay, Ronald Grele mentions that the first interviews in the USA were completed by a missionary in Hawaii, who began to complete interviews with the “oldest chiefs and people” in 1838, or by a Swedish-American utopianist, Jonas Bergen, who invented his own recording device similar to Thomas Edison’s. In the 1880’s, Bergen began to interview the elderly in his community, making his recordings among the oldest in the USA. In the second half of the 19th century, professional historians in the USA began to use interviews, such as with settlers, in various parts of the USA. dence” (33). For more on this topic, see Alexander von Plato, “Geschichte und Psychologie, Oral History und Psychoanalyse (History and Psychology, Oral History and Psychoanalysis: Development of a Problematic Relationship. Outline and Literature Survey),” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 5 (2004): 1.

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In Europe, the clearest use and codification of oral traditions was associated with the development of anthropology or the ethnology of the new colonial worlds, their cultures and the people living in them. This turned out to include narratives, fairy tales, or myths that fell into the realm of colonial anthropology, as narrative forms in general had already been classified in ethnological research from very early on. In Europe, through this “ethnological detour,” one’s own foreign worlds came into the field of vision of academia. This was especially true of farming populations, whose ways of life were threatened by industrialization and which were mostly illiterate, such as in Scandinavia in the mid-19th century. There, the first interviews and writing competitions bore witness to these disappearing worlds. Somewhat later, there were the earliest world exhibitions. For the first time, a less-educated public than that in the elite museums flocked to them. They provided the opportunity, for example, to view the earlier – or back then, current – agricultural way of life in Brittany and Normandy There were similar precursors to the new oral history in other countries and on other continents, but we know little about them, and research about them is in the beginning stages, if it exists at all. The greater the influence of the mass movements and the political parties at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century in the USA and in Europe, especially the working class or the national movements, the more it was noticed by the young, critical, social and historical sciences.⁶ At the turn of the 20th century, in the historical sciences, there were debates about an association/connections with social psychology and the social sciences (the founding of the Revue de synthèse historique ⁷ in France; the Karl Lamprecht debate in Germany), yet the dominating historiography of historicism mostly remained distanced from the lower classes and social groups. Nevertheless, eyewitnesses were also interviewed by them. An initial criticism of sources of oral statements was tried, and hermeneutics unfolded for the historical sciences. Hermeneutics was understood to be the teaching of understanding, even the teaching of contemporaries’ empathizing with the “pasts,” in order to “under-

 Such as Gustave LeBon, Psychologie der Massen (Cologne: Anaconda, 2016).  In 1990, the philosopher Henri Berr founded the journal Revue de synthèse historique. Its stated goal: to transfer history from the “metaphysical” to the academic stage, to coordinate the various areas of specialty, and finally, similar to Karl Lamprecht, develop historical social psychology as the peak of this development. In a debate with the political writing of history in France and with the Review, in 1929, the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. It had the mission of writing an integrated cultural, social, and economic history.

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stand them in research,” as the main representative of this school, Johann Gustav Droysen, put it.⁸ This presupposes the reflection, the realization, that “the content of our I” had developed and had been mediated in a historical way. In this process, memory creates the “recognized fact of agency.” This perspective is not very far from the modern terminology of “experience.” Both – these historicists, who were mostly aligned with the state, as were their opponents Karl Lamprecht and the founders of the Revue – could be seen as the individuals preparing what was later social psychology and oral history. With his concept of “experience,” or Erlebnis, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey attempted to expand hermeneutics and to develop an autonomous methodology against the humanities’ incorporation of natural sciences methods; therefore, he wrote about an “independent realm of experiences [Erfahrungen], which has its autonomous origin and material inside an inner experience [Erlebnis]⁹ and which therefore naturally is the object of a special science of experience [Erfahrungswissenschaft].”¹⁰ To my knowledge, that is the first time this expression was used. In the 1920’s, the discussion around historians’ basic question to (social) psychologists reached a new height; specifically, the question about memory and recollection. In particular, Maurice Halbwachs’s 1925 work about memory and its social conditions was influential, even today. After World War I, there were meaningful academic projects in which oral or written sources were used.¹¹ These works and many others did a lot to introduce methods of interviewing into the historical sciences, and the sharp division between the individual (psychological-sociopsychological) and supraindividual (historical-political-so Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Geschichte, ed. Rolf Hübner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974).  Erlebnis = a specific experience; Erfahrung = experience in general or the experience of a life or of a long time.  Wilhelm Dilthey, “Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Geisteswissenschaften und der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Bernhard Groethuysen (Leipzig: Teuber, 1922), 9.  Such as William I. Thomas and Florian W. Znaniecki’s five-volume examination, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Boston: Gorham, 1918 – 1920); Erich Fromm’s examination of authoritarianism in workers and white-collar employees just prior to National Socialism (1929 – 1930) or about authority and family in Paris in 1936 (Studien über Autorität und Familie, Paris: Institut für Sozialforschung, 1936); Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980); examinations of The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al. in the USA (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950); or the slave narratives project in the USA in the 1930’s, in which former slaves were questioned and their way of life examined, so that at least some of them received a face and voice (“Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 – 1938,” Collection in the Library of Congress, Washington).

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cietal) fields became increasingly questionable. Individuals acted in a collective, and collectives seemed to follow individual patterns that do not run at the same speed as the immediate politics, for example, depending on the individual or generation-specific previous experience. And we should use their expertise and should publish them – again, if necessary – to show the strength of these former historical works. These few suggestions may be sufficient to emphasize the meaning of earlier tendencies in historical sciences for the development of oral history. Still, oral history is at the beginning of its own academic history, for the time before and after World War II, as well as for the decade after 1996.

b) Oral History as the History of Experience From the very beginning, discussions regularly flared up as to whether oral history – as the name suggests – is limited to oral sources, or whether all sources with subjective experiences and personal behavior should be used. If one looks at oral history projects, it quickly becomes clear that almost all of the results from the oral interviews are compared with the results of the analysis of other sources (letters, journals, autobiographies, official situation reports, etc.) – next to the comparison or the confrontation with examinations in which no personal sources were used, no matter from what academic discipline. Nevertheless, in the constitution of the International Oral History Association in Gothenburg in 1996, it was decided that the use of oral sources was the deciding criterion for the organization of the members. That also makes sense if it has to do with the organization, but little sense in terms of academic work, as all of the historians in the group also use non-oral sources. Therefore, to me, it seems to be more fruitful to speak of oral history as a science of human experience, following Wilhelm Dilthey, and to look for close exchange with the qualitative and quantitative research in other disciplines, like sociology, pedagogy, ethnology, (social) psychology, etc.

c) The Problem of Generalization Discussions about the generalization of individual statements played a significant role in early international oral history, and still do so today. There is apparently an uncertainty principle, a missing link between statistical and individual information. Of course, in qualitative examinations, representativeness cannot be achieved. Methods that should achieve a certain plausibility of the generali-

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zation of personal statements have been regularly attempted in oral history projects, such as through the selection of very different interviewees, in accordance with age, gender, level of education, various orientations, etc., by typification, generational- or gender-specific experiences, by comparisons with research results from other cultures and countries, by the examination of collective cultures of memory. In this context, an early debate that shows a different direction is especially interesting. This debate was stimulated by Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle BertauxWiame, among others. Like other oral historians, they came to the assumption that in the interviewing of certain groups, a “degree of saturation” was reached after 30 to 40 interviews; no significant, new aspects were added through additional interviews.¹² Therefore, on that basis, are there other forms of generalization in qualitative research than in quantitative? It seems to be the case, and there are similar considerations in modern social sciences. A revitalization of earlier debates would make sense here as well.

d) Methods of Interpretation In the early years of oral history, value was placed on the development of methods of interpretation of subjective memories. A large number of texts on this emerged in this time, and a significant part of them goes back to classic hermeneutics. In my perspective, since this early time, there has been stagnation in this field. In addition, a number of other problems, challenges, and possibilities have been added to modern oral history, for instance all the problems which are connected with digitalization and modern archiving or voice recognition or with the results of modern brain research concerning memory.

Conclusion In modern “traditional contemporary history,” on the one hand, there is the acceptance of oral history as an empirical science, but at the same time, in various countries, there are contradictory tendencies that appear to have long been overcome. At most, biographical research or oral sources are accepted as addenda if

 Daniel Bertaux und Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, “Life Stories in the Baker’s Trade,” in: Biography and Society, ed. Daniel Bertaux (Sage: Beverly Hills, 1981), 169 – 189.

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there are no other sources. The fact that earlier experiences and expertise from individuals or groups (families, ethnicities, generations, resistance groups, victims of persecution, perpetrators, etc.) are “processed” and influence later developments, and that this “processed history” contains independent, subjective sources, is negated by some contemporary historians. In my opinion, the special strength of oral history lies in the examination of the “processed history” and its aftereffects. It must remain a part of historiography, with a universal claim; advocating for it must remain a constant task for oral historians. And the return to earlier debates which led to the strengthening of oral history can be very helpful in doing so. This book provides tips and suggestions for this purpose as well. I can still remember my beginnings as an oral historian in the early 1970’s well, when we found almost no situation reports and biographical histories and, in the archives, unsuccessfully looked for biographical histories, such as those from workers from the beginning of industrialization, or reports from victims of racist or dictatorial regimes. Thanks to oral history and its national and international academic organizations, archives, and journals, things look completely different today. Especially in its newer beginnings, which are depicted here, oral history has always been understood to be a “retrospective advocate” who understands those who were exploited and oppressed, who seldom leave behind testimonies of their lives, especially not in state or official archives. That is where the subversive power of oral history lies and lay. Therefore, it has – at least in retrospect – broken through the dominance of the official transmission (not just!) of dictatorships in its educational policy, in its archives, and in its policies concerning the past. Over the long term, the examinations of the motives and rationales for the turn towards right-radical movements, parties, and regimes have been shown to be especially productive, educational, and of political significance. Perhaps there should be a discussion about oral history as a “democratic science” with a subversive power again just facing nationalist, racist, antidemocratic movements, parties or governments in different countries – without any romanticization of the lower classes.

Table of Contents Alexander von Plato Foreword: Thinking about Oral History Today Annette Leo The Special Charm of Integration Introductory Remarks on This Volume

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Manja Finnberg The Intellectuals of the International Oral History Network Biographical Conditions and Motivations for Their Oral History 15 Work Christian König Movement and Solidarity A Network of Friends as an Academic Phenomenon

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Julie Boekhoff From the Power Structures of a Leadership Council to an Elected Board A History of the Network until 1996 97 Agnès Arp Crossing National Borders, with Reactions 143 The Internationality of the Network Silvia Musso The International Oral History Association as an Interdisciplinary Laboratory 175 Franka Maubach The Freedom of Speech as a Human Right 215 Silence and Speaking in the IOHA Annette Leo “Please Tell Us Your Life Story…” A Confusion of Roles or, How It Is When Experienced Interviewers Are Interviewed 247

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Lutz Niethammer Epilogue 263 Agnès Arp, Annette Leo, and Franka Maubach Thanks 291 293

Appendix

Short Biographies of the Protagonists and Selected Publications The Authors Index

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The Special Charm of Integration Introductory Remarks on This Volume It was occurring in some countries in which the post-1968 culture was important; it had an interdisciplinary approach, and did not have a very formalized type of organization. It was a predominantly European matter. […] It was declaredly left and democratic, but actually had a very undemocratic structure. It worked with very little money and had the charm of a completely different type of European integration.

These sentences, with which Lutz Niethammer introduced an international workshop about the beginnings of the International Oral History Association (IOHA) at the University of Essex on September 13, 2017, could also be understood as a quiz question. What is ensconced in this carefully but inconsistently described “it”? An organization or not, democratic yet undemocratic at the same time, a political project, a movement, a research association? While the oral historians at the workshop seemed to intuitively understand what was meant by “it,” the young researchers, who worked on a study about the IOHA and present their results here, initially seemed to be confused: how could the ambivalent character of this research project, which was initially very political, to give the “oppressed a voice,” be conceived in an academic manner? The authors of this volume searched for the answers to these questions. The object of their research is a piece of intellectual history from the previous century – the International Oral History Association (IOHA), as it was in the first 20 years of its existence from 1976 to 1996, when it was still not a formal organization, but rather an informal consortium. That is exactly where terminology problems begin, because at that time, “it” actually did not have a name, or rather, it was only used in some situations. In other contexts, “it” was a movement, group, committee, or network. One could say that this structure is, rather, a spontaneously-created, interdisciplinary, European and transatlantic networked association of researchers who – despite or precisely due to the lack of structures and rules of operation – contributed, in an extraordinarily effective way, to moving oral history from the edge of the academic landscape, which is where it was back then, closer to the middle. Yet this sentence also leads to more questions than it answers. For work with oral sources, the English term “oral history” has, in the meantime, gained extensive acceptance. It remains, as Herwart Vorländer writes, an “awkward term” that we use “due to a lack of other appropriate terms from our own lan-

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guage.”¹ In his autobiographical memoirs, Lutz Niethammer acknowledges that he was involved in establishing the “actually incorrect, but introduced” term in Germany,² which is unclear and confusing in multiple regards. On the one hand, he suggests that it has to do with a type of historical sub-discipline, which contradicts the interdisciplinarity. Other academic disciplines that have been working with oral sources for a long time and do not just use them with regard to the past appear to be excluded. On the other hand, the term leaves the question completely open as to what oral history actually is: a research method, a discipline of its own, simply just a type of source, or everything at the same time? Yet this lack of clarity – perhaps it is better to speak of ambiguity – has accompanied oral history since its beginnings. One of its significant characteristics is doubtless: that it has developed as a result of the practical work of many different researchers, each of whom had been inspired by methods that had already been introduced to question people, from journalistic interviews to therapeutic consultation and sociological questionnaires all the way to legal examinations of witnesses. Methodological and theoretical discourses play and played a role amongst its discoverers and users, but for a long time, there was no generally recognized definition of the matter, which might have been unnecessary. Myself, I find Dorothee Wierling’s formulation of the “double-meaning of type of source and method” to be the clearest, and perhaps one day, oral historians will come to an agreement about this description.³ In light of so many unclear and vague elements, one can at least say with certainty that the occupation with oral history and the engagement in the international network is an important part of the life story of a number of academics who, in the 1970’s, left traditional paths and tried out new possibilities for recording and interpreting the realities around them. For a while, they did that independently of each other, in various places, but sometimes under similar circumstances and for similar reasons. Later, they also did it together, in close connection and in exchange with each other. Perhaps the transnational, formative context of oral history is best reflected in the fact that the English term has not just become common in Germany: it is not least the exchange between researchers from different countries that led to the profiling of the method and helped oral history leave national isolation here and there.

 Herwart Vorländer, ed., Oral History. Mündlich erfragte Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1990), 7.  Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungsversuche (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 142.  Dorothee Wierling, “Oral History,” in Aufriss der Historischen Wissenschaften, Bd. 7 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 81.

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What types of new paths were they, where did they begin, where did they lead? Fundamentally, oral transmissions, memories, stories, myths, and fairy tales are the oldest sources from which historians, ethnologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars draw their findings. However, oral history, as we understand it today, as interviews about memories with contemporary witnesses and the meticulous documentation of their answers with the assistance of recording devices, first began in the 1930’s in the USA. To be more precise, it emerged from two different sets of roots: on the one hand, from the interest in the memories of influential people and, on the other hand, for the memories of oppressed minorities. That is how, since the beginning of the 1930’s, all presidents leaving office have been asked about the background of and connections between their political actions. These reports were collected at Columbia University, where Louis Starr and Allan Nevins founded an oral history research department in 1948. At around the same time, researchers at the University of Chicago began to question the descendants of Native Americans and the descendants of African slaves. They wanted to capture the history of those for whom there were no written testimonies.⁴ The fact that young researchers from the 1930’s and 1940’s later used these procedures under other auspices and reached for and disseminated the method with other special interests was due to the confluence of two factors. On the one hand, there was apprehension about and a lack of satisfaction with traditional research methods and contents, which only captured millions of key players in history as statistical sizes or elements within larger structures. On the other hand, there was the rapid development of recording and playback technology. Only the production of increasingly smaller and more affordable devices made it possible for researchers from various disciplines and highly-involved amateurs to make their way to the much-described “field” – to the anarchistic people living in the mountains of Catalonia, to English fishermen and weavers in Flanders – and to ask about their memories and experiences. Oral history is a result of the zeitgeist of the late 1960’s and 1970’s in Western Europe and the USA. It was a time of social and political breakthroughs as well

 For information on oral history in the USA, see Lutz Niethammer, “Oral History in USA. Zur Entwicklung und Problematik diachroner Befragungen,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 18 (1976): 457– 501. For examples of the context in Chicago, see Benjamin A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). In the Federal Writers Project initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, since the 1930’s, thousands of people nationwide – former slaves in particular – have been interviewed. See These Are Our Lives: As Told By the People and Written By Members of the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia (New York: Hastings House, 1975).

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as international détente and prosperity. The Cold War between the East and the West gradually led to a climate of dialogue. In Spain and Portugal, both of the last fascist dictatorships disappeared; the Communist parties in France, Italy, and Spain gradually emancipated themselves from the Soviet patronage and searched for their own national and local traditions. The quick European integration – the first European Parliament was elected in 1979 – also created a countermovement towards awareness and protection of regional and local identities. Furthermore, as a result of the technical revolution, entire branches of industry were in the process of disappearing after they had influenced the lives of people in certain regions for centuries, and there was the threat of losing the memories of them. At the same time, the European unification process, though accompanied by mistrust and hostility, paved the way for contact and cooperation across current borders. This also went beyond national agreements and economic interests. The youth revolts of 1968 did not just lead to the spectacular activities of the Red Brigades and Red Army Faction terrorist groups. In particular, as a result, many different sociopolitical movements emerged that wanted to democratize society from the grassroots in a rather quiet and non-violent way, such as the women’s movement; the peace, environmental and anti-nuclear movements; or the history workshops, which were all created using the English History Workshop as an example and from which significant impulses for the development of oral history originated. Amateurs and academics worked there together in order to make their idea of a more democratic writing of history come true, in which the so-called “little people” could finally have their say. Dig Where You Stand, the title of a book by the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, became the motto of a movement that had set the goal of destroying the current power structures in the interpretation of society and history, and giving a voice to the workers and craftsmen, the housewives, the migrants, the oppressed and the persecuted.⁵ This took place with the help of everyday history, the history of workers and gender history all the way to cultural history and microhistory. Oral history was located at this point of intersection. Due to its double role of type of source and method, it played a role in accessing many of these new approaches to content. According to Raphael Samuel, one of the founders of the history workshops in Great Britain and later a co-founder of the IOHA, oral history presents

 Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst. Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989).

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at least – potentially – one of the possibilities to fulfill the demand for an alternative writing of history that is concerned with the lives of completely normal people instead of some statesmen, sovereigns, or the wealthy. In this process, they are not just objects of examination, but appear with their own dignity and the complexity of their own language. They are not just described, but have the possibility to speak for themselves.⁶

In the meantime, oral history has emancipated itself from these very empathetic beginnings, which had not yet allowed for a critical distance between interviewer and interviewee. Dorothee Wierling believes that the fact that it survived the collapse of the political movements from which it originally emerged speaks for its potential.⁷ Among other things, this comprises an “explosion in complexity” – the discovery of the individual and the atypical, connected with a great openness in the analysis and interpretation.⁸ It also consists of the unusual ability to depict the subjectivity of the people involved in the historical action and their motives, where, inevitably, the researchers are also aware of their own subjectivity in the “production” of these sources. This entails an entire spectrum of essential questions and dimensions: it does not just have to do with the influence of cultural patterns of memory and collective as well as individual background experience. A person conducting interviews is dealing with the living, human memory – with a highly-fluid, difficult-to-define process – that psychoanalysts as well as brain researchers are trying to grasp in their own ways. To the interviewing and interpreting researchers, it always presents the question as to which connection the present has with the past, and what is being reconstructed and what is being constructed. Today, at universities and institutes of higher education in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia (this development has only recently begun in Africa), individual professors and researchers are working with interviews about the past and sharing their experiences and knowledge with students. At Columbia University in New York and the University of Venice, there are even a master’s degree programs and departments of oral history. Master’s theses and dissertations are submitted, which are, of course, based on oral sources, or oral sources are used at an equal footing with written records, and pop-

 Raphael Samuel, “Oral History in Großbritannien,” in Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History, ed. Lutz Niethammer (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 84.  Dorothee Wierling, Oral History, 90.  Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato, “Fragen – Antworten – Fragen. Methodische Erfahrungen und Erwägungen zu Oral History,” in Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten. Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes, eds. Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1985), 410.

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ular standard sources deal with the interpretation of oral materials.⁹ In the 1970’s and 1980’s, when this new method or type of source emerged from the alternative scene and began to spill over into academic territory, it provoked unease and resistance in the guardians of the conservative academic perspective. The openness and also overwhelming nature of this new approach caused a lack of understanding and resistance in academic circles. The critics were disturbed by the initiators’ political sense of mission, a frequent lack of distance from the interviewees, the cooperation with amateurs who were researching their own history, and, at the beginning, the unpolished methods of source criticism and analysis. The resistance seemed to be particularly widespread among historians, especially German historians; in sociology, anthropology, or psychology, researchers had already maintained a natural connection with oral traditions or interviews for a longer period of time. Detlef Briesen and Rüdiger Gans are of the opinion that, up to today, leading representatives of the oral history method are “in the back seats in the large theater of historical scholarship” and feel cast out: “If, in this theater, there is a play in which contemporary witnesses are questioned, the tenor of German criticism is still skeptical […].”¹⁰ Detlef Briesen and Rüdiger Gans view the cause for this position as the influence of a “historical, extremely Prussian writing of history” which has continued into the present. With its strict set of rules with regard to source criticism, since the 18th century, it has successfully fed the mistrust of oral sources and autobiographical testimonies. At the same time, as a “side effect,” the feelings and motives of the historical actors have been lost from the view of research. Ultimately, according to Briesen and Gans, the result was a “fight against telling” in a way that there never was in historical scholarship in Western Europe and the USA.¹¹ Even if this perception is no longer really the case today, the development of methodology in historical scholarship in Germany ensured that oral sources were particularly met with reservation for a long time. Resistance to oral history was also stirred up in academic circles in other countries that were not concerned with the legacy of historicism. Selma Leydesdorff and Jaap Talsma write that in the Netherlands, for example, the skeptical behavior “of some old-fashioned mandarins of the historical profession” can at least partially be explained by the close connection between the beginnings of

 A good example of this is the work that Orlando Figes published on Stalinism some years ago (Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia [London: Penguin, 2007]).  Detlef Briesen and Rüdiger Gans, “Über den Wert von Zeitzeugen in der deutschen Historik. Zur Geschichte einer Ausgrenzung,” BIOS 1.1 (1990): 68.  Briesen and Gans, Über den Wert, 2.

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oral history and women’s history.¹² Other objections came from representatives of the social sciences, especially social history, who wanted to claim a revolutionary approach and a new perspective on societies after World War II for themselves, and therefore considered oral history to be competition. In an essay, the American social historian Louise Tilly accused the “people’s historians”¹³ Raphael Samuel, Paul Thompson, and Alessandro Portelli of neglecting the social context and analysis in favor of emphasizing subjectivity and individual experience, and in doing so, altering possibilities for comprehension and generalization.¹⁴ With her essay, Tilly created an intensive debate in the International Journal of Oral History, over the course of which some protagonists in oral history used the opportunity to present the novelty and special features of their method and to refine their images of themselves.¹⁵ One memory that has remained indelible is the conflict between Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Lutz Niethammer at the Historikertag historians’ convention in 1983, when Wehler spoke of the intellectual imposition of the “conservative gruel” of the people’s history.¹⁶ Of course, there was also founded criticism with regard to the way oral sources were treated, including from the ranks of oral historians themselves. In this context, Lutz Niethammer wrote about the “identification with research subjects” as an occupational disease for historians.¹⁷ He – and other colleagues – were aware that if they wanted to get their foot in the academic door, they needed to develop special methods of analysis for the resulting materials in order to counter criticism about sources that they had co-produced. For long periods of time, the process of professionalizing and spreading oral history and concentrating its potential in a transnational network took place related to and parallel to each other. One can imagine it as a back-and-forth move-

 Jaap Talsma and Selma Leydesdorff, “Oral History in the Netherlands,” BIOS Special Issue (1990): 68.  “People’s historians” are typically researchers interested in worker’s history or the history of the “little people.” Tilly apparently refers to oral historians with the term, which is not the same thing.  Louise A. Tilly, “People’s History and Social Science History,” International Journal of Oral History 6.1 (February 1985): 8.  See the responses from Paul Thompson, Luisa Passerini, Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, and Alessandro Portelli in The International Journal of Oral History 6.1 (February 1985): 19.  Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Königsweg zu neuen Ufern oder Irrgarten der Illusionen? Die westdeutsche Alltagsgeschichte: Geschichte ‘von innen’ und ‘von unten’” in Geschichte von unten – Geschichte von innen. Kontroversen um die Alltagsgeschichte, comps. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Jürgen Kocka (Hagen, Germany: FernUniversität Hagen, 1985), 47.  Lutz Niethammer, Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), III.

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ment. At the beginning, the researchers, who worked in an isolated manner in their respective countries and felt that they were hardly recognized, tried to find a refuge, where they could exchange ideas and support each other. The same extent to which the refuge became a source of strength and the international oral history conferences gained attractiveness and significance had an influence on the individual countries in which oral history projects further spread. There, they improved their quality and many of their protagonists were able to establish themselves academically, which, in turn, had an effect on the conferences. Men and women from Italy, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the USA, among other countries, participated in the network. They were (and are) historians, sociologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, philosophers, etc. Many of the founding fathers and mothers are part of the generation that was young adults in 1968, had actively participated in the student revolts, or were at least influenced by the results of them. The elder among them had formative political experiences from more than a decade earlier. They mention the year 1956 – the Suez crisis and / or the Soviet intervention in Hungary – as the experience that helped them become politically aware.¹⁸ The 20-year history of the network from 1976 all the way to the formal founding in 1996 is defined by the international conferences that take place every two to three years. The first meeting took place in December 1976 in Bologna, but it was, of course, defined as such after the fact, because back then, no one could foresee that there would be a second meeting and many more after that. The conference in Bologna was called “Between Anthropology and History.” The initiative for this came from Italian anthropologists and ethnologists who were looking to discuss experiences with oral sources with both national and international representatives of other academic disciplines. Among others, they invited the Briton Paul Thompson, who apparently got so many ideas that, three years later, he organized another meeting on the campus of his home university. At the conference in Colchester, which was supported by the strong British oral history movement, in particular, historians and sociologists determined the content and direction of the exchange, and it remained so for a longer period of time. Among the key players, the importance of the meeting in Bologna in the pre-history of the IOHA is therefore contentious. While many IOHA activists view Colchester as the beginning of the international networking and Bologna as the

 Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Elena Rodríguez Codd, Barcelona, May 5, 2008; Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, Wivenhoe, England, July 17– 18, 2007.

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pre-history,¹⁹ Mercedes Vilanova considers the Bologna conference to be so significant that, when she was elected the first IOHA president in the year 1996, she explicitly wanted to link everything back to these neglected, forgotten beginnings.²⁰ After Colchester, the oral history activists met in 1980 in Amsterdam, 1982 in Aix-en-Provence, 1985 in Barcelona, 1987 in Oxford, 1990 in Essen, 1993 in SienaLucca, 1994 in New York, and 1996 in Gothenburg. A representative of the country in which the next conference was taking place then took over as the head of the network and was responsible for the preparation. Among other things, this included looking at the recommendations for topics, which were coming in by the ton, and the procurement of funds. Because the oral history network did not have the status of an organization, there was no institutional support – neither at UNESCO nor at national professional associations. In this respect, it is astonishing that the core of the group could mobilize so much energy and creativity in order to keep this solitary star in orbit in the international conference heaven. As a minimal organizational structure, starting around the early 1980’s, a committee or secretary was formed in order to support the chair in the meantime. It also organized preparatory meetings. Under the circumstances, the individual conferences were organized to various degrees of success. Some of them had a motto, and at the end, the conference proceedings were published with the talks; at other meetings, there was not even a unifying topic, or there was not a publication. Sometimes there was neither a topic nor a publication.²¹ Due to the fact that few conference titles were continued, the change in the subjects of research and viewpoints can only be traced to a limited extent. Therefore, the publication on the conference in Colchester had the title Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe and, with that, emphasized alternative European integration, which the participants apparently wished for. The topic of the conference in Barcelona in 1985, “Power and Society,” was aimed at an examination of dictatorship experiences, which created an important impetus for oral history not just in Spain and Portugal, but also in Germany and Italy. In 1987 in Oxford, the researchers met under the motto “Myth and History” – a sign that the critical reflection about individual and collective patterns of memory, about myths and their interpretation, was gaining momentum. The conference in 1990 in Essen, under the title “Gedächtnis und sozialer Wandel,” or  In this context, Luisa Passerini speaks of a “praestoria.” See Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Paverolo, Italy, April 12, 2008.  Mercedes Vilanova, “Las fuentes orales entre Bologna (1976) y México (2008),” Historia, Antropología y fuentes orales, 2.36 (2006): 49.  See the list of conferences in the appendix.

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“Memory and Social Change,” reflected the new questions and problems after the historical fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the bloc confrontation in Europe. Something irritating and strange for many left-wing Europeans from the former Western Bloc in the network was the entry of a larger number of eastern European colleagues, who brought along their critical confrontation with the communist dictatorships. In the 1990’s at the latest, the researchers who had registered for the conferences from all parts of the world became so numerous, their interests and expectations so different and sometimes controversial, that this process could no longer be managed in the form of an informal network led by a small group of activists. The conference in Gothenburg in June 1996, with the motto “Communicating Experience,” underwent the not-completely-seamless transition to a formal organization with statute and democratically elected leaders. To the surprise of many participants, Paul Thompson, who was generally recognized as the “founding father” of oral history, was not elected president, but rather his adversary Mercedes Vilanova was. As a Spanish-speaking woman, she stylized herself as a representative of all groups in the network which were apparently or actually marginalized. The now-institutionalized International Oral History has since taken on another character and a different developmental path. The focal point and emphasis of the oral history projects and the exchange have moved away from Europe, to Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The small, exclusive circle, in which everyone knew each other, dissolved in the larger context. With a few exceptions, the founding fathers and mothers pulled back from the organization. There are still the memories of “festival-like conferences,”²² of an “incestuous” club,²³ an “old boys’ network,”²⁴ or a “sub-erotic family.”²⁵ Lutz Niethammer and Luisa Passerini wrote autobiographical texts in which they have described their personal memories of the “wild” phase of the International Oral History Association.²⁶ The IOHA itself refers to its own background in a rather fragmentary way from time to time.²⁷ The retrospections up to now, all attempts to reflect upon

 Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungsversuche (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 145.  Beatrys de Graeve, interview with Annette Leo, Ghent, November 25, 2008.  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 5, 2008.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, September 26, 2007.  Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto de gruppo, 1998; Lutz Niethammer: Ego-Histoire, 2002.  Almut Leh and Lutz Niethammer, eds. BIOS: Kritische Erfahrungsgeschichte und grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit. The Networks of Oral History. Festschrift für Alexander von Plato, 2007.

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the location of the network in academic history, came from the key players themselves. In other words: historicization is due. The present publication is one first step in this direction. One of the protagonists, Lutz Niethammer, gave the impetus to do so, because in the year 2006, a group of doctoral students led by him was given this task. It was in the nature of the task that the initiator and subsequent project leader would switch to the role of contemporary witness and that the group would develop its own perspective, the perspective of a following generation.²⁸ The members of the research group traveled to London and New York, to Barcelona, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, Ghent, and Florence, to carry out autobiographical interviews with the key players of the network. The documents from the international conferences, the personal correspondence between the key players themselves, their publications, and national and international oral history journals served as additional important sources. At a relatively early point in time, the group rejected the original concept, which was that they should trace the origins of the international consortium, starting from the creation and development of oral history in individual countries. The decision to make the network and only the network the topic opened another field of questions, which were targeted at the broader context instead. Questions about the individuals who shaped the network, about the way that this loose organization could function over so many years, about the transnational and transdisciplinary cooperation, about the structures of power, the conflicts, and about the significance of the medium that connects and separates them all – the spoken word. In the first entry in this volume, in her essay, Manja Finnberg turns to the “biographical baggage” of the key players in the network. She compares family situations and life courses in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain; observes the differences and the points of intersection; and in many of her interview partners, identifies a similar attitude towards life with experiences of alienness and being excluded from a majority group. With great attention to detail, she draws lines of continuity between the protagonists’ political commitment in their youth and their later fascination with oral history.²⁹ In the following entry, Christian König searches for a conclusive designation for this association of intellectuals and finally decides on the term “network.” He asks about how it functions and about the cement that has held it to-

 For more on this, see Annette Leo’s contribution in this volume.  Manja Finnberg, “The Intellectuals of the International Oral History Network: Biographical Conditions and Motivations for Their Oral History Work.”

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gether for so long. In this demonstratively un-hierarchical entity, were there still structures of power?³⁰ In her entry, Julie Boekhoff meticulously traces the history of the network up to the founding of a formal organization in 1996. On the basis of the materials from the international conferences between Amsterdam and Gothenburg, and with the help of letters and publications from the key players, she works out that in 1996 in Gothenburg, there was basically not a split, but rather that the development of a formal organization emerged relatively early.³¹ In her text, Agnès Arp examines the connection between the key players’ interest in the international network and the recognition or lack of recognition of oral history in the individual countries. She describes the international oral history consortium as being “one-of-a-kind” in the academic landscape, as the “self-organized answer” to the desire of many young researchers for the academic exchange about the new, unusual methods of examination, and demonstrates that transnationality presented a necessary condition for the development of oral history.³² Silvia Musso is dedicated to the interdisciplinary cooperation within the network. She observes the various academic disciplines that each brought in their experience with regard to interviews, and sounds out possibilities and borders for this open dialogue beyond disciplinary borders.³³ In the context of oral history work, as in the context of international exchange, language is an important medium. Franka Maubach examines its role at various levels of meaning: from redemptive speaking as a means of processing trauma to the search for meaning with the help of language analysis all the way to the conflicts about the conference languages with which the conference participants communicated with each other.³⁴ Unfortunately, in this volume, there is not an examination of the role of gender relations in this academic field. Asking questions and listening are skills that are generally attributed to women. Was oral history then “feminine”? At least it is striking that at that time, at the IOHA conferences, more women attended than at

 Christian König, “Movement and Solidarity: A Network of Friends as an Academic Phenomenon.”  Julie Boekhoff, “From the Power Structures of a Leadership Council to an Elected Board: A History of the Network until 1996.”  Agnès Arp, “Crossing National Borders, with Reactions: The Internationality of the Network.”  Silvia Musso, “The International Oral History Association as an Interdisciplinary Laboratory.”  Franka Maubach, “The Freedom of Speech as a Human Right: Silence and Speaking in the IOHA.”

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similar events with a more traditional approach. In the small “chief” group, however, men still dominated. Finally, there is my report about the adventure of an oral history examination of oral historians. I ask about the conditions of origin, the backgrounds, the atmosphere of the autobiographical interviews with the founding fathers and mothers upon whom this volume is primarily based, during an interview with the members of the research group – how could it be any other way?³⁵

 Annette Leo, “‘Please Tell Us Your Life Story…’”

Manja Finnberg

The Intellectuals of the International Oral History Network

Biographical Conditions and Motivations for Their Oral History Work Intellectual community and work structures do not just live from the intellectual and practical contributions of their protagonists, but also from the biographical baggage that every one of the individuals involved brings with him; it is present in his expectations and actions. In other words, to a great extent, circles, confederations, and societies of intellectuals are interlaced with and made up of their subjectivity. This also affected the informal international network that existed as the precursor to the International Oral History Association (IOHA). An analysis of this modern association of intellectuals, which acted between 1976 and 1996, principally at the European level, cannot be made without looking at its members’ biographical experiences. If the dimension of the concrete subject is not taken into consideration, their motivations for the entry into this group context and for the occupation with oral sources are revealed only insufficiently. The question of the biographical conditions of their oral history work is also suggested because these intellectuals defended and practically tested a strong perception of the subjectivity (and later the intersubjectivity) within the academic discourses of their disciplines,¹ and because some of them granted access to autobiographical information in publicly-accessible literary or essayistic texts.² Next to autobiographical texts, biographical interviews offer individuals the greatest space in order to broach the topic of themselves. The narratives that unfold there, of one’s own personal and professional paths at the time, are observed and analyzed as layers in which previous experience is rendered as truthfully as possible, along with interpretations, expectations, and constructions from today’s perspective. My entry, which is based on biographical interviews, additional personal statements from the interviewees in correspondence

 Luisa Passerini, Storia e soggettività: Le fonti orali, la memoria (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988) and Memoria e utopia. Il primato dell’intersoggettività (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).  Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past (London: Verso, 1984); Luisa Passerini: Autoritratto di gruppo (Florence: Giunti, 1988); Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire? und andere Erinnerungs-Versuche (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002); Pietro Clemente, Triglie di scoglio: Tracce del Sessantotto cagliaritano (Cagliari, Italy: CUEC, 2002); Gerhard Botz, “Nazi, Opportunist, ‘Bandenbekämpfer’, Kriegsopfer, Dokument, Evidenz und Erinnerungssplitter zu meinem Vater,” BIOS 18.1 (2005): 28 – 47. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-003

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and autobiographical texts as well as on their publications, will discuss the following questions:³ For which reasons and with what motivation did the intellectuals turn to oral history? Where did the scholars come from and what family and social backgrounds did they have? Which biographical experiences predated their orientation toward oral history, and which were retrospectively depicted as being either decisive or unimportant for later work with oral sources? In particular, I will focus on two aspects that were extremely significant in the biographical narratives: one’s location in an intermediate position, which served the intellectuals’ self-stylization as an individual standing on the fringe, as well as their involvement in the political activism of the 1960’s. I will show that their following transition to the oral history method was influenced by this. Something that the intellectuals – who are central to this entry – have in common is their occupation with oral sources in their academic or career work, as well as the (short-term or decades-long) participation in meetings at the international oral history conferences and in their organizational committees. These academics’ life courses are, like those of any individual, unique and have developed in various national academic and cultural contexts. The interplay between the exploration of individual traces of experience and the search for representative statements about the key players in the pre-history of the IOHA is discussed here, and some life and career paths will be depicted, but not exhaustively discussed. The intellectuals represented here were selected from the great number of conference participants,⁴ because they played a significant role in terms of organization or methodology in the closer structures of the international network and also in their respective national contexts. This entry will provide information about the biographical similarities between those who made use of this network of intellectuals and shaped it over two decades, allowing for conclusions to be drawn about the character of the early network from which the IOHA developed. At first glance, it seemed to make sense to divide the intellectuals, who had been meeting since the first conferences in 1976 and 1979 in relaxed working and friendly connections, into two age cohorts. The elder among them were born in

 I rely on a collection of 22 interviews that were conducted between the summer of 2007 and spring of 2008 within the project Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte at Jena University, with protagonists from the international oral history scene in Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Austria, Great Britain, Russia, and the USA. See the bibliography in the appendix for further primary and secondary literature sources.  According to initial estimates, around 845 people presented at the international oral history conferences between 1976 and 1996; there were thousands of participants. See also Agnès Arp’s entry in this volume.

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the years 1934 to 1942, had spent their childhood years during World War II, and experienced their secondary socialization in the post-war years, on the brink between destruction and reconstruction. They received their academic education in the 1960’s, and, at the end of the decade, entered their work life, usually in academia as young lecturers and academic assistants.⁵ The younger intellectuals interviewed were born between 1946 and 1954, experienced their childhood in the post-war years, and began their university studies at about the same time as the European and worldwide student and worker unrests in 1968 and 1969. Accordingly, they experienced their academic education during the protests against the established university and political system, in an extremely politicized decade, which resulted in extreme ideological escalation and violent conflicts with the repressively-responding national politics in some countries, such as in the “leaden times” in Italy or the “hot fall” in Germany.⁶ Over the course of the analysis, however, it became apparent that the limits of experience of both cohorts were open and differences in one’s life course could be just as affected by an individual’s decisions as by social conditions shared by the members of an age cohort. For this reason, I decided to portray the development of selected individuals rather than the movement as a whole, from background experiences and the departure from one’s origins towards spheres of living and activity, all the way to working with the oral history method. In doing so, the assignment of some generational specifics was ignored.

Origins Experiences with Foreignness and Ambivalence in a Community In order to understand how people became who they are, it helps to know where they came from. Some of our highly reflective interview partners were not at all shy about answering questions about their personal situations and their origins. The Russian historian Irina Scherbakowa (born in 1949) began to tell about her life in a classic way, by giving information on her birth year and place, only to

 In the group of Italian intellectuals, this age group is just concentrated into two birth years: Pietro Clemente, Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and Alessandro Triulzi were all born in 1941 and 1942.  Overviews of the situation can be found in Norbert Frei, 1968. Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich: DTV, 2008) and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung. Deutschland – Westeuropa – USA (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001).

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immediately portray the assimilation of her maternal Jewish family in Russia through education in an extensive and reflective way, starting with her greatgrandmother. This deep and far-reaching knowledge of her own family history is something that she immediately attributed as Jewish tradition. At the same time, it signaled that she understands herself to be a Jewish intellectual in Russia.⁷ Even the German historian Alexander von Plato (born in 1942) began his narrative with the forced, precise description about time, place, social location, and familial relationships of his origin. Two central themes of his narrative, the (probable) connection of his parents to the National Socialist regime and his aristocratic background, are contained in hints: I am from Lüchow-Dannenberg County. There, my parents had a farm, a manor, that my father had finally just taken from a lease and brought into a functioning, operating, independent business. By the way, something that is not uninteresting is that he did it with the assistance of the Nazis’ debt relief policies. I was born in 1942; that is, during the war. My oldest sister was born in 1934 and my older brother in 1937. After my parents’ divorce in 1954, my father got married again in 1956, as did my mother, to whom I was awarded custody.⁸

Other interviewees only allowed themselves to disclose information about their childhood and youth after a long depiction of their career biography, and only spoke about their family in passing or when directly asked. This occasionally came across as though they viewed their own origins as not being relevant to the formation of their academic and thematic interests, although as researchers, they were especially interested in biographical connections. In the narratives that they provided about this first part of their lives, it is striking that they often described themselves as being in a position in which they were intentionally or voluntarily distant from the majority group, be it due to their family, location, school, or career; or which was characterized by ambivalence towards and alienation from natural inclusivity. Alessandro Portelli (born in 1942), an Italian specialist in American studies, grew up in Terni, an industrial city located northeast of Rome. The family had left Rome due to the father’s job and Portelli, as the son of an employee of the police headquarters, felt like he was a member of the elite in this small city populated with blue-collar workers in the post-war period:

 Irina Scherbakowa, interview with Franka Maubach, Moscow, March 6, 2008.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, Stade, Germany, January 15, 2008.

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[…] I didn’t know anything about this place […], because I lived in this separate neighborhood that belonged to a business, and then I went to school, a traditional college prep school, and then I came home. […] The college prep school was for elites.⁹

The educational path of Gabriella Gribaudi (born in 1948), now a historian in Naples, was the complete opposite. From the blue-collar Turin neighborhood where her parents lived as simple employees in a relatively poor environment, every day she went to the prosperous middle-class neighborhood. She attended intermediate and secondary schools with the children from this neighborhood: […] [I]t was if I had arrived in a completely different place […], already in secondary school I called myself left […,] I already had this conviction to be left… from the working class… that is… to be different.¹⁰

She emphasized this experience of alienation in the interview even more, as her father actually belongs to a rich Turin family, but was disowned for being born out of wedlock – an origin story that Gribaudi circles around in the interview and hints at multiple times before she finally gives a detailed account, with great emotional involvement, about how she, at the age of 15, discovered the truth about her father’s family under dramatic circumstances. Her double-formulated sense of not belonging to the middle class, not to her own family and not to her classmates, is supplemented in her story through her “dual upbringing,” which arose from her mother’s secular, socialistic convictions and the positions of her religious, non-conformist father. The duality is, as it were, to be seen as Gribaudi’s self-positioning in an intermediate position, between poles that either attract or repel each other, but still influence and attract the person standing in the middle to the same extent. In an interview with the historian Giovanni Contini (born in 1948), the feeling of being excluded from a community also came up when, after some hesitation, he reported on his childhood. As the oldest of seven children in an aristocratic Florentine family, he had taken on the role of a “somewhat inconvenient son.” After what was a dramatic and inexplicable decision by his parents, from his perspective, he was torn away from his siblings at the age of about 14. After the death of his grandfather’s wife, his grandfather was threatening to sink into a bout of melancholy, and Contini was to provide his grandfather company. Contini marked the distance that subsequently separated himself from his family, in the retrospective narrative, through the large garden that lay between his pa-

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Rome, March 16, 2007.  Gabriella Gribaudi, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Naples, March 20, 2007.

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rents’ and his grandparents’ house – his siblings, as playmates, close enough to touch yet, due to the responsibility of his assigned role as his grandfather’s assistance, unreachable.¹¹ In this isolated position at the side of his difficult but fascinating grandfather, who was a Hermetic poet,¹² Contini received his “intellectual upbringing.”¹³ In a certain way, this experience ended his childhood and gave him an ex-territorial status in the nuclear family that he retained, and which played a role throughout his biographical narrative. Ronald Fraser (born in 1930), one of the intellectuals who was sporadically active in the informal International Oral History Network, explicitly broached the issue of his constant feelings of isolation and alienation. He dedicated a longer, autobiographical text containing oral sources to his attempt to finding the cause of these feelings in his childhood and origin. Fraser is descended from an extremely well-to-do English-American family and grew up in a manor house, a country estate close to Reading, Berkshire, in southeastern England. The walls of the imposing manor house appear in his book In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933 – 1945 (1984) as a symbol for the borders and barriers that surrounded him in his childhood, as well as those between him and his parents, between him and the rest of reality: The place remained impenetrable, enclosed by walls of every sort. And that’s how it has always been […,] either confined behind them in childhood or shut out later by those walls. […] Those walls are inside me, I feel… Or rather, perhaps it’s something like split vision. […] [I]t’s not surprising, perhaps, because there were two worlds, two houses within those same walls. […] I belonged without yet belonging.¹⁴

In tracing the feeling of a lack of belonging and the distance to the people and the location whose comfort and trust Fraser was longing for, decades later, he interviewed the servants at his parents’ manor house, to try to get a view of the upper class in order to understand his own origins. In the maze of the

 Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, Florence, September 25, 2006.  Augusto Alessandro “Sandro” Contini Bonacossi (1899 – 1994). Hermeticism was a literary trend in the tradition of French symbolism and developed in the 1930’s, especially in Italy. A national literature prize was named after Augusto Alessandro Contini Bonacossi. His works, among others, include Studi per una poesia (Parma: Guanda, 1964); La via del silenzio (Milan: Mondadori, 1971), Canti dell’ultimo amore (Padua: Rebellato, 1975), and Le poesie (Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1978).  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, Florence, March 15, 2007.  Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933 – 1945 (London: Verso, 1984), 4.

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many voices of these people and the discussions with his psychoanalyst, the division within his own personality becomes clearer to him in the text: […] [T]he servants were the real human beings in my childhood whom I felt close to, sided with. Of course, it was an ambiguous alliance because I knew I was the little master […]. A role of inherent superiority which came to me from outside, from the servants among others. Inside however, I felt inherently inferior, inadequate to fill the role. That was the split…¹⁵

Fraser experiences his “non-belonging” as rather a division of his interior world, his own personality. He had internalized the various positions, fighting with each other, with which Gribaudi, for example, was confronted with from the outside. In his text, he presents the conflicts of this ambivalent position, as intimate psychological tension, in particular. The Italian philosopher Luisa Passerini (born in 1941), who, due to her methodological-theoretical contributions, later had a significant influence in the international oral history scene, also used the image of doubling as the basic experience in her childhood. Due to the death of her mother, as a six-year-old, she was pulled into an intermediate position with lots of consequences. Throughout my entire childhood and youth, there were two houses: that of my father, where I had lived for some years with him and my mother, and that of my grandmother, where I moved after my mother became seriously ill. When she died, I only had two feelings: her absence and the feeling of being torn between those who were still alive, who shared me between themselves. I reacted to the feeling of abandonment and the separation with a grudge that lasted for decades. ¹⁶

She grew up with her grandmother in the small Piedmont city of Asti, also separated from her father in terms of space, and experienced her childhood and youth in the lower-middle-class province “characterized by a social, capillary control,” which burdened her.¹⁷ In an interview, Passerini was reluctant to talk about her life story. She said that she was subjecting it to a revision, a deconstruction, which she was experiencing “as an individual and solitary discovery” and could therefore not share it.¹⁸ Passerini referred to information about her origins in her autobiographical text Autoritratto di gruppo (1988). There, in a talk with her psychoanalyst, the first-person narrator says, “I do not have any  Fraser, Search, 111.  Passerini, Autoritratto, 24.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Pavarolo, Italy, April 12, 2008.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008.

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roots, I do not have any memory of origins that resemble me. My mother is an empty space. I only have negative memories of her […].”¹⁹ In her youth, Passerini looked for mental stimuli outside of her home, and alternately moved between the available, partially opposing offers of her hometown: by visiting communist discussion groups, youth camps offered by a progressive Catholic priest and through her intensive reading of Immanuel Kant, she became, as she depicts herself, “a very intellectual girl.”²⁰ The topos of the outsider who looks at a community from a distance and with a diffuse mix of feelings of pride and pain, is often present in our interview partners’ origin stories. In the case of the German historian Lutz Niethammer (born in 1939), the specific mixture of a position of being on the margin and an elite self-perception, which was already indicated by Portelli, becomes especially apparent. Niethammer, together with the household of women in which he grew up until he was 10, found himself living in a village on the edge of the Black Forest at the end of the war. The educated, middle-class family who was poor at that point, was respected as the “elite of this village” of Sulz am Neckar, but “that you did not belong to this village, but that you just had a taste of it, but just had a taste of the top – that was, I think, the basic mental state of my childhood.” The return to his birth city of Stuttgart then did not mean increased familiarity for him, but was rather a confirmation of not belonging. He just found a “strange home” in which his father, completely unknown to him after years of war and a following imprisonment, appeared a broken, choleric man.²¹ In contrast, the American Ronald Grele (born in 1934) refused to take on the role in his local community that his well-integrated and anything but elite family system guaranteed him. Like Passerini, who has been his close friend for three decades, he was affected by the early death of a parent. His claim to being a member of the “luckiest generation in American history” is contrasted by the image that he draws in the interview about his childhood.²² His hometown of Naugatuck, Connecticut – “a working-class town, […] very, very depressing place” – featured a slimy river that had been colored a bilious green through the factory wastewater; widowed (yet active and often employed) women dominated the neighborhood. After the death of his father, he mostly lived with his father’s extended family, which had German roots. From his own perspective,     21,

Passerini, Autoritratto, 13. Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008. Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, Jena, Germany, May 27, 2008. Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, Jena, Germany, February 2007.

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his mother’s and father’s sides of the family were considerably different, both socially and religiously, which provoked tensions: in contrast to the mobility of his father’s family, who had emigrated from Lviv and belonged to the Episcopal church, was the centuries-long stagnation of the long-established “swamp Yankees” on his mother’s side, who, as representatives of the Protestant lower middle class, felt superior to the immigrant laborers.²³ Grele grew up in a constellation split into two. The close neighboring and family communities welcomed him and his sister after the death of his father and he felt emotionally supported. Nevertheless, the spiritual confinement repelled him. As he vehemently emphasizes in the interview: I hated it. Everybody knew me. I was a kind of rebellious little kid and there was no way of getting out of there. So, I’ve never been a big one on community. I lived in a community, and so when people talk about community and the search for a community, and how wonderful community would be, not for me, not for me. I knew at 14 I was going to get out of that town. I was not going to live that way, absolutely not.²⁴

In the retrospective narrative, Grele derives his future, negative position on communities directly from the depressing involvement in competing collectives, due to having a dead parent. This contradicts Grele’s life as a political activist in the 1960’s, which he describes not much later; however, viewed at the time of his telling, it serves to locate himself in a position of critical, but carefully observing distance, a position that many of the intellectuals portrayed here have also stylized for themselves.

Traces of Dictatorial Systems Experiences with the after-effects of Nazism and fascism in one’s own family or in the immediate environment is one of the recurring themes in the narratives of childhood, youth, and origin, and is often linked with placing oneself on the edge or intermediate area of society. The community in which the Dutch histor-

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008. “Swamp Yankees” is a derogatory term for New England residents who live along inland waters like lakes or slowly flowing tributary waters, which have the tendency to be muddy and swamplike. It is interesting that Grele uses this term for his maternal family and in doing so, sides with his father’s immigrant family and shares their (derisory) view. The closeness to his European, immigrant ancestors is surely one of the backdrops for Grele’s later intensive relationship with European intellectuals and the early oral history network on the “old continent.”  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008.

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ian Selma Leydesdorff (born in 1941) grew up in as the daughter of Jewish parents in Amsterdam was also close, yet “extremely traumatized” and “very far away from being integrated into Dutch society.” During World War II, her father was interned by the Japanese in Indonesia and most of his family members were murdered in the Sobibor death camp in Poland. Burdened by this shielded environment which was mostly made up of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children, and from the early death of her father, which led to the family’s social descent, she had a terrible school career that was not ended until she made the decision to leave this depressing world and transferred to a Catholic college prep school.²⁵ None of the other interview partners came from a family that had been damaged by racial persecution like Selma Leydesdorff’s, but some others intimated having ambivalent experiences with traces of previous dictatorships or condensed them into episodes. Giovanni Contini apparently did not have the words when he was asked about the position of his Florentine noble family under Fascism. As unclear as his paternal family’s political orientation presumably was to him, his sentences about its involvement in the Fascist regime are just as confusing: My family is a family that was originally not Fascist, but then my grandfather became podestà [a mayor appointed by the Fascists], you know, but his cousin was a partisan, so, it is also ver-… very special, also the involvement of the, the, the, the family with regard to the political matter, you know, that means my siblings are [looks away] all left-wing […].²⁶

More freely, almost amused, he continues that his mother’s family belonged to an extremely monarchistic right-wing, in whose eyes Mussolini’s politics were much too far left and too connected to the people to even want to follow them.²⁷ This complex, right-wing conservative leaning of his family, according

 Selma Leydesdorff, interview with Sirku Plötner, Amsterdam, April 27, 2008.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, September 25, 2006. Giovanni Contini’s great-grandfather, Alessandro Contini Bonacossi (1878 – 1955), was one of the most important art collectors and dealers in Italy. The assumption that he had very good relationships with the fascist and Nazi leadership is supported by the following facts: In 1939, he was named a senator under Benito Mussolini. In addition, he apparently had a strong business relationship with Hermann Göring. Parts of his important private art collections have been in the ownership of the Italian state as the Collezione Contini Bonacossi in the Uffizi Museum in Florence. For more information, see Günther Haase, Die Kunstsammlung des Reichsmarschalls Hermann Göring (Berlin: Edition Q, 2000), 93. Although Haase’s arguments are based on extensive documentation, for his results, he unfortunately does not include citations that are sufficiently verifiable.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, March 15, 2007.

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to which going along with any mass movements was to be avoided at all costs, no matter which political party they were affiliated with, makes it understandable how it was possible for Contini’s father to attack him by calling him “a red Fascist” in later conflicts about his son’s extreme left-wing political orientation.²⁸ In Autoritratto, Luisa Passerini writes that her elementary school years in post-war Italy were noticeably characterized by fascism. This affected the content of lessons, like poems and songs, but also a strong social discrimination that even existed in the classroom. She reacted to this with a great fascination for the “rejects on the last bench,” which, as she only mentions in passing, were typically the residents of a nearby children’s home. Her attraction to these children, with whom she shared a common experience, the loss of parents, still did not lead to closer relationships.²⁹ Passerini chose the daughter of a Jewish doctor who had converted to Catholicism as her best friend, and, as the daughter of a railway employee, stayed within the borders of her social class. When the approximately 13-year-old Passerini was moved away from her friend, with whom she shared the school bench, due to poor grades, she was devastated. In Passerini’s narrative, this experience was condensed into an episode about the presence of the past in her present, which she experienced in a highly ambivalent way: For me, the entire story about being banished to separate benches was an experience with the injustice of the world. To me, it seemed to be a part of fate that I had received this excessive punishment from a victim. The teacher had been persecuted by the Nazis, had lost her family in a concentration camp, had this terrible mark on her arm. For me, who could not see any pictures of a concentration camp inmate without shaking, she was symbolically a victim as well as a persecutor. I couldn’t speak with anyone about this fear and this suffering. Only a few times with my friend, but just a little bit, because it hurt so much and one couldn’t do anything about it; I couldn’t ask anyone for help.³⁰

Due to the history of persecution in the past of the teacher doling out punishment, Passerini would not allow herself to admit to the aggression and antipathy that she felt. This only increased her feelings of insecurity, isolation, and guilt. Lutz Niethammer belongs to the same age cohort as Luisa Passerini and, like her and in contrast to other colleagues from the international network, came from a country with significant experience with dictatorships. In the interview, he emphasized that he did not have any direct, independent experience with

 Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, September 25, 2006.  Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto, 24.  Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto, 26.

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the National Socialist regime and therefore could not have a “personal sense of guilt.”³¹ Nevertheless, in his childhood, he felt the […] unease of eternal yesterdays and connection back to the Third Reich, which you actually did not know, but of which you somehow knew that it was the embodiment of horribleness and that at the same time, it created a framework for responsibility that you simply couldn’t escape and also somehow you were brought up that way […]. And that it was unfathomable and that you somehow had to react to this connection to something unfathomable […].³²

The way that the incomprehensibility and foreignness this connection to the direct past appeared to him can be surmised by the impersonal form of his statement (“you”), his helpless choice of words (“somehow”), and the sentence construction, with repeated attempts to find an explanation (“and that”). In his case, it is based on this feeling of the inevitable reversion to his German heritage and, therefore, to the German past. It also establishes the basis for the thematic focus on National Socialism in his first two historiographical works.³³ Having said this, he did not find his motivation from the fact that the National Socialist past was suppressed in public civil discourse in the 1950’s and in 1960’s, as is often incorrectly asserted. His interest and his intellectual contradiction were rather awakened by the “quality of dissociation” with which Germany’s most recent past was depicted back then.³⁴ For Niethammer, it was unbelievable and unbearable, because he almost physically experienced the closeness of the National Socialist era. In contrast to Niethammer, other intellectuals felt irritated and disturbed by the lack of discussion about injustice that had occurred, crimes that had been committed, and, associated with that, their own responsibility in their community of origin. Not wanting to or being able to respect this silence drove them when researching contemporary topics. Their selected method, which was first instinctive and then reflective, was consequently not research with controversial documents in quiet archives, but was rather the questioning of their contemporaries

 Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008.  Lutz Niethammer, Entnazifizierung in Bayern. Säuberung und Rehabilitierung unter amerikanischer Besatzung (Frankfurt: S.-Fischer, 1972) and Lutz Niethammer, Peter Brandt, and Ulrich Borsdorf, eds., Arbeiterinitiative 1945. Antifaschistische Ausschüsse und Reorganisation der Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland (Wuppertal, Germany: Peter Hammer, 1976).  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008.

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about their experienced reality in the recent past, the impetus for discussions about avoided and neglected topics.³⁵

Family Oral Traditions Not just remaining silent, but also speaking could awake the intellectuals’ curiosity for stories from bygone times and develop sensitivity for the complex of the ideas and images of personal and national history transported through it. Many interview partners noted that in their childhood, they were fascinated or irritated by oral narratives. Therefore, Irina Scherbakowa presented her mother’s narratives about the history of the family that she, as previously shown, apparently integrated into her own life narrative without a problem, deliberately as an origin for her “ardent interest in the past and in other’s life stories.”³⁶ References back to discussions with his educated grandfather were much more problematic for Giovanni Contini than for Scherbakowa. In his narrative, these conversations represent how inappropriate the forced living situation with the melancholy man was as a way of life for the adolescent, and how great the demand was for him to replace his deceased grandmother as a conversation partner. Contini remembered the “tremendous boredom” that he had experienced and, with the understanding of a now adult man and experienced interviewer, added that it was “a terrible retelling of false anecdotes. […] His memories were really… were real fossils […].”³⁷ As he remarked, surprised, all of these things had maybe not just prepared him for the constant contact with old people in his interviews, but also sensitized him to twists in life stories and memory. Like Contini, some interview partners first discovered during the interview, astonished, a connection between the presence and cultivation of oral narratives in their family and their later professional occupation with oral sources. As the Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren (born in 1943), who only reluctantly provided details about his personal and family backgrounds: I had a father who was very interested in history […;] of course there was a rich oral tradition […]. So, my dad got from the U.S. one of the first tape recorders that actually run on a steel wire. He interviewed his old kin and so, in the family there was that tradition that you

 For more on the topic of society remaining silent as an impetus to research contemporary topics with the oral history method, see Franka Maubach’s chapter in this volume.  Irina Scherbakowa, Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten. Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror (Frankfurt: Campus, 2000), 23.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, September 25, 2006.

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interviewed people, you know. [quickly adding] And I never thought about that, when you mention it, it’s, it was there as a method, as a fa…. And I think that is a very interesting… tradition.³⁸

Löfgren, who, in particular, had attended the first international conferences on oral history, immediately generalized his family’s own tradition and specified that the new recording devices in the 1950’s accommodated the needs of the Swedish middle class, who documented their own families in photos, film, and audio recordings. In the early 1960’s, when Löfgren was looking for a possibility to research everyday life with qualitative methods, he changed his major from history to folklore / ethnology, where he first experienced a “cultural shock” after he realized that in this discipline, the necessary sources were created through interviews and field studies.³⁹ But Löfgren overcame this quickly and got used to the new method, now relieved, also thanks to the trusted, distinctive family practice of recorded interviews. Löfgren’s countryman Sven Lindqvist (born in 1932), author of one of the best-received oral history handbooks, Dig Where You Stand,⁴⁰ felt drawn to the active and passive interaction with language early in life, due to his literature-filled environment. His father, an elementary school teacher, read out loud to him, recited poems for him, and became his first “writing tool”: “Before I had the physical ability to write, I told stories to my father and asked him to write them down, which he did.”⁴¹ A little later, between the ages of five and 12, at Sunday School, Lindqvist came to appreciate the narratives of missionaries from China, Africa, and India as a “source of information and contact;”⁴² his interest in other countries grew and he noticed: […] this “that really happened” seemed so much more valuable and interesting than things that had just been taken off the cuff. […] I didn’t believe that I become a missionary [sic], but I would like to be a witness to the crude things that happen in the world. To have witness about and report what was happening; taking to world opinion […].⁴³

For Lindqvist, his affinity for reading and writing was, in retrospect, inseparably combined with this attention to foreign cultures and nations. Throughout his en-

 Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, Lund, Sweden, July 15, 2007.  Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, July 15, 2007.  Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst. Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989).  Sven Lindqvist, interview with Christian König, Stockholm, June 11, 2007.  Sven Lindqvist, interview with Christian König, June 11, 2007.  Christian König, interview with Sven Lindqvist, June 11, 2007.

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tire youth in Sweden, untouched by World War II, both of these things were intensified, until finally, in 1947, as a 15-year-old, he was able to take his first trip abroad and later, as a travel journalist and writer, could make his passion his career.⁴⁴

Departure Movement in Geographical Space Many of the intellectuals interviewed by us appeared, like Lindqvist, since their youth to be keen to take a step away from the families, locations, and milieus of their origins, to break away from the borders of the environment which they were born into since their youth, to break away by breaking themselves away. That is how, at the end of the 1950’s, three Italian high school students, all independent of each other, seized the opportunity to spend a year at a high school or college in the USA, thanks to a scholarship from the American Field Service. For Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and Alessandro Triulzi, their stays in North America between 1958 and 1960 did not just mean a certain gain in distance from their families, milieu, and region of origin, but the 17- to 19-year-olds were also confronted with fundamental political experiences and, in Triulzi and Portelli’s cases, with their future study and research discipline. While Triulzi (born in 1941), who later became a specialist in African Studies, came into contact with the Martin Luther King movement by flirting with an engaged, African-American activist,⁴⁵ in Los Angeles, Portelli felt extremely repelled by the strong anti-Communist attitudes in the USA. He was removed from the apolitical, generally anti-Communist position in his parents’ house, where politics were basically considered “dirty or insignificant,” and developed a strong interest for the American folk and civil rights movement. Later, he wrote his dissertation as well as multiple books about the topic.⁴⁶

 See his publications. Sven Lindqvist, China von innen. Zwei Jahre in Maos Reich (Wiesbaden, Germany: Brockhaus, 1964), Lateinamerika. Der geplünderte Kontinent (Hamburg: Marion von Schröder, 1971), and Durch das Herz der Finsternis. Ein Afrika-Reisender auf den Spuren des europäischen Völkermordes (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999).  Alessandro Triulzi, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, March 17, 2007.  Irene Rosati, “Alessandro Portelli. Ho imparato come gli artigiani rubando con gli occhi” in Alessandro Casellato, ed., Il microfono rovesciato. Dieci variazioni sulla storia orale (Treviso, Italy: Itresco, 2007), 57. Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, April 18, 2008. Portelli’s publications on the topic include Veleno di piombo sul muro. Le canzoni del Black Power (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1969); La canzone popolare in America. La rivoluzione musicale

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For Luisa Passerini, America was a means of escape: “There was no example, you didn’t know how you should behave, between the forbidden and the new. You just had the desire to throw the entire old world overboard.”⁴⁷ In Passerini’s autobiographical text, if the term “old world” is targeted towards her family and small-town surroundings in post-war Italy, it is only logical that she set out for the “new world,” the USA, with this attitude towards life. Surprisingly, in retrospect, in contrast to Portelli and Triulzi, Passerini did not want to accept that her exchange year had any influences on her later life, with the exception of her extremely helpful, excellent command of the English language. Following the logic of her narrative, this is due to the fact that her life in the extremely religious, Republican, middle-class family in Rochester, New York did not correspond to her previously-formulated requirement for a “heroic life,” with which she repeatedly measured her experiences in an interview.⁴⁸ As she previously explained upon the irritated request from her interviewer, a life like this is characterized by continuous transgressions. In a life like this, there is always a goal, a vision, that is more urgent than one’s own, private existence, an engagement to which one dedicates his life and which pervades everything. With a combination of regret and persistence in her voice, she added that it included this will to free oneself from the past, to always pursue the relationships that are immediately very intensive, the liveliest, and let the others go. Those are decisions that are a little bit like… the vision of a heroic life, but that simply cuts things out […].⁴⁹

Passerini’s four-person host family, in contrast, embodied the lower-middleclass existence, focused on wealth and consumption. It was a stark contrast to her circle of friends in Asti, who had tried to transcend the societally prescribed borders of the small Piedmont via the use of alcohol and free sexuality. The unfamiliar way of life in the host family simultaneously attracted and repelled Passerini, who had practically grown up without parents. She rejected them: “To me, they seemed limited, provincial, backward. I took them into my heart, but couldn’t follow the thread of affection, as occupied as I was with my oppositional anger.”⁵⁰ As a way out, she selected her trusted position between worlds: the liberal neighboring family offered her a second home that she could flee to.

di Woody Guthrie (Bari, Italy: DeDonati, 1975); Il testo e la voce. Oralità, letteratura e democrazia in America (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1992).  Passerini, Autoritratto, 38.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008.  Passerini, Autoritratto, 39.

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In most countries in post-war Europe, in Portelli’s, Triulzi’s, and Passerini’s age cohort (birth years 1941 and 1942), it was certainly unusual and rare to already have the experience of a longer stay abroad at a young age. The Spanish historian Mercedes Vilanova (born in 1936) also spent a year at a college in the USA at the same age as her Italian colleagues, and it certainly played a significant role that she came from an old, extremely well-to-do and politically-engaged family from Barcelona’s upper class. During Vilanova’s early childhood, the family had already spent many years in exile in France and in other countries. Each of these young Europeans thus belonged to a minority that distinguished themselves from the crowd of their peers, because they could already utilize attractive educational possibilities and experiences. Their special or intermediate position, created during their childhood and adolescence, appears again in the intellectuals’ narratives for this biographical stage, but this time, it has been clearly turned into the positive, with a privileged position. Vilanova mentions how her being different significantly substantiated an extended “initiatory trip” around the world following her year at the college. Vilanova characterized the young German noblewoman who accompanied her, with her origins in a family full of opponents to Hitler, as a suitable companion, only to immediately brush her aside: “[a]lone, I was alone, and I think that was important.”⁵¹ The Swedish ethnologist Birgitta Skarin Frykman shows that the privilege of this experience abroad was not exclusively based on a better material starting situation, but much rather due to self-initiative and a mental horizon that had been expanded through interest and engagement. Like Passerini, she was also born in 1941 and was raised by her grandmother, because her father lived in a hospital with an incurable illness and her mother died early: I was very well looked after, I had a happy childhood, but having lost my mother and my father being in hospital affected me. It meant that I sort of decided a whole lot of things for myself [laughs] and didn’t really ask for advice.⁵²

Due to this independence, Birgitta Skarin Frykman followed a wish ignited by reading the works of Heinrich Schliemann to become an archaeologist and, even already as a 16-year-old, looked for ways to participate in excavations and improve her English. Together with a friend – another parallel to Passerini, who traveled to the USA together with her best friend – she sent 40 applications to universities in the British Islands. Her first stay abroad in Ireland was a result  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007.

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of this. Even before she completed school, she participated in archaeological excavations with Michael O’Kelly at the University of Cork; a life-long contact, both privately and professionally.⁵³ With other interview partners too, the spatial dimension of breaking away from the borders of their own origin plays a central role when they retrospectively depict their life path in an interview. The experience of alienness, which was already described in childhood, was deepened and expanded in the narratives for the period of young adulthood, to include the aspect of temporarily being a foreigner or outsider with regard to language, culture and mentality. With a stay abroad, the possibility of challenging one’s own misgivings and prejudices and developing a more sensitive view for the complexity of human existence was certainly combined. This status between openness and a critical distance could later be an advantage in terms of behavior towards their own interview partners during an interview and in the interpretation of the conflicting, complex oral sources. In an interview, Lutz Niethammer vividly described how strongly travels that he took to Israel and Poland as a young student in the first half of the 1960’s, which he describes as “typical, goodwill activities generated due to the past,” had influenced him.⁵⁴ They were significantly different from his earlier stays in England and France to improve his language skills, with regard to the intensity of the emotional impressions. Spending seven weeks in Israel during the trial of Adolf Eichmann and visiting Auschwitz with a group of students in 1964 shaped his self-understanding as a member of a new, unencumbered, elite member of German post-war society who still had a sense of responsibility: The leitmotif was, basically, how do you deal with your own alienness? With the reflection that you are an outsider […]. We were constantly forced to reflect on our German origins, if only because we had brought this reflection with us. Yet there was this integration in a context of responsibility, which was reflected back to you from the outside, and which was inescapable.⁵⁵

Prior to this, Niethammer’s path into the open – “to get out of this family constellation” – had already begun with his engagement as the editor of a school newspaper and in the Junge Presse youth press organization:⁵⁶

   

Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007. Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008. Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008. Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008.

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Because I resorted to writing […], I left the immobility of my family, and also for the first time, discovered what the public sphere is or what politics is. […] Having an initial premonition about what politics is, what intellectual life is, what you can do, what you can’t do, and how to do it with other people, together […].⁵⁷

Niethammer experienced a departure as well, if not a spatial one in the geographical sense, but rather one to open up an intellectual space and horizon of experience. For the English historian Paul Thompson (born in 1935), later one of the most important networkers in the international oral history scene, who tried to travel to every country where oral history was beginning to be implemented, new spaces were opening up in an unusual way. Since the beginning of his academic career, he had closely combined travel and research, and yet he mentioned no radical travel experience or experience abroad that was connected with a clear or felt biographical break.⁵⁸ Rather, his short stay in prison can be understood to be a radical experience on foreign soil. As an activist in the peace movement, a 23-year-old Thompson published an article in the student newspaper, in which he used military knowledge from his stint in the British Marines. He was then consequently sued for the betrayal of state secrets and served a month of his three-month prison sentence. “Completely naïve” and afraid, he immersed himself into the conditions of the open prison and, without the skills of a friend in dealing with other people, if he had been left to himself, he would have “sunk.” In retrospect, Thompson evaluated the imprisonment as an “illuminating” and “intense experience,” especially due to the encounters with a number of people from the working class, who later became the object of his research.⁵⁹ The experiences of Triulzi and Portelli in the USA, Niethammer abroad, and Thompson in prison as someone on the edge of society were all connected with the politicization of the young adults. A personal development like that of the Italian historian Cesare Bermani (born in 1937) also fits in well here. Bermani came from a Northern Italian industrial family and involuntarily spent some of his school years at a very conservative private boarding school in Geneva. There, in political discussions with the  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008.  Paul Thompson, interview with Karen Worcman, Qualitative Data Service: Colchester, England, 1996.  Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, Colchester, England, July 18, 2007. See Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals, and Labour: The Struggle for London, 1885 – 1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967) and Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975).

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monarchistic and “racist” teachers at the school, he consolidated his role of the cast out and “marginalized,” with whom which he had already identified after other unfortunate and truncated school attendance.⁶⁰ The young Sardinian and later anthropologist Pietro Clemente (born in 1942) became politicized in the process of his move to the Italian mainland. Due to the great linguistic and cultural differences between Sardinia and Lombardy, this move was almost like a move abroad. His study of architecture in Milan between 1960 and 1962 did not come to an end, yet Clemente’s political career, which lasted until 1973, began there, upon his entry into the Partito Socialista Italiano, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).⁶¹ Finally, Ronald Grele should also be named in this context. To study, he left his rural home to go to the no less provincial University of Connecticut, and with the conviction to never, really never come back, as he clearly emphasized.⁶² From 1952 to 1959, with other students, he formed a group that enlivened the campus with their ideas and activities, even on the weekend, when most students went home. Grele’s circle of friends, which he ironically calls the “cadre of loose ends,” created the image of young, intellectual bohemians through its readings, its discussion topics, and folk music which the young students listened to. They first understood themselves in a politically rather undifferentiated way, as members of the beat generation, but just a short period of time later made up the basis of the civil rights and peace movement.⁶³ In retrospect, Grele presents his political development away from his family’s loyal republicanism as linear and consequent in a simplified, yet plausible way: I had become a Democrat, I had become a Socialist, and I had become a Marxist, fairly easy. The milieu in which we traveled was just that. The folk song club and the radicals, it was all mixed together in one big bunch. For Christmas in my second year, I asked my

 Cesare Bermani, interview with Mauro Pirini, Bologna, April 28, 2007. Suiting Bermani’s selfimage as a marginalized person and member of the resistance, the interview with him took place in the Museo della Resistenza in Bologna. Bermani’s maternal grandfather, Cesare Angelo Rossi, was the owner of the Istituto Geografico De Agostini in Novara from 1919 until 1947, the most important cartographical publisher in Italy.  Clemente, Triglie, 115.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007. Grele did not strictly keep this promise that he made to himself. In 1956, he returned home for a year in order to try out exactly what he never wanted to do: work in his family’s business. After a short period of time, he dismissed this. In addition, in 1959, he married a woman who came from the same hometown, whom he had known since childhood.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.

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mother for Capital, The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Origin of the Species. That was where I was: Darwin, Marx, and Freud.⁶⁴

Movement in Political Space It is not just Ronald Grele, but many of his later colleagues in the international Oral History network who came to this point when moving away from their milieu of origin at the beginning of the 1960’s: Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Upon the discovery of new spaces, they joined new political groups that included the principle of movement in their names. These political groups coagulated this principle into an organizational form which had the requirement of not being rigid, but rather standing out against other forms of political participation through its character of constant change and transformation as a movement. So, what did the political dimension of the personal story of movement that the intellectuals experienced looks like? Already at the end of the 1950’s and the beginning of the 1960’s, many of the oldest members were already going through a phase of intense political sensitization or were becoming politically active. While Mercedes Vilanova was engaged in resistance against the Franco regime as a member of the Catholic social movement Fraternidad de Foucauld and later, in the Frente Obrero de Catalunya (Workers’ Front of Catalonia, or FOC), Paul Thompson became politicized due to the Suez crisis in 1956 and joined the New Left. Austrian Gerhard Botz (born in 1941), who, during his studies in Vienna between 1960 and 1964, experienced a “mental and an environmental break” and became a left-wing social democrat – all of them had fundamental, politically-formative experiences prior to the beginning of the student unrest in 1968.⁶⁵ Some of the oral history representatives, who were around 30 years old at this point, were sympathetic to the protests and demands, but had some distance to them and, as teaching staff, supported their students.⁶⁶ Niethammer’s position on the 1968 generation is representative of

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007. The last two sentences (“For Christmas…”) were not stated in the interview, but rather, were added by Grele during his revision of the transcript. In his opinion, the later revision of the oral source is a valid and necessary process.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, October 4, 2006.  In 1968, Daniel Bertaux was a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Botz, an academic assistant at Johannes Kepler University Linz, felt immune “to the left-Marxist and other excesses and effects” (Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, October 4,

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their view of the events: “[I] understood the 1968 generation, so to speak, with regard to their return to the epoch of restoration and their high levels of aggressiveness and all of that […] but I found all of it very abstract.” At another point, he acknowledged that he was influenced by the spirit of the time, nevertheless: “I belonged to the age group that was a little bit too old for the emotional quality for the 1968 generation, but whose everyday lives were still strongly shaped by it.”⁶⁷ Yet also in this age group, some of the later oral history representatives showed intense political engagement over a longer period of time. This is true for Ronald Grele, for example, who, between 1960 and 1970, had various positions in the flexible structures of the emerging student movement at his academic stations in San Francisco, New York, Washington, Long Beach, and New York. Until 1980, Alexander von Plato continuously participated in the debates and the political work of a wide variety of left-wing organizations and circles, from the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union, or SDS) to the IG Chemie union all the way to the German communist party (KPD). The German psychologist Annemarie Tröger (born in 1940), daughter of an officer and manor owner, experienced the student movement as an activist in two countries. After she had worked with the SDS in West Berlin, where she had been studying, and among other things, had helped deserters of the US military forces stationed there, she went to the USA on a scholarship, in order to contact US sister organizations on behalf of the SDS. There, from 1968 to 1975, Tröger was active in various networks in the civil rights and student movements. She had only known her own father as a soldier when he was on home leave and from stories as a war prisoner, and, according to her own depiction, lost him because he rejected the flight from a Russian internment camp in Erfurt planned by her mother and finally died in Vorkuta. In the USA she worked with war veterans once again and combined political with therapeutic work.⁶⁸

2006). Thompson, then a lecturer of sociology in Colchester, attended protests and sit-ins as a speaker, but at the same time, also felt a distance from the mass of students, who were rather interested in ideological tendencies like Trotskyism and anarchism than in a concrete expansion of their rights to participate in decisions (Paul Thompson, interview with Karen Worcman, July 18, 2007). In 1968, Mercedes Vilanova began “another life” in academia, which for her meant the categorical separation from political engagement (Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008).  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008, and a group interview with Lutz Niethammer, Grünow, Germany, June 30, 2007.  Annemarie Tröger, interview with Annette Leo, Berlin, April 29, 2008.

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Apart from Tröger, Luisa Passerini is probably the only person who had similar political experiences in which borders and continents were crossed. After completing her university degree in 1967, she and her partner traveled to Africa, on the hunt for the vague concept of “the revolution, the guerrilla, the memory of the resistance.”⁶⁹ Her partner escaped military service in Italy and both of them, frustrated by the Italian reality, could finally actively live out their convictions – in the liberation movement in the colonialized African countries. Perhaps the attitude that Passerini left Europe with back then, in order to dive into another world, the “third,” resembles, in its exclusivity, in the rejection of her own personality and of the life she had lived to that point, carefully hidden behind the ideological rejection of the prevailing circumstances, the feelings of the other young intellectuals, who had also thrown themselves into the political movements of their respective countries at the same time: To reject everything, to be at a distance from everything, that was the feeling that drove me to Africa and, prior to that, into situationism; that is, into the opposition, into the illusion to take on positions that were contrary and outside. A strong aversion to everyone, but in particular, myself; the desire to dissolve, to negate, to annul myself.⁷⁰

The step away from her Western European life allowed Passerini to break free from her subjectively experienced life as an outsider and to become a part of society in Africa, in the form of a liberation movement. This was associated with the relieving realization that she could use her own talents, her social and historical knowledge, and her ability to write in many languages (“I finally understood how I could be of service”),⁷¹ in the way that she imagined it to be in alignment with her concept of a “heroic life”: in the service of a greater idea, a vision, an ideal. But as a white, female intellectual, she was significantly different from the African activists in the liberation movement. Soon, a climate of tension and violence unfolded, which began to disintegrate the white, radical circles and made her presence increasingly impossible. After a year and a half of a nomadic life in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, she was stranded in May 1969 in Turin, very indecisive about her own future, with a suitcase full of materials about the African fight for independence and “without a specific political con Passerini, Autoritratto, 93.  Passerini, Autoritratto, 92. The situationist idea was spread by a left radical-oriented group of European artists and intellectuals, especially through the Situationist International group, founded in 1957. It was based on applying aesthetic concepts to society and turning life into a work of art with the help of theoretical and practical situations. The situationists were in favor of the elimination of commodities, paid labor, and hierarchies.  Passerini, Autoritratto, 93.

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notation.”⁷² In her “function” of producing intellectual propaganda and information for a movement, which she already tried in Africa, she was drawn into a second, especially intensive, and lengthy period of political engagement, almost without control, as her metaphor of being captured by the “spinning river” of student and worker protests suggests.⁷³ In a certain way, Passerini’s Africa experience presents the matrix for the movement experience for the other Italian intellectuals interviewed by us who, without exception, were active in one of the splinter groups of the extra-parliamentary opposition, often for a number of years.⁷⁴ A diffuse discomfort of their own and societal existence, a feeling of isolation and segregation were dissolved upon entry into a political group, a “movement,” where meaning and hope for change were found in their activities and intense, positive feelings, enthusiasm, and passion could be experienced. The sudden change to a climate full of violence caused groups to break apart, also in Italy, putting an end to the feeling of belonging. In particular, the younger intellectuals, also outside of Italy, who had just begun to study when the strikes and occupations of the universities had begun – and, in some countries, expanded to the workers in the factories – experienced the time between 1969 and 1974 in this manner, without the formative previous experiences that the elder intellectuals had. For them, but also for the older ones, the political and activist phase of their lives led to the professional dealing with oral sources. Which continuities and connections between these two phases in life, and which discontinuities can be discerned in the biographical narratives?

 Passerini, Autoritratto, 163. She incorporated this material into her earliest publications. See Colonialismo portoghese e lotta di liberazione del Mozambico (Turin: Einaudi, 1970) and Giovanni Arrighi and Luisa Passerini, eds., La politica della parentela. Analisi situazionali di società africane in transizione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).  Passerini, Autoritratto, 163.  Luisa Passerini was active in Gruppo Gramsci (until 1974– 75), Alessandro Portelli in the PCI spin-off Manifesto (until 1972), Giovanni Contini and Pietro Clemente in Potere Operaio, Gabriella Gribaudi in Lotta Continua, Daniele Jalla in Collettivo Lenin and then Avanguardia operaia, which turned into Democrazia Operaia and later Democrazia Proletaria (until 1977). Only Cesare Bermani was a non-stop member of the communist party, PCI. Alessandro Triulzi did not mention membership in a political group in the interview and I missed the opportunity to ask him about it.

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Oral History Crisis and Break At the end of the “years of movement,” there was a profound life crisis, as can be implicitly or explicitly seen in the interviews with the intellectuals from the international oral history community. For the majority of the interviewees, it happened between 1972 and 1976, with the end of their intense political engagement. An example of this is the experience of the Italian Giovanni Contini. In his small office in the labyrinthine Board for the Cultural Assets of Tuscany, which appeared to be a protective space in its remote location, in the interview, Contini gave a step-by-step insight into the slow process in which he worked his way out of the closeness and restrictions of the ideological thought, behavior, and speaking patterns. For him, the turning point came in the year 1974 when, in the internal structures of the APO group Potere Operaio, in which Contini was active as a regional official, the legitimacy of the use of violence in a concrete case was discussed, which would have led the group into leftwing terrorism. Contini’s depiction of how he decided to leave the group makes it clear that this was accompanied by the recovery of his subjective view (“it doesn’t correspond to that, which I see around myself”), his own language (“it was difficult, because whoever is caught in the language of the group has great difficulties perceiving the reality behind this language”) and the step away from the position of the community to a more individual position (“so, [my friend and I] left […] and said: we don’t agree”).⁷⁵ The resulting psychological crisis, which apparently lasted until 1978, was also caused by the pressurefilled situation of being a young husband and father without a job and degree in addition to leaving politics. He solved this crisis through intensive studies and work on his initial research projects on the history of unions, with which he began to work with interviews. Increasingly, he was forced to admit his ideological narrow-mindedness and his hubris back then, which were now being reflected back to him through the eyes of the addressees of his former political agitation and revolutionary plans. In an interview which Contini conducted around 1980 within the framework of a research project at King’s College, Cambridge about worker revolts 10 years prior in the Turin Fiat plants,⁷⁶ his interview partner completely unexpectedly

 Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, September 25, 2006.  Giovanni Contini, “The Rise and Fall of Shop Floor Bargaining at Fiat 1945 – 80” in Between Fordism and Flexibility: The Automobile Industry and Its Workers, eds. Steven Tolliday and

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pointed him to his own historical role in these proceedings, which he had apparently “forgotten”: Let me tell you, an embarrassing thing happened, the foremen said: ah, yes, because… I asked them: Why were the workers so upset with you? You know, they were so… Well, they said, because the students were there. There was a Renault with a Florence license plate with a megaphone on top that announced: The foremen are your enemies. And the Renault was my car! [Pause] So… that means… in this situation, I had a strange type of [stops, pauses]. It was if I had forgotten that just a few years, 10 years prior to that, I had been in Turin, in order to organize the, these series of conflicts, you know, and the oral report first reminded me of that. [Stammers, swallows syllables] It was… a little, little strange, little emb…, just strange.⁷⁷

Interestingly enough, this key passage that was decisive for Contini’s professional development takes on the form of an interview within an interview. His search for words illustrates his uncomfortable intermediate position in the noman’s land between an un-involved researcher and the witness of historical proceedings, with which he was knowingly confronted for the first time, and which he described as shameful and embarrassing multiple times. The interconnectedness of his roles – as an interviewer back then, as a historical player in the situation being reported on ten years prior and as a commenting and categorizing interviewee in my present – is expressed in the quick change between the different time axes. A few sentences later, it is not just the temporal structures that become blurred, but for a short period of time, also the identities, when Contini continues by reporting on what the workers told him about their everyday reality back then: “We were all emigrants. We […].”⁷⁸ For me, as an interviewer, it was momentarily impossible to see who was speaking. Here, the 1968 revolutionary’s identification with the workers shines through, which fluidly merges into the young researcher’s temporary identification with his interview partner. It is exactly this role as the interviewer, who is looking for new information, not as an objective and uninvolved observer and researcher, but who is addressed in his own patterns of experience and thinking and in his subjectivity when entering into a dialogue with his interview partner, which became one of the characteristics of oral history. The critical reflection of this reciprocal, in-

Jonathan Zeitlin (Oxford: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 1986), 144– 167; Giovanni Contini, “Politics, Law and Shop Floor Bargaining in Postwar Italy” in Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 192– 218.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, September 25, 2006.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, September 25, 2006.

