No More Learning

The difference between bourgeois and Marxist historiography becomes eminently clear if we compare the subjects they choose to treat. The leading bourgeois and Marxist periodicals in the field, the Historische Zeitschrift and the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, can provide us with pertinent information. It is the editorial policy of both to publish articles covering the entire range of world history. Our sampling is taken from the year 1962. The Historische Zeitschrift published, among others, essays on the following subjects: "Frankish Coronation Customs and the Problem of the Ceremonial Coronation," "The Austro-Bavarian Treaty of Linz, September 11, 1534, as recorded in Munich Archives," "Giovanni Giolitti and Italian Policy in the First World War," "Structuresand Personalities in History," "The Emperor- ship of Otto the Great: A Reassessment after 1,000 Years," "The 'Kladder- adatsch' Affair: A Note on the Domestic History of the Second Reich. "
Some of the titles appearing in the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenchaft were as follows: "Modern Bourgeois Historiography's Attempts to Reha- bilitate German Militarism," "Atomic Arms Policy in West German Imperial- ism: From the MC 70 to the MC 96," "The Clerical-Imperialistic Ideology of the Occident in the Service of German Imperialism. " "Messianic Move- ments in the Middle Ages," "The Theory and Policy of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany on the National Question," "The Historical Mission of the German Democratic Republic and the Future of Germany," "The Major Class Conflict of Feudal Society as Reflected in Some Literary Sources from the Eleventh through the Thirteenth Century," "Friedrich Meinecke - A Precursor of the NATO Historians in West Germany," "Medieval Imperial Policy as Reflected in Bourgeois Historiography of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. " Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that an essay by Walter Ulbricht, "The Banner of the People's Democracy on German Soil," is the lead article in the first issue of the year and that the entire sixth issue is taken up with a reprint of Ulbricht's speech "A Historical Sketch of the German Workers' Movement. " We should also mention that in the Historische Zeitschrift, under the heading "Miscellaneous Notes," there is only one article for which it is essential to know the author's name. That is Gerhard Ritter's "A New Thesis on War Guilt? ", a critique of Fritz Fischer's book Germany's Aims in the First World War.
Without conducting a detailed quantitative analysis of subjects treated and methods employed, we can draw a few preliminary conclusions: In the His- torische Zeitschrift, all major historical epochs are equally represented. There are as many if not more studies of limited subjects as there are broad surveys.
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Theoretical discussions and articles on contemporary history appear rarely, but they are by no means excluded altogether. By contrast, the Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft strongly emphasizes the present and the immediate past, giving considerable space to work on the history of the German Com- munist Party or the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, particularly in their relationship to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A comparable number of pages is given to critical and often fiercely polemical articles on developments in the Federal Republic and in West German historiography. By comparison, all the rest of human history assumes a relatively unimportant position, but articles that do deal with other topics often command great respect for the sophistication and energy with which they investigate pre- viously neglected aspects of history. Needless to say, however, these articles, too, follow a general line of inquiry that focuses on "class structures" in any given society.
Social history, particularly as a statistical discipline, plays a surprisingly minimal role in the Zeitschrift fair Geschichtswissenschaft. Ideas, whether one's own or those of one's opponents, dominate the scene entirely. The level of work differs far more widely than in the Historische Zeitschrift. Along with well-documented, careful studies, there are always other essays that can only be characterized as rhythmic hymns larded with ritualistic condem- nations. But perhaps the most striking feature of all is that the contemporary and the medieval studies, the careful and the shoddy ones, are all informed by a single view that is accepted without reservation. The Historische Zeit- schrift, too, has a fundamental position that no reader will be able to ignore. But when compared with the informing principle of the Zeitschrift fMr Geschichtswissenschaft, that of the Historische Zeitschrift looks like a pale pastel next to a brilliant oil.
We must ask now what kind of exchange can take place between two types of historical scholarship so different that they can hardly be subsumed under the same general definition of "scholarship. " I do not intend to present a historical survey here. It is common knowledge that historians from the GDR attended German Historical Conventions as late as 1958. They were expelled from the meeting in Trier. There were good reasons for the expulsion, but the nationalistic overtones of some of the arguments on which it was based drew criticism not only in the GDR but in the Federal Republic as well. From that point on, the attitude of historians in the West toward their col- leagues in the GDR can best be summed up in the word neglect. Marxism itself, of course, has not been neglected in the least, but to my knowledge Historiography in the GDR was not the subject of a single essay in the West until the new discipline of GDR studies became fashionable and devoted some attention to it. The reverse trend among younger historians soon developed into a movement that has managed to change the earlier picture entirely in
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some fields of study. The situation in the GDR has been just the opposite. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that historians of the Federal Republic receive more attention from the GDR than from any other country in the world. The treatment West German historiography receives is, of course, almost entirely negative and comes exclusively from historians of the GDR. Their dominant attitude toward their colleagues in the West can be summed up in one word, too, and that word is polemic. More often than not, this polemic is grossly distorting. I recently called attention in print to a typical instance in which a GDR historian, by citing a paraphrase written by a like-minded colleague rather than the original text, was able to destroy a political enemy. 24I was the victim of a similar distortion not long ago myself when a quoted text of mine was so altered by ellipses that it came out mean- ing precisely the opposite of what it had originally meant. 25
We might state our first conclusion as follows: Correctness or, as the modish term has it, "factology" is not the be-all and end-all of scholarship, but whether bourgeois or Marxist, scholarship cannot do without correctness or at least the effort to be correct. Obvious distortions, ellipses that change the meaning of quotations, and outright falsifications of quotations deserve our censure no matter what the circumstances that produced them, but the more extreme the political situation is that forces the historian to be an advocate for his society, the more understandable these distortions become.
