Mastergradsstipendiat ved Arkivet fikk toppkarakter
Stiftelsen Arkivet er stolte over å kunne fortelle at mastergradsstipendiat Robert Zimmermann fikk toppkarakter for sin avhandling "Oral History by Second Hand". Sensor ga følgende kommentar til avhandlingen - "Sehr gut". Zimmermann er i disse dager i ferd med å søke stipend for å avlegge phd-grad, aller helst ønsker han å gjøre det i Norge. Nedenfor kan du lese et sammendrag av hans avhandling.
Summary - Oral History by Second Hand
Magister thesis by Robert Zimmermann
The witness, who experienced historical events, has become an important part of various concepts of museums, documentaries and educational programmes. However, it is important to note that in a few years younger generations will only be able to rely on audio or video recordings, if they want to find out more about individual experiences of the Second World War. The witnesses in the classrooms and cultural centres will be irretrievably gone. So far history science is helpless against this obvious trend. Literature about the secondary analysis of witness interviews is virtually non-existent; in fact historians‘ attitude towards subjective sources is still difficult.
The branch of history science, which deals with memory sources, including witness interviews, is called Oral History. This rather small scientific field has had to face mainly two major points of criticism. On the one hand the interview as main source of Oral History are accused of high subjectivity, and on the other hand memory is denied to be a scientific, reliable source at itself. Moreover, Oral History threatens the salient aim of historiography, objectivity.
The task of the thesis was to refute those criticisms and to demonstrate the potentials as well as limitations of secondary analysis of subjective sources, which incorporate any kind of oral or written subjective expressions like letters and diaries. It is not about listing counter-arguments, but about changing the perspective on dealing with subjective memory documents in history science. Primarily, it is important to understand the functions and capacity of the human memory from different perspectives. Neurology supports the critics, underlining the impossibility of accurate remembrance, whereas Sociology opens the memory theories towards a collective understanding. The concept of collective memory and its influence on the witness are crucial for history science, as well as for understanding the development of historical judgement of certain events through the decades.
The texts and interviews made with the Norwegian resistance fighter Robert Eichinger in the last 60 years serve as important source base for the approach. His story allows demonstrating how Oral History shifts from a detailed reconstruction of past‘s events (Historism) towards the presentation of historical processing. Hence, the processing of the individual story up until the present point becomes the centre of this historical approach. It matters how, rather than what does one remember. To which extend does the witness’ story differ from parallel sources? How did the witness’ perspective on his/ her own story change, when there are more comparable interviews or other subjective sources available?
In Eichinger’s case the answers to these questions led to interesting findings. His story revealed a lot of detailed information about the onslaught of April 1940, the organisation of resistance groups and the life in German prisons, which could hardly be provided by other, more objective sources. Furthermore it can be shown how the national narrative influences Eichinger’s story as an effect of collective memories. Even though he gave unverifiable information, the analysis of Eichinger’s documents has shown a high level of reliability of his story in the last 60 years with only little changes. This fact underlines the hypotheses stating that subjective sources may not stand alone, but can effectively underline a thesis. Therefore subjective sources provide the historian not only with the access to unique and unverifiable information, but more importantly with new perspectives on established images of historical events.
In general, Oral History brings the present time into the focus of historiography. At the end, the analysis of subjective sources contributes to „de-stereotyping“, instead of to underpinning prejudices. With the help of subjective sources the individual in the past is perceived as an emotional and social human being, rather than as a pure rational actor in history.
January 2010