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tersubjective process is one of the theoretical cornerstones of the work with oral sources and, at the same time, is an innovative contribution to the academics’ changing self-understanding.⁷⁹ The way that Contini reflected upon this interview experience, which is surely representative for many others, is an example of this. At the same time, it shows his motivation for the work with oral sources: […] One of the reasons why I became occupied with oral history, in my opinion, is also that through oral history, I came into contact with, I began to do work about the workers, with real, proper, workers, so, with […] this thing that was completely different from the working class, that… abstract working class that populated our brains as idiotic Operaists, you know […] these schematizations, these absolutely ideological schemata. Going there and talking with them, driving to Turin, where there was the famous mass of workers, who were the highest level of abstraction, because they no longer had any concrete qualities – they were simply the negation of the negation, who were only in the factory in order to stop the work on the assembly lines – they really represented an ideal image, the negation of the negation, they were, yes, they were simply just exploitation, and in the negation of this situation should have brought the positive things forward, the new society, so to speak. When I concretely interviewed them, on the contrary, I saw who they were, this life. They were people with very different, very pronounced regional origins, with political connections amongst each other, but also with friendly relationships. […] I discovered how right the Communists were when they spoke about work ethics, […] simply the opposite of that which we designed in theory. […] My experience as a researcher was then placing myself at the same level, placing myself head to head, and really understanding who the people we were addressing back then really were and how far away they were from that which we had imagined.⁸⁰

This type of self-questioning, which was productively used to question contemporary witnesses and used for the research on the history of the student protest and the working class as well, is fascinating due to its intuitive approach. As it is clear in Contini’s case, it emerged from the inner necessity to emancipate oneself from the readiness to use violence and the schematic thinking, from the ideologized perspectives and basic assumptions from one’s time as a political activist.

 For more information on this, see Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), XII and Luisa Passerini, “Shareable Narratives? Intersubjectivity, Life Stories and Reinterpreting the Past,” Berkeley, 4, accessed October 10, 2009, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/education/docs/shareablenarratives.doc.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, March 15, 2007. Operaism (from the Italian word operaio, “the worker”) simultaneously resulted as a Marxist tendency and social movement in industrialized areas of Northern Italy in the early 1960’s and propagated the fight against factory work, among other things.

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In reverse, the questioning of the other, the interview partner was turned into self-questioning, in order to gain depth and persuasiveness in the thought and recognition process.⁸¹ As Contini observed, this requires the researcher’s change in position in the research process and, subsequently, in the writing of history: he must be “at the same level, placing myself had to head.” In contrast to traditional historiography, with its omniscient narrator, this was posited as one of the innovative aspects of oral history for the writing of history. As Alessandro Portelli describes it in an early theoretical text: The narrator is now pulled into the narrative and becomes part of the story […,] is one of the characters, and the telling of the story is part of the story being told [emphasis Portelli’s]. This implicitly indicates a much deeper political and personal involvement than that of an external narrator.⁸²

It possibly also has to do with this personal and political involvement, this quasiexistential urgency, like with Contini, that those working with the oral history method could not and did not want to respect the time-honored disciplinary and methodological borders and therefore shaped the interdisciplinary and innovative character of the method.⁸³ Is this path towards an occupation with oral history, this motivation, an individual case? A look at Alexander von Plato’s narrative shows remarkable parallels. Plato seriously began to work with interviews as a source of historical knowledge when he joined a project in 1980 at the University of DuisburgEssen headed by Lutz Niethammer, which researched the experiences of the workers in the Ruhr region.⁸⁴ For him, this point in time also coincided with a “new orientation,” a “search for something new”: the Maoist-oriented Communist Party of Germany / Marxists-Leninists (KPD / ML) had just been dissolved and he had ended his occupation as a political functionary and, at the same time, a long-term relationship. Coming from the “left-radical corner,” Plato needed to get involved with the empirical data that he was gaining from the interviews and literally forced him to free himself from the “Marxism ingrained in his head,” through which he had observed history up to that point: “and now

 For example, Luisa Passerini and Ronald Fraser use this dialectical process in their aforementioned autobiographical texts as systematic methods. See Passerini, Autoritratto, 2008 and Fraser, Search, 1984.  Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 57.  See Silvia Musso’s contribution to this volume.  Lutz Niethammer, ed., Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930 – 1960 (Berlin: J.H.W. Dietz, 1983 – 1985). Alexander von Plato was the co-editor of the third volume in the series.

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there are a bunch of people, who – to put it bluntly – don’t behave like their class position would suggest.”⁸⁵ The fact that he gave space to the impulse to change his own way of thinking, and, as he says, “de-radicalize” himself, also has to do with the fact that Plato felt personally affected by the topics being dealt with and had already occupied himself with them for years.⁸⁶ A “strong left-wing alternative target and definition of work” of the work group and, as he then experienced, also of the international representatives of oral history, led to questions emerging with regard to content which had previously only been discussed at a political level. Now, they were transplanted into a new, academic context: questions about the effect of politics on the individual, about alternative scenes, political rebellions and revolutions.⁸⁷ In retrospect and even today, what Plato appreciates about the work with oral sources is that with regard to his suppositions, he, as a researcher, “is challenged in a much more compelling way [stresses] […] by the interview partners themselves or by that which they provide to you.” He adds, “And you have to react to that in a very concrete way.”⁸⁸ Like Contini, he experienced that in the interview situation, imperceptibly, questions with regard to the subjectivity of the interviewer came up. The new interview partners – workers, farmers, housewives, and craftsmen – were seldom radical, but offered the whole bandwidth of contradictory, ambivalent experiences having to do with everyday life and politics that could not be condensed into dogmatic theorems.⁸⁹ The Italian historian Daniele Jalla (born in 1950) also noted a precise biographical turning point in his interview. At the end of his political engagement, the conclusion of his excessively long course of studies, and personal divides came together and he simultaneously turned to oral history. From his words, it can be concluded that he experienced this moment as a time of personal and collective defeat, of failure:

 Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15, 2008.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15, 2008.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15, 2008.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15, 2008.  Consequently, in two of the basic oral history projects that intellectuals from the international oral history network had initiated in the 1980’s – Luisa Passerini’s research about the working class in Turin during fascism and Niethammer and Plato’s LUSIR project – the basic assumptions of the natural resistance of the working class to Fascism and Nazism had to be revised after the researchers came across forms of social acceptance of the respective regimes in the working class in the biographical interviews. See Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia e fascismo. Una storia orale (Turin: Laterza, 1984), 155, and Maubach’s interview with Alexander von Plato, January 15, 2008.

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So, we weren’t able to create a revolution, we simply didn’t accomplish it… for me… the criticism about political activism coincided with a method of work that was designed in such a way that beyond the vague and ideological assertions, it was anchored in reality, and a work method that transformed the discourses and words into texts that have an academic nature or that are at least based on a certain rigor which, in contrast, politics often wasn’t interested in […].⁹⁰

For Jalla, the research with oral history served as an anchor against sinking into disaffected language, into unclear thought constructions and – in his case, consciously – against the false identification with the workers, which had overtaxed him and which he therefore pushed away with relief: I could take my middle-class identity back; that was a great relief. I belong to this secularized, simple middle class, not rich, but rich in culture, traditions, well-to-do, I never lacked anything. At the very least, this terrible thing was over, and because of it, you never knew who you are, and when the Communist workers come at you from the factory gates and yelled, “Don’t annoy us,” then you also felt like a piece of crap. […] I can remember this suffering from back then, but it had an end, and especially with my thesis, it had… an explosive effect. Because the methodical study, the methodical dedication to just one object, the immersion in just one object seemed to me to be the only antidote to an attitude on life and on politics, which was mainly based on superficiality, on the free use of words, essentially on rhetoric and not on serious analysis.⁹¹

Jalla’s example illustrates how the young, left-wing former activists withdrew their intellectual forces from their political engagement due to increasing disillusionment and disappointment about the missed political goals. After that, their ideological agitation had failed due to the historical subjects, as Jalla had presented it in a compact manner in the factory gate episode, they applied these forces to the new oral history research method, driven by their “autobiographical and confessional urge […], their desire to merge the personal and the political,” as Ronald Grele formulated it for the American activists.⁹² Coming from a similar experience, Alessandro Portelli concluded after the first decade of his oral history work, which admittedly had developed along with his political engagement, that this method had to do with spreading a plurality of positions and perspectives. Instead of hiding behind “objective truths” and a false conformity with the positions of an abstract working class, purportedly due to ideological reasons, the historian emerges as a subject in the form of a “biased” narrator, because “oral history can never be told without taking sides,

 Daniele Jalla, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, February 26, 2008.  Daniele Jalla, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, March 11, 2008.  Ronald Grele, “History of the United States,” BIOS (1990): 7.

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since the ‘sides’ exist inside the telling. And, no matter what their personal histories and beliefs may be, historians and ‘sources’ are hardly ever on the same ‘side.’”⁹³ Contini, Plato, and Jalla learned this with empirical material and in doing so, experienced a second boost of disenchantment. Of course, in addition to this basic pattern, there were other biographical paths to finding oral sources for one’s own research discipline. But here as well, it is striking that many of the intellectuals involved in the oral history movement retrospectively connected the tendency towards (academic) occupation with oral sources with a personal and professional crisis situation. In 1972– 73, Lutz Niethammer became involved with it during a one-year stay in Oxford, with which he, next to new intellectual challenges, was also looking to gain a distance from his failing marriage, the muddled and perspectiveless relationship to his academic teacher and from the “establishment crisis” after his dissertation was completed and received little attention. There, he made important contacts to the English oral history scene centered around Raphael Samuel and Tim Mason.⁹⁴ In the same year, as a father of four, Ronald Grele took a position in oral history due to the pressure to earn money, without even knowing what it was all about. During the 1960’s, due to his political engagement, he had neglected his academic career and had done everything in order to avoid the critical experience of academic writing. He had changed jobs many times and constantly moved with his growing family.⁹⁵ It is completely possible that the linking of life crises and the methodological re-orientation was established retrospectively, in order to re-evaluate and reinforce, through a biographical turning point, the perceived radicality and the profound impact of this re-orientation, which may have taken place much more unnoticed. Luisa Passerini implied one such intellectual overrating in the retrospective depiction when she wanted to describe how great the existential pressure of a fundamental re-orientation was in this period of transition: Today and in this wording, this transition seems to be very rationalized, but in reality, it was… making a virtue of necessity […]. Decisions like this also happen in moments of crisis, in which you don’t know what the hell you should do. You forget that afterwards. […] We were tired, everything seems to be over, that was 1974– 75, then there was the idea to make an exhibition about Turin workers during the Fascist era and you begin to do interviews. I don’t know how much consciousness is involved in this transition. Back then it

 Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 57.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27, 2008.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008.

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seemed to be like a rescue! […] Rescue in the sense that we were desperate, so we tried to make something of ourselves.⁹⁶

Picking up an innovative method and asking old questions in a new way under new auspices could be a possibility to make something of oneself and could mean a new material and ideological occupation. What Passerini refers to as a “retransformation”⁹⁷ from a full-time revolutionary to an intellectual with a middle-class background consisted, among other things, of modifying the basic attitude and the motivation with which the questions were asked: “the impulse to change society rather became the impulse to understand it,” as Giovanni Contini had summarized it.⁹⁸

Continuities Even before the young intellectuals turned to oral history during or after a personal crisis, in some countries, there were very consistent branches of historical, anthropological, or ethnological research that made use of interviews as a source.⁹⁹ But between 1970 and 1976, these research institutions had a clear influx at the same time that many protest movements dissolved or transformed into left-wing terrorist groups and therefore released the intellectuals who were involved and not prepared to commit acts of violence. It was not by chance that the research projects working with oral sources grew into an internationally occurring phenomenon which many participants called movimento, Bewegung, or movement. Hypothetically, it may then be presumed that on the one hand, oral history, as a method, had an affinity to the understanding of the world and academics of these intellectuals. On the other hand, however, it was formed and shaped by each of them in accordance with their intellectual needs, prior experiences in their lives and their expectations after a phase of life full of illusions. Why did many of these intellectuals then feel drawn in by oral history in particular? What could research with oral sources offer the former political acti-

 Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, March 15, 2007.  An example of this is the USA, where the sociologically influenced Chicago School had a pioneering role in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Since 1948, there has also been an Oral History Research Office at Columbia University (Ronald Grele, History of the United States, 3). In Italy, anthropological-ethnological field studies have been used since the 1950’s (Giovanni Contini, “Towards a Story of Oral History in Italy,” BIOS [1990]: 58.)

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vists and how was oral history shaped by the former activists in its manifestation? An initial continuity between the phase of political activism and the work with oral sources can be determined at the thematic level. In the first ten years of existence of the informal precursor to the IOHA, from 1976 to 1986, in the schedules of the mostly biannual conferences, there were mostly contributions that had to do with the history and memories of the working class as well as the poorer, rural population.¹⁰⁰ The thematic focus was, on the one hand, due to the method itself, which is used to capture the history of those people who appear only sporadically in conventional written sources and whose subjective experience can therefore only be accessed orally (songs, stories, and biographical narratives). On the other hand, it was about the same groups of people who had been the focus of the various protest movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s: workers (and farmers), women, African-Americans. Like Plato and the French sociologist Daniel Bertaux (born in 1939), Passerini and Contini had agitated workers in front of the gates of large factories or within the unions. Leydesdorff, Tröger, and Passerini had dedicated themselves to the emancipation of the woman from patriarchal structures and patterns. Grele and Mary Marshall Clark (born in 1957) had fought for civil rights for the African-American population in the US and Mercedes Vilanova had helped to build schools, which would fight the illiteracy of Spanish workers. After the end of the politically-motivated, ideological criticism of the life conditions and the opportunities to participate in these social groups, as well as the end of the types of political action resulting from it, which did not have the expected result of a revolutionary change in society, it was now empirically explored with academic methods – taking a step backwards – what the daily reality of the “oppressed and subordinate” looked like.¹⁰¹ An example of the research projects resulting from the work of the individual key players in oral history is the Italian-English research cooperation Car Workers in Turin and Coventry  At the conference in Colchester in 1979, Luth Niethammer, Daniel Bertaux, Sven Lindqvist, Ronald Grele, Eugenia Meyer, Orvar Löfgren, and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame presented research on the working class. Annemarie Tröger spoke about women in National Socialism, but even here, it explicitly had to do with women from middle and lower social classes. The topic areas listed for the conference were as follows: “a) industrial and labour history, b) urban and community history, c) women’s history and family history, and d) rural history” (Paul Thompson, letter to Luisa Passerini, May 8, 1978).  At the international oral history conference in 1979, Luisa Passerini called the new topic areas that should be integrated into historical studies through oral history “[…] experiences of oppressed and subordinate social strata.” See Luisa Passerini, “Work Ideology under Italian Fascism,” History Workshop 8.1 (1979): 84.

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(1984 – 1987), which grew from the intense intellectual exchange between Luisa Passerini and Paul Thompson. In a comparative approach, they wanted to examine the everyday lives of the workers and their families, in order to better understand the troublesome relationship between microconflictuality – that is, the labor disputes at the plant level – and industrial productivity. In addition to other questions, via the interviews, the researchers were interested in “discovering the extent to which a worker in the automobile industry shares the political views of the activists who represented him.”¹⁰² Although the established political parties were primarily meant by this, in the background, there was surely also the question of both intellectuals’ experiences in New Left groups and leftwing extra-parliamentary opposition. They had also claimed to know and represent the opinions and interests of the workers. The fact that there was doubt about the correctness and effectivity of this is indicated by the carefully-formulated research question, “Which points of contact, if they exist, could exist between working conditions of the automobile workers and their political behavior?”¹⁰³ There had to have been factors that influenced this behavior and had not been taken into account in the situationist or Marxist analyses of the condition of the working class. These should have been explored in the study, such as through the questions about socialization, about experiences with domestic migration, or the workers’ family contexts. The end of the political activism was not synonymous with the renunciation of a political claim to one’s own intellectual work. On the contrary – and here, there is another important line of continuity between both phases of life, between political activism and the following oral history work – the academic work with oral sources about social groups and spheres of experience in society that had so far been overlooked was understood to be a political practice. For example, in an interview, Ronald Grele stressed that for him, oral history presented a “congenial” opportunity to do historical work that was “politically relevant” and, in contrast to the unpaid, voluntary work in the protest movement, also happened to be “lucrative.”¹⁰⁴ The perspective of the interview partners from her first oral history project, which Luisa Passerini retrospectively presented

 Luisa Passerini, I lavoratori dell’auto in Gran Bretagna e in Italia, 7 (unpublished).  Passerini, I lavoratori dell’auto, 7. No publications are known of the research results from Italy. For England, see Paul Thompson, “Playing at Skilled Men: Factory Culture and Pride in Work Skills among Coventry Car Workers,” Social History 13.1 (1988), 45 – 69 and Paul Thompson, “Imagination and Passivity in Leisure: Coventry Car Workers and Their Families from the 1920s to the 1970s” in The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century, eds. David Thoms, Len Holden, and Tim Claydon (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998).  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008.

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in an interview, was also meant to emphasize this inherent political perspective of her own work: […] [S]o, when I interviewed the old member of the working class in Turin about Fascism, he was for me, and for other people like me, in a sense the representative of a culture of workers that had the potential to change the world, not right away, but he or they were part of the revolutionary subjects.¹⁰⁵

Prior to that, she had noted that this perspective, that was based on a strong “identification” with the interview partner, had disappeared, because today, a shared horizon is lacking; a political consensus could no longer be reached.¹⁰⁶ The aspiration of the intellectuals in the oral history movement to connect political efficacy with research became the clearest through the oft-quoted programmatic slogan of wanting to give a voice to those people who had not yet been heard in history.¹⁰⁷ This narrowness had already been criticized since the beginnings of the international network, such as by Luisa Passerini, who warned of populism and unproductive self-limitation at the conference in Colchester in 1979.¹⁰⁸ In the following decades, however, it never completely disappeared from the practice of oral history. Lutz Niethammer, who was never personally engaged in one of the 1968 protest movements, but positioned himself as a leftwing liberal, wrote an introduction to an anthology of international oral history essays in 1980 in which he shows how important a historiography which deals with the “rulers,” not just the “upper class,” is for a future, democratically-con-

 Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008. The oral history projects with women from Kosovo brought Passerini back to “oral history as engagement” after an extended break. See Passerini, Sharable Narratives, 9. For more information on the projects and their results, see www.women.it/bibliotecadelledonne/donne_kossovo/ (accessed October 1, 2009) as well as Natale Losi, Luisa Passerini, and Silvia Salvatici, eds., “Archives of Memory: Supporting Traumatized Communities through Narration and Remembrance,” Psychosocial Notebook 2 (October 2001), www.forcedmigration.org/psychosocial/papers/WiderPapers/iom_notebook2.pdf (accessed October 1, 2009).  Luisa Passerini, interview with Finnberg and Musso, April 12, 2008.  Daniele Jalla and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame are representative of the interview partners who mentioned or asserted this aspiration. See Daniele Jalla’s interview with Silvia Musso on February 26, 2008: “There is a continuity in the research with oral sources to give an excluded person the chance to speak; that is, to reconstruct a story that did not have a chance to be expressed, to become known […].” In an interview with Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, conducted by Agnès Arp on April 4, 2007 in Nanterre: “In general, there was a general striving to giving a voice to people who, up to that point, had not had a chance to speak, especially through the attention to their struggles.” See also Franka Maubach’s chapter in this volume.  Passerini, Work Ideology, 84.

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stituted society. If, on the contrary, the historical studies ignore this group and their subjectivity, they help to cement and prolong unjust conditions. Niethammer even wrote of “opponents,” whose view had to be complemented by the new research method of oral history, and of the associated risk “to once again commit violence against the subjects in a benevolent way.”¹⁰⁹ The deficits which were initially stated for the historical studies were therefore also attributed with an effect that extended to the power structures in society. In this way, the historian’s work was given the ethical dimension of responsibility that Niethammer, as previously shown, had already felt a duty towards in his youth. In his article quoted earlier, Alessandro Portelli also refers to the special responsibility of those historians who want to write a “radical oral history” with oral sources. It results from the special role of these historians, which consists of being included in the depiction of history, this autonomous narrative act, with one’s own subjectivity. In the selection of contemporary witnesses, with regard to the research question or the adaption of sources, political choices need to be made that are “less visible and less vocal,” but in exchange for that, are “more fundamental” than those in direct political engagement.¹¹⁰ The younger generation of oral history researchers saw this strong political positioning with a mixture of appreciation and critical distance, which is shown by the statement from Passerini’s student Marcella Filippa (born in 1954). She characterized the focus of the research of established oral history representatives, whom she heard from at the international conferences since 1982, as being very “antagonistic” from her perspective;¹¹¹ that is, focused on class conflicts: […] that was the spirit of international oral history, the topics, the [political] affiliations of many of these intellectuals […], which brought the research together with a strong social, antagonistic, ethical dimension, with the figure and the role of the intellectual in the society […] many of these people had this connotation that other academics with other topics did not have.¹¹²

Accordingly, oral history, understood as a political practice, meant engaging in academia not just for the sake of academia, but rather also pursuing political goals via empirical research. This primarily included the intensified representation of social groups that had previously been neglected in the writing of history.  Lutz Niethammer, ed., Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 7.  Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 57.  Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008.  Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, May 6, 2008.

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In 1978, when Paul Thompson said that the goal of oral history was “to make history a more democratic activity,”¹¹³ that also implied actively letting members of these groups participate in the writing of history and to support them as professional or amateur researchers. A third continuity between the political and academic activity of the intellectuals interviewed has to do with the central function of the word, the spoken language, the orality in both areas. The protest movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s looked for new forms of expression and dialogue. Public and interpersonal speech should be more democratic, more open, and less restrained, as was demanded by the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964, among others.¹¹⁴ Associated with that was also the invention of new types of organization, assembly, and action that comply with this demand and for which new public spaces were specifically opened up or occupied. The countless collective and public events, such as demonstrations, assemblies, hearings, and sit-ins, together with the discussions in APO groups, brought a “focus on and intensification of certain forms of orality” with them, as Portelli observed, for example. The oral became the primary form of communication of the “movement,” and political meaning was attributed to the informal, volatile, and personal expressions of subjectivity. In this way, it moved into public attention.¹¹⁵ After the young intellectuals had therefore discovered a space for the spoken word within the protest movements, “discursive space and communicative spaces, amongst the students and with the outside world,”¹¹⁶ and had experimented with it, it was only logical to also include their insights into the academic discourse. They applied their experience, which is that making one’s own words audible in the public space is an absolute prerequisite for political participation and power, and introduced underrepresented parts of society into historiography as subjects of historical actions. The great significance that was attributed to the free dialogue and free speech is continued in the selection of interviews as a basic source, an example for the way in which the desire to innovate in the political movement was maintained in the innovative character of oral history. For the individual academics’ respective disciplines, this meant questioning the established hierarchy of sources and placing the value of oral

 Paul Thompson, “Life Stories in Poland and Sweden,” History Workshop 6.1 (1978): 209.  Ronald Fraser, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), 77.  Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 185.  Passerini, Autoritratto, 116.

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reports next to that of written sources. And lastly, the political engagement had raised an awareness for the power of language, an awareness for the word, that “demystifies, translates, explains, reports,” as Luisa Passerini formulates it, still in a very positive interpretation at that point.¹¹⁷ As the intellectuals’ attention soon was directed less towards the content and more towards the “form and meaning”¹¹⁸ of the information being communicated and therefore also the phenomenon of language in the interviews, they discovered that the language of the “oppressed” groups could mystify, disguise, conceal, and hide just as well. That was also a part of the sobering effect that the practice of oral history had on the former activists.

Final Remarks – Towards the IOHA The intellectuals interviewed by us, who, in the mid-1970’s, began to make a contribution towards social and people’s history using oral sources and brought social classes to the attention of their disciplines, which had been ignored up until then, seldom came from a poor family of workers, farmers, or craftsmen. Rather, they came from families who were from the economically relatively safe, education-oriented middle class, or were even extremely well-do-to; in some cases, had aristocratic origins. Furthermore, something that they have in common is that in the retrospective observation of their own childhood and youth, they have a view of themselves as outsiders and depicted themselves as being on the edge of communities or in an ambivalent intermediate position. As was shown, there was also the disturbing, often also ambivalent encounter with traces of the Nazi or Fascist rule or other dictatorships as well as initial points of contact with history transmitted orally – or the silence about it – amongst the events that made an impression on them in their world of origin. The marginalized, yet societally-privileged position of the later key players in oral history was continued in their young adulthood through the use of special forms of education, which occurred as variations of the classical intellectual grand tour in the form of stays abroad, and strengthened their subjectively experienced intermediate positions thanks to the crossing of borders that they were looking for, in a geographical and political sense. Following this, all future protagonists of the precursor to the IOHA were politicized and became active in the

 Passerini, Autoritratto, 120.  The sub-heading of the text in which Alessandro Portelli published his collected, mostly methodological-theoretical entries on oral history. See Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, 1991.

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political movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s, an experience that shaped their specific understanding of themselves as engaged intellectuals. This was because their political commitment was usually parallel to their academic education and work and, therefore, was carried out in a predominantly elite environment. Another thing that the key players in oral history observed here have in common is that they depicted the transition to their occupation with oral sources as a crisis in their own biographical narratives. This resulted, therefore, from disillusionment with and distancing from the political movement and / or personal and professional life crises in the 1970’s. As was shown, on the one hand, the intellectuals took on thematic emphases from the years of their political engagement, and on the other hand, they imported their claim to political relevance and the principal position of the spoken word to the new, interdisciplinary method. The drive to trigger and accelerate a radical, societal change shifted to striving for change in an academic area that should also be viewed as radical and innovative. The informal precursor to the International Oral History Association, in which the first age cohort of these intellectuals got together in 1979, was also characterized by this mixture of politics and academia. When Daniel Bertaux emphasized in an interview that the international milieu was made up in a manner, of people who had a kind of “spiritual community,” essentially political, and a “generational community,”¹¹⁹ it sounds like it was not just common research topics that caused the intensive exchange. Even a disappearing group connection, which had been based on political agreement, could be replaced by this circle. According to Luisa Passerini, the solidarity of the new community was primarily based on a shared experience, the recovery of “hope and solidarity in an ‘indirect’ engagement through cultural work, after the disappointment in direct politics.”¹²⁰ This fundamental political understanding can also be recognized in Ronald Grele’s choice of words, who attributed the ecstatic atmosphere at the conference in Colchester to the fact that, after lonely work, “in many respects on the edges of the academic world, suddenly finding yourself amongst companions again” (emphasis mine).¹²¹

 Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, Sèvres, France, November 16, 2006.  Luisa Passerini, “Friendship and Truth” in Zeit-Geschichten. Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, eds. Jürgen John, Dirk van Laak, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 2005), 179.  Ronald Grele, “Oral History and Contemporary History. Friendly Intersections and Memories” in Zeit-Geschichten. Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, eds. Jürgen John, Dirk van Laak, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Essen Germany: Klartext, 2005), 77.

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The key players at the international conference on oral history and in the organizational committees were, accordingly, politically similarly-minded liberals who also shared their self-perception as “outsiders” and marginalized in their discipline with each other¹²² (“they were all, all marginal figures in the academic field”)¹²³. In actuality, though, they all had at least an academic position as nonprofessorial teaching staff, if they were not professors or had a leadership role in an academic institution. The topos of the outsider that comes up time and time again can therefore be understood as stylization, as it is characteristic of the figure of the innovative intellectual.¹²⁴ After their return from the role of the revolutionary activist into that of the middle-class intellectual, for some of them, this self-image could maintain their separation from the majority and affirm the identity-shaping difference. Therefore, in the case of the oral history representatives presented here, it is – at most – legitimate to speak of a position at the edge of the uppermost social classes, which was less due to the actual social position of the intellectuals at the edge than through the degradation of the method itself as a niche and alternative method in the academic contexts with which the key players identify or identified. Considering the biographical similarities of its key players, can the IOHA’s informal precursor be considered a “late 1968 generation movement in the academic milieu?”¹²⁵ Due to the numerous political groups in which the intellectuals were active and that are only insufficiently described by the year 1968, a better description would be that it was an academic movement shaped by the political spirit of the late 1960’s. The left-wing to left-liberal positions of the key players shaped the international network, its conferences and academic discussions, together with a special mixture of diversity of disciplines and joint methodological interests. To conclude, the matter of how closely woven some of the intellectuals involved saw their academic contribution with their political experience will be illustrated with a statement from one of the most politically active intellectuals presented here, even today, Alessandro Portelli.¹²⁶ At the end of the 1990’s, in an introduction to his collection of his most important oral history essays, he wrote:

 Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, XII.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, September 26, 2007.  Jürgen Frese, “Intellektuellen-Assoziationen” in Kreise – Gruppen – Bünde. Zur Soziologie moderner Intellektuellenassoziation, eds. Richard Faber and Christine Holste (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), 441– 462.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, September 26, 2007.  From 2003 – 2008, Portelli was the advisor for the support and protection of historical memories for the city of Rome to then-Mayor Walter Veltroni. He was elected to the Roman city council from 2006 – 2007 as an independent, leading candidate for the Communist Refoundation Party.

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I do not regret or repent having been “for the revolution” or even having projected on the culture [of the working class] some of my political and human dreams and desires. Whatever is valid in the theory and methodology delineated in my earlier and current work is very much the product of those projections, dreams, and desires.¹²⁷

 Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia, XVII.

Christian König

Movement and Solidarity A Network of Friends as an Academic Phenomenon

There are almost as many languages spoken at International Oral History Conferences (IOHC) between 1976 and 1996 as there are interpretations of what this “organization” actually is, or if international oral history even is an organization (International Oral History Association, or IOHA) or should be one. The lack of an institutional structure, which was certainly not an obstacle for the functioning of the IOHA, makes it difficult to put it into words. The observations presented here therefore go into two directions: at the beginning, it is necessary to picture the phenomenon of the IOHA, in order to grasp its development for an analysis. The starting points for this include the statements and self-designations from agents as well as etymological categorization and organizational theoretical approaches. The goal is not an exclusive definition of the IOHA, but rather a definition of its form. This will be the basis of a closer characterization, which will follow in the second part. The internal structures of the IOHA as well as its agents are of special interest there. It is a matter of emphasizing various levels and dimensions of the connection, in order to make the functional mechanisms of the association and the connections between the people who shaped the IOHA more visible. In a more poetic way, it is to get closer to that which “binds the world’s innermost core together.” The goal is hence to depict a type of (structural) image of this international group. The temporal horizon for this observation extends from the creation of this international European community in the mid-1970’s until the ninth conference in Gothenburg in 1996. This focus on the first two decades of the IOHA is, on the one hand, based in the structural change, which took place with the formal founding of a corporate organization, and on the other hand, linked with the change in personnel at various levels of the association. An analysis of the first two decades can therefore clarify the view of the development and the change from a network of friends to the International Oral History Association.¹

 For more on this change from a network to an association, see Julie Boekhoff’s contribution to this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-004

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Nomen est omen? Getting closer to the complex of the international oral history community, there are a number of names connected to the IOHA. It is not an easy task to filter a term out of this pool of words that is viable in two respects: on the one hand, it needs to capture the IOHA phenomenon in words and be appropriately able to fit with the agents’ interpretation of themselves, without simply assuming it. On the other hand, the term corresponds to the task of functioning as a description of the IOHA in the analytical sense, which includes comprehensive as well as differentiating characterizations. One can already make inferences about the first self-designation from the English name “International Oral History Association.” “Association” derives from the Latin word associare (combine, unite). It was relatively common in organizational theory at the beginning of the previous century in Germany, but has become old-fashioned, at least in the German language. Its modern use is mostly limited to the field of psychology, as an expression for the triggering and connection of ideas or images.² In contrast, in English-speaking and Romance language-speaking countries, due to its etymology, it is still used to indicate federations and organizations, such as the US Oral History Association, for example. This use at least implicitly includes the association of such consortia based on a set of rules, a constitution. Following this logic, it is not surprising that the use of the term “association” appropriately increased in the past, to characterize the International Oral History Organization after its formal founding in 1996. The Bielefeld philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Frese offers an interesting approach to the use of the term in his analysis of modern associations of intellectuals. Here, there are some similarities to the classification of the IOHA phenomenon, yet there are also divergences.³ The name association, in accordance with the logic and the understanding of the use of the English language, may have its place both in terms of international comprehension and of external presentation and representation. However, the term “association” is not suitable to analyze the structures functioning internally. It suggests pre-conditions and  See Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, ed. Elmar Seebold (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), 65.  On the one hand, Frese refers to a joint “experience of awakening” and the feeling of marginalization, points which definitely apply to the researchers who are involved in the IOHA. On the other hand, he also describes a charismatic leader, which did not exist in this form within the International Oral History Association. See Jürgen Frese, “Intellektuellen-Assoziationen,” in Kreise – Gruppen – Bünde. Zur Soziologie moderner Intellektuellenassoziationen, eds. Richard Haber and Christine Holste (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), 441– 62.

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(legal) structures which the IOHA did not fulfill for the period of time being examined, from 1976 to 1996. In addition to the label “IOHA,” the terms used by the participants interviewed – however limited the number of interviews and their significance may be – make it possible to get closer to the phenomenon. A more precise look at the participants’ interviews shows that three additional expressions are used. The first is the term “organization.” On the one hand, it refers to the concrete organizational work, especially in preparation for the international conferences. The term is much less commonly used to designate the IOHA itself, and if it is used, then it is used for the phase after 1996. Apart from the non-use by the agents, the term “organization” has a further disadvantage, because in the 20th century, the term primarily took on the meaning of a uniform group.⁴ Therefore, it can be determined that this expression does not appear to be suitable, neither in the descriptive nor in the analytical senses, to name the IOHA “thing” for the period of time between 1976 and 1996. The second, more frequently used term, which is full of meaning for the interview partners, is that of “movement.” The term “movement” originally describes a change in position or location. In the 19th century, it was transferred to the semi-political sphere, to indicate social movements such as the German freedom movement, the worker’s movement, or the youth movement.⁵ The meaning of the term “movement,” also in terms of the personal understanding of the participants engaged in it, is rooted in the atmosphere in the 1960’s and 1970’s and in the individual biographies, as well as in the agents’ generational experiences.⁶ This is made clear in two examples. Björn Horgby, a Swedish historian, was born in 1952. He was a political Maoist at the beginning of the 1970’s and distributed flyers against the Vietnam War. Horgby used the term “movement” in this context to designate a politically engaged group in society. He also applies it to the Dig Where You Stand groups, which emerged in the 1970’s in Sweden, inspired by the book of the same name by Sven Lindqvist. They had to do with workers who – not exclusively, but primarily – researched the history of their own factory and the industrial history of their own location using oral history. Derived from the individual biographical interconnectedness, the image and its linguistic manifestation of an oral history movement therefore emerged in a temporal coincidence with the aftereffects of the 1968 eruptions.  “Organisation” in Duden, ed. Günther Drosdowski, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (Mannheim: Duden, 1993 – 1995), 2453; “Organisation” in Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, ed. Wolfgang Pfeifer, vol. 2 (Berlin: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), 1208.  Duden, s.v. “Bewegung,” 519; Pfeifer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Bewegung,” 163.  For more information, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume.

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The situation was depicted similarly in another interview. Ronald Grele, born in 1934, studied history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Until 1996, he regularly participated in the international oral history conferences. In the biographical interview, he used the expression “movement” almost 60 times. Grele spoke of a “student and beat movement,” of the “free speech movement,” of the “civil rights movement,” about the “peace movement,” even about “movement people.” He himself was a member of the beat generation in the 1950’s, was already highly engaged with the civil rights movement during his studies and, furthermore, remained interested and active in politics beyond that. Exactly these passages from his narrative are characterized by emotionality and intensity. From these personal experiences, or, better, participation and shaping, the transfer of the feeling of the movement to oral history, in which Grele found a field of occupation, is then derived. The self-image and self-understanding as “movement people” is included in the structures forming in the oral history community, in both a national and international dimension. At the same time, the casual nature of the community allows the participants to reflect and therefore confirm the biographically meaningful self-interpretation of their personalities. Movement research is a dynamic field, full of variations. Therefore, it is difficult to give just one definition of social movements. The political scientist and party researcher Joachim Raschke understands a social movement to be about a mobilizing, collective agent, which follows the goal to bring about basic social change, to prevent it or reverse it, with a certain amount of continuity based on high symbolic integration and low role specification by means of variable forms of organization and action.⁷

Although some points of reference to the IOHA’s description can be found, such as the minor organizational structure or a voluntary operational principle, some points still remain unclear: next to the numeric size of the group, it is important to ask about the group’s reach and ability to mobilize. In accordance with Raschke’s definition, the principle of a movement has an intrinsic political component, that is a “basic need to shape society.”⁸ Furthermore, a movement is characterized by the fact that it acts with a rational goal. That means that through conscious mobilization, it strives to accumulate the potential for

 Joachim Raschke, Soziale Bewegungen. Ein historisch-systematischer Grundriss (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), 77.  Dieter Rucht, “Gesellschaft als Projekt – Projekte in der Gesellschaft. Zur Rolle sozialer Bewegungen,” in Neue soziale Bewegungen. Impulse, Bilanzen und Perspektiven, eds. Ansgar Klein, Hans-Josef Legrand, and Thomas Leif (Opladen, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1999), 16.

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power, which can be implemented in a targeted way to re-shape society.⁹ This “political agenda,” the construction as a factor for power, and the definition of political-societal goals, mostly does not take place in the framework of the IOHA, in my opinion. In no way are the individuals’ conscious political awareness or the critical societal engagement denied.¹⁰ However, due to the factual reality and the real possibilities for action, engagement typically takes place in the respective national framework. It is exactly at these intersections of the national and international dimensions that this term, “movement,” becomes unclear. It operates linguistically at a level of a holistic nature and, in doing so, covers differences and structural breakdowns, among other things. An example shows exactly how far the range of self-interpretations is. While Ronald Grele characterizes the IOHA as a movement, looking back, Lutz Niethammer doubts this description: “it was also regularly called ‘The Movement.’ That was really absurd, considering how small it was, but at the conferences, the smallness suddenly appeared to be enormous.”¹¹ Without being able to get closer to the effectiveness of academic institutions or cooperations, here, I would like to describe the International Oral History Association as an academic, experimental structure, the characteristics of which are not completely congruent with the attribution of a “movement” (which is frequently used in an inflationary manner) in the theoretical sense described. The third term which is frequently used by the interviewees in connection with the IOHA is that of a “network.” For a long time, it has found, as an undifferentiated attribution, an entry into everyday language use. For our suggestion of a meaningful analytical term, this appears to be doubtful. Yet the term “network” functions as an explanatory pattern in many different academic disciplines. In economics, it serves to describe self-referential systems of higher order on the basis of contract and organization. The legal sociologist Gunther Teubner reminds that “one should then only speak of a network when a system of action simultaneously forms as a formal organization and as a contract system  Raschke, Soziale Bewegungen, 80 – 81.  For more on the engagement of individual agents, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, Jena, Germany, May 27– 28, 2008. The influences of one’s own origin, personal political position, and various biographical influences on the respective descriptions are certainly not to be neglected. Annemarie Tröger also understands oral history less to be a form of academic examination, but more like a real movement. This resonant distancing from the academic system is also due to negative experiences in Tröger’s case. As a woman who occupied herself with oral history, she always had to deal with in an academic system dominated by men and which was conservative in terms of methodology. See Annemarie Tröger, interview with Annette Leo, Berlin, April 29, 2008 and May 2, 2008.

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between autonomous agents.”¹² For some time, various disciplines in sociology have also been occupied with network research as a category of description and analysis of societal connections, and this approach makes a more exact observation and examination of the term “network” worthwhile for use in our context.¹³ In addition to that, it is worth taking a brief look at the etymology of the term. It involves a composite, which is made up of two word elements: “net,” as something interwoven, the wholeness of many connections that cross and branch off from each other, and “work,” derived from the verb “to work,” in the meaning of to make or produce.¹⁴ A look at the origins of the word already permits an illustration of the IOHA’s structural conditions. Recent sociological network research defines a network, in general as a limited quantity of nodes or elements and the quantity of the edges passing between them. […] The nodes or elements are the agents, such as people, or corporate actors such as companies, ministries, or countries. The edges are the relationships or relations that run between them.¹⁵

It is important to emphasize that the nodes present in a network do not necessarily have to be agents. It is just as possible that these things are events, such as conferences, or objects of joint interest. At the same time, different networks can consist of the same number of nodes, which means that networks are always defined specifically to their relations. Therefore, as a rule, it is not just one network, but rather a number of networks that is the object of analysis.¹⁶ If one uses this definition, then the phenomenon of the IOHA in the phase between 1976 and 1996 can be conceptually and – with a view to the etymology – figuratively depicted and displayed. Mittag and Unfried point out that  Gunther Teubner, “Die vielköpfige Hydra. Netzwerke als kollektive Akteure höherer Ordnung,” in Emergenz: Die Entstehung von Ordnung, Organisation und Bedeutung, eds. Wolfgang Krohn and Günter Küppers (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 204.  It is only in recent years that an interdisciplinary (methodological-theoretical) discussion and cooperation has come into being, which also is looking to open up historical research as an instrument for description and analysis. A collected volume edited by Berthold Unfried, Jürgen Mittag, and Marcel van der Linden offers a current overview: Transnationale Netzwerke im 20. Jahrhundert. Historische Erkundungen zu Ideen und Praktiken, Individuen und Organisationen (Vienna: Akademische Verlags-Anstalt, 2008).  For the etymology of the term network, see Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Netz,” 650 and s.v. “wirken,” 992; Pfeifer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Netz,” 1165 and s.v. “wirken,” 1981.  Dorothea Jansen, Einführung in die Netzwerkanalyse. Grundlagen, Methoden, Forschungsbeispiele (Wiesbaden, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006), 58.  Jansen, Einführung in die Netzwerkanalyse, 59.

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networks are more informal, fluid, limited in time, less stable and more rarely permanent in duration than institutions. Their cohesion is unstable […]. Most networks are only weekly institutionalized, and their hierarchies are not formalized. They are viewed as informal or habitual structures, but, as a principle, are not without hierarchies.¹⁷

The IOHA’s characterization with the term “network” describes, in my opinion, the intermediary form of this communitization. In view of the tasks set at the beginning, it complements the descriptions of the participants. The openness of the network model, which can, to a certain degree, incorporate elements of movements as well as regulations in the organizational sense, is of particular importance here. For the detailed examination, the characterization of the IOHA as a network opens up various approaches and levels of differentiation, which are briefly named as follows: (a) The structure of the phenotype of the entire IOHA network can be described as a composition of various partial networks and hierarchically-graduated sub-networks. (b) At the level of these partial and sub-networks, the focus on agents and their relationships is possible. Relations describe cooperative as well as competitive relationships, and can be differentiated in accordance with intensity and form.¹⁸ Through this, statements are possible with regard to structural design principles and operative functional mechanisms. (c) The examination of networks of agents allows for the depiction of different levels of agents in a structural dimension (shell model) as well as in a temporal dimension (organizers, organizational committee, conferences). (d) The analysis of the relationship networks opens up the view to gradual differences in the range of cohesion within the networks, beginning with academic exchange to acquaintances all the way to personal friendships. (e) Finally, this detailed structure possibly also allows for statements about the integration function, about problems and signs of disintegration within the IOHA.

 Jürgen Mittag and Berthold Unfried, “Transnationale Netzwerke – Annäherung an ein Medium des Transfers und der Machtausübung” in Transnationale Netzwerke im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Jürgen Mittag, Berthold Unfried, and Marcel van der Linden (Leipzig: Akademische Verlags-Anstalt, 2008), 17.  Jansen, Einführung in die Netzwerkanalyse, 59.

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Binding the World’s Innermost Core Together How can one get close to the IOHA phenomenon, then? Externally, the IOHA as overall construct defines itself superficially through the conferences that took place more or less regularly in various European cities.¹⁹ It was also observed that the circle of participants constantly grew over the years. The list of speakers shows that in Bologna, Italy, in 1976, 34 people gave talks. In Gothenburg in 1996, according to the program, 170 people were registered to give talks.²⁰ In the invitation to the first conference at the University of Bologna in the fall of 1976, which was planned by a historian working in anthropology and a sociologist, and was called “Proposal for a Meeting on Oral Sources History and Anthropology,”²¹ the title describes a meeting for anthropologists and historians. The reason for this was the historian’s use of methodology from traditional anthropological research. The goal was an exchange about methodological questions and potential for interdisciplinary research work and cooperation based on various research objects, in traditional communities in Africa as well as agrarian and industrial cultures in the West. Among others, this invitation was sent to Paul Thompson at the University of Essex in Great Britain, whom the African studies specialist Alessandro Triulzi had already met prior to 1976, through the British History Workshop, in which there had been a strong African studies branch.²² At the end of the invitation, Thompson was asked for his opinion and “proposals for eventual topics and / or names of potentially interested scholars”²³ – a reference to already-existing personal networks, which, in the sense of international exchange, should be made use of. This principle of improvisation and self-organization played a decisive role in terms of the growth and expan-

 A list of conferences is available in the appendix. It also needs to be mentioned what a break was made when the IOHA was founded as a formal organization based on a constitution. In the following years after 1996, the conferences all took place outside of Europe. It was not until 2004 that Rome was on the list of conference locations again.  All statistical information is based on the evaluation of the materials available to us by Philipp Neumann and Christian König.  The present analysis is based on the English invitation. It is assumed that it was also written and distributed in other languages.  At the time, the History Workshop, which was founded at the union academy in Oxford, was left-wing and an organization interested in history research from “down below.” Its leading representative was the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel, who died in 1996.  “Proposal for a Meeting on Oral Sources History and Anthropology – University of Bologna – Fall 1976,” University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.

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sion of the IOHA through the positive re-confirmation of random contacts at the beginning.²⁴

Levels and Dimensions of the Network In order to illustrate such relationships, called “edges” in network terminology, as an example, Luisa Passerini’s connections will be more closely observed. This is due to the relatively good sources available. In addition to the interview, we also had access to her correspondence from the years 1970 to 1995; she is a major component in numerous memories from other protagonists.

The National Framework Luisa Passerini, born in 1941, studied history and philosophy, was politically engaged in various left-wing-oriented groups and, at the age of 24, received her first position as an assistant at the University of Turin.²⁵ In her documents, there was a letter from the year 1970 to a person named Pietro, who was not named further, and who was an Italian colleague who was also very engaged politically.²⁶ The topic of this letter is the political situation in Italy. Luisa Passerini reports about the situation among the political activists with whom she was in contact. It has to do with the transition from engagement in extra-parliamentary opposition groups like Lotta Continua to another type of political work, within or outside of the Communist Party. She reflects on her experiences up to that point about the inability to adjust to the changed conditions and about her disillusionment with traditional concepts.²⁷ In the 1980’s, in her correspondence, there are letters from colleagues in which the situation of oral history in Italy is thematized. Luisa Passerini was in one such academic exchange also with Alessandro Portelli, an American studies specialist in Rome, who, among other things, was dedicated to research about

 For more on this principle of the creation of networks, see Christoph Boyer, “Netzwerke und Geschichte. Netzwerktheorien und Geschichtswissenschaften,” in Transnationale Netzwerke im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Jürgen Mittag, Berthold Unfried, and Marcel van der Linden (Leipzig: Akademische Verlags-Anstalt, 2008), 55.  For more information on Luisa Passerini, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume.  It is unclear if this person is Pietro Clemente (Cagliari, Sardinia).  Letter from Luisa Passerini to Pietro, February 7, 1970, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.

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folk songs and narrations and is the co-founder and president of one of the most important Italian oral history institutions, the Circolo Gianni Bosio. In the interview, Portelli emphasized his great appreciation for Passerini and stated that his research was influenced by Passerini’s work, even if they did not work on any projects together.²⁸ At that time, Passerini was also in contact with the historian Maurizio Gribaudi. His older sister was led to work with oral sources through the Turin group, centered around Giovanni Levi. As she says, it awakened her interest in history “from below,” for the individual and the macrocontext: “It was, how should I say it, a very natural development.”²⁹ On the one hand, there was a growing interest in new methodological processes – especially by young researchers – and on the other hand, there was an entrenched academic milieu, which is why Luisa Passerini initially failed at a rising career within the academic system in Italy. In a letter from the year 1981, the political scientist Giorgio Rochat showed his regret about the discrimination Passerini faced in one of the concorsi (selection processes) for a better position at the university: I’m very sorry that you were fooled at the application proceedings for the assistant professorship, on the one hand due to the way […] and on the other hand due to the general meaning: […] the research that follows new paths (was) punished and a person was punished who risks something instead of limiting himself to tradition.³⁰

Even Portelli was familiar with Passerini’s difficult situation: she was discriminated against “for the same reasons for which she was a star at the international level, and because she is a woman.”³¹ While Passerini was respected at the international level due to her practical work with oral sources as well as her theoretical reflections on oral history, she was not recognized in Italy for a long time. Only in the mid-1980’s did she first receive an assistant professorship, and it was just in 2002 that she first took over the institute of cultural history at the University of Turin. In the interview, she connected this career stagnation

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Rome, March 16, 2007.  Gabriella Gribaudi, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Naples, March 20, 2007. In the interview, Gabriella Gribaudi also spoke about Italian oral history, which is made up of various independent groups. She has less personal contact with Passerini, even though she has a “very good” relationship with her. She has an active exchange with Alessandro Portelli. Gabriella Gribaudi was the president of the Italian Oral History Association (AISO) from its founding in 2006 until 2013.  Letter from Giorgio Rochat to Luisa Passerini, December 18, 1981, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, April 18, 2008.

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with her own extravagance in the topics and methods she selected.³² This marginalization of oral history in the Italian academic landscape was also mentioned in letters. In March 1982, Passerini wrote: There is really an insurmountable reluctance from the side of the academic historians against it in terms of accepting the methods as well as the forms of expression of the non-ruling class. The reasons they cite are various, depending on whether they are from men from the “left” or from other political positions, but the substance is the same. In order to understand what is happening there, you have to imagine that unbelievable people were promoted there, that have only written a few really bad articles. […] Otherwise, more than anything, I am worried about the fate of those who work together with me: the lack of influence and didactic autonomy does not just affect me, personally, but also my students, initiatives, and young advisees.³³

According to Passerini, the defensive attitude pointedly comes down to the formula: anyone who uses oral history is not a real historian. In a letter, the anthropologist Pietro Clemente wrote about an “act of disregard by the old ‘written’ historians,” with regard to Passerini herself as well as the method of work with oral sources.³⁴ It is to be assumed that it was this setback in their own country that, among other things, gave them an impetus for the orientation towards international-European and cross-border communitization.³⁵

The Departure for Europe The orientation beyond the borders of subjects and countries already began with the conference in Bologna. There, Paul Thompson and Luisa Passerini, two central figures of the future IOHA, met each other. Passerini remembers the conference in Bologna as “pre-history.” There were the very first steps: “We didn’t even know that there was an oral history movement.”³⁶ In the following year, 1977, there was a lot of correspondence between Passerini and English oral historians. Through her participation in the oral history conference of the British Oral History Society in April 1977, she came into contact with ongoing research as well as  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Pavarolo, Italy, April 12, 2008.  Letter from Luisa Passerini to Camillo, March 20, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Pietro Clemente to Luisa Passerini, no date, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  For more information, see Agnès Arp’s contribution to this volume.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, April 12, 2008.

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methodical discussions in the area of oral history in Britain. Passerini planned to edit an anthology on work with oral sources, as can be assumed, with the intention of strengthening the position of oral historians in Italy by introducing British research to the academic discussion. Viewed over the long term, the aim was to make people aware of the new approach, to call attention to it, and to support the acceptance of oral history as an academic method. In her draft, Passerini wrote: The anthology will document the importance and the implications of a widespread use of oral sources for the historiographic method and the concept of history through an analysis of the development of oral history research from the years 1969 – 76. This implies, next to the specific problems of oral history, also examining questions which affect the spread of the research areas of historical studies and the changed position of the historian. The latter is especially with regard to the new problems which he faces, and with the new interview partners which occur as the subjects of the historical processes observed.³⁷

What is striking in her further argumentation is also the emphasis on methodology. In doing so, she emphasizes the academic aspiration of the work with oral sources, the quality of which should be guaranteed by the British projects presented. The “convergence in terms of content as well as methodology between history and other academic disciplines” put forward by Passerini is, in this sense, also an indicator of the credibility, through the use of the method in a number of disciplines.³⁸ Lastly, she refers to the potential for innovation in this work technique, to make the part of human life shaped by orality accessible for historical research. Paul Thompson first had contact with oral history in the early 1970’s in the USA and remembers his first (successful) interview in the framework of his study of society, The Edwardians. ³⁹ Thompson was also the person who organized a follow-up conference in England in 1979. In May 1978, he sent an invitation to Luisa Passerini. It said: “We are inviting some twenty scholars who have pioneered the use of oral sources in historical research in different European coun-

 Luisa Passerini, “Proposta di un’antologia sulla storia orale” (undated draft of an anthology, Storia Orale), Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy. The book later published as Storia orale. Vita quotidiana e cultura materiale delle classi subalterne (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1978).  Passerini, Proposta di un’antologia.  Thompson’s study, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society, was published in 1975 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in London. It was acknowledged in numerous European countries and made him famous.

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tries […].”⁴⁰ In doing so, Thompson indirectly described the conditions for creation: the use of oral sources developed in a parallel way in various (Western) European countries in a similar political environment in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Yet there were very few people who decisively defined the process. The international oral history conference took place at the beginning of the annual meeting of the British Oral History Society. The (active) participation in the first part of the conference, which was conceptualized as a “travel seminar,” was reserved for the close circle of “pioneers.”⁴¹ On the one hand, the connection to the Oral History Society was surely due to organizational reasons. On the other hand, one can also interpret it as Great Britain’s claim to a pioneering role. That is because Thompson does not forget to emphasize the advanced stage of development of oral history in England. At the same time, this invitation also refers to an already-existing network of contacts in the European framework at that point in time, which became more consolidated through the meeting of the agents at the conference in Colchester. Sven Lindqvist, a Swedish author who became an authority in the international oral history community because of his book Dig Where You Stand, invoked the long tradition of oral sources in the writing of history in his newspaper article “Fråga människorna om deras historia!” (“Ask people about their history!”) about the conference in Colchester – a tradition that was lost, but today, has begun to be re-created, on the margins of research based on archival material. It is especially for the research of modern Europe that it is “apparent that the knowledge in the form of documents is not sufficient.”⁴² Lindqvist pleads that historians should make the method of oral sources their own, not least in their own interest. It is remarkable that this conference in 1979, in the manuscript of the report written by Luisa Passerini and her colleague Daniele Jalla, is referred to as the “First International and European Oral History Conference.”⁴³ From this, it can be concluded that the meeting in Colchester had a special quality for Passerini and Jalla. It was not indicated as being in alignment with or as a follow-up to the

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, May 8, 1978, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  “The numbers for this part of the Conference will be limited to those invited […]. The second part will be the Oral History Society’s annual conference at the University of Essex […]. This will be an open conference with larger numbers, providing an opportunity for a much broader cross section of British historians to hear visiting speakers present their papers, and join in discussion with them.” Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, May 8, 1978.  Sven Lindqvist, “Fråga människorna om deras historia!,” in Dagens Nyheter, April 21, 1979.  Luisa Passerini and Daniele Jalla, “Primo convegno Internazionale ed Europeo di storia orale. 21/25 Marzo 1979” (undated manuscript), Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.

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meeting in Bologna three years earlier. The conference in Colchester was the starting point for a network of contacts at the European dimension, and one could say, with a Transatlantic addition. Luisa Passerini’s correspondence after 1979 includes Sven Lindqvist (Sweden), Daniel Bertaux (France), Annemarie Tröger (Germany), Cristina Borderías (Spain), Philippe Joutard (France), Lutz Niethammer (Germany), and Eugenia Meyer (Mexico) – a network that would continue to expand in the following years, fueled by the regular conferences.⁴⁴ The motivating impulse that originated from this Colchester conference can be determined in a letter from Daniel Bertaux, in which he writes about his discovery of oral history research in Italy and admires the researchers’ passion. He regrets not having already been at the Bologna conference and affirms his desire for closer contact in the future.⁴⁵ Viewed specifically in terms of the relationships, even with agents that remain the same, networks for academic exchange, the preparation and followup work for international conferences, the journalistic work together, joint project work, and personal friendships can be differentiated from each other. In practice and particularly also in the letters, these borders are often fuzzy and a clear allocation cannot be determined – and is also not appropriate. As is still to be shown, the close-knit network structures are a special characteristic in the creation of the IOHA. But first, some examples may illustrate the (partial) networks mentioned.

Networking Paths International Journals But [Alan Meckler] wanted a journal which would be a high-end academic journal, which would fill out his schedule, be an item of prestige. I was going to go to Britain, and so I said, “I would do that journal if it was an international journal.” […] My agenda at Essex was to build an editorial board for the international journal. As it turns out, I went to just the right place, because all the right people were there. […] I met wonderful people.⁴⁶

 This includes, for example, Jaap Talsma (the Netherlands), François Bédarida (France), or Ronald Grele (USA).  Letter from Daniel Bertaux to Luisa Passerini, March 29, 1979, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, Jena, Germany, February 21, 2007.

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That is how Ronald Grele euphorically described his experiences in Colchester. The journal that he started together with the publisher Meckler was the International Journal of Oral History (IJOH), which was first published in 1980. The editors included Daniel Bertaux (France), Luisa Passerini (Italy), Annemarie Tröger (Germany), Paul Thompson (Great Britain), and Eugenia Meyer, whom Grele had already met in the Americas as a representative of oral history in Mexico. The journal was an initial attempt at a title that went beyond the national borders of networking. At the same time, it was an expression of the eruptive atmosphere of departure from the conference of 1979 and a symbol for the creation or selfunderstanding of a transnational oral history community. Its outlines, like contents, similarities, and differences were not yet determined. Rather, this network was only at the beginning of its expansion and development. In the coming years, it was not just the “pioneers” of oral history who were included; the English-language journal offered a larger circle of researchers who worked with oral sources a chance to publish and, therefore, also a wider reception of their work. As Ronald Grele said, “I think that the most important thing that journal did was to give many Europeans a chance to publish in the United States.”⁴⁷ Through the possibility of publishing abroad,⁴⁸ a new dimension of awareness of their own research opened up, which could then be positively reflected on the respective national context. In addition, on the basis of their close relationships with each other, the protagonists of the IOHA created a type of mutual (international) system of references in the framework of the publications, which in turn helped to strengthen their position as leading minds within the IOHA. The IJOH can therefore be interpreted as an attempt at stabilizing a fluctuating, informal network, which was understood in the sense of the zeitgeist as a movement. It is exactly through this that its representatives negated forms of regulation or institutional structures. In contrast, the informality and the openness and, with that, indirectly also the functional principle of the personal network was emphasized. During the next conference in Amsterdam in 1980, there was also a meeting of the IJOH editorial board. In the interview, Grele described the visit to an Indonesian restaurant: “But we had a wonderful time. Again, knit-

 Ronald Grele, interview, February 21, 2007. In terms of percentages, in the IJOH publications, Europeans and other international researchers were represented in lower numbers than their American colleagues.  In the broadest sense, this also includes essays in other journals for national oral history associations or also contributions for collected volumes.

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ting together that group in terms much more than our scholarly work. It was a friendship group.”⁴⁹ The activation of this (friendship) network was shown around the year 1984. As the editor of the journal, in January of this year, Ronald Grele turned to Luisa Passerini, Raphael Samuel, Paul Thompson, Alessandro Portelli, and Isabelle and Daniel Bertaux.⁵⁰ Grele recommended a joint, pooled reaction to an article published by Louise Tilly, a leading social historian in the USA, in the prior year. It had critically dealt with oral history, and Grele recommended: “Luisa [Passerini] and I in conversation about the piece thought that a good way of responding would be to put together a special issue of the International Journal of Oral History. […] What I mean is an issue with the article and replies from each of us.”⁵¹ The planned edition of the journal was published in February 1985. At the same time, this edition of the IJOH was the last one with Grele as editor in chief; he had handed over the role to Charles T. Morrissey. In the editorial note, Grele focused on the IJOH’s concerns and, at the same time, took stock of the oral history movement in a way: When we started the IJOH, we stated that the objective would be to remove our discussions from the provincial and limited, and to concentrate upon methodological and theoretical debates. […] We have done so, and I think this issue will show how far we have come. Herein we present an essay by Louise Tilly […], which raises important questions about our theory and practice; we have also included a series of replies from some prominent authors in the field discussed by Tilly. The questions raised, the way they are posed, and the answers given all illustrate the growing sophistication of the debates about oral history, of which we would like to think we have been a part. This issue continues our original commitment.⁵²

But this collaborative effort was ill-fated from the very beginning, due to financing. Already in the early summer of 1981, Grele had asked his Italian colleague Passerini to write a type of recommendation for the acquisition of financial support from the University of California.⁵³ However, this engagement was without success. The International Journal of Oral History worked for a decade, before

 Grele is remembering Paul Thompson, Luisa Passerini, Daniel Bertaux, Annemarie Tröger, Orvar Löfgren, and others who were present. Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  The friendly connection becomes clear; Grele had addressed the letter to “Luisa, Raph, Paul, Sandro, Isabelle, and Daniel.” Letter from Ronald Grele, January 20, 1984, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Ronald Grele, January 20, 1984, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Ronald Grele, “Editorial,” International Journal of Oral History 6.1 (1985): 3.  A similar request was also found in Lutz Niethammer’s documents. Letter from Ronald Grele to Lutz Niethammer, May 28, 1981, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.

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it folded in the late 1980’s.⁵⁴ In the early 1990’s, the IJOH was re-structured and re-named the International Annual of Oral History. The first volume, edited by Ronald Grele in 1992, with the title Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History, was also the last volume of the periodical. The project of this international oral history journal that he co-founded had found its end. In England, the Nestor of British oral history, Paul Thompson, made a similar attempt in the 1990’s. He founded the International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories. ⁵⁵ Like its predecessor, the IJOH, it attempted to give oral history an international voice and also import international research with oral sources to Europe or England. The editorial board was made up of Paul Thompson (editorin-chief), Luisa Passerini and Daniel Bertaux (editors), and Selma Leydesdorff (review editor). In 1994, Alessandro Portelli agreed to work in the “inner editorial group.”⁵⁶ In addition, Eugenia Meyer and Mercedes Vilanova were represented as co-editors. The yearbook was also “advertised” with these names. For the first edition published in 1992, Luisa Passerini acted as a special editor. Despite these famous authors, in Luisa Passerini’s correspondence, letters are found relatively early in which the future of the international yearbook was struggling. It was planned to anchor the journal via regionally responsible teams and create an international network of associated and advising people: “to include known names.”⁵⁷ In addition, negotiations about the change in publisher and a more offensive marketing strategy were pushed forward. Yet the low level of dissemination and low number of subscribers as well as the consequential delicate financial situation led to the end of the International Yearbook just four years after its founding. Both publications are to be understood as efforts to internationalize oral history. Interestingly, both plans did not emerge from the international oral history community. It was rooted in national contexts; in one case, the USA, and in the other, Great Britain. Yet they were both initiated by central figures of the IOHA, Ronald Grele and Paul Thompson, respectively. It was first with the founding of the journal Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios that the International Oral

 Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” The Oral History Review 34.1 (2006): 66, http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/34/1/49.pdf; Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, “Critical developments: introduction” in The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2006), 6.  The yearbook was published between 1992 and 1996.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, March 8, 1994, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Minutes of the International Yearbook Editorial Meeting, Paris, February 4, 1995, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.

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History Association had its own bilingual publication and form of communication after its formal institutionalization in 1996. Remarkably, it does not include anything about internationality in the title – but has continued until today.⁵⁸

Joint Projects An example of the issues-focused, bi-national cooperation is offered by the comparative study of automobile workers in Turin and Coventry, carried out by Paul Thompson and Luisa Passerini.⁵⁹ Among others, on the Italian side, Marcella Filippa was included in the project, as Passerini’s student. Paul Thompson remembers an entire team of young researchers. After a euphoric beginning, challenges occurred over the course of the project. The different approaches to carrying out interviews made the comparative analysis difficult. In addition, after an election, the new provincial government in Italy stopped funding the project. The sources collected were declared by those politically responsible as being secret, to an extent, and therefore, were removed from access to researchers. With her own history as a member of the 1968 generation, Luisa Passerini turned to a new topic area and began to write her autobiography. Finally, in 1988, Paul Thompson published one part of the study on his own, which was based on his research in Coventry, under the title Playing at Skilled Men. Ten years later, he published a second examination, Imagination and Passivity in Leisure. ⁶⁰ Another project borne of the friendship and the personal backgrounds of the protagonists was an examination of the 1968 phenomenon as the year of the peak of the left-wing student and civil rights movement. The “working connection” had formed in 1982, in the context of the IOHA conference in Aix-en-Provence.⁶¹ Ronald Grele remembered, “We were sitting around, talking, Annemarie and Luisa and Sally and Ronny and Daniel, and we were just swapping stories about funny things we had done in the 1960’s. Luisa is, I think, tormented

 In addition to this journal, there were and are a number of oral history magazines at the national level that incorporate international research. Examples of this are the Oral History Review (USA), Oral History (Great Britain), BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebenslaufanalysen (Germany), and Historia y fuente oral, which has been known as Historia, Antropología y fuentes orales since 1996 (Spain).  See also the chapter from Manja Finnberg in this volume.  Paul Thompson, life story interview with Karen Worcman, 1996, www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/ online/data/edwardians/biography/PaulThompsonLifeStoryInterview1996.doc.  Annemarie Tröger, interview with Annette Leo, April 29 and May 2, 2008.

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about the sixties.”⁶² There are various versions of the beginning of this cooperation, but this much is certain: the impulse for the researchers to occupy themselves academically with the 1960’s occurred to the participants due to their own involvement and difficulties with this time in a fertile environment – academic research also as self-reflective “therapy.” At a follow-up meeting in Paris, the future 1968 project was launched. Ronald Fraser, an author who had attracted attention for his book about the Spanish Civil War based on oral sources, took over organizational leadership:⁶³ “Luisa and I planned everything, we recommended the people who should work with us, but we, she and I, were the core. I had contacts with publishing companies in England and the USA, I knew possibilities for getting money, and she knew the respected historians.”⁶⁴ A group was organized, made up of Ronald Fraser, Luisa Passerini, Annemarie Tröger, Daniel Bertaux, and Ronald Grele.⁶⁵ In their respective national contexts, the members of the group looked for help in completion, which primarily guaranteed that interviews with younger age cohorts could be completed eye-to-eye.⁶⁶ The weighting of individual processes was then heavily discussed. Ronald Fraser tried to bring these various interest groups together: “Working together in a team, as we did it for this book, was very difficult. Some were in the USA, me in England, France, Germany, Italy. Meeting, agreeing, writing took so much energy […].”⁶⁷ This shows the theoretical and practical problem constellations of multi-national (cooperative) work and indicates the limits of networking, if not a breakdown. Finally, American and British editions of the study on 1968 were published that had different emphases in terms of content.⁶⁸

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Fraser’s book appeared in two editions, a British version with the title Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War 1936 – 1939 (London: Allen Lane, 1979), and an American version, titled Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1979).  Ronald Fraser, interview with Elena Rodríguez Codd, Valencia, May 13, 2008.  In this project about the 1968 generation, there was evidence of a certain competition among those who generally fought together, as Daniel Bertaux noted. Paul Thompson was not asked, because Ronald Fraser was responsible for England. See Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, Sèvres, France, November 16, 2006.  Annemarie Tröger, interview with Annette Leo, April 29 and May 2, 2008. In the USA, Bret Eynon participated in the project. See Bret Eynon, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, February 21, 2008.  Ronald Fraser, interview with Elena Rodríguez Codd, Valencia, Spain, May 13, 2008.  Ronald Fraser, ed. 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988); Ronald Fraser, ed., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

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This example also shows the networking of the IOHA’s agents via their friendships. In particular, it becomes clear that these friendships were founded based on a shared international, generational position and similar political attitudes in their respective society. They were the drive for the examination of the processes in the most recent contemporary history, in which all of them, were engaged or positioned in their own way, some more than others. The joint project is, in this sense, also to be understood as a research into themselves, which in turn came from the aforementioned position towards work with oral sources as an “antidote” to the official interpretation of history.

Friendship as a Basis and Driving Force of the Network The quoted examples show that the protagonists’ personal friendships played a central role for the consolidation of the international oral history network. These friendships rose up from various roots. One pre-condition was the left-wing political orientation shared by a large number of the participants.⁶⁹ Although some people already knew each other in advance, the oral history conference in Colchester in 1979 had a decisive, catalytic effect: We were New Leftists, so there was that kind of community. And you know, as I say, I don’t like community, but this was something different. This was really a meeting of people who – it was a very affected group of people, and you know, that moment was really quite a startling moment. And we kept up those relationships over the years.⁷⁰

The friendships strengthened over the years. This was externally caused through joint interest and engagement for the oral history method, which, in a certain way, was also a communitization against an outside world which was perceived as hostile, blocking, and opposing. Internally, the friendships grew through the participation in the lives of the respective others. These close relationships were expressed in the form of trust and closeness. The counterparts turned into listeners, supporters, and advisors, even in difficult personal situations. In December 1982, Luisa Passerini wrote to Ronald Grele:

 Alexander von Plato, who describes oral history as an “alternative scene,” refers to gradual differences in the friendships. A number of contacts developed from meetings due to work relationships, but only some people developed close and deep personal friendships. Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, Stade, Germany, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.

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Dearest Ron, here I am, back in [Turin], where it has been raining without interruption since I arrived. […] The most striking effect of my return has been the realization of the poverty of my personal life, using a situationist jargon. I guess it was such in the last 2 years, but I could not see so lucidly. […] I miss so much your household and your way of life, that I have been sharing. I must say that living with other people can be very pleasant, and I had sort of forgotten the pleasure of daily communication over minute aspects of life.⁷¹

They visited each other, spent time with each other, shared domestic life. Paul Thompson used the home of his friends, the Bertaux couple, in the Pyrenees in order to write.⁷² The conferences and the organization of them can, in this sense, be viewed as an indication for the desire to overcome the spatial distance, to bridge the prescribed borders.⁷³ Luisa Passerini had close contact with Annemarie Tröger, Lutz Niethammer, Paul Thompson, and especially with Ronald Grele. For outsiders, the degree of this closeness is surely difficult to estimate. In any case, from the letters, it can be determined that there was a special sense of trust, which made communication even about deep personal crises, such as separation from a life partner or the beginning of psychotherapy, possible.⁷⁴ Another example of these friendships is found in Sweden. Even before graduating from secondary school, Birgitta Skarin Frykman decided to go to Ireland with a friend and participate in archaeological digs. In an interview, she warmly spoke of this phase of her life. It was the beginning of a close connection with the English-speaking world. She studied archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography in Uppsala. Her instructor for archival science, Folke Hedblom, spoke about the comprehensive system of collecting materials and narratives through specially-designed archives in Sweden at the first British oral history conference in Lei-

 Letter from Luisa Passerini to Ronald Grele, December 1, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, Wivenhoe, England, July 17, 2007.  In a letter Annemarie Tröger wrote to Luisa Passerini on June 19, 1979, she asks: “Could you stay over the weekend so that the three of us [Passerini, Thompson, Tröger] could have some time together” and concludes with “love Annemarie.” The importance of close personal relationships is also shown in a letter from the year 1982. Tröger wants to ensure that Luisa Passerini will participate in the IOHA conference in France: “So I’m really split about the trip [to Aix-en-Provence], the only reason to go there would be to meet old friends, but if they are not there…” (Letter from Annemarie Tröger to Luisa Passerini, February 16, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy). In her contribution to this volume, Manja Finnberg addresses this aspect of crossing borders, also in the motivational sense.  Letters from Luisa Passerini to Ronald Grele on July 8 and August 24, 1984, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.

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cester in 1971.⁷⁵ In an early edition of the British journal Oral History from 1974, in addition to Hedblom, there are also contributions about folklore in Ireland and articles about dialects in Scotland and England. In this early phase, there was a considerable congruency and closeness between the British oral history movement and Swedish ethnology. Paul Thompson euphorically described the long tradition of the collection of oral testimonies and the quality of the Scandinavian research on social and people’s history to be a true discovery.⁷⁶ After having become aware of his publications, Skarin Frykman met Thompson in 1978. She talked about his book The Edwardians on a radio show in Sweden and was invited by him to the conference in Colchester.⁷⁷ There, among others, she met Elizabeth Roberts, who had dedicated her research to working-class women and was actively engaged in the British Oral History Society – the beginning of a lifelong friendship: “I mean the link to England is very strong as you can notice and that has meant most for us.”⁷⁸ In addition to that, Skarin Frykman imported an idea that she had heard about when visiting the community center Centerprise⁷⁹ in London, in the framework of the travel seminar of the 1979 conference: the sales of small, inexpensive local studies and memories at the corner store.⁸⁰ In addition, she was in contact with Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop. The British History Workshop was also a parallel to the Swedish development, where, initiated by Sven Lindqvist’s handbook Dig Where You Stand, targeted at interested amateurs, teachers, students, journalists, and authors,

 Folke Hedblom, “Methods and Organisation of Dialect and Folklore Research in Sweden,” Oral History 2.2 (1974): 44– 58.  “I am amazed by the accidental way in which I stumbled on news of well established activities which ought to have been familiar to socialist historians in Britain years ago” (Paul Thompson, “Report Back: Life Histories in Poland and Scandinavia,” History Workshop 6.1 [1978]: 208– 10).  Paul Thompson wrote, “I must enclose a note with our conference invitation to thank you very much for your last letter, with the interesting booklist – and still more for your activities on Swedish radio! I’m delighted The Edwardians is getting this publicity. I’ve invited all the people to the conference whom you suggested and several have already accepted. I hope we may see you again too! Best wishes! Paul.” This short message simultaneously emphasized a functional principle of the IOHA, which was the instrumentalization and interweaving of national networks in an international space via personal bridges. Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, December 4, 1978, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007.  This project was the combination of a bookstore, a bar-café, a counseling center, and a reading forum for adults, with an oral history project. See Luisa Passerini, “Friendship and Truth” in Zeit-Geschichten. Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, eds. Jürgen John, Dirk van Laak, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 2006), 179.  The attempt soon collapsed, due to little interest and costs that were too high.

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countless study groups were forming throughout the entire country – a movement, as Lindqvist called it.⁸¹ It is exactly this book and its catalyzing and mobilizing effect that made Lindqvist a figurehead in international oral history, even though he only appeared at the conference in Colchester in 1979 and did not integrate himself into the (international) structure of the network. Lindqvist took on an interesting double position between the center and the periphery of the network of relationships; on the one hand, an ennobling attribution from the outside in the sense of a spiritus rector, but on the other hand, a distance to the IOHA that he chose himself. In contrast, Birgitta Skarin Frykman was regularly present at the international oral history conferences. Together with Sven B. Ek, in 1996, she organized the ninth International Conference at Gothenburg University and there, was also elected to the first council of the formally-founded IOHA.⁸² In an article from 2006, Ronald Grele described three phases of the development of international oral history. Grele sees the first stage – or, as it was argued, the foundation – as the first personal contact between researchers from Europe and the USA. In the second step, these researchers established an informal community of oral historians through a series of conferences and, third, continuously expanded this community.⁸³ He describes the development of the International Oral History Association as a story of discovery: “We are talking about how

 Sven Lindqvist, interview with Christian König, Stockholm, June 11, 2007. His book was published in 1978 in Stockholm. An English translation of the entire book was not published, but central theses from the book are presented in Paul Thompson and Natasha Burchardt, eds., Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe (London: Pluto, 1982), among others. The book is also available in German translation as Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst, Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989). Interestingly, only one chapter of the book dealt with memories as a source for research of one’s own workplace. In contrast, the practice of the groups that were forming was strongly focused on conducting interviews. After the publication of the book, Lindqvist traveled throughout all of Sweden and supported the groups that were forming. A visible result of his book was the Museum of Work in Norrköping, which was created through the engagement of the Social Democratic Party in the 1980’s. In the interview, his distance to the IOHA becomes clear. It seems that for him, the IOHA appeared as a growing “academic occupation” of research about work, which was originally carried out by amateurs.  Her two-year membership in the IOHA council was not mentioned in the interview. This speaks for the break that was experienced with the previous organizations – a change in the IOHA, which also meant the end of Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s engagement in the IOHA.  Ronald Grele, “From the intimate circle to globalized oral history,” Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios 4 (2007– 2008), http://www.iohanet.org/journal/archive/Vol4/grele.pdf. It is a lecture that Grele held at the conference in Sydney on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the IOHA in 2006.

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oral historians in different parts of the world discovered one another.”⁸⁴ According to Grele, oral history and the IOHA became an intellectual home for many researchers; “these meetings created a community among oral historians by bringing together practitioners who had been working in near isolation in their own countries, who now found a similarity of interests.”⁸⁵ In his essay “Brüder im Geiste,” or “Brothers in Spirit,” political scientist Claus Leggewie unfolds the various dimensions of friendship as a social relationship.⁸⁶ The range of the relationships goes from collegiality to camaraderie and companionship all the way to love. In the framework of the International Oral History Association there are, on the one hand, these forms of academic exchange and cooperation in a collegial context. Collegiality is characterized more strongly by formalization than by the intensity of the relationship and is founded in and targeted at the structures of a work community.⁸⁷ On the other hand, in the core group of the IOHA, with a view to the life stories of many protagonists, camaraderie is of special importance. In the continuum of the friendly relationships, Leggewie classifies it as being less formal, but with greater intensity. Companionship combines collegial traits with aspects of friendship. This is due to jointly setting goals to be reached that can have a political edge, but are de-differentiating and unifying in a friendly way.⁸⁸ Leggewie describes the following step of even higher intensity as “buddies,” which is mirrored in the deep, personal friendships in the IOHA, because these friendships also held true outside of the work context and also reached far beyond it in terms of time. Based on Leggewie, in this sense, one could designate the central figures of the IOHA, taking the gender relationships into account, as “siblings in spirit.” Men and women of one age cohort with similar generational experiences, often shaped by the emancipation from their respective milieu of origin, find – or, better, create – a “replacement family” for themselves in the international oral history network, in a way.⁸⁹

 Grele, From the intimate circle, 2.  Grele, From the intimate circle, 3.  Claus Leggewie, “Brüder im Geiste. Kleine Soziologie wissenschaftlicher Kollegenschaft” in Erleben, Erleiden, Erfahren. Die Konstitution sozialen Sinns jenseits instrumenteller Vernunft, eds. Kay Junge, Daniel Šuber, and Gerold Gerber (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2008), 219 – 22.  Leggewie, Brüder im Geiste, 222.  Leggewie, Brüder im Geiste, 221.  For more on this, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume.

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Structural Analysis of the IOHA Network – An Attempt After various paths of networking individual protagonists via their work relationships and friendships, the view will now be turned to the entire IOHA network, which manifests itself in the ten conferences between 1976 and 1996. The diagram (Image 1, page 77) should simplify the visualization of the network and, in addition, also display an image of the various personal circles at the international conferences. Of course, it is a typified schema that has no claim to completeness. At the same time, it cannot depict the change over time, but through the draft of the structural breakdown, it should make the foundation clear, and changes took place upon the basis of it. It depicts typified IOHA groups and, as indicated by structure and color, their position in the overall structure of the network. Its organizational decision-making center is made up by only a small group of people, called a core croup. In a structural as well as an organizational sense, these agents are surrounded by a larger circle of people, who occupy an intermediate position in terms of participation in decision-making processes. IOHA conference participants, listed by way of examples in the outer circle, participate indirectly in those decision-making processes, at best. As outsiders, Reinhard Sieder and also Alun Howkins have a critical distance from the International Oral History Association. Sven Lindqvist is a phenomenon in a different regard: on the one hand, as a pioneer in the oral history movement, he is a present and inspiring influence, but on the other hand, he consciously keeps a distance from the IOHA.

The Core Group The structural and operative core of the IOHA is made up of a small group of people. At the same time, it shaped the stability and dynamics of the entire IOHA network between 1976 and 1996.⁹⁰ The network that makes up the core

 Due to the experiences in organizing the conferences in 1979 in Essex and 1980 in Amsterdam, in 1980, a European Standing Committee for International Oral History Conferences was established, which had the goal of organizing European oral history conferences in a two-year rhythm. Eric Cregreen (Scotland), Philippe Joutard (France), Lutz Niethammer (West Germany), Luisa Passerini (Italy), Jaap Talsma (the Netherlands), Paul Thompson (England), and Orvar Löfgren (Sweden) were present. “None of the persons present was acting with an explicit mandate of her / his national oral history society” – mindful of this fact, there was the addition of

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Lin Sv en

Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame

dq vis t

Christian König

Sven B. Ek

Jean-Pierre Rioux Selma Leydesdorff

Philippe Joutard

Beatrys de Graeve

Anna Davin

Gabriella Gribaudi

Birgitta Skarin Frykman

Eugenia Meyer

Daniel Bertaux Ronald Grele Lutz Niethammer Luisa Passerini Alessandro Portelli Paul Thompson

Alessandro Triulzi

Marcella Filippa

Giovanni Contini Pietro Clemente

Daniele Jalla

Mercedes Vilanova Orvar Löfgren

Annemarie Tröger

Gerhard Botz Alexander von Plato

Cesare Bermani

Mary Marshall Clark Björn Horgby

Ronald Fraser

Irina Scherbakowa Alun Howkins

Reinhard Sieder

Image 1: Typified image of the IOHA network (without dynamics and temporal position shifts)

group, if one wants to endeavor to use the term hierarchy, then it is the tip of the entire network, from a vertical perspective. Viewed horizontally, this sub-network is in the middle of the structure and is characterized by the most intensive relations. The relationship network is especially close-knit due to the connections on multiple levels: from a joint interest in the method of oral history, congruencies

“provisional.” Final structural decisions should only be made after discussing them with the national oral history organizations. The European dimension of this committee and the IOHA was not just clear due to the people represented, but also in the goal of expanding it with members from other, exclusively European, countries. See “Minutes of the founding meeting of the European Standing Committee for International Oral History Conferences on Sunday 26 October 1980 in Amsterdam,” François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Madame Ranson, sub-folder Correspondance et généralités.

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in terms of research topics, all the way to academic work, the exchange of ideas, and possibly joint projects, all the way to the preparation, organization and execution of European or international conferences. The basis for this was the personal friendships of the participants. The relationships mentioned were grouped around them and created a viable and continuous network of relationships. Strictly speaking, it has to do, in turn, with various subnetworks, because “every person had his friends” (emphasis mine).⁹¹ It is from this intersection of different personal networks, made up via friendship, work relationships, etc., that the functional core of the IOHA between 1976 and 1996 was created. In the festschrift for Lutz Niethammer’s retirement, Luisa Passerini described the unfolding of such friendships under the illustrative heading “Friendship and Truth.” According to Passerini, the first connection was often due to mutual research interests, which came together in a productive and inspiring way in the framework of the IOHA conferences and often developed into close friendships – “esteemed colleagues and dear friends:” “Meeting with oral historians from many countries, ways of life and disciplines [sic], was extraordinarily exciting, and led to a sort of mutual recognition and solidarity, a collective feeling that nourished bilateral friendships.”⁹² The members of the core group themselves (and their close environment) recruited themselves from left-liberal to left-wing circles. Born between 1934 and 1941, the decision-makers of the IOHA are a little bit older than the 1968 generation, in terms of generations. Yet they have a certain, specific closeness to the age group of the protagonists of 1968.⁹³ This also had a shaping influence on the self-understanding of many participants of belonging to a “movement.” The international conferences were not academic conferences in a classical sense, but were conceptualized as an alternative model to academic culture. They were an open invitation to anyone interested. The research topics can also be understood to be an expression of this: the IOHA brought academics and non-academics together, who practiced a forced examination of people’s history, worker’s history, and women’s history using the controversial (not just in terminology) method of oral history. From this perspective, the IOHA can, on the one hand, be understood as an academic, and on the other hand, as a political-cultural movement. How diverse (and difficult to categorize), yet at the same time connecting these

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, April 18, 2008.  Passerini, Friendship and Truth, 178 and 180.  For the generational bearing and the political views, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume.

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events were becomes clear when Niethammer brings emotion into play as a force of cohesion: Because most people had the feeling that it was really something great that we came together, and that 400 people from all of Europe presented things that had something to do with each other, and had a feeling that, in a way that is better not be defined in detail, we are somehow something together.⁹⁴

In the process, for some researchers, the international cooperation could be a way out of what was often interdisciplinary isolation and marginalization in their home country. Luisa Passerini’s difficult career situation in Italy has already been referred to. But it is similar for Daniel Bertaux, who, with his interview-supported research, only found recognition in French social science after great difficulty; a place of respect was first created through internationality. Bertaux’s study about bakers in Paris⁹⁵ was positively evaluated in the already-mentioned critical article by Louise Tilly. It was a reason for him to not distance himself from Tilly, as Ronald Grele was encouraging others to do.⁹⁶ In the interview, the Austrian researcher Gerhard Botz also referred back to this phenomenon of isolation in the academic milieu.⁹⁷ He sees most of the oral historians as being in a niche position, in which it must be taken into consideration that this marginalization depended on the respective national context and other dependent variables, in which previous personal experiences and subjective self-images also played a role. With regard to that, it becomes especially clear which position the IOHA could take in terms of individual understanding. The (subjectively experienced or objectively present) niche position generated an impulse for communitization, as Grele also commented in the interview: But to be someplace where everybody was talking about the same thing, everybody was sharing a language, there was a set of shared assumptions in that crowd, and not only

 Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27– 28, 2008.  Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, Une enquête sur la boulangerie artisanale en France (Rapport au CORDES, 1980), 2 volumes.  Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, Sèvres, France, November 16, 2006.  “Under that, all oral historians massively suffered at that time, all of them. Paul Thompson was isolated, massively, in England. In the first place, oral history was a niche history, an alternative history, outside of institutions. And it actually […] amazed me. And all, all of them were fringe figures in academia. The only exception was Mercedes Vilanova, who came from the inside […].” (Vilanova worked in contemporary history at the University of Barcelona). Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, September 26, 2007.

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about oral history, about many, many other things. It turns out that many of us were fringe characters in our own professions.⁹⁸

The strong engagement for the IOHA was, in this sense, targeted at creating their own niche outside of national, university hierarchies, in which the potential for a methodological profiling of oral history could be developed, as also that of oral historians in the academic environment in their home country. The Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren realized: I think the important thing was: did people feel they came from disciplines where oral history was very marginal? Because then they […] were seeking confirmation and brotherhood or sisterhood [emphasizes] in that, you know. But I came from a discipline where it was very central so, I felt, if you see what I mean, if you come from a history department where you are the only one that is advocating oral history or you’re a sociologist and the others, your colleagues think: what’s this? I mean, [emphasizes] then it’s very important to have this backup of an interdisciplinary network. So, that maybe also have played [sic] some role in recruiting people.⁹⁹

In comparison, it stands out that the resistance in historical studies was much more strongly against work with oral sources across boundaries than in other disciplines. In turn, one could say that the historians profited the most from establishing oral history.

The IOHA Conferences – Structural Nodes The entire network of the International Oral History Association visualized itself in the form of the conferences organized at irregular intervals. These were characterized by an openness of form, which allowed for and supported a high amount of connectivity in many senses (personal, ethnic, thematic, disciplinary). Access criteria were, like the selection policy, loosely worded and extremely relaxed. As the organizer of the conference in Gothenburg in 1996, Sven B. Ek, formulated it, the proposals were to be selected with great leniency: This procedure is based on the same policy as for previous conferences, that is generous judgement. As we all know, there are many countries or universities where oral history is

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, Lund, Sweden, June 15, 2007.

