teksty do dyskusji panelowej:

In my talk, I am going to speak about the "after learning from history" theme. We must conjure with the fact that although the effort to make history into a science has been going on for over a hundred years, it still remains much less than that. Although it seeks objectivity, history is not a science. Its objectivity is that of the law or the judicial system. But this means that the discourse of history belongs to the ideological state apparatus, along with law and religion. Narrative history by its form alone shows how "mythical" it is, but this is not a weakness; it is rather a kind of virtue. To speak of history as myth is to stress its "poetic" basis. But we must distinguish between the discourse of history and professional historical studies. The latter is an institutionalized discourse with rules and procedures and as such is only one aspect of the discourse of history. Far from being only a study of the past, the discourse of history points to the relation between the knowledge of the past and the present's "horizon of expectations." The discourse of history has as its task the grasping of the present as history.

Although academics and politicians continue to use the standard legitimations about the "usefulness" of doing history, these legitimations have become practically obsolete - especially after the Eastern European development following 1989. Ours might be the time to look for a more "primary" fascination with the past - and for ways to respond to this fascination in the way we write history. I will present some basic feature of my recent book In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time as an attempt in this direction.