II. MARX'S AND ENGELS' CONCEPT OF SCHOLARSHIP
We can move ahead now and ask whether Marx or Engels would have sub- scribed to the position I have developed here. Or to put the question in more general terms: What concept of scholarship did the founders of Marxism hold?
We should note first that when contemporary Marxists criticize bourgeois historiography, or least German historiography and its tradition, they can justifiably cite Marx and Engels as their authority. Marx spoke scornfully of that "dancing dwarf Ranke,"26 and Engels used the phrase "those two schools of historical fabricators 27when he described the division of German historians into those favoring a greater German confederation and those favoring a limited one. But these two remarks should not be interpreted as license for any and all gratuitous attacks. In the foreword to his Contribution
24. Cf. Ernst Nolte, "Ideologie, Engagement, Perspektive"in Geschichte Heute: Posi- tionen, Tendenzen iind Problemne, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Gdttingen, 1973), 292.
25. Cf. Ludwig Elm, Hochsclzule und Neofaschismrus: Zeitgeschichtliclie Stiidien zur Hochlscliulpolitik in der BRD (Berlin [Ost], 1972), 250ff.
26. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke (MEW) (Berlin, 1956ff. ), XXX, 432. 27. Ibid. , XXXII, 452.
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to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx speaks of the conclusions he has reached there as the "results of long and conscientious research. "28Marx and Engels surely would not have called mere political pamphlets scholarly, even if the pamphlets in question had served the interests of their own party. And they would have been even less inclined to regard massive acceptance of their ideas as a substitute for sound arguments. Engels takes it for granted that in matters of scholarship there can be "no democratic forum. "29He does not even hesitate to use language that we would be obliged to describe as traditional: "Whoever is led by an ideal cannot be a scholar, for his mind is already made Up. "311 Engels does not have just the ideals, prejudices, and party interests of others in mind here; for in 1893, when Hermann Bahr asked him to take a position on anti-Semitism, Engels replied that he could not do so impartially because fellow party members in Germany were running for election against some anti-Semitic candidates at the time. 3'
Thirty years earlier, when Marx was treating Ricardo's and Malthus' ideas in his Theories of Surplus Value, he formulated this same view in more gen- eral terms: "I call any man a 'scoundrel' who tries to accommodate scholarship
(whatever its failings) to principles not inherent in it but derived from interests external and alien to it. "32
For Marx, even the immediate interests of the proletariat or of a mass party are interests alien to scholarship. As a scholar, and even to a certain extent as a politician, he by no means regards himself as the advocate of any particular group. This is why he can say that he and Engels received their call to represent the proletarian party from no one else but themselves,33 and this is also why he asserts without bitterness in a letter to Kugelmann that scholarly attempts to revolutionize scholarship will never find a great echo. :4 But the primacy of scholarly "rigor" in Marx's thinking is perhaps
nowhere more apparent than in his and Engels' ceaseless efforts to refute Lujo Brentano's claim that in the inaugural address held at the International Workers' Association Marx had quoted a sentence from Gladstone so as to distort its meaning, indeed, so as "to falsify [it] grossly both in form and content. "35
German scholarship would be better off if everyone accused of distorting quotations in the service of a particular party or in the course of a political campaign would try to disprove the accusations leveled at him with even a
28. Ibid. , XIII, 11.
29. Ibid. , XXXIV, 286.
30. Ibid. , XXXVI, 198.
31. Ibid. , XXXIX, 79.
32. Ibid. , XXVI, Part 2, p. 112.
33. Ibid. , XXIX, 436.
34. Ibid. , XXX, 640.
35. Ibid. , XVIII, 89 and especially XXII, 93-185.
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fraction of the diligence that Marx and Engels expended. There can be no doubt whatsoever that rigor, conscientiousness, and objectivity were basic principles of scholarship for Marx and Engels. The best intentions in the service of the noblest party are no substitute for them, nor, of course, are shouting and demonstrating.
So far we have dealt only with the external features of scholarship, with its workmanlike aspects, if you will. If we turn now to Marx's view of its content, we may often have the impression that he ascribes "faithfulness to fact," and therefore true scholarly rigor, only to the natural sciences and that he sees his own research as having scientific character in that it reveals the workings of social and economic laws. He writes in a frequently quoted passage from the foreword to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "In studying such social changes, we must always distinguish be- tween material changes in the conditions of economic production - changes that can be precisely measured by scientific methods - and the legal, po- litical, religious, artistic, or philosophical forms they take, i. e. , the ideological forms, through which people become aware of a conflict and within which
they fight it out. "36If we were concerned here with more than Marx's and Engels' concept of scholarship, we would have to consider a number of other questions at this point. We would have to inquire into the relationship between dialectic and a linear concept of causality, into the question of whether we can admit a concept of conflict that is independent of the circumstances in which conflict is worked out, and into the meaning of the political character of Marxism itself.