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just beginning and needs encouragement. Experience has shown that where it has got a foothold, research quality increases rapidly.¹⁰⁰

Submitted papers were grouped regionally and given to a person responsible for the subject area for evaluation. It was, as Giovanni Contini remembered, “very democratically selected and therefore all [talks] were admitted and therefore, it then required a whole lot of effort to divide this flood of entries into categories.”¹⁰¹ The conferences were open to academics, journalists, and writers, as well as amateurs. Over the years, there was a constantly growing, dynamically changing circle of participants made up of interested researchers from various subject areas in social sciences from all over the world. The interest in the conferences served as personal confirmation for the organizers as well as a strengthening and basis for their academic claims.¹⁰² The conferences can be understood to be sub-networks of the IOHA, which, at this stage, also created specific relationships between those participating in the organization. The meetings themselves could therefore be sub-divided into various levels with respectively varying relational contents and relational intensities. On the one hand, there was the dimension of the lectures and the thematic and methodological exchange; on the other hand, there was a half-official level of small-group or private discussions, such as about current political developments. Furthermore, there was, for example, also a network of interpersonal sociability, private parties, or dance events.¹⁰³ These get-togethers were, of course, limited to a closer group. It is actually because of this that they serve as an expression of the meaning of long-term acquaintanceships and personal friendships. In connection with the high percentage of women in the IOHA, Gerhard Botz spoke of “a type of sub-erotic family.”¹⁰⁴ And also according to other statements, there was a sensual-sexual component to keeping the IOHA together. This special form of the IOHA conference network was linked together through these different levels, occupied by different people, which touched, over-

 Letter from Sven B. Ek to Ronald Grele, May 21, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, Florence, September 25, 2006.  It is of note that from the very beginning, the IOHA network has had a high percentage of women participating in it.  See Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, September 26, 2007. “So, in England, we danced late into the night once, but at whose place, I don’t know – probably at Paul Thompson’s, in Oxford we danced once. And at Lutz’s [Niethammer, in Essen] I don’t think so, I can’t remember […]. Oh yeah, sure, I also danced in Barcelona, yes, of course […].”  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, September 26, 2007.

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lapped, permeated each other. At the same time, the levels of the conferences point to the functional mechanisms of the network through their special structural features. They represent the closeness and distance from organizational and decision-making competency. For the participants interested (Image 1, outer circle, page 77), as the gatherings’ fluctuating elements, the thematic interest, the concrete, project-related exchange, aside from existential methodological questions of oral history, was often in the foreground.¹⁰⁵ These people were relatively weakly linked to the IOHA, and in terms of the image, were on the margin. At the same time, one could also understand this area to be the most dynamic. On the one hand, it could lead to a rapid dissociation from the IOHA. On the other hand, however, it could lead to a closer connection that involved moving closer to the core of the IOHA by intensifying the relationships, and therefore participation in the process of stabilizing the network and, more concretely, the conferences. The bearers of this continuity were the small group that called themselves “superstars”¹⁰⁶ on one occasion and formed a relatively “closed society.” Therefore, it was difficult for younger researchers to make their way to the center of the IOHA, which was occupied by charismatic leaders like Passerini, Thompson, or Grele. It was a circumstance that Marcella Filippa also critically commented on, because “when some of them then pulled back, there was no one – and that is maybe another error [of the IOHA] – there was not a sufficient transfer or transition to the next generation.”¹⁰⁷ There is a hierarchization inherent to this segregation. The core (Image 1, inner circle, page 77) gained a certain power due to the organizational work of the conferences, which paradoxically resulted from the grassroots democratic impulse of the lack of formalization and therefore created what was actually a democratic, legitimational contradiction within the IOHA, and the participants were aware of that. The question of what the organization is and how it should be composed had always been in the room. The network had arisen from the spirit of the 1960’s and 1970’s. For the majority of the agents, the self-perception of a movement prevailed. This was also the reason why the admission policy for submitted

 Björn Horgby, interview with Christian König, Linköping, Sweden, June 12, 2007.  Report from the European committee meeting, IHTP, July 6, 1981, from François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Dossier des réunions.  Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008. In an interview, Beatrys de Graeve also mentioned this exclusivity and spoke of a “lodge,” a “club,” which had its own certain type of protectionism and shield as a center for initiative and action. Beatrys de Graeve, interview with Annette Leo, Ghent, November 25, 2008.

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talks was handled extremely generously, contrary to arguments for specialization and qualitative improvement – this was, Lutz Niethammer explained, for the benefit of the emotional movement factor.¹⁰⁸ Ultimately, this open, integrative “policy” also prevented a challenging of the decision-making power of the core group. This core of friendships was the international network’s stabilizing element for years. Pietro Clemente, who, as an anthropologist, does not understand himself to be a part of oral history, saw the international conferences as an opportunity to meet people, but afterwards, it was difficult to maintain contact and initiate cooperations. According to Clemente, there was a type of movement, a dynamic atmosphere, because many young people were there, but this vitality petered out at the end of the conference.¹⁰⁹ The task of continuing the contacts, that is, their “vitality,” was completed and created by the friendship network within the core group, as Filippa also admits: In this respect, one must say that Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli in particular had an especially strong international spirit. They were the animators, and they kept up and built up the international relationships. Subsequently, they brought important research topics to Italy and also included their students. It was the skill of these two leaders to be aware of the international dimension, to build up relationships, and in doing so, to include the young academics. I think that was the greatest merit, especially of Luisa Passerini and maybe also that of Alessandro Portelli. So, there was an intensive cooperation and connection that [had] this international dimension from the very beginning, also due to the farreaching topics, 1968, the work environment of the working class, the resistance, the history of the persecutions and after that, gender history, which completely recognized the importance of the international in the reconstruction. They taught us that, us, who were, in a sense, the children or grandchildren of these people […].¹¹⁰

The centrality was therefore justified and appeared in another way. The members of the core group fulfilled a bridging function in many ways. In the network, they constituted the connecting bridges, the hinges between various sub-networks and levels. At the same time, they were also the juncture between the national and international space – and this not just in a passive, but also in an active sense. The protagonists of the core group organized the access to the IOHA by making it known in their home countries, through invitations and recommendations. From the very beginning of the international conferences, Paul Thompson acted as a central coordinator. On the one hand, against the background of the Oral History Society in Great Britain, which was already well-organized, he ap-

 Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27– 28, 2008.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Siena, Italy, May 10, 2007.  Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008.

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peared as an engaged, internationally-thinking “networker.” On the other hand, through his works, especially due to his study The Edwardians, he had already achieved international recognition. Through this combination, for numerous researchers, in both theoretical and practical senses, Thompson moved into a mediating position in the access to the IOHA cosmos. Luisa Passerini serves as another example for this bridging function. In 1983, she forwarded invitations from Ronald Grele to an international oral history conference in New York, organized by the US Oral History Association, to Alessandro Portelli and other young Italian researchers.¹¹¹ Ronald Grele developed a special engagement when “importing” researchers from abroad through offers to talk as well as invitations to meetings and conferences. This effort was expanded through Grele’s publication of the International Journal of Oral History. Even after he had given up the role of editor-in-chef, he mediated the publication of an essay by Luisa Passerini.¹¹² These functional mechanisms are also found in other leading minds of the IOHA. Other prime examples here are the organization of a joint seminar with Paul Thompson at the Free University of Berlin, initiated by Annemarie Tröger, Mercedes Vilanova’s engagement for the Spanish journal Historia y Fuente Oral, or the organization of an international symposium on working class culture in Norrköping, Sweden in 1986, with participants including Paul Thompson, Selma Leydesdorff, Lutz Niethammer, François Bédarida, and Mercedes Vilanova.¹¹³ Another example of the bridging function was the exchange of graduate students arranged through the network relationships. Birgitta Skarin Frykman remembered her doctoral students’ international contacts as follows: “I had quite a lot of contacts with Raphael Samuel, too. And one of our doctoral students went across to Ruskin College and spent some time there, which was also a sort of knowledge, which came back, came back to us.”¹¹⁴ And the participants’ “commuting” between the international level and the national work and research contexts in a positive sense made it clear that the core group served as  Luisa Passerini sent the invitations to Anna Bravo, Adele Pesce, Simonetta Piccone Stella, Anna Maria Rivera, and Diego Leoni. Letter from Luisa Passerini, July 1, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Charles T. Morrissey to Luisa Passerini, October 6, 1986, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  A collected volume edited by Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Elisabeth Tegner was also published: Working Class Culture: An International Symposium, Organized by the Museum of Work, Norrköping, and the Department of Ethnology, University of Gothenburg, September 1986 (Gothenburg, Sweden: 1989).  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007.

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personal bridges for thematic and methodological proposals and contents, which in turn influenced the national environment. They also offered bridges for people. As previously mentioned, the personal center included young researchers in a targeted way at the national level, in the 1968 project that was created in an international framework. Coupled with this cooperation, for the young academics, there was also an option to have international contacts and experiences in the IOHA, which could be bridged by means of the core group members. In the framework of the conferences, with regard to the organization of the IOHA network, the few “chiefs” took on the same role. They were surrounded by a circle of colleagues, who were to some extent younger (Image 1, middle circle, page 77), who performed decisive design work for the conferences in close cooperation. For example, Beatrys de Graeve, Selma Leydesdorff, or Birgitta Skarin Frykman served as secretaries of the standing committee. This organizational center was therefore close-knit to the network of the decision makers, but at the same time was also to a certain extent dependent on it. In this sense, the group of those responsible remained relatively closed over years. Prior to 1996, change there could only be carried out under certain conditions. In summary, it can be said that the members of the core group created a link between the various levels within the conferences, that they also created a connection between the conferences and played a central mediating role – active and passive – between national and international spaces. It should also be mentioned that the bridging function had an immanent duality of arranging contacts, on the one hand, as well as their regulation, on the other hand, which, for example, manifested when it came to access to the conferences. Ronald Grele described how he very deliberately selected participants in accordance with certain criteria: “We did not want it to become overloaded with Americans”¹¹⁵ – a type of protective function that points to an intricate balance within the IOHA. Within the network, the relationships between the agents were in no way always conflict-free. An example for this is the difficult relationship between Annemarie Tröger and Lutz Niethammer. Grele remembered a relationship “full of tension.”¹¹⁶ This tension was also expressed in the letters between Luisa Passerini and Annemarie Tröger.¹¹⁷ Conversely, Lutz Niethammer cannot remem-

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Tröger complained about the difficulties of her position at the university. In addition, she criticized the way in which Niethammer set up an oral history project in the Ruhr region, which she assessed as a competing project. She stated that Niethammer had a low readiness for cooperation and criticized “narrow minded academic discipline[s]” in general, especially the histor-

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ber these episodes but admits, self-critically, that he maybe had a harmonizing memory regarding this.¹¹⁸ But tensions also existed in the international framework, especially when it had to do with the International Oral History Conferences (IOHC), which the protagonists viewed as their child. The question of the conference languages had been a common theme with regard to the IOHC since their genesis. It developed into a real challenge for the network as it continued to expand. In connection, there were also disagreements about admissions practices and making the IOHC an international association.¹¹⁹ The relationships and the structure of this entire network as well as the subnetworks changed in the 1990’s. An international as well as thematic expansion of the conferences could be seen. The diversification of and specialization in research interests led to a loss of the ability to communicate internationally, which, not least, was rooted in the problem of finding (a) common language(s) and came to a head here. Generally speaking, a waning interest in worker’s history, an academic drawing card of the 1980’s, could be determined. The abrupt loss of the existing national and systemic borders in Europe through the collapse of the Socialist systems in the early 1990’s also changed the view of the IOHA and provoked a re-orientation. Not least, linguistically insecure, in the interview, Alessandro Portelli reported about his first contact with the Eastern Europeans at the conference in Essen in 1990.¹²⁰ He was not alone about that. For Giovanni Contini, the intrinsic difference between the sobered Eastern Europeans and the politically left-wing Western Europeans of the IOHA at the meeting remained vivid in his memory.¹²¹ Birgitta Skarin Frykman also addressed this difference

ians. See the letter from Annemarie Tröger to Luisa Passerini, July 18, 1980, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy. Two years later, with regard to Lutz Niethammer, Tröger commented, “Well, for our relationship it may be better if we have some hundred miles between us” (letter from Annemarie Tröger to Luisa Passerini, February 10, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy). For her part, Passerini also wrote about the difficult position as a woman in academia and the problems establishing women’s history (letter from Luisa Passerini to Annemarie Tröger, March 2, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy). These letters indicate a further (gender-specific) drive for international cooperation and at the same time, illuminate an additional facet of the close friendly relationships and networking, due to the difficult position of the female oral history researchers in the male-dominated academic system.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo, May 27– 28, 2008.  For more on these conflicts, see Franka Maubach’s and Julie Boekhoff’s contributions to this volume.  Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Rome, March 16, 2007.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, Florence, September 25, 2006.

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in political positions, and later on in terms of research thematic focuses, related to the conference in 1996 in Gothenburg: What was striking when it comes to differences during our conference I thought in 1996, […] when I look at the talks made by people from Eastern Europe then […], was that what took up most space was revolutions, war, difficult times. Whereas people from Sweden, they talked about consumer culture and things like… I mean, this enormous difference, […] it was so striking, because people came from so many parts of the world, was that what we were doing in our research was completely irrelevant to the personal difficulties […], they were the theme: I mean, war and revolution. […] And maybe one reason why oral history there is important: when you can talk about it and when you can do something, it’s important that these things come out. But I thought I felt that we were so cut off in a way from the world. I mean, even if we discussed it, I mean, the mere fact when I looked at the problem or what I knew of Swedish research in the humanities, we were far away from them, and not in a good way.¹²²

Skarin Frykman’s retrospective look reveals the changes in the IOHA in the 1990’s. The contact with Eastern European researchers, but also the growing number of participants from South America brought up new perspectives and new questions. Due to this, the International Oral History Association was forced to do some self-reflecting. The centering on the Western world of the (old) IOHA was made aware and challenged. The result of these processes seemed to be, on the one hand, a new (or re‐) discovery of the potential of oral history, especially for the research of violent experiences and, on the other hand, was a trigger for thinking about or re-considering one’s own field of research.¹²³ Also in connection with an advancing establishment or at least tolerance of oral history as an academic method, the IOHA’s fading away as a left-wing, avant-garde movement could be observed (that had also aged in the meantime).¹²⁴

 Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007.  There needs to be a detailed analysis, which cannot be given at this point, about the extent to which new impulses for research could have arisen in the “peaceful societies” that were challenged, like Sweden or Great Britain. This also includes France.  “It is not a movement the way it was. I think it’s sort of landed in the academic background and people don’t stand up and say: ‘I am an oral historian.’ Very few, you would find very few, I guess. But it becomes an accepted way of working in many disciplines and, I mean, that’s the success story. I think it’s [emphasizes] good that people don’t stand up and say: ‘I’m an oral historian,” because that’s the pioneer period, that’s where you need that, I mean, once it’s accepted as a good method, used in many disciplines… mhm… that’s success. And then you don’t have to wave the flag. I think that’s…. So, in a sense, the success of oral history results that oral history disappears as a, as a very visible identity.” Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, Lund, Sweden, June 15, 2007.

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At that time, the international oral history network was dominated by Europeans. But at the same time, these Eurocentric tendencies promoted the perception of the diversity and closeness of European peoples, apart from politics.¹²⁵ In front of the background of the network’s oral history representatives’ politically left-wing orientation, the historic-social scientific research approach of a “history from below” did not just contain a (political) claim to democratization. The concentration on the demos, especially in the form of a cross-border comparison in the sense of a fusion, promoted the new occupation with Europe in critical selfreflection. Pointedly, one could interpret that from the crisis of the 1990’s, the gradual rescue of “left-wing utopianism” arose in the form of a Europe of the people.¹²⁶ Therefore, the question is asked of how, among the auspices named, the institutionalization of the IOHA as a recognized international and even global academic organization in 1996 is to be interpreted.¹²⁷

Conclusion The International Oral History Association depicts a special phenomenon in academia: elusive and barely tangible, but present as an arena for international exchange. In its early phase from the mid-1970’s until the mid-1990’s, the IOHA could best be described as a network. As an open structural model, the network allows for the incorporation of various attributions and self-interpretations. It allows it to encompass the range from an external self-portrayal as an association all the way to an internal (also linked to individual experiences) attribution of characteristics of a movement. The core of this network was made up of a small group of people, an “international milieu [that] was made up of people who created a type of intellectual community, especially a political one, and a generational community.”¹²⁸ Crossborder (personal) friendships formed the basis and the central initiative for this context. The protagonists were close-knit through their relationships with each other, which were rooted in strong friendships. The network was based on the resource of trust, which did not just have an emotional quality, but also meant

 Passerini, Friendship and Truth, 180.  Some of the protagonists of the early IOHA occupied themselves with questions of the joint European development. Luisa Passerini, Lutz Niethammer, and Birgitta Skarin Frykman are examples of this.  For more on this, see Julie Boekhoff’s chapter in this volume.  Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, November 16, 2006.

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that there was a justifiable expectation of mutual reliability.¹²⁹ In addition to these, there were further, convergent attractors, which were bound together into a tight network of relationships. From their joint curiosity, always present in academics (who lead interviews), there was also an interest for each other in a broad sense: for the researcher and his studies, but also for the person himself. Thematic closeness and methodological congruence are further adhesive forces in the connections, which created, in total, an impulse and drive to organize international conferences about the work with oral sources. These connections can be illustrated with a term from sociology, that of the “invisible college.” It outlines a limited community of academics who are in an exchange about current research topics through academic communications media and, as a driving source of cooperation, informal contacts beyond disciplinary and international borders.¹³⁰ In addition to the personal ties of friendship between the oral history networkers, the oral history conferences that were organized by them can also be viewed as a level of these connections, or as communications media in the broadest sense. To some extent, the IOHA conferences were the visible part of the invisible college, which also opened the intermediary space of the oral historians’ network outward. The French historian Jean-Pierre Rioux characterizes those academics who work away from written sources found in archives using the oral history method as researchers of intermediate spaces.¹³¹ This position on the fringe met the concept of the movement and was cultivated in a certain way. The International Oral History Association itself was (and is) one such intermediate space, and that in three senses: geographical, between different nationalities, and between various academic disciplines. It was understood to be a network away from beaten academic paths, as an innovative countermovement that was looking to position itself in national university systems by creating an international reference framework. From the feeling of having an outsider position, which, in the relational sense of the network, was a linking and unifying feeling, grew, among other things, an avant-garde topos, which fulfilled the function of confirmation in the mutual recognition within the group. Consequently, a compensation function unfolded within the international network. For individuals, the IOHA served the attempt to bring oral history or work with oral sources from the edge to the center of the profession through the international expansion and acceleration in the respective national academic system.

 Boyer, Netzwerke und Geschichte, 50.  Leggewie, Brüder im Geiste, 222– 23.  Jean-Pierre Rioux, interview with Agnès Arp, Paris, December 18, 2006.

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If one follows the interpretation of Giovanni Contini that the method of oral history leads to increased sensitivity and the researcher must have a certain ease with interpersonal contact,¹³² this emphasizes the meaning of personal friendships as central edges of the network. They created the basis for the construction, the expansion, the stabilization, and finally, the continuity of the IOHA. Openness in interacting with each other also expanded in the nine or ten conferences that took place between 1976 and 1996. These were always an open invitation to everyone interested, had a mobilizing function, and were targeted at internationality and interdisciplinarity as new qualities of academic research. In turn, the conference made the structures of the entire network or the partial networks noticeable: a clear horizontal and vertical centralization of the decision-making and organizational competences in a small circle of people. The core group in and of itself presented an image en miniature of internationality – EuropeanNorth Atlantic, at least. Its centrality in the framework of the IOHA network was founded in the resources available, the great number of advantageous connections, as well as a bridging function which was simultaneously also the result of that asymmetrical distribution of “power.”¹³³ Its bridging function comprised four dimensions: people, themes, theory, and method of oral history, and had a bi-directional, catalyzing as well as filtering function between the national context and international level. In this layering of levels and the closeness or distance to organizational and decision-making competences, the IOHA presented a complex structure, which can be described as “infrastructure of differentiating integration.”¹³⁴ As a network structurally shaped through people, the IOHA saw various external and internal challenges in its development. The constant expansion of the circle of participants brought questions about borders into its agents’ consciousness. Is the IOHA European or global? Which language(s) should the IOHA speak? Questions of legitimacy about democratic forms of organization were also associated with that. The growth of the network increasingly led the friendship network of the protagonists to organizational borders, especially regarding the necessary financial funds. A discrepancy emerged between the size of a personal network, which is naturally limited through an individual’s networking ca-

 Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, Florence, September 25, 2006.  Here, “power” is different from Weber’s formal, bureaucratic definition. Boyer, Netzwerke und Geschichte, 49.  Ravi Ahuja developed this term. See Ravi Ahuja, “Netzwerke und Arbeitsmärkte: Annäherungen an ein Problem transterritorialer Arbeitsgeschichte,” in Transnationale Netzwerke im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Jürgen Mittag, Berthold Unfried, and Marcel van der Linden (Leipzig: Akademische Verlags-Anstalt, 2008), 101.

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pacity, and the dimensions of an international academic arena, increasingly in the global sense. Therefore, in the 1980’s, there was already deliberation about creating a formal, organizational basis of the oral history network and appearing to the outside world as an “association,” not just by name, but also in practice, in order to increase visibility and the group’s legal capacity. However, these attempts failed due to an internal resistance, the source of which was surely the agents’ mistrust of institutions from their close association with the movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. These basic questions achieved a new quality in the 1990’s, with the influx of South American and Eastern European researchers. Changes in the composition of people, the internal balance of power, and the thematic horizons were accompanied by an unease for the Western European, left-wing-oriented founding generation. In addition, a (generational) transition phase began. Some of the original agents, such as Luisa Passerini, left the IOHA organizational relational network – the friendships remained. Therefore, one could say that a new period of the International Oral History Network began with the 1996 approval of a Constitution of the International Oral History Association and the election of a president and a council. In brief, it can be formulated as follows: after two decades, the friendship network of a small group of people as the organizational basis of the IOHA was replaced by the aforementioned regulations of the constitution, but at the same time, a permanent organization was established that was dissociated from people, targeted at continuity, and committed to the further development of work with oral sources.

Julie Boekhoff

From the Power Structures of a Leadership Council to an Elected Board A History of the Network until 1996 What is perhaps the strangest aspect of the current International Oral History Association (IOHA) is that it only has – or wants to have – a limited memory. This observation is of significance in connection with the question of the extent to which the year 1996 simultaneously marked its ending and new beginning. While the public presentation of the current IOHA web site does not mention an existence prior to 1996, older and younger members certainly speak about the organization’s pre-history or past in various essays.¹ The present organization lists its founding as having taken place in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1996. As their web site states, “The International Oral History Association was formally constituted in June 1996 at the IXth International Oral History Conference in Göteborg [Gothenburg], Sweden.”² Here, however, it is noticeable that the current organization has an ambiguous relationship to its past. This is because in the case of the founding conference in 1996, one would expect that it would be called the first conference and not the ninth, which suggests that there were numerous previous conferences and, therefore, a pre-history. In its year of founding, 1996, the International Oral History Association could already look back at eight gatherings in 20 years. This pre-history began in 1976 at a meeting on anthropology and history in Bologna, and underwent a gradual process of modification, development, and change from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. The steps of this process were partially a consequence of the rapid expansion of this initially small group, partially the result of personal rivalries and “wrestling matches” for the strongest position  Examples of this include Alistair Thomson, “Eine Reise durch das Gedächtnis unserer Bewegung. Vier paradigmatische Revolutionen in der Oral History,” BIOS Special Issue 20 (2007): 21– 29; Alexander von Plato, International Oral History on the Move: 1996 – 2006 and Beyond: A Conversation Among Founders, (manuscript for the sixteenth International Oral History Conference in Sydney, 2006); Mercedes Vilanova, “International Oral History, Abschlussrede auf der Konferenz in New York 1994,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 67– 70; Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, “The International Oral History Association and the New Tendencies in the Field of Oral History,” BIOS 20 (2007): 43 – 51. Marieta de Moraes Ferreira only hints at the pre-history; her main focus was on the founding in 1996 and the period after.  “About the Association,” International Oral History Association, accessed March 6, 2009, http://www.iohanet.org/about/index.html. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-005

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in the group – the primus inter pares – and partially the logical consequence of the simultaneously advancing and mutually influential establishment, which consisted of academization and institutionalization of oral history on the one hand, and the organization of intellectuals addressing it on the other hand. The process culminated in the debate about a constitution and the election of the first president in Gothenburg. Since 1996, numerous members who played a crucial role in constructing this organization and kept it alive over the years have no longer actively participated. Some of them turned to other organizations and tasks. Other “old members” continued to remain active for a number of years and again others passed the baton to younger successors.³ The greatest break with the network prior to 1996 was the election of a woman, and a Spanish native speaker at that, as the first president of the IOHA. Until then, the most active and, therefore, most influential key player in the network, was the British historian and sociologist Paul Thompson. The organization changed its focus with the election of Mercedes Vilanova for the top position. Nevertheless, the Spaniard came from the first generation of people active in the association; she was among those who had been engaged from the very beginning. Using some selected conferences, I would like to examine how the development process until 1996 took place and which characteristics, inevitabilities, and changes marked it. Each of these meetings embodied one of the stages in the process, which began in 1980 with the founding of a standing committee and, therefore, with the stabilization of the meetings. The claim to a progressive academic nature followed, and the first attempt to draw up a constitution for the network failed in Oxford in 1987. The New York meeting in 1994 presented itself as the first “truly international” congress and prepared the way for a second attempt at creating a constitution in Gothenburg in 1996. At the conference in Gothenburg in 1996, the network institutionalized itself by accepting a constitution and the formal founding of the International Oral History Association. Along with that, the oligarchic “domination” by “known and experienced individuals”⁴ from the first twenty years was over. Elected representatives now took their pla-

 An example of this is Lutz Niethammer passing his position to Alexander von Plato. Niethammer stepped back from the network in the early 1990’s. Von Plato, who describes himself as being the “second generation,” moved up to the top and became secretary and treasurer of the IOHA in 1996. See “Past Councils,” International Oral History Association, accessed February 9, 2010, http://www.iohanet.org/about/past_councils.html. He evaluates his position in the organization as follows: as a learner and participant from 1980 to 1984 and as an active member beginning in 1988. Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, Stade, Germany, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.

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ces. Which effects these gradual structural changes had on the network and whether the institutionalization was only a formality which marked the end of the informal period of time – these questions will be answered later. But first, the network’s stages of development beginning in 1980 will be presented and examined.⁵

Amsterdam 1980 – The Founding of a European Standing Committee The practices and structures of the officially unofficial organization developed surprisingly early. As early as October 1980, during the third meeting in Amsterdam, some particularly active participants met and, from then on, called themselves the European Standing Committee.⁶ They wanted to announce their alliance at the final session of the conference. The reason for the founding was to determine guidelines for future conference planning and, therefore, simplify organization and financing. Jaap Talsma had called for the meeting in the name of the organizational committee in Amsterdam. The seven people present, all of whom explicitly rejected being representatives of oral history for their respective country, in addition to Talsma – who had been named as a transitional secretary until the next meeting – were Paul Thompson, Lutz Niethammer, Luisa Passerini, Philippe Joutard, Eric Cregreen from Scotland,⁷ and Orvar Löfgren from Sweden. From then on, all existing national oral history organizations needed to either name a

 For more on the two founding conferences, see the introduction as well as Silvia Musso’s essay in this volume.  “Minutes of the founding meeting of the European Standing Committee for International Oral History Conferences on Sunday 26 October 1980 in Amsterdam,” François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Madame Ranson, sub-folder Correspondance et généralités.  Eric Cregreen died in 1983. There has been an oral history organization in Scotland since 1978, the Scottish Oral History Group. The fact that Scotland was not as active in the network after Cregreen’s death supports the thesis that the network primarily functioned due to the people in it: if no successor was called upon, the country left the network for the time being. Only relatively few members from the early period called on successors or not all batons were passed on to the next generation successfully. Successful exceptions to the rule were in the United States, where Mary Marshall Clark was a successor to Ronald Grele, and Germany, where Alexander von Plato moved up to the first row in the second generation after Lutz Niethammer stepped back in 1996. The line of succession failed in Spain, where Cristina Borderías turned away from Mercedes Vilanova. Instead, starting in 1996, Vilanova prepared Marieta de Moraes Ferreira to be her successor. For more on the transition between generations, see the final section of this essay.

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current member of the committee as their representative or name their own representative. In particular, the committee wanted to expand and include members from other European countries (Austria, Denmark, Poland, and Hungary). With reservations, Philippe Joutard took on the organization of the next conference, which was held in 1982 in Aix-en-Provence. The organizational motor, called into life in Amsterdam, began to run. The problematic experience in Amsterdam, where the follow-up work on the conference, which simultaneously served as preparation for the next one, came to a standstill, was not to be repeated.⁸ In July 1981 in Paris, the committee met to prepare the conference in Aix-en-Provence. Because the organization of this meeting was in cooperation with the Paris Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) in cooperation with the Centre de Recherches Méditerranéennes sur les Ethnotextes, l’Histoire Orale et les Parlers régionaux (CREHOP) at Aix-Marseille University, the French researchers, seven of the 13 representatives present, clearly made up the majority. François Bédarida, Marianne Ranson, Jean Pierre Rioux, Sylvie Schweitzer, and Danièle Voldman participated as representatives of the IHTP; Philippe Joutard and Jean Claude Bouvier were present from CREHOP. In addition, a representative of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Isabelle Bertaux, was present.⁹ English and French were selected as the official conference languages. Other languages were included using translated summaries and students as simultaneous translators. After there were only three French contributions in Amsterdam, this time, French was the official language of the conference for the first time. This was ultimately due to the fact that the conference was taking place in France.¹⁰ Five half-days were planned for the conference. A maximum of 300 registrations would be accepted for the closed sections, and, as at previous conferences, no travel or lodging costs would be defrayed, with the exception of those for the financially disadvantaged. After the experience in Amsterdam, in Aix, a new

 Jaap Talsma neglected the follow-up work. See Jaap Talsma’s letter to the members of the European Standing Committee for International Oral History conferences, June 28, 1981, François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Madame Ranson, sub-folder Correspondance et généralités.  Report from the meetings of the “Comité européen” at the IHTP in Paris, July 6, 1981, François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Des réunions.  Letter from Jean Pierre Rioux to an unknown addressee, October 28, 1981, François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Madame Ranson, sub-folder Correspondance et généralités.

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learning process took place prior to and after the conference. In a letter to Lutz Niethammer in late October 1982, Paul Thompson thematized two aspects that would be significant for the further development. For the first time, the name Beatrys de Graeve came up. Paul Thompson had gotten to know her at a conference in Brussels and wanted to include what he considered to be a young, energetic academic from Belgium in the preparation of the next conference.¹¹ Just one year later, in June 1981, Beatrys de Graeve would replace Jaap Talsma as secretary and participate in the work on the first draft of the constitution. On the other hand, in his letter, Thompson insisted that after the experience of the meeting in France, an emphasis should be put on the organization of the next conference. In order to counteract the academic halt in Aix that the British participants were complaining about, he recommended selecting specific topics, on the one hand, and on the other, offering a more open forum for young researchers and new research.¹² Just one month later, Thompson wrote a similar letter to Ronald Grele, in which he particularly regretted that in Aix, they had not successfully discussed “community based projects.”¹³ He assumed that the dominating academic ambitions in the conference planning were responsible for this. Here, Thompson’s contradiction in both letters is interesting. On the one hand, he criticized the lack of academic standards; on the other hand, he said that too much academic ambition was responsible for the fact that other perspectives were not taken into consideration. Furthermore, Thompson also found it to be a shortcoming that the other conference participants could not partake of the experienced oral historians’ (which included himself and Grele) knowledge: “[o]n the other hand I entirely agree with you that people were denied the benefit of hearing those of us with more experience.”¹⁴ However, these lectures from the old participants should, in accordance with the experience in Amsterdam, not be of a general nature, but rather have concrete topics and projects. The lesson from Amsterdam was “workshops rather than plenaries.”¹⁵ Based on an American model, one could introduce a first day with basic workshops and perhaps no longer distribute the papers prior to the conference, so that at the conference, participants would not

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Lutz Niethammer, October 28, 1982, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Lutz Niethammer, October 28, 1982.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, November 17, 1982, Ronald Grele’s private papers.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, November 17, 1982.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, November 17, 1982.

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hear what they had already read. According to Thompson, proceedings like these would also be significantly cheaper.¹⁶ For the organizational committee, after four conferences, there were the following questions. How could one overcome the now widespread feeling of an (academic) halt? How could one better integrate projects that had emerged outside the academic context? And how could one best pass along the older participants’ experience? In Amsterdam, the stabilization of the conferences through an informal organization, which was closed and not expanded, began. While the circle of participants at the assemblies constantly grew, the committee’s announcements about expanding to representatives of other European countries, remained lip service. Of the four countries named at the founding meeting – Austria, Denmark, Poland, and Hungary – only one representative from Austria, researcher Gerhard Botz, was occasionally at the meetings, but in retrospect, saw himself in no way as a member of the core group.¹⁷ Even though the type of formalization from Amsterdam fit the informal character of the network – it was undemocratic, but not wild – at the same time, there was an inherent, latent conflict: the internal, constitutive circle in the committee that was formed remained unchanged while the environment around it began to change.¹⁸

Barcelona 1985 – The Ambitious Academization Fifth International Oral History Conference, Barcelona 1985 The woman who took over the organization of the fifth conference was the Spaniard Mercedes Vilanova, born in 1936, from a middle-class home. She had studied history and literature in Spain and the USA and was later involved in the resistance against the Franco regime. She began her university career in 1968, which she continued until she became a professor at the University of Barcelona in 1993. She came into contact with oral history for the first time in 1969, within the framework of a questionnaire about the civil war and revolution. Later, she did a lot of research about illiterate people. Mercedes Vilanova, who, in addition

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, November 17, 1982.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, September 26, 2007.  The only change was Eric Cregreen’s death in June 1983. Mercedes Vilanova said that the international committee “was a closed group in which there was Grele, Luisa, Paul, and Bertaux on the one side. […] And on the other side, there was Bédarida and the French: Joutard, Voldman, etc. Lutz and Botz.” Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 5, 2008.

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to her native language, is also proficient in English, French, and German, had already participated in the conferences in Colchester in 1979 and Amsterdam in 1980. She agreed to organize the next conference when it was determined that Luisa Passerini would not find sufficient support for an international conference in Italy due to the economic and political situation there.¹⁹ However, Vilanova only took over the organization of the fifth conference after she was invited to, in writing, by François Bédarida.²⁰ The Spanish researcher later claimed that in Barcelona, for the first time, there was good preparation work, academia had been paid attention to, and that translators had been taken care of.²¹ Vilanova viewed the meeting that she organized as the “turning point” in the history of the movement: she wanted to prove to the “boys’ network,” as she called it, that the meetings were worthy of improvement.²² There were also multiple meetings of the core group in the run-up to this conference. Just before Christmas 1982, in a letter to Bédarida, whom Vilanova called “the spokesperson of the small international group,”²³ she suggested a joint meeting in Europe to plan the next conference. Copies of this letter also went to Lutz Niethammer, Luisa Passerini, Ronald Grele, Jaap Talsma, and Paul Thompson, as members of the European Standing Committee.²⁴ Because Vilanova had only received financing for the conference in Barcelona and not for any preliminary discussions, other members of the core group took over responsibility for a planning meeting. Paul Thompson organized a meeting

 Letter from Luisa Passerini to Mercedes Vilanova, January 15, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to François Bédarida, December 22, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy. The organization of the conference was taken over by the University of Barcelona’s Department of Contemporary History, in cooperation with the Centro de Estudios Históricos Internacionales (CEHI). It is not known why Vilanova wanted a written request. Also, in the interview, she only mentioned that she requested everything in writing, without naming further reasons. Perhaps bureaucratic formalities were decisive with regard to the search for financing.  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to François Bédarida, December 22, 1982, Luisa Passerini’s private archive, Pavarolo, Italy. Vilanova probably used this term because Bédarida, as the organizer of the previous conference, was her first point of contact.  She cannot remember the others who were in Aix when the location of the next conference was decided upon. See the letter from Mercedes Vilanova to François Bédarida, December 22, 1982. Luisa Passerini’s answer was also sent to Philippe Joutard. See Luisa Passerini’s letter to Mercedes Vilanova, January 15, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.

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in London with the support of the Oral History Society and Lutz Niethammer offered to prepare a meeting to discuss the program in Germany in December 1983.²⁵ Niethammer intended to hold three meetings before Barcelona, in order to give the core group the chance to have enough business meetings. These meetings would make it possible for a consistent core group with representatives from Austria, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, and possibly the USA to discuss methodological and historiographical problems in the oral history environment, together with specialists for the planned topic workshops in a more in-depth way. The planned topics included memory, interview interactions and oral “text,” fascism and war experiences as the pre-history to Europe’s post-war era, facts and legends, and the question as to whether interviews could reconstruct lost worlds.²⁶ German, English, or French were required as languages for these meetings; difficulties in communication should be solved pragmatically: “I hope we can muddle through with some whispering help from neighbours here and there.”²⁷ This letter was sent to the aforementioned eight people as well as the Swede Sven Lindqvist. During the preparatory meetings in Germany, questions about content were the focus; in contrast, in London, the meetings were primarily about internal organization. The committee met there in late June 1983, at the invitation of Paul Thompson.²⁸ Talsma, Passerini, Thompson, and Vilanova were present; Bédarida, Joutard, Niethammer, and Grele were excused. Paul Thompson’s new recruit Beatrys de Graeve participated for the first time, as did Robin Law, who replaced the recently deceased Eric Cregreen, from Scotland. Jaap Talsma stepped down from his position as secretary and Beatrys de Graeve was elected as his successor.²⁹ As a new step in structuring, the committee determined that it should have four types of members: European countries that had an oral history organization or journal; the organizers of the previous and next conference; people who were invited by the committee as representatives of other European countries; and fi-

 Letter from Paul Thompson to François Bédarida, March 31, 1983, University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.  Letter from Lutz Niethammer to Luisa Passerini, February 20, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Lutz Niethammer to Luisa Passerini, February 20, 1983.  Letter from Paul Thompson without an addressee, April 26, 1983, University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.  Report dated July 12, 1983 from the June 24, 1982 meeting of the International Standing Committee in London, Ronald Grele’s private papers.

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nally, researchers from non-European countries who were invited by the committee. The members of the first group, which included Great Britain, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Italy, were allowed to send two members; the members of the third group, to which Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Austria belonged, were each allowed to send one member. Here, with the exception of Denmark, the participants’ names were already known: Lutz Niethammer, François Bédarida, Philippe Joutard, Mercedes Vilanova, Beatrys de Graeve, Sven Lindqvist or Sven B. Ek, Dagfinn Slettan, and Gerhard Botz. For the time being, the members of the last group were the USA, with Ronald Grele, and Mexico, with Eugenia Meyer.³⁰ The simplicity and cautious restraint of the founding meeting, at which those present had explicitly emphasized that they did not view themselves to be their respective countries’ permanent representatives of oral history, gave way to healthy self-consciousness less than three years later. The committee no longer called itself the European Standing Committee, but rather the International Oral History Conference Standing Committee.³¹ The next item on the meeting’s agenda was concrete planning for the conference in Barcelona. Mercedes Vilanova pointed out that the workshops prior to the conference, planned by Niethammer, would require at least a passive command of the German language. Therefore, the committee agreed to have further meetings independent of the workshops. The travel costs for the committee members should be assumed by the various oral history organizations, when possible. Beatrys de Graeve was also assigned to look into financing through the European Economic Community in Brussels.³² The program for the three-day conference, with the umbrella topic of power in society, was made up of four components: three general meetings on the umbrella topics, discussion groups on various aspects and methodological problems connected with power, work in progress sections accessible to anyone, and practical workshops for beginners. In accordance with Paul Thompson’s suggestion to reduce costs, participants did not receive all of the lectures; every-

 Eugenia Meyer, from Mexico, had already been at Colchester in 1979. See the overview of speakers and conferences. The fact that two French people, Bédarida and Joutard, appear in this list, even though only one French member was intended, is explained by the fact that the French, as organizers of the previous conference, had special rights.  Report dated July 12, 1983 from the June 24, 1983 meeting of the International Standing Committee in London.  Report dated July 12, 1983 from the June 24, 1983 meeting of the International Standing Committee in London.

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one just received the papers from the sections in which they were participating. Furthermore, every interested participant could purchase extra lectures.³³ The call for papers was in English and in French; Beatrys de Graeve provided the English version and Mercedes Vilanova and the French were responsible for the French version. For the procedure for selecting the entries, the committee agreed on effectivity without bargaining; the quality of the recommendations alone should be decisive – this alone shows the desire for academic professionalization.³⁴ The drafts should be submitted by mid-January 1984. For the final selection process, the plan was to put together a group of five and meet again in Paris in late February, to decide on the preliminary program.³⁵ However, the decisions from this meeting were apparently not as clear as they are in the report. The question about who would make the decisions about the recommendations and where this should take place was at least still open to Mercedes Vilanova in July 1983, as can be seen from a letter to the other members of the committee.³⁶ For the presentation of new research projects, Vilanova suggested a work in progress section, with projects from Latin America, Africa, the USA, and possibly the Middle East as well.³⁷ The reactions to this suggestion were mixed. In particular, Ronald Grele was concerned that a separation and exhibition of these countries would lead to their separation as exotic members, an objection that Mercedes Vilanova finally gave in to: “do not worry [;] we will go hand in hand like true friends and of course there is a chance of changing the format since no format was decided.”³⁸ While determining the focal points in the content primarily seemed to be left to the respective organizers, in contrast, it is also shown that prior to the fifth

 Report dated July 12, 1983 from the June 24, 1983 meeting of the International Standing Committee in London.  Too often, other criteria, such as personal acquaintanceships or projects, had played a role in the selection.  Report dated July 12, 1983 from the June 24, 1983 meeting of the International Standing Committee in London.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to “Dear Friends,” July 12, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy. The members of the committee that she wrote to included Passerini, Bédarida, Botz, Grele, Joutard, Lindqvist, Niethammer, Talsma, and Thompson. The report from the London meeting has the same date as Vilanova’s letter: July 12, 1983. At the time of the letter, Vilanova probably was unaware of the official report, even though she was present in London.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to “Dear Friends,” July 12, 1983.  See the letter from Ronald Grele to Mercedes Vilanova, July 24, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy. Quote from Mercedes Vilanova’s letter to Ronald Grele, August 4, 1983, Ronald Grele’s private papers.

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conference, there was apparently more or less unofficial bureaucracy, with which Vilanova, the organizer, was partially not in agreement with. After the meeting in London, in August 1983, she protested against the organizational decisions that the committee had made in her presence in London and that were presented in the draft of the report.³⁹ In a circular letter to the committee members, she complained that there was a draft for an English call for papers in which it was not mentioned that the conference in Barcelona was organized by the Department of Contemporary History at the university, together with the CEHI.⁴⁰ In addition, she emphasized that she only came to the meetings in Paris and London to talk about the umbrella topic of the conference and did not want to be drawn into any other decisions that the committee made at this meeting.⁴¹ While the details remain unclear as to which of the agreed-upon decisions Vilanova is concretely referring to, the answer from Luisa Passerini indicates that the Spaniard wanted to distance herself from the group’s structural decisions. That is because Passerini, to whom Vilanova’s reasons also remained unclear, replied to her that: My opinion is that the London meeting simply formalised a situation which had existed de facto since the Amsterdam conference, without any attempt to exclude anyone. I say in this case you object to the very constitution of the committee.⁴²

Thompson and Secretary Beatrys de Graeve were also confused about Vilanova’s protest.⁴³ Thompson suspected that she had drafted a call for papers herself, later received the draft from Beatrys de Graeve that had been promised, and was therefore indignant. According to Thompson, it was planned to distribute the draft by Mercedes Vilanova in any case, but he wanted to retain the content of the report.⁴⁴ For him, the case was closed, but by this point at the latest, Mercedes Vilanova was critical of the committee. This was shown, for example, in a letter from February 1984, in which she requested a selection of 50 lectures for the conference and ironically called the committee a “decision committee,” in

 Letter from Luisa Passerini to Mercedes Vilanova, August 20, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to “Dear Friends,” August 4, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to “Dear Friends,” August 4, 1983.  Letter from Luisa Passerini to Mercedes Vilanova, August 20, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, September 12, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, September 12, 1983.

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quotation marks.⁴⁵ Here, the extent to which the individual groups within these primarily non-existent structures did not work with each other or worked against each other. Apparently, at this point in time, three of the most active committee members, Passerini, Grele, and Thompson, were unclear about the practical organization and especially the selection of lecture topics for Barcelona. Passerini wrote to the Spanish co-organizer Jordi Planes, “the three of us in London seemed to have different memories about the organizational aspects (great start for oral historians!)”⁴⁶ In the meantime, Thompson had gone through 100 of the 150 proposals received and had already recommended a concrete division into seven topic areas with further sub-groups to Vilanova. In order to facilitate the financing for participation, he also suggested that two thirds of the proposals be presented in a work in progress section.⁴⁷ At this point, the network did indeed seem to be strongly dominated by the most active member(s). Therefore, one can understand the protest of the person entrusted with the organization. The question is, of course, the extent to which it applies every conference and the extent to which the committee’s recommendations were binding. In the materials available to us, the organizational work of Mercedes Vilanova, who was actually commissioned with the organization, appears to be pushed into the background. Whether that was really the case is difficult to examine, because the entire communications process is not made up of letters. Here, there is also the question about the modalities of making decisions: do they have to be unanimous, is a majority sufficient, or, at this point, was there actually a lack of formalization? Vilanova’s aforementioned quote from a letter to Ronald Grele indicates that there was enough leeway: “of course there is a chance of changing the format since no format was decided.”⁴⁸ Independent of whether the core group made its decisions unanimously or otherwise, in any case, in Aix, they had decided to wait at least two and a half years until the next conference in Barcelona, so that there would be enough

 Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to “Dear Friend,” February 29, 1984, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Luisa Passerini to Jordi Planes, March 24, 1984, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Mercedes Vilanova, March 23, 1984, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy. Being accepted as a speaker allowed many of the participants to receive reimbursement for travel costs via their respective institutions.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to Ronald Grele, August 4, 1983, Ronald Grele’s private papers.

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time for the development and presentation of new research.⁴⁹ This way, the intellectual halt of oral history at the conferences, which Thompson complained about in a letter to Niethammer in late 1982, could be counteracted. The Austrian historian Gerhard Botz remembers that in Barcelona in 1985, Vilanova had already “been placed under a massive amount of pressure from her young Spanish revolutionaries, who, of course, were already from a completely different phase.” Back then, it had become clear to him that the group no longer was made up of the basic movement from the very beginning.⁵⁰ At the same time, one can observe that only a few members from the first generation seriously took care of a successor. From then on, the difference between the core group and the next age group was becoming clearer. Even though, in 1985, Botz already had the feeling that an “institutional blast,” as he called it was impending, but the situation first calmed down again. At this point, one more thing needs to be mentioned: in February 1985, there was call by the standing committee to all those interested, “to seek a wider supportive structure, and more participation in the future organization of conferences,” to meet on the last evening of the conference in Barcelona at the Institut Municipal d’Història de Barcelona. ⁵¹ The question of making the group an International Oral History Association with a regular, elected committee and supporting members, individuals as well as institutions, was up for debate. The reason for securing this was as follows: assuming responsibility for organizing future conferences, allowing for the financing of these conferences from various sources that would not be accessible to an adhoc committee, as well as the publication of an international newsletter. If those present at the evening meeting were in favor of formalization, an ad-hoc committee would be formed to draw up a constitution and determine the members, and an election would take place by mail. If those present decided against formalization, the standing committee would request a mandate for the further organization of conferences. This call was signed by Mercedes Vilanova in the name of the standing committee.⁵² It is not known to us whether this meeting actually took place and what the consequences of it were. However, it can be

 Letter from Lutz Niethammer to Luisa Passerini, February 20, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, October 4, 2006.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to her “Dear Friend,” February 1985, University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to “Dear Friend,” February 1985. At the end of the letter, 13 people were named as members (in alphabetical order): François Bédarida, Gerhard Botz, Beatrys de Graeve, Ronald Grele, Sven B. Ek, Philippe Joutard, Robin Law, Lutz Niethammer, Luisa Passerini, Jaap Talsma, Paul Thompson, Mercedes Vilanova, and Danièle Voldman.

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seen as the first attempt to give the network a solid form of an organization and, in this process, to include all participants in the conferences in a democratic way – the complete opposite of the founding of the standing committee. After 1985, no change in the organization could be determined, but there was the birth of the idea of a constitution. However, this idea, in the form of a call that fit the academic traditions and was the core of professionalization, turned out to be radically different from the first draft of the constitution presented at the next conference.

Oxford 1987 – The Failed Attempt at a Constitution Sixth International Oral History Conference, “Myth and History,” Oxford 1987 Two years later, at the sixth conference in Oxford, the committee presented a draft for a constitution for this first time. This had already been discussed there the year before. In addition to Paul Thompson, the other author of the recommendation was Beatrys de Graeve, from Belgium. In a letter to Luisa Passerini in September 1986, Thompson mentioned that within the committee, the path that they should take in the future had already been clarified. They had decided to hold a meeting at the Oxford conference at which it would be proposed that the group should be made formal, as an international association. It would, in accordance with the previous rules, continue to be led by the committee, which would report back at a general assembly at every international conference.⁵³ What did the other members of the core group think about this proposal? At this point in time, American Ronald Grele was against the formalization of the group, because he was afraid that the sense of community would be lost. He had already spoken out against it for the same reason in Aix in 1982, in the first discussion provoked by Paul Thompson about an international organization.⁵⁴ Lutz Niethammer and his student Alexander von Plato, Luisa Passerini,

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, September 30, 1983, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, Jena, Germany, February 21, 2007.

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the Italian Alessandro Portelli, as well as the Spaniards and the French were also against having an organization.⁵⁵ Alexander von Plato got to the heart of the concerns about formalization: as a whole, there was a “strong, left-wing alternative target and work definition” and that, when dealing with each other, other forms were required than the classic, hierarchical ones.⁵⁶ Paul Thompson was in favor of an organization. He passionately pursued the academization of oral history at the international level, just as he had successfully done it at the national level in England.⁵⁷ His former student, the British social historian Alun Howkins, said that with regard to Oral History, Thompson “was desperately and rightly, in a way, committed to making it respectable. But I think that alienated a lot of people from him.”⁵⁸ The British historian and sociologist Paul Thompson represented the driving force in the core group of oral historians. Thompson, born in 1935, had been a lecturer in social history at the University of Essex, co-founder of the Oral History Society, founder and co-editor of the society’s journal, and the founder of the National Life Story Collection in the British Library’s National Sound Archive.⁵⁹ After his examination of British society at the time of King Edward VII (1901– 1914), he became a pioneer in oral history methodology and his book about the oral history method, published in 1977, was translated into eight languages.⁶⁰ Thompson was interested in extremely varying topics, especially smaller, local projects, and, as an “inveterate traveler,” collected impressions throughout the entire world.⁶¹ During his guest professorship at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1970’s, he traveled throughout the USA, in order to meet oral historians. That is how he got to know Ronald Grele in 1975, who, three years later, invited him to the American Oral History Association conference. Since the mid-1970’s, he has had contact with the French sociologists Isabelle and Daniel Bertaux, with whom he was

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, April 18, 2008; Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Alun Howkins, interview with Julie Boekhoff, Brighton, England, July 24, 2007.  Alun Howkins, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 24, 2007.  From 1994 to 2001, as the director of Qualidata at the University of Essex, he took care of collecting and protecting qualitative research material for future use. He also deposited the research data that he had collected there and monitored the development of this archival service provider. See “Professor Paul Thompson, Online Biography,” The Edwardians Online, accessed September 12, 2009. http://www.qualidata.ac.uk/edwardians/about/paulthompson.asp.  Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.

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not just connected through joint projects, but also their friendship.⁶² In 1976, he was invited to a conference of anthropologists and historians in Bologna, where, among others, he met Luisa Passerini. Three years later, he held an oral history conference in Colchester. Thompson became the driving force of the European oral history group and, in particular, advocated for the academic recognition of this discipline. Ronald Grele said about Thompson: He was the person who brought everybody together, who really pulled things together. He’s indefatigable. I mean, sometimes he is omnipresent all the time about doing this and doing that, and doing that. If you make a commitment to him, by God you’ve got to live up to it, because he’s right on you all the time. […] But it takes that kind of thing to build an Oral History Movement […]. He was always working with different people and different projects, and he really built, I think, built a worldwide movement.⁶³

Even if his commitment and his position in the middle of the core group as founding father and older brother were undisputed⁶⁴ – the Italian Alessandro Triulzi even calls him “a pillar”⁶⁵ – his plans with regard to formalizing the group were viewed more critically. It is unknown how the committee discussion at the pre-meeting in Oxford went.⁶⁶ In any case, between the call in Barcelona in 1985 and the conference in Oxford in 1987, a constitution was drafted that was supposed to be shown to the plenary in Oxford. During this second conference, organized in England under Thompson’s leadership, the international committee met, in order to discuss future conferences and the report to the plenary. This report contained the proposal to develop into an association while continuing to work in accordance with the tried and tested procedures.⁶⁷ What was actually surprising about this first draft of the constitution is that it simply formalized the situation up until that point; that is, that the power was left in the hands of the founding members of the group. There was no mention of replacements, changes, or even elections, to allow new members into the committee. As before,

 Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, Wivenhoe, England, July 17– 18, 2007.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Gerhard Botz, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, September 29, 2007.  Alessandro Triulzi, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, March 17, 2007.  For the period between 1987 and 1993, there is a large gap in the records found by us or made available to us. The sources for this period of time unfortunately do not allow for the depiction of the discussions and results in the context of the first proposal for a constitution. In addition to a few statements in the interviews, from this period of time, we only have the draft of the constitution but none of the reports of the committee meetings.  Beatrys de Graeve, letter to “Dear Colleague,” July 7, 1987, University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.

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it was the responsibility of the committee to recruit new members. The draft contained four articles and spoke for itself in its brevity:

International Oral History Association Constitution 1. 2.

3.

4.

The name of the Association shall be the International Oral History Association / Association Internationale d’Historie Orale. The aims and purposes of the Association are the encouragement of international contact and activities in oral history and in particular the organization of international oral history conferences. The International Committee for Oral History will be responsible for the organization and general running of the Association. The Committee shall have power to appoint a Secretary and other officers and to co-opt other members to the Committee at its discretion. The Committee shall call an open General Meeting of the participants at each international conference to present a report on the work of the Association and to discuss general matters of policy. The General Meeting may make recommendations to the Committee (shall have power to decide) on such general matters by voting.⁶⁸

The full assembly at the conferences could react to the committee’s report, discuss basic decisions and had – as a limited democratic element – a voice in general matters. Even if Paul Thompson no longer knew why the draft was rejected,⁶⁹ it is not a surprise to outsiders that the majority was not ready to agree to permanently giving oligarchic rights to the founder’s group. The result was a paradoxical mix: a loose movement that had a self-appointed committee, a secretary, a letterhead, and therefore, some bureaucracy, that presented itself to the outside world in a way that was different from its internal organization. In Oxford, the distance between the closed core group, which did not expand, despite its original announcement, and the participants, who, in the meantime, came from five continents, became greater. A statement in the conference proceedings

 Undated draft of the constitution, appendix to a letter from Beatrys de Graeve to “Dear Colleague,” July 7, 1987, University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.  Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 17– 18, 2007.

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by Margaret Mackay, which emphasized this characteristic of the Oxford conference, appears to be almost prophetic about the following meetings: This was a truly international conference, with representatives from countries in all five continents and elsewhere present, barring Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Perhaps on future occasions they will be participating, too.⁷⁰

At the same time, the conference in Oxford was already so large that there were the usual frustrations involved with such large events, as Mackay further reported: the sessions taking place parallel to each other, so one had to decide which one to attend, even though one would also like to be at the other; the meetings with intellectual soul mates that always only worked out at the last minute; and the lack of time for debates and discussions.⁷¹ Another report from Alan Bruford emphasized the general chaos, especially that many speakers had no clue about oral history.⁷² In contrast, after the conference, the British historian Joanna Bornat described completely different impressions in a letter to Paul Thompson. In her opinion, the format of the conference had a tendency towards conservativism and segregation, completely different from oral history elsewhere. She therefore supported a following meeting that was more relaxed and open, maybe by expanding it to theater, music, and other forms of media. The Germans, who were responsible for organizing the next assembly in Essen, should be encouraged to break away from the academic format and to include and reflect on some of the energy and the “popular will” that shaped British oral history.⁷³ Here, it becomes clear how the postulated academization and professionalization that Thompson and Vilanova wanted in their different ways were opposed to the original idea of a movement; therefore, here, the return to the original idea of a democratized form of academia was demanded by the base, so to speak. In Great Britain, in addition to the academic Oral History Society under Paul Thompson, there existed another strong group, the History Workshop, based around Raphael Samuel, a Marxist historian. The History Workshop was founded in 1966 at Oxford’s Ruskin College, a union academy for mature students; that is,

 Margaret A. Mackay, International Oral History Conference: Oxford, September, 1987, 20.  Mackay, International, 20.  Alan Bruford, Oral History and Myth: Oxford, September 1987, 21.  Letter from Joanna Bornat to Paul Thompson, undated, University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library, Paul Thompson’s research files.

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people who began their first studies later in life, such as after a traineeship.⁷⁴ In the History Workshop, the focus was on people’s history with a democratic approach in the foreground: history from the perspective of the “little people” and their history. Joanna Bornat’s proposal to integrate this branch in the conferences in order to get new ideas and overcome the intellectual halt makes it clear what a strong position also the other British oral history association had in Great Britain. A further point of criticism in Bornat’s letter was about how much the group still cut itself off at this point in time. She described and expressed regret about how the British Oral History Society had not been included in the conference at all and that hardly anyone knew what the International Committee really was. A joint reception by the Oral History Society and the International Committee could have helped. In the future, one could focus on improving the international connections and contacts by special invitations and activities.⁷⁵ At the conference in Great Britain, where oral history was not just an academically recognized discipline that was often used, but was also represented by two established associations, the Oral History Society and the History Workshop Group – one more shaped by academia and the other more left-wing and alternative – some (developmental) characteristics of the international group became particularly apparent. On the one hand, the core group, or the international committee, was hardly known among outsiders and those less involved. On the other hand, there was a contradiction between the conference, which appeared to be chaotic, and the criticism of the academic format, which was found to be restrictive and limiting. In addition to this, there was the fact that the group had officially rejected institutionalization, which also means that the majority of the people present in Oxford still saw themselves as part of a movement and less as an established organization. Without a doubt, the core organizers and the field of participants had different expectations. Most of the people involved were interested in the potential of oral history and the exchange with other researchers. They did not worry about the structural aspects.

 Since 1976, the History Workshop group has had its own journal, History Workshop Journal, accessed February 22, 2010, http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/hiwork/about.html.  Letter from Joanna Bornat to Paul Thompson, undated.

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New York 1994 – The International Conference In the change process of the network described here, the conferences in Germany in 1990 and Italy in 1993 served as precursors to the conference in New York. The seventh International Oral History Conference took place in late March and early April 1990 in Essen. This first conference in Germany, which had actually been recommended as a conference location for 1984,⁷⁶ now took place just after the changes of 1989, with the appropriate title “Gedächtnis und sozialer Wandel,” or “Memory and Social Change,” and, in particular, attracted new participants and interested people from Eastern Europe and Russia. This group brought completely different experiences with oral sources to the network and expanded it with research in (post‐) totalitarian societies. For the conference in Germany, Niethammer had organized a pre-meeting for the committee in Bad Homburg in September 1989. Next to consulting about the suggestions that had been submitted and the thematic structure of the conference, the status of oral history in the individual countries should be discussed, on the basis of short country reports.⁷⁷ The academic aspect of the meeting was originally built into it for reasons of financing; it led to the publication of a special issue of the German oral history journal BIOS after the conference.⁷⁸

 Niethammer made this recommendation in 1980. Minutes of the Founding Meeting of the European Committee for International Oral History Conferences on Sunday 26 October 1980 in Amsterdam, François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Madame Ranson, sub-folder Correspondance et généralités.  These country reports would then be distributed at the conference. Lutz Niethammer’s letter to “Dear,” November 22, 1988, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers. See also the application for financing for the pre-meeting in Bad Homburg submitted to the Werner Reimers Foundation, in which Niethammer incorrectly names Essex as the conference at which the committee was founded. See Lutz Niethammer’s letter to Konrad von Krosigk at the Werner Reimers Foundation, January 17, 1989, Luth Niethammer’s private papers.  Niethammer would not have received funding for a pre-meeting without an academic purpose. Therefore, no additional participation fees would be necessary, because the conference would then be funded by the city of Essen together with the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the University of Hagen. See Lutz Niethammer’s letter to “Dear,” November 22, 1988. The German journal Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Oral History, BIOS released a special issue in 1990 with research reports on oral history from different countries. The History of Oral History: Development, Present State and Future Prospects: Country Reports, eds. Karin Hartewig and Wulf R. Halbach.

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The main languages at the conference were to be English, French, and German, but Niethammer wanted to offer workshops in other languages,⁷⁹ at the request of the committee.⁸⁰ That was because the goal was to plan the event to be as open as possible. This included the call with the request for contact information of researchers from Eastern Europe and other countries that had not yet participated in conferences.⁸¹ The 238 participants in Essen came from 20 different countries; 30 of whom came from the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and the USSR.⁸² As the organizer of the current conference in Essen, Lutz Niethammer was elected as the next chair of the international committee.⁸³ Together with Selma Leydesdorff and Jaap Talsma, he tried to establish a permanent office for the network with headquarters in Amsterdam that should move the spread of oral history and international contacts forward. The office would be responsible for the administrative aspects in the background of the conferences and, most importantly, create and manage a register with the names of people and institutions from the oral history environment.⁸⁴ It is unknown if this attempt to retroactively consolidate the administration of the network was successful. The fact that Niethammer, who was one of the opponents of institutionalization, was in favor of it, shows once again how, with the increasing expansion of the network, bureaucratic organs were necessary, if not unavoidable. Three years later, the Italians organized a conference; their second, after 1976. The eighth International Oral History Conference, “Memory and Multiculturalism,” was held in February 1993 in the Tuscan sister cities of Siena and Lucca. Retrospectively, this title evokes associations with special multi-cultural

 It is significant that Spanish was not mentioned here. For the plenary meetings, a simultaneous translation into German and translators for English and French were planned. See the “Kostenaufstellung im Antrag an die Forschungsabteilung des Ministeriums für Wissenschaft und Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen,” February 17, 1989, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers, letter from the co-organizer Wulf R. Halbach to “Dear Friends and Colleagues,” January 18, 1990, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.  Letter from Lutz Niethammer to “Dear,” November 22, 1988.  Letter from Lutz Niethammer to “Dear,” November 22, 1988.  Of the 238 participants, 123 were from Germany; all other countries had fewer than 15 participants per country. See the undated list of participant numbers, Lutz Niethammer’s private archive, and an undated press statement from the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut im Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen about the first international oral history conference in Germany, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.  See the undated press statement from the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut.  Stichting i.o. Secretariat [sic] of the International Oral History Association, undated (probably 1991), Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.

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aspects, like problems with comprehension and communication, which marked the conference. In Alessandro Portelli’s memory, in Siena-Lucca, things came to decentralization in an explosive way in the North Atlantic area. The Brazilians came and the Turks and Mexicans, and that was very fascinating. Oral History is not a discipline centered around Europeans and Americans.⁸⁵

But the new participants did not just bring new multi-cultural and international topics with them. There were also Anglo-Latin American status fights about the predominating and permitted languages. There is little known about the eighth conference as well; no reports from the core group’s pre-meeting are available.⁸⁶ Yet in Siena and Lucca, it seems to have been the case that the papers were generously selected and that rejections were only set out if no oral sources were used in the draft.⁸⁷ The international committee met in Pontignano, near Siena, on April 10 and 11, 1992, to talk about the approximately 230 proposals⁸⁸ for papers.⁸⁹ The Italian organizers Pietro Clemente and Valeria Di Piazza had also planned a public presentation of the conference concept for Italian academics and the sponsors (board of guarantees).⁹⁰ Like Mercedes Vilanova at the conference in Barcelona, the Italians also placed emphasis on having good external representation, already prior to the conference. Furthermore, it is interesting that the agreements about the conference between the Italian organizers and the committee members mostly took place over the telephone, and with only three members: “[w]e held regular telephone-contacts [sic] with Luisa Passerini, Paul Thompson and Selma Leydesdorff.”⁹¹ Apparently, not all members of the committee were equally included in the preparations.

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, April 18, 2008.  A meeting of the international committee was planned in Siena in January 1992. Letter from Luisa Passerini to “Dear friends,” January 9, 1991, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.  These principles were also used in Gothenburg. Letter from Sven B. Ek to Ronald Grele, May 21, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Undated alphabetical list of proposals for the eighth International Conference of Oral History, Siena-Lucca, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.  Letter from Pietro Clemente and Valeria Di Piazza to “Dear friends,” February 25, 1992, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers. Twelve members were present at the committee meeting: Gerhard Botz, Pietro Clemente, Giovanni Contini, Valeria Di Piazza, Sven B. Ek, Birgitta Skarin Frykman, José Gotovitch from Belgium, András B. Hegedüs from Hungary, Selma Leydesdorff, Lutz Niethammer, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson. List of members of the International Committee meeting on April 10 – 11, 1992 in Pontignano, Lutz Niethammer’s private papers.  Letter from Pietro Clemente and Valeria Di Piazza to “Dear friends,” February 25, 1992.  Letter from Pietro Clemente and Valeria Di Piazza to “Dear friends,” February 25, 1992.

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The conferences in Essen and Siena-Lucca show how much the circle of participants grew, especially after 1990, and which problems were associated with it. In New York in 1994, eventually more than 300 participants from more than 50 countries met up.⁹²

“Power and Identity: The Role of Ethnic, National, Gender and Political Identity in Oral History”: The International Conference on Oral History, New York, 1994 The New York conference in 1994 did not receive a spot in the continuous numbering that had been used since 1976. Our first impression was that it was a protest against the biannual rhythm, which had been broken by Ronald Grele, from the US. This impression was strengthened by Grele himself, who, in his interview, emphasized that the meeting in New York was not a part of the international conferences: “We weren’t part of the scheme of things.” Mary Marshall Clark is still very embittered about it.⁹³ However, an analysis of the correspondence prior to this meeting shows that the conflict about the numbering was rather a result of Grele’s problems to get financing and had less to do with the exclusion that Grele felt. This also shines new light on Grele’s statement, which he uses to emphasize the unique nature of the New York conference and its forward-looking character. In June 1993, Grele, who acted as the paid program coordinator,⁹⁴ asked Birgitta Skarin Frykman – the current president of the committee, as the Swedish organizer of the next conference – for a letter of support from the committee for his grant application at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Grele emphasized that the most important thing would be to stress the point that the New York conference was not a regular meeting, but was supported by the organization. The letter, which Grele had already formulated for the Swedes, also indicated how important it was that participants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America would be invited, which had always been a goal of the international conferences, but for which the appropriate means had always

 Letter from Ronald Grele to Selma Leydesdorff, February 25, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Selma Leydesdorff from February 25, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. In the calculation, $1500 per month were intended for his duties as program administrator.

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been lacking.⁹⁵ Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Sven B. Ek used the exact phrasing recommended by Grele.⁹⁶ Two months later, it turned out that the grant application would not be successful. Skarin Frykman, who had also made Grele’s call for papers public via the mailing list of the international committee, promised him that there was still enough time for everyone to find funding of their own, with perhaps the exception of the Eastern Europeans and participants from third-world countries.⁹⁷ After the failure with the NEH, Grele turned to the Rockefeller Foundation.⁹⁸ The NEH had made it clear that they would not support any pedagogical programs, but rather were only interested in the research aspects. To the Rockefeller Foundation, Grele emphasized that it was exactly the exchange and the discussion in the workshops that was the decisive characteristic of the conference: “Practical training is what distinguishes the American oral history movement. It is the one thing we have to offer an international audience.”⁹⁹ Grele continued that the workshops would make the conference especially attractive for participants from the third world, for archivists and local researchers, and would break apart the strictly academic atmosphere of earlier conferences.¹⁰⁰ One month later, in September 1993, the Rockefeller Foundation also rejected supporting the conference. In March 1994, Grele finally tried to find private support for the conference. To do so, he had to prove that the meeting was part of an existing series and therefore asked Birgitta Skarin Frykman to be able to use the number IX or IX (interim).¹⁰¹ For the Swedes, this late change was a financial problem, because in the meantime, they had paper and envelopes printed with IX for Gothenburg. They were not averse to the suggestion of the numbering IX (interim), but Skarin Frykman made it clear who, in her perspective, should have the last word:

 Letter from Ronald Grele to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, June 11, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, June 11, 1993.  Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele, August 8, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. Later, Grele also made the call for papers for Sweden public via his mailing list. Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele, September 19, 1994, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Alberta Arthurs, Director of the Humanities Program of the Rockefeller Foundation, August 9, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Alberta Arthurs, August 9, 1993.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Alberta Arthurs, August 9, 1993.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, March 10, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.

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To judge from the discussions in Siena this is, however, also a question of policy. I therefore send your and my letter to Paul Thompson for decision. On our part we are clear. It will be expensive to us if we cannot use IX conference. It does not matter to us if you put (interim) after IX. I would, however, like the matter to be decided by Paul.¹⁰²

Paul Thompson also thought IX (interim) to be the best solution.¹⁰³ Why Grele then did not use this compromise, but rather chose not use any number at all, cannot be determined by the materials available to us. Officially, in any case, the New York conference took place outside of the chronological order. If it just had to do with the cost of re-printing invitations and letterhead paper, then it is surprising that neither Birgitta Skarin Frykman nor Sven B. Ek – as the Swedish organizers, the current president and vice president of the international committee – came to New York and remained vague about their reasons.¹⁰⁴ According to Thompson, in the run-up to the conference, there were still rival calls for papers from Grele and the Swedes.¹⁰⁵ In a letter to Thompson in the summer of 1994, Grele saw the problem with numbering as the reason that neither Birgitta nor Sven would come to New York: “That silly thing about numbers is really a point with them. As you see we are not using a number because they said that they had already put out information with the number IX.” And: “[i]t really doesn’t matter to me but when I tried to include them in the program they declined.”¹⁰⁶ Thompson was rather perplexed

 Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele, March 14, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Fax from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Ronald Grele, March 17, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Fax from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele, April 17, 1994. Skarin Frykman thanked him for the invitation to be a chair. “As it looks at the moment however, I shall not be coming to New York. I am very disappointed about this […].” Sven B. Ek formulated his rejection similarly: “As it stands now I will not be able to go to New York.” Letter from Sven B. Ek to Ronald Grele, April 21, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. However, another Swede from their institute, Kjell Bergman, participated in the conference in New York and acted as a messenger between them, based on Skarin Frykman’s recommendation. See the fax from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele, April 17, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, September 15, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, June 3, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.

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that neither of the Swedes would come to New York: “it seems strange and unfortunate.”¹⁰⁷ In accordance with the proven practice, the American conference administrator Grele put together a committee that should make the decisions about the submitted proposals. The conference languages were English, French, and Spanish.¹⁰⁸ A Spanish and Portuguese language workshop was planned especially about the methods, problems, and experiences with oral history research in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking cultures and communities in the USA, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe.¹⁰⁹ Parallel to this, similar workshops would also be offered in English and French.¹¹⁰ The American historian Carl Ryant saw the conference as a one-time chance for American academics to come into contact with the completely different approaches to oral history in different parts of the world.¹¹¹ Grele’s extensive correspondence in the run-up to the conference shows how much Grele was attempting to win over international participants. This also included numerous attempts to receive travel reimbursements for participants from as far away as Thailand and the Philippines.¹¹² Despite this, it is especially striking that the conference in New York in 1994 was not just called the first “truly international conference” by its organizer, Grele, but in her closing speech, Mercedes Vilanova also stated that New York was “the most international conference in which I have assisted.”¹¹³ Mary Marshall Clark even called the conference “a great offering to the movement.”¹¹⁴ It can be easily verified whether the meeting in New York was really the first international one. In fact, an analysis of the participants shows that 261 speakers

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, June 13, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Call for papers, undated (likely mid-July 1993), Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. On July 21, 1993, Lutz Niethammer received the call for papers, together with a letter from Ronald Grele.  Letter from Rina Benmayor to Ronald Grele, June 15, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Alberta Arthurs, August 9, 1993.  Letter from Carl Ryant to Ronald Grele, June 24, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. According to Ryant, at this point, he was a member of the International Oral History Committee.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Alberta Arthurs, August 9, 1993.  Mercedes Vilanova, “International Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 67– 70.  Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, February 20, 2008.

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from 38 nations came to New York.¹¹⁵ In contrast, at the conference at Oxford, which had already designated itself international, there were 105 speakers from 25 countries.¹¹⁶ The rush of Latin Americans can also be explained by the fact that the travel costs were significantly more affordable for them than for participation in a conference in Europe.¹¹⁷ In particular, there was a strong group of Brazilians. Paul Thompson was entangled with parts of this new fraction in the run-up to and at the conference in New York. This conflict is believed to have had an influence on the election results in the presidential election in Gothenburg. Since 1990, Thompson had traveled to Brazil three times and was excited by the oral history initiatives there. He published two case studies about projects in the Brazilian favelas, based on conversations with locals. For New York, he sent Grele a paper by the Brazilian Karen Worcman, the founder and director of the virtual Museu da Pessoa, a museum of the individual, in São Paolo.¹¹⁸ To Grele, in the summer of 1994, Thompson appeared to be concerned that in Brazil, a “rather destructive power struggle between cliques” had broken out, which would be reflected in some decisions for the New York schedule.¹¹⁹ For their part, the Brazilians came to New York, outraged. They were disgusted with an essay that Thompson had published about oral history in their country and in which he had accused them of elitism. With his behavior, Thompson had especially turned the president of the Brazilian Oral History Association, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, against him.¹²⁰

 According to the data from Philipp Neumann, who only counted the participants who gave talks. According to Grele, the participants came from over 50 nations. Letter from Ronald Grele to Selma Leydesdorff, February 25, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. For information on the internationality of the participants, also see Agnès Arp’s contribution to this volume.  According to the data from Philipp Neumann, in accordance with Agnès Arp.  Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, February 20, 2008.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, October 26, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele. For more on Karen Worcman, see “Speakers,” Museums and the Web 2001, accessed September 29, 2009, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/ bios/au_3204.html.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, no date, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Like Ronald Grele, in his interview, Alexander von Plato mentioned that Thompson had had a falling out with Marieta de Moraes Ferreira. Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008; Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007; Paul Thompson, “Oral History in Brazil,” Oral History 19.2 (1991): 68 – 70; Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, “Challenges and Dilemmas of Oral History in the

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The long-term effects of this conflict would still be seen at the next conference in Gothenburg in 1996. In New York, neither of the two Brazilian proposals that Thompson had supported were accepted, because, according to Grele, other speakers were given preference, due to the quality of the work.¹²¹ Mercedes Vilanova, in particular, was excited about the quality of the papers submitted. She belonged to the circle of evaluators, to whom Grele had sent the submitted papers: “[m]y general impression is that as a whole they constitute the best group of proposals that I have ever read.”¹²² Of the more than 250 proposals submitted, in the spring of 1994, approximately 100 were finally accepted. The paper from Karen Worcman was not among them.¹²³ The topic of the constitution also came up again in the run-up to the New York conference. In the meantime, Grele had come to the point to give up his opposition to a formalization of the group, because especially after the conference in 1990, it had dawned on him that the organization of conferences would become increasingly difficult without support. During the conference in New York, he once again spoke with Thompson about institutionalization.¹²⁴ In the run-up to the conference, Thompson had taken the initiative and asked whether there would be an official meeting where the new constitution could be discussed.¹²⁵ Grele had responded cautiously by pointing out that Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Sven B. Ek would not be coming and, as organizers of the next conference, could not be absent at an official meeting such as that.¹²⁶ As a result, in New York, the international committee did not have an official meeting on the 1990s: The Brazilian Case,” paper presented at the 9th International Oral History Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 1996.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Paul Thompson, June 3, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office. “The proposal from Karen Worcman was nixed by almost anyone who knew anything about Latin America, even with the letters etc. Janotti send [sic] in a paper proposing to talk about oral history in Brazil. She didn’t send in a proposal on her actual research. We had three such proposals and had to select the one that seemed to be the best organized. […] The others had a lot more about intellectual and methodological trends.”  Letter from Mercedes Vilanova to Ronald Grele, December 24, 1993, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Karen Worcman, February 25, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, May 25, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Paul Thompson, June 3, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele: “I don’t know if we can have an official session. Check with Sven and Brigitte [Birgitta].”

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new constitution, because without the only two officers, Skarin Frykman and Ek, such a meeting could not take place.¹²⁷ While an official discussion about a constitution did not come about in New York, the creation of a new draft of the constitution was further driven. In the same letter, Grele himself offered Thompson, to take over the draft together with Mary Marshall Clark, because that had not yet moved forward: “[i]f you want she and I can sit down and within a few minutes have a draft upon the constitution of the US Oral History Association.”¹²⁸ At first, Thompson did not accept this offer, but rather turned to Skarin Frykman and Ek in August 1994 with the request to formulate a draft.¹²⁹ Birgitta Skarin Frykman was of the opinion, however, that Thompson himself should prepare the rough draft: After all, you are the person who has taken the initiative and kept oral history going internationally all this time. You know its strengths, the problems, and what you wish for the future. Actually I think it would be a great pity if anybody but you made the outlines, alone or in cooperation with others.¹³⁰

Here, it becomes clear what significance Thompson had within the group and also how much respect he had earned due to his tireless commitment to oral history. Yet his reaction was rather reserved. After a discussion with Selma Leydesdorff, both were of the opinion that “it is more likely to cause trouble if [Thompson were] personally the original author of the proposed new constitution.”¹³¹ Both he and Selma Leydesdorff planned to talk with Michael Frisch and the other Americans who were supposed to work on a first draft in New York, and only if they did not present one by September, Leydesdorff and Thompson would take over the task.¹³² The result of the conversation during

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Ronald Grele, June 13, 1994, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Paul Thompson, June 3, 1994.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, August 4, 1994, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers: “I think your solution for the constitution is a good one.”  Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Paul Thompson, September 19, 1994, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers. She continued, “I know that if anybody else did it, you would still have the chance to change it, but you know as well as I do that once a document has got a shape, it tends to preserve it, in spite of corrections.”  Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, October 7, 1994, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, October 7, 1994.

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the New York conference was that Selma Leydesdorff prepared a concept together with the Americans in late October.¹³³

Gothenburg 1996 – The Founding of the International Oral History Association The Ninth International Oral History Conference, “Communicating Experience,” Gothenburg 1996 The extremely controversial ninth conference was to become the conference at which the rivalries and fights for the leadership of the network escalated and at which the previous founding elite was voted out. At the same time, the International Oral History Association was born. The second attempt to give the network a constitution was successful, and the draft of the constitution worked on by Grele, based on the statutes of the American Oral History Association, was accepted in the plenary.¹³⁴ Even today, the Swedish organizer, Birgitta Skarin Frykman, groans when she thinks about the difficult meeting.¹³⁵ In contrast to the previous conferences, in the run-up to Gothenburg, the international committee had not had any preparatory meetings.¹³⁶ Apparently, its members had correspondingly felt somewhat neglected, because in a letter to Grele in May 1996, shortly before the conference, Skarin Frykman admitted that she might not have been as courteous to the committee as they might have expected.¹³⁷ In any case, in the scope of their possibilities, she and Sven B. Ek had done their best and in doing so, had prioritized answering participants’ questions, wishes, and applications for grants over regularly notifying the committee. That was because they had assumed that the committee would

 Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, October 27, 1994, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Sven B. Ek, November 11, 1995, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007.  Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Sven B. Ek to “Dear Friends,” July 17, 1995, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers. A meeting in Gothenburg had been planned for mid-August, but because so few members had confirmed, it was canceled, and everyone was sent the papers by mail for evaluation.  Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele and Paul Thompson, May 21, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.

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trust them and remain loyal to them and accept their decisions.¹³⁸ Therefore, in the run-up, there appear to have been tensions between the organizers and the rest of the committee because the members did not think that they were sufficiently kept up-to-date. However, there are sufficient indicators about the development of a constitutional draft. Finally, Ronald Grele received the first draft from Skarin Frykman and Ek in the run-up to the Gothenburg conference in the fall of 1995. Together with Paul Thompson, he developed a concept from it by the end of November 1995, which was then circulated among the members of the committee for evaluation.¹³⁹ For Grele, working on a constitution for an organization was nothing special; by his own account, he had already drafted a number of constitutions like this for various American organizations, and he easily created a constitution for the oral history group based on the Swedish draft sample.¹⁴⁰ This first draft from late November 1995 consisted of 11 articles. In essence, it codified once again the existing role of the committee. However, new aspects were the creation of set positions and the duty of the organization to document its actions and decisions. Membership was open to individuals as well as institutions. A president and two vice presidents would be elected with a simple majority; one of them should be named the first vice president and become the next president. He simultaneously functioned as the chair of a council consisting of nine members, which should also have a director with the tasks of a secretary and treasurer of the organization. All offices could be held for up to three years, until the organization’s next full assembly. The constitution could be changed with a twothirds majority. In this way, the previous path was being visibly left: the democratization, based on the American example, changed the procedures up to that point, which were those of a rather static network held together by the bonds of friendship, and introduced the end of the first, informal phase of the IOHA. In the first article, six goals of the organization were named, which codified the activity of the group up to that point, but also additionally emphasized the engagement outside of the conferences: to be a forum and cooperation platform for people from all over the world who worked with oral history and the documentation of human experiences; to stimulate and publicize the research results

 Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Ronald Grele and Paul Thompson, May 21, 1996.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Sven B. Ek, November 11, 1995, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers; letter from Ronald Grele to “Dear Friends, November 11, 1995, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele; fax with attached draft of the constitution from Ronald Grele to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, November 28, 1995, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.

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on the method and use of oral history; the development of standards and principles to advance the collection and preservation of interviews; to contribute to a better understanding of oral history; to participate in international projects; and finally, to organize and support various types of communication and meetings between oral historians, not just international conferences and seminars.¹⁴¹ In late May 1996, a re-worked, shorter version of the draft of the constitution circulated, which contained just nine articles as well as only four of the originally six goals.¹⁴² Points three and four, the support of the understanding of oral history and participation in international projects, had been eliminated, two aspects which had also not been very strongly represented in the practice of the network up until then. The line-up and length of time for holding office had also been changed to some extent. Next to the council, there was now also a board made up of five members, with the option to have up to two more. The board would be elected for three years and its members could be re-elected for a second term in office. A maximum of only two people per country could be elected to the board. The president, who was now called a chairperson, should have the deciding voice on the board and be selected from its members, as should the vice president and director. A separate office was created for the treasurer, a role that could also be taken by a non-member of the organization. The board would also meet at least once a year and was also responsible for determining the location and organizer of the next conference, for which an acting president would be named. The organizer assumed full responsibility for the financial and administrative aspects of the conference and would regularly inform the board about the planning and seek their advice. In addition, the board and no longer the council would now decide when the next full assembly would take place. The nine-person council would no longer be elected by the full assembly, but named by the board and should represent all continents. It would be informed about the association’s activities by the board and would be consulted for all fundamental questions. Furthermore, it would elect a chairman from its ranks and would be responsible for nominating candidates for the following board. A change in the constitution would now already work with a simple majority.¹⁴³

 Letter with attached “Constitution: International Oral History Association” from Ronald Grele to “Dear Friends,” November 27, 1995, Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, Material Ron Grele.  Fax with the re-worked second draft of the constitution from Sven B. Ek to Ronald Grele, May 24, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Fax from Sven B. Ek to Ronald Grele, late May 1996, with the revised second version of the draft from May 24, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.

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If one compares the two drafts, the second is shorter, but by having two committees with similar, overlapping duties and two presidents or chairs, three with the acting one, it also became significantly more complicated and confusing. Ronald Grele also shared this opinion. He suggested to the Swedes that the board be expanded to 12 members and, in exchange for doing so, eliminate the council, because otherwise, two identical committees would exist, parallel to each other.¹⁴⁴ It would also be sufficient to name one person responsible for the respective next conference. Membership contributions could also contribute to financing beyond the current organizer’s means. The members of the organization would now elect the board and president at every conference. The term of office of the president would be until the next conference and that of the board members would be for a set period of time, but in stages, so that there would always be someone there who had already had a number of years of experience. Members would make nominations at the full assembly. In general, Grele felt that the draft needed to be more democratized, in that more decision-making power should be transferred to the members and, therefore, the full assembly. Nominations also needed to be valid without confirmation from the board and the president should not have the right to vote. Everyone who paid the membership fee should have the right to nominate and vote for all positions.¹⁴⁵ At this point, it is remarkable that it is Grele, who of all people, was originally against any formalization, advocated for a democratic version, while the concept that had apparently been re-worked by the Swedes appeared to be more elite. With the board, an instance had been established that had significant powers of decision and an extended period in office – which was reminiscent of the current committee’s practices, for which there had been no democratic control. In contrast to Grele, Paul Thompson was not critical of the second draft; he was much more concerned about when the constitution would be discussed and how the elections would be shaped.¹⁴⁶ With regard to his criticism, Grele was not alone for long. Alistair Thomson, then the co-editor of the journal Oral History, and Argentinian Dora Schwartzstein also agreed with his objections.¹⁴⁷

 Letter from Ronald Grele to Sven B. Ek, May 28, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Sven B. Ek, May 28, 1996.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Berith Jacobsen, May 31, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.  Letter from Alistair Thomson to Sven B. Ek, June 4, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers; letter from Dora Schwartzstein to Sven B. Ek, June 5, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.

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The draft was revised once again, this time by Grele, and all six goals were included in the first article again. The members should now pay contributions and next to the president, both vice presidents and the director, the office of ex-president was introduced. The president and vice presidents were now elected by the members at the full assembly with a simple majority, and they remained in office until the next conference. The director would be named by the council for a set period of time, once again would take over the duties of a secretary and treasurer, and was also responsible for the accounting and the archive. The council consisted of nine members from five continents, in addition to the officials. Two new articles were regarded publications that would be edited by the association – a journal, a newsletter and occasional papers – as well as the finances. The membership contributions should be invested and managed.¹⁴⁸ If one compares the draft from 1996 with the first proposal for an association from 1987, it is immediately noticeable that they are two completely different types of documents. While the draft from 1996 depicts a classic, corporate constitution with a members’ assembly and a management board as organs, the draft from 1987 does not have any of these rules for statutes, but rather only provided for a codification of the status usus, without granting the majority of participants possibilities, rights, and duties to participate or have an effect on the organization. It was a long path to institutionalization: it promoted democratization, but at the same time, it gave the IOHA a completely different shape, which was significantly different from the network of friends of the first phase of the movement. Ronald Grele sent the third draft to the Swedes on June 6, 1996, just a few days before the conference in Gothenburg, and it was then presented at the conference.¹⁴⁹ In Skarin Frykman’s perspective, the main thing was adopting a constitution at all. If it didn’t work, they could always improve and expand it later.¹⁵⁰ Interestingly, Birgitta Skarin Frykman anticipated the conflict: “[…] there is no point in making mount[a]ins out of mole-hills, that is to engage people to  Fax with the third draft, likely from Ronald Grele to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, June 6, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman.  The version that was adopted was different from the last draft in terms of just a few details. By re-grouping some things, it then included eight articles, and the support and development of national oral history organizations was added as the seventh. In addition, it was no longer five continents that the members of the council should come from, but rather six “different geographical regions,” and members could hold an office for up to four terms. International Oral History Constitution, accessed February 16, 2010, http://www.iohanet.org/about/documents/ 7– 06revIOHAConstEng.pdf.  Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Paul Thompson, June 8, 1996, Birgitta Skarin Frykman’s private papers.

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form groups for and against, which is a tendency which can be observed.”¹⁵¹ Exactly that happened at the voting about the constitution and the related election for president: the full assembly split into multiple camps, for and against the constitution and for and against Paul Thompson as president. Grele had convinced Paul Thompson, who was physically weak and hesitant due to private and health problems, to run for president, due to his service to oral history and the group in the past. For Grele, there was no doubt that Thompson would be elected: “[t]hat would be the logical thing, that, you know, if an international organization were formed, then Paul should be the president.”¹⁵² A problem that was not to be underestimated during the adoption of the constitution in Gothenburg was a cultural one. While the creation and acceptance of a constitution was an everyday, well-known procedure for the Americans and Brits, it was less common for the mainland Europeans and, for most of the Latin Americans, it was completely unknown and incomprehensible. Therefore, when at the full assembly in Gothenburg, during the vote on the draft of the constitution, every article was individually presented, discussed and voted on, it became a long and difficult meeting. Over the course of it, Grele had the feeling that many of those present at some point could no longer follow the process. As for the non-Europeans, they probably had a strong feeling that something foreign was being forced on them. And perhaps the Latin Americans felt like they were being overrun once again, and therefore made an “attack” by presenting Mercedes Vilanova as a presidential candidate against Paul Thompson. So, after four hours, the situation escalated with the nomination of candidates for the presidency. After Thompson had been nominated and the Brazilians named Mercedes Vilanova, Selma Leydesdorff also decided to run, by her own account, in order to position herself together with Thompson against Vilanova.¹⁵³ But her candidacy probably helped Vilanova to win, because that way the voices of the Thompson supporters were split.¹⁵⁴

 Letter from Birgitta Skarin Frykman to Paul Thompson, June 8, 1996.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007. Alexander von Plato also saw Thompson as the representative of the movement; see Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Selma Leydesdorff, interview with Sirku Plötner, Amsterdam, April 27, 2008.  That is how Ronald Grele, Alexander von Plato, and even Mercedes Vilanova view the situation. See Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008; Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008; Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 5, 2008.

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Although we unfortunately do not have a report of the meeting and the events at the presidential election, a lot of revealing information can be found in the various memories and perspectives of the people who were present. Alexander von Plato felt bad about the course of the election, not just because he recognized Paul Thompson as being the first representative of international oral history. In particular, he attributed the results of the election to Thompson’s conflicts with the Latin Americans as well as their superiority in numbers.¹⁵⁵ For Björn Horgby from Sweden, the Brazilians’ role is clear: “[T]hey made a complot against him. […] [I]t wasn’t him personally, it was this Anglo-Saxon political domination that they didn’t like. So, it was an interesting game. I talked to a lot of Brazilians and they enjoyed this game very much.”¹⁵⁶ Cristina Borderías from Spain, one of Mercedes Vilanova’s former students, also sees Thompson as a victim: “They were really a little cruel to Paul Thompson. […] In my opinion, he was not a person who wanted power. There was no one like him in oral history.”¹⁵⁷ As Borderías implies, Mercedes Vilanova did not necessarily want Thompson as president, for reasons that she could not understand. Lutz Niethammer takes these thoughts to an extreme, in that he postulates: “[t]hen a mixture of non-Europeans and a council of biddies conspired to not give him this office.”¹⁵⁸ From the perspective of others, and just of his friends, Thompson is primarily viewed as a victim. One could even go so far as to say that he was a victim of the internationality that he had strengthened. The question of how both of the protagonists remember the occurrences and their roles is also interesting. Paul Thompson left the hall, surprised and shocked by the course and results of the election. According to him, despite his personal problems, he had only decided to run because he could not see “who else was going to do the job.”¹⁵⁹ In his interview, he said that he would have supported Mercedes Vilanova if she had informed him about her candidacy in advance. Here, the injured pride of the IOHA’s founding father shines through, claiming that he would not have denied his support if he had only been asked for it.¹⁶⁰ In Grele’s view, it also would have been a well-deserved symbolic ges-

     

Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008. Björn Horgby, interview with Christian König, Linköping, Sweden, June 12, 2007. Cristina Borderías, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 6, 2008. Lutz Niethammer, group interview, Grünow, Germany, June 30, 2007. Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 17– 18, 2007. Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 17– 18, 2007.

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ture to elect Thompson as the first president of the association – as a tribute and thanks for his engagement and his service in the past.¹⁶¹ Mercedes Vilanova, for her part, says that she had not had the intention of becoming president. She hadn’t known about the conflict between Thompson and Marieta de Moraes Ferreira.¹⁶² Her reluctance was directed towards the proceedings of the vote: “But that was an assembly at which the people should be forced to decide on the statute, so that Paul Thompson could be elected. […] You can’t have an assembly like that. It is impossible.” She hadn’t expected to be nominated as candidate: “I couldn’t know that they would nominate me. I was against the association.” After the Brazilians nominated her and Grele requested that she briefly introduce herself and her program, she saw the whole thing as a game, similarly to the Brazilians, and gave “like, a totally anarchistic talk” in which she rejected the constitution.¹⁶³ Even the ex post memories make it very clear how much that, which appeared to be a classic power struggle, needed to be reconciled with her own demands for a consequent criticism of power, which was associated with her demand for academia (“giving the oppressed a voice”). Even while they were still fighting for power, they were also stating that they were not on the side of power – Vilanova’s criticism of power while taking over power is symbolic. In addition to Mercedes Vilanova as president, at the plenary in Gothenburg, two vice presidents, a secretary-treasurer, and a council were elected. The vice presidents were both from the second generation, Marieta de Moraes Ferreira from Brazil and Alistair Thomson from Great Britain. Alexander von Plato from Germany, also from the second generation and elected as secretary-treasurer, also moved into the front row. Of the eight members of the new council, only two were from countries that had already been represented in the first generation of the core group: Swede Birgitta Skarin Frykman and Italian Alessandro Portelli. With the exception of Albert Lichtblau from Austria and Mary Marshall Clark from the US, the remaining six were from countries whose representatives had only become active in the later conferences: Graciela de Garay from Mexico, Arzu Öztürkmen from Turkey, Dora Schwartzstein from Argentina, and Ken Manungo from Zimbabwe.¹⁶⁴

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Conflicts and tensions affecting members of the core group did not circulate among all the participants. Even Alessandro Portelli, who had been part of it for a longer period of time, did not understand the controversy between the Brazilians and Thompson. See Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Rome, March 16, 2007.  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  Past Councils, accessed February 16, 2010.

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With Mercedes Vilanova, an old member had been elected as the first president of the IOHA, who had already had the ambition to improve the conferences back in 1985, who represented and wanted to drive forth new developments, and who immediately tackled them. The energetic Spaniard first relocated the conference locations away from Europe to South America and South Africa. She wanted to achieve an alternating cycle, once in Europe, once outside, and in doing so, further promoted the globalization and further development of the IOHA. As far as her “anarchistic” speech at the election is concerned, she places great value on having been able to do everything without bureaucracy: “[w]e worked a lot, but without bureaucracy,” because “[…] we always… that is the anarchistic way – reached a consensus.”¹⁶⁵ Even if it seems unlikely to have led such a large organization without bureaucracy, the statement once again shows the attempt to make a position of power compatible with a fundamental view that is critical of power. At the same time, Vilanova knows exactly what she accomplished as the first president: “we built the organization.”¹⁶⁶ And it cannot be denied that she did achieve important things for the development of the International Oral History Association and for the transition from the informal phase, limited to Europe, all the way to the true globalization of the IOHA. Vilanova’s last statement is directly followed by the question whether the founding of an institution in 1996 meant the end, a reform, or a new beginning for the existing network. Vilanova’s observation that the organization was really only built under her presidency indicates that she herself views the founding as a new beginning. But can the twenty years of international oral history conferences be so easily conceived in that way?

Gothenburg 1996 – End, Reform, or New Beginning? Alessandro Portelli from Italy, who, as an arbitrator, tried to mediate between Mercedes Vilanova and Paul Thompson in 1996, said in his interview about the structure of the network that it was not a formal organization, but that the

 Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  However, at the conference in Istanbul in 2009, she did not miss the opportunity to announce that Marieta de Moraes Ferreira was her successor, without following the election rules. According to Ronald Grele, he was the only person back then who protested against these proceedings and required formal candidacy and elections. See Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.

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power was de facto in the hands of the group of founders. Selma Leydesdorff expresses a similar view: the group had been “hierarchical in terms of its organizational structures” and “at the top there were people like Lutz [Niethammer], Paul [Thompson], Luisa [Passerini].”¹⁶⁷ This group of founders, the European and later international committee, varied between five and eight people, because their personal commitment differed from time to time, and therefore, not all members were present at every meeting. Paul Thompson, Ronald Grele, Luisa Passerini, and Lutz Niethammer were represented regularly and for the longest period of time. As the informal group in the committee became little by little overrun by the expansion of the conferences, the cement of the network, which was based more on friendships than anything, began to crack. With its increasing structuring, differentiation, and expansion, more and more subnetworks and various external rings formed, originating from and all around the original core group in the middle. This core group, however, did not change, but rather remained the same. Between the various levels of the network, the external rings that were not directly associated with the core, and the internal ring, there were interactions that created new dimensions of the (meta) network.¹⁶⁸ These interactions were also influenced by the various views of oral history. Because just like the core group was made up of pure oral historians (Paul Thompson, Ronald Grele) as well as academics for whom oral history was (just) an interesting field of research (Mercedes Vilanova, Lutz Niethammer, Gerhard Botz), among the new members, there were also representatives of both groups. Over time and due to its expansion, the European network that had been founded by members from the very beginning, the first generation, finally lost its focus on Europe. The problem of the European network was that it neither correctly nor punctually reacted to the increasing expansion. The potential of the new countries joining the network, with their different approaches and perspectives, was not realized. In retrospect, Alexander von Plato also noted, surprised: “the amazing thing was that this informal group did not succeed at really taking the non-European representatives of oral history seriously, with the exception of those from the USA, either individually or as a group, and include them.”¹⁶⁹ The best example for this was the bitter fight of the new participants from South America for the recognition of Spanish as an official conference lan-

 Selma Leydesdorff, interview with Sirku Plötner, April 27, 2008.  For more on the characteristics of the network, see Christian König’s essay in this volume.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.

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guage. The French had already tried something similar, but had been in the minority, and had failed. The number of Spanish-speaking conference attendees however was steadily increasing and their pressure and their influence on the core group became stronger. Mercedes Vilanova from Spain, whom one could describe as an unofficial speaker for this new pressure group, criticized the core group – a member of which she had been since 1983, at the latest – as dominated by men and Anglo-Europeans.¹⁷⁰ The opposition of the quickly-growing Spanish-speaking faction against the European-Anglo-Saxon overload was also interpreted politically. In a letter to the Mexican Eugenia Meyer, Luisa Passerini characterized the Spanish and South Americans’ behavior as a “struggle against cultural imperialism.”¹⁷¹ The basic attitudes going back to the time of the movement – like here, the constant criticism of imperialism – was then transferred to the organization itself, which could definitely lead to a self-critical attitude. With the founding of the IOHA in 1996, the “time of European domination” was then finally over. However, the council was still dominated by Western Europeans until the conference in Rome in 2004, and again since the conference in Sydney, the organization’s committees have been primarily filled with Europeans.¹⁷² The call for institutionalization, which was particularly driven by Paul Thompson, was not just directed by the desire for recognition and establishment in the academic landscape. The rapid expansion of the group also made the formalization appear necessary due to pure financial reasons. The planning and execution of conferences, to which no longer 50, but rather 150 to 250 people came,¹⁷³ caused significant financing problems for the respective organizers. At the same time, travelling was more expensive for many of the new participants from countries farther away, and the informal group had few possibilities to fund transportation and travel costs. One aspect that cannot be ignored about the beginning of the financial support is the fact that by this, the composition of the participants changed: now, young academics and interested parties could also afford a trip.

 Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  Letter from Luisa Passerini to Eugenia Meyer, July 11, 1979, Luisa Passerini’s private papers, Pavarolo, Italy.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  While there were 87 proposals for papers for Aix-en-Provence in 1982, there were already 250 proposals for New York in 1994, only half of which could be considered. See Letter from Ron Grele to Karen Worcman on February 25, 1994; the report of the meeting of the “Comité européen” on December 12, 1981 at the IHTP in Paris, François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Des Réunions.

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The interest in institutionalization did not just have organizational reasons, but was also combined with the wish and the hope to strengthen oral history on a national level through an international association, and in doing so, receive recognition and legitimacy.¹⁷⁴ Birgitta Skarin Frykman got to the heart of it: “[s]omehow you didn’t exist if you hadn’t been formalized.”¹⁷⁵ Even if, in principle, the goal of the entire group was to make oral history an “academically acceptable” method,¹⁷⁶ the group was and remained split with regard to creating an organization: we had those two sides; those who wanted to be completely informal and those who saw the need of some kind of organization. […] [T]here were violent discussions about both the organization and the official languages.¹⁷⁷

However, the group was rather unanimous about who embodied the primus inter pares. If one asks the members of the original core group about their “chief,” most of them name Paul Thompson, but rather with the addition that he had been the founding father. He probably had the strongest position within the group for the longest period of time, because he personally committed himself very intensively to oral history and its establishment and institutionalization, while for others, oral history did not have such an important position in their lives and, accordingly, they drifted in and out of the conferences corresponding to their respective interest in the situation. In an oligarchic organization, as this was in its beginning phase, conflicts through personal tensions are predestined in a way. And the peak of these conflicts was the acceptance of the constitution and, associated with that, the election of the first president of the new IOHA. And the fact that the Spaniard Mercedes Vilanova was elected the first president is one of the reasons why the creation of an organization in Gothenburg in 1996 was the end, reform, and new beginning all at once. Mercedes Vilanova, like perhaps no one else, embodied all of the changes and innovations as well as the old traditions and structures. Whether the founding of the IOHA in 1996 was viewed as a turning point depends on whom one asks: the further away the person is from the inner circle of the core group, then the more likely answer is that the year 1996 did not mean a

 Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Annette Leo and Philipp Heß, Jena, Germany, May 27– 28, 2008.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.

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turning point. For the participants who had noticed little of the debates and tensions in the environment of the core group, the founding and presidential election were not burdened with the same memories as for members of the old core group. They, and the new members of the IOHA, experienced oral history at the end of its establishment process and, as a result, had other expectations of oral history, because they were already familiar with the method. By now, it was no longer a provocation for conventional history research; the network’s motivation to establish it as a field of research had long been achieved. Does this mean that the organization was no longer attractive, at least for the long-term members, the pioneers of oral history? Had they become victims of a typical organization process? Had the conflict perhaps been unavoidable, because the network, with its participants increasing in age, had “outlived” itself? At the beginning, charismatic individuals had been needed in order to support and fight for oral history projects. Here, the terms that the South African historian Sean Field uses, that oral historians are “intellectual activists” and “agents of social change,” are especially appropriate.¹⁷⁸ The problem with charismatic figures is, however, that they do not like to stop, or they do not like to let go of what they built up.¹⁷⁹ In the mid-1990’s, Paul Thompson also saw what caused Giovanni Contini to call the founding group the “generation of the old people.” A trench had opened up between the generations, because the older people did not support the younger, but rather, had built barriers against the newcomers.¹⁸⁰ The core group had neglected a gradual transfer to a younger generation.¹⁸¹ Interestingly, Orvar Löfgren argues that the group had survived its natural life span of a movement carried and driven by enthusiasts, and that the intensity at the beginning was being replaced by a normalizing phase.¹⁸² Alessandro Portelli describes the intensity at the beginning as follows:

 Sean Field, “From Stepchild to Elder: Has Oral History Become ‘Respectable’?,” IOHA debate, accessed July 11, 2009, http://www.iohanet.org/debate/.  An example of this is Paul Thompson’s withdrawal from British national oral history. Ron Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2008.  Giovanni Contini, interview with Manja Finnberg, Florence, September 25, 2006; Reinhard Sieder, interview with Philipp Neumann, Vienna, September 25 and 27, 2007; Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 17– 18, 2007.  Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008.  Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, Lund, Sweden, June 15, 2007. In her interview, Marcella Filippa also said, “It was a movement, and there was actually the denial and the thought that it would lose its strength if it would become an association. The strength was, however, the soul of international oral history, the topics, the [political] memberships of many of these intellectuals – Thompson, Ron Grele, and others – who all belonged to this di-

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It is a movement, because it lets ideas circulate, they had read Paul Thompson and he had read something from me, the ideas circulate […] and it is a movement in the sense that I don’t need a membership card, like in an organization. There is an endless line of people who come and go, move around […].¹⁸³

The year 1996 meant the end of this movement structure; structurally, the IOHA was now no longer dependent on the personal engagement of its activists. It was a formal democratic organization with elected bodies. The character of the meetings was also changed by the new structure, as Ronald Grele regretted: One of the things that happens when you have an organization is that you attract organizational people, […] certainly not as interesting as the people who were involved in the earlier days. […] They are involved with each other organizationally, but not intellectually.¹⁸⁴

However, the attractiveness of oral history apparently did not suffer any damage through the organization: eight years after the founding of the IOHA, at the 2004 conference in Rome, the registered participants in the association were actually in the minority among the participants and, rightly, Portelli, noticed that “the whole oral history world is not included by the association.”¹⁸⁵ The founding of the IOHA was also a reform. It reformed the existing, entrenched structure of the group by redefining its composition. Even if the change in generations wasn’t directly connected to it, but was already inherent in it, the transfer of power thus took place. The oligarchic core group, in the form of the international committee, lost its authority. The regular change in office holders now guaranteed greater diversity and allowed for the necessary change in genmension, which brought together the research with a strong social, antagonistic, ethical dimension, with the figure and the role of the intellectual in society. I think one can’t neglect that. Many of these people had this connotation that other academics with other topics don’t have.” (Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008). Sean Field also sees dangers in the establishment: “I am arguing that to describe oral history methodology and the oral history movement as reaching a state of ‘respectability’ is fine. Provided we do not lose sight of the radical or democratic intentions that motivated so many of us to do oral history projects in the first place. Provided we continue to keep the dynamism of oral story-telling alive in how we disseminate stories and memories through multiple mediums. Provided we continually critique ourselves and strive to learn from each other. But most of all we need to remain open to learning from story-tellers, who remain our primary site(s) of inspiration. How we understand and draw from the creativity inherent in dialogues with story-tellers should motivate us to continue the process of conceptual reflection and debate on the stories they tell each other and us.” Sean Field, From Stepchild to Elder, June 11, 2009.  Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, April 18, 2008.  Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007.  Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, April 18, 2008.

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erations, in contrast to the relative stability of the core group. Here it is interesting that in 1996, not all members of the older core group left, but those who assumed tasks in the new organization were exactly those who had always rejected institutionalization: Mercedes Vilanova, Alexander von Plato, and Alessandro Portelli.¹⁸⁶ Despite attempts at mediation by Alessandro Portelli, Paul Thompson and Selma Leydesdorff completely withdrew from the IOHA. Together, they changed to the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC),¹⁸⁷ which replaced the IOHA as a Eurocentric successor, and created a new branch of oral history there.¹⁸⁸ In addition to this partial continuity in personnel, there was also continuity in the questions and topics, in the implementation and the approach; the problems from the developing countries were new. In Alexander von Plato’s perspective, the movement character up until then was not completely gone, because the developing countries now took over the continuation of a movement, if not at the structural level, then at the content level.¹⁸⁹ The founding of the IOHA marked a new beginning in that the changed structure brought new people to positions, the conference locations changed, and the organization solidified.¹⁹⁰ Furthermore, the association became bilingual. The Spanish-speaking members won through and since 1997, the IOHA has been publishing an annual, bilingual journal in English and Spanish, Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios. ¹⁹¹ In addition to the support of new researchers and, therefore, new members, Vilanova also established a new rhythm. The old two-year distance between conferences was kept, but these now took place alternating within and outside of Europe – such as at the 1998 conference, which took place in South America, in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁹²

 Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  See the European Social Science History Conference, accessed February 16, 2010, http:// www.iisg.nl/esshc.  Alessandro Portelli had tried to reconcile and offered Selma Leydesdorff and Paul Thompson membership in the editorial committee of a new journal. At this point in time, however, both were already active in the ESSHC and were publishing the Memory and Narrative series. A “seat” in an editorial committee was not in question for them. Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 17– 18, 2007.  Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, January 15 – 16, 2008.  Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, July 17– 18, 2007.  “Journal: Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios,” International Oral History Association, accessed February 22, 2010, http://www.iohanet.org/journal/index.html. The first volume was published in January 1997.  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.

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Conversely, the new organizational paths, with their clear division of work, also presented a risk, because in such a fixed organizational structure, in which tasks are clearly divided, independent engagement is not necessarily required any longer and therefore declines. However, Mercedes Vilanova’s demand from her closing talk in New York in 1994 was successful: to go back to the roots in Bologna and once again achieve a wider range of topics.¹⁹³ It was only after 1996 that the IOHA really became global, not just geographically, but also in terms of content. Like at the beginning in 1976 in Italy, where the range of topics was significantly more broadly diversified, because anthropologists and therefore representatives of other disciplines participated, beginning in 1996, the IOHA opened itself up to other disciplines and fields of research. It is exactly this ideological and conceptual diversity of the academics from different age groups that is the strength of oral history. That is exactly how Sean Field, a current member of the IOHA and the director of the Centre for Popular Memory in Cape Town, South Africa, sees it. He summarizes the fascination for oral history and the tasks of the association as follows: But it is precisely the democratizing potential and the critical slant of oral history methodology that has been, and continues to be, one of the central reasons why both academic and non-academic researchers are attracted to using the methodology. The approaches represented have varied from liberal to socialist to ultra-left ideological positions and a range of modernist and post-modernist conceptual paradigms have been adopted by oral historians. In my view, this ideological and conceptual diversity amongst oral historians internationally is its strength not its weakness. At a bare minimum, I think we need to continue providing spaces, at conferences, in publications and on our web site, for such a diversity of oral history voices and positions to be articulated. These debates must be constructive and stimulate oral historians of different ages to not just do oral history projects in their own contexts but to also critically reflect on how and why they engage in oral history and memory-work.¹⁹⁴

 In 2000, Mercedes Vilanova transferred the presidency to her successor Marieta de Moraes Ferreira. According to Alessandro Portelli, Vilanova withdrew from the IOHA after the conference in Rome in 2004, because she could not get over the fact that the conference was held in Rome instead of in Barcelona. Rome was already the third conference in Italy, after Bologna in 1976 and Siena-Lucca in 1993. Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, April 18, 2008. Vilanova preferred Alexander von Plato’s proposal to go to Berlin, because “Rome meant the return of the ‘old boys’’ network. That was really a step backwards. That was not democratic.” Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  Sean Field, From Stepchild to Elder, July 11, 2009.

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Field’s call for a critical reflection of the reasons for engagement with oral sources and memory work leads back to the introductory question about the own memory of the international oral history association itself: Did the current, formalized association unconsciously forget or consciously repress its “wild” and disorganized past and pre-history, which, after all, spanned 20 years? The fact that the pre-history before 1996 is not mentioned on the current organization’s web site at all is somewhat astonishing for an organization that is dedicated to researching the potential of oral transmissions of the past. The lack of memory may have to do with the ambivalences of the pre-history, which was politically eventful and academically alternative, but was also geographically limited and closed in terms of personnel.

Agnès Arp

Crossing National Borders, with Reactions The Internationality of the Network In talking about the international development of oral history we are not talking about the growth of oral history in different parts of the world. We are talking about how oral historians in different parts of the world discovered one another.¹

If you look for the IOHA’s web site, you will find a brightly colored internet site which depicts the interpersonal, interethnic, and multi-cultural characteristics of oral history using portraits and tries to explain them to the reader. You receive the impression that oral history is a science that, like no other, lends an ear to all people on our planet, stimulates them to be involved with their own history, and brings them together across national and intellectual borders. In doing so, every type of hierarchization is avoided, or at least it appears to be that way. No ethnicity, no country, and no location seem to have been forgotten. The International Oral History Association presents itself as a platform for oral historians who have the common element of having humans or the narrated human experience at the center of their research.² The IOHA’s internet presentation emphasizes their claims of internationality and modernity in its function as a global contact space. The fact that, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, this international network of researchers was limited to Europe and the United States is not mentioned on this web site. Consequently, the great minds of the IOHA are possibly divided about the group’s origins. Some protagonists’ paths were divided in terms of content and methodological research approaches, as well as language barriers and guiding questions about the sense and purpose of this association. At the beginning, it brought researchers and passionate users of oral sources from various nations and with various social backgrounds together. The significance and the role of the protagonists of this informal work group often lead to contradictory perspectives,

 Ronald Grele, “From the intimate circle to globalized oral history,” Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios 4.1– 2 (2007– 2008): 2, accessed April 26, 2011, http://iohanet.org/journal/cur rent.html.  “The International Oral History Association provides a forum for oral historians around the world and a means for cooperation among those concerned with the documentation and interpretation of human experience” (The International Oral History Association, accessed May 6, 2011, http://iohanet.org/). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-006

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which, among other things, were reflected in the question of the internationality of this movement. Therefore, it seems appropriate to more closely examine the question about the nature and scope of the internationality of this network and the controversies that resulted from it. When observed in general, we could determine that “inter-nationality” – in the literal sense – already begins with the meeting or exchange between a few people across the borders of states and nations. Of course, characteristics like the type, length, or frequency are also of importance. Even if the IOHA can be described as “transnational” in the best sense from current research perspectives, because something unique and new was created in the exchange between the researchers from different countries, the concept of “internationality” is predominantly maintained, especially where the key players fought about the definition. How should the IOHA’s internationality be shaped? Here, two aspects should be emphasized. First, this exchange can lead to cross-national homogeneity, and even to the neglect of nationality. The national attribute recedes as a criterion for identity in favor of a convergence, sought out and found for certain problems. In contrast to this, this exchange can be directly targeted at the value of the variety of nations and traditions, of multiculturality. As soon as the criterion of power³ and the rivalries between researchers collide with these forms of exchange, a tension-filled structure emerges, in which internationality becomes an argument in the conflict about various concepts, ideas, and visions of the IOHA’s structure. In its time, the IOHA was unique among the international groups of academics in many respects. For us, it is of interest how visions and practices of internationality developed in this organization within the first 20 years of its existence. Could we establish the hypothesis that the selection of participants, speakers, and research topics presented⁴ – and along with that, the possible shifts in national prioritization (countries from North, South and Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania) – latently contained the potential for power? Before I dedicate myself to the various interpretations of internationality within the constative circle of the IOHA and the controversies associated with it at the end of my essay, I will examine its structural profile in the first part of my essay. In the second part, I will ask about its actual internationalization. The term “internationality” is defined at two levels. On the one hand, a comparison with other organizations in an exemplary manner should show the way in

 For more on this, see Heinrich Popitz, Phänomene der Macht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992).  This includes the regions being examined by the speakers.

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which the IOHA stands out from the usual international structures of academic communitization. On the other hand, the key players’ and topics’ degree of internationality can serve as an indicator for the IOHA’s international attractiveness and, consequently, as an indicator for the establishment of the approach. To do so, it is worth taking a look at the referees’ regions of origin as well as the regions they examined. Third, I will examine the question as to why the creation of an association that deals with research with oral sources “had to” take place in an international framework. Finally, in the fourth part, the dynamic relationships between the international developmental space of this movement and the respective status of oral history in the participating countries is illuminated. This is a dynamic that – this much can be anticipated here – can be described as a boomerang effect, and a fruitful one at that.

One-Of-A-Kind in the International Academic Landscape? In order to illustrate the special nature of the IOHA, a look at the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS) and the associated meetings for historians, as well as the International Sociological Association (ISA), are of use. Both organizations are examples of the development of a number of international academic societies that were founded in the interwar period and, which, in the late 1940’s, experienced a new beginning due to help from UNESCO. From the very beginning, the ISA and ICHS had solid structures, clearly designated tasks, and a constantly growing pool of members. UNESCO’s sponsorship provided significant financial support for the regular international congresses for four years. In contrast, the IOHA neither came about due to the actions of powerful institutions that guaranteed its continuance, nor was it founded along disciplinary borders. It is likely that the interdisciplinary, extra-academic, and politically motivated exchange about the field of oral history, which was institutionalized relatively late and depending on national contexts, is one reason why the IOHA can be viewed as one-of-a-kind in the palette of international academic associations. With regard to its genesis, the IOHA is reminiscent of a (new) school. Its supporters did not rally around a single master, but rather an approach. An additional special feature is its genesis and its inner dynamics: it was informally started in 1976 or 1979.⁵ The IOHA was, therefore, the self-organized answer to numerous young researchers’ desire for academic exchange about the  For more on this, see Julie Boekhoff’s contribution to this volume.

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new, unusual method of examining biographical interviews. This initiative was based on the engagement and intellectual interest of individuals and could therefore not turn to regular financial support. The fact that some of the protagonists “deradicalized” themselves using the work with oral sources as a solution and escape from the political activism after 1968⁶ and therefore directed the focus of their research towards the most burning human topics, which, for me, is an important identifying characteristic of the IOHA. One of the biggest differences from the aforementioned “older” associations is the fact that the IOHA founders and members probably neither had the same need to democratize society, as their academic advisers would have, nor had the same vision of elucidating society. While after 1945, both generations of researchers dedicated themselves to the service of democracy, they represented different visions of a democratic society. The first worked for the democratization of the elite and the society system; the latter for the democratization of the masses. This is also reflected in the emergence of cultural studies in Germany as, for example, Lutz Niethammer describes: The history of experience was a product of the democratic comprehension of responsibility in society that postulated: “With simple explanations about the actions of the elite, we are not going to come any farther. We have to research what the mass of people had experienced themselves and what shaped them.” […] But in the core of the emergence of cultural studies in contemporary history, there is a democratic question, and namely, a question about the self-reflection and personal responsibility of swaths of society.⁷

Consequently, the IOHA shaped itself as an experimental space for new academic methods with an explicitly political aspiration, at least at the beginning. The younger researchers withdrew their attention from the future project of creating a democratic society. Out of necessity, they turned their focus towards the past of those societies and to the many people who had been neglected in the writing of history up to that point. This sociopolitical claim and the political attitude of many key players are reflected in the topics being examined: the working class and workers’ movement, feminism and questions about gender, dictatorships and post-dictatorial society, especially Fascism and National Socialism. Without the solid structure of an organization in particular, the international conferences offered the possibility to save this program.

 For more on this, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume.  Lutz Niethammer, “Drei Fronten, ein Fehlschlag und das Unbewusste der Aufklärung,” in Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts?, ed. Norbert Frei (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2006), 110.

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The First IOHA Conferences: An Inventory of Their Internationality (1976 to 1996) The first ten IOHA conferences between 1976 and 1996 took place at approximately two-year intervals. Western Europe was selected as the site of nine conferences; an unnumbered conference taking place outside the series was organized in the USA. Over these twenty years, there were thousands of participants; there were approximately 630 speakers from around 63 countries. A quarter of them were even continuously present. The speakers’ countries of origin and lecture topics were statistically evaluated using the conference materials available in order to determine trends in development.⁸ Here, it is noted that unfortunately, only a limited corpus of sources from which we could take the names was available to us. That is why no statements about the make-up of the conference participants could be made in general, but only about the make-up of the speakers.⁹ In some cases, the chairs of sessions or panels were included. Before we look more closely at the individual conferences, we will take a look at the most important countries of origin for the speakers: Aside from the total number of speakers per country, the graphic also takes multiple talks into consideration. In this context, Daniel Bertaux, Ronald Grele, Selma Leydesdorff, Eugenia Meyer, Lutz Niethammer, Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and Paul Thompson should be named, among others. Among the Spaniards, Mercedes Vilanova and Cristina Borderías are also particularly noticeable. If this image reflects the magnetic field of the closest part of the network in general, more concretely, it shows us the dominance of the US and the Western European countries that were represented the most strongly: Italy, France, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain. Among other things, national trends had an influence on the frequency of the attendees. For example, until 1990, many French speakers were present, but after that, their number quickly dropped. This correlates with the academic interest in oral history in France, which also appeared to have dropped off at the end of the 1980’s. On the other hand, the percentage of Spanish-speaking speakers increased beginning in 1985, which reflects the oral history boom there beginning in the mid-

 Philipp Neumann managed most of the data, and the work was finished by Christian König and Agnès Arp.  There was often missing information about the speaker’s discipline and academic origin. The people who were of a different nationality than their institution were classified by their institutional affiliation.

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Fig. 1: Number of speakers per country, sorted by the 30 most important countries or territories of origin, 1976 to 1996, in absolute numbers. Source: Conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University. The numbers for the former Eastern Bloc countries were taken into consideration up to the conference in 1990.

1980’s.¹⁰ With regard to the Northern European countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland), it can be said that at the time, they cooperated mainly within the Northern European framework,¹¹ which had an effect on their presence at the IOHA conferences. From 1979 onwards, there was at least one Swedish speaker (such as Orvar Löfgren), but their number first grew in the 1990’s. At the conference held in Gothenburg in 1996, there were 13 Swedish and 12 Finnish researchers presenting their research. This shows the extent to which the number and origin of the speakers depended on the closeness or distance of the respective event location. Those present from (post‐) Socialist countries were primarily from the USSR / Russia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and the GDR. With the exception of Poland, which had already been present since the 1980’s, the breakdown of the

 Mercedes Vilanova, “Por una historia sin adjetivos: 25 años de fuentes orales en España,” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 14 (1995): 95 – 116.  For more on this, see the comments from the Swedish historian Björn Horgby, for whom the IOHA was of no primary importance. Instead, he concentrated on the already-existing national cooperation with colleagues from the area of working-class history. With regard to this, there were attempts to create a Nordic network (Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden), which, due to the dissipating interest, could never really be developed. Björn Horgby, interview with Christian König, Linköping, Sweden, June 12, 2007. There is not actually a Working-Class Studies Association, other than the WCSA, which was founded in the USA in 2004. See “About the Association,” Working-Class Studies Association, accessed May 11, 2011, http://www.wcstudies.org/about/.

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Eastern Bloc allowed many people to participate in the conferences for the first time, the first meeting between East and West in Essen in 1990. With regard to countries from North and South America, the over-representation and continuous participation of North Americans was noticeable; this result could be explained by the many years of work with oral sources in the United States. The most frequently represented Central and South American countries were Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the USA with Puerto Rico. Additional speakers came from 33 other countries.¹² For purposes of presentation, for some conferences, the origin of the speakers is no longer presented according to country, but rather according to regions or continents. This illustrates the internationality of the composition of every conference: Western Europe,¹³ North America,¹⁴ Eastern Europe,¹⁵ Latin America,¹⁶ Africa,¹⁷ Asia,¹⁸ and Oceania. In general, the number of speakers continuously rose (with a decrease in Siena-Lucca in 1993), which does not just show the increasing importance of the IOHA, but also the growing importance and acceptance of research with oral sources worldwide.

 Based on the conference materials available to us, there are also individual speakers from other countries. They are listed here in ascending order by their strength of participation: Venezuela, Tunisia, Turkey, Thailand, Tanzania, Swaziland, Sudan, Slovenia, Slovakia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Latvia, Jamaica, Iceland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Egypt, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Singapore, Switzerland, Romania, Portugal, Cuba, Croatia, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, the Czech Republic, Peru, Denmark, and Greece.  The Western Europeans include representatives from the following countries: Switzerland, Norway; the founding members of the European Economic Community (1957): Belgium, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands; Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark (1975); Greece (1981); Portugal and Spain (1986); Sweden, Finland, and Austria (1995). A total of 17 countries are included in our definition of Western Europe. See Markus Jachtenfuchs and Beate Kohler-Koch, Europäische Integration (Opladen, Germany: Springer, 2003).  North America includes the USA and Canada.  Here, Eastern Europe does not consist of the entire Eastern Bloc, but rather the GDR, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the USSR, as well as their successor states.  Latin America includes Central America, with the Spanish-speaking parts of the Caribbean (Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico), Central America (Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama), and South America (Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile).  The African countries are Egypt, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Tunisia.  We classified the following countries as Asia: Israel, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Singapore, and Indonesia.

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Fig. 2: Speakers’ regions of origin at the conferences from 1976 to 1985, in absolute numbers. Source: conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University.

Fig. 3: Speakers’ regions of origin, Bologna 1976, in percent. Source: conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University.

As can be determined from this figure, the presence of the Western Europeans, which reached a peak of 109 participants in Barcelona in 1985, outweighed the presence of others. They were followed in number by speakers from the US. Researchers from Eastern Europe came occasionally, especially to Amsterdam in 1980, while in this time period, we determined that there were six Central and South Americans who were at Barcelona and at Colchester in 1979. There was an African (Sudan) in Amsterdam and a participant from Israel in Barcelona.

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Using two further figures, the special case dominated by anthropologists, the conference in Bologna in 1976,¹⁹ will be presented more closely. The comparison of the speakers’ regions of origin with the regions being examined, with their respective research, is disproportional: as figures 3 and 4 show, the primarily Western European and the few North American and Eastern European speakers in Bologna worked on projects about an extremely wide variety of regions. Here, research about oral traditions in various African countries was increasingly presented – the African continent was the region most examined at this conference.²⁰ At the same time, this beginning also was already the end, even though Philippe Joutard repeatedly emphasized how important it was to view oral traditions in Africa in a comparative perspective with Europe.²¹ The relatively large number of talks about Asia (17 %) and Oceania (8 %) was never again achieved after Bologna, either. In contrast, for the only time in the first two decades of the conference, Europe (Western and Eastern), with a number of “just” 29 (13 %) of the regions examined, was the region examined the least (in later conferences, it made up much more than half of the regions examined). At the following conferences, and viewed overall, the regions being examined were predominantly identical to the speakers’ regions of origin. Western Europe clearly dominated, and in addition to that, there were some analyses on North America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The comparison of the speakers’ regions of origin with the regions being examined in their respective research points to a basic tendency that remained at least until the conference in Siena-Lucca in 1993: the regions being examined, from which there were usually

 For more on this, see Silvia Musso’s contribution to this volume.  Here is the list of talks that had to do with an African country: “I messaggi espresso dalle configurazioni spaziali dei diola del mof evvi di Enampor” (Bassa Casamance, Senegal); “Les documents d’histoire autres que les récits dans la société Anyi” (Ivory Coast); “Les traditions orales des peuples Mande et les recherches sur l’histoire de l’habitat en Afrique occidentale” and “L’interprétation légendaire de l’histoire de Jonkoloni” (Mali); “Oral Tradition and the Reconstruction of the Past in Northern Ghana / Tradizione orale e ricostruzione del passato nel Ghana del Nord”; “Self Defence against Invented Tradition: An Example from Zambia”; “The Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Africa; Storia dell’Africa e fonti orali”; “Sources orales et connaissance des systèmes économiques et sociaux de l’Afrique précoloniale.” From the program for the conference in Bologna, EMG archive.  Report of the work meeting on July 6, 1981, as preparation for the conference in Aix-en-Provence, François Bédarida’s papers from his time as director of the IHTP, CNRS, Archives nationales, Paris, folder Madame Ranson, sub-folder des reunions.

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Fig. 4: Regions being examined, Bologna 1976, in percent. Source: conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University.

no speakers, were formal colonial areas,²² few industrialized countries, and, as one used to say in the 1980’s, “third-world” countries.

Fig. 5: Speakers’ regions of origin at the conferences from 1987 to 1996, in absolute numbers. Source: conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University.

 Retrospectively, Luisa Passerini wrote: “Looking back [on the 1970’s and 1970’s] one can now see that the common basis of these exchanges and constructions was Eurocentric, although internationalist and anti-imperialist […].” It had to do with the fact that in the beginning of oral history, it was assumed that oral history was a “relatively homogeneous interplay between the self and the other” and that the interviewer and interviewee shared the same political opinions. Luisa Passerini, “Self and Other: Thirty Years of Doing Oral History,” BIOS Special Issue (2007): 237.

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The regions that the speakers examined and came from seldom overlapped. Participation in a conference such as these probably failed, simply due to the fact that the expenses for the trip and accommodation were too high – a circumstance in which conscious or potential power dynamics were inherent. In summary, it can be determined that the first decade of the IOHA’s existence was marked by the stability of the Euro-Atlantic domination of speakers and regions being examined – a structure that was first broken apart in the 1990’s. Consequently, Figure 5 appears to be much more diverse. After ten years of the existence of the IOHA, new trends took shape, as one can gather from the conferences in Oxford in 1987, Essen in 1990, and New York in 1994. In this period of time, a type of change in paradigm took place, which will be addressed later. Most speakers still came from Western Europe, followed by the USA, but there was significant growth in the number of speakers from Latin America and Eastern Europe. At the end of this phase, all parts of the world were represented. The degree of the conferences’ internationality had therefore widened and was in accordance with the IOHA’s claim to globality. This irreversible course of the internationalization of the participants and the regions being examined shows two main features: the constantly growing presence of Latin America as well as an opening towards the east, as a consequence of the collapse of the Socialist dictatorships. In addition to these sociopolitical reasons for growth, informal contacts also played a role. On a trip to Latin America, Paul Thompson had visited numerous oral historians and invited them to work together, while Lutz Niethammer and Alexandro von Plato met Irina Scherbakowa at a conference in Moscow. The conference in Oxford in 1987 already indicated the structural shifts; in particular, the percentage of Latin American speakers has constantly grown since then. Parallel to this, one can notice an expansion of the regions being examined. Due to the political change in the Soviet Union’s satellite states, for the first time, interested parties from Eastern Europe came to the next conference in Essen. Due to the greater diversification in the speakers’ origins, the conference showed greater diversity in the regions and also the topics being examined. Therefore, in 1990, the majority of the attention was placed on countries from the former Eastern Bloc, which made up almost a quarter of the talks; at the same time, the percentage of Western Europeans sank to less than 60 %. Accordingly, Luisa Passerini remembered: “The one in Essen […], held at the Ruhrlandmuseum and organized by Lutz [Niethammer], really marked the changes of the time: the big novelty was in fact the presence of many oral historians from Russia, Hungary, the

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GDR, and Azerbaidzan [sic].”²³ To that extent, one could recognize the consequence of two political developments in Essen, the collapse of the South American dictatorships over the course of the 1980’s²⁴ as well as the fall of the Communist bloc at the end of the decade. For oral history, these developments opened up a still untapped reservoir of narratives and witnesses, of stories and memories.

Fig. 6: Speakers’ regions of origin, Gothenburg 1996, in percent. Source: conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University.

The liberation of language and narratives in long-oppressed societies influenced the IOHA’s dynamic. Because of the extent that the method of oral history spread, Western Europe lost significance as a region being examined. In particular, Eastern Europe and Latin America were now focal points, but Africa, Asia, and Oceania also moved strongly into the field of vision once again. In this sense, a truly international spectrum including all regions in the world has only existed since the beginning of the 1990’s. Figures 6 and 7 from the conference in Gothenburg illustrate this process, which began in New York in 1994. Due to its structure and genesis story, the IOHA did not have any politically induced pedagogical goals and, therefore did not have any misgivings, per se, about shaping its profile in a more international way. Yet it received campaigners from other national contexts with great openness. Lutz Niethammer remembers that “[i]nitiatives from other continents… [were] welcomed with the greatest pleas Luisa Passerini, “Friendship and Truth,” in Zeit-Geschichten. Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, eds.. Jürgen John, Dirk van Laak, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 2005), 180.  Between 1980 (Peru) and 1990 (Chile), there was the end of dictatorships in most South American countries (Argentina in 1983, Brazil and Uruguay in 1985).

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ure.”²⁵ What one could interpret as a condoning internationalization emerged instead as a sign of the intrinsic characteristic of this network’s internationality.

Fig. 7: Regions examined, Gothenburg 1996, in percent. Source: conference materials, EMG archive, Jena University.

In its first 20 years, the originality of the IOHA as an international academic association had to do with its uncommon combination of spontaneity, inquisitiveness, and the aspiration to lead contemporary history down new academic paths. The fact that the protagonists were children of their time can also be determined by their familiarity with European institutionalization processes as well as the ability to complete efficient research in an informal organization.²⁶ In an essay, Lutz Niethammer emphasized how the change in paradigm in the historical sciences took place in the late 1960’s as a European phenomenon: Oral history in particular [emphasis Niethammer’s], but furthermore, everyday history in general, was a European movement from the very beginning, and that from a very characteristic context: everyone who belonged to this […] “movement,” were, of course, isolated and marginalized in their disciplinary contexts due to the superiority of the conservative methodology. Therefore, we acted in accordance with the motto: minorities of the world, unite!²⁷

In the following section, the motivation and personal dynamics of the IOHA’s key players will be examined and the question of the often-named marginalization will be explored.

 Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungs-Versuche (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 143.  Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire, 144.  Lutz Niethammer, Drei Fronten, 111.

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The International Oral History Association as a Platform for Similar-Minded People In the second half of the 1970’s, oral history quickly spread in Europe. It was a time of societal unrest and tensions as well as of new possibilities and hope that brought creative potential along with it. The policy of détente in the East-West relationships opened up new horizons in individual countries’ domestic politics, next to strategic armament and competing systems. The European Community supported the international currency system, which came into effect in 1979. In the same year, the representatives of the newly elected European parliament met for the first time. After Franco’s death in 1975 and the approval of the constitution three years later, the Spanish dictatorship ended with the establishment of the process of democratization. In Italy, the actions of the Red Brigades’ leftwing terrorism left the country holding its breath for a time; the tragic climax was the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. In Greece, the military dictatorship was finally beaten. In this climate of change, throughout all of Europe, academics from various disciplines spoke up, showed a growing interest in the “history(ies) from below” and were frequently in academic conflict with the positivistic dogmas that were prevailing at universities at the time. Local history became an impulse for the question of legitimation of the left-wing parties. In these years, among other things, innovative disciplines like microhistory,²⁸ everyday history,²⁹ or the Swedish movement “Dig Where You Stand”³⁰ came into being. As Werner Fuchs-Heinritz pointed out, The [interest in biographical research] developed appropriately and quickly at the international level: biographical researchers from Italy, France, Poland, Canada, West Germany, Switzerland, England, from third-world countries noticed that they worked on similar questions and that they were all a similar distance from the quantitative mainstream of social research. International conferences in the late 1970’s promoted the exchange and the joint self-perception of research groups. In particular, the work group at the World Congress for

 Carlo Ginsburg, Der Käse und die Würmer: Die Welt eines Müllers um 1600 (Frankfurt: Wagenbach, 1979); Giovanni Livi, “Un problema di scala,” in Dieci interventi di storia sociale, eds. S. Bonacchi et al. (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1981). In Turin, he founded the journal Microstorie, which existed between 1981 and 1991.  Dirk van Laak, “Alltagsgeschichte,” in Aufriss der Historischen Wissenschaften, Band 7: Neue Themen und Methoden der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Michael Maurer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 14– 80.  Van Laak, Alltagsgeschichte, 15; Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst. Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989).

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sociology in 1978 in Uppsala that was led by Daniel Bertaux was especially important, as was the European oral history conference in Essex in March 1979.³¹

In his description of the etiology of biographical research in sociology, Werner Fuchs-Heinritz struck the core of the IOHA’s reasons for forming. That is because parallel to this development, many researchers had the need to come into contact with each other about thematic and methodological questions about dealing with oral sources, with biographical interviews and their value in research. They were frequently dissatisfied with the academic norms and practices in their own countries and were looking for like-minded people beyond their own national borders. The domestic intellectual narrowness therefore encouraged the step towards the international stage, where there was the possibility of dialogue. In its experimental beginning years, the IOHA served as a meeting place for “researchers of intermediate spaces” (Jean-Pierre Rioux)³² or “intermediate cultural carriers” (Lutz Niethammer),³³ who saw it as their task to create contacts and connections. The view into the neighboring countries and beyond turned out to be methodologically fruitful. The first impulses of an international network of oral historians were not just initiated by continental European researchers, but much more so by researchers from the USA and Great Britain. The search for allies arose from various situations and sensitivities. While Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, and Spaniards wanted to overcome their – at least perceived – academic isolation, the British and American oral historians were looking for new horizons.

Looking for New Horizons Starting in the 1950’s, the development of oral history accelerated, thanks to the increasing prevalence of tape recorders. Their beginnings were in the United States and were borne at two different institutions.³⁴ The sociologists William Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, and Robert Park from the University of Chicago, who were occupied with life narratives in the 1930’s, took the first steps. They founded a school

 Werner Fuchs-Heinritz, Biographische Forschung: Eine Einführung in Praxis und Methoden (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005), 118.  Jean-Pierre Rioux, interview with Agnès Arp, Paris, December 18, 2006.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with the research group, June 30, 2007, Grünow, Germany.  Florence Descamps, L’historien, l’archiviste et le magnétophone. De la constitution de la source orale à son exploitation (Paris: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique, Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2001), 28 – 40.

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of thought that, since the 1960’s, has been able to offer a wide reservoir of topics and inspirations for many successors. Parallel to this, in 1960, Oscar Lewis published The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, which was widespread and had high appeal. In 1967, Studs Terkel published Division Street: America, biographies of Chicago residents during the world economic crisis of 1929. This book became a massive success. Studs Terkel, a graduate of the University of Chicago, spread oral history methods, goals, and achievements. The second oral history tradition in the USA owes its founding to Allan Nevins at Columbia University, who, together with Louis Starr, founded the Columbia University Oral History Research Office in 1948. They were not just interested in collecting stories “from below,” but rather, were interested in systematically archiving biographical stories of famous Americans, based on interviews carried out with them.³⁵ In 1967, Nevins founded the American Oral History Association. Beginning in 1973, approaches and ideas on oral history could be spread via the journal Oral History Review. In this phase, the focus of American oral history moved farther away, to Central and South America, on the hunt for American Indian roots, to Israel, moved by topics that included power structures, and finally to Canada, where the Francophone and indigenous cultures, which are a minority there, were motivation to hold interviews. The Canadian Oral History Association was founded in 1974. Louis Starr played a decisive role in doing so, in that he actively made contacts abroad, in order to make the work of other oral historians known in the USA.³⁶ At the same time in England, Paul Thompson worked for a similar reason. In addition to Raphael Samuel,³⁷ he was a key figure in the spread of work with oral sources. Thompson traveled through Europe, Africa, North and South America, founded the journal Oral History in 1971, and was active in the founding of the Oral History Society. Through his numerous undertakings, he made acquaintanceships with academics, who later became loyal visitors of the IOHA conferences. Beatrys de Graeve, who completed distance studies in Oral History with Paul Thompson in Colchester from 1981 to 1985, worked as the secretary of the international network for some time. In her memory, it was identical to the Oral History Society:

 Louis Starr, “Oral History in den USA. Probleme und Perspektiven” in Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History, ed. Lutz Niethammer (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 40. See also Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History (Boston: Anchor, 1985).  See, among others, Ronald J. Grele, “From the Intimate Circle to Globalized Oral History,” Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios 4.1– 2 (2007– 2008): 2.  In 1971, Raphael Samuel founded the History Workshop movement. Anna Davin, interview with Julie Boekhoff, London, July 20, 2007.

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For me, the Oral History Society was first and foremost British; it was Paul Thompson and the club with Paul. And I think that Paul and the people around him, when they institutionalized the Oral History Society, that it was very important, to de-Brit… to internationalize it a little bit. But I think, England was always in a leading position, because Paul was the founding father, and he was for a long time. And because Paul has a personality – very extroverted, very sociable, I think that was very important in creating an Oral History Society. Because Paul always made the initiative towards institutionalization, so that the movement would expand. If I think about it now, the Oral History Society was protectionistic for too long.³⁸

De Graeve felt like an outsider, if anything: even though she was active in the inner circle for a while, she was really only close to Paul Thompson. In this way, her name was among those on the first draft of the IOHA constitution (1987). Beatrys de Graeve was simultaneously an outsider and directly involved; she belonged to the generation of students and, furthermore, has not dealt with Oral History in the past 20 years. Therefore, she has an outsider’s perspective, which, among other things, confirms our thesis on the IOHA’s internationality. The first phase of internationalization can be reconstructed by the exchange of letters between Paul Thompson and Ronald Grele.³⁹ After Thompson had talked to him,⁴⁰ in November 1974, Grele suggested a personal meeting at the American Historical Association conference in New York City. Ronald Grele was interested in talking with him about “the state of the art of oral history in England and any mutual concerns about the practice of oral history which we might have.”⁴¹ They agreed to meet for brunch at the Conrad Hilton Hotel on December 29. This date was the beginning of a long and productive cooperation. One first step towards this took shape in the idea of a bi-national meeting with English and American oral historians.⁴² Ronald Grele envisioned two meetings, in England and the USA respectively, with a maximum of 25 participants. In October 1978, Ronald Grele founded an international journal for oral history. In addition to Thompson, Daniel Bertaux, Annemarie Tröger, and Luisa Passerini, whom Grele had met at the conference in Colchester, worked as corre-

 Beatrys de Graeve, interview with Annette Leo, Ghent, November 25, 2008. Even now, she is close friends with Paul Thompson.  Ronald Grele’s letters, EMG archive, Jena.  The question of whether Ronald Grele was then aware of the difficult exchange between Louis Starr and Paul Thompson remains unclear. Grele wrote, “Louis Starr […went] to England to a meeting of the British Oral History Society where he met Thompson and they became immediate enemies. Ronald Grele, From the Intimate Circle to Globalized Oral History, 2.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Paul Thompson, November 25, 1974.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Paul Thompson, February 21, 1975.

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spondents.⁴³ The International Journal of Oral History was published for the first time in 1980. Luisa Passerini had set six goals for this, and among others, one was “to help foster a community of scholars working along similar lines.”⁴⁴ The journal’s creators had the expectation that it would be interdisciplinary and would help spread American oral history to Europe. This moment seemed to be decisive for some oral historians. Ronald Grele remembers, “When we met in Essex, in my memory, the mood was ecstatic. Many of us working alone, in significant ways on the fringes of the academy, found ourselves among comrades.”⁴⁵ Some of the protagonists came together for the first time in Colchester, but other important representatives of the later network were not yet present at this conference, such as Mercedes Vilanova.

Fleeing from National Constriction Mercedes Vilanova also took the path via the USA and, four years prior to the conference in Colchester, had made an important acquaintanceship: In 1975, I was in the United States, in Berkeley, and I met Willa Baum⁴⁶ in the ROOH [Research Office Oral History]. I think she was a wonderful woman. I worked with her in her office. At this time, the 15th International Congress of Historical Sciences was taking place. I said to Willa Baum – you have to know, at this time, oral history was totally marginal – I said to her, we have to go to this conference and say: “We’re here.” Willa Baum then rented a room in the Fairmont Hotel and the first oral history workshop took place there. And this workshop was such a success that the secretary of this international organization, whom she had invited, said to her at the end, “In Bucharest, I will create an official oral history section,” and he did it.⁴⁷

This “secretary” was none other than Louis Starr, who cultivated contacts with oral historians from all over the world.⁴⁸ In 1980, Mercedes Vilanova participated

 Letter from Daniel Bertaux to Ronald Grele, March 31, 1979.  Letter from Ronald Grele to Daniel Bertaux, December 4, 1979. This letter was also sent to the other correspondents.  Ronald Grele, “Oral History and Contemporary History: Friendly Intersections and Memories,” in Zeit-Geschichten. Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, eds. Jürgen John, Dirk van Laak, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 2005), 77.  Willa Klug Baum (1926 – 2006) did pioneering work in the spread of oral history in the USA. In 1958, she became head of the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO), which had been founded in 1954 in Berkeley.  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 5, 2008.  Grele, From the Intimate Circle, 2.

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in the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Bucharest and gave a talk within the framework of a panel about problems and methods in oral history. There, she met the Frenchman François Bédarida, who was director of the IHTP until 1980, who brought her into contact with the IOHA. The first IOHA conference in which Vilanova participated was the one in Aix-en-Provence (1982). This event was actively supported and organized by historians from the IHTP, in cooperation with Aix-Marseille University, where Philippe Joutard had a professorship. Joutard was among the protagonists who had prepared the path for oral history in France. In 1967, he had completed his first interview with a farmer from Cévennes for his dissertation about the Camisard insurrection.⁴⁹ In 1974, he became a professor of modern history, and since then, has been occupied with oral history questions. He does not call it oral history, however, and rather understands it to be “research with oral sources.” Parallel to this, historians focusing on contemporary history in Paris were occupied with similar questions. They gathered around Bédarida and his colleagues: Jean-Pierre Rioux, Danièle Voldman, and Michael Pollack. For his part, Rioux participated in IOHA conferences twice (in Barcelona and Aix-en-Provence) and he had international contacts with Italian and German colleagues, among others, but did not develop any joint projects with them. Danièle Voldman⁵⁰ was in a similar situation. In 1981, as an employee at the IHTP, she began to co-develop a new department for interviews. Eleven years later, together with the other historians, she published the book La bouche de la vérité? ⁵¹ and then turned to other research topics. In our interview, she spoke about the competition between the IHTP and Daniel Bertaux, who was coming from the field of sociology, as well as Philippe Joutard, which broke out in Oxford in 1987. Apparently, it is due to these conflicts that Voldman did not take part in the following IOHA conferences. In France in the 1980’s, oral history was temporarily experiencing a real boom, which quickly faded away again. At this time, the sociologists Daniel and Isabelle Bertaux researched about biographical interviews and consciously directed their studies towards a qualitative direction with new methodological approaches. In his interview, Daniel Bertaux reported on the experience of intellectual awakening that the readings in Oscar Lewis’s 1961 book had triggered in him:

 The Camisard insurrection is an armed conflict that took place between 1702 and 1705, with the Protestants of the Cévennes and part of the lower Languedoc against the royal commander.  Danièle Voldman, interview with Agnès Arp and Annette Leo, Paris, April 3, 2007.  Danièle Voldman, ed. La bouche de la vérité? La recherche historique et les sources orales, IHTP 21 (1992).

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So, the Children of Sánchez, that was shocking to me. And I told myself, that’s it, that, what you want to do. Biographical stories. And that has nothing to do with mathematics.⁵² And yes, of course everyone in the sociology department [in Paris] said: but the guy is crazy, he trained in engineering at a technical college, he has a wild life. This wild life looking for something qualitative, things, so, people’s narratives that… back then, one said, “Oh, listen to these talks, where people tell something,” that’s grotesque, that is everything other than academic, the academic things, those are numbers.⁵³

In Daniel Bertaux was met with incomprehension from his colleagues in Paris, at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH). Therefore, he began to give lectures in English, such as in the framework of the ISA. Later, he heard of Paul Thompson and then began to do everything to network himself internationally, because he felt alone academically in France: This milieu never offered me anything. […] That is the reason why I began an international career, because there, I was together with like-minded people. There weren’t any hierarchies. I loved that. That’s why I had this friendship with Paul Thompson.⁵⁴

Eventually he met Nicole Gagnon in Quebec and invited her to Paris, in order to offer a seminar with her at the MSH.⁵⁵ At the same time, he still harbored the hope that oral history would become established in France. In 1979, he wrote to Grele that he wanted to ensure that this method would be spread. Back then, he emphasized that at that point in time, he knew very little about American oral history.⁵⁶ In an interview, he added, But what I want to say is that this international milieu was made up of people who made up a type of intellectual community, especially politically, and a generational community.⁵⁷ Between us, one never spoke about careers, but about international or domestic politics, […] we talked about our enemies, who did not understand, be it the traditional historians or… it never had to do with careers, no interest, and in general, it also really wasn’t about the

 Daniel Bertaux had studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1957 and, in 1963, finished a Master of Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. After his return to Paris, he finished an additional degree in sociology in 1966.  Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, Sèvres, France, November 16, 2006.  Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, November 16, 2006.  Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, November 16, 2006.  Letter from Daniel Bertaux to Ronald Grele, March 31, 1979.  Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, November 16, 2006. This political community does not imply, strictly speaking, that all protagonists were also key players of the 1968 movement. For example, Lutz Niethammer never felt like a member of the 1968 generation, but still had an important relationship to it.

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other person’s paper. No criticism. That was very congenial. About as many men as women, but absolutely no academic atmosphere.⁵⁸

The excitement of the beginning phase, carried by naïve euphoria, becomes clear in Bertaux’s retrospective assessment. At the same time, this illustrates the central impulse for the creation of the international communitization. Due to the national isolation of many oral history pioneers in the 1960’s, the IOHA developed into a refuge and also a protective space in which they were no longer outsiders. Marginalization in established academic milieus lead to the search for confirmation at the international level, which required a basic political agreement. All of the leading protagonists were familiar with this situation, even in Italy, where oral history still needed more time in order to be taken seriously. The Italian Marcella Filippa is a profound expert on the Italian oral history landscape. In 1981, she completed her doctorate about oral history with Luisa Passerini and Aldo Agosti. It was the first dissertation with this new approach that had been defended in Turin. Filippa also makes it clear how the innovation came to Germany via Luisa Passerini, and emphasizes the initial predisposition for international cooperation. Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Fertelli were the ones who connected the national and international levels. They were in the position of creating and maintaining international contacts, and they had brought the international movement and its most important topics into the national context. Young researchers and students were integrated by them and were familiarized with the international questions and debates.⁵⁹ For years, Marcella Filippa was occupied with the subjectivity approach developed by Luisa Passerini. In turn, Mary Marshall Clark very productively turned to it in the United States. Yet the idea of researching with oral sources did not penetrate Italy’s academic spheres. Multiple articles reported about their marginalization in the 1970’s.⁶⁰ In 1981, Alessandro Portelli spoke about a specter that was spooking academic lecture halls, […] the spectre of “oral history”. The Italian intellectual community, always suspicious of news from outside […] and even more wary of those who suggest going outside – has hastened to cut oral history down to size before even trying to understand what it is and how to use it.⁶¹

 Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, November 16, 2006. See also Christian König’s text in this volume about the career possibilities that the IOHA opened up to Daniel Bertaux, as well as information on his intellectual exchange with Louise Tilly.  Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008.  Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop 1981: 96 – 107; Giovanni Contini, “Towards a Story of Oral History in Italy,” BIOS Special Issue 1990: 57– 63.  Portelli, The Peculiarities of Oral History, 96.

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He repeated this statement 16 years later, when he became aware of the persistence of the rejection that oral history still experienced in Italian academic circles in an intellectual as well as in a political way. He described himself back then as the only oral historian in Italy who had gotten a professorship, and that outside of the historical sciences. Institutionally, oral history in Italy does not exist. Its intellectual impact nationally is also quite out of proportion with its international visibility. […] For the professional intellectual community in Italy, with very few exceptions, the work with which our international colleagues engage in dialogue might as well not exist.⁶²

He was aware of Luisa Passerini’s difficult situation. In her country, she did not experience a step up in her career, even though she was experiencing breakthroughs at the international level. She was discriminated against “for the same reasons why she was a star at the international level, and because she is a woman.”⁶³ Passerini said in the interview that she could draw creative energy from this – naturally highly stylized – intellectual ban. Standing outside of a network… I became a professor when no more fruit could be borne […], a way of standing on the edge, […] I was not discontent with this marginality, because otherwise, the price is very high […], even at a personal level […], that would have been unbearable for me […], and the marginality also teaches something […], standing with one foot outside allows you to appreciate certain things; it is a lifestyle, a coherent decision.⁶⁴

Other conference participants who were also interested in the topics and methods were also looking for new horizons, and they developed their own research topics, possibly due to curiosity about other methodical processes. Björn Horgby speaks as a representative for some of the visitors who viewed the IOHA conferences as a possibility for continuing education in oral history and as a forum for international cooperation for certain thematic areas, in his case working-class culture and working-class history.⁶⁵

 Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, XV.  Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, April 18, 2008. In the mid-1980’s, Passerini received an assistant professorship. It was only in 2002 that she took over the department of cultural history at the University of Turin. In the interview, she linked this stagnation with the extravagance of her topics and the method.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Pavarolo, Italy, April 12, 2008.  Björn Horgby, interview with Christian König, Linköping, Sweden, June 12, 2007. In his interview, he emphasized the difference between researchers who viewed oral history as a calling,

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Could the pioneers and representatives of oral history or research with oral sources⁶⁶ become established in their own countries? Or did the active participation in the IOHA conferences serve as a springboard to an international academic career?

The International Oral History Association as a Space for Establishment Many of the protagonists considered themselves outsiders. Without a doubt, this is due to early experiences. Later, this self-image still remained, even long after they had received academic positions. The process of establishing oral history as well as its initiators was, to a certain extent, strongly dependent on the position of contemporary history / modern history in the academic landscape of individual countries.

The Development of Transnational Projects If the influence of the USA cannot be brushed aside, it is important to note that the unstoppable spread of oral history in Europe in the 1970’s does not just lead back to that. The internationalization of oral history is more complex and has multiple roots. For all of the protagonists, above-average travel activity is characteristic, as it led them to the USA as well as to many European and non-European countries, where they carried their impulses, to and from which they took impulses with them. Activity such as this was possibly decisive in keeping an informal network together. In doing so, perhaps in a different way, they picked up the tradition of the international worker’s movement. Bi- or transnational exchange came about through opportunities, through meetings, conferences,

and researchers who used it as one method, among others. Next to the international cooperation, networking via working class studies also played an important role. For example, Birgitta Skarin Frykman co-organized a working-class culture conference in 1986 in Norrköping, Sweden. This conference, specifically for working class studies, served as a meeting point for what Frykman differentiated between as two groups of people: oral historians and people who use oral history. Frykman counts herself among the former. Paul Thompson also invited Frykman to the IOHA conference in Essex (1979) and her regular participation is proof of her interest in oral history.  Here, the discipline is to be taken into consideration. Anthropologists and ethnologists did not need to legitimize their reliance on oral sources.

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texts. The key players were likewise members of European or international associations of sociology, history, literature, or other areas. A “general importer” served as an intermediary into the national level, who had a bridging function.⁶⁷ A person who participated in the conferences to present his own work had good perspectives to see his work then published in other countries and in the USA. In 1978, Lutz Niethammer published a report of his trip to the USA, with which the practice of oral history was presented in Germany for the first time.⁶⁸ The new method inspired him to begin his large research project about worker’s history in the Ruhr region.⁶⁹ After arriving in Essex, he had the idea to present his first oral history work samples from various national cultures, in order to learn from them. Colchester provided the necessary material for this book. In April 1977, Luisa Passerini invited Paul Thompson to Bologna. In addition, at the British Oral History Society in conference in Edinburgh, she made more contacts.⁷⁰ In 1979, she published an anthology with English oral history texts.⁷¹ Passerini remembers the conference in Bologna as “pre-history,” but here, the first steps were taken: “[w]e didn’t even know that there was the oral history movement; we discovered that in Essex.”⁷² Already, for the following year, there was extensive correspondence with English oral historians. Viewed over the long term, it had to do with making people aware of the new method, finding attention, and supporting the acceptance of oral history. The work of English oral historians could therefore be imported to Italy, and, the other way around, Passerini’s book became an important reference work for Alessandro Portelli and Giovanni Contini. The History Workshop Journal (HWJ) also turned out to be a significant instrument for communication. Here, Ronald Grele came across Passerini’s name for the first time, and Portelli’s first English article was published in the HWJ. The need for international exchange further materialized itself in a project about the automotive industry (Passerini / Thompson), in which Daniele Jalla from Turin

 For the definition of the bridging function among the members of the core group, see Christian König’s contribution to this volume.  Lutz Niethammer, “Oral History in USA. Zur Entwicklung und Problematik diachroner Befragungen,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 18 (1978): 457– 501.  Lutz Niethammer, ed., Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980), 78.  Luisa Passerini, Friendship and Truth, 178.  Luisa Passerini, ed., Storia Orale. Vita quotidiana e cultura delle classi subalterne (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1978). Passerini worked on the anthology between the conferences in Bologna and Essex. See also Niethammer’s comments about Passerini in his book Ego-Histoire, 145.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Pavarolo, Italy, April 12, 2008.

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also played a key role.⁷³ In addition, in 1984, Paul Thompson and Daniel Bertaux initiated a project about family and social mobility, which, among other things, failed due to financial difficulties. Thompson finally integrated some results in a book about aging.⁷⁴ Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, as further companions of the early phase, supported multiple work groups with various IOHA protagonists. For them, the conference in 1985 marked the beginning of cooperations with Spanish and Italian colleagues, including Cristina Borderías, who interviewed women with similar targets and methodological approaches. In doing so, she placed the focus of her examination not on their biographies, but rather on the structures and framework conditions of life.⁷⁵ Many French-Italian meetings took place and projects were initiated based around the group in Val d’Aoste with Passerini and Joutard. Joutard seemed to be the focal point of this Turin group. Daniele Jalla mentions his name at multiple points in his interview,⁷⁶ and has remained in contact with him until today, because in addition to their work with oral sources, both have published on similar topics. Special similarities developed between the French and Spanish academics, who rejected the term “oral history” and argued for the term “oral sources.” The French considered the confrontation of various sources to be very important. In addition, they were more critical of oral sources than written sources and could appeal to the Annales school with their skepticism. In comparison with Great Britain, the history workshop movement was underdeveloped. The French and Spaniards were linked by a great interest in methodological discussions. With regard to this, Mercedes Vilanova and Philippe Joutard were very close.⁷⁷ Similar to the French, Vilanova represented an understanding of oral history concentrated on the historians. A Spanish and South American exchange began in 1988, when Eugenia Meyer organized the first international meeting of Latin American, South America, and Spanish oral historians. In summary, that means that representatives of oral history from the USA profited from innovations and academic cultures from Europe. Parallel to this,

 Paul Thompson, interview with Julie Boekhoff, Wivenhoe, England, July 17, 2007. This project turned into a catastrophe, as the new provincial government seized the interviews.  Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson, eds., Pathways to Social Class: A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility (Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 1997).  Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, interview with Agnès Arp, Nanterre, France, April 4, 2007.  Daniele Jalla, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, March 11, 2008.  Vilanova, Por una historia sin adjetivos, 95 – 116.

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European researchers found the basis and also legitimacy for their efforts in the American research. At the core, they were a single-purpose movement, which was held together through the exchange of experiences about the innovation of qualitative interview research in contemporary history and its neighboring social and cultural disciplines, by penetrating the memory and remembrance dimension of history and the trial and academic verification of this new method. Different from the primary locally- and in all cases nationally organized history workshops, the oral historians (despite their mostly local connection to their research and the national-cultural dependence on language in the oral method) first organized themselves internationally. Practically, that first meant Western European (with a North American offshoot). In this process, there was what is a highly-characteristic mode of European communitization, also for many NGOs: in their national institutions, innovators on the edge change the level of action and, in the trans-national space (initially Western Europe), establish the experimental and validating networks, so that they can then – medially strengthened – play off against the forces of persistence in their respective home countries.

Internationality as a Stepping Stone for an Academic Career While protagonists of the early IOHA encountered problems in the establishment of their academic careers, Paul Thompson, Ronald Grele, and Lutz Niethammer emphasize that the transition from their studies to an academic position was not associated with any difficulties. That has to do with the expansion of education in the 1960’s and 1970’s, when numerous universities were founded and academic positions were set up. At the age of 45, Paul Thompson became a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and in 1973, at the age of 34, Lutz Niethammer received a professorship in modern history at the University of Duisburg-Essen; at relatively young ages, both received well-paid positions as university lecturers. In the 1970’s, Alessandro Portelli, Pietro Clemente, Alun Howkins, and Philippe Joutard also became professors.⁷⁸ One could claim that these positions in academia were not necessarily associated with academic reputations. Rather, one tried to get them with new methods and research topics, a desire that was accompanied by an aspiration for innovative topics. As an association of researchers, the IOHA offered a platform

 In the 1980’s, Botz and Triulzi became professors; in the 1990’s, Vilanova, Passerini, Horgby, and Gribaudi also became professors.

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that made it possible to bypass nationally established academic committees and organizations, but also receive a professional reputation at the international level, which then also counted in one’s own country and would be recognized. Paul Thompson’s efforts with regard to this were often mentioned in the interviews. Of course, this implies that the degree of establishment was necessarily measured by an academic structure or recognition and other levels at which research was being done were excluded.⁷⁹ The IOHA was used as a space to fulfill the protagonists’ joint “mission”: to strengthen the method internationally, in order to be nationally accepted. Many protagonists of the core group were already academically experienced and had a great interest in introducing oral history as a method of academic research. A space was created at the international level that fulfilled the academic “community’s” expectations for an acceptable method; that is, holding international conferences with publications and in doing so, showing strength, presence, and professionality. In an interview, Lutz Niethammer described how conscious the core group’s protagonists were of making the method presentable back then, in order to establish a more democratic understanding of history at the university.⁸⁰ The efforts of Philippe Joutard, who supervised master theses using histoire orale at Aix-Marseille University beginning in 1975, also went in the same direction.⁸¹ Now retired, he is continuing to evaluate qualification work and dissertations and is still working in accordance with his self-understanding as a proponent of oral sources – an academic and intellectual position that is not very common in France. During his period as the rector of the Akademie Aix-Marseille, he was asked by François Bédarida to lead an oral history workshop at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Montreal in 1995. Joutard contacted Mercedes Vilanova, who had already recruited him for her journal Historia y Fuente Oral in 1989. Yet the French historian’s role in the IOHA remained minor and at the end of the 1980’s, continued to lose significance in the academic milieus.⁸² At the beginning of the 1980’s, Joutard still had the hope that oral history had a future, which caused him to take over

 See the summary of this written by Michel Trebitsch, “Du mythe à l’historiographie,” in La bouche de la vérité? La recherche historique et les sources orales, ed. Danièle Voldman, Cahiers de l’IHTP 21 (November 1992): 13 – 32.  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Annette Leo and Philipp Heß, Jena, Germany, May 28, 2008.  Together with linguists and ethnologists, in 1978 – 79, he offered seminars about histoire orale. His book, Ces voix qui nous viennent du passé (Paris: Hachette, 1983) offered French-speaking readers a nationally valid book on oral history for the first time. See Philippe Joutard, telephone interview with Agnès Arp, October 28, 2008.  Danièle Voldman, interview with Agnès Arp and Annette Leo, Paris, April 3, 2007.

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the organization of the next conference. To do so, he had ensured the support of the IHTP. As the results of oral history projects continued to gain skepticism,⁸³ however, he felt like he had been left alone.⁸⁴ There were also impulses in Italy, such as the founding of the national Oral History Association (2006). Gabriella Gribaudi shows, for example, that oral history was first established in academia when it became one method among many. Gribaudi herself had always evaluated oral sources among other sources in her academic work as a historian. She only participated in one IOHA conference, as a recent graduate in Bologna (1976), as she did not have much money and in her conference attendance, oriented herself towards thematic and not methodological questions. Today, Gribaudi is the president of the new Italian Oral History Association.⁸⁵ In Spain, the problem was that there were too few researchers and furthermore, that they did not get along. Nevertheless, cornerstones were laid at the end of the 1980’s, with the formation of the Oral History Association in Barcelona and the founding of the journal Historia y Fuente Oral. Cristina Borderías dates the excitement in the founding, which brought new vitality to the Spanish debates, to the conference in Colchester (1979).⁸⁶ In the Netherlands, the path via the IOHA was the only way for the researchers affected to avoid intellectual isolation.⁸⁷ However, the institutional presence is weak there, similar to the way it is in Belgium or Scandinavia. Finally, the support of national organizations is one of the IOHA’s requirements. Since 1996, it has tried to strengthen local, individual initiatives.⁸⁸

 See Florence Descamps’s monumental study on the history of oral history in France, L’historien, l’archiviste et le magnétophone. De la constitution de la source orale à son exploitation (Paris: CHEFF, 2001).  Philippe Joutard, interview with Agnès Arp, Paris, November 15, 2006.  An oral history association had been planned for a long time. In the 1980’s, the two key pillars, Bermani’s and Portelli’s institutes, were in crisis. See Contini, Towards a Story of Oral History in Italy, 63; Gabriella Gribaudi, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Naples, March 20, 2007.  Cristina Borderías, “L’histoire orale en Espagne,” BIOS Special Issue (1990): 49.  Jaap Talsma and Selma Leydesdorff, “Oral History in the Netherlands,” BIOS Special Issue (1990): 75.  Article G of the 1996 constitution, IOHA, http://www.iohanet.org/about/documents/7- 06re vIOHACOnstEng.pdf, accessed April 27, 2011.

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Internationality, A Controversy? Since the conference in Colchester in 1979, the IOHA’s core group has claimed the internationality of their activities. But what kind of internationality was it, really – was the IOHA European, transatlantic, or global? The conference in Colchester was significantly called the International European Conference in Oral History. In the following 20 years, the adjective “European” was dropped. However, Luisa Passerini emphasized that this international orientation still had a Eurocentric note at the beginning: Most of the participants [in Essex] were in fact European, except a minority. While there were elements of Eurocentrism in this, there was also the discovery of a continent very different from the Europe of power, i. e. the Europe of workers, peasants, migrants, of associations’ internationalism, and of material culture.⁸⁹

One can view this first European phase with transatlantic expansion as the prestage of the later globalization. In contrast, one could also argue that already in this first phase, the ideas were already divergent in terms of what direction this internationalization should take. The core group of the young IOHA was made up of people who came from different countries and were situated in their own career and intellectual logic. As far as their understanding of oral history is concerned, we have determined that it can be divided into Anglo-Saxon, social sciences-based, and Latin schools, which were inspired by anthropological methods. After the Bologna conference, the anthropologists and historians / sociologists once again went their separate ways. According to Pietro Clemente, “after this moment of interdisciplinary harmony and public significance, oral history took a complicated path of development.”⁹⁰ Concerning the understanding of internationality, within the IOHA, one can also distinguish two main groups: the Transatlantists and the Eurocentrists. The main points of discussion were the languages as a medium of international communication within the network and questions about the complex problem of institutionalization, as well as methodological and theoretical opinions. Those debates accompanied the IOHA throughout the first 20 years of its existence. Finally, it took 20 years to give the IOHA a framework and when it was created, there was the re-formation of 1996. This was due to the division into a European-transatlantic, more sociologically oriented wing, and a

 Passerini, Friendship and Truth, 180.  Pietro Clemente, Triglie di scoglio: Tracce del Sessantotto cagliaritano (Cagliari, Italy: CUEC, 2002).

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global wing, more oriented on cultural anthropology, embodied by Paul Thompson and Mercedes Vilanova. In particular, the oral historians from Spanish-speaking regions throughout the world could gain increasingly greater significance. Eugenia Meyer described how, after oral history workshops in Brazil in 1976 and Venezuela in 1977, she and her team began to collect material for projects in 10 Latin American and Caribbean countries. UNESCO supported this initiative, which ended in 1984 and generated a wealth of papers on oral history. Journals were founded and regular meetings were organized. Three years later, the Latin American presence at the sixth IOHA conference in Oxford had increased significantly.⁹¹ By this point at the latest, the dominance of the English language left a sense of unease with the native speakers of Spanish.⁹² As a reaction to this, in 1988 in Mexico, the first international meeting of oral historians from Latin America and Spain was organized, and around 150 researchers from 12 countries attended.⁹³ This event can be viewed as the IOHA’s counterpart on the (South) American continent. The growing self-confidence of the Spanishspeaking community became much more noticeable in the following meetings. In retrospect, Mercedes Vilanova constructed a tradition of its own: In 2008, with the decision to hold the next IOHA conference in Mexico, a circle was completed that began in 1988, when Eugenia Meyer organized the first international meeting of oral historians from Latin America and Spain at the Instituto Mora. This meeting was understood as an answer to the marginalization that we Spanish-speaking historians had suffered under at the conference in Oxford in the previous year. Following the conference in Barcelona back then, we founded the journal Historia y Fuente Oral with the first debate topic: “Oral History?” and we distanced ourselves from the populistic theses that specified that we give “the voiceless a voice,” without taking experiences from anthropology and studies of the oral tradition in Africa into consideration. At the initiative from Padre Batllori

 Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 5, 2008.  The sociologists in the ISA also went through this process. In the 1970’s, Spanish was added as a recognized language, but English remained the administrative language. At the beginning, English and French were the two official languages of the ISA. When the US hegemony increasingly asserted itself and UNESCO no longer had such a central appearance, the dominant position of the French language was endangered. In 1958, the Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française was founded, which immediately joined the ISA. At the ISA congress in Mexico (1982), the role of the Spanish language was discussed. Many local sociologists, especially students, felt linguistically excluded and protested against the lack of translation possibilities; the ISA could seldom afford simultaneous translations. When there was a similar protest at the congress in Madrid (1990), it was agreed to add Spanish to the list of official languages. See Jennifer Platt, A Brief History of the ISA: 1948 – 1997. Madrid: International Sociological Association, 1998, 29, 37.  Eugenia Meyer, “Recovering, Remembering, Denouncing, Keeping the Memory of the Past Updated: Oral History in Latin America and the Caribbean,” BIOS Special Issue (1990): 20.

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(Bucharest 1980) and François Bédarida (Montreal 1995), the oral sources penetrated the academic and official world with power at the International Congress of Historical Sciences, which took place every five years. After the “Twenty-Five Years of Oral History” roundtable talk in Montreal, which was published in [Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales] 14, we viewed one of the goals for which we had fought to be achieved and decided to begin a new epoch with a new title: Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales. The founding of the IOHA in 1996 meant a democratization of our movement and opening it to other continents, breaking apart the Anglo-Saxon axis and passing on leadership roles to new generations.⁹⁴

Conclusion In Western Europe, oral history developed out of the political and social problems of the 1960’s. New questions were posed to the past; new topics were raised and answering them required new methodological tools. At the beginning, the IOHA was a platform for intellectual exchange and the search for a dialogue that appeared to be unthinkable in the participants’ own countries. The networking with foreign researchers and like-minded people, the search for fellow comrades-in-arms, for new, different epistemological possibilities required the path to internationality. Until the mid-1980’s, measured by the speakers’ regions of origin and the regions being examined and conferences were not international, strictly speaking, but were transatlantic in the best case. But the novelty of this academic dealing and its self-understanding as a cross-border movement brought about long-term emotional effects in many participants that still affect them today. As can be derived from Lutz Niethammer’s estimation: It was something typically European […]: the break-out from national blockades into a utopian practice, first in Europe. Only then could we learn from each other and receive resonance. And I believe that the relatively strong resonance that everyday history and oral history had in the 1980’s was not least because of this Europeanization process, which was a path of hope and simultaneously a festival.⁹⁵

Until 1990, the composition of the IOHA was more European than international. After that, on the one hand, the Eastern European, and on the other hand, the Central and South American presence enriched the conferences. The IOHA had finally become, as Ronald Grele put it, “really international.” Today, the IOHA, like all significant international organizations – one is tempted to say unavoid-

 Mercedes Vilanova, “Las fuentes orales entre Bolonia (1976) y México (2008),” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 36.2 (2006): 49.  Lutz Niethammer, Drei Fronten, 112.

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ably – has entered the global phase of its existence. Parallel to the acceleration of mobility and communication, the IOHA has turned to countries farther away and consciously accepted a global profile, which is clearly visible online today. On the one hand, the internationality of the IOHA was intrinsic, because the methods required it, and on the other hand, it was due to the isolation at the national level. The internationalization was consequent, because in many cases, limitations and obstacles of national structures could be circumvented. At the same time, the internationality was controversial and reflected a question of power, to the extent that the protagonists had various visions of their functions. In this sense, certain and positively-connotated key terms like European, transatlantic, transnational, and global, concealed specific, by all means pronounced constellations of power (European-transatlantic-sociological vs. Spanish-speaking-cultural anthropological, etc.). Finally, the internationality of the IOHA was unavoidable, because a national institutionalization of this method had not taken place in the field of history, except for in Italy, Great Britain, and the USA. All in all, the international network’s protagonists detected, tried out, developed, and supported alternative academic methods. For them and others, the IOHA became an experimental space.

Silvia Musso

The International Oral History Association as an Interdisciplinary Laboratory Introduction In a lecture at the first conference of the Italian oral history association AISO (Associazione Italiana di Storia Orale) in Rome on March 16, 2007, Alistair Thomson, the current president of the IOHA, outlined the development of oral history from the end of World War II to the digital revolution in the late 1990’s and named four factors that had influenced oral history during this time period: – The growing significance of political and legal practices in which personal testimony is a central resource; – The increasing interdisciplinarity of approaches to interviewing and the interpretation of memory; – The proliferation of studies from the 1980’s concerned with the relationship between history and memory; and – The evolving internationalism of oral history.¹ At the same time, Alistair Thomson also emphasized that the expanded dialogue between the various disciplines dealing with oral sources developed parallel to each other and developed consequent to the critical awareness for the topics of memory and subjectivity that was emerging. It was subjectivity that gave oral sources meaning, because in them, people gave their past a sense; they explain it and use these interpretations in the present. The discussion about the central role of the interviewed in historical discourse is the same for those disciplines that use oral sources next to other documentation sources. In the opinion of Thomson, an Australian historian, this tendency can be linked to the end of the 1970’s. It coincides with the birth of the international oral history movement and with the organization of larger European conferences as platforms, where academics and non-academic researchers from Europe and elsewhere came together and discussed what were, from their various perspectives, often similar topics. At the first conferences in Bologna (1976), Colchester

 Alistair Thomson, “Dancing Through the Memory of Our Movement: Four Paradigmatic Revolutions in Oral History,” Oral History Australia, accessed June 26, 2002, http://www.ohaansw.org./au/page/oral_history_papers.html. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-007

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(1979), and Amsterdam (1980), intellectuals from various academic disciplines participated, including from anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and historical science. The conference in Bologna, the first of the international conferences about oral sources examined here, was a meeting of historical science and anthropology. It was organized by anthropologists, mostly African studies specialists, who, in their field studies, often dealt with the question of orality in societies with no form of writing, or where traditions were primarily orally transmitted. At the conference, attention was paid to the relationship between history and anthropology, their different methods – one diachronic, the other primarily synchronic – and in the center of the debate was their dealing with orality. The difference between a synchronic and a diachronic discipline is important for this dialogue and the debate back then. A subject area like anthropology, which developed in the 19th century during the expansion of the colonial empires, had the goal of researching communities, tribes, and ethnic groups and that in the state in which they were found at the present moment that the research work was being done. The concentration on the here and now in the research excluded a deeper historical perspective that could have captured the changes and transformations of the societies being examined. For a long time, cultural identities were therefore understood to be static and unchanging, and only thanks to the exchange with the historical sciences was it possible to integrate a temporal dimension that had previously been non-existent, but at the same time, was fundamental for a deeper understanding of the context. Conversely, in dealing with their objects of research, the social sciences developed innovative methods like interviews and participatory observation, which generally did not have a use in historical science. Combining the various approaches and respective methods expanded upon the knowledge that one could gain from a phenomenon or a context, because it made it possible to bring heterogenous sources – direct and indirect, oral and written, private and official – together and have them confront each other. Alessandro Triulzi, one of the organizers of the conference in Bologna, retrospectively designated the international meeting as an “unbelievable conference” that was successful at bringing concepts together; on the one hand, there was the historiographical current from Africa following Jan Vansina’s studies about so-called “non-written societies” and, on the other hand, there was the European tradition, which used oral sources as an addition to the written ones, to “give the oppressed a voice.” As Triulzi said, We did not invite anyone who shared the same way of doing or writing history. We invited people whom we believed were relatively close to our topic, anthropology and history and

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oral sources. Sometimes there was […] a term that came from orality […], one had to frequently stop the simultaneous translator and try to explain […], because it really was two worlds who came together for the first time and spoke with each other, and therefore, there was this need to agree upon joint terminology that, up to that point, did not exist.²

At the conference organized by Paul Thompson at the University of Essex, which most of the protagonists believe to be the true beginning of the international oral history movement, more than 120 academics from European and American countries who dealt with oral history took part. They presented research from extremely various areas and discussed their methodological hypotheses and the status of the social sciences in their respective countries of origin. In the program and on the list of participants, there were sociologists, social historians, economic historians, history teachers, ethnologists, philosophers, and ethnomusicologists; academic groups as well as research foundations; young researchers as well as historians who were associated with the worker’s and women’s movements. In addition, there were similarities with regard to research topics in various countries and between the disciplines, such as the question of family and relatives, which occupies history as well as sociology. In a letter from May 8, 1978 to his colleague and friend Luisa Passerini, Paul Thompson wrote: The Oral History Society is planning to hold, as its annual conference in March 1979, an International European Conference in Oral History, organised from the University of Essex. We are inviting some twenty scholars who have pioneered the use of oral sources in historical research in different European countries to participate in the Conference and to offer papers in their work for presentation there. We believe that with the recent rapid growth of interest in this new method, which is particularly strong in England, an international meeting would be especially valuable.³

In this excerpt from the invitation to the conference, the view of oral history is that it is a method that is capable of bringing various disciplines together on similar topics.⁴

 Alessandro Triulzi, interview with Manja Finnberg, Rome, March 17, 2007.  Letter from Paul Thompson to Luisa Passerini, May 8, 1978, Luisa Passerini’s private papers. Passerini’s private papers contain extensive material on the first international conferences on oral history.  It is to be noted that there was no unanimous concept about the nature of so-called oral history. For example, Paul Thompson, who, in this letter as well as in his publications, spoke of oral history as a method and saw it as an independent discipline. From the beginning, the discussion about whether oral history should be viewed as a source, a method, or an independent discipline has characterized the use of oral sources and by the international context examined by us. The debate and its results will be discussed later.

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From the list of participants from the conference in Amsterdam in 1980, it can also be seen how heterogeneous the participants’ geographical and disciplinary origins were. The workshop topics were family history, minorities, city history, and history of the community, everyday life in 20th century dictatorships, the sociology of memory, women’s and agricultural history, European anthropology, the didactics of oral history, history of the working class, oral history and tradition, and biographical narratives. It seems interesting to me that one of the three plenary sessions, led by Robert Papstein and the historian Philippe Joutard under the title “Oral History and Anthropology,” critically addressed the differences in different subject areas in dealing with oral sources. It can therefore not only be stated that the conference was interdisciplinary, due to the researchers’ provenances, but it can also be proven that their relationships and interfaces were critically reflected upon, and that one tried to emphasize one’s own specifics. The abstract to Joutard’s talk therefore seems to be especially significant: Oral history seems to have arisen from two sources: on the one hand from political journalism which wants to rebuild the past from the testimonies of big or small actors, on the other hand from anthropology which tries to describe the culture of groups without history and without direct written documents. But, as far as oral history did rise from anthropology, are not oral historians in fact anthropologists without knowing it? Without denying all the debts towards the related disciplines, nor the need to go on deriving inspiration from the latter, oral history must know how to prove its specificity.⁵

Using the examples of these three conferences, it can be determined that, on the one hand, the international context showed a tendency towards disciplinary heterogeneity from the beginning and, on the other hand, the use of oral sources was maintained as a transversal process that was common among various researchers and theoretical approaches. Therefore, in this entry, I would like to examine the interdisciplinary aspect of the IOHA. In doing so, the interdisciplinarity is taken into consideration with regard to the topics – the exchange about similar questions and subjects between various disciplinary traditions – as well as the methods – the discussion about research methods and, in particular, how to deal with oral sources, such as about the question of the concrete form of the conduction of interviews, transcription, or the archiving and conservation of the interviews. The initial questions are therefore: was there an effective and useful dialogue between the disciplines? Which consequences did it have?  Philippe Joutard, “Oral History and European Anthropology,” Special Issue Conference Guide, International Oral History Conference, 16.

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Although oral history came from other subject areas (anthropology, ethnology, sociology)⁶ and was developed through them, it is also true that over the course of the years, it endeavored to become its own specific discipline which then led to influencing the other subjects for its part, in that it made a new research method available to them. The accompanying thesis is that there was a reciprocal influence between oral history and the other disciplines. As shown earlier, even though attempts were made to categorize it over the course of the years, oral history is not to be understood as a discipline of its own, but rather comprehended as a research method and, in this sense, as a meeting point of researchers from various disciplines. Finally, I would like to show that one of the most important effects of the interdisciplinary approach was the development of a critical view of the concept of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and on the use of biographical stories as an important instrument of analysis that crosses the borders of disciplines. It will therefore be examined whether Alistair Thomson’s thesis about the interdisciplinary character of oral history and the subjectivity have been valid for the international oral history movement since its beginnings.

Protagonists’ Interdisciplinarity Oral Sources or Oral History? A Question of Definition The question formulated in the title about the correct designation for academic work with oral testimonies does not evade the discourse about the interdisciplinary character of the IOHA, even if it could appear to do so. In fact, it was (and still is) one of the main intellectual areas of conflict. On its fronts, it is not just individual people who were facing each other, but much rather the disciplinary experiences and traditions represented by them. Behind this terminological conflict, there was, on the one hand, the desire to sketch out the borders between the disciplines, and on the other hand, to find points of contact, in order to drive forth joint discourse. The problem of the definition came into being because there was a dialectic about meeting and conflict between the various approaches to driving and defining research with oral sources that often occurred  In a discussion, Luisa Passerini defined oral history as being a “rib of anthropology” (Luisa Passerini, interview with Silvia Musso, Pavarolo, Italy, June 27, 2006). In her interview, Birgitta Skarin Frykman said, “I mean having contact with oral history meant a lot, because that’s part of traditional ethnology, that we have always… that we used them” (Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007).

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at the national level, that was then pushed to the international level, and from there, was once again reflected back to the local level.⁷ At the international conference in Colchester in 1979, there was an intense debate about the oral sources and the necessity to confront them with other sources, without immediately falling back on outdated positions, such as the supposed advantages of written as opposed to oral lore. A higher level of awareness for the special nature of oral sources grew from the discussions. The British historian Raphael Samuel affirmed how important it was to use all available and possible sources; in some cases, they could exclusively be oral, and in doing so, taking their specific characteristics and the methodological implications associated with them into consideration.⁸ Soon after the meeting in Colchester, at an Italian conference in Rimini in March 1979, Luisa Passerini spoke about the use and concerns with regard to oral sources (“Fonti orali: utilità e cautele”): The title under which I have been invited to speak here today reminds me that the first precaution that is required of us is often of terminological nature. Many people criticize the term “oral history,” because it either appears to allude to a new historiographical branch, to a further specialization, or makes seemingly careless claims to an alternative history, which, in its way, is just as comprehensive as traditional historical studies. In contrast, “oral sources” seems to be a more neutral expression that implies other interpretations: that one is speaking of a technology that has spread in recent decades thanks to the [technical] recording processes and that is usable in many different disciplines.⁹

With this example, it becomes clear how impulses from the level of the international network were merged into the level of the national discourse, here into the Italian discussion, and in this process, considerations and points of discussion were imported. Until today, the terminological dispute has not been settled. In particular, in the case of Italy, this is shown in the contrast between the anthropologist Pietro Clemente and the historian Alessandro Portelli. Portelli formulated his position on this as follows: I believe, a point is that I insist on saying “oral history” and [Clemente] insists on “oral sources.” That is a difference between us. […] I believe that some disciplines, such as anthropology, could not work without oral sources, while the oral sources present a challenge for the historical sciences. Historiography was constituted without them, and therefore, the

 For more on this, see Agnès Arp’s contribution to this volume.  Luisa Passerini and Daniele Jalla, “Primo convegno internazionale ed europeo di storia orale,” presented at International European Conference in Oral History, University of Essex, March 1979.  Luisa Passerini, “Un intervento su ‘Fonti orali: utilità e cautele,’” Rimini, Italy, March 29, 1979.

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status of oral sources is much more problematic than in… That is the one thing. Then there is maybe a nuance, an accent between the anthropological approach, which is targeted at the cultural classification, and the historical approach, whose attention is given to that which is hidden.¹⁰

Until today, Pietro Clemente has been nurturing a great aversion to the term “storia orale,” “oral history.” As he insinuates in the interviews and in his autobiography Triglie di scoglio, Clemente considers the term “storia orale” to be too politicized. The development of this method actually has one of its roots in the political engagement of 1968.¹¹ Clemente himself confirms that his closeness to the orality and conducting interviews coincided with his engagement as a political activist, from which he later distanced himself: My political experience in a party that existed back then and that no longer exists today, the PSIUP, the socialist left, looked like this: the attempt to collect voices and to give them expression. My first political experiences were like this: you went into the factories, tried to speak with the workers and then wrote flyers that were based on what they said.¹²

According to Clemente, oral history, which had been connected to political engagement, had no pronounced professional connotation and remained outside the gates of the university.¹³ It was often in contrast to academic research, which over the course of the years, showed resistance and defense to the acceptance of oral sources for historical research, and only in exceptional cases was there a professorship dedicated to oral history in university majors. It is interesting how Clemente positions himself against Portelli with regard to the use of the terms “oral sources” and “oral history,” and how he sees political meanings in the latter: [Portelli] has, until today, remained very connected to a political approach to the sources […], while in 1983, I had already perceived the burden of a political implication of these sources. I was rather in favor of the separation of the cognitive process; what I maybe strove for was a classification of the information, a comparison: what do our mezzadri [sharecroppers] say, what do our mountain people say, that is, cross-cultural. Instead,

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Rome, March 16, 2007.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Florence, March 4, 2008. For more on the relationship between oral history and political engagement, see Manja Finnberg’s contribution to this volume. The question of the relationship between oral history and academia will be discussed later.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Siena, Italy, May 10, 2007.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, May 10, 2007.

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the others were primarily connected to the political experience, and even today, I feel a separation from Portelli in this direction.¹⁴

The Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren commented as follows on the problem of the correct “labeling” of the method from another European region: And then the oral history movement came along and we mainly got in contact with that through England. And at first, we were a sort of really… we thought it’s strange, you know, we thought the name was not a good one, I don’t like the name still, because the idea of oral history is a sort of reification, I mean, an interview is something much more complex than oral history. And I think, ahem… this is very important, because my problem with the oral history label is that you’re there to dig out history. But, I mean, any interview is carried out in the present. So, I mean, the present is very, very important. And, ah… that’s why we thought of… we never used oral history label for our students. They… we didn’t tell them: do oral history; do interviews. I mean, listen, the interview is the thing. And you will be moving back and forth.¹⁵

This debate also erupted between the guests at our workshop in Colchester in September 2007. Some of the protagonists of the first 20 years of the informal predecessor of the IOHA encountered each other at this opportunity to talk: Mercedes Vilanova, Paul Thompson, Lutz Niethammer, Selma Leydesdorff, and Daniel Bertaux. The question as to whether one should speak of “oral history” or “oral sources” appeared during the first evening, as various, conflicting positions began to crystallize between our guests. The next morning, Lutz Niethammer continued the discussion from the previous evening and emphasized how the academic approach of oral sources is strongly shaped in an interdisciplinary way and that therefore, the expression “oral history” is a misnomer, because it has the tendency to describe a purely historiographical area, even though the social sciences also belong to it. Mercedes Vilanova appealed, full of conviction and strongly argumentative, against the use of the term “oral history” and emphasized that she exclusively spoke of “oral sources.”¹⁶ It is also interesting that none of the terms used are neutral expressions, but rather in contrast, they have become instruments in the assertion of various positions and ideas. Those who prefer the term “oral history” would like to primarily emphasize the difference from a traditional historical discipline. One’s own

 Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, March 4, 2008.  Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, Lund, Sweden, June 15, 2007.  Mercedes Vilanova, Paul Thompson, Lutz Niethammer, Selma Leydesdorff, and Daniel Bertaux, discussion at the workshop on the history of the IOHA at the University of Essex, Colchester, England, September 12– 13, 2007.

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identity, created due to the contrast, and one’s own uniqueness, especially in contrast with the contemporary history, should be confirmed. This position sways between the intention of emphasizing one’s own specialness and the risk of drawing sharp borders and, often, creating unnecessary barriers between the disciplines. With regard to this, in an interview, Luisa Passerini tried to highlight the special aspects of the individual disciplines; in this case, anthropology and oral history. In her opinion, no clear classifications should be developed, but rather the respective special characteristics should be respected and acknowledged: The desire to define clear borders between the disciplines, to lay stakes? No, there is no intention to define areas, there is an inheritance that cannot be lost, and the inheritance is different from discipline to discipline. Anthropology especially has the inheritance of participatory observation, in which text is important, but not the most important thing, like it is for us [historians]. Of course, we have learned a lot from participatory observation too, but it is still another tradition that emphasizes other aspects: behavior, intersubjective relationships that we often cannot observe. We have a person, an individual before us, who is speaking about the past, while the anthropologist finds himself in the middle of a reality that is happening at that moment. So, there is a fundamental difference, the methodological instruments are different. One can try to combine the approaches with each other, but it is not so easy.¹⁷

This perspective was and is not shared by all researchers. For example, as mentioned Pietro Clemente prefers the term “oral sources” rather than “oral history” and answered as follows: Musso: And you never called it “oral history”? Clemente: No, no… let’s say I had already done an entire study before I came into contact with oral history. I saw it as, let’s say, a history of popular traditions, anthropologically, like a… today, one would call it historical anthropology, because a significant amount of it is direct contact, more memory than oral history, and then I think that oral history and historical anthropology, maybe the English would also like that, because I don’t know, if someone like Thompson, they did a lot of field studies that were very anthropological and they were historians, they called it “oral history,” and I, as an anthropologist, call it “historical anthropology.” That is because I always did field studies with an interest in the present, so I am an anthropologist for the present, and in this sense, the dialogue with the contemporary historians would be valuable, but unfortunately, we often belong to two different camps.¹⁸

 Silvia Musso, “Luisa Passerini. Far emergere le memorie.” in Il microfono rovesciato, 10 variazioni sulla storia orale, ed. Alessandro Casellato (Treviso, Italy: Itresco, 2007), 48.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Siena, May 10, 2007.

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The less stiff expression “oral sources” refers to a practice that can also be shared by various social scientists and therefore is more open to interdisciplinary use. The borders are more instable and more open. In particular, anthropologists make use of this term, because the attention to orality has always been a component of the anthropological approach and was never questioned.

The Heterogeneity of Experiences: Educational Paths that Led to Oral History and the IOHA When Paul Thompson talked about his education in his interview, he remembered many people who had shaped his path to oral history and who came from extremely various disciplines. His biology professor, Darlington, at Bishop’s Stortford College, for example, imparted a passion for research. Even if, in this case, it had to do with studies in the natural sciences, Thompson found the idea exciting, because “you could go to a local field and discover something new, that nobody had ever found.”¹⁹ His French teacher Walter Strawn taught him that art cannot just be found inside a museum, but rather that it is real and that he was surrounded by it. His university tutor Trevor Aston also had a great influence on him. This medieval historian, unusual in every aspect, gave him access to work with old documents: […] he got me doing research on the College buildings, and that was really exciting, I can remember rushing around the building with him, in this slightly intoxicated kind of state of excitement, and him showing me medieval documents about the building of it.²⁰

Finally, the encounter with Peter Townsend in the early 1960’s was decisive for Thompson’s career. Back then, Thompson was drawn towards the new universities, just then coming into existence, which were more informal, less linked to the traditional approaches of Oxford and Cambridge, and, most important, more open to new disciplines. He went to the University of Essex, where he received a position with the chair of social history in the sociology department. Townsend taught there and his book The Family Life of Old People had a decisive influence on Thompson’s research because it taught him that his own examinations could have a social goal, and because it familiarized him with an anthropological approach to the object being researched. In Thompson’s publication

 Paul Thompson, life story interview with Karen Worcman, Stockholm, June 12, 1996.  Paul Thompson, life story interview with Karen Worcman, June 12, 1996.

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The Edwardians from 1975, as well as his following publications, it can be seen how he, as a non-anthropologist, had adopted the methods of participatory observation and field studies.²¹ It is exactly this interdisciplinary nature of Thompson’s work and education that fascinated the Italian anthropologist Pietro Clemente so much that he had a student write a diploma thesis about Thompson’s research.²² An additional, essential influence on Thompson was William George Hoskins, author of the book The Making of the English Landscape, a historical interpretation of landscape that was based on an analysis of locations and human constructions (field shapes, bridge positions).²³ From this work, Thompson gained the understanding that the space and the environment are also a source or a historical and social document, with which the history of the country and the city can be comprehended from a social perspective by a look at the architecture. The academic background of Paul Thompson, who is viewed by some of the representatives as the “father” of oral history in Europe, is deliberately interdisciplinary and very multi-faceted. The Italian anthropologist Pietro Clemente is skeptical about the interpretation of Thompson as a “founding father” of European oral history. In Italy, according to him, the use of oral sources in historical research and the notion of “giving a voice” to those who otherwise did not have one does not go back to Paul Thompson, but is much older and goes back to the 19th century. At the beginning of the attention towards the oral tradition was folk song research, which began with Niccolò Tommaseo and his book Gita nel pistojese (1834). In Clemente’s view, this work can be called the first collection of oral sources in the area of traditions of the simple people. Tommaseo noted and commented what the “shepherd poets” whom he met sang in the traditional meter; he interviewed women on the street, in order to capture their Tuscan dialect. In the years directly following the publication of Tommaseo’s work, with the research on folk tales, a second wave of ethnology developed. The most important representative, Vittori Imbriani, was a southern Italian collector who stenographically captured everything he heard and that was told to him. Both of these researchers from the mid-19th century and their way of using oral sources were so fundamental for Clemente’s own academic development

 Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975).  Roberta Pallotta, Le fonti orali tra storia e antropologia. La linea di ricerca di Paul Thompson (laurea thesis, Sapienza University, 1997).  William George Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955).

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that today, he belongs to a trend in Italian anthropology that is based on this research on the history of folk traditions. Clemente’s interest in oral sources and the world of the mezzadri, or sharecroppers, to whom he dedicated multiple research projects,²⁴ has its roots in Tommaseo’s studies and Imbriani’s writings. If the educational paths of the intellectuals interviewed by us are being discussed, Luisa Passerini’s multi-faceted education also must be taken into consideration. After a university degree in philosophy, she traveled to Africa, partially due to personal and partially due to ideological reasons. She began to work with the freedom movements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and in Mozambique. They were partially revolutionary movements that were open to relationships with Western European intellectuals: I got to know the freedom movements in South Africa, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, and then particularly the one with which I could create the most longterm relationships for effective collaboration, the so-called Frelimo, the “Frente da Libertação de Moçambique.” I actively worked together with them and I also published a book in Italian about this party, this movement, which now has the power in independent Mozambique.²⁵

In this environment, Passerini came into contact with the great significance of orality for the first time, even if one cannot yet speak of conscious dealing with oral sources in the sense of a precise research method, but rather of an awareness shaped by anthropology, that mixed with her historically educated perspective. After her return to Italy, Passerini worked on a study that was led by the Turin historian Giovanni Levi, and led to an exhibition called “Torino tra le due guerre,” “Turin Between the World Wars.” This project also worked with the research technique of interviews. This was related to the “pre-history” of Italian oral history and its most important representatives, Danilo Montaldi and Gianni Bosio, Rocco Scotellaro, and Nuto Revelli.²⁶  Pietro Clemente, “Lo spettacolo popolare,” in Teatro Regionale Toscano, ed. Teatro popolare e cultura moderne (Florence: 1978), 12– 21; Pietro Clemente and Vera Pietrelli, “‘Subalternità contadina. Alcuni materiali orali sulla condizione mezzadrile e bracciantile nel Senese,” Annali dell’Istituto Alcide Cervi 2.2 (1980): 165 – 181.  Luisa Passerini, interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, Pavarolo, Italy, April 12, 2008.  Danilo Montaldi’s Autobiografie della leggera (Turin: Einaudi, 1961) deals with the social and economic changes of the Padana valley using autobiographies, a form that the historian himself suggested to the narrators. Gianni Bosio’s Il trattore ad Acquanegra (Bari, Italy: De Donati, 1981) was created between the 1950’s and 1971 (the author’s year of death) as a local history that reconstructs life in the community of Acquanegra, Mantua. Rocco Scotellaro’s L’uva puttanella

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If one looks at Passerini’s development more closely, one can see very different elements shaping her intellect. The readings of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World influenced her the most.²⁷ His thesis of the carnival and the people’s and farmer’s culture as a “thousand-year fact that goes beyond the times, with its character of the protest, the rebellion, the revolt”²⁸ is the basis of the interpretation of worker’s culture under fascism that Passerini argued for in “Torino operaia e fascismo.”²⁹ In retrospect, Passerini noticed that the readings of the Italian religious historian and ethnologist Ernesto de Martino³⁰ as well as the British historian Edward P. Thompson and his approach to social history were also pioneering for her work. Her intellectual background was formed by ethnological research, African studies and their attention to cultures without writing, as well as from the history of folk traditions, in particular those influenced orally, especially from anthropologist Luigi Maria Lombardi Satriani’s works about southern Italy. It becomes clear that contact with diverse spheres of knowledge was extremely important for her work at the national and international levels of oral history: the relationships to anthropology; the African studies specialists who have already been quoted, such as Elizabeth Tonkin from Britain; dealing with the history of the folk cultures, especially the group centered around Cirese and Clemente; with linguistics as well as with contemporary history. This broad horizon can be viewed in her correspondence and the diverse contacts in this abundance of experience, circled around the oral sources in Italy and Europe, can be re-constructed. Passerini moved in the center of the international network for oral history, as the image in Christian König’s essay in this volume clarifies. This central position that she had as an important node in the IOHA movement, at least for the first decades, is, in my opinion, primarily due to her heterogeneous education and her interdisciplinary approaches, in addition to her undisputed theoretical authority. In her studies, she posed and answered important theoretical questions, which stimulated the debates and arguments between the intellectuals, at the international level as well as in the respective

(Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1955) re-constructs the battles, hopes, and goals of southern Italian farmers. Nuto Revelli’s most famous work, Il mondo dei vinti (Turin: Einaudi, 1977) is a collection of 107 testimonies that tries to explore the class consciousness of Piedmont farmers.  The Italian edition: Mikhail Bakhtin, L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare. Riso carnevale e festa nella tradizione medievale e rinascimentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1979).  Musso, Luisa Passerini, 46.  Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia e fascismo, Una storia orale, Turin: Laterza, 1984.  Martino’s most important works include Sud e magia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959) and Furore, simbolo, valore (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1962).

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national contexts. The intersubjectivity, the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee, the meaning of silence and the right to forget are some examples of topics that underwent thorough analysis in her most important theoretical texts, such as Storia orale. Vita quotidiana e cultura materiale delle classi subalterne (1978), Storia e soggettività. Le fonti orali, la memoria (1988), and Memoria e utopia (2002).³¹ Daniel Bertaux’s first encounter with oral history was with the book The Children of Sánchez by the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, which was based on interviews and participatory observation.³² On his path to oral history, he was further influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, in their distance from the academic milieu, had given attention to the voices of the people. In addition, the insight that in France it was not the written French, but rather spoken French that was the language of the majority, because society became increasingly multicultural, was also important to him. Bertaux had a sociological education, as he explicitly emphasized – “moi, je suis sociologue”³³ – but his approach, different from structuralist Pierre Bourdieu’s³⁴ or the exclusively quantitative research of Raymond Boudon,³⁵ already had – and still has – points of contact with oral history. Bertaux did not experience any resonance in his national environment, where Philippe Joutard, with work about the Camisards, was considered the father of French oral history,³⁶ but rather found fruitful grounds for discussion with colleagues in the international context.

 Passerini is better known as an astute intellectual abroad than in her home country. This is surely due to the fact that Italian universities neglected to recognize the significance of oral history and the legitimate use of oral sources in official historical studies for a long time.  Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961).  Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, Sèvres, France, November 16, 2006.  In this context, the contrast between the two French sociologists must be paid attention to. Pierre Bourdieu, who was very critical of Bertaux’s approach in an article, accused the method of the histoire de vie of “biographical illusionism” and spoke of a “sociological racket.” In his national environment, Bertaux was therefore in the minority and could only find answers to his qualitative sociological methods in the international environment. Daniel Bertaux, interview with Agnès Arp, November 16, 2006. See also Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” BIOS 3.1 (1990): 75 – 81.  Raymond Boudon, born in Paris in 1934, studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, the University of Freiburg, and Columbia University in New York. Since finishing his doctorate in 1967, he has been teaching at the Sorbonne. He heads the journal L’Année Sociologique and the CNRS’s Centre d’Études Sociologiques in Paris.  Philippe Joutard, La légende des camisards: Une sensibilité au passé (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).

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Like Bertaux, Ronald Fraser also counted Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez among his basic readings. After he had completed his first literary work and was disappointed by its publication, the book and a personal meeting with the author led him to oral history: I read a book that really impressed me. A North American wrote the foreword, Oscar Lewis. He also wrote a famous book in the 60’s, The Children of Sánchez. It had to do with a Mexican family that he had interviewed. He had a multi-visual perspective and spoke about the same temporal events of the family, but from different perspectives. That really impressed me and I had the fortune of meeting him. I asked him what he thought he was doing, anthropology or literature. He answered me: literature. That made me happy, because that way, I could become literarily active through other people, without having to come up with something myself. These people only gave me their life data. I was really interested in the lives of other people. That’s how I began.³⁷

Prior to that, Fraser had worked as a journalist. Because he wanted to become a novelist, but couldn’t study, because it was “not the best time to go to university, because all of the demobilized soldiers came and it wasn’t possible to be accepted,” he turned to a professor who, at his mother’s old college, was responsible for student admissions. I told him that I wanted to study literature in order to become a novelist. He told me that I should do something and would then collect experience in the real world and not in the academic world. That’s how I became a journalist.³⁸

Like Ronald Fraser, Sven Lindqvist from Sweden, a literary historian and novelist, came to oral history through journalism. Lindqvist’s interview skills and the evaluation of interviews for his articles, reports, and books were different from those of his journalist colleagues;³⁹ they were more polished and closer to oral history than classical journalism. In his reports about the living conditions of farmers and workers in Latin America in the 1960’s, Lindqvist noticed the following about his work process: I made up the rule to have at least half of the interviews being non-expert interviews, but interviews with people that really mattered. I had the experience that the best results were

 Ronald Fraser, interview with Elena Rodríguez Codd, Valencia, May 13, 2008.  Ronald Fraser, interview with Elena Rodríguez Codd, May 13, 2008.  Lindqvist’s most important text, Dig Where You Stand, is not a pure oral history book, but rather is understood to be a handbook for workers to do research about their own history and dedicates a chapter to the collection of memories and interviews, using the example of cement workers in Sweden. See Sven Lindqvist, Gräv där du står (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1978).

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if you did not start at the top but at the bottom. I went to a ministry, say the ministry of agriculture and land reform, and I went into the cellar, because that’s where they were stockpiling their reports and inquiries and so on and then asked to have this landpaper given to me. People were always glad to give me out the papers, that was a general rule. Then I read about, say, this agricultural reports [sic] and then went out to places they dealt with, one or two examples, and looked to what had happened there and asked a lot of questions and interviewed people about using this report to dig out something. Only then, coming back to the capital, with the report and with the answers what were given locally, I would go to somebody in a responsible position in the ministry, or even to the minister himself and ask. What I now knew was the pertinent, the important questions. And all the time being able to refer to what I said in the report I was quoting and what was said by people locally on the spot. This was a method that I found very productive, but time-consuming, of course. Other Swedish journalists or writers were doing Latin America in a week, stopping at a few capitals and talking only to ministers.⁴⁰

He formulated his professional self-understanding as follows: “I was a Swedish writer. I had no ambitions in this oral history movement. I just wanted to learn from them and to tell them about what I had done.”⁴¹ For the Swedish journalists, the international oral history conferences were an atmosphere in which he found encouragement and inspiration. The participation in the conferences gave him the opportunity to learn and acquire findings from the discussions about oral history, in order to transfer them to his own professional field and to his own education.

The IOHA’s Interdisciplinarity Until now, the focus of the observations has been on the interdisciplinarity in relation to the individual protagonists of the oral history network who were interviewed for our project. In contrast, the second part of the essay is dedicated to the international oral history network as a movement that found its direct expression in the contacts during the international conferences and the mutual disciplinary influences, but also debates that shaped the exchange at the international level. As already depicted, through the individual researchers, numerous academic disciplines were represented at the conferences and not seldom, one came across the same topics that were dealt with by various means of examination. A type of dialectic platform emerged at which a comparative approach to the objects being

 Sven Lindqvist, interview with Christian König, Stockholm, June 11, 2007.  Sven Lindqvist, interview with Christian König, June 11, 2007.

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examined and the research methods was tried out. The participants confronted each other with the respective theoretical and methodological basics of their disciplines. This attitude encouraged the attention for other studies and openness toward them, but also the development of a critical position towards one’s own discipline. In this exchange of knowledge and practices, the academics could receive impulses and food for thought, in order to further develop their own studies and examinations. The focus of the exchange was, of course, the orality and the use of oral sources in the research. In addition to the apparent effort to differentiate the area of the discipline of origin, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there were good reasons for not just discussing the interdisciplinary use of interviews and oral testimonies, but also try them out. As Ronald Grele said, The practice of collecting and using oral data produces its own impetus towards interdisciplinarity. Because we cannot fully understand or exploit the materials we are dealing with if we remain within the narrow conventions and methods of our own fields of specialization, we reach out with much uncertainty for some more or less sophisticated cooperation with other field workers. We become interdisciplinarity [sic] in spite of ourselves.⁴²

Orvar Löfgren also described the interdisciplinarity of the conferences in an enthusiastic way. As an ethnologist, he found more points of contact with people who occupied themselves with oral history than with colleagues from his subject, who were more likely to occupy themselves with cultures outside of Europe: When we went to England, we talked to the anthropologists, who were doing a sort of more non-European stuff. They were totally uninterested in oral history. They had a sort of purity ideal. So, we were surprised and the historians were also, if I mean, the interesting thing that it was sociologists that in many ways pioneered it in Britain. And we had our contacts with the sociology crowd. So, that was an interesting thing for us. And then we discovered, okay, so, this is what it’s called: oral history. We’ve been doing it all our lives and we always thought about it in different terms, in terms of ethnography. But it was very refreshing, because what was refreshing was the interdisciplinarity [emphasis mine]. Suddenly you met social historians, historical sociologists… people who[m] you would never have a dialogue with.⁴³

A profitable exchange with academics from other disciplines arose. Oral history presented the connecting bridge by which they reached each other. Thanks to this open approach that could be used by researchers from various disciplines with different goals, it was possible to observe the same topics from different

 Ronald J. Grele, “A Surmisable Variety: Interdisciplinarity and Oral Testimony,” American Quarterly 27.3 (1975): 276.  Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, July 15, 2007.

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perspectives, to understand which paths had already been taken, which questions already asked, which methods already used. Through the contribution of other disciplines and the debate with them, within their own specialization, gaps could be closed and knowledge expanded, as the interview with Löfgren significantly shows at multiple points: So, what this oral history interest helped us was to see the need for comparative research. […] And the oral history movement was very good in bringing that kind of dialogue into the field.⁴⁴ So, everyday culture was [emphasizes] left as an open field. And history was yet not interested, but ethnologists moved in and became the sort of discipline of the everyday life. And that meant that when historians became interested there was much more of a dialogue between even partners. […] So, we had a much more open dialogue with historians as they became interested. And I think many historians were heavily influenced by ethnological methods in the seventies and eighties. That’s our version of the history. […] I mean, historians became more and more interested in culture. The cultural turn meant that they imported a lot of anthropological, many anthropological ideas, you know, history of mentalities… There was this strong interest in social history, in working-class history among Swedish historians. And they discovered the ethnological archives, for example. That was a material that was new to them and that they found useful and… there was a lot of cooperation, for example, in working-class history. It was very striking; you had network[s] of ethnologists and historians discussing. And I thought that was very fruitful, it was a good… that benefited both parts, you know.⁴⁵ Yes, I mean, you return to all the interviews that you once interpreted in one way and you realize there’s a total other different message there that you didn’t catch the first time, because you were so obsessed with this is what I’m looking for. So, I think, that’s rewarding the fact that you can return to these materials. And that of course makes it interesting. If you go to sociology they have [emphasizes] no tradition of recording and putting interviews into archives, you know. They have the tradition that… or anthropology neither, you know, this is the personal property of a researcher and it’s in the desk somewhere and when he dies, it will be gone, you know. So, that’s also interesting, what kind of disciplines are interesting in collecting and preserving this [sic] interviews. And that varies a lot, I think, also between different national settings.⁴⁶

For Löfgren, the international oral history conferences were an arena, in this sense, in which researchers of related subjects who were driven by the same interests to be able to exchange information about topics and methods – “the interdisciplinarity was the fun thing, both in terms of subjects and methods:”⁴⁷

   

Orvar Orvar Orvar Orvar

Löfgren, Löfgren, Löfgren, Löfgren,

interview interview interview interview

with with with with

Christian Christian Christian Christian

König, König, König, König,

July July July July

15, 15, 15, 15,

2007. 2007. 2007. 2007.

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Many of the people who went to the first conferences never went… continued to go, you know, because ah… they have made [sic] their contacts, they had discussed the methods and ahem… they saw themselves as, as… not as oral historians, but historians or ethnologists or sociologists who used an oral history method, that was… among many other methods, I mean. So, that was a part of their tool. […] I would say seventies and eighties for me was the strong period, absolutely the strong period and very refreshing and stimulating and new, new networks, new dialogues, you know. And I thought I got a lot out of that, that international field. And there were many ethnologists who went to these conferences, you know, ah… In those years. But I mean, that was [emphasizes] one interdisciplinary arena.⁴⁸

Thompson uses the image of oral history as a bridge and describes history and sociology as the bridgeheads. In an essay about the status of oral history in Great Britain, Thompson emphasized that for a long time, there was an academic separation between both disciplines: the historians were skeptical of the sociologists’ concepts and methods; in contrast, the sociologists were exclusively concentrated on the present, without observing the deeper temporal dimensions.⁴⁹ Since the 1960’s, the barriers between the two disciplines slowly broke apart and at the academic level, the development of an interdisciplinary dimension was promoted. The leading universities in doing so in Great Britain were Lancaster and Essex, which, in the meantime, have become leading academic centers in the area of oral history. In the same essay, Thompson analyzed the areas in which the interdisciplinary approach had achieved the greatest success (for example, studies on the working class and the union movement)⁵⁰ as well as the research areas that it had influenced (city history) and, most importantly, highlighted the contribution of interdisciplinary research to the interpretation and historical understanding of the events. According to Thompson, in this context, the increasing interest for the dimension of the memory and subjectivity had great relevance. Ronald Fraser’s book In Search of a Past (1984) was an example of reflection at various

 Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, July 15, 2007.  Paul Thompson, “The Development and Present State of Oral History in Britain,” BIOS Special Issue (1990): 77– 86.  On this, Birgitta Skarin Frykman wrote: “Not that we would only do working-class culture, but it would be a sort of central field of research. And that suited me quite well, because I had written my paper for the candidate exam about food habits in an industrial community outside Göteborg [Gothenburg], where I compared food habits of the workers and food habits of the administrators or the bosses and so on. […] And I think also cause through Sven Lindqvist and Dig Where You Stand and movements like that, which are coming natural [sic], I think, you can say, when you do working-class culture.” Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, June 13, 2007.

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levels of memory, with the help of an instrument that was innovative in historical research, the autobiography. Oral history helped the French sociologist Daniel Bertaux to approach the topic of subjectivity in a more systematic way. He came to the realization that the people whom the research was about were not simply players who were moved like marionettes by the strings of social networks, but were people with their own, profound subjectivity. Academics like Bertaux, who came from various disciplines and were open to this type of historic-sociological research, therefore consequently worked with the social research method of collecting biographical stories and in doing so, noticed how much the people had to say and that the quantitative methods, the statistics, and also the majority of the written documents were and are just as biased as the individual report. Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, also a sociologist, emphasized the increasing importance of histories de vie as a methodological point of contact for various subjects. In an interview, she made numerous references to interdisciplinarity and the relationships between oral history and, for example, anthropology and linguistics. Even if they kept their specific approach and goals, the individual disciplines often worked on the same topics and, in doing so, adopted transversal methods of examination. In her work about the biographical stories of bakers in Paris, which she completed with Daniel Bertaux, the historical approach was integrated with a sociological method from the tradition of the Chicago School. The study was an attempt to examine a selected economic production area not with the help of statistical data, but rather, with biographical stories. According to Bertaux-Wiame, an approach like this forced a person to not just observe the socio-structural relationships within and outside of the relevant social class, but especially the men and women who lived this experience, retained it over time, and who, in turn, were conditioned by these relationships.⁵¹ The examinations and the methods of the Dutch historian Selma Leydesdorff also showed a special sensitivity to subjectivity. About her work, she said: Maybe I moved more and more consequently in the direction of subjectivity. The individual biographical story played an increasingly important role to me. […] No, there is not very much development in my method. Maybe the narrative became more important in and of itself and the historical happening moved more clearly into the background. That is maybe the most important shift in focus. But that is not a methodological development. The human drama was always at the center of my work. […] I am also occupying myself with trauma research. I am working with a work group about “the language of trauma” –

 Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, “Life Stories in the Bakers’ Trade,” in Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, ed. Daniel Bertaux (Beverly Hills, California: 1981), 169 – 190.

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together with sociologists and anthropologists. Here, I understood that “speaking” is much more than oral “language,” but, more than anything has to do with the body. In Srebrenica, some women talked about their traumatic experiences for the first time and yes, that is an intervention into their lives. Oral history can deeply interfere with the lives of others. An interview can often let unbelievable feelings loose. Some women wailed. […] But I’m not a psychologist. I just know that talking always does you good.⁵²

In this statement, it comes through that oral history can be a useful approach to concentrate on biographical narratives without replacing them with other disciplines, like psychology. In this case, oral history does not want to take over the therapeutic aspect of psychology, but rather transforms the subjects – who, until then, did not have a voice – into historical subjects, who bring new perspectives to light with their testimonies. The informal international network of oral history, which was formed at and between the conferences, played a significant role in the shaping of this historical research method that is concentrated on the individual and his importance in history. In the interview, the Spanish historian Cristina Borderías emphasized the meaning of the exchange between the various work methods as an interesting aspect of the international conferences: One talked about the different types of interviews, about the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, what consequences were brought about with which type of interview and what type of relationship. Even very practical questions: where should the microphone go, and rather methodological questions: asking which questions, which questions should you ask, and what shouldn’t you ask? […] I think they were very useful encounters for the oral historians, because at other history conferences, you couldn’t answer these methodological questions well. But here, it was a process of reflection, to which many disciplines contributed something. The interdisciplinarity was the thing that made oral history particularly interesting. There, there were the sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and also politically engaged people who had no academic approach. But this interdisciplinary exchange, that was really an interesting thing.⁵³

According to Borderías, she learned a lot through her participation at the international oral history conferences and had acquired various approaches that had surely enhanced her career path. In her interview, the Spanish academic finally came to the same conclusion as her French colleague Bertaux-Wiame: today, with her colleagues, she notices an increasingly rare interest in dedicating themselves to an analysis of methodology and exchange about it at the interdisciplinary level.

 Selma Leydesdorff, interview with Sirku Plötner, Amsterdam, April 27, 2008.  Cristina Borderías, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 6, 2008.

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Bertaux-Wiame actually confirms that this rich and deep-reaching cooperation between the disciplines is increasingly rare and weaker, from her perspective. Over the course of the years, she still looked for an interdisciplinary dialogue for her research projects on autobiographical narratives and the rhetoric of biography. In doing so, she turned to many disciplinary directions and included historical demography, and social geography as well as anthropology and linguistics, among others.⁵⁴ Now I would like to try to increasingly steer the focus to the individual disciplines and their mutual influences, and in doing so, concentrate on linguistics. Until this point, in this text, linguistics remained mostly ignored while there was more discussion about oral history as the bridge between sociology and history, and there have been multiple references to the growth of oral history from anthropology, ethnology, and the social sciences. Linguistics were important because they brought the attention to the phenomenon of the language itself, from memory to the narration. In the previously cited interview, Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame emphasized the relationship to linguistics, in that she spoke of the “existential narrations,” which were a field of analysis in anthropology as well as linguistics. For some linguists, the considerations on the biographical text especially leveled the playing field in the search for a rhetoric of biography. In this context, Bertaux-Wiame is reminded of “Paul Ricœur’s famous sentence”: “la mise en intrigue du récit,” and the deep text analysis in Maurizio Catani’s book Tante Suzanne. ⁵⁵ The American Ronald Grele defined linguistics and anthropology as “two of the core disciplines dealing with oral testimony,” and commented about the first that Linguistics is the key discipline in the analysis of the spoken word, the discipline which has developed the most elegant and powerful theories explaining and predicting language behavior and the discipline upon which some form of synthesis of the various disciplines can be based. Also the particular form of the debates and changes in linguistics make it more possible than ever before to initiate a preliminary interdisciplinary discussion. […] [T]he consequences of the reorientation of the discipline would seem to have enormous implications for the analysis of oral materials and for our thinking about oral materials.⁵⁶

 Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, interview with Agnès Arp, Nanterre, France, April 4, 2007.  Maurizio Catani and Suzanne Mazé, Tante Suzanne. Une histoire de vie sociale (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1982). Catani is also mentioned by Clemente, who considers the literary analysis of Tante Suzanne to being almost psychoanalytical at some points. See Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Florence, March 4, 2008.  Grele, A Surmisable Variety, 277.

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In some interviews that were conducted for this research project, the significance of the language and dialect used by the interview partners was mentioned.⁵⁷ Its analysis gave the researchers a new level of understanding. In this context, Birgitta Skarin Frykman, from Sweden, refers to the constant interest for the collection and archiving of oral sources in Sweden: And of course, we have a long tradition of these dialect and folklore archives here in Sweden, which… we thought of… we give our materials to them or our interviews, our tapes, our written-out interviews and so on and they store them and anyone can go there and use them. And you’ve got them in Lund, you’ve got them in Göteborg [Gothenburg], in Uppsala, the Nordic Museum in Stockholm and in Umeå; they’re all over the country.⁵⁸

Pietro Clemente, from Italy, who has extensively examined the dialect as the bearer of deep meaning, emphasized how important it was to have the interviews undergo a very specific text analysis: The oral narrator feels much more comfortable in his skin than the written narrator, because a person who writes often produces more of an epic, because he undergoes an effort, struggles with the material nature of the text, and at the end, things come out that appear to be wooden. In contrast, the oral narrator – if he speaks in a language like Dina [Mugnaini’s], which is simultaneously a dialect and Italian – produces a narrative that, in my eyes, is unusual from a literary perspective.⁵⁹ These biographical narratives are “unusual worlds” that had various levels of meaning in and of themselves and that also must be noted in terms of their literary quality. If literary scholars and other researchers “who treasure the communicative worlds” work together in the analysis of the testimonies, it would be a one-of-a-kind contribution. In this way, the analysis of the oral autobiographical narrative would become a field in which various approaches and research overlap. In an interview, the Italian American studies specialist Alessandro Portelli confirmed the significance of the linguistic approach to investigating orality and remembered a meeting at the institute of linguistics in 1980 in Urbino at which Dennis Tedlock participated. Tedlock’s dialogical anthology and his his-

 For more on the aspect of language, see Franka Maubach’s contribution to this volume.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, June 13, 2007.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Florence, March 4, 2008. Here, Clemente is referring to a published biographical narrative of a Tuscan woman. Valeria Di Piazza and Dina Mugnaini, Io so’ nata a Santa Lucia. Il racconto autobiografico di una donna toscana tra mondo contadino e società d’oggi (Castelfiorentino, Italy: Società storica della Valdesa, 1988).

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torical linguistics approach to orality was a “discovery” for Portelli.⁶⁰ Here, it is important to note that Portelli came to oral history via literary studies and research on folk music, and expanded on the topic of subjectivity. It is remarkable that in this interview, Portelli quoted multiple linguists who participated in the IOHA’s international conferences and, through their disciplinary origin, brought new perspectives to oral history. For example, he remembered Régine Robin from Montreal, a Franco-Canadian academic with “linguistic roots,” who was present at the conference in Barcelona in 1985.⁶¹ With regard to the relationship between the individual disciplines, it is also necessary to mention historiography, which, on the one hand, can be viewed as a sister discipline to oral history, but, on the other hand, can also be viewed as its opponent. Usually, oral history is understood to be contrary to official history, or rather as if the identity of the first developed in opposition to the second. Historiography vehemently criticized the use of oral testimonies, because they were seen as too subjective and therefore neither safe nor representative and, consequently, un-academic sources. Without extensively dealing with the criticism about the legitimacy of oral sources, which has been debated a lot at the national and international levels and is still being debated at this point, only the ambivalent role of historiography should be emphasized. Because speaking about the relationship between oral history and the other academic disciplines and, in doing so, ignoring historical studies, would only offer a short-sighted and incomplete perspective of the topic. Even if, on the one hand, historical studies rejected the use of oral sources, on the other hand, it was unquestionably influenced in parts by the studies and critical work in oral history, and even included some aspects of it. For Cristina Borderías, oral history depicted a new type of historical studies:

 Alessandro Portelli, interview with Silvia Musso and Manja Finnberg, Rome, March 16, 2007. See also Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).  Her talk was called “L’histoire orale rend-elle la parole à ceux qui en sont privés ou l’histoire orale est-elle un lieu hors-pouvoir?” At the same conference, Portelli held a talk on “The Function of Orality in Political Trials,” about the legal use of oral sources; that is, an additional way of using oral history. See Alessandro Portelli, interview with Silvia Musso and Manja Finnberg, Rome, March 16, 2007. At a later time, the relationship between oral history and jurisprudence should be further explored in terms of the topic of interdisciplinarity. I would only like to mention that in an interview, Marcella Filippa also spoke of using approximately 2000 oral sources in a legal case. It had to do with her service as a historical expert in a case about mass sedition against some representatives of the right-radical party Lega Nord in Verona. See Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, May 6, 2008.

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For me, oral history is more than just conducting interviews. It meant changing the historical view, the perspective. Giving people a chance to speak who, up to that point, had no voice. Doing “history from below.” That was also a movement for a completely different type of history. I think that is what made things so difficult. It wasn’t about accepting or not accepting interviews as academic tools. I believe that it was also the fear of another way of writing history.⁶²

According to Borderías, this new way of writing history has become widespread in the meantime. In contrast, in the 1960’s, it was extremely difficult to introduce oral history to the academic world. Yet Vilanova’s and her efforts were finally crowned with success when they founded the journal Historia y Fuente Oral and began to offer courses about the oral history method. “It was very difficult,” Borderías confirms, but at the end, the method became so widespread that at the present time, there is even the danger of its trivialization, “because everyone is using [oral sources] like a usual source and there is no longer an interest in writing another type of history.”⁶³ Today, many traditional historians have accepted the qualitative method of conducting interviews and integrated it into their own research methods. When Bertaux-Wiame spoke of the relationships between contemporary history and a certain direction of sociology, she pointed to the fact that some historians were founding oral archives and, in doing so, noticed that one could also write history with the help of people, of contemporary witnesses. The contact came via technical questions on the type of recording, transcription, and archiving that, until then, had been ignored by historiographers. Furthermore, in historical research, a growing sensitivity for private archives and their collection of objects, letter and journal sources can be established. Even if these are not oral sources in the strictest sense, they are still the result of the subjectivity that was disputed by many “official” historians. With regard to the current relationship with historiography, in the interviews, Clemente said: I don’t see the relationship in the practical work of academic institutions. At the moment, I have enough exchange with contemporary historians, with Paul Ginsborg in Florence, with Marcello Flores in Siena, but they do not directly use these methods. As it is, Ginsborg consumes everything that has to do with sources. That is, he also uses oral sources, but not in an especially systematic way; he leaves the work to his students. […] [W]ith the Italian historians, who come from more traditional experiences, there is more understanding for each other, but I would not say that cooperation exists.⁶⁴

 Cristina Borderías, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 6, 2008.  Cristina Borderías, interview with Annette Leo, March 6, 2008.  Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Florence, March 4, 2008.

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The interdisciplinary dialogue was always present, not just at the national level, but also within the international oral history scene. But there are also critical voices who comment that there was never a truly interdisciplinary discourse, and some disciplines were even excluded from the international movement. Alexander von Plato, who had taken on a critical position from the very beginning, did not consider the oral source the only important one, for example. Rather, he emphasized in an interview that a research project also had to take other subjective sources into consideration, such as journals, photos, and films. More specifically, he said the following about the international oral history movement: I was always against the organization of these oral history conferences all the way to an association. Because I believed that it is exactly this informal form that is appropriate for the method and the status of the international contacts. […] We would exclude all of the people whose work is rather historical-anthropological or people coming from ethnology, who had a great advantage over the historians when it comes to this question […]. We would exclude all of these people, with their experiences, and especially ethnology has a tremendous experience in dealing with narratives.

And on the national level, he stated: We had planned to create an organ and apply for a collaborative research center […] with different disciplines at the University [of Hagen], with sociologists, literary studies specialists, with historians and pedagogues […], who addressed biographical research, oral history, and biographical analyses in an interdisciplinary way. That was all the way back in the 1980’s. But then the historians suddenly didn’t want that any more. Only the journal BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Oral History still exists today, and that in an interdisciplinary way.⁶⁵

It can actually be determined that in retrospect, von Plato was not denying the existence of an exchange between various disciplinary areas, but was rather indicating the difficulties that could arise from this exchange. But the conflicts, especially those already mentioned between oral history and “official history” also belong to the topic of interdisciplinarity, if one understands it to be a confrontation between different subject areas. Mercedes Vilanova was even more skeptical. When she was asked about interdisciplinarity in an interview, she answered very evasively. Leo: Within the network, was there an exchange of experiences between historians and non-historians?

 Alexander von Plato, interview with Franka Maubach, Stade, Germany, January 15, 2008.

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Vilanova: No, there was not. Leo: Other disciplines, like anthropology and sociology, worked with oral history earlier than the historians did. Was there an exchange of experiences? Vilanova: There was one in Bologna, but then there was a rift. Leo: You said that in Colchester, the beginnings from Bologna were not taken up again. Vilanova: Clemente reported on exactly what happened, because there was this rift. He is telling it 30 years later. Portelli is a legal expert, not a historian, and an expert on AfricanAmerican literature, not a historian, and that is a problem, too.⁶⁶

It is clear how Vilanova tried to not answer, and the interviewer’s questions remain without clear and defined answers. As has been shown for years in the theoretical reflections on oral sources and the analysis of oral testimonies, in reality, the untold elements are meaningful bearers of messages as well. Vilanova’s incomplete answers illustrate her skepticism of the existence of an effective, interdisciplinary dialogue, which could be supported by a joint method, specifically, oral history. Vilanova refers to Clemente’s essay “El debate sobre las fuentes orales en Italia,” which was published in 1995 in the Spanish journal Historia y Fuente Oral and in which the Italian anthropologist stated: It must be emphasized that this mixture of disciplinary and interdisciplinary solidarity existed only for a short period of time; the discussion lasted until the beginning of the 1980’s. Then the discussion about history and social sciences was exhausted; it is the beginning of a political phase that was termed a “step back,” also following the period of “terrorism”; the crisis of Marxism and the role of the workers’ movement led to isolation in research with oral sources.⁶⁷

In his article, Clemente especially referred to the case in Italy, about which he wrote of as “disciplinary fortifications,” but he also opined: In the 1980’s, though, there were also the international conferences, some Italian conferences, the journal Fonti orali, which came into being through a cooperation with historians and anthropologists. Therefore, they are the years of the contradictory maturity of the Italian “history with oral sources.”⁶⁸

Vilanova complained about the lack of interdisciplinarity within the IOHA and, in her home country of Spain, with the help of the journal Historia y Fuente Oral,  Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, Barcelona, March 5, 2008.  Pietro Clemente, “El debate sobre las fuentes orales en Italia,” in: Historia y Fuente Oral 14 (1995): 86.  Clemente, El debate, 87.

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tried to encourage work that would really be comprehensive, and to also practice it in her own studies and research. Therefore, it is not surprising that at the New York Oral History Conference in October 1994, she declared: We cannot accept any more to live in the ghetto of oral history, because there are many historians that use interviews and do not come to our meetings, and because what we want is to work towards a history well done, without the need of any adjective to define it. A history without adjectives is what we want. But at the same time we have to be pioneers in new fields in order to develop the dialogues that will advance the oral history movement. […] [O]ur interdisciplinarity approach brings us closer to anthropology, ethnology etc. Maybe we have to go back to our beginnings in Bologna, when historians and anthropologists gathered together in 1976 in our First International Conference under the title “Oral Sources: Anthropology and History.”⁶⁹

According to this, the discussion about the existence of an interdisciplinary approach within the international network was very complex and divided. However, it can be observed that many interview partners emphasized the development over time: since the early 1990’s, the way in which oral history has been understood at the national as well as the international levels has changed. The tendency to categorize and draw borders between similar disciplines that wanted to maintain their uniqueness developed. Interdisciplinary dialogue became weaker and oral history became less of a method of examination, but was increasingly viewed as a new academic area, which tried to assert itself in opposition to contemporary history and in the continuation of the social sciences. In summary, it can be determined that the participants’ readiness for debate and dialogue about joint topics and methods is meant when the IOHA’s interdisciplinarity is the topic. The researchers opened themselves up to the dialogue yet remain anchored in their own disciplinary fields, with their own unique idiosyncrasies. What makes this aspect so interesting is that these contacts were in no way a matter of course. The IOHA created favorable conditions in order to break down academic barriers and then build transdisciplinary bridges. The international network became a channel through which the exchange of experiences could exist and grow. For example, the question of subjectivity and intersubjectivity or the interest in biographical stories could develop in the fertile soil of the interdisciplinary framework of the network. As already presented, the IOHA offered academics from various disciplines the opportunity to meet and reflect, and influence each other in this way. At the international level, the effects

 Mercedes Vilanova, “International Oral History,” in History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 69.

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that oral history, or, more broadly, work with oral sources had on various academic subject areas, can be determined. In this context, the essay “The Interdisciplinarity of Oral History” by David K. Dunaway is enlightening. It provides a summary of reflections on various disciplines – anthropology, education, ethnohistory, ethnology, gerontology, law, literary studies, communications and media sciences, sociology and gender studies – and their relationship to oral history. He makes it clear that every discipline, originating from the same basis, the collection and analysis of oral sources, of oral data, is occupied with the oral testimony in a special and unique way and that each of them uses the data collected in accordance with a specific method. Despite the differences, the extremely heterogeneous disciplines still share the difficulties and the advantages of the work with oral sources. In his essay, Dunaway portrays the history of oral history since the 1960’s and shows how it gradually influenced a growing number of disciplines, from linguistics to ethnology, from ethnomusicology to museology. No matter whether it was viewed as a method or technique, a craft or as a movement, the most important result of oral history was the interdisciplinarity of its use.⁷⁰ This interpretation is also confirmed in most of the interviews conducted by us. According to Birgitta Skarin Frykman, oral history contributed to the development of a new consciousness within disciplines that were predestined to use oral sources: I think that what was attracting me consciously was… I think it was more the fact that you know, that all of a sudden, a method which ethnologists had used for quite a long time, I mean talking to people, doing interviews or… either with tape recorders or just taking notes and so on, that it had all of a sudden become fashionable in a lot of other disciplines as well, which meant that you had got an interdisciplinary arena with people who are interested in the same method. So, you could learn a whole lot in that way. And then of course, you know, it was nice as an ethnologist to say, “Ah, we’ve been doing this all the time; there’s nothing new in this,” as a joke. And of course, an ethnologist would go out and do fieldwork and so on, but interviews, I mean, they were not high up on the list and at the same time you talk to people and what’s interesting is that we haven’t really looked into this, but we just… how to say that… we have always been doing it and at the same time we weren’t, because it wasn’t said.⁷¹

This quote shows how many ethnologists, who were familiar with the use of oral sources through their education, developed a critical view on the collection,

 David K. Dunaway, “Introduction: The Interdisciplinarity of Oral History,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Walnut Creek, California: Altamira, 1996), 7– 22.  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 13, 2007.

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transcription, and archiving of the interviews through oral history. The oral testimonies received a value of their own and were not just viewed as functional for the research. And they allowed for a more in-depth, more accurate description than the situations experienced in field studies. This new consciousness and the more careful use of oral testimonies are surely the result of the confrontation of ethnology or anthropology with oral history. In addition to different subjects’ growing interest in oral sources, from my perspective, the idea of oral history’s interdisciplinarity gains even greater relevance if oral history were not understood as a separate discipline, but rather as a transversal practice that penetrates and reflects various areas of research, as Skarin Frykman also emphasized: And as oral history has never… its strong side has never been theory, but its method. And that Paul Thompson says in many papers: this is a method and nothing more. It’s not a discipline, it’s not a theory, but it is a method. […] Which means that there is not one oral history, but there are several oral histories being done [emphasis mine].⁷²

The American Mary Marshall Clark explained that oral history is a “global practice” from a geographical perspective, but also from an interdisciplinary perspective, because it has entered the methods of many social sciences. Oral history is also global, because it bridges the borders of the academic environment by including associations, independent research institutes, and various archives. And it is a practice that creates meaning and works on social questions; that makes it global as well.⁷³ In this direct context, Orvar Löfgren’s perspective is especially significant: Oral history was not a creed, but it was a tool, a method among other methods and it was one of the methods I used. It is not a movement the way it was. I think it’s sort of landed in the academic background and people don’t stand up and say, “I am an oral historian.” Very few; you would find very few, I guess. But it becomes an accepted way of working in many disciplines and, I mean, that’s the success story. I think it’s good that people don’t stand up and say, “I’m an oral historian,” because that’s the pioneer period; that’s where you need that. I mean, once it’s accepted as a good method, used in many disciplines, that’s success. And then you don’t have to wave the flag. So, in a sense, the success of oral history results that oral history disappears as a very visible identity [emphasis mine].⁷⁴

 Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.  Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, USA, February 20, 2008.  Orvar Löfgren, interview with Christian König, Lund, Sweden, July 15, 2007.

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In this sense, oral history became a space for the synthesis and processing of various approaches and the analysis of the interview allowed for an interdisciplinary reading at many levels – linguistic, cultural, political, social, historical. Here, I return to the beginning of my entry: the term “oral sources” appears to be more appropriate than that of oral history.

National Journals as an Interdisciplinary Intermediary between the National and International Contexts Until now, I have exclusively concentrated on the international context, without addressing its relationships to the national circumstances. However, an examination of the mutual influences of the two levels is another important element for the analysis of the interdisciplinary nature of oral history. It is of interest to determine how, in the different European countries, the impulses coming from international oral history were steered and forwarded, and whether these impulses in their own country served to open up interdisciplinary exchange between research areas with similar interests that had been separated from each other academically. In this sense, it can be profitable and promising to contrast various national contexts with each other, such as through journals on the topic of oral sources. Therefore, in this section, I would like to comparatively examine journals from three countries: Italy, Spain, and Great Britain. While in Italy, the journal Fonti Orali, or Oral Sources, was characterized by a gradual isolation of individual academic areas within their disciplinary strongholds and borders, as it was repeatedly confirmed by the editorial members Pietro Clemente, Daniele Jalla, or Marcella Filippa,⁷⁵ and as it emerged from its leading articles, the British and Spanish journals had another path of development. Since its founding, the Spanish publication Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales (until 1995: Historia y Fuente Oral) had the goal of creating a level of discussion for researchers. Even today, it shows Spain’s interest in a dialogue between research areas that are differentiated from each other due to their disciplines as well as their geographical locations. In the individual volumes, the

 Pietro Clemente, interview with Silvia Musso, Siena and Florence, Italy, May 10, 2007 and March 4, 2008; Daniele Jalla, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, Italy, February 26, 2008 and March 11, 2008; Marcella Filippa, interview with Silvia Musso, Turin, Italy, May 6, 2008.

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journal contains numerous essays from authors from all over the world, who discuss topics of mutual interest from their respective disciplinary perspectives. Even in Great Britain, the two journals, Oral History, published by the Oral History Society and led by Paul Thompson for a long time, and the History Workshop Journal, published by the History Workshop Collective, led by Raphael Samuel,⁷⁶ were the place for debate, communication, and exchange between researchers of various backgrounds. The following observations were made based on analyses of the tables of contents from the first decades of the three journals – a period of time that spans until the mid-1990’s.

Great Britain, Oral History The British journal is significantly older than its Italian and Spanish siblings. Its founding goes back to the year 1971, and it is still being published. As can already be determined by the title, the British editors have a positive opinion of the use of the name “oral history,” unlike those in Spain and Italy. Despite this clear position that oral history is rather a discipline rather than a specific method, the journal was and is characterized by an interdisciplinary aspect. The various editions – editions until 1996 were taken into consideration – contained entries from heterogeneous disciplines, such as from anthropology (no. 3, 1975, with Elizabeth Tonkin’s article “Implication of Oracy: An Anthropological View”), women’s history (no. 6, 1977), communications sciences (no. 6, 1978, which was dedicated to mass media, like radio and newspapers), museology (no. 12, 1984), and psychology (1989). The attention to the penetration of oral sources with other types of sources is especially noteworthy. For example, issue no. 18 from 1990 is dedicated to handicrafts and art, while no. 19 from 1991 deals with photography. Oral History did not contain a special section for news, but rather, dedicated a lot of space to (then‐) current research projects. These examinations, which represented the various topics and disciplinary backgrounds, were always

 Both journals were founded in the 1970’s (Oral History in 1971 and History Workshop Journal in 1976) but did not compete with each other, as the British historian and Samuel’s long-time partner, Anna Davin, mentioned in an interview. Both of the founders, Samuel and Thompson, were friends, but their groups and their journals were just too different and targeted at different audiences to be able to speak of competition. In addition, the History Workshop fought less for academic recognition; it was shaped more by the left. See Anna Davin, interview with Julie Boekhoff, London, July 20, 2007.

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viewed and analyzed through the view of oral history, so it therefore received a greater identity than in the other national contexts depicted earlier in this text. The analysis of the publications also reveals a greater focus on national research. Authors from abroad were only sporadically represented, and even then, mostly when referring to anglophone topics and less with topics from their countries and continents of origin. The relationship to the international environment was less evident than in Fonti Orali and Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales. However, if one looks at the topics of the various editions more precisely, there is still a certain convergence with the IOHA’s thematical direction. The main topics were the analysis of the wartime past, women’s history and gender topics, the working class, and the situation of the workers. These questions cyclically recurred in the British journals. Finally, the topic of the process of conducting and archiving the interviews remains. The question of collecting and using the interviews seemed to be a much greater issue in both of the other journals and they created their own rubrics for this. In contrast, Oral History primarily concentrated on research reports and results and only marginally dealt with questions of a technical nature.

Italy, Fonti Orali The first edition of this journal was published on September 1, 1981. As its title makes clear, it focused on work with oral sources as a method instead of oral history as a discipline. The bulletin was created as the result of two conferences about oral sources: the international conference in Amsterdam in October 1980 and a national conference in Turin in January 1981. It was to respond to the “need for a place for discussion and for a method of communication for researchers.” The journal’s interdisciplinary leaning already became immediately clear in the leading article in the first issue: […] [T]he bulletin should offer the chance to share information and make connections; it wants to create the conditions to initiate debates between various disciplines. The general intention of the relaying of knowledge and creation of contact includes two specific goals: on the one hand, the revival of Italian experiences in the area of oral sources, especially those having to do with World War II, taking into consideration the much older tradition of folkloric, ethnological, and sociological studies. On the other hand, it is targeted at spreading experiences from various disciplines, which has turned out to be vital if one wants to make advancements in the analysis of these highly complex sources. All of us have had the experience that knowledge about oral sources, which linguists and dialectologists consider to be self-evident, are a discovery to experts from a discipline like histori-

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ography. We will therefore make an effort to not only expand upon the dialogue between the socio-historical disciplines but also build relationships to literary studies, communications, and audio-visual production.⁷⁷

Over time, the journal underwent more changes, yet retained its basic structure, which was based on the following sections: research reports, archiving / techniques, conferences, and international news. In the first edition, the first section was significantly large. Like a type of round table, it offered academics the possibility to present their research. Fonti Orali was open to all disciplinary traditions. As the leading article in the second volume in 1982 put it: In this edition, we present a differentiated selection of work and, in doing so, want to present information about initiatives in the area of oral sources that currently exist in Italy. Despite the dominant use in history, the majority of them come from sociology, where oral sources present important instruments for surveying and evaluation. This means opening up an additional, multi-disciplinary field, after contacts were already made between history, anthropology, and ethnology in the previous edition.⁷⁸

In addition to the section on research reports, the section about conferences and dates was of great significance. A special, multi-disciplinary interest can be taken from this as well: national as well as national conferences from various research disciplines (history, sociology, linguistics), which included even the briefest mention of the use of oral sources, were published here. Over time, significant changes to the structure of the bulletin could be determined, and even a tendency to regress, which led to its slow dissolution. Although, on the one hand, multiple local editorial offices of Fonti Orali were established, which were spread out in different regions – in Piedmont and the Aosta Valley, in Tuscany, in Latium and Campania, in Sicily – and picked up the original intention to bring experiences and researchers into contact with each other once again, on the other hand, the form of the information bulletin became more and more dominant, which offered increasingly less room for discussion. The size of the journal was further reduced in 1984, with the second edition, so that it took on the form of a newsletter. In 1985, a second publication phase of the bulletin began. In the leading article, the logistical and financial difficulties of the sustenance of a journal like this were emphasized and, with a bitter undertone, it was remarked that the interdisciplinary dialogue and the effort to deepen the networks between various areas of research, which had characterized the founding, were further diminishing:  “Editoriale,” Fonti Orali. Studi e ricerche. Bollettino nazionale d’informazione 1.1 (1981): 4.  “Editoriale,” Fonti Orali 1.2– 3 (1981): 2.

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While, in the academic area, the academic work with oral sources has conquered little space, in various disciplines, a development all the way to discussion and exchange is conceivable. However, this is apparently developing less systematically: after the rapprochement and the enthusiasm of the 1970’s, in contrast, once again, the creation of fractions and return to one’s own disciplinary field [emphasis mine] appear to be prevailing.⁷⁹

In this second phase, Luisa Passerini transferred leadership to Daniele Jalla. Passerini, whose central position in the core group of the international network has already been outlined,⁸⁰ also played a major role in the development and founding of Fonti Orali. The journal’s success in its early years was surely due to her, more than anything, because through her, the national journal could remain in contact with the international context, and from there, gain numerous inspirations and create fruitful exchange as well as important connections. Passerini, who was very highly respected in the international oral history scene, gave the Italian journal Fonti Orali an orientation and ideas. This is not to say that the development of the journal completely overlapped with Passerini’s development – the journal was not shaped by a single individual, but rather existed due to the various people who worked on it: the editorial members throughout the entire country are an example of this. However, Passerini was surely an important point of reference and a top intermediary in the dialogue between the national and international oral history scenes. With the personal changes in the journal’s editorial staff, the relationship to the international network weakened. The view beyond the national framework was limited to announcements about meetings and conferences. The journal, with its binding function between various contexts, geographical areas and disciplines decreasing, was finally ended after just a few years, in 1987.

Spain, Historia y Fuente Oral While the Italian journal was suited for emphasizing the significance of the interdisciplinary approach, but also the difficulties in its implementation at the national level, the Spanish journal is characterized by greater openness. Both periodicals show a similar structure, with a focus on research reports, a section on methods and interviews, and a final section on national and international conferences. However, Historia y Fuente Oral presented itself as more open to the international context. Since 1989, entries about non-Spanish research on var “Editoriale,” Fonti Orali 5.1.1 (1985): 1.  See Christian König’s contribution to this volume.

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ious subjects were published in its issues. Every issue was dedicated to a certain topic that was expanded upon through articles from various authors. Something illuminating about the journal is that the first issue, “¿Historia Oral?,” problematized the concept of oral history. In the following years, the journal often returned to this topic, especially to the function of so-called oral history, a term that has been and is used critically. It is apparent – even in an interview with Mercedes Vilanova – that in Spain, the use of “oral sources” is primarily spoken of as a historical-social method that is indispensable when dealing with various topics: from memory to biography to (world) wars, migrations, identity. Through the use of this special type of testimony and its comparison with other sources, various disciplines met on the pages of this journal in order to have a dialogue about their respective perspectives about a selected topic. My evaluation shows that the attention to topics about identity, the construction of identity, and the creation of traditions was in the foreground. This tendency lead to the journal turning to subjects that are primarily occupied with cultural identity, such as anthropology and ethnology. Issue 8 from 1992, entitled “Andalucía: Invención y realidad,” focused on the topic of the feeling of belonging to a place and, as a result, the topic of identity, which, in particular, brought historians and ethnographers into the discussion together. The following edition, with the title “Historia y Etnología,” concentrated on the relationship between the two disciplines, on the old borders, on the differences, and new encounters. In the same edition, the concept of oral history was also dealt with, in that multiple authors – Cristina Borderías, Ronald Fraser, José Antonio G. Alcantud, Ignasi Terradas, and Mercedes Vilanova – commented on the text “Historia Oral” by Gwyn Prins. The connection between history and ethnology seemed to finally come into being with the beginning of the “2a Época” of the journal. Beginning in 1996, it modernized itself, beginning with the title, which, starting then, was Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales. Issue no. 16 (the second of the re-formed journal) was called “Historia y sociología” and was dedicated to the relationship between the disciplines, using significant entries, such as by Louise A. Tilly. The journal’s connection to the international environment is clear, especially considering the authors of the articles published. Even a clear majority of nonSpanish academics, including a number of members of the close circle in the oral history network, like Alessandro Portelli, Ronald Fraser, Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Danièle Voldman, can be found in it. In addition, the section “Agenda” was another important element; there, not just Spanish

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conferences or international conferences⁸¹ were announced, but also numerous other events taking place in other countries. In the review of the Spanish journal, in my opinion, its intention of establishing a network between researchers, which should become even tighter and larger, can be determined. The Spanish journal’s attention was and is also targeted at regions outside of Europe; towards Latin America, in particular.⁸² Therefore, among the journals presented here, it is the best example of a meeting between the national and international oral history scenes and for interdisciplinary dialogue. This tendency towards disciplinary as well as geographical openness characterizes the journal even today: Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales has maintained its critical, dynamic, and lively spirit. Much of this is surely due to Mercedes Vilanova; she is the fulcrum and linchpin of the journal’s editorial staff and a key figure in the Spanish context as well as at the international level, where she and Alessandro Portelli are the only people interviewed by us who are still active today.

Concluding Remarks This chapter was opened with words by the current president of the IOHA, Alistair Thomson, who emphasized two aspects as being characteristic for oral history. I think that the observations until now have shown that the interdisciplinary character of the use of oral sources and the interest in the subjectivity as the result of a transversal dialogue between various disciplines have been present in the oral history movement since its beginnings. Around the mid-1970’s, the method of oral history grew and expanded. A new exchange between the European countries and North America brought extremely different studies into contact with each other, which included ideas from folklore, social history, anthropology, and microsociology. In the research of oral traditions, famous predecessors were drawn upon. Conferences, which allowed for the exchange between researchers, were regularly organized.⁸³

 As far as the connection to the IOHA is concerned, I think that the relationship has been solidified since issue no. 11 in 1994, which was dedicated to the international conference in SienaLucca. The topic of the conference was multiculturalism, a topic that was especially close to the Spanish journal’s interest in identity and memory.  The special attention towards Latin America was also surely motivated and supported by the shared language.  Luisa Passerini, “Le testimonianze orali,” in Introduzione alla storia contemporanea, ed. Giovanni De Luna et al. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1984), 232– 248.

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The interview testimonies collected and cited here show that the diversity, the merger of a number of disciplinary experiences was and is still among the strengths of the international oral history movement. It was, as already emphasized many times, a platform where one could meet and exchange ideas, and the interdisciplinary aspect of it was intrinsic from the very beginning. The need for exchange was always a significant part of the international conferences, which, through workshops, seminars, and also in informal gatherings, tried to create an open context for dialogue and the exchange of experiences. With their various geographical backgrounds and educations, the participants had the possibility to discuss similar topics and questions of joint interest from various disciplinary perspectives. This need is probably due to the fact that in these decades, the international conferences that were based on just one discipline (anthropology, linguistics, contemporary history, psychology), did not provide any food for thought beyond the subject area’s own borders, and always remained closed in themselves and therefore remained self-referential. It could be established that until 1996, the informal predecessor to the IOHA provided the basis for cooperating on theoretical and methodological questions (research topics, questioning techniques, types of transcription) as well as ethical questions (the researcher’s responsibility to the contemporary witnesses and their biographical stories) and technical questions (recording and the problems associated with it) in an interdisciplinary way.⁸⁴ From my perspective, the use and interpretation of the oral sources developed further because different disciplines cooperated. In this respect, the interdisciplinary approach provided the conditions, so that academic methods could develop that were able to face the “magma of orality”⁸⁵ and make oral forms important sources for different types of research. Finally, it should be emphasized that since the first international conferences, the oral history network and its protagonists played an important role in establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue and developing interest and sensitivity for an open approach that was based on the meetings of intellectuals with various educations, but with the same research interests. Our interview partners have shown a special interest in viewing the borders between the disciplines not as barriers, but rather as cross-border territories in which profitable communication could take place. Through this attitude, it was possible for the use of oral sources to spread and gain an increasing amount of significance and visibility. In conclusion, I would like to quote Dunaway one more time. He determined, “As meetings of [the] International Oral History Association have shown in the

 Grele, Variety, 294.  Grele, Variety, 294.

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1980s and 1990s, oral history offers an entire world of opportunity.”⁸⁶ After the analysis in this entry, I cannot just share this perspective with him, but rather also add that the interdisciplinarity is not a characteristic that was exclusive to the international oral history network, but is rather a characteristic of oral history in general. Oral history as a method, not viewed as a discipline, has proven, using the numerous works by academics from various disciplines, that it can find heterogeneous and interdisciplinary applications: Oral historians have responded by finding ways of applying technology to create an international exchange of methods, approaches, and theory. If oral tradition is a river, at times flowing underground, tapped by successive generations, then oral history is its tributary, recycling history into story and sending story bubbling up into history by expanding the interdisciplinarity boundaries of the field.⁸⁷

 Dunaway, Interdisciplinarity, 19.  Dunaway, Interdisciplinarity, 19.

Franka Maubach

The Freedom of Speech as a Human Right Silence and Speaking in the IOHA

Introduction: On the Belief in the Redemptive Word In the beginning, there was silence. “There was a terrible silence about the causes of racism and the rationale of the separation of people who believed supposedly in the same god,” explained Mary Marshall Clark just a minute before the beginning of her biographical interview, which we conducted at the Columbia Oral History Research Office in New York.¹ Born in 1950 in the American South, North Carolina to be exact, Clark grew up with segregation. At the same time, in this region, an initial awakening had been shown; the roots of a social protest movement were growing, which finally grew into the national civil rights movement over the course of the 1960’s. Her origins from this environment full of violence and awakening seemed to show Clark her law of life: she recognizes “a consistency between the things I was struggling with as a young child and the things that I [am] still trying to struggle with today through oral history.” It was Clark’s paternal grandmother – a religious Christian, early student, feminist, social reformer, and “anti-racist” – who advanced to a hero and role model in this fight. Even if today, Clark realizes that her grandmother was no saint but rather just a person, a woman whose humanity was driven by a hypocritical drive to missionize, her childhood enchantment that had transformed the story of her grandmother into a fairy tale-like myth still shines through in her narration: The myth is, and I think there is a lot of truth in this myth, that she refused to settle right down in the town she’s grown up and I grew up in, which is a town of 600 people named Clarkton, North Carolina [laughs] – embarrassing, we were all related – and she took off on a horse – I’m sure it was more complicated than that [both laugh] – and just really for a year rode around the state of North Carolina and began to do her social reform work. In the process, she managed to set up a couple of orphanages for children. And she worked in them.²

 Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, February 20, 2008.  Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, February 20, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-008

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The intensity with which this child-like perception dominated is clearly shown at the spot when Clark disrupts the logic of “anything’s possible” with a comment formulated from the here and now (“I’m sure it was more complicated than that”). In this way, she gets back in touch with the reality of the story and, in doing so, creates a comic tension, which is resolved by laughter. The fact that the grandmother becomes a fairy tale-like mythical role model can first be explained by her position on the side of the good: in North Carolina, going back and forth between discrimination and overcoming it, she was on the morally correct side. She was independent of feminine tradition, climbed on a horse like a man – apparently equipped with a Bible and cowboy hat – and helped the weak. She didn’t stay silent, but rather brought things up and questioned the system of oppression and violence in the southern states: “And so she questioned… she questioned the social order.”³ At the same time, her grandmother’s status as a heroine was fed by another source: Mary Marshall Clark knew little about her. Directly following her telling of the myth, she mentions that her grandmother had stopped speaking when she was five years old – so she had just learned to put her needs, experiences, and feelings into words: And some years ago, maybe about 12 years ago, my first cousin sent me an excerpt from the journal she had written about that time. And it was really revelatory, because my grandmother really stopped speaking when I was four or five years old. She had Alzheimer’s or something like that. So, no one could… You know, I could never do an oral history of her. I could never really find out what her real politics were and as a result, she was sort of made into a saint.⁴

Her grandmother’s silence offered a surface for projecting attributions and identifications; the (hero) myth requires not knowing. Not least because of that, the grandmother’s autobiographical notes were a revelation for her granddaughter: because they adjusted the image that she had had of her grandmother and complemented the all-too romantic ideas through contradictions that turn heroes back into people. Clark’s introductory narrative shows both sides of silence in an almost idealtypical way (whether she consciously launched into this custom definition or is only intuitively associated with it remains to be seen): On the one hand, the silence is the result of terror, violence, and persecution. The opponent and enemy of a political-society system must be silenced: muzzled, in order to ensure that

 Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, February 20, 2008.  Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, New York, February 20, 2008.

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they do not question the prevailing balance of power.⁵ On the other hand, silence is the condition necessary to create myths. In silence, there can be fantasies for which there is no space in the spoken word. It is precisely the fact that the grandmother does not speak that allows for her stylization as a hero. In both cases, the silence makes the speaking about things one-sided – about good and evil, right and wrong – in that it covers up a much more ambivalent reality. For Clark, the grandmother became a pioneer in the most literal sense. Her resistance (like that of her father, who was also involved in the early civil rights movement, still constrained in the region) motivated Clark’s own engagement: she has owned a recording device since she was 11 or 12 years old and with it, went through her home town, asked both blacks and whites questions, and listened to their stories. The young woman conducted an interview with a multi-racial man with wide-reaching consequences. The man, who, as a “mixture of African-American and Native American,” was between all communities and therefore an outsider in society, and was considered a “gypsy” and a madman. For 50 or 60 hours, he told her his visions and stories. Clark emphasizes that with this interview, she was confronted with the ethical side of oral history for the first time: when she asked the man if she could record his story, she sensed that he felt used. In return, he asked her to teach him how to read and write, which she did. Afterwards, he put his visions on paper, traveled throughout the country, preaching, and died somewhere on the West Coast. She said that from this interview, she learned that as an interviewer, “oral history is always an exchange. You have to give something back.”⁶ In the sequences presented here, Clark, who is a trained theologian, gives the spoken word an almost religious accent: in it, there is the power to free people from oppression; it creates resonance and unifies people. Silence and speaking are the axles upon which history turns on multiple levels; the accentuation of the terms is typical for the historical creation context and the specific manifestation of the oral history movement, and can be found again in other interviews or subjective testimonies, as well as oral historians’ research literature, which is used here as a source. As is more precisely presented in the first part of the text, this special coding of silence and speaking is understood to be a direct result of the occupation with the injustice system and the exclusionary and violent politics of the 20th century, a form of occupation, for which dealing with the Holocaust was the prototype. The silence, behind which the genuine  For more information about the connection to racial discrimination in the USA and the exclusion of blacks, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982).  Mary Marshall Clark, interview with Franka Maubach, February 20, 2008.

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truth is hidden in so many philosophical reflections and which denotes the realm of the truth that could not be captured in words was understood to be a burden, a load on societies, as a symptom of a trauma and as the result of the ban on speaking in modern oppression and dictatorial politics (“there was a terrible silence…”).⁷ Giving the voiceless a voice became a moral imperative of oral history, which was emerging at the same time in various societies. This defense for speaking, the belief in the redemptive word, definitely had religious implications.⁸ This is already seen in the short excerpt from Mary Marshall Clark, but becomes clearer in her presentation on the connection between oral history and human rights politics, which can be found online. In this lecture, she talks about oral history as a “mission” and stylizes the individual interview as a message to all of humanity: The goal of our mission is incredibly complex and the stakes are very high, because in essence, when a person has decided to tell a story of trauma, catastrophe, or genocide, he lives with the expectation that the story not only will be heard by that one person, but that it will be understood by the world.⁹

In the following essay, the connection between silence and speaking in international oral history (at the level of oral history as a method as well as a discipline and academic community) will be discussed. First, the stereotypical motive of wanting to give the oppressed a voice will be more precisely illuminated and its implications for research will be questioned. In the sense of Sigrid Weigel’s definition, based on the works of Aby Warburg, the aspiration to wanting to help the speechless speak is understood to be a formula for pathos. In formulas for pathos, “memories of and from suffering” find their symbolic expression; these “passionate memories” and emotional convictions are “resistant to clarification or better knowledge.”¹⁰ In particular, Weigel examines formulas for pathos which originated in processing the Holocaust after 1945, such as

 In this context, see George Steiner, Sprache und Schweigen. Essays über Sprache, Literatur und das Unmenschliche (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973).  An examination of the oral history movement viewed from the perspective of religious history could be gainful.  Mary Marshall Clark, “Oral History and Human Rights Documentation; Acts of Witness on a Journey to Justice,” Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research, accessed October 24, 2007, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/humanrights/news_events/2007/conference/presentations/2– 1– 2.ClarkM.html?2.  Sigrid Weigel, “Die Sprache des Unbewussten. Pathosformel der Gedächtnisgeschichte,” in Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Geschichte?, ed. Norbert Frei (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2006), 58 – 66.

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the discourse about the supposed “unspeakability” of Auschwitz or the emotional gesture of the perpetrators’ descendants identifying with the victims.¹¹ With the belief of the word as a liberation from silence, a formula for pathos has been found that, above and beyond the German context, applies to the international processing of war and dictatorships after 1945. Following that, the significance of this presupposition for international oral history will be examined. What role does this more political-moral than academic motive play for the international communitization of oral historians? Did it have a binding character? Or was international oral history rather a result of a crisis that resulted from the realization that the truth was not easy to find, by breaking the silence? These questions will be examined, predominantly using the example of the Colchester conference and, more concretely, using the lecture that was held there by Luisa Passerini. This lecture can be seen as a turning point that initiated the process of academization for oral history. Behind the silence, as the empirical process of oral history had shown, it was not the language of the truth that was hidden, but rather, it was the language itself that turned out to be problematic. Alistair Thomson also recognizes this development of oral history to be from a positivistic to a “post-positivistic approach to memory and subjectivity.”¹² Oral history resorted to a detailed language analysis which made international communication about research results difficult and revealed the problem with translation. The situation in the IOHA increasingly resembled a Babel, in which the lack of understanding replaced the original political unity. The fact that the discussion about the organization’s language for communication, which had accompanied the IOHA from the very beginning ultimately expanded to be a veritable fight about languages, has a symbolic meaning in this context. Last but not least, at the same time, the conflict about the language(s) for communication in the IOHA, English, French, or Spanish, shows that the partisanship for the oppressed and minorities remained alive and accompanied (and still accompanies) the IOHA. The criticism on the dominant English language was also always a criticism of the hegemonial Anglo-American world order. Therefore, one can hardly speak of a stringent process of de-politicization and academization; it could rather be said that there is a constant and productive tension between external and internal considerations. It is one of the core questions of this essay whether and to what extent the emotional core of the formula

 Weigel, Die Sprache, 62, 65.  Alistair Thomson, “Eine Reise durch das Gedächtnis unserer Bewegung: vier paradigmatische Revolutionen in der Oral History,” in BIOS Special Issue 20 (2007): 21.

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for pathos was resistant against oral history’s academic access to oral memories. Today, do oral historians and their work still count as the realization of the human right to free speech?

“Giving the Unheard a Voice” – Implications of a Formula for Pathos Mary Marshall Clark’s narrative about her grandmother can be viewed as a typical story of an initiation to oral history. Shifted to the biographical level, there is a stereotypical conviction that had already characterized the first generation of oral historians: that one must “give a voice” to the voiceless, oppressed, disenfranchised.¹³ This moral entitlement was not least because of the political engagement following the 1968 movement, from which oral history had arisen.¹⁴ The academic work had de-radicalized their political beliefs, but at the same time, the aspiration for academic research had been radicalized through the increased assertion of political beliefs.¹⁵ With the formula for pathos of “bringing up a subject,” the beliefs, which were outside of academia to begin with, and the partisanship of the left-wing researchers were elevated to an academic program for the “wretched of the Earth.”¹⁶ This included a preliminary decision about the research, which should first and foremost be critical of power. In 1980, in an introduction to one of the first international collected volumes about oral history, Lutz Niethammer wrote that a “democratic future requires a past in which not just the upper classes are audible.”¹⁷ From the lower classes, from the oppressed groups, it was often the case that nothing else was noted  In Cristina Borderías’s quote, the formula is a belief that is still valid: “For me, oral history is more than just conducting interviews. That means changing the historical viewpoint, the perspective. Giving people a voice who, up until now, did not have one.” As a rule, the formula is quoted with critical distance, in order to show that one has come away from the naïve beginnings.  See Manja Finnberg’s essay for more on the political persuasion of this academic school.  First-generation oral historians regularly drafted ideas of radical history that they wanted to pursue; a good example of this is Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop 12 (1981): 96 – 107.  The title of the famous book by Frantz Fanon, which was well-received by the 1968 movement, in which he had generally criticized colonialism and wanted to give their countries back to those that were oppressed in the colonies (and, of course, an extract from the “Internationale”). Frantz Fanon, Die Verdammten dieser Erde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008).  Lutz Niethammer, “Einführung,” in Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History,” ed. Lutz Niethammer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 7– 26, 7.

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than their date of birth or date of death. Nothing more remained of the women than passivating discourse about them from men, the patriarchy. At most, there were police reports about the actions of those who protested against the power and had performed resistance. In short: only the “contours and reflexes of these groups” could be recognized – “laboriously-determined raw data about a way of being that is [remaining] predominantly blind about the thoughts, experiences, and actions of these people.”¹⁸ After the overturn of power politics in the first half of the 20th century, which culminated in the Holocaust, the general criticism of power and the basic democratic impulse were close at hand. The criticism was not just directed against the rulers, but also against the (historical) sciences, which, until then, had primarily reflected and potentiated the perspective of power. Modern structures of power were associated with textuality; modern historiography, which was concentrated on rulers’ written legacies, had even reproduced these structures of power. The impulse, critical of power then demanded that the research focus be moved to the spoken word as a source. This preliminary heuristic decision was made by researchers in every different national context and, in doing so, united international oral history before the term was even coined.¹⁹ Yet the formula for pathos in the various national oral histories was directed at very different addressees: national history as well as existing research traditions decided on who had not been heard and now needed to be asked. Researchers from the direction that is dominant and still continues to exist today wanted to get the victims of the authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian regimes or politics to speak; their prototype was survivors of concentration camps.²⁰ After 1989 – 91, the victims of Stalinism were added to this, and since the mid-1990’s, the victims of the Latin American military dictatorships have also had a greater voice.

 Niethammer, Einführung, 7.  Some researchers describe that they had already conducted interviews before they had even heard that there was an academic “oral history” approach. For example, see Mercedes Vilanova, interview with Annette Leo, March 5, 2008.  See the paradigmatic texts Giorgio Agamben, Was von Auschwitz bleibt. Das Archiv und der Zeuge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003); Michael Pollak, Die Grenzen des Sagbaren. Lebensgeschichten von KZ-Überlebenden als Augenzeugenberichte und Identitätsarbeit (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988). The core of this testimony is silence.

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The Formula of Pathos as a Ranking In countries without a dictatorial past, the criticism of modernity was in focus, such as on the modern economic framework, which lead to the exploitation of workers, criticism of colonialism, or criticism of the modern patriarchy, which had oppressed women. With the mutual international recognition, a ranking was created, so to speak: the researchers from societies that did not have a dominant historical culture of oppression, such as the Scandinavian countries or Great Britain, even developed something like an inferiority complex. It had already developed in comparison to the countries that had to deal with a fascist past, and further increased to the extent that Eastern European academics who researched the victims of Stalinism joined the IOHA in the early 1990’s. Birgitta Skarin Frykman clearly remembers experiencing this discrepancy at the conference in Gothenburg in 1996, through the presence of Eastern European academics. The blatant difference between research topics that had to do with societal experiences of violence and those that were focused on topics such as workers’ culture of consumption created a rift in the community: “We were so cut off in a way from the world. […] We were far away from them, and not in a good way.”²¹ The understandably irritated comment from the interviewer Christian König, that a country like Sweden, without such a past, could consider itself lucky, clearly shows how much Skarin Frykman’s argument actually reflected the scale of intrinsic value in oral history at the time (she said herself, “I remember I thought this then, but I haven’t really checked it now”). The greater this societal silence was in a society, the more urgent the need and the requirement to break it, and therefore the greater the challenge for the research. This rift was also perceived by the other side, from societies with especially widespread histories of silence and with a totalitarian past. In a 1992 essay, Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova compare the various societal forms of remembrance internationally, and in doing so, create a ranking of national histories of silence from a perspective opposing Skarin Frykman’s: Remembering, wether [sic] personal or political, has its own special social and historical context in each country. The relatively untroubled, unpolitical British confidence in the worth of the past thus contrasts with the overtly contested claims to political legitimacy of post-war Italians, the enforced silence of Spain under Franco, or the ambivalence of the deliberate silence of the wartime generation in France or Germany. Yet the Soviet

 This and the following quote are in Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.

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Union is perhaps the most remarkable case of all: a society, probably unique in the whole world, where remembering has been dangerous since at least the 1920s.²²

Almost patronizing, but definitely ironic, they gradually begin with the unagitated British trust in the past and then continue through the post-Fascist societies all the way to the Soviet society, which has been condemned to silence since the 1920’s. Even if Paul Thompson was and is viewed by many as the “founding father” of European oral history,²³ from a thematic and theoretical perspective, the academics who were viewed as trend-setting were those who came from societies that had to process dictatorial pre-histories and the forced silencing of events: in the very beginning, especially Germany and Italy, but also Spain – a fact that is important for the question about the reasons for the end of the informal phase. The silence that had to be broken apart was the core of the formula for pathos that was fulfilled in an almost ideal-typical way for those who could not participate in the collective memory, fixated on writing, because they were illiterate. These “mute ones” in modern society received special attention, because they literally embodied the claim of the formula for pathos. Mary Marshall Clark’s mythical memory of her first interview fulfills exactly this: in exchange for the man telling the girl about his visions, she taught him how to read and write, did not just give him a voice, but also gave him the ability to put his thoughts in writing. Mercedes Vilanova’s research about illiteracy can also be viewed in this context, especially its connection with a lack of democratic participation and the resulting invisibility of large parts of society that came out of it.²⁴ It is not a surprise that Birgitta Skarin Frykman calls the view that globalization equalizes societies throughout the world a myth, because 60 to 70 percent of the world’s population still cannot read or write and do not have any access to the globalized world.²⁵

 Daria Khubova, Andrei Ivankiev, and Tonia Sharova, “After Glasnost: Oral History in the Soviet Union,” in Memory and Narrative (International Yearbook of Oral History, vol. 1), ed. Luisa Passerini (Oxford: Transaction, 1992), 89.  The term is used in Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.  Mercedes Vilanova, “Illiteracy, non-voting and oral sources during the Second Republic in Barcelona (1931– 1939), BIOS Special Issue 20 (2007): 173 – 179. She has since expanded this regionally-limited research; see Mercedes Vilanova and Frederic Chordá, eds., A Mind at Work; We Are Our Questions (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2003); Mercedes Vilanova, Voces sin letras: analfabetos en Baltimore (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2005).  Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.

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The Results of the Formula for Pathos: Taking the Oppressed at their Word The high significance attributed to the words of the oppressed and disenfranchised could lead to dealing with the interview partner’s recorded memories in an identificational and less distanced way. This is best shown by the tendency to not treat self-created sources methodologically or interpret them in an academic way, but rather to let them speak for themselves: As Birgitta Skarin Frykman put it, “And, you know, when oral history first started, I mean, the sort of papers presented there would be long [emphasized] quotations from the interviews and hardly any theoretical or methodological discussions at all. But let[ting] the people talk [laughs] was the main thing.”²⁶ Recording the spoken word was already considered the core of the academic work, and the concentration on the wording shows the high potential to identify with the source material. In extreme cases, in the early phase, the view was held that the researchers could not express themselves better than the interviewees – the language of the researcher and the source were congruent. The most consequent form of this were the history workshops, which incited normal people to research their history themselves; Sven Lindqvist introduced this term in his book Dig Where You Stand. ²⁷ In this way, the researchers distanced themselves as far as possible from every claim to interpretation and even considered a complete delegation of the task to the historical subjects. There was nothing left to add to the historical key players’ perspectives of themselves. This trouble spot made oral history vulnerable to criticism. In her socio-scientific criticism of oral history in 1985, Louise E. Tilly touched on this sore point when she accused the (otherwise esteemed) work of Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame of exactly this: unfounded overidentification, that surrendered any claim to research (that, at its core, means interpretation): “Bertaux-Wiame had on occasion surrendered to a ‘resurrectionary’ faith […], as when she refused to analyze certain interviews because she could ‘say nothing better than my interviewees.’”²⁸

 Birgitta Skarin Frykman, interview with Christian König, June 13, 2007.  Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst. Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989); for information on the history workshops, see Gerhard Paul and Bernhard Schossig, eds., Die andere Geschichte. Geschichte von unten, Spurensicherung, ökologische Geschichte, Geschichtswerkstätten (Cologne: Bund, 1986).  Louise A. Tilly, “People’s History and Social Science History,” in International Journal of Oral History 6.1 (1985): 5 – 18; she is referring to a quotation from Bertaux-Wiame in Dominique

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Tilly interpreted the orientation of the wording of the interview as a rejection of the academic core of the task of interpretation. In her response, Bertaux-Wiame describes the two directions of oral history, the first of which was directed more at the collection of facts, and the second more on the analysis of mentalities. She suggested that the development from one to the other equaled a process of scientification, and described her statement, quoted by Tilly, as an “imprudent statement.” In the 1980’s, a process of reflection had actually begun and in the process of this, oral history distanced itself from the naïve assumptions from its initial phase, which today, are almost consistently qualified as teething trouble. The attempt to take interview partners at their word does not just show the naïve approach that often characterizes the early phases of academic innovations, but also the political prerequisites for oral history. The interview partner’s spoken word was a rebellious attack on traditional academia, focused on writing, and a call for a radical change in the perspective on history. In this way, the interviewees spoke completely in terms of the researchers; the supposedly authentic voice of the workers, women, or victims of dictatorship was not least their own. Pointedly, the academics expressed themselves through their interview partners: they articulated their feeling of standing on the edge and their impulses, critical of power. When, in a text from 1981, Alessandro Portelli attempted to reject the accusation that oral history let the working class speak for itself, uncommented, he did so with this very argument: for him, the political contribution of oral history was that the researchers – in an act of “ventriloquism,” as it were – would speak through the working class; that is, would themselves become part of the sources and, in this way, abandon the traditional form of the omnipotent narrator who observed history from above, and re-enter it as an active participant, as an activist. The field of history then became a virtual area of action for the groups disappointed by the political practice, to a mental demonstration against material power: Even accepting that the working class speaks through oral history, it is clear that the class does not speak in the abstract, but speaks to the historian, and with the historian (and, inasmuch as the material is published, through the historian). Things may indeed be more the other way round: the historian speaking through the workers’ testimony, ventriloquilising a discourse which is not theirs [emphasis mine].

Aron-Schnapper and Danièle Hanet, “D’Hérodote au magnétophone: sources orales et archives orales,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 35 (1980).

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So far from disappearing in the objectivity of the sources, the historian remains important at least as a partner in the dialogue, often as a “stage director” of the interview, as an “organiser” of the testimony – and organisation, as the old radical saying goes, is not technical, it is political. Instead of finding sources, the historian at least partly “makes” them; though other people’s words may be used it is still his or her discourse. Far from becoming a mere mouthpiece of the working class the historian may amplify a personal contribution.²⁹ For Portelli, a radical writing of history was exactly that: the presence of the historian in the source, which became an “autonomous act of narration.”³⁰ Not least, the oral historians brought themselves to speak. Even if, in the course of its development, oral history distanced itself even farther from the interview partner’s wording and the interpretation was given more space again, the close connection between the interviewee’s direct speech and the academic’s interpretation is still shown in the widespread practice of presenting one’s own interpretation below a direct quote. Until today, compelling interview quotes regularly serve as the title of academic works and in doing so, indicate a productive as well as precarious closeness between source and interpretation.

Our Common History – Common Language and Academic Crisis In two respects, the oral history movement tried to have a radical change of perspective on history: as the past and as a historical discipline. At the same time as the oppression of societal groups, the exclusion from the academic community was always discussed – a stereotypical statement that is found throughout all of our interviews and the contemporary texts, and in conflicts, such as the one with Louise E. Tilly, which has already been quoted. This doubly experienced marginalization was one reason for the international association, which should function not least as support and for the strengthening of the national oral histories.³¹ The supposedly identical experience base, the homogeneity of the interests, the common perspective coming from the 1968 movement that academia has to be radical, the supposedly identical problem of silence in society and

 Portelli, The Peculiarities, 105. Tilly’s “People’s History and Social Science History” (9) strongly criticizes this position.  Portelli, The Peculiarities, 105.  See Agnès Arp’s contribution to this volume.

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the same strategy of solving the problem – breaking the silence – linked the group together internationally and simplified quick discussion, which went above and beyond academic discussion and included private as well as political exchanges.³² The conviction that one is speaking the same (intellectual) language then overcame the very tangible barriers that were always in the way to international communitization: language barriers, which prevented differentiated communication, and cultural barriers, which were due to the fact that one had a different underlying understanding about certain things. The belief that those excluded automatically understood each other, that they spoke the same language and despite their national origins, social classes, and academic disciplines, they shared the same basic understanding about the order of the world characterized the formative phase of international oral history. International oral history’s horizon of expectation was – just like the interview work itself – was straddled by an identificational feeling. Ronald Grele summarized this context in a very impressive way in an interview (and in my opinion, remains close to the experience back then). Prior to that, he had described the feeling of standing on the edge of US oral history, which was just as advanced as it was traditional: But to be someplace where everybody was talking about the same thing, everybody was sharing a language, there was a set of shared assumptions in that crowd, and not only about oral history, about many, many other things. It turns out that many of us were fringe characters in our own professions.³³

Today, in a self-critical turn, the protagonists from back then view the belief of speaking the same (intellectual) language about the same problem as naïve and romantic, or even as ideological. It arose from political convictions that were slowly challenged through the empirical work: the supposed mutual preunderstanding was questioned, because it was in no way confirmed by the practical interview work. The work yielded other results than one had believed; the interview partners did not say what had been expected, but rather said something completely different and many things were not said at all, which therefore

 For information on the IOHA as a network of friends, see Christian König’s contribution to this volume.  Ronald Grele, interview with Julie Boekhoff and Franka Maubach, Jena, Germany, February 21, 2007. See also a letter from Ronald Grele to Luisa Passerini, January 24, 1980: “In all candor I must confess to a feeling of confraternity and comradeship with your work. For several years I have been thinking and writing about these problems and have often felt like a crank or outsider.”

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brought the identificatory basis of the work in danger. These experiences led straight to an internal academic crisis, about which one had to communicate. The feeling of disillusionment is regularly mentioned in the publications from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. This fits Alistair Thomson’s previously-mentioned attempt at periodization, which, in the late 1970’s, was a turning point for the transition from a positivistic to a post-positivistic phase.³⁴ For him, the symbolic date for the beginning of this post-positivistic phase – for the transition from the examination of the content of language to the language itself – is Luisa Passerini’s talk at the first IOHA conference in Colchester, among others, a text that, in the meantime, has become one of the almost holy texts of international oral history.³⁵ In Thomson’s opinion, one of the main representatives of the positivistic phase of oral history is Paul Thompson, the organizer of the Essex conference and the founding father of the IOHA – a categorization against which Ronald Grele explicitly took a stand in a later issue of the Oral History Review. ³⁶ However, the thesis that things had moved from naïve, positivistic beginnings all the way to a reflective, post-positivistic phase – even if it is applicable in many regards – suggests an academic development that is much too direct. Thomson quoted a standard academic narrative, the story of the romantic, innovative beginnings, through disillusionment and crisis, all the way to a final professionalization, establishment, and even the spread of the approach. This story of maturation can be understood as a transfer of the typical biographical coming-of-age novel to the academic collective and, in retrospect, can be frequently found in the development of innovative branches of academia (where the already-established people looking back profit from this narrative). With a more exact look, the academic “changes in paradigm” and clear transitions mostly turn out to be gradual evolutions and naïve expectations and empirical experience are not mutually exclusive in any way, but rather, both co-exist. The Colchester conference became a “Pentecostal experience” for international oral history, because it was both: it maintained and revived the belief in a common language, created a common history, and moderated the crisis into which oral history had maneuvered itself.

 Thomson, Reise durch das Gedächtnis, 21.  He is referring to her study about Italian Fascism; her basic reflections on staying silent in interviews were already presented in Colchester.  Ronald J. Grele, “Commentary,” The Oral History Review 34.2 (2007): 121– 123; Alistair Thomson, “Response,” The Oral History Review 34.2 (2007): 125 – 128. See also Ronald J. Grele, “From the Intimate Circle to Globalized Oral History,” Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios (2007– 2008): 1– 4.

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An example of this is the collected volume on the Colchester conference, Our Common History, which was published in 1982 under the leadership of Paul Thompson, and in many ways, it can be termed the IOHA’s “founding publication.”³⁷ Immediately, in his first sentences, Paul Thompson describes how the conference participants’ and contributors’ mutual understanding was created organically and unexpectedly, as it were: Why Our Common History? The truth is that as I look at it again, now ready for printing, I am still a little surprised myself. For this is a book which has claimed its title from its own intrinsic qualities: from its sense of common purpose and from the criss-crossing of themes and concerns which give it such overall coherence. In this it certainly far exceeds the hopes which I or – I imagine – most of the other contributors could have held before the weekend in March 1979 at which these twenty-one papers were presented.³⁸

According to Thompson, the surprising commonality was “intrinsic”; the content-related connection in the book was not due to external design work, but was rather organic. The essays fit together because their authors were connected through common (political) aims and goals and from the many overlaps in the criss-crossing of topics and issues worked on, the (thematic and personal) network automatically evolved. Here, it seems that the academic coherence had emerged because similar societal aims resulted in a common language, a similar look at history, and a related academic focus. An initial look at the table of contents confirms the shared spirit: the essay titles are dedicated to the unifying topics of early oral history. They have to do with workers and farmers, women and family, fascism and resistance, and the possibilities of having a democratic history. If one reads the individual entries, initial, sobering observations can be found under the traditional thematic umbrella that distanced the people in the movement from their interview partners and that disrupted the identification: it turned out that the presumptions

 As far as the definition of the common geographical space is concerned, the volume still only contains contributions by the Europeans, while the non-European entries that were prominently represented at the conference are named in a footnote. It has to do with the “common history” in the European space, which is made clear in the sub-title (“The Transformation of Europe”); with it, at first, an exclusively Eurocentric level of understanding was created. For more on this, see Agnès Arp’s essay in this volume.  Paul Thompson, “Introduction,” in Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe (London: Pluto, 1982), 9. Here, Thompson is working on the myth of the “Pentecostal experience,” which Jürgen Frese describes as constitutive for intellectual associations. See Jürgen Frese, “Intellektuellen-Assoziationen,” in Kreise-Gruppen-Bünde. Zur Soziologie moderner Intellektuellenassoziationen, ed. Richard Faber and Christine Holste (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), 442.

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about the often-glorified working class and the results of the interviews with members of this class significantly diverged. In an almost ironic way, Lutz Niethammer described the experiences in an interview project on the anti-fascist movements of 1945: “It came as something of a shock that with these local working-class functionaries, many of them Communists, we […] faced almost impenetrable barriers.”³⁹ Yet there was still hope that there would be understanding between academics and workers – with Niethammer as well, as can be clearly understood from his oral history title “Channel of Communication between Workers and Historians.” Yet the disillusionment that directly resulted from the empirical research prevailed: to the extent in which information was put into words which was previously unknown or kept silent, the assumptions with which the research had begun also changed. The narratives of memories did not correspond with the expectations, but were often contrary to them and were more ambivalent, contradictory, confusing, and ambiguous than expected. With the awareness of these irritations, the politically induced presuppositions were shaken up and a process of academization was introduced, which, at the core, meant an ability to distance oneself and an understanding for ambivalence. The irritations made a change in the focus of the research necessary: instead of just reproducing the content of the narrative, one needed to observe the mode of the memory itself, one needed to listen to the language in which the memory was being shared. The transition from the semantic to the linguistic level of the interviews was – equally logically as well as paradoxically – characterized by fact that the focus was also placed on what was not said, but seemed to be important. In concrete, empirical research, it quickly became clear that the “sense” of an interview did not arise from what was actually said. Because Luisa Passerini pointed to this problem at the Colchester conference, her contribution is remembered as an eye-opener and, as it is often quoted, often changed and re-printed; it became a canonical, almost holy text in international oral history. It is not just due to this initiation text that Colchester became a “Pentecostal experience” and was the first (instead of second) international oral history conference. As I will more specifically discuss later, the references to this talk can be found throughout the researchers’ texts about self-understanding and also some of our other interviews. What made this text so effective? What did Luisa Passerini say?  Niethammer in Thompson, Our Common History 25. See also the Bertauxs’ sobering experiences when meeting workers in the Le Creusot project; Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle BertauxWiame: “Autobiographische Erinnerungen und kollektives Gedächtnis,” in Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History,” ed. Lutz Niethammer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 108 – 122.

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Passerini’s Key Feature: Silence as Consensus with the Dictatorship Passerini’s text was a hidden precursor that indicated the direction in which oral history would develop: disguised in a title appropriate for the trends of the time, “The Italian Working Class under Fascism,” Passerini showed the inner crisis that oral history was in and indicated a productive way to overcome it, in that she steered her focus to the language, or rather, that which was unspoken. In front of the new community of oral historians who had gathered at the University of Essex in Colchester, Passerini spoke about two problems closely linked together: the problem with a political writing of history and the methodological problems that the source presented to the academics. As Passerini began, in the fight against the established writing of history, oral history had already been able to gain some victories. For example, it had expanded the horizon of historical research, in that it discovered new “spheres of reality”: everyday life and the experiences of the oppressed social classes. In spite of this, the shortcomings could not be overlooked: Amongst the gravest of the inadequacies of oral history, I would suggest, is the tendency to transform the writing of history into a form of populism – that is, to replace certain of the essential tenets of scholarship with facile democratization, and an open mind with demagogy. Such an approach runs the risk of constructing oral history as merely an alternative ghetto, where at least the oppressed may be allowed to speak [emphasis mine]: In order to counteract this tendency towards a complacent populism (and the simple description which appears to be intrinsic to it), we must elaborate ways of using oral sources which take account of two interrelated requirements.⁴⁰

Passerini spoke about the danger of a more populistic than academic oral history that, by using the programmatic formula of “giving the oppressed a voice,” had ultimately created an “alternative ghetto.” Only at the first glance was the term a contradiction in terms and, at the second glance, painfully hit the mark. With the term “ghetto,” Passerini was not accidentally alluding to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, who had pre-formed every concept of suppression, persecution, and violence after 1945. The victim’s apotheosis, in connection with coping with the past after 1945, had only created an additional ghetto in which the victims needed to maintain their status as victims. The passivation to a victim was a part of policies of violence, against which the only means that helped was turn Luisa Passerini, “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism,” History Workshop Journal 8.1 (1979): 84.

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ing the victims back into people – with good and bad qualities. On the contrary, the alternative ghetto of victim apotheosis extended an individual’s disempowerment. Only a turn away from cheap populism and openness towards academia could open the borders of this alternative ghetto. For Passerini, the formula for pathos in the movement was populistic, not least because the interviewers told the interviewees what they wanted to hear and identified with their words, rather than critically keeping them at a distance. The simple description, the naïve repetition of that which was said was the method that corresponded to this “complacent populism” (“the simple description which appears to be intrinsic to [the complacent populism”).⁴¹ Looking for the factual truth in the source was not just a populistic fallacy, but rather was common practice for the criticism of sources in historical research up until then, in which “the historian treats the fragments through which the past ‘as it really was’ may be reconstructed.”⁴² Here, Passerini refers to Leopold von Ranke’s classic formula and the according historic criticism of sources, which is more about the reconstruction of the past reality (not least by considering the criterion of the timeliness of the source as decisive).⁴³ With an approach such as that, however, the actual richness of the oral memory could not be unearthed: interviews were, most importantly, an expression and representation of culture. They did not disclose the factual reality, but rather, were about its subjective appropriation by an individual. According to Passerini, throwing the traditional criticism of sources overboard and asking the interview sources about their reflections of “subjectivity” was necessary on the path to academic use of oral history. Using the example of her own research, she showed how such a path could be taken, and in doing so, also slaughtered a holy cow: using the example of the working class in Turin, she referred to the workers’ consensus with the Fascist system, which only became apparent if one then asked what the interviewees had not said. That was the main content of Passerini’s lecture that remained in the memory of most audience members: that she had turned the focus to silence and that this silence hid consensus (instead of oppression). This was extremely far away from taking the workers in Turin at their word. Analyzing the silence was a truly academic operation, because in doing so, the superficial level of the word, which is always subjected to current purposes,

 Passerini, Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism, 84.  Passerini, Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism, 84.  Detlef Briesen and Rüdiger Gans, “Über den Wert von Zeitzeugen in der deutschen Historik. Zur Geschichte einer Ausgrenzung,” BIOS 6.1 (1993): 1– 32.

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was circumvented and ambivalences were looked for. The topics about which the interviewed Turin workers did not speak appeared to be just as “irrelevant” to Passerini in the first, still identificatory approach as the jokes told in the interview.⁴⁴ It was only at the second glance that the silence turned out to be significant; at the same time, awareness of it led to another interpretation of what was said; that is, to an innovative reading. For one listener or another, one reader or another of the text, which was later printed in multiple versions, the reason for the Turin workers’ silence was likely surprising, because it collided with their presuppositions – and it was also because of this that it stayed in their memory: their silence covered a (partial) consensus with the Fascist regime.⁴⁵ If one looks at this more precisely, this consensus could be discerned from the very detailed descriptions of the work itself, which show how the workers had finally placed themselves in the Fascist system: “[i]deologies of work, wether [sic] expressed in thought or in behaviour, can be considered one of the main channels of the acceptance of authority […].”⁴⁶ The workers’ traditional pride in their abilities, their mastery of the work, had turned into the submission to the regime of work; the current silence in the interview was just the extension of the Fascist authority that was tacitly accepted back then. This argumentation shook up the common fundamental beliefs of the leftwing researchers’ group: the people that they had idealized because they were in opposition to power politics and dictatorships were now suddenly recognized as being exactly one of the communities who remained silent, which were to be criticized. Now, even the working class did not offer any preserve for the upstanding fight against the dictatorship anymore. Examining their memories did not bring any counter-history about resistance and opposition to light, but in contrast, illuminated the functioning of fascism. Even if here, there is not yet an idea about appropriating a Fascist order in self-interest, as it was presented in detail in papers in the 1990’s, but as it were, Passerini worked out the acceptance of the indoctrination and still worked with Marxist ideals about the liberation from alienated work, her argumentation still consciously disenchanted the classic stereotypes and prejudices that one could have cultivated prior to the empirical work. With a look at the language, Passerini re-surveyed the oral history landscape and the connection between academia and politics: stopping at the outer surface  Passerini, Work Ideology, 91.  See Luisa Passerini, “Work Ideology and Working Class Attitudes to Fascism,” Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe (London: Pluto, 1982), eds. Paul Thompson and Natascha Burchardt, 54– 78, 59 – 61.  Passerini, Work Ideology and Working Class Attitudes, 61.

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of the present statements does not hold any academic discoveries, but rather remains a populistic operation directed at the present. Those who wanted to “give the oppressed a voice” ultimately only ingratiated themselves with the idealized working class and were happy with the quasi-moral pretension. The pretension, in contrast, of wanting to get closer to the past in an academic way required going past the outer surface of the content of the statements and venturing into that which is unsaid, kept silent, implied, or hidden. Here, there were innovative findings, because they did not agree with the presuppositions; here, there were ambivalences that created an image of the past which was more cumbersome and hostile to identification than expected, but which was possibly closer to the always contradictory human experiences. By introducing and defining the trend-setting term of subjectivity, Passerini finally abandoned the left-wing consensus about the objectivity of the situation.⁴⁷ It is because Passerini pointed an oral history in crisis down a practicable path that freed the research, which was trapped in the political and focused on itself, all the way to truly innovative and bewildering interpretations, her Colchester talk has remained in attendees’ memories for a long time. Today, the text is still regularly quoted and re-interpreted; its wide reception proves the nature of the turning point of the text. Lutz Niethammer, who, at almost the same time, had similar, disillusioning experiences with the worker milieu under National Socialism, which later took up a lot of space in the LUSIR project, said the following about Colchester: Then there was an everlasting topic – I came into contact with it for the first time in Colchester, but maybe my memory is also wrong now. But I would simply say that was actually a running topic; that is, the silence in an interview. What is that, which is not said? Is that perhaps the most important thing?⁴⁸

Directly following the conference, Passerini’s text was published in the History Workshop Journal under the more explicit title “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism” and one year later, in the international organ led by Ronald Grele, The International Journal of Oral History (IJOH). Lutz Niethammer also published it in his anthology Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis,

 Luisa Passerini, Work Ideology, 85: “Even if we accept that coercion always has a material basis, what is it that leads the oppressed to accept their opposition in cultural and psychological terms, even to the point of praising it and preferring it to any struggle for change?”  Lutz Niethammer, interview with Annette Leo and Philipp Heß, May 27– 28, 2008.

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“much enlarged and revised, virtually rewritten,” as he wrote to Grele.⁴⁹ The text had already taken on a life of its own, as Grele commented with irony, in a letter to Niethammer: “The damned thing has gone through so many revisions and transformations it is simply too confusing to deal with.”⁵⁰ To close the circle, the article was finally published in the conference volume Our Common History. ⁵¹ The internationalization of oral history also arose from a need for self-understanding. One spoke (politically) the same language, but academically, it did not go very far. The transportation of Passerini’s text into various national oral history cultures must be placed in a greater context of the active translation work that is noticeable from the early until the mid-1980’s. Our Common History indicated the beginning of the project that was a joint writing of history which was primarily based on the translation of oral history research from one national context to another and which also served the self-understanding of a new discipline in an internal (and external) crisis situation. This process of translation also brings the question as to the extent to which the oral history, with all of its linguistic specifics, was even translatable, into the foreground.

Translation, Conflict about Languages Among the IOHA publications from this phase, Our Common History is just the most relevant and prominent example, because this collected volume grew out of the founding context of the IOHA, and was therefore loaded with the “Colchester” myth. Yet after the Bologna conference, Luisa Passerini, who had become famous through Paul Thompson’s work at the time, had made Thompson’s work public in Italy through the collected volume that she edited, Storia orale. Vita quotidiana e cultura materiale delle classi subalterne. ⁵² Typical for the time, this volume still included everyday life and material culture of the oppressed classes in the title. It is significantly different from Passerini’s funda Luisa Passerini, Work Ideology; Luisa Passerini, “Italian Working Class Culture Between the Wars: Consensus to Fascism and Work Ideology,” International Journal of Oral History 1.1 (1980): 4– 27; Luisa Passerini, “Arbeitersubjektivität und Faschismus. Mündliche Quellen und deren Impulse für die historische Forschung,” in Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History,” ed. Lutz Niethammer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 214– 248. See also Lutz Niethammer, letter to Ronald Grele, June 13, 1980 (private papers of Ronald Grele).  Letter from Ronald Grele to Lutz Niethammer, August 20, 1980 (private papers of Ronald Grele).  Luisa Passerini, Work Ideology.  Luisa Passerini, ed., Storia orale. Vita quotidiana e cultura materiale delle classi subalterne (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1978).

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mentally critical reflections on the status of oral history from just one year later. Between the two, there was the frustrating experience of her own research work about the workers in Turin: Passerini had determined that the optics of searching, which had been pre-set through the discourse in the Italian left about the working class under Fascism, had hindered her ability to gain knowledge, and an open perception necessary for dealing with the sources was missing: Oral sources refuse to answer certain kinds of questions; seemingly loquacious, they finally prove to be reticent or enigmatic, and like the sphynx they force us to reformulate problems and challenge our current habit of thought.⁵³ It was only at the initial, superficial glance, that the sources were “speaking”; they actually evaded the understanding, remained mysterious, and only spoke to the researcher if he asked the right questions and directed his attention at that which was unsaid. The collected volumes as well as the international journal published following Colchester served the debate about a discipline in crisis: the translation of foreign oral history into one’s own national context primarily served the self-understanding. Therefore, in founding the IJOH, for which he found editorial members among participants of the Colchester conference,⁵⁴ Ronald Grele used other criteria to make oral history presentable in the USA. There, one could look back on an already-established tradition of historical interview research. In doing so, in this already very elaborated field that had been beamed to all other existing oral history and still beams (which can still be seen on the widespread term “oral history,” which developed in the USA), the goal was a re-importation of innovative trends from other societies. The IJOH was published from 1980 to 1990; in it, texts from European oral historians Bronislaw Misztal, Luisa Passerini, Detlev Peukert, and Alessandro Portelli were published. Before Grele stepped down from the position of editor in 1985, as already mentioned, he gave his closest colleagues, Daniel Bertaux, Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and Paul Thompson the chance to respond to social historian Louise Tilly’s criticism of oral history. Even if the IJOH’s range of distribution was surely not too wide, the attempt to translate similar approaches into one’s one academic context (not least in order to strengthen one’s own position in one’s home country, such as the debate with Tilly, who worked at the New York School for Social Research, significantly shows), is remarkable in and of itself.  Passerini, Work Ideology, 91.  In addition to Americans on the editorial board, the European representatives were Daniel Bertaux, Orvar Löfgren, Robert Manchin, Luisa Passerini, Paul Thompson, and Annemarie Tröger. There were also representatives from Nigeria, the Philippines, Canada, Malaysia, and Mexico (Eugenia Meyer).

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The anthology Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History, edited by Lutz Niethammer, was also first published in 1980. In addition to numerous researchers from the USA, whom Lutz Niethammer had met on his interview trip to the USA in 1976, many oral historians were also represented, with whom Niethammer had first come into contact in Colchester.⁵⁵ One year later, in 1981, Daniel Bertaux published an anthology in English, Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, which also included an essay by Paul Thompson.⁵⁶ These four publications and the journal reflect the euphoria at the beginning and the propulsive force of the joint undertaking, as well as the process of selfunderstanding within the core group of the emerging international oral history. At the same time, with the increasing number of conferences and publications in English, there was doubt about the translatability of one’s own academic work and the criticism about the dominance of English. Was it even possible to understand the core of the examinations, the results of which were based on differentiated language analyses? With growing sensitivity for the language, these examinations included sociolects and dialects and all other special characteristics of orality, and often, they were in a spatial context that was very specific and difficult to translate – exactly because many oral history studies were located in the very small context of local history. In his talk in Colchester about two Jewish workers in New York, Ronald Grele had emphasized that it was hardly possible to understand the full meaning of the interview “[w]ithout listening to the sing-song Yiddish accents of New York.”⁵⁷ He could imitate this sing-song so perfectly that Daniel Bertaux later sent him a letter in which he congratulated him on his acting abilities.⁵⁸ Grele spoke this sentence in a poised way, and in the matter-of-fact manner with which many Americans and Britons treat their language as the world language. It is exactly this reproduction

 Daniel Bertaux, Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, Luisa Passerini, Raphael Samuel, Paul Thompson.  Daniel Bertaux, ed., Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1981).  Grele, Ronald J., interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, February 21, 2007. The text of the talk is published as Ronald Grele, “Listen to Their Voices: Two Case Studies in the Interpretation of Oral History Interviews,” Oral History 7.1 (1979): 33 – 42. The 1979 issue of the journal Oral History also reflected the impulse to translate, which resulted from the conference in Colchester. In the same issue, other than the essay from Grele, there was another essay by Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame about her migration project and an essay by Sven Lindqvist about Dig Where You Stand.  Letter from Daniel Bertaux to Ronald Grele, March 31, 1979 (private papers of Ronald Grele): “[…] I appreciated very much the presentation you did, or rather – you played, you acted. You have a lot of talent!”

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of the essence of an interview that is often hidden in the fine bifurcations of the use of the language, which was not possible for other conference participants. Although the problem of the language is present in all international communities, it can be assumed that it especially shaped the IOHA, because here, the language was not just a means of communication. Rather, it had an intrinsic value and was of increased meaning for one’s own work. Even if English remained the dominant language until 1996, there was not a lack of criticism about it and attempts to end its dominance. The fight about languages was one of many factors that finally led to the end of the IOHA’s informal phase.⁵⁹

The Fight about Languages as a Question of Power The conflict about the conference and communication language of the IOHA accompanied the community from the very beginning, but peaked over the course of the 1990’s and led to the fracture in 1996. The two most important figures, Paul Thompson and Mercedes Vilanova, also represented two different language camps: the English language camp and the Spanish. The development of research described earlier in the text, moving away from what was primarily political and content-based connections to an academic interest in the language of memory maybe only supported this development indirectly, but should not be ignored as a factor. As long as the same intellectual, political language had carried the movement, the concrete language in which one was unified was of secondary importance. To the extent to which the focus was placed on the language itself, its significance as a means of communicational also increased. In addition, as described previously, the subtlety of academic interpretations, which brought aspects such as sociolect or dialect into the analysis, was difficult to translate into English and to convey in the international space. To the extent to which the sensitivity to language(s) increased, it became important to reclaim a space for one’s own language in the international context. Therefore, in preparation for the Barcelona conference, Lutz Niethammer offered to organize workshops on the LUSIR project, for which participants needed to have at least a passive knowledge of the German language.⁶⁰

 For more on this, see Julie Boekhoff’s contribution to this volume.  Beatrys de Graeve, report on the Preliminary Session on the International Oral History Conference, London 24. July 1983, July 12, 1983, EMG archive, Jena, Germany: “Mercedes reported that all those attending the workshops planned by Lutz Niethammer would require to have

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At the same time, the conflict about languages clearly showed that the professionalization of the approach described here, which increasingly replaced cohesiveness due to political opinions, did not lead to the conventional forms of the criticism of power becoming ineffective. From the very beginning and until the end, the question of languages was always also discussed as a question of power. The criticism of the dominance of British and American English implied criticism of the (in a classic, left-wing understanding) hegemonic Anglo-American Western world order after 1945. The demand of giving the languages oppressed by English a forum for use, even in the international space, was a variation of the formula for pathos. The extent to how well the old mechanism of the criticism of power functions even today became clear in the discussion between some former members of the core group about the question of language– Daniel Bertaux, Selma Leydesdorff, Lutz Niethammer, Paul Thompson, and Mercedes Vilanova – at the 2007 Colchester conference. Lutz Niethammer, who had spoken out for the introduction of small workshops in different national languages at the fringe of the conference back then, varied on the formula for pathos as follows: “You have to open up for minority cultures and to do a lot of translating. You can’t just say: Let’s say it in English or be quiet, yes?”⁶¹ In doing so, Niethammer contradicted Selma Leydesdorff’s argument. She was of the opinion that one had to comply with the situation and would have to speak English, but not without adding a comment critical of power, laconically: “I mean, I don’t care. The world is in the hand of the Americans; they are the masters of the world, and all we have to speak American.”⁶² Daniel Bertaux developed the question of language as a criticism of the power of one universal language, in that he drew up the dystopian scenario of a world in which the National Socialists had won World War II and forced everyone to speak German. In doing so, using the ur-example of every criticism of power after 1945, National Socialism, he constructed an analogy, which he – also with an ironic undertone – termed a “pedagogic type” of language criticism, which he had once developed when talking with a British colleague. Well, I told him, “Quite imagine, the Germans had won World War II. Now German is the international language – oh my goodness! [Group laughs] – Um, it means that, it means that if you want to publish in a sort of journal which is read widely outside your country, you

[sic] at least a passive understanding of German. Since this would exclude the majority of those present it was agreed that some further meetings of the committee would be needed independent on [sic] the workshops.”  Lutz Niethammer, Colchester group interview, September 13, 2007.  Selma Leydesdorff, Colchester group interview, September 13, 2007.

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have to publish in German. “Oh, I can do that.” “No, you cannot, because you have to learn German, you will always be unable to write a [sic] good German. You write up to 70 percent, but further is too difficult, so you have to pay somebody to translate or you have […] to be happy with a poor form of your thoughts. But that’s not the only thing. You have to read all the very important German literature, which is appearing in German. Yes. Nobody cares any more about American or British papers. Nobody is interested. Nobody can read them. […] If you are not aware of [what’s happening in Germany], you don’t quote it; then your paper gets turned down because you have not quoted the most recent thing. But you don’t get the goddamn books in your library in London. […] And the [man] said: “Hm, I’m glad we won the war.”⁶³

This shows the criticism of power in the form of a pastiche in which the current situation is exposed. All four former members of the core group who did not speak English as a native language – especially Mercedes Vilanova, whom we will soon discuss in detail – had firm criticism about the dominance of English. From this perspective, the British “founding father” Paul Thompson embodied the patriarchal power of decision about the language.⁶⁴ While Ronald Grele could actually be considered the arrogant American who spoke no other language (but always, and with lots of enthusiasm, supported the “true internationality” of the association), Paul Thompson took the wind out of the sails of this criticism with a pronounced habit of a polyglot. From the very beginning, he tried to learn the languages of the most important network members. After meeting Luisa Passerini in 1976, he learned Italian, and he used his blooming friendship with the Bertauxs to use his French, which was already very good. When the South American and Eastern European groups became stronger in the 1990’s, he tried to learn Portuguese and Russian. The fact that he had not reached his goal by the end is symbolic, especially considering the end of the core European phase in 1996.⁶⁵ Thompson’s entire academic biography is pervaded with the attempt to take up other national traditions and assimilate to them; in the British journals History Workshop and Oral History, he repeatedly wrote articles about the status of oral history in other countries.⁶⁶ His knowledge of many languages helped Thompson to begin and carry out international projects, and in doing so, to expand his sphere of influence. This is particularly clearly shown in the 1990’s, with the interview project that he carried out with Daniel Bertaux in

 Daniel Bertaux Colchester group interview, September 13, 2007.  For more on the role of patriarchy in power structures, see Heinrich Popitz, “Macht und Herrschaft. Stufen der Institutionalisierung von Macht” in Phänomene der Macht, ed. Heinrich Popitz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992), 248.  Paul Thompson, life story interview with Karen Worcman, Stockholm, June 12, 1996.  Examples of this are Italy, Scandinavia, Poland, and the USA.

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the former Soviet Union.⁶⁷ The fact that his knowledge of languages made him immune to criticism raised against him was also shown in the course of the discussion in Colchester in 2007: after Thompson began to speak after a while and argued that the IOHA did offer other languages a forum to unfold, he was immediately taken out of the criticism about the Anglo-American hegemony, especially by Selma Leydesdorff: “[y]ou’re an exception.”⁶⁸ For active participation in the central conference events, it was still essential to speak fluent English, so that it would be possible for the speakers to present complex findings in a form of English that is generally comprehensible. Excellent English was also a criterion for entering the core group’s decision-making center. And most of the long-term members had had language or research stays in Great Britain or the USA and had gained a knowledge of the language there, with which complex situations could also be discussed in a sophisticated way.⁶⁹ In the history of the IOHA until 1996, there were two attempts to establish a second language in addition to English: French and Spanish. While French could not sustainably be implemented, after 1996, Spanish became the association’s second official language of communication. Today, the conferences are carried out bilingually and even the IOHA journal, Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios is published in English and Spanish (while all communal publications from the informal phase were always published in English). But why could Spanish be implemented, and not French? In the program for the Colchester conference, in the small print, it was added: “Facilities for simultaneous translations are not available, and the main proceedings will be in English, but depending on the needs of the conference members, discussion groups will be in English, French, or Italian with summarised translation.”⁷⁰ The fact that French and Italian were named reflects the closest network that had developed between the Britons, French, and Italian since the mid-1970’s, and also the attempt to tailor the IOHA to its European core audience. It was not least due to the strong influence of the French fraction, which included Daniel Bertaux, who worked closely with Paul Thompson, as well as François Bédarida and Joutard, that French, in particular, became an (in-

 Daniel Bertaux, Paul Thompson, and Anna Rotkirch, eds., On Living Through Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2004).  Selma Leydesdorff, Colchester group interview, September 13, 2007.  See Agnès Arp’s and Manja Finnberg’s contributions to this volume. Often, the first contacts in the network were made in the USA, such as with Daniel Bertaux, Lutz Niethammer, Paul Thompson, Annemarie Tröger, or Mercedes Vilanova.  See the Colchester conference program.

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formal) second language of communication in the IOHA. Bédarida and Joutard organized the third (or fourth) conference in Aix-en-Provence. There were ambitions to make French as powerful as English and present a “Romanic front” against the Anglo-American academic imperialism, due to the “hegemonial influence of North American sociology.”⁷¹ With interventions such as this ironically-tinged one from Daniel Bertaux, it was not just two languages playing off of each other, but also different understandings of academia. While the AngloAmerican tradition was associated with a positivistic, traditional, and sociological or socio-historical approach (and thus precisely with that against which oral history was competing), the idea of “Romanic” academia was associated with “advanced” cultural-historical approaches. The conference in Bologna, with its anthropological-ethnological character, and Passerini’s concept of subjectivity were representative of this, like the French tradition of Annales. Much more was associated with the use of French as a second language for communication than the hope for an alternative form of communication. After the conference in Aix-en-Provence, French had effectively advanced to the second language, as the organization of and proceedings at the fourth (fifth) conference in Barcelona in 1985 show. This conference marks a significant turning point in the informal phase of the IOHA and already hints at the crisis 10 years later. Instead of Spanish, French was used as the conference language; the call for papers was published in English and French, and organizer Mercedes Vilanova was responsible for the French version. To some extent, workshops were offered parallel to each other, in English and French.⁷² As Vilanova said in Colchester, given Catalonia’s special location and location on the border, this part of the conference really made sense to her. So, I in a sense… I really was home but when in Oxford Spanish people and Latin Americans were not allowed to have sessions in Spanish, I decided this was the end for me. I started the journal and we decided with Eugenia Meyer that this was going to happen never again. And it didn’t happen.⁷³

 Daniel Bertaux, letter to Luisa Passerini, December 6, 1981 (private papers of Luisa Passerini).  See Paul Thompson and Ronald Grele’s suggestion to Mercedes Vilanova, March 23, 1984 (private papers of Ron Grele): “Our sessions would all be in English […]. We suggest that there should be a parallel session for those who would prefer to have a workshop in French, and if you like I will write to Philippe Joutard suggesting that he and Geneviève Joutard undertake this.”  Mercedes Vilanova, Colchester group interview, September 13, 2007.

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The assertion of a “ban” on Spanish-speaking sections could not be verified; as a matter of fact, all of the sections in Oxford were in English, and in some of them, some talks were held in French. This organization was absurd, especially considering the section “Memory and Denunciation – Daily Life and Material Culture in South America,” which took place on September 13, 1987. Six of the seven speakers came from Latin America (and Fabio A. Martinez from the USA) and all of them likely spoke Spanish. However, the section was held in a strange mixture of English (four talks) and French (three talks). The fact that the language rules up to that point were still kept at a regionally focused panel could be one point of departure for the conflicts between the English- and Spanish-speaking lobbies and the fight for power in the following years. The Spanish-speaking lobby’s “assumption of power” in the IOHA, which took place in 1996, when Mercedes Vilanova was voted president, and was expressed at the first formalized IOHA conference in Rio de Janeiro (under the challenging title “Oral History – Challenges for the 21st Century”), had already been imminent before the 1990’s. The roots of the second, non-European phase lie deep in the European beginnings of the IOHA. This is not just the case for the tradition of a strong criticism of the Anglo-American supremacy that was felt, which seemed to legitimate the countervailing power of Mercedes Vilanova and the Latin American lobby and also fit the established rhetoric of the criticism of power. The personal knots for a Spanish-Latin American network were also tied from the very beginning through the regular presence of Eugenia Meyer, from Mexico, who was at the front of the oral history movement for her reappraisal of the Latin American military dictatorships.⁷⁴ Just like Marieta de Moraes Ferreira from Brazil, from the very beginning, she was at the edge of the European network and participated in conferences, and it can be assumed that it is exactly because of this already-established cooperation that the Latin Americans (and not Asians or Africans) took the baton. They also had already established a Latin American oral history association. Vilanova also had cooperated with Eugenia Meyer for many years, so the founding of the Spanish-language journal Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales had already been sorted out since 1987. The founding of this journal, a conference organized by Vilanova and Meyer in Mexico, Thompson’s fight with the Brazilians, and also the New York conference, which according to Ronald Grele, was “truly international,” as well as the constant growth of the organization, through

 Eugenia Meyer, “Recovering, Remembering, Denouncing, Keeping the Memory of the Past Updated: Oral History in Latin America and the Caribbean,” BIOS Special Issue 1990: 18.

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which the European core group had become the minority created the field in which the Spanish-speaking lobby could gain an increasing amount of influence. In front of this background, the Spanish-speaking oral history became a stooge for the criticism about “Anglo-American imperialism” and the fact that European oral history colonized topics that were firmly outside of Europe, instead of giving non-European researchers influence; it was also representative of a decidedly cultural studies-based tradition of oral history. From this perspective, it is no surprise that Vilanova had recently published the Bologna conference program in an essay in her journal, in order to dig out the roots of the association once again, which had been cut-off by the Anglo-American hegemony and to create a new historical tradition for the formalized association.⁷⁵ Behind the partisanship for the Spanish language, there was an impulse very critical of power that had characterized oral history from the very beginning: giving the oppressed (in the IOHA) a voice. It was not least this criticism of power that helped the breakthrough of the Spanish language.

Conclusion In the history of the formative phase of the IOHA, with Alistair Thomson, a change from a positivistic-semantic understanding to a constructivist-linguistic understanding can be traced, and its symbolic turning point was Passerini’s lecture in Colchester. With that, oral history was a method that was already sensitive for the constructive character of a language early on and combined it with deconstructivist and discourse-theoretical approaches, which have long since become mainstream in modern historical studies. At the same time, and in a certain way, in contrary to this, the idea of a “paradigmatic revolution” (taken from the classical ideas of Thomas Kuhn) hides the fact that old and new convictions, methods, and forms of interpretation frequently co-exist next to each other, rather than replace each other.⁷⁶ In this way, the history of a progressive, advancing oral history is written – even by researchers who are experienced in dealing with mythical narratives – had, empirically disenchanted, come away

 Mercedes Vilanova, “Las fuentes orales entre Bolonia (1976) y México (2008),” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 36.2 (2006) 49 – 50; Alessandro Triulzi, “Hace treinta años,” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 36.2 (2006): 79 – 85, 87– 88 (Bologna conference program).  The term “disciplinary matrix,” which was also coined by Thomas Kuhn and expanded upon by Jörn Rüsen, is better for the analysis. See Jörn Rüsen, Historische Vernunft. Grundzüge einer Historik. Bd. 1: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983), 29.

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from its idealistic, moral-political roots. This standard narrative of the established academic can, in fact, be traced and proven, but hides the fact that ideas and convictions that were characteristic of oral history from the very beginning are still inherent to this academic approach. It is exactly the expanded view of language, also as a means of communication within the IOHA that could illuminate that it is not just the stereotypical formula for pathos of giving the oppressed a voice that led to Spanish advancing to become the second official language. Since the 1990’s, oral history has become re-politicized because along with it, policies hostile to human rights that muzzle their opposition, suppress, and displace others all the way to genocide are no longer examined after the fact, but rather in the course of the events themselves.⁷⁷ For example, it is illustrated by interview projects in the framework of the Yugoslavian Wars in the 1990’s, in which Selma Leydesdorff and Luisa Passerini participated. First and foremost, international oral history did not remain active because it was formalized and became academic, but rather, because since then, it has also remained a forum for people who want to give the victims a voice, and more so, because it became a forum for the victims themselves. This process is not least due to the psychologizing of the approach. Today, oral history has also become a therapeutic agent for processing human rights violations. In a Freudian sense, giving the victim a voice now means helping to overcome trauma that occurred through human rights violations.⁷⁸ Mary Marshall Clark’s appeal quoted in the beginning of the text, to understand every word in an interview as if it were directed at the entire world, places the old formula for pathos back into the work. Today, oral history is an academic approach – and at the same time, it is increasingly a form of transmission for the translation of human right to free speech into a political as well as therapeutic branch of academia.

 Ronald Grele, From the Intimate Circle, 1– 4.  Sigmund Freud, “Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten. Weitere Ratschläge zur Technik der Psychoanalyse II (1914),” in Studienausgabe. Ergänzungsband, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich (Frankfurt: S.-Fischer, 1989), 206 – 215; Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff, Mary Chamberlain, and Leyla Neyzi, eds., Memories of Mass Repression: Narrating Life Stories in the Aftermath of Atrocity (London: Routledge, 2008).

Annette Leo

“Please Tell Us Your Life Story…” A Confusion of Roles or, How It Is When Experienced Interviewers Are Interviewed As the saying goes, doctors make the worst patients. When they find themselves in the unusual (and significantly more powerless role) of the ill, their professional medical expertise is not very useful to them. On the contrary, the exact knowledge about what can happen if one does or does not do this or that can stand in the way of a successful treatment. Is the comparison misleading, or is it similar for experienced interviewers when they are placed in front of a recording device and asked to tell their life stories? In this project, this request was made of 30 men and women aged between their mid-50’s and 70 – historians, sociologists, philosophers, and representatives of related career groups who live and work in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, and the USA. The thing they have in common is that they were intensively occupied with oral history for many years during their career lives. Many of them can hardly count the number of interviews they conducted or that resulted from the projects that they led. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, they developed methods on questioning and analysis and made a significant contribution to creating a space for work with oral sources in their countries’ academic landscapes. (The preceding entries in this book are about this and the international association which kept them together for a long time.) This text deals with the implications and complexities of an oral history examination of the oral historians themselves. It thematizes the self-understanding and the experiences of a group of young researchers, who explored the beginnings, the storm and stress period of the International Oral History Association (IOHA) by confronting the founders with their own methods. To keep the carousel of this role reversal further in motion, the author of this entry, who was also the coordinator of the project, questioned the group. The topics of conversation were the conditions of the founding, the context and constellations in which the biographical interviews took place, upon which the research project on the IOHA history was significantly based – in other words, a criticism of the source. Since oral history entered the historical sciences, the subjectivity of all of our sources (not just the oral ones) is becoming increasingly accepted. If we take it seriously, then in this project, it appears to be essential to not just depict the interviewees’ personal interests and aspirations, but to also be aware of one’s own position https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-009

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and role and depict it in an appropriate way. That is because undoubtedly, the discussions with the founding fathers and mothers of the IOHA were about more than a transfer of experience. It was also a dialogue between two generations and the critical adoption of a piece of academic history. As a co-interviewer and coordinator of the project, I took on a type of intermediate position. I am closer in age to our interview partners. However, I can observe their history from the outside, just like my younger colleagues. At the time that the oral historians met in Colchester, Amsterdam, and elsewhere, and fought about oral history as a method or discipline, about interview techniques, about subjectivity and intersubjectivity, I lived in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and conducted journalistic interviews, which gradually turned into interviews with contemporary witnesses – back then, it was a good chance to get behind the taboos in a world of closed archives. The group of young researchers is made up of Agnès Arp, Julie Boekhoff, Manja Finnberg, Philipp Heß, Christian König, Franka Maubach, Silvia Musso, and Philipp Neumann. Julie Boekhoff, Manja Finnberg, Christian König, and Philipp Neumann were working on doctoral dissertations within the framework of the research group Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte (Memory – Power – History) at Jena University and their topics examined historical proceedings that can be located between the poles of these three terms. Julie Boekhoff was dealing with denazification in Lower Saxony, Philipp Neumann was recording the history of the International Buchenwald Committee, Christian König interviewed displaced people who later had careers in the GDR, and Manja Finnberg compared different autobiographical testimonies from two generations of her ancestors. The post-docs, Franka Maubach and Agnès Arp, were occupied with different research contexts. While Franka Maubach was working on a project about the generation of war children within the framework of the group Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte, Agnès Arp was completing a project about cultural conflicts in the 1980’s in the GDR countryside. During her work on this project, Silvia Musso was completing her undergraduate studies in Turin, where she wrote a diploma thesis in anthropology. In his paper for his state examinations to become a teacher, Philipp Heß reconstructed the life’s work of an exiled academic that had been lost, using the help of oral history. The occupation with the IOHA was a task that united everyone who came with the “package” of the research project, so to speak. Manja Finnberg remembers that Lutz Niethammer called her when she was still in Italy and made this suggestion to her. As a “highlight,” the group should work on a joint project: “IOHA – that’s what I understood. Until then, I had never heard of it.” Agnès Arp immediately had interest, especially due to the possibility to conduct interviews in her native language, French, but then, she had no idea about what this

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IOHA was about. At first, Julie Boekhoff found the idea of working together with other people interesting, “so that you can then exchange ideas with each other. And there, the topic was something secondary. I actually first warmed up to it after a year.” Philipp Neumann reckons that he first heard about the IOHA project “when the application was mostly over. I can remember that I came to it like the Virgin Mary to the Child.” Christian, who only joined the group later, could originally not imagine “what should come of it.” The breakthrough came when he met and interviewed former members of the IOHA in Sweden, and “from then on, my interest in the topic increased.” As Franka Maubach says that at first, she had “no feeling at all for it, somehow nothing. Of course, I didn’t choose it myself, but rather I was signed up for it. You kind of had to make it your own.” In contrast, Manja quickly warmed up to the project, not least because she really wanted to get to know Luisa Passerini. She had already read some of her texts during her studies in Italy and found her “interesting and fascinating,” but “it was a little bit of a problem for me that the others found it more difficult. I wanted to share it somehow and there was not a real resonance.” The person who thought up the topic and signed these people up for the project was Lutz Niethammer, doctoral advisor, head of the Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte research group and, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, was a key player in this international association of oral historians. It was a constellation that was not completely unproblematic, which was known to all of the participants. At the end of his interview, with an ironic comment, Ronald Grele, one of the IOHA veterans questioned, commented that “Only in Germany [laughs] could that be an object of investigation. Only in Germany, I think, probably only because of Lutz.”¹ Here, Ronald Grele is alluding to the fact that in the USA, oral historians separate the source and interpretation much more strictly than in Germany. Such an attempt of “self-historicization” would not have been conceivable under these circumstances. Philipp Neumann: So, from the very beginning, it was really clear that this topic was very important for Lutz and I asked myself what aim he was following. In other projects with him, I had the impression that he has now entered the phase of taking stock of his own life. This project certainly belongs to that and therefore, it then interested me in two ways. On the one hand, there is the IOHA as a trans-national organization of academics, where I then also see certain parallels to the topic of my dissertation; that is, to the history of the International Buchenwald Committee. On the other hand, it interested me to see what Lutz actually wants from us and how we deal with it as a group. Will he now try

 Ronald Grele, interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff, Jena, Germany, February 1, 2007.

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to preserve this thing that he helped build, for posterity, or will he give us free space, and we can do our work ourselves and make our own conclusions? Manja Finnberg: I never found his role to be so dominant that you had to fight against it. I really came into contact with Lutz for the first time at the beginning of the project. This style that he had, as a professor – I wasn’t familiar with that and found it to be very pleasant. Franka Maubach: […] but also very suggestive. That is because the theories that he had are strong. If you think about it: The IOHA is, so to speak, an example for current European institutionalization processes or the “re-socialization of the 1968 generation”… that is also very idealistic and suggestive, subtle, intellectual – those are strong theories that we are working through, that are also included and discussed everywhere in his essays.

In the extent to which the project group adopted the topic, was excited about it, and developed their own ideas, they also began to distance themselves from Lutz Niethammer. All of them were unanimous: if the attempt at historicizing the IOHA is going to be taken seriously, the initiator and project leader needs to change to the role of contemporary witness and “object” of research. To a certain extent, the confrontation with him was the core of the confrontation with the history of the teacher generation. In retrospect, the group members also concurred that decisive advancements in this process took place during the closed meeting in June 2007 in Grünow, Germany, and in September of the same year, at a meeting with some of the IOHA protagonists in Colchester, England. Franka Maubach: “So I know that we sat together in Grünow and had a heated discussion before Lutz came. That was definitely very strong, of all of us, the critical position, uncovering the legend, so to speak.” Did Lutz create a much too harmonic image of the IOHA meetings and conferences? Manja: “We then increasingly dug into the tensions, the fights, and the power.” “Power and women,” says Agnès, and laughs, “well, if you know Lutz […].” Franka Maubach: Well, I had the feeling that we were in a phase of our research in which it was probably very important to have developed a type of meta-criticism. The entire question of making oneself a legend, the self-historicization of Lutz, we viewed extremely critically. He is now imposing it on us to write his history, so to speak. For me, it would now be the goal to come away from this meta-criticism once again, to a more balanced perspective. I have the feeling that we are currently doing that. Philipp Neumann: He told us his version of history, also told us whom we should interview, in his opinion, but he never said, that and that has to be the result, but rather there, I already had the feeling that we had free space, actually from the very beginning.

The outlines became clearer between the meetings in Grünow and Colchester. The project group lost some of its members. Stephan Paetrow, Cornelia Siebeck, Franca Czeromin, and finally also Susanne Hantke, who were in Colchester,

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needed to leave, because they had to work on other projects. But even the group of the founders of the IOHA that were to be questioned became smaller. The researchers decided to concentrate – with a few exceptions – on the so-called “main figures” who had significantly determined the development until 1996. Agnès Arp: “One can already see parallels in development, that is, us and the other group that we are researching about. That is really interesting. Since Colchester, there really has been a change. We know where we’re going and with whom and all of it is becoming very concrete.”

In September 2007, the group traveled to Colchester, England – to the location where, in 1979, the first international meeting (after Bologna) of oral historians took place. In this university universe, wonderfully set in nature, but constructed in the ugly 1960’s style, between seminar rooms, apartments, cafeterias, archives, libraries, and a market square, we met Paul Thompson, who had taught oral history there for decades. In addition, Daniel Bertaux from Paris, Selma Leydesdorff from Amsterdam, and Mercedes Vilanova from Barcelona had responded to our invitation to meet. While we were there, Lutz Niethammer, who, of course, had come with us, moved back and forth between his roles as project leader and contemporary witness. Yet the IOHA, which until then, had been a rather unclear image in the minds of the group, became visible, tangible, began to live. Susanne Hantke: In Colchester it became clear to me that there was kind of a class field trip atmosphere, and for me, that was very moving to experience that in the moment. Well, the idea: these were the protagonists, they are now spread out all over the world. In Colchester I first noticed, or it became clear to me that, for example, Lutz had not seen Paul Thompson since then. I found that to be really crazy. Franka Maubach: I personally also view it as a turning point. I think that is because we – as you already got to the heart of it with the term “field trip” – that we were really confronted with the network for the first time. That is, for the first time, multiple people really sat together and one could really imagine what this IOHA even is. And after that, we created our outline according to topics and no longer according to nation; that is, in accordance with the network. Manja Finnberg: In Colchester, I sensed that there was great respect for everyone and that was the basis upon which they were meeting each other. Well, that they respected the other people as very capable people and personalities, academically. When they met back then, I imagined that they were all about 40 and had just really started in their career. And were very dynamic and had a very large need for… yeah, for mutual intellectual stimulation. So, I imagine that this is how this solidarity came to be. […] The good thing about our meeting in Colchester was surely that it finally became concrete, but for me, Colchester was actually a big problem, because I had the feeling that we lost a lot of time; we were already supposed

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to be at a completely different point in the project, and somehow, we didn’t have enough substance in order to meet these people.

In retrospect, Franka Maubach thinks that the necessary process of the emancipation of the group from Lutz Niethammer was and remained ambivalent. It was something like “an artificial operation,” because Lutz was the initiator of the project and he remained their teacher and doctoral advisor, but at the same time was an object and subject of this research project. The IOHA group soon met without Lutz Niethammer and no longer directly included him in the conceptual work. Yet at one point in time, when the majority of oral historians in different countries had already been interviewed, we procrastinated on the decision as to who should actually interview Lutz Niethammer. All of us were a little intimidated by that. We thought about how, in this interview, we could manage to go beyond that what he had already said in the previous meetings. Would two interviewers be better than one? Should the interviewer already have known him for a long time, or rather, have a less close relationship to him? It is in no way surprising that Lutz Niethammer also had difficulties with an interview like this. He underpinned his resistance and delay with various reasons: we should all first interview each other before he would also be ready, in addition he already told us everything, and a biographical interview would also be difficult because he had already written an autobiography and would just repeat himself. Of course, the group did not want to accept that. Philipp Neumann: After all, he initiated the whole thing, he had the demand that the others become engaged and he, himself, then didn’t want to do that. I found that a little bit difficult. It wouldn’t have been good if it hadn’t worked out.

The “breakthrough” finally came with a spontaneous group interview during the closed meeting in Grünow. Almost one year later, Philipp Heß, the last person to join the project, took over the biographical part, supported by me in the first two hours of the interview. Luisa Passerini was also similarly “resistant” when she was questioned by Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso. At the beginning of the project, Passerini was to act as an advisor, which, however, didn’t lead to much, due to health and restrictions in time. However, she still primarily saw herself in the role of an expert. Right at the beginning of the interview, she said that she did not want to talk about her life, first, because she had already written about it in Autoritratto di gruppo ² and second, because she no longer found the way of narrat Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto di gruppo (Florence: Giunti, 1988).

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ing her own life using episodes that always identically repeated themselves, “crystallized memories, “to be interesting. Both of her interviewers, Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso, almost despaired over Luisa Passerini’s inability – or was it rather a refusal? – to remember, to engage herself in the narrative. Manja Finnberg: This mixture of the roles was more dominant in this interview than in no other that I have conducted. I believe that the constant guarding of her role as an academic advisor in this project prevented her from engaging in a contemporary witness interview. I suppose she used it in order to protect herself exactly from that, rejected the biographical interview.

Other IOHA founders had no problem engaging in conversation; difficulties with the change in role, resistance, and unexpected reactions were only exposed over the course of the interview. “Please tell us your life story” – this opening formula, probably thought up and tried out by sociologists 40 or 50 years ago, now belongs to the repertoire of oral historians, in Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, France, the USA, and in many other countries. The formula contains an open offer to the interviewees. They apparently have the freedom of choice about what they would like to share about their own biographies and how much personal information they will disclose. Yet experienced interviewers know exactly that this freedom becomes smaller, in the extent to which the famous narrative thread unfolds its own logic. They know the strategies, how to get this thread going and how to speed it up. Without a doubt, our interview partners had all of that in the back of their minds as they suddenly found themselves in the other role. In addition, their interviewers, approximately 30 years younger, of whom some – but not all – had some experiences with oral history, would certainly not forget for an instance with whom they were dealing. Philipp Neumann, who interviewed sociologist Reinhard Sieder in Sieder’s apartment in Vienna, unsparingly captured the minute stages of his own nervousness in a report: After Sieder made me a coffee, the interview begins. During the interview, my hands really begin to sweat – probably not just because of the coffee – and moisten the red tablecloth. It is really unpleasant for me and I try to cover up the mishap by – in the most literal sense of the term – not moving my hand from “the spot.” When Sieder later gets some water, I can place my water glass on the sweaty spot and in doing so, can make the spot invisible.

Julie Boekhoff, who visited Paul Thompson at his house in Colchester, found it “really intimidating” to interview someone who had such a great name and about whom she knew little, despite her research in advance. “I told myself,

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maybe it is an advantage if I just sit there, completely unbiased, and just listen to everything.” But just the sitting there turned out to be a problem: He sat down on the couch, which was very low, and I didn’t want to sit next to him, because I would have had to turn to him the whole time, and I would have somehow found that inappropriate for a longer period of time. Then I sat down on one of the chairs, but all of them were much higher than the sofa and so I sat enthroned above him, which was really unpleasant for me but could not be avoided. Then on the second day, he pointed that out to me, in a pointed way, that he would like to comment about something in the interview technique. I said that that also occurred to me.

However, as Julie reported, the problem also couldn’t be solved on the second day, because Paul Thompson once again took a spot on the sofa and Julie looked for a somewhat shorter chair than on the previous day, which did not really change the constellation. For the course of her conversation with Thompson – Julie’s very first biographical interview – the question of the seat height was apparently less bothersome. Maybe with his comment, he just wanted to let her know how much he was in control of the situation in all details. The location at which the interview took place, the seating arrangement, how much time was available – all of that was arranged by the interview partners and, therefore, influenced the natural atmosphere and course of the conversation, especially if they were extremely experienced and reflected interviewers. Agnès Arp and I had arranged to meet Danièle Voldman in her small office at the University of Paris. We wedged ourselves onto two chairs directly in front of her desk and, in doing so, blocked the door. After an hour, we had to get up, because Voldman’s colleague, who, at the beginning of the conversation had left the room, wanted to come back in. It was clear that the conversation was therefore over. Shortly before that, Dr. Voldman had told us that for her, a “good interview” never lasted longer than an hour. It is not very surprising that until that point, she had not said a single personal sentence. Agnès Arp’s first meeting with Daniel Bertaux, also in Paris, was confusing for another reason. Apparently, some unfavorable conditions came together. In her report, Agnès commented: There was a large construction site in the staircase, so that drills and jackhammers were audible almost the whole time. Therefore, I had to ring his doorbell for a long time until he even heard me. Then he invited me in and left me waiting in the kitchen for maybe 15 minutes with an American book about globalization that he had gotten from the bathroom. He absolutely still had to answer e-mails. Then he came and wanted to make himself something to eat while we talked. He got eggs and spinach from the refrigerator, put the spinach in the microwave and forgot it until it really exploded in the microwave. Bertaux began a sudden cleaning job and then tried to eat the rest of the spinach. He had long for-

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gotten the eggs. He then made coffee, which he mixed with Caro. He didn’t offer me anything (thank goodness!). All the while, he couldn’t stop talking.

Conscious misarrangement or an unconscious resistance? Agnès Arp: Well, it was strange somehow, not as easy as I thought. But on the other hand, when Bertaux said in Colchester that he was completely flustered by the interview – that once again brings it into another light.

In Barcelona, I had an appointment with Cristina Borderías at her office at the university. After a very extensive introductory chat, I put the recording device on the table. Professor Borderías looked at the clock and said that she had an appointment at 4:30, in an hour and a half. I was a little disheartened but thought, OK, let’s first begin. After a short period of time, we were having an intensive and lively discussion. An hour and a half later, on the dot, the telephone actually rang. My interview partner stopped in the middle of her sentence, grabbed a large envelope that was under the table, and said she had to take it downstairs; she would be right back and then we could continue. If the discussion had not been so good up until that point, that probably would have been her reason to get rid of me. Franka Maubach: One thing totally occurred to me in comparison with the interviews with the helpers in the German Wehrmacht, which I had conducted before this. The Wehrmacht helpers, they created a certain atmosphere, they always invited me into their apartment, sat me on the couch and served me tea. In contrast, the oral historians created a type of comfortable work atmosphere. We sat across from each other on two chairs, and one could also write something, at a table. They set up this interview situation in a very reflected way. Paul Thompson apparently not, based on what you just said. […] But with Mary Marshall Clark and also Irina Scherbakowa, also with Bret Eynon, I found this to be very noticeable.

Manja Finnberg could confirm this experience: “Work, office, but more comfortable.” She reported about her insecurities and doubts at the beginning: At the beginning, we had the fact in our minds that these are all professionals that we want to hit with their own words. Well, I went into my first interview with Giovanni Contini and came out and thought, wow, he just told you a whole lot. I could hardly believe it myself that that could be the case, that it was a good interview. I thought, you have to listen to that now, he surely tricked you. Then I listened to it and the more frequently I occupied myself with the material, the more I thought: he openly and authentically told you something. So, I first had to find confidence. In the later interviews, I was often moved, also thankful, when I noticed that they had really shown something about themselves. There, a dialogue was created, a conversation. That is a type of gift that someone gives you when he allows you to look into his life.

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Agnès Arp: In particular, I was annoyed by the role that they wanted to bring me into; specifically, that of the student who knew less. Like, you still have a long path ahead of you. I perceived that with Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame.

In the interview with Alessandro Portelli, Manja Finnberg also felt like she was relegated to the role of the student for a few moments: He commented on the interview techniques. We were at this conference and there was a methodological contribution where someone talked about how you conduct interviews, what the steps are: first, allowing the person to speak freely and then this type of questions and then this type of questions. And Portelli stopped speaking freely and said: now first the open questions and then the closed questions, or something. He wasn’t particularly arrogant; he just was that way… He was like a politician; he intimated that it wasn’t very important to him. While all others showed me that they were taking the time and respected me, opposite them. But with Portelli, that was the moment where I noticed: you still don’t have any experience. I knew exactly that it is not okay that you are boiling over with anger during the interview. Now you’ve got to somehow get that under control. It is clear to you what kind of a situation he created and now you’ve got to deal with it. Christian König: I found the interviewers’ own interest in the interview impressive. They had apparently never found themselves in that situation. They had never been interviewed before. And they had surely thought about it and were curious to see how it developed. At some points, they had not yet thought about it, so to speak; this interest on them, as people, that they were prompted to speak about it.

Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff interviewed Ronald Grele, without a doubt one of the most experienced oral historians in the USA. For the first time in his life, he found himself in the role of the interviewee. Franka Maubach: Ron Grele really criticized me because I did not ask him any questions [in the phase of the free narrative about one’s life]. He wasn’t familiar with it. So, we were confronted there with other interview cultures and techniques. After the fact, I would say that it was good that we did not ask Ron any questions, because in his free life narrative, he spoke about things that he hadn’t expected. With Alexander von Plato, it was different. There, I asked a question sometime and he said, “Your mistake was that you stopped the free life narrative too early.” So that was like: I got a school grade. They always commented on and detected that.

Sometimes the reflection about the situation itself was a part of the discussion. Perhaps in this way, they wanted to show that they held the reins in their hands. Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff began their second interview with Ronald Grele with the question about what, from his perspective, went wrong in the first session.

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Franka Maubach: With Bret Eynon, we also talked about what we are actually doing here and what he thinks of that, what kind of an interviewer he is, what kind of an interviewer I am. It was really important to him that he was spoken to as a person and that he says, “I can do that, too.” In that situation, it is like a transfer, so to speak… Manja Finnberg: It was always there, even with Contini. He said, I’m now taking my jacket off and then you know, that is now on the second (video) tape, or something. Something like that always, always came. But that didn’t make me lose my cool. Then, I said to myself, okay, message, I understood it. You’re here, you know what we’re doing, but… that was somehow to be expected, I thought.

Apparently, Paul Thompson had also had this experience in his days as a young researcher. In any case, in his book The Voice of the Past, he cites the American Thomas Reeves, who writes about his interviews with liberal intellectuals and that they especially seemed to be interested in his believability as an oral historian and tested his knowledge about the subject under discussion. Often, especially at the beginning of the interview, he had the feeling that they were questioning him: “These sorts of queries are ploys in status games.”³ When Franka Maubach began her interview with Alexander von Plato, he also turned on his recording device and spoke the usual introductory sentences: location, time, people present, as he had always done it – as an interviewer. In order to ask her introductory questions, she had to interrupt him. After a few minutes of free narrative about his life, Plato had just spoken about his father, then suddenly and unexpectedly turned to her and asked her about her origins. Here, did he reflexively change into his usual role or had he simply lost track of what he was saying? Here, Franka does not only want to talk about mixing up or confusing roles. She goes one step further: They interviewed themselves in a way, even when they were totally engaged with us. That was somehow funny, like with Alexander von Plato… Well, he had developed his own interview method, and in it, there is a fourth phase, specifically, the conflict phase. That has to do with the fact that Alexander von Plato, probably also as a former member of the Communist party, often had the need to contradict his interview partners. And I believe he then came up with this fourth phase as a method. Because – he had already begun to fight too early, he explained that to me, in interviews, and he swapped that out. He always thought that he could do that later. And then – we were done with the interview after about ten or eight hours, I shut off the device and said something, a theory. I don’t remember what it had to do with anymore. He answered, well, I don’t see things that way at all, and please turn the device back on. So, I turned the device on again and said, yes, apparently that here is now the fourth phase, it was not intended in my interview, something like that. And then

 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 166.

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he said, Ms. Maubach just said that and that and I do not agree with that at all – on tape, of course. And then we still had this soft conflict phase of seven minutes, where I had no problem… well, I didn’t have to fight with him. There, I also thought, there is the transfer of his technique to my interview.

Traces of a phenomenon such as this were also found in the others’ conversation situations, but rather as a negative impression. As mentioned earlier, Ronald Grele missed questions in the first interview phase that he apparently needed to structure his narrative; specifically, the questions that he had always asked his interview partners in this situation. In his case, the phenomenon of a “self-interview” also took effect in a different way, as it did with Luisa Passerini, Annemarie Tröger, and Mercedes Vilanova. The four of them had apparently planned to present their life story in accordance with a certain concept, and not simply beginning with birth and childhood, maybe also their parents and grandparents, then then letting themselves be carried away by the narrative. Ronald Grele drafted the history of his generation, maybe to hide behind it as a person, but in any case, he wanted to associate certain, general evaluations with that. Luisa Passerini announced a revision of her autobiographical publication. She wanted to talk about what had changed since then, what she did not describe back then, and what has become relevant today, in contrast to back then. Annemarie Tröger had planned to give me an overview about her experiences with oral history instead of a biographical narrative. For the psychologist, who had left the IOHA with the feeling that she was being forced to the edge by her German colleague Lutz Niethammer, it was apparently essential to first depict to me (who had come from Lutz Niethammer) her early contacts with the important people, their innovative ideas, and her independent position in this field of research. After a short period of time, she had become entangled in her narrative so much that one could no longer speak of an overview. She finally ended her transit through oral history like a telegram and we made a new appointment. With Ronald Grele, the “we narrative,” as Franka calls it, did not function for very long, “so that he very quickly achieved a cataclysm and then asked for questions.” Luisa Passerini also ended her ambitious narrative after about fifteen minutes. Manja: “She stated that this type of an interview could not continue like this, a little helpless and a little like the professor who is, despite everything, methodologically aware.” It is only Mercedes Vilanova who spoke about her engagement for the “unseen” and the various “underground” types that she had been part of over the course of her life, maintained this concept almost until the end of the interview, highly stylized and metaphorical. Finally, the interviewees from France – Philippe Joutard, Isabelle BertauxWiame, Danièle Voldman, and Jean-Pierre Rioux – did not talk about their bio-

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graphical histories at all, and all of them just disclosed some data from their professional biographies. Can that somehow be explained by the fact that the French oral historians (with the exception of Daniel Bertaux) do not know the interview phase with the free biographical narrative and, in particular, work with catalogues of questions on the respective object that they are examining? But then Agnès admitted that she had not asked the question about their biographies at all. Although, as a student of Lutz Niethammer, in her interviews in Germany, she always asked about the biographical history first, the same procedure in France, especially with people older and more established than she was, would have seemed inappropriate and indiscrete to her. Without a doubt, the fact that our interviews with the protagonists of the IOHA went differently than questioning textile workers or Wehrmacht helpers, did not just have to do with the status games mentioned. Intellectuals who are used to reflecting at meta levels probably think about the respective interpretation of every word that they say. Or they simply provide it, which does not always make it easier to follow their own memories. The interviewers, for their part, who include all of that in their thoughts, sometimes felt self-conscious and insecure. When looking back at the 30 question and answer games, the question was forced upon us about the various interview methods that our conversation partners practiced and practice themselves. During the IOHA meetings, had they exchanged ideas or fought about this? Did they even define their respective practice and differentiate it from each other or had, for example, only the German group based around Lutz Niethammer created a type of rulebook about conducting interviews?⁴ In his fundamental text on Oral History, The Voice of the Past, Paul Thompson writes, “Asking questions in the best way is clearly important in any interview. This is, however, an issue which can raise strong feelings among oral historians.”⁵ Thompson presents a wide range of possibilities using numerous examples – from a set catalog of questions all the way to an open conversation – in order to then determine, in a Solomonic way, that the form that one should respectively decide on depends on many different factors. At the beginning of our meeting in Colchester, when we asked our guests what a good interview was dependent on, in their opinion, the range of answers also went from a clear structure with a prepared catalogue of questions (Mercedes Vilanova) all the way to the defense of maxi-

 Dorothee Wierling, “Oral History,” in Aufriss der Historischen Wissenschaften Band 7, Neue Themen und Methoden der Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 124– 148.  Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 168.

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mum openness (Selma Leydesdorff). Finally, Daniel Bertaux said, and in doing so, hitting the core of the matter, that “You’re all right and everyone has his own path.” The narrative interviews with 30 of the former IOHA initiators and members are not our only sources for getting closer to the history and functioning of the IOHA network, but are the most important sources. After the meeting in Colchester, we chose to primarily limit our attention to the men and women who held the reins in their hands, who made decisions, who also regularly met before and after the conferences, between whom close personal relationships had grown and who were viewed as the connections to the national oral history groups. Beyond that, we interviewed – in contrast – some oral historians who described their position as being rather on the edge of the happenings, because they had joined later, or because they were students of the main members, or because they did not find access to the main group for other reasons. A special element of oral history is that in many countries, it was initiated and spread by non-academics who were engaged in history workshops and other political movements.⁶ Without exception, our interview partners are academics. The majority of them are historians, but among them there are philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, philologists, and a psychologist. At the point in time at which they founded the international association, most of them had finished their doctorate. Over the course of the following years, they had a career and were given professorships or leading positions at universities or research institutes. When we conducted interviews with them, many of them were already retired or about to retire. For the members of the research group, the interviews presented the double challenge of getting closer to the founding fathers and mothers of the IOHA and, at the same time, creating a distance from them. Distance was already created by the temporal as well as the generational distance from the happenings alone. Manja Finnberg said that it was first in Colchester that she understood how much time has passed since then: […] that that with which we are occupying ourselves is something that took place 20, 30 years ago, that it is no longer present in the lives of the protagonists, because you could see that they are seeing each other again for the first time and are actually strangers to each other and put so much space between their bodies when they meet each other. Those are not close friends. That is just the past. And then I thought, well, how it is

 Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst. Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989).

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when I think back on groups who were really central to a certain, important situation in my life and then lost their importance. And then I understood that was similar to the IOHA.

In particular, Philipp Neumann sensed a distance to the group’s political sense of mission back then: Well, on the one hand, you can comprehend the enthusiasm that they showed back then, but today, it is somehow a little anachronistic. That is, this belief that this method can change the world… I do think it has had a great effect, but to a certain extent, it was maybe really illusory.

The interviews also testify to the important moment of subjectivity in this project – with the interviewers as well as the interviewees. Christian König: We have to acknowledge that we are often not able to receive any clear answers and I think that that also makes up the charm of the work, to look at it from different perspectives, to look at it interrogatively. Appropriate for this diffuse network that we examined, in our texts as well, some things will remain open. For me, that is a very formative thing that became crystallized. With the interviews alone, we could not answer many questions and with the written sources, we are always dependent on what the people in question made available. So, of course we have large gaps in our material. I’m not sad, because we could then turn it into an essayistic description of the whole thing.

Finally, the interviews offered the possibility to multiply the perspective of the project head and initiator, Lutz Niethammer, and to relativize it. Philipp Neumann: If one looks at how many interviews were conducted, there we have, I believe, different views, and my impression is: at the end, there will not be the history, but finally, there will be many perspectives of a history. That is actually that, which I can envision the best, how we can get out of this… this problem that it was just a project by Lutz at the beginning.

Lutz Niethammer

Epilogue

This oral history of the International Oral History Association (IOHA) from 1976 to 1996 is a joint project within the framework of the research group Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte (EMG, or in English, Memory – Power – History) at Jena University between the years 2007 and 2010. The group was financed by the Volkswagen Foundation and, for the most part, led by me. Such a lax qualification already requires more precision. I had already retired before the application for this project, and back then, it was something special that this foundation, which had already made multiple innovative and experimental research projects possible,¹ accepted an application like this and, finally, also supported it. Even drafting the application was a community effort, when two promising doctoral students, Franka Maubach and Stephan Paetrow, brought my somewhat unconventional draft into a form worthy of funding after discussions with the foundation. In this epilogue, I would like to include some commentary on my colleagues’ findings, because I did initiate the project and, at their request, also occasionally advised it, but consequently stayed out of all decisions in this self-organized group work. There is a simple reason for this: here, a committee was researched to which I belonged throughout the entire time period examined, and which I led between 1988 and 1993. From my experience back then, I had the impression that the IOHA was an interesting object of contemporary intellectual history² and that young researchers in Jena would have a locational advantage in their research, due to my collection of materials and contacts. However, I would have found it embarrassing and uninteresting to interfere with the group’s development and results. What I want to report instead is much more related to the context of our EMG research group’s community project, because this was also a structural experiment in the area of doctoral studies. It wanted to combine the development of thematically- or methodologically-enhanced dissertations, not just with a collo-

 In the area of oral history, this mostly concerns support during multiple, extended survey phases for a series of books on history and social culture in the Ruhr area from 1930 – 1960, since 1980 at the University of Duisburg-Essen and later at the University of Hagen, as well as support for our field studies in the German Democratic Republic in 1987 for Die Volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine Archaeologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991).  I described my learning experiences with the IOHA in Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungsversuche (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), 143 – 146. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-010

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quium program for further studies, but rather – in accordance with the principle of research-based learning – with a joint educational trip beyond our disciplinary and national borders to the origins of our methods. I am afraid that this educational trip, which became increasingly autonomous, was much more successful than the structural experiment that I was responsible for. Therefore, I found an epilogue to this volume, which presents the critical results of the educational trip, as the appropriate place to evaluate the structural experiment. As a whole, it failed, but the lovely result was this communal project and, finally, this book. In addition, I am using this epilogue for two considerations which were sidelined by the group’s fundamental decision to essentially compose an interviewbased oral history of the IOHA. The first concerns the connection between the organizational and communicative network examined in this book and the creation of a methodological canon of European oral history, in as far as it evolved transnationally in the development of respective, nationally influenced introductions, essay collections, and journals as discursive leading media. The second is focused on the four autobiographical texts by oral historians which were not collected through interviews, but rather, were written down and are available as books. In comparison with basic trends in contemporary autobiographies of historians, I will try to interpret the special characteristics of a small sample of oral historians. In doing so, I must start by stating three limitations. First, historical studies traditionally have a tense relationship to this genre anyway, because the establishment of history as an academic discipline since the 19th century did develop in critical distance to this type of sources. Second, I am also involved here as an observer and a producer of both forms of sources,³ and third, I can therefore only write about these topics in the form of an essay, without any claim to an unbiased or even complete treatise.

I The Discrete Charm of the Collective At the heart of it, our application to the Volkswagen Foundation for an alternative structural experiment was critical of the then-extensive introduction of thematic graduate schools as the main path to doctoral studies. It was in order to simplify the increasingly difficult support of individual graduate students, for whom I was still responsible, or at least for a group of loosely related disserta-

 Lutz Niethammer and Werner Trapp, eds., Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der “Oral History” (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980); my co-editorship of the journal BIOS and the text Ego-Histoire?, mentioned in Footnote 2, are also relevant here.

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tions, and to connect them with a self-managed group project. When I retired, a group of graduates and interested postdocs remained in the area of memory and historiographical studies. They were occupied with examples of historical studies in the 19th century, oral history projects on generation, mainly children of war in the 20th century, the memorialization of fascism and anti-fascism in post-war Germany, research on the political formation and power of collective memory, and the potential to educate people about individual memory and historical research. I would not call such a grouping of loosely affiliated study interests a thematic approach, but rather a stimulating and challenging variety of topics. Various individual projects had to do with biographical and ideological formation, the politics of history, and among the contemporary projects, oral history interviews were often used, and challenged understanding, refinement, and practice. To that extent, it seemed evident to recommend an area for the group’s potential for further education above and beyond their individual dissertations, in which they could tap into trans-national intellectual history, practice the method of oral history, and follow the trail of the influences of politics and the media on the powers of collective memory, but could also come within reach of opposing memories and historical research. In the spirit of “learning by researching,” I applied to the foundation and asked the candidates to participate in a community project, in order to research the IOHA in the two decades in which it was founded, and I received active encouragement from both sides: the foundation brought us (in addition to some necessary scholarships) funds for trips throughout all of Europe and financed our coordinator, Annette Leo, a historian and publicist of Jewish-Communist origin, with significant and sensitive experience with interviews. In her cool pragmatism, she turned the departure towards a loving deconstruction of a wave of European ethnology of subjectivities into a hip adventure of knowledge. The group mostly accepted the proposal and split up for individual and joint educational trips into the European (and occasionally also American) history of intellectuals from my generation. Today, if I think back to this departure more than five years ago, I am torn as to whether I can be proud of the results of this educational journey presented in this book or whether I should be ashamed of its unintended side effects, which I should have anticipated. First, the bad news: the size of our small, experimental “graduate school” halved by the end of the project. That is not so surprising, given my age, but each of these departures – who were looking for a better chance in another location, or were making better progress with their share in the communal project than with their own dissertations, and which was mostly understandable in each of their own circumstances – cut a notch, and a pattern could be noticed in the notches. It indicated that in our little college experiment, for some participants, the joint, self-administered, and openly conducted com-

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munal project was apparently more attractive than their own dissertations. If this observation is correct, then our communal project was a mistake, in terms of “the andragogy of doctorates.” The graduate school’s community events should serve as continuing education in methodology and theory and counteract the dangers of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s principles of loneliness and freedom, which are experienced in the doctoral phase at the latest and with a special, existential urgency. They must not be too attractive, in order not to take energy away from the doctoral candidates’ own research, and especially cannot detract from writing their first book. Apparently, I had listened too eagerly when members of established graduate schools told me about the fraudulent labeling of their events, routinely inviting famous names but with the advisors having shortages in time, because only one or two doctoral candidates could be financed through this form of organization and, therefore, only briefly remained engaged with them. Writing a doctoral dissertation in the social sciences, in cultural studies, and the humanities in general, where the completion of a dissertation generally ends with authoring one’s first book and, therefore, coincides with the limiting experiences of choosing a topic of one’s own productivity, and image building, can also be described as a protracted crisis with predictable, pre-determined breaking points. The first ones appear to be simple, even though they can trigger deep frustrations: the topic is already being worked on or cannot be worked on due to a lack of data, a lack of access to sources, or other methodical problems that cannot be circumvented. If one has secured both a topic and workability, around the next corner, there may be a skunk of a Cerberus as the only suitable adviser who also has enough time and the desire to advise. Then there is the problem with the data and sources, which, even if they are available, might not inspire the candidate to do anything, or the answers are too different from the original research questions. If that has gone well, there is the greatest pre-determined breaking point, when the research and analysis of the materials developed need to be merged into a text, usually the first big text, its author already the mutation of an omnipotent quibbler into a – in his own perception – an absolute nothing, completely insignificant, speechless, and incapable of structuring anything, when the production of it either blocks or opens up a future career path. And such crises repeat themselves a few more times over the course of the writing process in various constellations, until in some 90 % of the cases, a much too long, and in 70 % of the cases a difficult-to-read, and in 50 % of the cases, an academically overloaded and defensive text is submitted. (That is hardly exaggerated: recently, in the Faculty of Arts at Jena University, a 12-volume theological treatise was submitted as a doctoral dissertation.) I want to say that along with the standard illnesses that a doctoral candidate may have, there are

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many delays, such as the flu, migraines, or hemorrhoids, but also moribund dangers such as the plague, cholera, and suicide. Here, we have to deal with symptoms of self-handicapping at the highest level of intelligence and everything that is not invested in the result of the work is still very efficient at creating an escape. With all of these things, it still must be considered that such dangers – that certainly do not appear with every doctoral candidate in our range of subjects, but the variation of which I could recognize more or less severely in surprisingly many of the 44 post-graduate qualification works for which I was the first reviewer – that, therefore, all such endangerments will finally be experienced and processed in a new form of loneliness and independence, because even in the best graduate community, there is the profiling of one’s own work and, therefore, the start of an individual achievement profile, and therefore, these dangers certainly predispose a person to an escape into every attractive conviviality. I could also observe some signs of that in our smaller circle of the EMG group when I initiated this project, and then pulled back to the status of the source and participated only in project group meetings about the history of the IOHA at the expressed request of the scholarship recipients. Here, I must admit that because our small research group Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte was also a structural experiment as an alternative to the dominating collectivity and curricula in thematic graduate schools, with their many disadvantages: it did not prove itself as an alternative. The communal project took too much energy away from the individual doctoral dissertations and excessively extended their completion (with the exception of one case), or even exacerbated the usual cycle of crises of working on a dissertation so that it actually led to abandoning the thesis, as it did in two cases in which both had worked hard on the communal project on the IOHA. Vestigia terrent… so much for the bad news. Now for the good news. In its own right, the topic of researching the founding decades of the IOHA turned out to be worth it. It triggered curiosity, initiative, and cooperation in the research group, gave it a reason to cross Euratlantic borders and make cultural comparisons, and in the shaping of this book, one can recognize an academic will to work and to make a difference.⁴ The fact that,

 In my application to the foundation, we only applied for interviews with the founding members of the IOHA and the analysis of their private archives. It was only when revising the work, through my ambitious students, that there was the idea of working on a collective volume by the entire group. I admit that I am guilty; of course, I should have recognized the seduction of the intellect to self-referential excursions into new territory and put a stop to it. But I was too curious about what these young people could find out about our old network with our own methods and let it continue.

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under the leadership of the coordinator and the postdoc scholar at the time, a complementary collection of chronicles and analyses of the association’s history and of interpretations of the collective biography of the leading figures can now be presented is due to two circumstances. First, as Golo Mann might have said it, it is the nature of the matter itself. It is because of that that the IOHA is such an interesting and worthwhile example for the studies of the innovation of a trans-national academic collective, because one could have anticipated so little of it. In all of its contradictions and persistence, a history full of counterintuitive findings is hidden. Empirical members of the 1968 generation? Elite populists? The transnational organization of radical democrats in a virtually Gaullist form, in order not to go as far as the workings of a mafia? New social movement among professors? Cheerful and relatively efficient lack of means? Liquid institutionalization? Eurocentrism open to the world? And so on and so forth. The oral history of leading oral historians, of whom some had never sat on the other side of the microphone, still conveys one or another shock of detypification and lets exciting stories gush from the episodic memory. They tell about new knowledge interests in history and, more generally, in cultural studies and social sciences since the 1970’s, from the prism of their national cultural characteristics and from the following eastward expansion of our consciousness. In addition, they let the contradictory development of new, fluid group expressions be recognized in a transnational space. The other circumstance that may have motivated the authors has to do with the immediacy with which they could do research about a piece of intellectual history, the obvious historicity of the methods they used, and with basic problems of contemporary history and its approximate gain of territory. In doing so, they also legitimately made their teacher and his friends an object of their critical examinations. That was completely intentional, because when I suggested the project, I talked about my impressions and provided contacts, but then pulled myself out of the concrete project work and did not present a single request to change the research group’s findings (although it was sometimes difficult, and although I am not sure if my old friends from the IOHA will forgive this reticence). I wanted to avoid everything that would impose “our” – and with the “us,” I now mean the mostly unchanging leadership committee of the IOHA from the founding until the 1990’s – self-image and collective memory onto the group, and was curious about opposing voices, new findings, and possibilities for interpretation. However, I also had to experience the fact that the collective memory of the old members cannot be invalidated just through such an act of will. Once, the research group organized a collective meeting between old and young at the location of the IOHA’s founding in Colchester, England, and it was as astonishing for them as it was for me, that I was, in a certain way, between both of the

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“wes,” that immediately (after ten, twenty years or more), the old group dynamic was revived between us old people, including all of our collective myths, feelings, and rivalries. Here, the young people could study that like in a laboratory experiment, but I believe that this collective reproduction of memory continued to have an effect in a less apparent way, also in the individual interviews of the communal project, and could not be avoided so simply in the interactive production of individual experience reports. Maybe it is therefore best to speak of a critical survey and analysis of the IOHA tradition.

II Memory of Memory:⁵ The Phase of Creating a European Canon Beginning with the conferences in Bologna and Colchester at the end of the 1970’s, which are both equally manifest and disputed as the founding dates of the IOHA, the oral history movement had experienced its meandering, festivallike conferences throughout Europe, which had proven themselves as a forum for professionalization of its innovative research instrument, in contrast to its position on the edge in the respective national academic disciplines, as events with enjoyable encounters and cooperations and extensively documented and reflected this formative exchange and its history.⁶ I will soon come back to this, with some references.

 I am borrowing this title from a panel at the IOHA conference in Rome in 2004, at which some of the founding members (specifically Ronald Grele, Luisa Passerini, Sandro Portelli, and I) as well as Tina Campt reported about their experiences. See Lutz Niethammer, “Intervenir en la memoria,” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 32 (2004).  This is especially true for the time between “Colchesters,” before which there were only specialized periodicals on oral history from Anglo-American countries (especially the Newsletter and the Oral History Review of the Oral History Association in the USA and Oral History: The Journal of the Oral History Society from Great Britain, which was edited for a long time by Paul Thompson), and the first periodicals on the European continent. In German-speaking countries, there was BIOS, published since 1988 by Alexander von Plato et al., and in the Iberian and Latin American areas, there was Historia y Fuente Oral, published since 1989 by Mercedes Vilanova et al., and thematic volumes of the International Yearbook for Oral History and Life Stories, which were edited between 1992 and 1996 by many founding members of the IOHA, including Ronald Grele, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, and have recently been made accessible once again by Selma Leydesdorff. In this time period, the oral history “movement” was, more than anything integrated by the summarizing introductions, by Paul Thompson (first in 1978) and Philippe Joutard (1983), and a special series of often international collected volumes, which represented a specific social and people’s history approach, and were interested in methodological questions

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Presented in a broader historical context, the two decades dealt with in this volume appear to be a short period of time that contains, according to a conventional definition, little more than a generation. But from today, that is more than a decade later and in the middle of European crises, but also transnationally

and studies of memory. I will list the most important ones here in accordance with their date of publication. Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); René Rémond and Jean-Pierre Rioux, eds., Problèmes de méthode en histoire orale. Table ronde, 20 juin 1980 (Paris: Institut d’histoire du temps présent, 1981); Lutz Niethammer and Werner Trapp, eds., Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980); Daniel Bertaux, Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1981); Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Irmgard Weyrather, “Oral History. Geschichte von Unten,” Literatur und Erfahrung 10 (1982); Paul Thompson and Natasha Burchardt, eds., Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe (London: Humanities Press, 1982); Philippe Joutard, Ces voix qui nous viennent du passé (Paris: Hachette, 1983); Werner Fuchs-Heinritz: Biographische Forschung. Eine Einführung in Praxis und Methoden (Opladen, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1984); Hubert Ch. Ehalt, Ursula Knittler-Lux, and Helmut Konrad, eds., Geschichtswerkstatt, Stadtteilarbeit, Aktionsforschung. Perspektiven emanzipatorischer Bildungs- und Kulturarbeit (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1984); Hubert Ch. Ehalt, ed., Geschichte von unten. Fragestellungen, Methoden und Projekte einer Geschichte des Alltags, (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984); Gerhard Botz and Josef Weidenholzer, eds., Mündliche Geschichte und Arbeiterbewegung (Materialien zur historischen Sozialwissenschaft 2) (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984); Lutz Niethammer and Alexander von Plato, eds., “Wir kriegen jetzt andere Zeiten.” Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern, (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Dorothee Wierling, comps. Einführung in die Oral History, Kurseinheit 3: Auswertung und Interpretation, 3 Studienbriefe der FernUniversität (Hagen, Germany: 1986); Trevor Lummis, Listening to History (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987); Wolfgang Voges, ed., Methoden der Biographie- und Lebenslaufforschung (Opladen, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1987); Alf Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt: Campus, 1989); Herwart Vorländer, ed., Oral History. Mündlich erfragte Geschichte (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990); Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, eds., The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990), Kristin Platt, Mihran Dabag, and Susanne Heil, eds., Generation und Gedächtnis. Erinnerungen und kollektive Identitäten (Opladen, Germany: Springer, 1995); Helga Bories-Savala, “Erinnerung – Göttin, Liebedienerin, Kronzeugin? Zum Stand der Oral History in Europa,” Francia 24 (1997– 98): 117– 132; Daniel Bertaux, Les récits de vie. Perspective ethnosociologique (Lucon: Nathan Université, 2001). More recently, there has been Florence Descamps: L’historien, l’archiviste et le magnétophone. De la constitution de la source orale à son exploitation (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2001); Friedhelm Boll, Sprechen als Last und Befreiung. Holocaust-Überlebende und politisch Verfolgte zweier Diktaturen. Ein Beitrag zur deutsch-deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 2003); Dorothee Wierling, “Oral History,” in Aufriss der historischen Wissenschaften in sieben Bänden, vol. 7, ed. Michael Maurer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 81– 151; Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010).

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conventionalized life practices, the experience of the European dimension at that time – namely, as a rescuing horizon of hope from innovators, and, at the same time, a romantic and open-minded community event – is already a history that is no longer continuing and hardly repeatable. This volume tells of it symptomatically, and therefore, that cannot be the function of my epilogue. But because Europe has moved so far ahead in everyday life, beyond all of its everyday problems of bureaucratization, financial drama, sympathetic disunity, and a growing normality of contacts, it has lost the post-war pathos of the beginning of European integration and could also hardly renew it in the course of eastward expansion. The memory of this intermediate phase, in which our meeting was an example of other, such associations back then and that was documented so diligently and historically invoked, seems remarkable to me. The birth years of the long-term founding members of the IOHA show them to be children from the World War II era – very few, like François Bédarida or Sven Lindqvist, were significantly older, and many of them who practiced oral history in most western European countries for the first time were a little younger. In other words: we no longer belonged to the group that fought on various fronts in World War II and had turned the relativity of such fronts, like the absolute terror about the crimes against humanity in Europe, into the original motives for European integration. We were, however, not yet part of the younger generation, who, with ERASMUS and other exchange programs, experienced a mobile Europe to already be a conventional stage of their education and practical world orientation. We were between them and participated in both. It was natural to us that a peaceful Europe, integrating itself, was the educational objective in the epoch of national states and imperialism, but we were not yet used to living it and even further removed from being flabbergasted and dismayed by the efforts at the different levels. International learning and living was much more awakening and adventure, and was associated with a natural promise to contribute towards the creation of a more peaceful, human, and modern world. Even though its function was merely that of an international bearer of an exchange of experiences about an innovative method in cultural studies and the social sciences, there was an intermediate position and eventful excess that gave the IOHA the character of a politically- and culturally important medium of encounter. In addition to that, many people active in the early oral history movement were people who had formerly been active in 1968 and were looking for social reality, a cultural practice associated with the people, and a transnational ethnology of the oppressed and minorities (Bologna was a symbol of this),

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while in England (History Workshop)⁷ and in Scandinavia (Dig Where You Stand, originally published in Sweden in 1978),⁸ there were already models developed by engaged, amateur historians which found more attention in continental Europe after Colchester, and found imitators, mostly intellectual. Both branches were connected by the impulse of leaving the university in order to develop a practice of heuristic co-determination of those groups whose experiences seemed important, and should be examined and brought to the forefront of the academic arena and in public. This readiness to look and learn led to an otherwise hard-to-find formation of networks in the area of readers, introductions, and journals, which is reminiscent of the “new social movements” emerging at the time and their communication and mobilization practices. They were not just limited to the local and regional levels in their individual countries, but for these purposes, they could also refer to models from the virtually identical motifs and scenes from far away or show them as a result of the creation of an intuitive, transnational canon. The best literary example of this was a talk about the ambivalent nature of the pride in their work that Turin workers had under Fascism that Luisa Passerini had held in Colchester and that, within a short period of time (and although there were still not any periodicals in the oral history scene back then outside of England and the USA), was soon published in Italian, French, twice in German, later in Spanish, and surely in some other languages, in addition to English.⁹ Through collections of essays in the respective countries and languages and stereotypical hints at our new classics in the best introductions, methodological and thematical models for a joint practice of oral history emerged. One can surely understand this process to be the creation of a pool of quotes, but then the aspect of the parallel resonances was lacking, because many of the people who contributed to this wave of early publications and their reciprocal referentiality did not belong to the pool of quotes, if only because it was their first relevant publication. For such a proactive profile development from below, at the IOHA conferences, there was no central committee, because when some people sat down there and talked about publication, it mostly had to do with the creation of an academically-acceptable (Englishspeaking, of course) central organ that, much later, in the 1990’s then (for just a few years, however) came about in the form of an international yearbook and followed the informal creation of a canon in a codified way, rather than being its  Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1989).  Sven Lindqvist, Grabe wo du stehst. Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1989).  The German version can be found, for example, in Niethammer and Trapp, Lebenserfahrung, 214.

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foundation. To me, the many-voiced and multi-lingual process of searching and referring before that was an interesting phenomenon, because in an unsteered way (in borders), it brought forth a basic consensus for a good, recognized practice of oral history studies in Europe. On the topic of borders and Europe: I do not want to exaggerate the potential of informal consensus building. The borders already became apparent in the problem of finding a name. Because the models came from English-speaking countries, it was given the name oral history, a term that was created in the USA and was factually incorrect but catchy and integrative. In the Latin civilizations, the academic resistance against the new thing could be determined by their tedious specification that one was only dealing with sources of another type (archives orales or fontes orales) and that this actually belonged to the pre-academic area of collection and documentation, where oral history in the USA mostly stayed. In Austria and occasionally also in West Germany, one Germanized the incorrect English term to an even more incorrect “mündliche Geschichte.” While otherwise in the Federal Republic of Germany and in Italy, the Americanization of the language was already so inured that the term oral history was named in quotation marks, as if one had spoken narrative prose, and also as a sign that one actually knew better. In the German triumvirate at the end of the Cold War, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) then outdid this more or less venial mistake: here, every interview needed to be approved by the GDR’s ministerial council, which, in practice, amounted to a ban of oral history, which was then circumvented by calling it documentation literature, by writers. Back then, the background was explained to me by the leading contemporary historian of the GDR, Rolf Badstübner: because the GDR was an avant-garde state, the people had a backward consciousness, out of necessity. Therefore, creating a feedback of this consciousness on itself through interviews and public documentaries was a reactionary endeavor.¹⁰ It is exactly when one preserves a realistic relationship to the national blinders of any creation of a European consensus, be it from above or below, that it remains remarkable that beyond the smoke and noise of names, soon, a creation of a substantial European profile in the most important methodological basic questions of oral history took place, and that it was significantly different from the previous American practice. In the USA, oral history had mostly developed out of journalism, as a practice of documenting biographical interviews with members of secondary and functional elites of politics and society and in-

 Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991), 10.

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stitutionalized in university archives and presidential libraries.¹¹ The IOHA was always open to America, but the small minority from the USA who participated in the European conferences, such as Ronald Grele¹² (or in another way, Michael Frisch) was completely unrepresentative of the majority of the American practice, but – and that is also very American – 1) they led the oldest, largest, and most important oral history archive in the USA (and the world) and a large project about quantitative and qualitative social history that would have been unthinkable in Europe; 2) they were politically more left-wing and in terms of academic politics, were more theoretical (and already better known in these methodological considerations through a few, but targeted, publications) than most Europeans in the early phase; and 3) they were always present in the IOHA, never took over leadership, and had the best, amicable contacts worldwide. In other words: not since Casablanca was the offer for a beautiful friendship better. And despite, or maybe because of these American contradictions between established practice and external representation, a prevailing theory of oral history developed in Europe, which was directly opposite the dominant practice in the USA. 1) Unlike in the States, they did not interview those secondary elite members of society and government who had functional power but no publicity, and were therefore biographically interesting, although they could not publicly sell memoirs. Rather, the Europeans dedicated themselves to everyday heroes: victims of and members of the resistance to dictatorships, workers, women, discriminated minorities, the last witnesses to life environments and trades being destroyed. 2) They interviewed such everyday witnesses and surviving victims and heroes from the “age of extremes”¹³ about their biographies, because in Europe, or at least in Central Europe, the special interest was targeted at how individual people had made it through dictatorships and World War II. This biographical approach was combined with a highly dialogical activity to stir and animate

 Lutz Niethammer, “Oral History in USA. Zur Entwicklung und Problematik diachroner Befragungen,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 18 (1978): 457– 501. Characteristic of the practice are William W. Moss, Oral History Program Manual (New York: Praeger, 1974) or David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira, 1996).  Ronald J. Grele with Studs Terkel et al., Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (Chicago: Precedent, 1985).  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914 – 1991. London: Pelham Books, 1994.

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the performance of memory – which was contrary to all of Fritz Schütze’s principles on the narrative interview in the social sciences, to which we owed so many insights, and was inspired by the theory of memory.¹⁴ Despite all attention to the experience of the people or the oppressed, the distrust of all individuals typical for post-totalitarian societies was so great here that in an interview, you wanted to collect as much material as possible, in order to compile evidence to examine the interview partner’s information on his circumstances at different layers in time. Post-dictatorial interpreters consider this mistrust to be smart and realistic; others explain this mistrust as specifically post-dictatorial and rather tend towards interviews focused on topics for which the rest of the witness’s biographical history is not so important, because one does not have to distrust everyone. 3) They interviewed their interview partner as if their memory were a product of a collective construction of memory, as in Maurice Halbwachs,¹⁵ or a posttraumatic stress disorder in the Freudian tradition; in other words: as the bearer of predominantly unreal memories, and only later opened themselves up to the perceptions of the episodic memory. In contrast, through the interviewees’ self-censorship over the course of their authentification of the interview transcripts – in American oral history, one would have proceeded as if there were no conflicts between truth and retrospection – and as if those questioned had a right to as well as the property of their own biographical history, and as if one should also believe them up to proof of the contrary. In the 1950’s, Lewis Edinger had already determined general distrust to be a burden for democracy inherited from dictatorship, and in our indoctrinated European cynicism, we had gotten in a fuddle, because we wanted to believe our interviewees, who were among the victims, the minorities; in short: the good. To me, this mistrust of many European experts in oral history, associated with the people, also appears to be a motif of their highly-theoretical discussions about collective memory and sociocultural interactions in inter After the uninterrupted self-representation of one’s own life story, which more than anything, secures a piece of cultural heritage from the present, but also provides a first indication about an individual’s biographical history, the emphasis was – ideally, at least – on the multiple changes of the associative traces of memory, especially in the primarily thematized life dimensions, and then using a long catalog of partially open queries in order to gain additional information from three additional dimensions of memory: 1) information from the latent memory of everyday work, living, and family situations at various biographical stations; 2) the provocation of one’s own memories of important macrosocial and political events; and 3) an invitation to an evaluation and historical classification of one’s own biographical history, with questions like, “In retrospect, when were the good years and when were the bad years?”  Maurice Halbwachs, Das kollektive Gedächtnis. Frankfurt: S.-Fischer, 1985.

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views and about the interview partner’s silences, for which there was often not an example in the American practice, with perhaps the exception of Ronald Grele. The tension between the development of an informal consensus about good academic practices in European oral history and its role and special forms in the individual countries remained on the inside, of course, especially because it belonged to the core of European integration in terms of its national plurality and also structured the IOHA in its founding decades. It is exactly through the increased meetings at the conferences and through the media of exchange mentioned earlier that the meaning of the national difference or path dependency became more conscious and stoked the curiosity for its forms. Differences were not a reason for competition or exclusion, but rather for becoming aware of one’s own lack of awareness and for the interest in others’ attractiveness. In addition to this, a decade later, there was the feeling that after solidarność and Gorbachev, in addition to the national, the greater systems’ differences of the Cold War triggering even more curiosity was also available for examination. At this time, when us researchers from West Germany could undertake an oral history project in the GDR for the first time that had become relatively large due to misunderstandings, and were privy to the meaning of social mobility and a prevailing symbiosis of generations in state socialism, but we were now also dedicated to its lack of perspective and the closeness to a cultural crisis, an IOHA conference was to take place in Germany for the first time. Back then, we understood it to be the Central European job to mediate. In 1989, prior to the actual conference in Essen in the spring of 1990, we hosted a pre-conference in Bad Homburg that served not just pragmatic purposes, such as the selection of the proposed papers, but more than anything, thematized a history of the oral history movement in Europe for the first time (and would now include the fallen “East” and some windows to a world outside of Europe opened), and did so characteristically, through reports about its development and its status in individual countries, in the west and in the east. The reports were collected in a special issue of BIOS, “The History of Oral History,” and distributed to all participants of the following conference in Essen, entitled “Gedächtnis und sozialer Wandel,” or “Memory and Social Change.”¹⁶ In addition to all of the interesting information and national narrations, today, this collective volume seems to be remarkable for two reasons. First, it was because a decade after Colchester, we

 Lutz Niethammer, Karin Hartewig, and Wulf R. Halbach, eds. The History of Oral History: Development, Present State, and Future Prospects. Country Reports, BIOS Special Issue (1990).

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already had the feeling that we should and could affirm our history. And second, that we could do so through national research reports, while one world around us broke apart and another one opened, to which our IOHA first responded eight years later, with a resolute internationalization and democratization of the organizational structure, which, at the same time, would mean drifting away from Europe. Now, under leadership of Mercedes Vilanova, from Catalonia, and in close understanding with the groups from Latin America, a post-colonial focus was placed on the function of oral history in the emerging countries. Later, the divide between America and Europe was ended under the leadership of Alistair Thomson, an Australian teaching in England, and a world oral history movement was founded with the publication of a comprehensive reader in English, which also re-documented many texts that had become classics, and approached historical self-reflection more globally.¹⁷ The global success was at the cost of the regional, because many Europeans apparently did not feel supported by their organization after its veritable institutionalization, and Europeans’ participation at conferences and membership numbers sank to a depressing level, corresponding with Europe’s globalization. Still, during this phase of globalization, a German, Alexander von Plato, was the vice head and manager of the IOHA. He was also the main editor of one of the three European journals for oral history that were sustainable over a longer period of time and for a long time, was the head of a German archive for interviews and ego documents at the University of Hagen. On the occasion of his retirement in 2007, a festschrift on the networks of oral history was dedicated to him, which once again dealt with aspects of the history of the oral history movement in the core of a further thematic spectrum, with broad, international participation.¹⁸ In contrast to these clear indications for close, discursive internal communication and the Eurocentric tradition-building (surely worth of criticism) in the framework of the IOHA’s informality of its two decades of founding, the publicational traces in the decade and a half that have passed since then point towards a strange phenomenon in the framework of the ambivalences of globalization. While the democratization of the IOHA organization, Eurocentric but open to the world, was driven by a left-wing British understanding of democracy, the longest and most sustainable in the framework of an English language regime and  Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 2006); Mercedes Vilanova and Lluís Ubeda, eds., El repte de les fonts orales (Barcelona: Memorial Democràtic, 2006).  Almut Leh and Lutz Niethammer, eds., Kritische Erfahrungsgeschichte und grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit. The Networks of Oral History, BIOS Special Issue 2007.

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in which the post-colonial benefits were tacitly used, in the formal founding phase of the IOHA, the internal European discourse, including a highly-explosive tension between east and west, was mostly dismissed. In its position, it was replaced by the dominance of the discursively unremarkable competition of English-speaking and Spanish-speaking post-colonialism. In the meantime, the Spanish as well as the Australian cultural agencies have shown themselves to be an intermediate stage toward re-establishing a camouflaged US hegemony, with smaller concessions. The newest big handbook publications on oral history¹⁹ and on memory studies²⁰ were published by Oxford University Press, but under US direction, and in their traditional and epistemological understanding (with occasional concessions to other world regions as a courtesy, including Europe), they reflect the US practice, which has become pluralized in the meantime.²¹ Furthermore, the intellectual level of the oral history volume remained significantly behind that of collected works on memory studies and one yearns for the international level of communication and reflection of the American “prevailing outsiders,” like Ronald Grele or Michael Frisch. But they have retired. The European practice of oral history is continuing, notwithstanding these superordinate hegemonial shifts. But strangely, in individual countries, on the one hand, it seems to have reached the mainstream, but on the other hand, it is methodologically and institutionally insecure and slackened in its European exchange. Was Europe just a romantic intermediate stage that is now better to forget? Both of the editors admonished me to restrain my nostalgic sorrow. They are right. The IOHA journal, which is now also online, is published in English and Spanish, and its current head is a European from Prague.

III Ego-Histoire and the Search for the Self In 1987, Pierre Nora, the editorial impresario among the intellectuals of the École des Annales, editor of Le débat, and later the culturally pessimistic creator first of

 Donald A. Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).  Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Earlier, there was Endel Tulving and Fergus I. M. Craik, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), which contained a contribution by Endel Tulving about episodic memory that was highly stimulating for oral history.  See the recently published anthology of European, including German, texts from the canon. Julia Obertreis, ed., Oral History (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012).

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French and then of European books about Lieux de mémoire, published the volume of Essais d’ego-histoire, to which leading historians of the Annales school contributed a type of work autobiography in essay form.²² The book was successful, because it corresponded to the interest in the biographies and motives of leading French historians and philosophers and in doing so, strictly observed the proper boundaries between the public and the private in these life stories. At the turn of the century, history students at the European University Institute in Florence took up these thoughts and invited historians from different countries from the 1968 generation to report on their work and their lives, myself included. Back then, as a guest fellow at the institute, I participated somewhat reluctantly. The students’ undertaking, the results of which were published in 2001 in an Athens yearbook for cultural history,²³ was supervised at the time by Luisa Passerini, the Italian pioneer of oral history and Italy’s representative to the IOHA for many years, with whom I had been friends since Colchester. Back then, she was a professor at the European University Institute before she returned to Turin (and New York), and in 1988, had already published a “socialized” autobiography, so to speak, Autoritratto di Gruppo (the Italian title, which means “group self-portrait”; in the American edition, it even became History of a Generation).²⁴ Later, I translated my contribution to the lecture series back into German, which had already grown out of proportion in the English draft and consisted partly of a fictitious self-interview, and, in doing so, expanded it again by a third, my originally reluctant memory had been stimulated so much. It was then published together in a volume with other memories from my academic life.²⁵ I do not know of extensive autobiographical texts from the other main members of the IOHA, which means very little, because recently in

 Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) (with contributions from Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, George Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques LeGoff, Michelle Perrot, and René Rémond). For its reception, see Jeremy D. Popkin, “Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers,” French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 1139 – 1167.  Luisa Passerini and Alexander Geppert, eds., “European Ego-histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970 – 2000,” Historein. A Review of the Past and Other Stories 3 (2001) (with contributions from John Brewer, Antonis Liakos, Barbara Taylor, Leonid Borodkin, Barbara Duden, Gareth Stedman Jones, and Lutz Niethammer). Here, there is also an afterword by Pierre Nora as well as the best bibliography on the topic by Alexander Geppert. My contribution was reprinted as the introduction to Lutz Niethammer, Memory and History: Essays in Contemporary History (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 7– 53.  Luisa Passerini, Autoritratto di gruppo (Florence: Giunti, 1988); English edition Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968 (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).  Lutz Niethammer, Ego-Histoire?, 103 – 191. Here, see also my laudation for Luisa Passerini, 216 – 24.

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New York, Ronald Grele entrusted me with a very dense, not-yet-published essay about his intellectual formation and there are surely similar texts elsewhere, particularly because several of us were biographically interviewed, especially in a series in the late 1990’s by Daisy Perelmutter from the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo, Brazil. From Paul Thompson, who had done the most for the international mobilization and networking of the oral history movement, one can download a biographical interview via a link on his homepage at the University of Essex Department of Sociology. But here, the focus is not on more or less spontaneous interviews with oral historians, as they were conducted by our research group, but rather about written (and that means: well-constructed and -formulated autobiographical texts, which document the literary depiction of one’s own life). In a further sense, two books can also be taken into consideration here: the English historian about modern Spain Ronald Fraser (1930 – 2012)²⁶ was already a pioneer in the left-wing oral history of England in 1968. His oral history of the Spanish Civil War, Blood of Spain, was published in the early years of the IOHA and was quickly considered an event as well as a social-historical model; 20 years after 1968, he presented a large-scale oral history of the 1968 generation, due to a large interview project throughout Europe at which various IOHA members had cooperated.²⁷ Four years prior to that, the reconstruction of his childhood in a southern England manor house had been published, whose former servants he had interviewed for In Search of a Past. ²⁸ Also to be included here in a similar sense is a collection of biographical stories about life and survival under Stalin’s terror by Irina Scherbakowa, published in German in 2000.²⁹ The Russian writer, historian, and prominent NGO activist at  See the obituary in the Guardian from February 15, 2012, written by his friend Tariq Ali.  Ronald Fraser, Work: Twenty Personal Accounts (London: Penguin, 1968); Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, Experience of Civil War 1936 – 39 (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Ronald Fraser: 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988).  Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past: Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933 – 1945 (London: Verso, 2010).  Irina Scherbakowa, Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten. Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror, Frankfurt: 2000, especially the first 90 pages and the conclusion, entitled “Wie funktioniert Erinnerung?” Due to this reflection of her own drive for research, Irina’s family investigations belong here. Meanwhile she has expanded both stories in: Zerrissene Erinnerung. Der Umgang mit Stalinismus und Zweitem Weltkrieg im heutigen Russland (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2010) and most recently in her great narrative Die Hände meines Vaters. Eine russische Familiengeschichte (Munich: Droemer, 2017). I am not including a fascinating and torturous occupation with one’s own father like in Gerhard Botz, “Nazi, Opportunist, ‘Bandenbekämpfer’, Kriegsopfer. Dokument, Evidenz und Erinnerungssplitter,” BIOS 18.1 (2005): 28 – 47, because it is almost exclusively focused on the father and not on the Viennese contemporary historian and Austrian representative to the IOHA himself.

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the Moscow society Memorial, has belonged to the inner circle of the IOHA since her breathtaking talk about women in gulags at the Essen IOHA conference 1990. In the first part of this book, she explores her access to the topic and to oral history since her childhood, her origins from a Jewish-Ukrainian family and their involvement in the Communist revolution and in high-ranking functionaries of the Communist Party, the terror, and the war. My interest in contemporary autobiographies of academics was awakened by the project in Florence, and in my last semester of teaching in Jena I offered, in collaboration with my Polish colleague Zofia Wóycicka, a seminar on ego-histoire and historians’ autobiographies since Henry Adams. In 2006, at a meeting of the biographical section of the German Sociological Association, I gave a talk about ego sociology using autobiographical texts from German sociologists who were born in the period between the wars,³⁰ and then once again, seen from a different angle and placed in relation to the surprising self-sociologization of Pierre Bourdieu,³¹ at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. I would not like to assert that I researched this field extensively and in depth, although it deserves more detailed knowledge and interpretations on intellectual history, but from my survey of over 50 relevant texts, some main impressions have remained, two of which seem worthy of being shared here, before I turn to the form and episteme of oral historians’ autobiographical attempts. The majority of autobiographical texts from authors in the social sciences who were born in Germany in the time period between the wars, and whom

 The text that launched the topic was Martin Kohli, “‘Von uns selbst schweigen wir.’ Wissenschaftsgeschichte aus Lebensgeschichten,” in Geschichte der Soziologie, ed. Wolf Lepenies (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). Other sources include collected volumes such as Karl Martin Bolte and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds., Soziologie als Beruf. Erinnerungen westdeutscher Hochschulprofessoren der Nachkriegsgeneration (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 1998); Christian Fleck, ed., Wege zur Soziologie nach 1945. Autobiographische Notizen (Opladen, Germany: Springer, 1996); Ralf Dahrendorf: Über Grenzen. Lebenserinnerungen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002). However, Dahrendorf’s text ends with his formational period. René König, Leben im Widerspruch. Versuch einer intellektuellen Autobiographie (Munich: Hanser, 1980), is also significant.  Pierre Bourdieu, Ein soziologischer Selbstversuch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). In my time in Paris in 1978 – 79, the meetings with Bourdieu were the most important. His intellectual omnipresence had inspired me and his personal warmth really drew me in. In 1986, as he vehemently raged against the “illusion biographique” in his house journal; we translated it in BIOS. In addition, in a commentary, I counter-polemized about his surprisingly naïve ideas about biographical research (BIOS 3 [1990]). Shortly before his death he, then one of the most-watched intellectuals in the world, bowed out with a lecture at the Collège de France, the highest level of intellectual establishment in France, and thematized the damages of the social climber from a provincial house of “little people.” Maybe he wanted to do it for other people, but viewed by itself, I found it to be a completely unnecessary “illusion biographique.”

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the sociologist Helmut Schelsky, equally creative in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic of Germany, therefore counted as being among the “skeptical generation,” which is structured (in West Germany) by its excitement for America and empirical social research. In most cases, it is a redeeming adaptation after a youth formed by National Socialism and war. In this cohort, however, the finding of post-fascist skepticism and pro-American enthusiasm can be found most prominently in contributions by M. Rainer Lepsius,³² who had spent his youth not in Nazi Germany, but in Brazil, and by Ralf Dahrendorf, who was imprisoned by the Nazis in the winter of 1944– 1945 and whose father was a prominent antifascist social democrat also imprisoned in 1944,³³ in a troubling way. It is especially irritating if one perceives that members of the same generation, if they had happened to grow up in the east and were therefore not “skeptical,” but were rather pathetically called the “building generation” of Socialism, received similar impulses for excitement by and adjustment to Stalin’s Soviet Union, and became ideological rather than empirical pioneers. In any case, in most of these autobiographical texts, the motif of conversion was finally dominant, and since then, the doubt has been gnawing on me as to whether one should not view the unfolding of empirical social research, that is, the open market version of sociology, and that of Marxism-Leninism, that is, a political-strategical ideological formation, as a functional equivalent – in particular, because both of them had left the sociological “high road” as an autonomous oppositional science and theory of the social, in order to be useful. The second observation is primarily based on the autobiographies of historians, a difficult genre since historicism, because in it, the memory had been placed into question through the critical recourse on the questions and the remains of the past, in particular. To my surprise, there was actually a recent wave of biographies by historians³⁴ (in the course of the 2004 seminar mentioned previously, we established and examined almost 50 texts available in book form in German, English, and French alone; today there are certainly more), and more than half of them were from Jews who, in one way or another,

 M. Rainer Lepsius, Demokratie in Deutschland. Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993); Interessen, Ideen und Institutionen. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990); Extremer Nationalismus. Strukturbedingungen vor der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966).  Dahrendorf, Über Grenzen.  Early on, there was a well-informed overview by Jeremy D. Popkin, “Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 725 – 748. As a result of this wave, a more extensive examination was encouraged: Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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had survived or escaped from the Holocaust and had become historians, but in a qualified minority of the cases, had consciously not become contemporary historians.³⁵ In this way, a narrative was once again prescribed that, at the core, referred back to settings of the course in the first half of the 1940’s and had to do with personal exemption or wounded survival. The determining factors of the narrative came from the outside, and one’s own history could be told as shaped by this, but also as a completely different one, as one’s own story. It belongs to the personal and literary greatness of Saul Friedländer that his (early) contribution to this genre, Quand vient le souvenir (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978)³⁶ was described as a history of memory, and that as a laborious uncovering of memory about a simultaneously rescuing and expropriating change in identity. That is very seldom the case in this genre. In contrast, in most cases, there are traces of a twofold special position. On the one hand, it is against the collective, dominating history and mass murder history of the perpetrators, and on the other hand, it exists as a special history of the surviving self which – at least this was my main impression – is rather expressed as an experience of individuality than of contingency. Both tendencies – forming meaning from the context of mass murder, individualization through sparing circumstances – are radically diverse, yet work together to overcome the modern autobiographical uncertainty and provide clear coordinates of the significance as a whole and in detail. This meaningful basic constellation of criminal domination and personal exemption can be found in a different way and in a weaker form also in most au-

 Among the historians who published autobiographies or memoirs in recent decades and were recognized in Western Europe are: Philippe Ariès, Arno Borst, Karl Buchheim, Carl J. Burckhardt, Richard C. Cobb, Joachim Fest, Iring Fetscher, Dietrich Geyer, Doris K. Goodwin, Sebastian Haffner, Hermann Heimpel, Peter Hoffmann, David Irving, Gerhard Keiderling, George F. Kennan, Fritz Klein, Golo Mann, Walter Markov, Kurt Pätzold, Sheila Rowbotham, Peter Schäfer, Ernst Schmidt, Hermann Weber, and a remarkably large number of colleagues of Jewish origin, like Isaiah Berlin, Helmut Eschwege, Saul Friedländer, Evyatar Friesel, Peter Gay, Felix Gilbert, Walter Grab, George W. Hallgarten, Raul Hilberg, Eric Hobsbawm, Wilma and George Iggers, Klemens von Klemperer, Annette Kuhl, Jürgen Kuczynski, Walter Laqueur, Gerda Lerner, Robert J. Lifton, John Lukacs, George L. Mosse, Richard Pipes, Fritz Stern, and Howard Zinn. An entire series of collected volumes with autobiographical reflections in essay form should also be taken into consideration (for more on this, see Alexander Geppert’s bibliography in in “European Ego-Histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970 – 2000,” in Historein: A Reivew of the Past and Other Stories (Athens: Nefeli, 2001), 174). Most important is the festschrift for Rudolf Vierhaus from Hartmut Lehmann and Otto G. Oexle, eds., Erinnerungsstücke. Wege in die Vergangenheit (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997), with contributions from Verhausen’s contemporaries born in the 1920’s, like Karl Otmar von Aretin, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Iring Fetscher, Walther Hofer, Erich Kosthorst, Eberhard Weis, Karl Ferdinand Werner, and Wolfgang Zorn.  German edition: Saul Friedländer, Wenn die Erinnerung kommt… (Stuttgart: DVA, 1984).

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tobiographical texts of German, non-Jewish historians born in the period between the wars. The context of guilt and violence of World War II, driven by Germany, also becomes the meaningful background of another individuation for the young Germans at the time, whether they were already in the military or just flak helpers – it is not determined by the individual’s exemption from being a victim, but rather from being a member of the nation of perpetrators. The following second chance is the pivot and hinge in the biographies of the 1945 generation, which justified a special closeness with the victors and then the respective superpower of the Cold War, east and west, and their (and in some cases also oppositional) closeness with the system. In both cases, we find stories about a strong, even if passively experienced individuality, which gains its meaning from the external reality, the historical reality of the World War II era and its aftermath. Appropriately, the ego-histoires of this cohort are told as positive narratives supported by reality in which the great meaningless-meaningful, yet retrospectively morally processed history and the individual life stories are correlated with each other, full of dramatic existentiality about reprieve and conversion, and can be told like epics from the 19th century. In the meantime, the subjects, the Jewish ones more so than the non-Jewish, are sure of the meaningfulness of their history and can report on them in chronological order, also and especially with the historian’s flair for the unexpected. In terms of the theory of memory, they belong to the type of tradition dedicated to the future, which is founded in Roman-Christian tradition and was sociologized by Maurice Halbwachs in the period between wars.³⁷ If this observation were viable, it would raise questions with regard to the fact that the majority of these authors are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Similar to Saul Friedländer’s book of his layers of memory, the autobiographical texts of the oral historians mentioned do not have an epic narrative character, but rather are characterized by their fragmentary, searching, recursive structure.³⁸ In terms of memory theory, it can more closely be associated with episodic memory and the great impulse for remembrance of secularized Jews at the turn of the 20th century. From Henri Bergson to Sigmund Freud to Walter Benjamin, this impulse does not assert the social construction of memory, but rather the inner persistence of memories that are meaningful and unforgettable, even

 See Axel Doßmann and Lutz Niethammer, eds. Kollektive Identität. Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur. (Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt 2000), 323 – 342.  In Historians on the Autobiographical Frontier, Popkin had already emphasized this special structural characteristic in the texts by Luisa Passerini, Saul Friedländer, and by the English social historian Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986).

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against one’s own will and all societal conventions, and it places this recursive and redeeming memory in a relationship to the salvation history of the chosen people from Biblical times. The confusion in the reassignment of the memorytheoretical findings to the authors’ biographical raw data could hardly be greater. The ego-histoires, which went through the school of oral history, came from people who were still children in 1945, or in Ronald Fraser’s case, teenagers, or like Irina Scherbakowa, were not even born yet, and in the first three cases, their relationship to the age of extremes is only imparted and less conscious, because in England, West Germany, and Italy, they were not exposed to the prolongation of this time period in the east. It is only with Irina that the Jewish dismay and the family entanglement in Communism coincide. However, they have been shaped by the world of World War II in a way that they can hardly directly remember themselves. The conscious world of their coming of age is that of the Cold War; their engagement should go above and beyond this. They remember the time shortly before or shortly after the European upheaval of 1989 – 1990 and do not have an overpowering narrative that by and large fulfils their history with sense. They have unanswered questions about their own lives, in which the dimensions of publicity and privacy simply cannot be held apart, and individuality is first of all a normal fate, yet also a chance that is capable of evolving, and they are looking for answers in the contexts of their childhood or in the collectivity of their “left-wing” generation. Formally and epistemically, that is expressed in the face that their reports are primarily not purposeful narratives, but rather a search for explanations for one’s own self. To do so, one’s own memory is questioned, which is certainly – the authors are experienced oral historians, after all – not sufficient, in and of itself. Ronald Fraser, who had tried to write about his past for years, wanted to solve a personal problem, specifically, “to put down on paper the intimate nullity that an English childhood had left me with,”³⁹ interviewed the servants at his parents’ manor house, who had originally with their care and warmth helped him get over the coldness and societal rites of his parents, who imitated the surrounding gentry, to which they did not belong. Fraser deepened this externally reconstructive act internally, through psychoanalysis. I probably picked up the impulse of the ego-histoire for a report about work and life in the most faithful way and – without paying attention to Nora’s limitations⁴⁰ – went on the hunt

 Fraser, Search, XI.  On page 7 of his introduction to Ego-histoire, Pierre Nora warned his authors about the dangers of a modern autobiography in Rousseau’s style: “No mistakenly literary autobiography, or

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for the pre-conscious drive for my writing and my institutional behavior and explored the history of my very contradictory and yet very connected parents, from artistic modernity through National Socialism and a long war. I asked myself why I had never really moved away from the topic of the consequences of National Socialism, and why I created my work contexts like an elective familial affinity. Luisa Passerini, who had lost her mother early in life and admired her politically respectable anti-fascist father, grew up with relatives, and finished high school in America, traced the history of her 1968 generation in Italy, which she had missed in a very dramatic way at the Frelimo front in Africa, using questionnaires with her peers in the left-wing and feminist intellectual scene all the way to some prisons for criminal terrorists.⁴¹ Irina Scherbakowa, whose exploration of her relatives led to victims of Stalinism as much as it did to the endangered leaders of the Komintern in Hotel Lux, in whose environment she grew up during the final and after-phases of Stalinism, followed her own drive to discover the secrets of the gulag even as a teenager, through primitive biographical explorations (and yet paying attention to the still-influential regime of secrecy, in that she kept the interviews unlabeled, like music cassettes), until she had recognized after the short memorial boom before and after 1990 that she, the activist of Memorial, professor of oral history of victims at the new humanities university, which had been converted from the former CPSU university, was pursuing a counter-memory that evoked increasingly less resonance in Russia’s collective memory. (But she had written that before she could organize school competitions on the history of the 20th century even in Russia in recent years….) In other words, we did not have an obvious narrative that we wanted to pass on in cultural memory and to authenticate with our individual experience, but rather, we wanted to find our way in a world that had affected us with the results of the age of extremes and in which we could hardly understand these impressions from our own decisions in a world that had somehow become “normal” again. Fraser speaks of his split personality on the search for its earlier ambivalences, before his childhood left him behind with “nullity,” a complete, internal emptiness. In my explorations of my own German wartime and post-war boy-

unnecessarily intimate confessions, no abstract confessions of principles, no attempt of a dilettantic psychoanalysis.” In other words, he wanted to facilitate the self-reports for the historians whom he had invited to work on his cultural-national memory history by dissuading them from everything that characterizes a modern autobiographical self-reflection.  I tried to characterize her combination of psychoanalysis and the reconstruction of her political generation through renewed encounters in an interview in “Erlebte und erwählte Affinitäten,” my laudatory speech when Passerini received a cultural studies prize from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in Niethammer, Ego-Histoire?, 216 – 224.

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hood in an almost completely female nest with an absent and effectively unknown father, I discovered the future overlap of the private and the career worlds and the creation of functional equivalents between them. Passerini let the reports of Jungian psychoanalysis of her private as well as professional life crisis that also stimulated her biography and the reconstruction of her left-wing generation in Italy run parallel. Scherbakowa most strongly felt a mission for societal enlightenment, I suppose, but unsuccessfully looked for its origin in her complex childhood and family, or even Brezhnev’s period of stagnation. It must be emphasized that the empirical basis of my observations is extremely narrow and, in addition to that is biased, because the observer is one of the observed and as far as that is concerned, my comments – but in the field of oral history, that is not so unusual – ask questions rather than solidify answers. Yet the contrast between the broken narrative and investigative structures of the oral historians’ autobiographical texts and the more mainstreamed ones of their mostly older and often socially much more recognized colleagues is remarkable. But is this difference really the retroactive effect of the other method and historical practice, or is the other practice due to a different threshold of experiential history? In conclusion, let us compare two classic oral history biographies, by Studs Terkel and Jan Vansina. With his numerous social interview books on the Great Depression and the working world, on the American dream and the “good war,” American Pulitzer prize winner Studs Terkel (1912– 2008)⁴² created patterns for interactive documentation and found great public resonance with them. And the Belgian Medieval Studies specialist and African ethnologist Jan Vansina (born in 1929),⁴³ who later became established in the USA, became just as groundbreaking for African history through his early text on Oral Tradition as for the differentiation of cultures through communicative memory and its processing in oral history. Both of them wrote memoirs in old age that report on their long and successful careers, their encounters and their mission, but there is nothing of an autobiographical search for themselves or fragmented narratives that appear to be characteristic for the texts written by oral historians from the founding decades of the IOHA, as well as for the research with memory inter-

 Studs Terkel, Touch and Go: A Memoir (New York: The New Press, 2008).  Jan Vansina, Living with Africa (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). His classic work on oral history was first published as De la tradition orale (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 1961), but in particular, since the publication of its translation, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), it has been highly respected worldwide. In 2006, it was re-published, with an introduction by Selma Leydesdorff and Elizabeth Tonkin (Piscataway, New Jersey: Aldine Transaction).

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views conducted since then. Sure enough, at least Terkel does not stick to a clear, chronological narrative schema, but his uninterrupted self-confidence,⁴⁴ his ability to give the interviewees the feeling that they were needed, and also his sometimes roaring sense of humor is not appropriate for the younger authors. Or would one of them pick the following quotation for their gravestone, as Terkel did a year before his death: “curiosity did not kill this cat”? And this difference can also be seen with a completely different character. At the end of his report on his work and life, Vansina speaks of “fulfilment” and “contemplation” and illustrates it with a West African collection of small rugs that reaches over centuries and came from the same tradition. At first glance, all of these rugs appear to be the same, but on closer examination, their differences become visible, and for him, they illustrate the creativity of the individual in a communal culture. Therefore, the difference appears to be clearly generational. And now let’s take the last two autobiographies from leading academic figures from the 1968 generation in Germany, political scientists or cultural studies specialists who have produced lots of literature, who were once politically active in the far left and now have reached higher or more private cultural spheres, and who are not suspected of interactive practice with everyday people: the Lebensfäden of Ekkehart Krippendorff (born in 1934)⁴⁵ and Helmut Lethen’s (born in 1939) Handorakel. ⁴⁶ Both serve our expectations on something other than the epically evolutionary or degenerative narrative of naturalism to some extent, in as far as Krippendorff breaks up his life (loosely following a suggestion by Goethe) into threads and associative chains of memory, and pushes far into the dimensions of the theater and the religious. Lethen, a specialist in German studies, presents his bashful report about his past as a Maoist in a series of readings, missed

 At the beginning of his success, this included political discrimination. As he was left wing, at the height of the Cold War, he was denied a career in television and was tolerated only in the niches on underground spoken radio. But there, everything was not yet edited together, but rather, in this freer space, one could still have long, complex, and uncensored dialogues with normal people, and Terkel could do that like no other. He made a virtue of necessity and found resonance that made him the envy of many TV hosts of their more conventional talking heads.  Ekkehart Krippendorff, Lebensfäden. Zehn autobiographische Versuche (Heidelberg: Graswurzelrevolution, 2012). For information on its reception, see the reviews from Friedrich Schorlemmer, “Götter und Goethe,” Neues Deutschland, October 10, 2012 and Willi Winkler, “Installateur des Protests,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 12, 2012.  Helmut Lethen, Suche nach dem Handorakel. Ein Bericht (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2012). For information on its reception, see the reviews by Franka Maubach, “Vom Nutzen der Kälte,” Der Freitag, November 28, 2012; Jens Hacke, “Wenn das Politische privat wird,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 22, 2012; Lorenz Jäger, “Dr. Hüllen hatte die Linke voll im Blick,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 1, 2012.

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books and friendships with men, and freely lets his anecdotal repertoire (or is that really his episodic memory?) loose, so that reviewers of all political persuasions are uplifted by the light and sweet stories, but are also in agreement that they didn’t really learn anything. Krippendorff’s biographical stories self-critically dive into his family and childhood stories from the Third Reich, but then, to a great extent, suddenly transform into the pleasant, complex stories told by one of the leaders of the 1968 generation, being driven away from German academia, the anti-American peace researcher’s teaching career at an American university in a Eurocommunist city in Italy, his return to Berlin, and his almost complete return to his educated middle-class origins (expanded by Goethe, Shakespeare, and art religion). More than anything, Lethen’s light, sweet anecdotes from the radical Bohemia of Berlin lead to a private withdrawal from everything consciously political⁴⁷ into the cultural studies of intellectuality in the male conservative revolution attitude of the 1920’s. Its killing of vital rationality that goes beyond political parties was continued in elite leadership roles (ironically transformed) rather than overcome in “Verhaltenslehre der Kälte.” Nowhere is there an empirically open and solidly reflective meeting with those people whose abstractions had been instrumentalized politically and in the philosophy of history. Our comparative subjects from the 1968 generation – and here, I have not just picked current cases, but rather, selected two of the most politically prominent and culturally productive – have once again led us off track. Therefore, generation is also not the only key. Even if the form of deliverance of oral history is exchanged for a better-selected and more self-reflective text, it is worth it to study the double-refraction of European oral historians’ self-perception. In its generational difference from earlier practices in dealing with oral traditions, as well as in the special nature of its methodological, empirical, and reflexively opened practice, it stands out from other political-cultural forms of treatment from the generation of leftwing academics after 1968. In this respect, this domestic re-working of written traditions ends in a recommendation of this book, a critical oral history of the formative period of the IOHA.

 It may be a comment on his political withdrawal into irony when newspapers reported recently that the wife and former student of the leftist director of the International Forum of Cultural Studies is now active in Vienna as a speaker for the Identitarians, an Austrian right-wing nationalist faction.

Agnès Arp, Annette Leo, and Franka Maubach

Thanks

More than anything, our thanks goes to the 33 founding fathers and mothers of the IOHA interviewed here, who, with their willingness to tell us their life stories and let us look into their private archives, made this publication possible at all. Among them is also Lutz Niethammer, who understood his double role – as the head of this project and an important source – as a challenge and, with us, was curious about his history. We would also like to thank the members of the research group Erinnerung – Macht – Geschichte who were a part of this project at the beginning but needed to leave before it was over, or who supported us with the interview work: Susanne Hantke, Philipp Heß, Philipp Müller, Philipp Neumann, Stephan Paetrow, Sirku Plötner, Elena Rodriguez, Cornelia Siebeck, Mauro Pirini, and Zofia Wóycicka. Almut Leh at the Institut für Geschichte und Biographie in Lüdenscheid granted us a look at the archive materials. Our secretaries, Sabine Wolfram and Silvia Blaser, guaranteed the organizational-technical framework for the work. Thanks also goes to Christine Theml, who made Schiller’s garden house available for our work meetings. We would like to thank the Volkswagen Foundation for the generous support of an unusual mini graduate school, including printing subsidies. Also, with great involvement and a lot of patience, Ms. Kömen from Wallstein Verlag helped the German manuscript become a book. In addition, we would like to thank Mark Cave, Indira Chowdhury, Don Ritchie, Mirek Vaněk, and Mercedes Vilanova for their reliable and tireless support in the hunt for a publishing company that would publish the English translation of our volume. We would also like to thank Sue Anderson and Lauren Kata for their quick and uncomplicated support. Finally, we would like to thank the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, the IOHA, Jena University, and Lutz Niethammer for their great financial support during the final phase of this book project.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-011

Appendix Unpublished Sources Erinnerung-Macht-Geschichte (EMG) project group archive, Jena University, Germany. François Bédarida, papers from his time as director of the IHTP, Archives Nationales, Site de Fontainebleau, Paris. Institute for History and Biography at the University of Hagen. IOHA archive, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York. Paul Thompson’s research files, Albert Sloman Library, University of Essex. Private papers of Luisa Passerini, correspondence with the IOHA, Pavarolo, Italy. Private papers of Birgitta Skarin Frykman. Private papers of Lutz Niethammer. Private papers of Ronald Grele.

Interviews Interview with the research group: Daniel Bertaux, Selma Leydesdorff, Lutz Niethammer, Paul Thompson and Mercedes Vilanova. Colchester, England, September 13, 2007. Bermani, Cesare. Interview with Mauro Pirini. Bologna, April 28, 2007. Bertaux, Daniel. Interview with Agnès Arp. Sèvres, France, November 16, 2006. Bertaux-Wiame, Isabelle. Interview with Agnès Arp, Nanterre, France, April 4, 2007. Borderías, Cristina. Interview with Annette Leo. Barcelona, March 6, 2008. Botz, Gerhard. Interview with Philipp Neumann. Vienna, October 4, 2006. Clark, Mary Marshall. Interview with Franka Maubach. New York, February 20, 2008. Clemente, Pietro. Interview with Silvia Musso. Siena, Italy, May 5, 2007 and Florence, March 4, 2008. Contini, Giovanni. Interview with Manja Finnberg. Florence, September 25, 2006. Davin, Anna. Interview with Julie Boekhoff. London, July 20, 2007. de Graeve, Beatrys. Interview with Annette Leo. Ghent, November 25, 2008. Filippa, Marcella. Interview with Silvia Musso. Turin, May 6, 2008. Fraser, Ronald. Interview with Elena Rodríguez Codd. Valencia, May 6, 2008. Grele, Ronald J. Interview with Franka Maubach and Julie Boekhoff. Jena, Germany, February 21, 2007. Gribaudi, Gabriella. Interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso. Naples, March 20, 2007. Horgby, Björn. Interview with Christian König. Linköping, Sweden, June 12, 2007. Howkins, Alun. Interview with Julie Boekhoff. Brighton, England, July 24, 2007. Jalla, Daniele. Interview with Silvia Musso. Turin, February 26, 2008 and March 11, 2008. Joutard, Philippe. Interview with Agnès Arp. Paris, November 15, 2006 (personal) and October 28, 2008 (telephone). Leydesdorff, Selma. Interview with Sirku Plötner. Amsterdam, April 27, 2008.

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Lindqvist, Sven. Interview with Christian König. Stockholm, June 11, 2007. Löfgren, Orvar. Interview with Christian König. Lund, Sweden, June 15, 2007. Niethammer, Lutz. Interview with Philipp Heß and Annette Leo. Jena, Germany, May 27 – 28, 2008. Niethammer, Lutz. Group interview. Grünow, Germany, June 30, 2007. Passerini, Luisa. Interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso. Pavarolo, Italy, April 12 – 13, 2008. Plato, Alexander von. Interview with Franka Maubach. Stade, Germany, January 15 – 16, 2008. Portelli, Alessandro. Interview with Manja Finnberg and Silvia Musso. Rome, March 16, 2008. Portelli, Alessandro. Interview with Manja Finnberg. Rome, April 4, 2008. Rioux, Jean-Pierre. Interview with Agnès Arp. Paris, December 18, 2008. Scherbakowa, Irina. Interview with Franka Maubach. Moscow, March 6, 2008. Sieder, Reinhard. Interview with Philipp Neumann. Vienna, September 25 and 27, 2007. Skarin Frykman, Birgitta. Interview with Christian König. Gothenburg, June 13, 2007. Thompson, Paul. Interview with Julie Boekhoff. Wivenhoe, England, July 17 – 18, 2007. Thompson, Paul. Interview with Paul Thompson. Stockholm, June 12, 1996. Qualitative Data Service, University of Essex, Colchester. www.qualitdata.ac.uk/edwardians/about/PaulTh ompsonLifeStoryInterview1996.pdf, accessed January 3, 2018. Triulzi, Alessandro. Interview with Manja Finnberg. Rome, March 17, 2007. Tröger, Annemarie. Interview with Annette Leo. Berlin, April 29 and May 2, 2008. Vilanova, Mercedes. Interview with Annette Leo. Barcelona, March 5, 2008.

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Rémond, René and Jean-Pierre Rioux, eds. Problèmes de méthode en histoire orale: Table ronde, Institut d’histoire du temps présent. Paris: Press of the IHTP, 1980. Revelli, Nuto. Il mondo dei vinti: Testimonianze di vita contadina. Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Ritchie, Donald A. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Rosati, Irene. “Alessandro Portelli: Ho imparato come gli artigiani rubando con gli occhi.” In Il microfono rovesciato: Dieci variazioni sulla storia orale, edited by Alessandro Casellato, 55 – 68. Treviso, Italy: Istresco, 2007. Rousso, Henry. La Hantise du passé. Paris: Editions Textuel, 1998. Rucht, Dieter. “Gesellschaft als Projekt – Projekte in der Gesellschaft: Zur Rolle sozialer Bewegungen.” In Neue soziale Bewegungen: Impulse, Bilanzen und Perspektiven, edited by Ansgar Klein, Hans-Josef Legrand, and Thomas Leif, 15 – 27. Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999. Rüsen, Jörn. Historische Vernunft: Grundzüge einer Historik, Bd. 1: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983. Samuel, Raphael. “Oral History in Großbritannien.” In Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History, edited by Lutz Niethammer. Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980. Samuel, Raphael, ed. People’s History and Socialist Theory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Samuel, Raphael and Paul Thompson, eds. The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge, 1990. Scherbakowa, Irina. Die Hände meines Vaters. Eine russische Familiengeschichte. Munich: Droemer, 2017. Scherbakowa, Irina. Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten: Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror. Frankfurt: Campus, 2000. Scherbakowa, Irina. Zerrissene Erinnerung. Der Umgang mit Stalinismus und Zweitem Weltkrieg im heutigen Russland. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2010. Schorlemmer, Friedrich. “Götter und Goethe.” Neues Deutschland, October 10, 2012. Scotellaro, Rocco. L’uva puttanella. Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1955. Singer, Wendy. Creating Histories: Oral Narratives and the Politics of History Making. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sharpless, Rebecca. “The History of Oral History.” In History of Oral History: Foundation of Methodology, edited by Thomas L. Charlton, Louis E. Meyers, and Rebecca Sharpless. Lanham, Maryland: Altamira, 2007. Skarin Frykman, Birgitta and Elisabeth Tegner, eds. Working Class Culture: An International Symposium, organized by the Museum of Work, Norrköping, and the Department of Ethnology, University of Gothenburg, September 1986. Gothenburg, Sweden: Department of Ethnology, University of Gothenburg 1989. Starr, Louis M. “Oral History in den USA. Probleme und Perspektiven.” In Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der Oral History, edited by Lutz Niethammer. Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1980. Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago, 1986. Steiner, George. Sprache und Schweigen: Essays über Sprache, Literatur und das Unmenschliche. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973.

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Talsma, Jaap and Selma Leydesdorff. “Oral History in the Netherlands.” BIOS Special Issue (1990). Tedlock, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Terkel, Studs. Touch and Go: A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 2008. Teubner, Gunther. “Die vielköpfige Hydra: Netzwerke als kollektive Akteure höherer Ordnung.” In Emergenz: Die Entstehung von Ordnung, Organisation und Bedeutung, edited by Wolfgang Krohn and Günter Küppers, 189 – 216. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992. These Are Our Lives: As Told By the People and Written By Members of the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. New York: Hastings House, 1975. Thomas, William I. and Florian W. Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in America. Boston: Gorham, 1918. Thomson, Alistair. “Dancing Through the Memory of Our Movement: Four Paradigmatic Revolutions in Oral History. Oral History Australia. http://www.ohaansw.org./au/page/ oral_history_papers.html (accessed June 26, 2002). Thomson, Alistair. “Eine Reise durch das Gedächtnis unserer Bewegung: Vier paradigmatische Revolutionen in der Oral History.” BIOS Special Issue: Kritische Erfahrungsgeschichte und grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit. The Networks of Oral History. Festschrift für Alexander von Plato (2007): 21 – 29. Thomson, Alistair. “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History.” The Oral History Review 34.1 (2007): 49 – 70. Thomson, Alistair. “Response.” The Oral History Review 34.2 (207): 125 – 28. Thompson, Paul. “The Development and Present State of Oral History in Britain.” BIOS Special Issue: The History of Oral History: Development, Present State and Future Prospects (1990): 77 – 86. Thompson, Paul. The Edwardians: The Remaking of the British Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975. Thompson, Paul. “Imagination and Passivity in Leisure: Coventry Car Workers and Their Families from the 1920s to the 1970s.” In The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century, edited by David Thoms, Len Holden, and Tim Claydon. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998. Thompson, Paul. “Introduction.” In Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe, edited by Paul Thompson and Natasha Burchardt, 9 – 20. London: Pluto, 1982. Thompson, Paul. “Life Stories in Poland and Sweden.” History Workshop 6.1 (1978): 208 – 10. Thompson, Paul. “Oral History in Brazil.” Oral History 19.2 (1991): 68 – 70. Thompson, Paul. “Playing at Skilled Men: Factory Culture and Pride in Work Skills among Coventry Car Workers.” Social History 13.1 (1988): 45 – 69. Thompson, Paul. “Report Back: Life Histories in Poland and Scandinavia.” History Workshop 6 (1978), 208 – 10. Thompson, Paul. Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1995 – 1914. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967. Thompson, Paul. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Thompson, Paul and Natasha Burchardt, eds. Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe. London: Pluto, 1982.

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Thompson, Paul, Luisa Passerini, Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame, and Alexxandro Portelli. “Between Social Scientists: Responses to Louise A. Tilly.” International Journal of Oral History 6.1 (February 1985), 19 – 39. Tilly, Louise A. “People’s History and Social Science History.” International Journal of Oral History 6.1 (1985): 5 – 18. Tommaseo, Niccolò. Gita nel pistojese. Pistoia, Italy: Cassa di Risparmio di Pistoia e Pescia, 1990. Tonkin, Elizabeth. Narrating Our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Triulzi, Alessandro. “Hace treinta años.” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 36.2 (2006): 79 – 85. Tulving, Endel and Fergus I. M. Craik, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Unfried, Berthold, Jürgen Mittag, and Marcel van der Linden, eds. Transnationale Netzwerke im 20. Jahrhundert: Historische Erkundungen zu Ideen und Praktiken, Individuen und Organisationen. Leipzig: Akademische Verlags-Anstalt, 2008. van Laak, Dirk. “Alltagsgeschichte.” In Aufriss der Historischen WIssenschaften, Band 7: Neue Themen und Methoden der Geschichtswissenschaft, edited by Michael Maurer. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Vansina, Jan. De la tradition orale. Tervuren, Belgium: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 1961. Vansina, Jan. Living with Africa. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965. Vilanova, Mercedes. “Illiteracy, Non-voting and Oral Sources during the Second Republic in Barcelona (1931 – 1939).” BIOS Special Issue: Kritische Erfahrungsgeschichte und grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit. The Networks of Oral History. Festschrift für Alexander von Plato (2007): 173 – 79. Vilanova, Mercedes. “International Oral History, Abschlussrede auf der Konferenz in New York 1994. “ History Workshop Journal 39 (1995): 43 – 51. Vilanova, Mercedes. “Las fuentes orales entre Bolonia (1976) y México (2008).” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 36.2 (2006): 49. Vilanova, Mercedes. Voces sin letras: Analfabetos en Baltimore. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2005. Vilanova, Mercedes and Frederic Chordá. A Mind at Work: We Are Our Questions. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2003. Vilanova, Mercedes and Lluís Ubeda. “Editoriale.” Fonti Orali: Studi e ricerche: Bollettino nazionale d’informazione 1.1 (1981): 4. Vilanova, Mercedes and Lluís Ubeda, eds. El repte de les fonts orals. Barcelona: Memorial Democràtic, 2006. Vilanova, Mercedes and Lluís Ubeda. “International Oral History: Abschlussrede auf der Konferenz in New York 1994.” History Workshop Journal 39.1 (1995). 67 – 70. Vilanova, Mercedes and Lluís Ubeda. “Por una historia sin adjetivos: 25 años de fuentes orales en España.” Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales 14 (1995): 95 – 116. Voges, Wolfgang, ed. Methoden der Biographie- und Lebenslaufforschung. Opladen, Germany: Leske & Budrich, 1987. Voldman, Danièle, ed. La bouche de la vérité? CNRS, 1992.

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Vorländer, Herwart, ed. Oral History: Mündlich erfragte Geschichte. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990. Weber, Wolfgang. “Mass of Trash” or “Veins of Gold”? An Investigative Report on the Relationship between Oral History and Archives. Regensburg, Germany: Roderer Verlag, 2000. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. “Königsweg zu neuen Ufern oder Irrgarten der Illusionen? Die westdeutsche Alltagsgeschichte ‛von innen’ und ‛von unten.’” In Geschichte von unten – Geschichte von innen. Kontroversen um die Alltagsgeschichte, comps. Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Jürgen Kocka. Hagen, Germany: FernUniversität Hagen, 1985. Weigel, Sigrid. “Die Sprache des Unbewussten: Pathosformeln der Gedächtnisgeschichte.” In Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts?, edited by Norbert Frei, 58 – 66. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2006. Weyrather, Irmgard. Oral History: Geschichte von unten. Berlin: Literatur & Erfahrung, 1982. Wierling, Dorothee. “Oral History.” In Aufriss der Historischen Wissenschaften, Band 7: Neue Themen und Methoden der Geschichtswissenschaft, 124 – 48. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Winkler, Willi. “Installateur des Protests.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 12, 2012. Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Recording Oral History: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1994.

IOHA Conferences, 1976 – 2020         

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First conference in Bologna, Italy, December  –  “Tra storia e antropologia / Between Anthropology and History” Second conference in Colchester, Great Britain, March  –  “International European Conference in Oral History” Third conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October  –  “International Oral History Conference” Fourth conference in Aix-en-Provence, France, September  –  “Colloque international d’histoire orale” Fifth conference in Barcelona, Spain, March  –  “El poder a la societat / El poder en la Sociedad” Sixth conference in Oxford, Great Britain, September  –  “Myth and History” Seventh conference in Essen, Germany, March  – April  “Gedächtnis und sozialer Wandel” Eighth conference in Siena-Lucca, Italy, February  –  “Memory and Multiculturalism / Memoria e multiculturalismo” Conference in New York, USA, October  –  “Power and Identity: The Role of Ethnic, Nation, Gender, and Political Identity in Oral History” Ninth conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, June  –  “Communicating Experience” Tenth conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June  –  “Oral History: Challenges for the st Century” Eleventh conference in Istanbul, Turkey, June  – 

308

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Appendix

“Crossroads of History: Experience, Memory, Orality” Twelfth Conference in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, June  –  “The Power of Oral History: Memory, Healing and Development” Thirteenth Conference in Rome, Italy, June  –  “Memory and Globalization” Fourteenth Conference in Sydney, Australia, July  –  “Dancing with Memory: Oral History and its Audiences” Fifteenth Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, September  –  “Oral History: A Dialogue with our Times” Sixteenth Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, July  – ,  “Between Past and Future: Oral History, Memory and Meaning” Seventeenth Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, September  – ,  “The Challenges of Oral History in the st Century: Diversity, Inequality and Identity Construction” Eighteenth Conference in Barcelona, Spain, July  –  “Power and Democracy” Nineteenth Conference in Bangalore, India, June  – July  “Speaking, Listening, Interpreting. The Critical Engagements of Oral History” Twentieth Conference in Jyväskylä, Finland, June  –  “Memory & Narration” Twenty-First Conference in Singapore, June  –  “Harmony and Disharmony: Bringing Together Many Voices”

Short Biographies of the Protagonists and Selected Publications François Bédarida was born in Lyon in 1926 and died near Paris in 2001. In his youth, he moved with his family to Paris, and he was active in the resistance during the German occupation. In 1949, he graduated from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). From 1950 to 1956, he taught at the Institut Français and then worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for three years. In 1961, Bédarida received a position as assistant professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne, where he worked until 1966. Then he returned to Great Britain to finish a Master of Arts degree at Oxford. In addition, Bédarida was responsible for the Maison Française (1966 – 1970) and worked at Sciences Po in Paris (1971– 1978). In his research, he dealt with the conflict between history and memory as well as with the structures of contemporary French society. Bédarida was the founder of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP), of which he was a member until 1990. In that year, he became the General Secretary of the International Committee for Historical Studies (ICHS) and, in his work, set the goal of modernizing the congresses taking place within its framework and internationally networking the institution. François Bédarida aimed at giving the ICHS an international focus. Publications (Selection): 1974 La Grande Bretagne – L’Angleterre triomphante (1832 – 1914). Paris: Editions de l’Atelier. 1976 La Société anglaise du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours (1851 – 1975). Paris: Arthaud. 1989 La Politique nazie d’extermination. Paris: Albin Michel. 1989 Le Nazisme et le génocide – Histoire et enjeux. Paris: Nathan. 1992 Le Nazisme et le génocide – Histoire et témoignage. Paris: Presses Pocket. 1995 L’Histoire et le métier d’historien en France 1945 – 1995. Paris. 1999 Churchill. Paris: Fayard. 2003 Histoire: critique et responsabilité. Paris: Editions Complexe. Cesare Bermani, born in 1937, grew up in a rich industrialist family in Novara, Italy. After a diverse school career, he completed his university entrance qualification at a private school in Switzerland. He began to study psychology at the University of Milan in 1958 – 59, but did not finish his degree. A member of the Italian Communist Party since 1955, Bermani has been heavily involved in politics and worked as a freelance employee at local newspapers. In 1960, he joined the Circolo Rosa Luxemburg collective and, among other things, fought for the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-013

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rights of psychiatry patients and institutionalized children. Together with Gianni Bosio and Roberto Leydi, in the early 1960’s, Bermani began to collect old and new political folk songs in Italy and publish a series of records, I Dischi del Sole. From 1962, he also acted as the editor of the newspaper Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano and, until 1981, was an employee of Avanti, the publishing company of the Italian socialist party, in Milan. Bermani was a co-founder of the Istituto Ernesto de Martino. Through his close relationship with Bosio, he gained access to the method of questioning contemporary witnesses and, for his own research, completed his first biographical interviews about partisans in Piedmont. In 1971, he published the first volume of his study, but from 1974, he dedicated himself more intensely to editorial work at various newspapers, including at Primo Maggio. Since 1981, he has been working as a freelance author on various sociopolitical and historical topics and has been participating in various oral history projects of the Società di Mutuo Soccorso Ernesto de Martini in Venice. Publications (Selection): 1971 Pagine di guerriglia: L’esperienza dei garibaldini della Valsesia, 4 volumes. Milan: Sapere Edizioni. 1987 (co-editor) Gramsci raccontato. Rome: Edizioni Associate. 1991 Il bambino è servito: Leggende metropolitane in Italia. Bari, Italy: Dedalo. 1997 Spegni la luce che passa Pippo: Voci, leggende e miti della storia contemporanea. Rome: Odradek. 1997 Il nemico interno: Guerra civile e lotte di classe in Italia (1943 – 1976). Rome. 1998 Al lavoro nella Germania di Hitler: Racconti e memorie dell’emigrazione economica italiana 1937 – 1945. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. 1999 / 2001 (editor) Introduzione alla storia orale: Storia, conservazione delle fonti e problemi di metodo. 2 volumes. Rome: Odradek. Daniel Bertaux was born in 1939 in Paris. After finishing secondary school in 1957, he completed military service and, in 1963, began to study sociology in Berkeley, California. Beginning in 1996, he continued his education at the Sorbonne and, two years later, was working as a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), which, at that time, was led by Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Boudon, and Alain Touraine. Parallel to this, he was engaged in the student movement. Daniel Bertaux is the co-founder of the Comité Liaison Étudiants Ouvriers Paysans (CLEOP). Influenced by the French workers’ strikes in the fall of 1969, he began to deal with the relationship between capital and work and, in this context, completed

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the first interviews with French workers and craftsmen. At the same time, he endeavored to make contacts with other international oral historians, like Paul Thompson, Ronald Grele, and Nicole Gagnon. Since 1973, he has been an employee of the Centre d’Études des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS), which was founded by Alain Touraine. He was a participant at the first IOHA conference in Colchester and also later in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Aix-en-Provence. From 1984 – 85, Bertaux was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. After his return from the USA, he increasingly dedicated himself to sociological-psychological questions, such as the problem of children of divorce, and completed research on everyday life in the Soviet Union. In addition, since 1995, he has taught courses on methodology at the University of Warsaw. Since the late 1990’s, at the behest of the European Commission in Brussels, Daniel Bertaux has been dealing with the question of the impoverishment of families. In 2001, he founded the Association Français de Sociologie and was elected its head in 2002. Today, he is the head of research at the CNRS. Publications (Selection): 1976 Histoires de vie ou récits de pratiques? Méthodologie de l’approche biographique en sociologie. Paris: Maison des sciences et de l’homme. 1977 Destins personnels et structure de classe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1991 (with Catherine Delcroix) “Where Have All the Daddies Gone? On the Loosening of the Father / Child Bond after Divorce.” In European Parents in the 1990’s: Contradictions and Comparisons, edited by Ulla Björnberg, 181– 96. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction. 1993 (co-editor) Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories. Oxford: Transaction. 1997 (with Paul Thompson) Pathways to Social Class: A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility. Oxford: Taylor & Francis. 1997 Les récits de vie. Paris: Nathan Université. 2000 (with Catherine Delcroix) “Case Histories of Families and Social Processes: Enriching Sociology.” In The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science: Comparative Issues and Examples, edited by Prue Chamberlayne et al., 71– 89. London: Taylor & Francis. 2004 (co-editor) On Living Through Soviet Russia. London: Routledge. Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame was born in 1945. She studied history and social history in Paris. Following that, she completed sociological interviews for projects on a freelance basis and had already begun to work with Daniel Bertaux, through whom she came into contact with oral history. Within the framework of the CNRS, she does research on women’s work, between paid and housework. She

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attended the IOHA conferences in Aix-en-Provence and Barcelona and occasionally worked together with Cristina Borderías. Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame’s research focuses were initially in joint projects with Daniel Bertaux; the two cooperated on research on the life stories of Parisian bakers. In the late 1970’s, she examined the problem of people moving from the country to Paris. In the 1980’s, she focused on the topic of cultural inheritance and genealogical organizations in individual regions. However, Bertaux-Wiame’s interest has been moving away from history and closer to sociology. Today, she is a senior research fellow at CNRS. Publications (Selection): 1980 (with Daniel Bertaux) “Autobiographische Erinnerungen und kollektives Gedächtnis.” In Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis: Die Praxis der Oral History, edited by Lutz Niethammer, 108 – 22. Frankfurt: Syndikat. 1981 (with Daniel Bertaux) “Life Stories in the Bakers’ Trade.” In Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, edited by Daniel Bertaux, 169 – 89. Beverly Hills, California: Sage. 1991 (with Daniel Bertaux) “‘Was du ererbst von deinen Vätern…’: Transmissionen und soziale Mobilität über fünf Generationen.” BIOS 4.1: 13 – 40. 1999 “Les rapports sociaux de sexe: Un objet social masqué? A propos de La Poste.” Cahiers du Genre 26: 59 – 77. 2000 “Mobilité masculine, sédentarité féminine? Une ‘évidence’ à questionner.” Et pourtant elles bougent! A propos des mobilités des femmes: Actes des Journées d’Études du GDR-MAGE: 3. 2005 “Parcours professionnels, mobilité géographique: Une analyse des inégalités homme / femme dans le secteur bancaire.” In Les ressorts de la mobilisation au travail, edited by Jean-Paul Durand and Danièle Linhart, 25 – 32. Paris: Octares. Cristina Borderías was born in Madrid in 1951, as the oldest of six children. A few years after her birth, her family moved to Zaragoza, where she attended school and in 1969, after receiving her university entrance qualification, began a degree in history. She was engaged in the anti-Franco movement and became a member of an illegal opposition party, which led to conflicts with her parents. In 1972, Borderías left the University of Zaragoza, where she found the environment too restrictive and conservative. She moved to Barcelona and enrolled at in the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Barcelona. There, she met Mercedes Vilanova, under whom she wrote her thesis about the anarchistic uprising in Catalonia in 1932. At the suggestion of Vilanova, in this context, she carried out biographical interviews with the insurgents’ wives, sisters, and daughters. Later, during her doctoral dissertation, she examined the con-

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sciousness and identity of modern women. For this, she surveyed employees of a Spanish telephone company. Her contacts to the IOHA had been developing since the mid-1970’s, when she founded the journal Historia y Fuente Oral with Mercedes Vilanova. Both of them offered seminars on oral history, in the style of Paul Thompson’s summer schools. In 1979, Borderías participated in the IOHA conference in Colchester and got to know Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, Anna Davin, and Raphael Samuel. Shortly after this, she was introduced to Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame through Ronald Grele in New York. Later, she worked together with Bertaux-Wiame on a research project on women’s history and oral history. In the mid-1990’s, she stopped working with Mercedes Vilanova. Cristina Borderías distanced herself from oral history and the IOHA. She transferred to the Institute of Modern History at the University of Barcelona and began to concentrate on 19th-century women’s history. Since 2001, she has held a professorship in this institute. At present, she is heading a large European comparison project, “Gender and Well-Being: Interactions between Work, Family and Public Policy.” She is again conducting interviews within this framework. Cristina Borderías is the president of the Asociación Española de Investigación de Historia de las Mujeres. Publications (Selection): 1993 Entre líneas: trabajo e identidad femenina en la España contemporánea: La Compañía Telefónica, 1924 – 1980. Barcelona: Icaria. 1993 (with Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli) Strategie della libertà: Storie e teorie del lavoro femminile. Rome: Manifesto. 2007 (editor) Género y políticas del trabajo en la España contemporánea, 1836 – 1936. Barcelona: Icaria. 2009 (editor) La historia de las mujeres: Perspectivas actuals. Barcelona: Icaria. Gerhard Botz was born in Schärding am Inn, Austria in 1941. After finishing his university entrance qualification in 1959, he first began to study law at the University of Vienna but changed his majors to biology, geography, and history. He found his calling when studying contemporary history – including under Friedrich Heer, among others. Botz’s studies in Vienna shaped him politically. The increasing radicalization of the student body in Vienna scared him and he turned towards social democracy, in a clear rejection of left-wing Marxism. In the mid-1960’s, Botz had the possibility to work on a project about National Socialism with Gerhard Stadler, who had returned from exile. In 1967, he completed his doctorate, with a dissertation in contemporary history about the role of violence in Austrian politics, and he had completed some interviews for it. Following that, he and Stadler went to the Faculty of Social Sciences, Economics

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and Business at Johannes Kepler University Linz and was employed there as a university assistant from 1968 to 1979. He began to study sociology, which awakened his interest in quantitative methods in social history. There, he began a social statistical investigation of Austrian NSDAP members. At the recommendation of Hans Mommsen, Botz applied for a Humboldt Foundation scholarship in 1976, which, among other things, made a research stay in England possible. In the same year, he participated in the summer school in Colchester. As a result, he conducted some biographical interviews, with concentration camp survivors in particular. In 1979, Gerhard Botz completed his habilitation under Ludwig Jedliczka and a year later, he received a position as professor of Austrian history, with a focus on contemporary history, in Salzburg. There, using the example of the summer school, he established annual courses every September for quantitative methods in social sciences and, from 1985 – 1993, the international Erasmus Summer School of New Methods in History for oral history. In 1982, he founded the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Sciences in Vienna and Salzburg, and he has since led it. Between 1985 and 1987, he also served as a guest professor at the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, and in Paris. Botz is a regular participant in the International Oral History Association conferences and is a co-editor of the series Studien zur historischen Sozialwissenschaft and the journal BIOS. From 1997 to 2008, he served as a professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna. Publications (Selection): 1972 Die Eingliederung Österreichs in das Deutsche Reich: Planung und Verwirklichung des politisch-administrativen Anschlusses (1938 – 1940). Vienna: Europa. 1975 Wohnungspolitik und Judendeportation in Wien 1938 bis 1945: Zur Funktion des Antisemitismus als Ersatz nationalsozialistischer Sozialpolitik. Vienna: Geyer. 1978 Wien vom “Anschluss” zum Krieg: Nationalsozialistische Machtübernahme und politisch-soziale Umgestaltung am Beispiel der Stadt Wien 1938/39. Vienna: Jugend und Volk. 1984 Mündliche Geschichte und Arbeiterbewegung: Eine Einführung in Arbeitsweise und Themenbereiche der Geschichte “geschichtsloser” Sozialgruppen. Vienna: Böhlau. 1987 Krisenzonen einer Demokratie: Gewalt, Streik und Konfliktunterdrückung in Österreich seit 1918. Frankfurt: Campus. 1994 (co-editor) Kontroversen um Österreichs Zeitgeschichte. Frankfurt: Campus. 2005 (editor) Schweigen und Reden einer Generation. Vienna: Mandelbaum. 2009 (co-editor) Krieg. Erinnerung. Geschichtswissenschaft. Vienna: Böhlau.

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Mary Marshall Clark was born in North Carolina in 1957. From an early age, she was active in the civil rights movement. After studies in religion, psychology, and literature at the University of North Carolina, she continued her theological education at the University of North Carolina. At the end of the 1970’s, she received a scholarship for a fellowship in Geneva, where she looked at South American liberation theology. After her return to the US in 1980, she enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, where she completed two master’s degrees, including one in theology. Until the end of the 1980’s, she worked in journalism, at the oral history department of the New York Times. In 1990, Ronald Grele offered her a position in the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University. Since then, she has regularly attended conferences for oral historians, and, together with Ronald Grele, organized the 1994 IOHA meeting in New York. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, she completed more than 500 interviews with New York residents. In 2002, she became the director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University and established a master’s program in oral history. Her academic focus is on research on apartheid and human rights movements as well as the topic of trauma and memory, especially as it relates to 9/11. Publications (Selection): 2004 “Das Medienauge und die Regierungslüge: Fünfhundert Geschichten nach dem 11. September 2001.” BIOS 17.2: 221– 31. 2005 “Resisting Attrition in Stories of Trauma.” Narrative 13.3: 294– 98. 2011 (co-editor) After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 2001 and the Years that Followed. New York: The New Press. Pietro Clemente was born in 1942 in Nouro, Sardinia. He initially began to study architecture in Milan, but quit after two years. After that, he returned to his home island, in order to enroll in the Department of Philology, Literature, and Linguistics in Cagliari. Clemente was involved in the student movement and founded a group for the left-wing extra parliamentary group Potere Operaio in Cagliari. In 1969, he finished his degree under Alberto Cirese, with a thesis about Frantz Fanon, and worked as a secondary school teacher for some time. In addition to that, he was an adjunct instructor at the university. Beginning in 1973, he taught folklore and cultural history at the University of Siena; after that, he taught in Rome and Florence. In connection with the workers’ strikes at the Turin Fiat plants in 1969, Clemente began to complete initial interviews with the workers, which he published in small brochures. From 2001 to 2012, he served as a professor of anthropology at the University of Florence and has been teaching at the universities of Siena, Rome, and Perugia. He retired in 2012.

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Publications (Selection): 1971 Frantz Fanon tra esistenzialismo e rivoluzione. Bari, Italy: Laterza. 1976 (with Maria Luisa Meoni and Massimo Squillacciotti) Il dibattito sul folklore in Italia. Milan: Cultura Popolare. 1985 L’antropologia italiana: Un secolo di storia. Rome: Laterza. 1986 (co-editor) Interni e dintorni di Pinocchio. Montepulciano, Italy: Editori del Grifo Italia. 1999 (with Emanuela Rossi) Il terzo principio della museografia: Antropologia, contadini, musei. Rome: Carocci. 2002 Triglie di scoglio: Tracce del Sessantotto cagliaritano. Cagliari, Italy: CUEC. 2004 Museografia e comunicazione di massa. Rome: Aracne. 2005 (with Fabio Dei) Poetiche e politiche del ricordo: Memoria pubblica delle stragi nazifasciste in Toscana. Rome: Carocci 2007 (with Anna Iuso and Elena Bachiddu) Il canto del nord. Rome: CISU. Giovanni Contini Bonacossi was born into a well-to-do Florentine noble family in 1948 as the oldest of seven children. Beginning in 1967, he studied philosophy at the University of Florence. He was extremely engaged in the student movement and, from 1969, was a member of the extraparliamentary group Potere Operaio. In a short period of time, he rose to be their regional official. After the official dissolution of the group in 1973, he moved away from political work. Two years later, he finished his degree, with a thesis supported with interviews about the history of left-wing unions in Italy in the 1950’s. After that, Contini worked as an assistant at the Department for Union History at the University of Siena and was entrusted with research assignments. This was followed by a stay as a fellow at the Research Centre at King’s College Cambridge (1981– 1983), where Contini participated in an international comparative research project about worker conflicts. For this, he completed numerous interviews in the Turin Fiat plants. After his return to Florence, in 1984, he became an employee of the Soprintendenza Archivista in Tuscany and director of the audio-visual archive department there. Since 1996, Contini has been a co-editor of the web zine Ossimoro and an honorary lecturer at the department of history at La Sapienza University in Rome. In 2002, he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo and in 2003, he completed a research stay at the Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles. From 2006 to 2012 he taught contemporary history at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Since 2013, he has been the President of the Associazione Italiana di Storia Orale.

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Publications (Selection): 1985 Memoria e storia: Le Officine Galileo nel racconto degli operai, dei tecnici, dei manager. Milan: F. Angeli. 1987 Santa Croce sull’Arno: Biografie di imprenditori. Florence: Museo della zona del cuoio. 1989 (with Luciano Ardiccioni) Vivere di coltelli: Per una storia dell’artigianato dei ferri taglienti a Scarperia. Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano. 1993 (with Alfredo Martini) Verba manent: L’uso delle fonti orali per la storia contemporanea. Rome: Carocci. 1995 (co-editor) Un’isola in terraferma: Storia orale di una comunità mineraria dell’Amiata. Siena, Italy: Il Leccio. 1997 La memoria divisa. Milan: Rizzoli. 2005 Aristocrazia Contadina. Sulla complessità della società mezzadrile: fattoria, famiglie, individui. Siena: Protagon. Anna Davin was born in 1940 and grew up in Oxford. In 1966, she began to study history at the University of Warwick, under Edward P. Thompson, among others. In 1968, together with other women from the Socialist Society in Warwick and with American exchange students, she founded a women’s liberation group. Along with non-student members from nearby Coventry, they fought for advancements with regards to equal pay, the right to make decisions in family planning and better access to university education, and they demanded the creation of a childcare center for women who studied and worked at the university. In the 1970’s, she was heavily involved in the History Workshop movement; she had met the leader, Raphael Samuel, during her studies in Warwick. She became one of the founding members of the editors’ collective of the History Workshop Journal and is still active as an editor today. Her most famous publication is an essay on “Imperialism and Motherhood” in one of the first editions of the History Workshop Journal (1976). In the mid-1970’s, she moved to London and began work on a dissertation in history at Birkbeck College at the University of London. There, she joined the Stratford Women’s Liberation Group and a feminist students’ group in Pimlico, the History Group. She was also active in various groups in the people’s history movement, such as in the new community history group People’s Autobiography of Hackney, in the Feminist History Group, and in The Public Library, a shortlived attempt to create a library of political ephemera. Anna Davin has been teaching women’s history for many years, in evening courses in London in the 1980’s, as a guest lecturer at Binghamton University in New York (1979 – 2002), as a research fellow at Middlesex University in the 1990’s, and as a visiting lecturer in women’s history at Royal Holloway at the University of London. After

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that, she taught summer academy students at the University of Michigan and until today offers an annual oral history course at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of London. Finally, she returned to adult education and taught courses on the history of London for the Continuing Education Department at Birkbeck College at the University of London. She only participated in the IOHA conferences in 1979 in Colchester and in Amsterdam one year later, because she could not afford further trips. Publications (Selection): 1976 “Imperialism and Motherhood.” History Workshop Journal 1.5: 9 – 66. 1980 (with Annmarie Turnbull and Patricia de Wolfe) Women with a Past: A Brief Account of Some Aspects of Women’s History in Britain in the 19th and 20th Centuries. London: Women’s Research & Resources Centre. 1981 “Feminism and Labour History.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 176 – 81. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1982 “Child Labour, the Working-Class Family, and Domestic Ideology in 19th Century Britain.” Development and Change 13.4: 633 – 52. 1984 “Working or Helping? London Working Class Children in the Domestic Economy.” In Households and the World Economy, edited by Joan K. Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Hans-Dieter Evers, 215 – 32. Beverly Hills. 1996 Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870 – 1914. London: Rivers Oram. 2000 “Flight to the Centre: Winnie Gonley, 1930s Colonial Cosmopolitan.” Journal of World-Systems Research 6.2: 286 – 306. 2001 “Waif Stories in Late Nineteenth-Century England.” History Workshop Journal 52.1: 67– 98. Marcella Filippa was born in 1954 in Castagnole Piemonte, in northwestern Italy. After student teaching to become an elementary school teacher, she completed a degree in history at the University of Turin while working as a tenured teacher. Her thesis on seasonal workers in her hometown made use of oral history and was supervised by Luisa Passerini. In 1983, she had a fellowship at the University of Lyon under Yves Lequin, where she completed oral history work on female seasonal workers between Turin and Cuneo. After her return to Italy, she left teaching and has been working as a journalist, lecturer, and academic since 1985. From 1981 to 1987, she was also a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin Fonti Orali in Turin. Her journalistic and academic work includes topics like migration, discrimination, racism, food and table culture, biographies and the use of oral sources, photography, and the production of exhibitions and documentary films from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

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From 1991 to 1994, she was a fellow at Gonville and Caius Colleges at Cambridge University as well as at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. Since 1992, she has been working as the academic director of the Fondazione Vera Nocentini foundation in Turin, which has an archive for the history of unions. Since 2001, Marcella Filippa has been teaching the history of photography at the European Institute of Design in Turin. Publications (Selection): 1982 Mia mamma mi raccontava che da giovane andava a fare i mattoni: I fornaciai a Beinasco tra fonti orali e fonti scritte. Alessandria, Italy: Dell’orso. 1988 “Nei ghetti bui e misteriosi.” In Piemonte vivo 4 (1988): 28 – 35. 1990 Avrei capovolto le montagne: Giorginia Levi in Bolivia: 1939 – 1946. Florence: Giunti. 1998 Dis-crimini: Profili dell’intolleranza e del razzismo. Turin: SEI. 2001 La morte contesa: Cremazione e riti funebri nell’Italia fascista. Turin: Paravia 2003 (editor) Il cibo dell’altro: Movimenti migratori e culture alimentari nella Torino del Novecento. Rome: Edizioni Lavoro. 2009 (editor) La montagna insegna: Saperi e sapori delle vallate alpine. Turin: Piazza D. Ronald Fraser was born in 1930 in Hamburg and during World War II, his family returned to England. He completed secondary school and attended a private school in the USA for a year. In the framework of his military service, he completed his first interviews, which were used to determine the mental health status of the recruits. Following that, he spent six years as a Reuters correspondent in Belgium and Holland. In 1957, he went to Spain, where he wrote his first novel. Yet he remained unsuccessful. Fraser began to work with some interviews that he had already completed with his family’s former household servants. In addition to that, he wrote for the English journal New Left Review. A friend who was a specialist in Spanish studies asked him to research biographical stories from the time of the Spanish Civil War. In this context, he came into contact with Mercedes Vilanova, who archived his interview recordings in the city archive in Barcelona in 1988. In the early 1980’s, Fraser was a university assistant in Oxford, where he met Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson. He also participated in history workshops and attended the IOHA conference in Aix-en-Provence. Through Ronald Grele, he received a teaching position at the University of California, where he taught oral history. In 1988, he published the comparative study 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. At the request of Luisa Passerini, Fraser examined the 1968 student

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movement in Great Britain. Due to health problems, he retired from the IOHA in the early 1990’s. Fraser died in 2012. Publications (Selection): 1972 In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes. New York: Pantheon. 1973 The Pueblo: A Mountain Village on the Costa del Sol. London: Allen Lane. 1979 Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War 1936 – 1939. London: Allen Lane. 1984 In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933 – 1945. London: Verso. 1988 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. London: Chatto & Windus. 2008 Napoleon’s Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War 1808 – 1814. London: Verso. Beatrys “Bie” de Graeve was born as the youngest of eight children into a family of agricultural workers in a southern Belgian village in 1956. In 1972, she left for Ghent University to study law, but in 1974, she changed her major to sociology. After completing her studies in 1978, she worked as a municipal curator for an exhibition about child labor in Ghent’s textile industry at the turn of the 20th century. In the preparation for this exhibition, she began to collect written, photographic, and oral material. She contacted Paul Thompson in England, whom she first met in person in Lancaster at an Oral History Society conference in 1979. In 1980, she began to work at Ghent University and established an oral history department with her colleague Frank Simon. She completed biographical interviews on the history of Flemish elementary school education. At the same time, Bie de Graeve also accepted a scholarship from the British Council for master’s studies in oral history with Paul Thompson in Colchester. Through her close friendship with him, she got to know Daniel Bertaux and Raphael Samuel, among others. As the temporary secretary of the Oral History Society, she prepared some IOHA conferences for Thompson and participated in the meetings in Amsterdam, Aix-en-Provence, Oxford, and Barcelona. In 1986, she left Ghent University, because her position was no longer financed and there was an increasing lack of support for oral history. She could not finish her doctorate due to her many teaching duties. Beatrys de Graeve changed career paths and since 1987, has been an adjunct instructor at various business schools, where she offers post-graduate manager training. This work takes her to the Netherlands and to Scandinavia. Since 2008, Beatrys de Graeve has been working as a freelance management advisor.

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Publication: 1984 (with Karel de Clerck and Frank Simon) Dag meester, goedmogen zuster, goedmiddag juffrouw: Facetten van het volksonderwijs in Vlaanderen. Tielt, Belgium: Lannoo. Ronald Grele was born in Naugatuck, Connecticut in 1934. From 1952 to 1959, he studied history at the University of Connecticut. He completed his PhD at Rutgers College in New Jersey, with a scholarship from the Urban Studies Center. In 1965, he finished a one-year adjunct professorship at Lafayette College in New York and accepted a position at the Presidential Library in Washington. He completed his initial interviews in connection with his duties as a collector and archiver of documents from and about John F. Kennedy. In 1966, he was offered a position as adjunct faculty at California State University, Long Beach. At the time, Grele was engaged in the civil rights movement and became an advisor and coordinator for student groups. In 1969, he accepted a position at Kingsborough Community College in New York; he finished his PhD in 1971. He was politically engaged in New York as well and lost his job due to participation in a demonstration. After that, Grele accepted an offer from the Ford Foundation to support the Oral History Association, which they sponsored. He came into contact with the History Workshop Journal and, through it, became aware of Paul Thompson. In 1975 – 76, Grele taught oral history at Rutgers College and offered public workshops. In 1977, he was asked by the New Jersey Historical Commission to work on the political history of the state, using biographical interviews. One year later, he became the research director of this commission, a position which he held for 18 years, before he transferred to the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was the long-time director of the Oral History program. At the same time, he was also elected president of the Oral History Association. In 1994, together with Mary Marshall Clark, he organized the conference in New York, and until 1996, he was a regular participant in the IOHA conferences. Until 2002, Grele was the long-time director of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University. Publications (Selection): 1964 (with John Bebout) Where Cities Meet: The Urbanization of New Jersey. Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand. 1975 (editor) Envelopes of Sound: Six Practitioners Discuss the Method, Theory, and Practice of Oral History and Oral Testimony. Chicago: Precedent. 1989 (co-editor) Elite Oral History Discourse: A Study of Cooperation and Coherence. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press.

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1990

“The Development, Cultural Pecularities and State of Oral History in the United States.” BIOS, Special Issue: 3 – 15. 1992 (editor) International Annual of Oral History, 1990: Subjectivity and Multiculturalism in Oral History. New York. 2005 “Oral History and Contemporary History: Friendly Intersections and Memories.” In Zeit-Geschichten: Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, edited by Jürgen John, Dirk van Laak, and Joachim von Puttkamer, 75 – 83. Essen, Germany: Klartext. 2007– 2008: “From the Intimate Circle to Globalized Oral History.” Words and Silences / Palabras y Silencios, New Series, 4.1– 2: 1– 4. Gabriella Gribaudi was born in 1948 in Turin’s working-class neighborhood of Borgo San Paolo. She grew up under the influence of strong ideological and social contrasts and studied history at the University of Turin from 1967 to 1973. Gribaudi participated in the student protests and joined the extra-parliamentary opposition group Lotta Continua. In 1974, she went to Naples with a scholarship from the Centro Nazionale di Ricerca (CNR) to work at the renowned research institute Centro Sviluppo Mezzogiorno, where she wrote her first major academic work, about the role of mediators in the conflicts about modernization in Southern Italy. After the completion of this text, similar to a dissertation, for the next 15 years, Gribaudi conducted her research under very precarious economic conditions, earned a living through part-time jobs, and still completed an ambitious long-term study about the mechanisms of the social transformation of southern Italy, based on the city of Eboli, for which she also completed interviews. Parallel to this, she was also engaged in the women’s movement in Naples. Gabriella Gribaudi became an assistant professor at the University of Bari in 1992, and in Naples in 1994. Ten years later, she took over a chair of 20th-century history at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Naples Federico II. In addition, from 2006 to 2013, she was the president of the Associazione Italiana di Storia Orale (AISO). Publications (Selection): 1980 Mediatori: Antropologia del potere democristiano nel Mezzogiorno. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. 1990 A Eboli: Il mondo meridionale in cent’anni di trasformazione. Venice: Marsilio. 1997 (editor) Conflitti, linguaggi e legittimazione. Bologna: Il Mulino. 1999 Donne, uomini, famiglie: Napoli nel Novecento. Naples: L’ancora. 2003 (editor) Terra bruciata: Le stragi naziste sul fronte meridionale: Per un atlante delle stragi naziste. Naples: L’ancori del Mediterraneo.

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2005 Guerra totale: Tra bombe alleate e violenze naziste: Napoli e il fronte meridionale 1940 – 44. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. 2009 (editor) Traffici criminali: Camorra, mafie e reti internazionali dell’illegalità. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. 2016 Combattenti sbandati prigionieri: Esperienze e memorie di reduci della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Rome: Donzelli. Björn Horgby was born in 1952 in the Swedish industrial region of Östergötland. After graduating from secondary school, he began to study history at Linköping University in 1971, which he finished five years later. After that, he began a doctorate at Stockholm University and began to work on various academic projects, such as on the industrialization of Stockholm or on the everyday life of the textile workers in Norrköping. To do so, he completed his first interviews. In 1986, he finished his doctorate, with a dissertation about criminality in Sweden in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Horgby received a position at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, where he dealt with the history of the Swedish working class. The work with oral sources and the examination of labor history in the Scandinavian countries, also in a comparative perspective, was an impetus for him to participate in the international oral history movement meetings. Horgby established a Scandinavian research network for the history and culture of the working class. After working as a lecturer at Linköping University, in 2003, he was granted a tenured professorship in history at Örebro University. Publications (Selection): 1986 Den disciplinerade arbetaren: Brottslighet och social förändring i Norrköping 1850 – 1910. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. 1993 Egensinne och skötsamhet: Arbetarkulturen i Norrköping 1850 – 1940. Stockholm: Carlsson. 1996 Dom där: Främlingsfientligheten och arbetarkulturen i Norrköping 1890 – 1960. Stockholm: Carlsson. 2001 “Fotboll som arbetaridentitet: En berättelse om en åttafotad häst.” In Det goda livet, edited by Per Månsson, 171– 84. Gothenburg: Daidalos. 2007 Rock och uppror: amerikansk, brittisk och svensk rockkultur 1955 – 1969. Stockholm: Carlsson. 2010 (with Fredrik Nilsson) Rockin’ the borders: rock music and social, cultural and political change. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. 2017 (with Christer Ericsson) “Trust, Loyalty and Negotiation.” The Journal of Ohara Institute for Social Research 705: 7– 16. Alun Howkins was born into a lower-middle-class family in Oxfordshire, England, in 1947. He left school at the age of 15 and made a living with various tem-

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porary jobs. Due to his engagement in the union, in 1968, he ended up at Ruskin College in Oxford, a union institution for mature students, where he began studies in business and politics. There, he got to know Raphael Samuel and Anna Davin as well as the History Workshop movement. Samuel finally convinced him to study history. In 1970, Howkins transferred to Queen’s College at Oxford University for his studies and, following that, in 1973, to the University of Essex, where he completed his doctoral dissertation. In Essex, he met Paul Thompson, who became his doctoral advisor. Howkins was also one of the interviewers for Thompson’s project on British society at the time of King Edward VII. Howkins’s dissertation about the farm worker’s association in East Anglia, a region in eastern England, was published in 1985 as Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1872 – 1923. He received his first position as a junior lecturer at the University of Sussex in 1976 and remained there until he retired. After transferring to Sussex, he ended his membership in the Oral History Society, in which he had been active in since his time in Oxford in 1970. He later turned to Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop again and, in 1975 – 76, became one of the co-founders of the History Workshop Journal. He is still one of the editors today. Because he was dissatisfied with the development of the History Workshop in the mid1970’s, he quickly distanced himself from the organization. Today, he is critical of both British oral history organizations. In his opinion, they have been split into two fractions: the support of oral history as an academic discipline and the support of oral history as a political weapon. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Alun Howkins was politically active as an extreme left-wing revolutionary socialist and Marxist and became a member of the Labour party, but left in 1994 due to his disillusionment. Howkins wrote about a wide variety of topics, from the paintings of Turner to Communist party politics in the 1930’s. His main interests were always in historical research for rural regions, especially poor rural populations. For a long time, he was a professor of social history and the director of the graduate program in the humanities at the University of Sussex and has since retired. Publications (Selection): 1973 Whitsun in 19th Century Oxfordshire. Oxford: History Workshop. 1979: “Economic Crime and Class Law: Poaching and the Game Laws, 1840 – 1880.” In The Imposition of Law, edited by Sandra Burman and Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, 273 – 88. London: Academic. 1981 “Bread of Blood.” History Workshop Journal 12.1: 177– 82. 1985 Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1872 – 1923. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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1988 (with Susan Easton et al.) Disorder and Discipline: Popular Culture from 1550 to the Present, London: Aldershot. 1991 Reshaping Rural England: A Social History, 1850 – 1925. London: Routledge. 2003 The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900. London: Routledge. 2008 A Concise History of England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daniele Jalla was born in 1950 and grew up in Zurich and Milan. He finished secondary school in Turin and enrolled in university there in 1969, in order to study history. An intensive period as a political activist, which had already begun during secondary school, prolonged his education, as did his job as a gym teacher, with which he earned a living. In 1977, he finished his degree, with an oral history thesis about the Turin working-class neighborhood Borgo San Paolo. Following that, he worked as a lecturer and on research projects in the department of history at the University of Turin. In 1980, Jalla began to work in the Piedmont regional administration, where he worked with local history and culture in an academic manner and then put together exhibitions. Parallel to this, he was an editing member of the bulletin Fonti Orali and, together with Anna Bravo, studied the history of Italian deportees using oral sources. This later became the highly respected publications La vita offesa and Una misura onesta. From 1994 to 2012, Daniele Jalla was employed by the city of Turin to work in museums; since 2011, he has been director of the Turin city museum Museo Torino. Since 2004, he has been engaged in the Italian committee for the UNESCO International Council of Museums. Publications (Selection): 1981 (with Stefano Musso) Territorio, fabbrica e cultura operaia a Torino (1900 – 1940). Turin: Regione Piemonte. 1986 (co-editor) La vita offesa: Storia e memoria dei Lager nazisti nei racconti di duecento sopravvissuti. Milan: Franco Angeli. 1994 (with Anna Bravo) Una misura onesta: Gli scritti di memoria della deportazione dall’Italia 1944 – 1993. Milan: Franco Angeli. 2000 Il museo contemporaneo: Introduzione al nuovo sistema museale italiano. Turin: UTET Università. Philippe Joutard was born in Paris in 1935. After attending a Jesuit secondary school, he began to study history at the university level, and was particularly inspired by the works of Robert Mandrou. Joutard was actively engaged as a member of the union movement; he experienced and observed the 1968 movement with sympathy. In 1969, he became an academic assistant at Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence. In 1974, at the age of 39, he defended his dissertation,

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in order to receive a tenured professorship at Aix-Marseille University in Aix-enProvence. Joutard has been in contact with oral historians since 1967 and was the first to use the method in France. In 1980, he participated in the IOHA conference in Amsterdam. Later, he also co-organized the conference in Aix-en-Provence. At the International Committee for Historical Sciences (ICHS) in Montreal in 1995, he spoke about the result of 25 years of oral history in the world. He opened the 10th conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1998 and the fourth national oral history conference in Buenos Aires in 1999. He missed the decisive academic impulse in his own country and also began to re-orient himself in his career. From 1989 to 1997, he was the rector of the academies in Besançon and Toulouse. Publications (Selection): 1964 Mémoires d’un compagnon: Par Agricol Perdiguier. Paris: Club des libraires de France. 1977 La légende des camisards. Paris: Gallimard. 1979 (with François Taillefer) Les Cévennes: De la montagne à l’homme. Toulouse: Privat. 1986 L’Invention du Mont Blanc. Paris: Gallimard. 1998 (with Robert Mandrou) De la culture populaire aux 17e et 18e siècles: La Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes. Paris: Imago. 1999 (with Claude Thélot) Réussir l’école: Pour une politique éducative. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. 2006 (with Geneviève Joutard) De la francophilie en Amérique: Ces Américains qui aiment la France. Arles, France: Actes Sud. 2013 Histoire et mémoires, conflits et alliance. Paris: Ecritures de l’histoire. Selma Leydesdorff was born in Jakarta in 1949 and spent her childhood in the former Dutch colony of Suriname. During World War II, her father was interned by the Japanese in Indonesia and most of his family members were murdered in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. In 1954, her parents returned to the Netherlands with their three children. After completing her secondary education at a Catholic night school, Leydesdorff decided to study history. She was engaged in the women’s movement and decided to make it the focus of her research. After her studies, she worked for a period of time as a secondary school teacher until she accepted a position as an assistant in historical pedagogy at the University of Amsterdam. Beginning in 1976, she was employed at the Documentation Centre for Contemporary History at the University of Amsterdam and completed her doctorate a year later, with a dissertation based on interviews about the Jewish proletariat in Amsterdam between 1900 and 1940. In 1980, invited by Jaap Talsma, Leydesdorff attended the IOHA conference in Amsterdam, where she met Paul Thompson and Anna Davin. She was also a participant in the history

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workshops in Oxford. She edited the International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories with Paul Thompson and, until 1996, served as secretary of the IOHA. Today, Selma Leydesdorff is the head of the National Commission of the Royal Academy on the History and Culture of Jews in the Netherlands. Publications (Selection): 1977 Verborgen arbeid – vergeten arbeid: Een verkenning in de geschiedenis van de vrouwenarbeid rond negentienhonderd. Amsterdam: Koninklijke van Gorcum B.V. 1983 “In Search of the Picture: Jewish Proletarians between the Two World Wars.” In Dutch Jewish History, edited by Jozeph Michmann, 305 – 15. Jerusalem: Tel-Aviv University. 1988 “Das gebrochene Schweigen: Lebensgeschichten von Überlebenden des jüdischen Proletariats in Amsterdam.” BIOS 1.2: 17– 26. 1993 Het water en de herinnering: De zeeuwse wastersnoodramp 1953 – 1993. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. 1993 “Wir haben als Mensch gelebt.” Das jüdische Proletariat von Amsterdam. Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag. 1996 (co-editor) Gender and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004 De mensen en de woorden: Geschiedenis op basis van verhalen. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. 2008 De leegte achter ons laten: Eeen geschiedenis von de vrouwen van Srebrenica, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. 2009 (co-editor) Memories of Mass Repression, Narrating Lifestories in the Afthermath. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction. Sven Lindqvist, the well-known Swedish author, was born in Stockholm in 1932. Lindqvist studied psychology, the history of religion, and the history of literature in Stockholm. After his first examinations, he continued his studies in the subjects of philosophy and sinology. In 1996, he finished his doctorate in the history of literature with a dissertation about the Swedish author Wilhelm Ekelund. Lindqvist has been working as an author since 1955. In the 1960’s, various trips abroad took him to China and India, among others; he experienced the political and societal eruptions of 1968 during a tour of Latin America. After his return, he began to undertake lecture trips through Sweden. His 1978 publication Dig Where You Stand has had a lasting influence on the writing of history. Conceptualized as a handbook for amateurs interested in their own history, it was the starting point for a movement. In the following years, throughout all of Sweden, study groups formed, dedicated to the research of labor history and culture. In 1979, Lindqvist presented his handbook within the framework of the international oral history conference in England. However, he did not constantly partic-

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ipate in this network. In particular, Lindqvist became internationally renowned due to his numerous books about China, Latin America, and Africa. For his work as an author, he received, among others, an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and an honorary professorship from the Swedish government. Near the end of his life, he was interested in the history and culture of Australia. He died in 2019. Publications (Selection): 1963 (with Cecilia Lindqvist) Kina inifrån. Stockholm: Bonniers. English translation: China in Crisis. London: Faber & Faber, 1965. 1967 Myten om Wu Tao Tzu. Stockholm: Bonniers. English translation: The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu. London: Granta, 2012. 1969 Slagskuggan: Latinamerika inför 70-talet. Stockholm: Bonniers. English translation: The Shadow: Latin America Faces the Seventies. Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1972. 1978 Gräv där du står. Stockholm: Bonniers. English translation: Dig Where You Stand. 1990 Ökendykarna. Stockholm: Bonniers. English translation: Desert Divers. London: Granta, 2010. 1992 Utrota varenda jävel. Stockholm: Bonniers. English translation: Exterminate all the Brutes. New York: The New Press, 1996. 2005 Terra nullius – en resa genom ingens land. Stockholm: Bonniers. Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One’s Land. London: The New Press, 2005. 2008 Avsikt att förinta. Stockholm: Bonniers. Orvar Löfgren was born in Stockholm in 1943. In 1963, after completing secondary school, he began to study history, but soon after, changed majors to ethnology and anthropology. Through these majors, he hoped to find clearer references to humans as the protagonists of their history. Among others, Löfgren studied under John Granlund and Mats Rehnberg, pioneers of Swedish working-class history and the documentation of memories. Löfgren worked on an interview project about fishers on the West Coast of Sweden for the Nordic Museum, which he developed into his PhD dissertation. In 1970, he began to work as a university lecturer at Lund University and here, he occupied himself with the question of class affiliation and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. While working on these studies, he became aware of British research from Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson. Due to the similarities in topic, he participated in the 1979 IOHA conference in Colchester. Löfgren was engaged in the framework of the international oral history network resulting from it, and he gave further talks in Amsterdam in 1980 and in Gothenburg in 1996. From 1991 until 2008, Löfgren was a professor of ethnology at the University of Lund. His research interest covers na-

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tional identities, transnational movements, the history of everyday life, and sociocultural topics, such as tourism and consumption. Publications (Selection): 1987 (with Jonas Frykman) Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 1996 (co-editor) Force of Habit: Exploring Everyday Life, Lund Studies in European Ethnology 1. Lund: Lund University Press. 1998 “My Life as Consumer.” In Narrative and Genre, edited by Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thompson, 114– 25. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction. 1999 On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2003 “The Anthropology of Everyday Life.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 4969 – 72. 2004 “Concrete Transnationalism? Bridge Building in the New Economy.” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 43: 59 – 75. 2005 (co-editor) Magic, Culture and the New Economy. Oxford: Bloomsbury. 2007 “First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin… Branding the Experience City.” In Fun City, edited by Gitte Marling and Martin Zerlang, 74– 98. Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press. 2010 (with Billy Ehn) The Secret World of Doing Nothing. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. 2013 (co-editor) Coping with Excess: How Organizations, Communities and Individuals Manage Overflow. Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar. 2016 (with Billy Ehn and Richard Wilk) Exploring Everyday Life: Strategies for Ethnography and Cultural Analysis. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Lutz Niethammer was born in Stuttgart in 1939. He finished his university entrance qualification in 1960, then spent a year learning Hebrew and Greek, before he began to study history and Protestant theology, followed for four years by the study of various social sciences, in Heidelberg, Bonn, Cologne, and Munich. While studying, he attended language courses in England and France and traveled to the Middle East, Poland, and the USA. He also worked as a freelance writer for radio stations and newspapers and was an academic assistant for Hans Mommsen in Bochum. He completed his doctorate on the Denazification of Bavaria, advised by Werner Conze, in Heidelberg in 1971. In 1972, Niethammer became a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and one year later, he became a professor of modern history at the then-new University of Essen, where he also served as dean of the division of humanities and

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vice president for study programs. In 1978 – 79, he was guest professor at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris and from 1980, he directed a major interview project on workers’ experiences and social culture in the Ruhr region between 1930 and 1960. In these years, he was also active as German representative for the IOHA, of which he president from 1988 to 1993; he also co-founded and coedited a popular historical journal (Journal Geschichte, 1979 – 89). From 1982 to 1993, Niethammer was the first professor of modern history at the University of Hagen. He pursued the expansion of the department into a major program of further education in the humanities, including historical and social studies. At that time, among others, he served as a guest lecturer at the study center of the British Open University in York (1982), guest researcher at the GDR Academy of Sciences in Berlin (East, 1986 – 87), fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (West, 1987– 88), and an adjunct instructor at the University of Basel (1988– 89). In 1989, an institute for advanced cultural studies was founded at the Wissenschaftszentrum NRW in Essen and Niethammer served as founding president until 1993. In the field of oral history, he was among the co-editors of the new journal BIOS (since 1988) and in 1990, he was responsible for organizing the IOHA conference on memory and social change in Essen, which was the first with scholars from the GDR, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and China. In 1993, Niethammer moved to the East himself and became professor of modern and contemporary history at Jena University, where he is still based, although he retired in 2005. From 1998 to 2000, he acted as historical advisor for the Federal Chancellery for the establishment of the foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future,” which was initially founded to make humanitarian payments to former slave and forced laborers and other victims of Nazism. Since 2001, he has been among the project directors of a major research combine on the transformation of East Germany. In 2002, he was awarded the University of Bochum’s Historikerpreis award for economic and social history, and became a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1993 to 2017, Niethammer was member of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, his longest engagement of all, where he co-directed two documentaries from secret GDR and Russian archives and advised four doctoral studies on the history of the camps and the memorial uses of the place. After directing or advising research projects on various aspects of the social and cultural history of the GDR, he returned finally to the Ruhr and Nazism, directing a project about the Tengelmann Group’s business in Germany between 1930 and 1950. In between such projects, Niethammer toured southeastern Europe, was a guest scholar the European University Institute in Florence, taught European studies in Vienna, and, in search of a new generation from the East, supported an interview project with young peo-

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ple in Warsaw that could be compared with the outlook of young people who had experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had previously been documented in Jena. Furthermore, Niethammer spent six years at the Imre Kertész Kolleg, an advanced study institute for East Central Europe in the 20th century, as a senior advisor, a discussant and a curious learner. Publications (Selection): 1969 Angepaßter Faschismus: Politische Praxis der NPD. Frankfurt: S.-Fischer. 1972 Entnazifizierung in Bayern: Säuberung und Rehabilitierung unter amerikanischer Besatzung. Frankfurt: S.-Fischer. Second edition: Die Mitläuferfabrik. Berlin: Fischer, 1982. 1976 (co-editor) Arbeiterinitiative 1945: Antifaschistische Ausschüsse und Reorganisation der Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland. Wuppertal, Germany: Hammer. 1980 (co-editor) Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis: Die Praxis der Oral History. Frankfurt: Syndikat. 1983 – 85 (editor) Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930 – 1960. 3 volumes. Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz. 1986 (co-editor) Marshallplan und europäische Linke. Frankfurt: EVA. 1989 Posthistoire: Ist die Geschichte zu Ende? Reinbek bei Hamburg Germany: Rowohlt. English translation: Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? London: Verso, 1992. 1990 (co-author) Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland: Historische Einblicke, Fragen, Perspektiven. Frankfurt: S.-Fischer. 1991 (with Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling) Die volkseigene Erfahrung: Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR: 30 biografische Eröffnungen. Berlin: Rowohlt. 1994 (editor) Der “gesäuberte” Antifaschismus: Die SED und die roten Kapos von Buchenwald. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1998 (co-editor) Sowjetische Speziallager in Deutschland. 1945 – 1950. 2 volumes. Berlin: De Gruyter. 1999 Deutschland danach: Postfaschistische Gesellschaft und nationales Gedächtnis. Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz. 2000 (co-editor) Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur. Reinbek bei Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt. 2002 Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungsversuche. Vienna: Böhlau. 2007 (co-editor) BIOS. Sonderheft: Kritische Erfahrungsgeschichte und grenzüberschreitende Zusammenarbeit: The Network for Oral History. Festschrift für Alexander von Plato. 2008 (co-editor) Hormone und Hochleistung: Doping in Ost und West. Cologne: Böhlau.

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Memory and History: Essays in Contemporary History. Bern: Peter Lang. (co-editor) Bühne der Dissidenz und Dramaturgie der Repression: ein Kulturkonflikt in der späten DDR. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. (co-editor) “Wenn die Chemie stimmt…”: Geschlechterbeziehungen und Geburtenkontrolle im Zeitalter der Pille: Gender Relations and Birth Control in the Age of the ‛Pill’. Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein. (editor) Tengelmann im Dritten Reich: Ein großes Familienunternehmen des Lebensmittelhandels und der Nationalsozialismus. Essen, Germany: Klartext.

Luisa Passerini, who was born in 1941 in Asti, Italy, spent a year at a high school in Rochester, New York after finishing her university entrance qualification in Italy. After that, she began to study philosophy and history in Turin and graduated in 1965, with a thesis about the concept of historical crises for Saint Simon and Comte. In 1967, together with her life partner, who, like her, belonged to a group close to the Situationists, she engaged in propaganda work for the Frelimo freedom movement in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. After her return from Africa two years later, Passerini worked as a lecturer at the University of Turin as well as at secondary schools and became involved in the student movement. After many years of intense political work, in the mid-1970’s, she left the Gruppo Gramsci political organization but remained active in the women’s movement and the union. Through her work on the exhibition project Torino fra le due guerre, which was dedicated to the working class in Turin under Fascism, she began to work with oral sources. She received a permanent position as an academic assistant at the University of Turin, but did not receive a position as assistant professor until the 1980’s, because she was marginalized in her academic environment due to her topics and methods. At the same time, Passerini increasingly oriented herself towards the internationally expanding oral history movement and found a space for academic and friendly exchange in the IOHA. In the mid-1980’s, she worked through her 1960’s political experience in the autobiographical text Autoritratto di gruppo. In 1985, she finally received an assistant professorship for methodology in Turin, but because of her pioneering work on the memory, she also taught abroad. For almost a decade, from 1994 until 2002, Luisa Passerini taught 20th century history at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2002, she was given a full professorship for cultural history in Turin which she held until 2011. From 2008 to 2011 she was a visiting professor at the Oral History MA program at Columbia University in New York. Currently, she is a part-time professor at the Department of History and Civilization

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at the European University Institute in Florence and is a principal investigator for the European Research Project “Bodies Across Borders” (BABE). Publications (Selection): 1970 Colonialismo portoghese e lotta di liberazione in Mozambico. Turin: Einaudi. 1978 Storia orale: Vita quotidiana e cultura materiale delle classi subalterne. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. 1984 Torino operaia e fascismo: Una storia orale. Rome: Laterza. 1988 Autoritratto di gruppo. Florence: Giunti. 1988 (with Ronald Fraser et al.) 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. London: Chatto & Windus. 1991 Storie di donne e femministe. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. 1991 Mussolini immaginario: Storia di una biografia 1915 – 1939. Rome: Laterza. 1999 Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics between the Wars. New York: New York University Press. 2003 Memoria e utopia: Il primato dell’intersoggettività. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. 2008 Storie dell’amore e dell’Europa. Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo. 2010 (co-editor) New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and Love in the Twentieth Century. New York: Berghahn. Alexander von Plato was born in 1942 in Lüchow-Dannenberg County, Germany. After finishing his university entrance qualification in 1962, he completed a six-month internship in mechanical engineering in Hamburg; rejecting and rejected from military service, he moved to Berlin and began studies as an industrial engineer at the Technical University of Berlin. During the student movement, Plato came into contact with left-wing political thought. In 1965, he transferred to the Free University, to study philosophy, theater, German studies, psychology, political science, and sociology. At the same time, he also worked at Radio Free Berlin and started his first film work. In 1967, he became a member of the Socialist German Student Union, was a student representative for the theater students, and was disinherited. He became involved as a teacher in the IG BCE trade union in 1967, but was excluded in 1972. From 1970 until its dissolution in the year 1979, he was a member of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1972, Plato received a position as director of studies and lecturer at the Protestant Student Academy in Villigst and also completed his doctorate (1973). In 1980, he met Lutz Niethammer and worked with him at the University of Duisburg-Essen for the LUSIR project, among others, until 1985; from 1982 as its secretary. He then transferred to the University of Hagen. Plato became increasingly interested in the oral history method; from 1980 onwards, he was active in the IOHA and, from its beginning in 1988, as one of its founders, has served as a co-editor and

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copy editor for BIOS, a journal for biographical research, oral history, and the analysis of life courses. From 1993 to 2007, he was the founder and head of the institute of history and biography in Lüdenscheid, Germany, which is affiliated with the University of Hagen, and organized more than 30 oral history projects. From 1996 to 2000, he was the secretary of the IOHA, and also served as vice president for many years. His academic focuses are the research of the historical mindset (“mentality history”) in the 20th century, especially during National Socialism as well as in both post-war Germanys, the global politics from the 1980s to 2010 and the methodology of qualitative historical studies. Since 2007, he has served as a guest professor in Vienna, Winnipeg, and Voronezh, Russia. Publications (Selection): 1974 Zur Einschätzung der Klassenkämpfe in der Weimarer Republik: KPD und Komintern, Sozialdemokratie und Trotzkismus. Berlin: Oberbaumverlag. 1987 Nachkriegsgesellschaft: Erfahrungsstrukturen und “große Politik”. Tübingen: Deutsches Institut für Fernstudien an der Universität Tübingen. 1991 (with Lutz Niethammer and Dorothee Wierling) Die volkseigene Erfahrung: Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR: 30 biographische Eröffnungen. Berlin: Rowohlt. 1997 (with Almut Leh) “Ein unglaublicher Frühling”: Erfahrene Geschichte im Nachkriegsdeutschland: Dokumente und Analysen. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. 1998 (co-editor) Sowjetische Speziallager in Deutschland 1945 bis 1950. Bd. 1: Studien und Berichte. Berlin: Akademie. 1999 “Opferkonkurrenten?” In Eine offene Geschichte: Zur kommunikativen Tradierung der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit, edited by Elisabeth Domansky and Harald Welzer, 74– 92. Tübingen: Brandes & Apsel. 1999 (editor) Die DDR in der Erinnerung: Studienbrief der FernUniversität Hagen. Hagen, Germany: Studienbriefe der Fernuniversität Hagen. 2002 Die Vereinigung Deutschlands – ein weltpolitisches Machtspiel: Bush, Kohl, Gorbatschow und die geheimen Moskauer Protokolle. Berlin: Links Christoph. 2004 “Flucht und Vertreibung: Lebensgeschichte, Erinnerung und Realgeschichte: Vom geteilten kollektiven Gedächtnis in Deutschland.” In Geschichte und Gedächtnis in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft: Migration zwischen historischer Rekonstruktion und Erinnerungspolitik, edited by Jan Motte und Rainer Ohliger, 131– 44. Essen, Germany: Klartext. 2010 (co-editor) Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe. New York: Berghahn.

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2013 (co-editor) Opposition als Lebensform: Dissidenz in der DDR, der ČSSR und in Polen. Berlin: Lit. 2013 “Die Bombardierungen Dresdens und Hamburgs – vom unterschiedlichen Umgang mit den Luftangriffen.” In Zeitzeugen des Hamburger Feuersturms 1943 und ihre Familien, edited by Ulrich Lamparter, Silke Wiegang-Grefe, and Dorothee Wierling, 220 – 30. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2014 “Blicke ehemaliger Zwangsarbeiter und Zwangsarbeiterinnen auf die Deutschen.” In Politische Bewegung und symbolische Ordnung: Hagener Studien zur Politischen Kulturgeschichte, edited by Werner Daum et al., 183 – 210. Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz. 2015 “Opposition Movements and Big Politics in the Reunification of Germany.” In The Revolutions of 1989, edited by Wolfgang Mueller, Michael Gehler, and Arnold Suppan, 307– 21. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 2015 The End of the Cold War? Bush, Kohl, Gorbachev, and the Reunification of Germany. New York: Palgrave. 2019 Verwischt: Eine Liebe in Deutschland 1989. Berlin: Epubli. Alessandro Portelli was born in 1942 in Rome and grew up in the Umbrian industrial city of Terni. Following a high school year in Los Angeles and finishing his university entrance qualification in 1966, he studied law in Rome and, after passing his final exams and completing his military service, re-enrolled to study American studies and English. During his second course of studies, and until he received a full professorship in 1979, Portelli worked as an employee of the National Research Council in Rome. During the student unrest, he participated in occupying the faculties and was active in the union movement. His work with oral sources began in 1969, while collecting American and Italian folk songs and during the founding of the Circolo Gianni Bosio in Rome, of which he is still president today. From 1970 to 1972, Portelli was a member of the group Manifesto and began to regularly write contributions for the daily Communist newspaper Il Manifesto, in which he still publishes articles today. In 1973, he left the University of Rome, having finished a diploma thesis on the American folk singer Woody Guthrie. He received an assistant professorship at the University of Arezzo, and, in 1979, a full professorship for American studies. From 1981 until 2013, he was professor of Anglo-American literature and language at the University of Rome. He was also a regular participant at the international oral history conferences and the Columbia summer school. From 2003 until 2008, Portelli was the Mayor of Rome’s representative for historical memory.

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Publications (Selection): 1969 Veleno di piombo sul muro: Le canzoni del Black Power. Bari, Italy: Laterza. 1975 La canzone popolare in America: La rivoluzione musicale di Woody Guthrie. Bari, Italy: De Donato. 1985 Biografia di una città: Storia e racconto: Terni 1830 – 1985. Turin: Einaudi. 1991 The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 1997 The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Act of Dialogue. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 1999 L’ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. Rome: Donzelli. 2007 Storie orali: Racconti, immaginazione, dialogo. Rome: Donzelli. 2008 Acciai speciali. Terni, la ThyssenKrupp, la globalizzazione. Rome: Donzelli. 2017 Biography of an Industrial Town: Terni, Italy, 1831 – 2014. London: Palgrave. Jean-Pierre Rioux was born in Clichy, France in 1939. At the age of 25, he finished his degree in history and from 1964 to 1972, he taught history at schools in Chartres and Neuilly-sur-Seine. In 1968, he became involved in the union and participated in various campaigns, such as an initiative to open up the university to those who had not completed college prep secondary schools. Two years later, he began to work as adjunct faculty, and then, until 1980, as an assistant and lecturer for contemporary history at Paris Nanterre University. From 1978 to 1998, Rioux was the co-head editor of the publication L’Histoire and from 1977 to 1982, he was a member of the editorial committees at Esprit and Mouvement Social. In 1978, he became a member of the Paris Institute of Political Studies and later, was the research director of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (1980 – 1991). In the early 1980’s, as the director, he encouraged the department to participate in the IOHA movement, and co-organized the conference in Aix-en-Provence. In 1984, Rioux founded the journal Vingtième Siècle, also worked as a production director and chronicler at France Culture, and was a chronicler at Le Monde from 1987 until 1996, and since 2000, has been a chronicler at La Croix as well. From 1991 to 2003, he was active as the general inspector for public schools for the Ministry of Education. Furthermore, from 1990 to 1995, Rioux was an associate professor at New York University. He wrote fundamental books on French history. Publications (Selection): 1968 Les Bonaparte. Lausanne: Editions Complexe. 1971 La Révolution industrielle (1780 – 1880). Paris: Seuil. 1973 Révolutionnaires du Front populaire. Paris: Union Générale d’Editions.

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1980 La France de la Quatrième République, vol. 1: L’ardeur et la nécessité, Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine. Paris: Seuil. 1983 La France de la Quatrième République, vol. 2: L’expansion et l’impuissance, Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine. Paris: Seuil. 1990 La Guerre d’Algérie et les Français. Brussels: Fayard. 1997 (with Jean-François Sirinelli) Histoire culturelle de la France. 4 volumes. Paris: Points. 2006 La France perd la mémoire. Paris: Tempus Perrin. 2011 Les Centristes: de Mirabeau à Bayrou. Paris: Fayard. 2015 Vive l’histoire de France! Paris: Odile Jacob. 2017 L’Évènement Macron: Un abécédaire historique. Paris: Odile Jacob. Irina Scherbakowa was born in Moscow in 1949. She studied German studies and history but could not graduate, because her institute was forcibly dissolved. In 1972, she began to work as an editor at the journal Literaturnaja Gasjeta and translated works by the following writers, among others: Kurt Tucholsky, Egon Erwin Kisch, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Böll, and Christa Wolf. At the end of the 1970’s, she received the task of putting together a collected volume of prose from (East) German writers. At that time, after she read the book The Gulag Archipelago, she began to conduct interviews with former camp inmates. In the mid-1980’s, she has been adjunct faculty at Moscow State University and also taught her students methods for conducting interviews. In 1989, she became a member of Memorial and participated in a conference on oral history initiated by Daria Khubova. There, she met Alexander von Plato, with whom she initiated a project on Russian forced laborers in the early 1990’s. In 1990, Scherbakowa participated in the IOHA conference in Essen, where she met Lutz Niethammer. In 1994, she was awarded the German Katholischer Journalistenpreis for her film on Alexander Men. Also in 1994, she became a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. In 1999, she received a guest professorship in Salzburg, and in 2002, she began working on an interview project about Mauthausen concentration camp. She established an annual competition for secondary school students, which focused on the “human in Russian History in the 20th century.” The best entries are published in collected volumes. Irina Scherbakowa is currently a professor for contemporary history at Bauman Moscow State Technical University and, since 1999, has been a member of the board of trustees for the Buchenwald memorial site near Weimar. In 2017, she published a book on her family’s history, which gives many insights into her biography as well.

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Publications (Selection): 1997 “Die Denunziation im Gedächtnis und in den Archivdokumenten.” In Denunziation: Historische, juristische und psychologische Aspekte, edited by Günter Jerouschek, 168 – 82. Tübingen: Kimmerle. 1997 (with Susanne Scholl) Moskauer Küchengespräche. Graz: Styria. 2000 “Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten”: Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror. Frankfurt: Campus. 2003 Russlands Gedächtnis: Jugendliche entdecken vergessene Lebensgeschichten. Hamburg: Edition Körber-Stiftung. 2005 “Die sowjetische Vergangenheit in den Augen der Jugend. Ost-West: europäische Perspektiven.” In Solidaritätsaktion der Deutschen Katholiken mit den Menschen in Mittel- und Osteuropa und dem Zentralkomitee der Deutschen Katholiken, edited by Renovabis, 122– 29. 2006 (editor) Unruhige Zeiten: Lebensgeschichten aus Russland und Deutschland. Hamburg: Edition Körber. 2008 “Mündliche Zeugnisse zur Zwangsarbeit aus Russland.” In Hitlers Sklaven: Lebensgeschichtliche Analysen zur Zwangsarbeit im internationalen Vergleich, edited by Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld, 241– 54. Vienna: Böhlau. 2015 (with Karl Schlögel) Der Russland-Reflex: Einsichten in eine Beziehungskrise. Hamburg: Edition Körber. 2017 Die Hände meines Vaters: Eine russische Familiengeschichte. Munich: Droemer. Reinhard Sieder was born in 1950 in Göstling an der Ybbs, Lower Austria. After completing his university entrance qualification in 1969, he enrolled in history and German majors at the University of Vienna, and became a member of the Socialist Students of Austria. In 1975, he finished his doctorate under Michael Mitterauer and worked as his research assistant on various projects on the history of the family in Austria and Europe, which were financed by the Austrian Science Fund. In 1978, within the framework of a research stay in Cambridge, he participated in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. After that, Sieder worked as adjunct faculty at the Universities of Vienna, Salzburg, and Budapest, at the European University Institute in Florence, and later, at the University of London. Starting in the mid-1980’s, he taught some September courses in Salzburg and, in doing so, met Gerhard Botz, Lutz Niethammer, and Paul Thompson. He intensively occupied himself with methodologies from sociology, ethnology, and cultural anthropology and tried to develop methods for memory interviews for the purposes of social and contemporary history. Since late 1982, Sieder been a university assistant at the Department of

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Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. His research focus is on the everyday history of the Viennese working class. In 1989, he completed his habilitation, with the text Zur alltäglichen Praxis der Wiener Arbeiterschaft im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, and received an assistant professorship in social and contemporary history. In 1990, he founded the journal Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft. From the mid-1990’s, Sieder began to more intensively occupy himself with psychoanalytical methods, which he uses to influence his interviews. A full professor at the University of Vienna since 1997, he recently took up his research interest in family history again and expanded it with a study on patchwork families, which was published in 2008. Publications (Selection): 1977 (with Michael Mitterauer) Vom Patriarchat zur Partnerschaft: Zum Strukturwandel der Familie. Munich. 1982 (co-editor) Historische Familienforschung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1987 Sozialgeschichte der Familie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1995 (editor) Österreich 1945 – 1955: Gesellschaft, Politik, Kultur. Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik. 2000 (with Karl Stocker) “Gross Stadt Verkehr.” In Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 11/2000/2. 2002 “Kultur und Geschichte.” In Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 1/2002. 2003 “Musik-Kulturen.” Vienna. In Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 1/2003. 2008 Patchworks – das Familienleben getrennter Eltern und ihrer Kinder. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 2010 (with Ernst Langthaler) Globalgeschichte 1800 – 2000. Vienna: Böhlau. Birgitta Skarin Frykman was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1941. Even before beginning her university studies, she traveled to Ireland, fascinated by archaeology, and worked in excavation projects with Michael O’Kelly from Cork University College. After her return, she studied archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography at the Universities of Uppsala and Cork. She participated in many archeological excavations in Ireland and Sweden, including the excavation of Eketorp fort in Öland. Birgitta Skarin Frykman graduated in 1965. After her move to Gothenburg, she was employed at the Archaeological Museum from 1966 to 1971. She then began to work at Gothenburg University as a student advisor for archaeology and in the newly founded department of ethnology, and she was highly involved in its expansion. Together with Sven B. Ek, who had been named professor in 1980, she established working class culture as a central research area in the in-

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stitute. Since 1978, Skarin Frykman has been in contact with Paul Thompson, who invited her to the international oral history conference in Colchester. Since then, she has regularly taken place in the IOHA meetings. From 1993 to 1996, she was the secretary of the international oral history network and, together with Sven B. Ek, organized the conference in Gothenburg in 1996. At this conference, when establishing the International Oral History Association, she was elected to the newly created council for a period of two years. In 1985, Birgitta Skarin Frykman completed her doctorate on bakers in Gothenburg. Three years later, she accepted a position as assistant in the department of ethnology at Gothenburg University. In 1996, she became a full professor of ethnology and took over the coordination of the ERASMUS project “Working Class Culture in the European Perspective,” among other things. Her research interests are labor culture and history, the topic of Europeanization, and questions of sustainability. Birgitta Skarin Frykman retired in 2008. She died in 2017. Publications (Selection): 1985 Från yrkesfamilij till klassgemenskap: Om bagare i Göteborg 1800 – 1919. Gothenburg: Etnologiska inst. 1990 Arbetarkultur – Göteborg 1890. Gothenburg: Surte. 1999 “Demokrati, kultur och kunskap: Visioner och verkligheit.” In Demokratins estetik: Demokratiutredningens forskarvolym IV, edited by Erik Amnå and Lena Johannesson, 125 – 53. Stockholm: Statens Offentliga Utredningar. 2003 “Ethnological Knowledge: A Question of Culture, Safety, and Social Sustainability.” In Komplexe Welt: Kulturelle Ordnungssysteme als Orientierung, edited by Silke Göttsch and Christel Köhle-Hezinger, 29 – 36. Münster, Germany: Waxmann. 2004 “What Is It That Happens in Everything That Happens?” In Culture, Security and Sustainable Social Development After September 11, edited by Fredrik Lundmark, 241– 75. Hedemora, Sweden: Gidlunds. 2007 (with Lena Johannesson and Ulrika Kjelman) Arbetarrörelse och arbetarkultur: Bild och självbild. Stockholm: Carlsson. 2012 (with Carina Ahlqvist and Annika Nordström) Vardagsliv under andra världskriget: Minnen från beredskapstiden i Sverige 1939 – 1945. Gothenburg: Institutet för språk och folkminnen. 2014 (with Annika Nordström and Ninni Trossholmen) Västsvenskt vardagsliv under andra världskriget – en tillbakablickande antologi. Gothenburg: AScript. Paul Thompson was born in Surrey, England, in 1935. After completing secondary school, beginning in 1955, he studied modern history at Queen’s College, Oxford. He graduated in 1958 with First Class Honours and, from 1961 to 1964,

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worked as a Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s College. After he successfully completed his doctorate about the founding of the Labour Party as a political medium for the London working class in 1964, he transferred to the University of Essex, where he worked as a lecturer of Sociology and Social History. There, he later became head of the Sociology Department (1980) and has had a research professorship there since 1988. As a Marxist and Socialist, Thompson was already active in the peace movement and the New Left in the 1950’s. For him, the Suez Crisis in 1956 was a reason to join the Labour Party. He experienced the events of 1968 while he worked as a professor in Essex and supported the student movement as an intermediary between the students and the vice chancellor of the university, but was later disappointed that the students did not take advantage of the democratic power that they had fought for. At the beginning of the 1970’s, Thompson began to work on The Edwardians, a study of British society at the time of King Edward VII based on interviews, which made him a pioneer in the development of life stories and oral history as a research method in Sociology and Social History. His 1977 book about the oral history method has been translated into eight languages. Paul Thompson became a staunch advocate of the academisation of oral history in Great Britain. In 1971, he was one of the founders of the Oral History Society, and he was also the founder and editor of their journal, Oral History. From 1985 to 1989, he also published the journal Life Stories and was also the founding editor of the International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories (1992– 1996) and was one of the editors of the Memory and Narrative series (1996 – 2004). Thompson was interested in various topics, especially smaller, local projects and, as a passionate globetrotter, has gathered impressions in many places. His guest professorships did not just take him to Oxford, Leeds, and Bristol, but in 1972, also to Johns Hopkins University in the USA, where he traveled throughout the country in order to meet oral historians. In this way, he met Ronald Grele in 1975, who, three years later, invited him to a conference of the American Oral History Association. Since the mid-1970’s, he has been in contact with the French sociologists’ couple Isabelle and Daniel Bertaux, with whom he is connected not just through joint projects, but also through friendship. In 1976, he went to Bologna for a conference of anthropologists and historians, where he met Luisa Passerini, among others. Three years later, he organized the first oral history conference at his university in Colchester. In 1987, he organized the second IOHA conference in England, but this time, in Oxford. In the same year, he founded the National Life Story Collection (today: National Life Stories) at the British Library in London and was its director until 1996. His interest in the protection and the availability of qualitative research material led him to create a special archive service, Qualidata, at the University of Essex, where he also

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saved his own data. He monitored the development of this service as its director until 2001. In 2003, Thompson was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Community Services at the Young Foundation in London. Since his retirement in 2008, he has dedicated himself to smaller projects, such as a biographically oriented project in his hometown of Wivenhoe. In addition, he is continuing to work on a research project about the pioneers of social history research. Publications (Selection): 1965 (with Peter Kidson and Peter Murray) A History of English Architecture. London: Penguin. 1967 Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1885 – 1914. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1967 The Work of William Morris. Oxford: Heinemann. 1975 The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1978 The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982 (editor) Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe. London: Pluto. 1983 (with Tony Walley and Trevor Lummis) Living the Fishing. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1990 (with Catherine Itzin and Michele Abendstern) “I Don’t Feel Old”: The Experience of Later Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1990 (with Raphael Samuel) The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge. 1993 (co-editor) Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories. Oxford: Transaction. 1997 (with Daniel Bertaux) Pathways to Social Class: A Qualitative Approach to Social Mobility. Oxford: Taylor & Francis. 1997 (with Gill Gorell Barnes et al.) Growing Up in Stepfamilies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998 (co-editor) Narrative and Genre. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction. 2004 (co-editor) On Living Through Soviet Russia. London: Routledge. 2006 (with Elaine Bauer) Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Alessandro Triulzi was born in Rome in 1942. During his studies of political science, a Fulbright fellowship allowed him to spend a year in the USA. He graduated after he returned, with a thesis on the négritude movement in Europe in the 1930’s. He completed a master and PhD at Northwestern University in the USA and wrote his dissertation about the history of Ethiopia in the 19th century. Triulzi viewed the collection of oral sources as an attempt to come a little bit closer to the reality of Africa, far away from the writing of colonial history.

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From 1970 to 1973, he was in Ethiopia for research. After that, Triulzi became a faculty member in ethnology at the University of Perugia and, in 1975, became adjunct faculty in African history at the Naples Eastern University. Since 1985, he has been a professor of Sub-Saharan African History there and has coordinated the PhD program in African studies in Naples for two decades. In 1994 and 1998, he was a visiting professor at Addis Ababa University. He retired in 2011. Since 2007, he has been involved in recording migrant testimonies and narratives and established an Archive of Migrant Memories in Rome. Publications (Selection): 1978 (co-editor) Fonti orali – Oral Sources – Sources orales: Antropologia e storia – Anthropology and History – Anthropologie et Histoire. Milan: Angeli. 1979 (co-editor) Storia dell’Africa e del Vicino Oriente. Florence: La Nuova Italia. 1981 Salt, Gold, and Legitimacy: Prelude to the History of a No-Man’s Land: Belā Shangul, Wallaggā, Ethiopia ca. 1800 – 1898. Naples: Don Bosco. 1996 (co-editor) Being and Becoming Oromo: Historical and Anthropological Enquiries. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordic Africa Institute. 2000 (co-editor) Uomini in armi: Costruzioni etniche e violenza politica. Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo. 2002 (editor) La colonia: Italiani in Eritrea, Bologna: Il Mulino. 2004 (co-editor) State, Power and New Political Actors in Postcolonial Africa. Milan: Feltrinelli. 2005 Dopo la violenza: Costruzioni di memoria nel mondo contemporaneo. Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo. 2013 (co-editor) Long Journeys: African Migrants on the Road. Leiden: Brill. Annemarie Tröger was born in Jena, Germany in 1940, as the daughter of a manor owner. In 1945, the Soviet occupation force confiscated the manor. The family was torn apart: her mother and grandmother were deported to the British zone. Her grandfather died in the special Soviet camp at Buchenwald; her father, as a commissioned officer, as a prisoner of war in Vorkuta, Siberia. Annemarie Tröger and her brother initially stayed with their paternal grandmother in Bernburg. Because as the daughter of a nobleman, she was not permitted to attend a college preparatory secondary school, in 1955, she moved to her mother’s in Hannover. She completed her university entrance qualification and studied psychology and sociology in Berlin. In 1961, she became a member of the Socialist German Student Union and participated in protests against the Vietnam War. In 1966 – 67, she worked at the Max Planck Institute, where she, as a psychologist, evaluated interviews with concentration camp survivors. Within the framework of the Socialist German Student Union, she helped deserted US soldiers. In 1968, she went to the USA on behalf of the organization, where, on the West

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Coast, she worked as a therapist and a political activist in the group of Vietnam veterans against the war. In the following years, she got to know Ronald Grele and other American oral historians. That is how she worked with Larry Goodwyn in Ohio in a master’s program with oral history for black students. After her return to Germany, she was given a permanent ban in her occupation due to these political activities. From 1975, she had various projects at the Otto Suhr Institute and began with independent oral history work, including work about women under National Socialism. Annemarie Tröger initiated history workshops and summer universities. In 1979, she participated in the IOHA conference in Colchester. Until 1990, she was one of the regular participants of these meetings. She is friends with Paul Thompson and Luisa Passerini, among others, and participated significantly in the research project about the 1968 movement. From 1990 to 1992, after German reunification, Tröger worked for the Ministry of Labor, Health, Women, and Social Affairs for the state of Brandenburg. In 1993 – 94, she accompanied her husband to Egypt, where she contacted women’s organizations and worked with victims of torture. After additional training in Berlin and London, since 2001, she has been a state-approved psychotherapist in Berlin. Publications (Selection): 1977 “Die Dolchstoßlegende der Linken: Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht gebracht.” In Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beiträge zur Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen, 324– 55. Berlin. 1981 “Die Frau im wesensgemäßen Einsatz.” In Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, 246 – 72. Frankfurt. 1984 Frauen in Berlin 1945 – 1947. Berlin: Nishen. 1988 (with Ronald Fraser et al.) 1968 – A Student Generation in Revolt. London: Chatto & Windus. 1990 (co-editor) “Zwischenzeiten – Frauenforschung aus der DDR.” Feministische Studien 8.1. Mercedes Vilanova is professor emerita at the University of Barcelona. Born in 1936 in Barcelona in a republican family, during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), her parents emigrated to Italy and France with their two daughters until 1939. After that, Vilanova grew up in Spain under the Franco dictatorship. In 1953 – 54, she was a freshman at Barat College in the USA, and afterwards traveled around the world with a German friend. In 1955 she became the first woman scuba diver of Spain. In 1956 she became active in the anti-Franco resistance in the Workers’ Front of Catalonia until the death of Franco in 1975, and became a member of the Catholic movement Fraternidad de Foucauld. After competing her

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degree in history in 1959, she lived in Paris, the United States, Latin America, and Israel. Married and with two children, she returned to Barcelona in 1964 and founded a school for workers. In 1968, after she completed her doctorate, she began an academic career at the University of Barcelona. She worked on an economic-statistical study of L’Escala, a Catalonian village, to find out why the anarchosyndicalist revolution failed in Spain in 1936. Through interviews, she discovered the importance of illiterate participants in history. In 1972, Ronald Fraser contacted her and asked her to put him in contact with contemporary witnesses for a book about the Spanish Civil War. In 1975, she worked with Willa Baum, director of Oral History Research Office at Berkeley. With her, Vilanova organized the first oral history workshop as part of the side program of an international historian meeting. Due to its great success, it was integrated into the official program at the next meeting for contemporary historians in 1980 in Bucharest. There, Vilanova met the French historian François Bédarida, who had just started the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP), Paris. In 1985, she organized the fifth International Oral History Conference in Barcelona and presented a paper on the importance of illiteracy to understand the present and the past. In 1989, together with Cristina Borderías, Vilanova founded the journal Historia y Fuente Oral and she was the editor until 2012. In 1996, in Gothenburg, she was elected the first president of the now institutionalized IOHA, and re-elected in 1998. She retired in 2006, but still organized the 28th International IOHA Conference in Barcelona in 2014. Publications (selection): 1968 España en Maragall. Barcelona: Península. 1971 La conformidad con el destino en Azorín. Málaga, Spain: Ariel. 1986 (co-editor) El poder en la sociedad. Barcelona: Antoni Bosch. 1992 (co-editor) Atlas de la evolución del analfabetismo en España de 1887 a 1981: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia. 1995 Les majorités invisibles: exploitació fabril, revolució i repressió. Barcelona: Icaria. 2005 Voces sin letras: Analfabetos en Baltimore. Barcelona: Anthropos. 2006 Atlas electoral de la segona república a Catalunya. 2 volumes. Barcelona: Fundació Jaume Bofill. 2006 (co-editor) El repte de les fonts orals. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya. 2014 Mauthausen: después. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. 2016 (co-editor) Many Voices of Oral History. Barcelona: Icaria. 2017 La palabra y el poder: L’Escala, Anarquismo, Pasqual Maragall. Barcelona: Ediciones Carena.

The Authors Agnès Arp, born in 1973, studied philosophy, German studies, and history in Paris, Berlin, and Jena, and is an academic assistant at the Institute of Psychosocial Medicine and Psychotherapy at Jena University Hospital. Most recent publication: Difficulties and Obstacles of Remembrance: Memories of the GDR – 20 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall (DigiOst: 2020). Julie Boekhoff, born in 1977, studied modern history, English literature, and law at the Universities of Braunschweig, Jena, and Aberdeen, and is Project Manager Education and Training at the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. Most recent publication (with Dietmar Herz): “Gewaltenteilung,” in Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. 1, eds. Pim den Boer et al. (Munich: De Gruyter, 2012), 187 – 206. Manja Finnberg, born in 1978, studied German, political science, psychology, and history in Leipzig, Jena, and Manchester and was a German Academic Exchange Service lecturer at the University of Bologna (Italy). She teaches German to refugees in Berlin. Most recent publication: “Ruth Seydewitz im Exil. Unsichtbare politische Arbeit und die Entdeckung der Geschlechterdifferenz” in Politik – Parteiarbeit – Pazifismus in der Emigration: Frauen handeln, eds. Hiltrud Häntzschel and Inge Hansen-Schaberg (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2010), 59 – 77. Christian König, born in 1980, studied modern history, political science, and biology at Jena University and is an academic assistant at the Institute of Medical History and Ethics, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Most recent publication (with Anja Werner et al.): Arzneimittelstudien westlicher Pharmaunternehmen in der DDR, 1983 – 1990 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2016). Annette Leo, born in 1948, studied history and Romance languages at Humboldt University of Berlin. She lives as a public historian in Berlin. Most recent publication: Das Kind auf der Liste. Die Geschichte von Willy Blum und seiner Familie (Berlin: Aufbau, 2018). Franka Maubach, born in 1974, studied history, political science, and Slavic studies at the University of Freiburg and is an academic assistant at Jena University. Most recent publication (co-edited with Klaus Latzel and Elissa Mailänder): Geschlechterbeziehungen und Volksgemeinschaft (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2018). Silvia Musso, born in 1982, studied cultural anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and completed a master’s degree in sustainability management at the University of Turin. She is a freelance journalist and publicist in Piedmont. Most recent publication: “Far emergere le memorie. Intervista alla storica Luisa Passerini” in Il microfono rovesciato. Dieci variazioni sulla storia orale, ed. Alessandro Casellato (Treviso, Italy: Promemoria, 2007), 43 – 54. Lutz Niethammer, born in 1939, is professor emeritus of modern history at Jena University. Most recent publication in English: Memory and History: Essays in Contemporary History (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-014

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Alexander von Plato, born in 1942, is a habilitated historian. He was the founder and longtime director of the Institute of History and Biography at the University of Hagen and had guest professorships in Vienna, Winnipeg, and Voronezh, Russia. He served as both the secretary and vice president of the International Oral History Association and is the co-editor and copy editor of the journal BIOS. Over the course of his career, Plato has also worked on numerous films and books. Most recent publication in English: The End of the Cold War? Bush, Kohl, Gorbachev and the Reunification of Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2015)

Index Abendstern, Michele, 256 Abrams, Lynn, 196, 213 Adams, Henry, 203 Adler, Nanci, 180, 213 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 213 Agamben, Giorgio, 164, 213 Agosti, Aldo, 124 Agulhon, Maurice, 201 Ahlqvist, Carina, 255 Ahuja, Ravi, 73, 213 Aklajew, A., 2 Alcantud, José Antonio G., 157 Ali, Tariq, 202, 213 Alistair Thomson, 100 Amnå, Erik, 255 Angell, Robert C., 213 Ardiccioni, Luciano, 237 Aretin, Karl Otmar von, 204 Ariès, Philippe, 204 Aron-Schnapper, Dominique, 166, 213 Arp, Agnès, 15, 18, 41, 44, 53, 59, 65, 72, 95, 111, 113, 119, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 136, 142, 147, 168, 169, 177, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 210, 211, 212, 259 Arrighi, Giovanni, 214 Arthurs, Alberta, 92, 93, 94 Aston, Trevor, 139 Bachiddu, Elena, 236 Badstübner, Rolf, 197 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 141, 214 Batllori, Padre, 131 Bauer, Elaine, 256 Baum, Willa, 122, 198, 216, 258 Bebout, John, 240 Bédarida, François, 55, 64, 67, 69, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 89, 105, 116, 122, 129, 131, 178, 196, 211, 231, 258 Benjamin, Walter, 205 Benmayor, Rina, 94 Bergen, Jonas, 4 Bergman, Kjell, 93 Bergson, Henri, 205 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110561357-015

Berlin, Isaiah, 204 Bermani, Cesare, 30, 33, 129, 211, 231, 232 Berr, Henri, 4 Bertaux, Daniel, 6, 32, 39, 44, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65, 72, 86, 114, 119, 121, 123, 124, 127, 138, 142, 146, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 195, 196, 211, 214, 232, 233, 234, 239, 255, 256 Bertaux-Wiame, Isabelle, 6, 12, 39, 41, 60, 65, 123, 127, 146, 147, 150, 166, 170, 174, 175, 177, 186, 188, 211, 214, 226, 233, 234 Björnberg, Ulla, 233 Bloch, Mark, 5 Boekhoff, Julie, 3, 12, 15, 22, 23, 30, 31, 38, 40, 46, 56, 59, 60, 66, 70, 72, 75, 85, 86, 87, 92, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 113, 120, 127, 154, 168, 175, 181, 182, 185, 187, 212, 213, 259 Boll, Friedhelm, 196, 214 Böll, Heinrich, 252 Bolte, Karl Martin, 203 Bolte, Martin, 214 Bonacchi, S., 119, 219 Borderías, Cristina, 3, 55, 77, 102, 114, 127, 129, 147, 149, 150, 157, 163, 186, 211, 214, 233, 234, 258 Bories-Savala, Helga, 195, 214 Bornat, Joanna, 88, 89 Borodkin, Leonid, 201 Borsdorf, Ulrich, 25, 221 Borst, Arno, 204 Bosio, Gianni, 52, 141, 214, 231, 232, 251 Botkin, Benjamin A., 9, 214 Botz, Gerhard, 3, 14, 17, 31, 32, 44, 65, 67, 79, 81, 84, 86, 91, 105, 195, 202, 211, 214, 234, 235, 253 Boudon, Raymond, 142, 232 Bourdieu, Pierre, 142, 203, 214, 232 Bouvier, Jean Claude, 77 Boyer, Christoph, 51, 72, 73, 214 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 204

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Index

Brandt, Peter, 25, 221 Bravo, Anna, 243 Brewer, John, 201 Brezhnev, Leonid, 207 Briesen, Detlef, 11, 171, 215 Bruford, Alan, 88, 215 Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef, 12, 195, 215, 227 Buchheim, Karl, 204 Burchardt, Natasha, 62, 195, 219, 222, 225, 226 Burckhardt, Carl J., 204 Casellato, Alessandro, 27, 138, 215, 220, 224 Catani, Maurizio, 147, 215 Chamberlain, Mary, 180, 213, 246 Chamberlayn, Prue, 233 Charlton, Thomas L., 3, 215, 217, 224 Chaunu, Pierre, 201 Cherubini, Donatella, 220 Chibova, Darja, 2 Chordá, Frederic, 165, 227 Cirese, Alberto, 236 Clark, Mary Marshall, 40, 77, 92, 94, 95, 96, 103, 124, 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 180, 186, 211, 215, 235, 240 Claydon, Tim, 40, 225 Clemens, Petra, 3 Clemente, Pietro, 17, 18, 30, 33, 52, 53, 68, 91, 128, 130, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 215, 236 Cobb, Richard C., 204 Contini Bonacossi, Alessandro, 23 Contini Bonacossi, Giovanni, 3, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 66, 71, 73, 91, 107, 124, 127, 129, 186, 187, 212, 215, 236, 237 Contini Bonacossi, Sandro, 20, 215 Conze, Werner, 246 Craik, Fergus I.M., 200, 226 Cregreen, Eric, 64, 77, 79, 81 Czeromin, Franca, 183 Dabag, Mihran, 195, 223 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 203, 216 Daum, Werner, 250 Davin, Anna, 120, 154, 212, 234, 237, 242, 244 de Beauvoir, Simone, 142

de Graeve, Beatrys, 14, 67, 68, 69, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 120, 121, 175, 212, 239, 240 De Luna, Giovanni, 158, 222 de Wolfe, Patricia, 238 Dei, Fabio, 236 Delcroix, Catherine, 233 den Boer, Pim, 259 Descamps, Florence, 120, 129, 196, 216 Di Piazza, Valeria, 91, 148 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 5, 6, 216 Domansky, Elisabeth, 250 Doßmann, Axel, 205, 216 Drosdowski, Günther, 47, 216 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 5, 216 Duby, George, 201 Duden, Barbara, 201 Dunaway, David K., 152, 158, 159, 198, 216 Durand, Jean-Paul, 233 Easton, Susan, 243 Edinger, Lewis, 199 Edison, Thomas, 4 Ehalt, Hubert Ch., 195, 216 Ehn, Billy, 246 Eichmann, Adolf, 29 Ek, Sven B., 62, 66, 81, 84, 91, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 254 Ekelund, Wilhelm, 245 Elizabeth Tonkin, 141, 155 Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, 216 Ericsson, Christer, 242 Eschwege, Helmut, 204 Evers, Hans-Dieter, 238 Eynon, Bret, 59, 186, 187 Faber, Richard, 44, 169, 217 Fanon, Frantz, 163, 164, 216, 236 Febvre, Lucien, 5 Fertelli, Alessandro, 124 Fest, Joachim, 204 Fetscher, Iring, 204 Field, Sean, 106, 107, 109, 216 Figes, Orlando, 11, 216 Filippa, Marcella, 42, 58, 67, 68, 107, 124, 149, 154, 212, 238 Finnberg, Manja, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 47, 48, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65,

Index

66, 71, 73, 85, 86, 90, 103, 107, 108, 109, 113, 125, 126, 129, 134, 137, 140, 149, 163, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 212, 213, 259 Fleck, Christian, 203, 216 Flores, Marcello, 150 Franco, Francisco, 31, 79, 118, 149, 165, 234, 243, 258 Fraser, Ronald, 17, 20, 21, 36, 42, 59, 142, 143, 146, 157, 202, 206, 207, 212, 213, 216, 217, 239, 249, 258 Frei, Norbert, 18, 113, 162, 220, 227 Frese, Jürgen, 44, 47, 169, 217 Freud, Sigmund, 180, 205 Friedländer, Saul, 204, 205 Friesel, Evyatar, 204 Frisch, Michael, 97, 198, 201 Fromm, Erich, 5 Frykman, Jonas, 246 Fuchs-Heinritz, Werner, 119, 195 Gagnon, Nicole, 123, 232 Gans, Rüdiger, 11, 171, 215 Gay, Peter, 204 Gehler, Michael, 251 Geppert, Alexander, 201, 204, 222 Gerber, Gerold, 63, 219 Geyer, Dietrich, 204 Gilbert, Felix, 204 Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, 18 Ginsborg, Paul, 150 Ginsburg, Carlo, 119 Girardet, Raoul, 201 Goodwin, Doris K., 204 Goodwyn, Larry, 257 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 199, 251, 260 Gorell Barnes, Gill, 256 Göring, Hermann, 23, 218 Gotovitch, José, 91 Göttsch, Silke, 255 Grab, Walter, 204 Granlund, John, 245 Grele, Ronald J., 3, 4, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 40, 44, 48, 49, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111,

351

114, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 131, 144, 148, 158, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 187, 188, 194, 195, 198, 199, 201, 202, 211, 212, 217, 232, 234, 235, 239, 240, 255, 257 Gribaudi, Gabriella, 19, 20, 21, 33, 52, 128, 129, 212, 240, 241 Gribaudi, Maurizio, 52 Guthrie, Woody, 251 Haase, Günther, 23, 218 Haber, Richard, 47 Hacke, Jens, 208, 218 Haffner, Sebastian, 204 Halbach, Wulf R., 90, 200, 221 Halbwachs, Maurice, 5, 199, 205 Hallgarten, George W., 204 Hanet, Danièle, 166, 213 Hansen-Schaberg, Inge, 259 Hantke, Susanne, 183, 184, 210 Häntzschel, Hildtrud, 259 Hartewig, Karen, 3, 90, 200, 221 Hedblom, Folke, 61, 218 Heer, Friedrich, 234 Hegedüs, András B., 3, 91 Heil, Susanne, 195, 223 Heimpel, Hermann, 204 Heß, Philipp, 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32, 38, 49, 65, 68, 70, 106, 128, 173, 181, 182, 184, 210, 212 Hilberg, Raul, 204 Hobsbawm, Eric, 198, 204, 218 Hofer, Walther, 204 Hoffmann, Peter, 204 Holden, Len, 40, 225 Holste, Christine, 44, 47, 169, 217 Holzer, Jerzy, 3 Horgby, Björn, 47, 67, 102, 114, 125, 128, 212, 241 Hoskins, William George, 140 Howkins, Alun, 64, 85, 128, 212, 242 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 192 Iggers, George, 204 Iggers, Wilma, 204 Inikova, S.A., 2 Irving, David, 204 Itzin, Catherine, 256 Iuso, Anna, 236

352

Index

Ivankiev, Andrei, 165, 218 Jachtenfuchs, Markus, 115, 218 Jacobsen, Berith, 100 Jäger, Lorenz, 208, 218 Jalla, Daniele, 33, 37, 38, 41, 55, 127, 136, 154, 156, 212, 222, 243 Jansen, Dorothea, 50, 218 Jean, Bruno, 218 Jedliczka, Ludwig, 235 Jerouschek, Günter, 253 Johannesson, Lena, 255 John, Jürgen, 44, 62, 117, 122, 217, 218, 222, 240 Joutard, Geneviève, 178, 244 Joutard, Philippe, 55, 64, 77, 80, 81, 84, 116, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129, 135, 142, 178, 188, 195, 212, 218, 243 Junge, Kay, 63, 219 Kafka, Franz, 252 Keiderling, Gerhard, 204 Kennan, George F., 204 Khubova, Daria, 165, 218, 252 Kidson, Peter, 256 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 252 Kjelman, Ulrika, 255 Klein, Ansgar, 48, 224 Klein, Fritz, 204 Klemperer, Klemens von, 204 Kluge, Friedrich, 47, 49, 218 Knittler-Lux, Ursula, 195, 216 Kocka, Jürgen, 12, 227 Köhle-Hezinger, Christel, 255 Kohler-Koch, Beate, 115, 218 Kohli, Martin, 203, 218 König, Christian, 15, 26, 29, 46, 51, 62, 66, 67, 69, 71, 98, 102, 104, 106, 107, 113, 114, 124, 125, 126, 135, 138, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 153, 156, 165, 166, 168, 182, 186, 189, 212, 213, 259 König, René, 203, 218 Konrad, Helmut, 195, 216 Kosthorst, Erich, 204 Kósza, Gyula, 3 Krippendorff, Ekkehart, 208, 219 Krohn, Wolfgang, 49, 225 Kuczynski, Jürgen, 204 Kuhl, Annette, 204

Kuhn, Thomas, 179 Küppers, Günter, 49, 225 Lamparter, Ulrich, 250 Lamprecht, Karl, 4, 5, 219 Langthaler, Ernst, 254 Laqueur, Walter, 204 Latzel, Klaus, 260 Law, Robin, 81, 84 LeBon, Gustave, 4, 219 Leggewie, Claus, 63, 72, 219 LeGoff, Jacques, 201 Legrand, Hans-Josef, 48, 224 Leh, Almut, 3, 14, 200, 210, 219, 220, 250, 253 Lehmann, Hartmut, 204, 219 Leif, Thomas, 48, 224 Leo, Annette, 8, 14, 16, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 38, 49, 59, 65, 68, 70, 79, 80, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 121, 122, 128, 129, 130, 147, 149, 150, 151, 164, 173, 181, 192, 210, 211, 212, 213, 259 Lepenies, Wolf, 203, 218 Lepsius, M. Rainer, 203, 219 Lequin, Yves, 238 Lerner, Gerda, 204 Lethen, Helmut, 208, 219 Levi, Giovanni, 52, 141 Levy, Daniel, 200, 221 Lewis, Oscar, 120, 123, 142, 219 Leydesdorff, Selma, 3, 11, 23, 40, 57, 69, 90, 91, 92, 95, 97, 101, 104, 108, 114, 129, 138, 146, 176, 177, 180, 183, 189, 195, 207, 211, 212, 213, 225, 244 Liakos, Antonis, 201 Lifton, Robert J., 204 Lindqvist, Cecilia, 245 Lindqvist, Sven, 10, 26, 27, 39, 48, 55, 62, 64, 80, 81, 82, 119, 143, 146, 166, 175, 189, 196, 212, 219, 245 Linhart, Danièle, 233 Livi, Giovanni, 119, 219 Li-wen, Yang, 3 Löfgren, Orvar, 26, 39, 56, 64, 66, 71, 77, 107, 114, 137, 138, 144, 145, 153, 174, 212, 245, 246 Lombardi Satriani, Luigi Maria, 141 Losi, Natale, 41, 219

Index

Lüdtke, Alf, 195, 220 Lukacs, John, 204 Lummis, Trevor, 195, 219, 256 Lundmark, Fredrik, 255 Mackay, Margaret, 88 Mailänder, Elissa, 260 Mandrou, Robert, 243, 244 Manigand, Christine, 220 Mann, Golo, 194, 204 Månsson, Per, 242 Markov, Walter, 204 Marling, Gitte, 246 Martinez, Fabio A., 178 Martini, Alfredo, 215, 237 Martino, Ernesto de, 141, 220, 232 Mason, Tim, 38 Maubach, Franka, 15, 19, 22, 23, 25, 31, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 56, 59, 60, 66, 70, 76, 85, 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 148, 150, 153, 160, 161, 168, 175, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 191, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 220, 260 Maurer, Michael, 119, 196, 226 Mazé, Suzanne, 147, 215 Men, Alexander, 252 Meoni, Maria Luisa, 236 Meyer, Eugenia, 3, 39, 55, 56, 58, 81, 105, 114, 127, 130, 131, 174, 178, 179, 220 Meyers, Louis E., 3, 215, 217, 224 Michelet, Jules, 4 Michmann, Jozeph, 244 Misztal, Bronislaw, 174 Mittag, Jürgen, 49, 50, 51, 73, 213, 214, 220, 226 Mitterauer, Michael, 253, 254 Mommsen, Hans, 235, 246 Montaldi, Danilo, 141, 220 Moraes Ferreira, Marieta de, 3, 75, 77, 95, 103, 104, 109, 179, 220 Moro, Aldo, 118 Morrissey, Charles T., 57, 69 Moss, William W., 198, 220 Mosse, George L., 204 Motte, Jan, 250 Mueller, Wolfgang, 251 Mugnaini, Dina, 148, 223

353

Murray, Peter, 256 Musso, Silvia, 13, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 52, 53, 54, 67, 68, 71, 76, 103, 107, 116, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 148, 149, 150, 154, 182, 184, 212, 220, 260 Mussolini, Benito, 23 Nadig, Maya, 220 Neidhardt, Friedhelm, 203, 214 Neumann, Philipp, 14, 31, 32, 44, 51, 65, 67, 79, 84, 86, 95, 107, 113, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 190, 210, 211, 213 Nevins, Allan, 9, 120, 220 Neyzi, Leyla, 180, 213 Niethammer, Lutz, 3, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 22, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 49, 55, 57, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 94, 102, 104, 106, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 128, 131, 138, 157, 164, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182, 183, 184, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 219, 220, 221, 224, 225, 233, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 260 Nilsson, Fredrik, 242 Nora, Pierre, 201, 206, 221 Nordström, Annika, 255 O’Kelly, Michael, 29, 254 Obertreis, Julia, 201, 221 Oexle, Otto G., 204, 219 Ohliger, Rainer, 250 Olick, Jeffrey K., 200, 221 Paetrow, Stephan, 183, 191, 210 Pallotta, Roberta, 221 Park, Robert, 120 Passerini, Luisa, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 91, 104, 105, 114, 116, 117, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 156, 158, 163, 165, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 184,

354

Index

188, 194, 195, 197, 201, 202, 205, 206, 207, 211, 212, 214, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 234, 238, 239, 248, 249, 255, 257, 260 Patterson, Orlando, 161, 222 Pätzold, Kurt, 204 Paul, Gerhard, 166, 222 Pemberton, Jo-Anne, 222 Perelmutter, Daisy, 202 Perks, Robert, 57, 200, 222 Perrot, Michelle, 201 Petricioli, Marta, 220 Peukert, Detlev, 174 Pfeifer, Wolfgang, 47, 49, 216 Piazza, Valeria di, 223 Pietrelli, Vera, 140, 215 Pipes, Richard, 204 Pirini, Mauro, 30, 210, 211 Planes, Jordi, 83 Plato, Alexander von, 1, 2, 3, 10, 14, 19, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 60, 75, 76, 77, 85, 95, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 117, 150, 151, 157, 187, 195, 197, 200, 212, 219, 220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 248, 249, 252, 253, 260 Platt, Jennifer, 131, 223 Platt, Kristin, 195, 223 Plötner, Sirku, 23, 101, 104, 146, 210, 212 Pollack, Michael, 122 Pollak, Michael, 164, 223 Popitz, Heinrich, 112, 176, 223 Popkin, Jeremy D., 201, 204, 205, 223 Portelli, Alessandro, 12, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, 30, 33, 35, 36, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 52, 53, 57, 64, 68, 70, 71, 85, 90, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 114, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 137, 148, 149, 151, 157, 163, 167, 174, 186, 194, 223, 224, 226, 234, 251 Prins, Gwyn, 157 Puttkamer, Joachim von, 44, 62, 117, 122, 217, 218, 222, 240 Ranke, Leopold von, 171 Ranson, Marieanne, 77 Raschke, Joachim, 48, 223 Reeves, Thomas, 187 Rehnberg, Mats, 245

Reich, Wilhelm, 5, 223 Rémond, René, 195, 201, 224 Revelli, Nuto, 141, 224 Ricœur, Paul, 147 Rioux, Jean-Pierre, 72, 77, 119, 122, 188, 195, 212, 224, 251, 252 Ritchie, Donald A., 200, 224 Robin, Régine, 149 Rochat, Giorgio, 53 Rodríguez Codd, Elena, 12, 59, 143, 212 Rosati, Irene, 27, 224 Rossi, Cesare Angelo, 30 Rossi, Emanuela, 236 Rousso, Henry, 224 Rowbotham, Sheila, 204 Rucht, Dieter, 48, 224 Rüsen, Jörn, 179, 224 Ryant, Carl, 94 Salvatici, Silvia, 41, 219 Samuel, Raphael, 10, 12, 38, 51, 57, 62, 69, 88, 120, 136, 154, 174, 195, 196, 224, 234, 237, 238, 239, 242, 245, 256 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 142 Schäfer, Peter, 204 Schelsky, Helmut, 203 Scherbakowa, Irina, 19, 25, 117, 186, 202, 206, 207, 213, 224, 252 Schliemann, Heinrich, 29 Schlögel, Karl, 253 Schmidt, Ernst, 204 Scholl, Susanne, 253 Schorlemmer, Friedrich, 208, 224 Schossig, Bernhard, 166, 222 Schütze, Fritz, 198 Schwartzstein, Dora, 100, 103 Schweitzer, Sylvie, 77 Scotellaro, Rocco, 141, 224 Sedelnikov, Sergej, 2 Sharova, Tonia, 165 Sharpless, Rebecca, 3, 215, 217, 224 Siebeck, Cornelia, 183, 210 Sieder, Reinhard, 64, 107, 185, 213, 253 Singer, Wendy, 224 Sirinelli, Jean-François, 252 Skarin Frykman, Birgitta, 28, 29, 61, 62, 66, 69, 71, 72, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 106, 125, 135, 146, 148,

Index

152, 153, 164, 165, 166, 211, 213, 224, 254 Slettan, Dagfinn, 81 Smith, Joan K., 238 Squillacciotti, Massimo, 236 Stadler, Gerhard, 234 Starkow, N.I., 2 Starr, Louis, 9, 120, 121, 122, 225 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 201 Steedman, Carolyn, 205, 225 Steiner, George, 162, 225 Stern, Fritz, 204 Stocker, Karl, 254 Šuber, Daniel, 63, 219 Suppan, Arnold, 251 Taillefer, François, 244 Talsma, Jaap, 3, 11, 55, 64, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 90, 129, 225, 244 Taylor, Barbara, 201 Tedlock, Dennis, 148, 149, 217, 225 Tegner, Elisabeth, 69, 224 Terkel, Studs, 120, 198, 207, 208, 217, 225 Teubner, Gunther, 49, 225 Thélot, Claude, 244 Thomas, William I., 5, 120 Thompson, Edward P., 141, 237 Thompson, Paul, 1, 3, 12, 13, 14, 30, 31, 32, 39, 40, 42, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 114, 117, 120, 121, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 145, 146, 153, 154, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 195, 202, 211, 213, 219, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 232, 233, 234, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 246, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257 Thoms, David, 40, 225 Thomson, Alistair, 3, 57, 75, 100, 103, 133, 136, 158, 163, 168, 169, 179, 200, 222, 225 Thonfeld, Christoph, 253 Tilly, Louise, 11, 12, 57, 65, 124, 157, 166, 167, 174, 226

355

Tolliday, Steven, 34, 215 Tommaseo, Niccolò, 140, 226 Tonkin, Elizabeth, 207, 226 Touraine, Alain, 232 Townsend, Peter, 139 Trapp, Werner, 192, 195, 220, 221 Trebitsch, Michel, 128 Triulzi, Alessandro, 18, 27, 28, 30, 33, 51, 86, 128, 134, 179, 213, 226, 256 Tröger, Annemarie, 32, 39, 40, 49, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 69, 70, 121, 174, 177, 188, 213, 257 Trossholmen, Ninni, 255 Tscheschko, Sergej, 2 Tucholsky, Kurt, 252 Tulving, Endel, 200, 201, 226 Turnbull, Annmarie, 238 Ubeda, Lluís, 200, 227 Unfried, Berthold, 226 Unfried, Bertold, 49, 50, 51, 73, 213, 214, 220 van der Linden, Marcel, 49, 50, 52, 73, 213, 214, 220, 226 van Laak, Dirk, 44, 62, 117, 119, 122, 217, 218, 222, 226, 240 Vansina, Jan, 134, 207, 208, 217, 226 Veltroni, Walter, 45 Vierhaus, Rudolf, 204 Vilanova, Mercedes, 12, 13, 14, 28, 31, 32, 40, 58, 65, 69, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 88, 91, 94, 96, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 114, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 138, 149, 151, 152, 157, 164, 165, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 183, 188, 189, 195, 200, 210, 211, 213, 226, 227, 234, 239, 258 Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered, 200, 221 Voges, Wolfgang, 195, 227 Voldman, Danièle, 3, 77, 79, 84, 122, 123, 128, 129, 157, 185, 188, 227 Vorländer, Herwart, 8, 195, 227 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 238 Walley, Tony, 256 Warburg, Aby, 162 Weber, Hermann, 204 Weber, Wolfgang, 227 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 12, 227

356

Index

Weigel, Sigrid, 162, 227 Weis, Eberhard, 204 Welzer, Harald, 250 Werner, Anja, 259 Werner, Karl Ferdinand, 205 Weyrather, Irmgard, 195, 227 Wiegang-Grefe, Silke, 250 Wierling, Dorothee, 9, 10, 188, 195, 196, 197, 215, 221, 227, 248, 250 Wilk, Richard, 246 Winkler, Willi, 208, 227

Wolf, Christa, 252 Worcman, Karen, 30, 32, 58, 95, 96, 105, 139, 177 Wóycicka, Zofia, 203 Yow, Valerie Raleigh, 227 Zeitlin, Jonathan, 34, 215 Zerlang, Martin, 246 Zinn, Howard, 204 Znaniecki, Florian W., 5, 120, 225 Zorn, Wolfgang, 205