In our present discussion we will have to limit ourselves to asking whether bourgeois thought has any relevance for the mode of inquiry and the method characteristic of Marxism. The answer must be not only that bourgeois thought is relevant to the Marxist approach, but that bourgeois thought created the Marxist approach. In his well-known letter of March 5, 1852, Marx writes to Weydemeyer: "As far as I am concerned, I cannot claim the honor of having discovered either classes or class conflict in modern society. Bourgeois historians had described the historical development of class struggle long before I came along, and bourgeois economists had laid bare the economic anatomy of this struggle. My contributions were to prove (1 ) that the exis- tence of classes is directly linked to specific historical stages in production methods, (2) that class struggle will inevitably lead to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and (3) that this dictatorship itself forms only a transition to the abolishment of classes and to a classless society. "37In other words, what
often goes under the name of Marxism today - demonstration of the exis- tence of classes, structural analysis of societies, acceptance of the concept of class struggle- all this is in fact, as Marx himself clearly stated, the product
36. Ibid. , XIII, 9.
37. Ibid. , XXVIII, 507ff.
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of bourgeois thought, particularly as represented in French and English writings.
It is well worth noting here, too, that in Marx's lifetime "classes" were a very palpable reality, not, as they are today, a phenomenon we can hardly perceive any more. It was against the law in Prussia as late as 1869 for noblemen to marry women of the petite bourgeoisie, and the French bourgeois thinkers Marx had in mind in the passage just cited above - Guizot, Mignet, the Thierrys- were all followers of the eighteenth-century writers Dubos and Boulainvilliers, a priest and a nobleman. And even if we take the nar- rower of Marx's and Engels' two concepts of class as our basis, a concept by which "estates" were not classes, what was more common usage in the era of Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, than the contrast of bourgeoisie and common people, indeed, of bourgeoisie and proletariat?
On the other hand, the elements of Marx's theory that he identified as his own contributions are precisely the ones that bourgeois thinkers have to call the undemonstrable, the political, the utopian, and the unscholarly tenets of Marxism. We have finally come to a point where "bourgeois" and "Marxist" scholarship differ radically and irreconcilably. But not even this difference is absolute, for bourgeois thought cannot be identified with any one of its manifestations, not with the historicism that most historians of the Second Reich in Germany subscribed to, nor with the positivism that dominated in the French Third Republic, nor with the pragmatism that characterizes most English and American historians. Bourgeois thought can readily admit the possibility that "class society" will be followed and replaced by a "post-class society," just as class society followed and replaced a society based on estates. Bourgeois thought can also accept as given the tendency to dislodge the ruling groups of the past and to initiate an era dominated by the "common man" or even by a broadly defined "proletariat. "But it cannot believe that at any time there will be a world society without inner differentiations, i. e. , classes, and without centers of power, i. e. , states, a world society, furthermore, in which individuals will no longer be subject to a division of labor. Skepticism
toward this idea of a classless society- an idea that is at the heart of Marxism - forms the one real dividing line between bourgeois and Marxist historiography. But both share the same methodological principles and they may share certain procedural techniques, such as structural analysis, ideo- logical critique, quantitative analysis in social history, and even economistic analysis.
III. STATE MARXISM, FREE MARXISM, AND SCHOLARSHIP
Bourgeois historiography cannot, of course, offer any proof for its disbelief because the future is not among its subjects of inquiry. But within its area of
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competence it can ascertain that leftist Marxists have kept the ruling wing of Marxism under sharp and constant attack from nearly the first day the Communist Party came to power. Critics ranging from Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Gorter, and the Kronstadt sailors on through Arthur Rosenberg and Trotsky and up to Ernst Bloch and a recent publication entitled Socialism as a Ruling Political Power38 have all used Marxist terminology to attack Marxist government. They have spoken of exploitation, class, the rule of a minority over the majority, etc. The disillusioned Left of earlier times and the New Left of the present and of the recent past have pointed out more emphatically than any bourgeois historian ever has that the term "socialistic" can be applied to the governments of the Soviet Union, its allies, and the People's Republic of China only in quotation marks and only as a shorthand term of convenience.
We have to distinguish, then, between state Marxism and free Marxism. Both make use of Marxist terminology but in contexts of differing scope, and we cannot help but notice that state Marxism is a "political science" in the narrowest sense of the term. It lacks the critical distance toward its own state and government that we find among bourgeois scholars, even among the most determined representatives of "bourgeois class interests. " Conversely, free Marxism embodies the most radical and total form of critical distance and consequently represents the purest development of bourgeois scholarship imaginable. Where free Marxism can play an extremely stimulating and fruit- ful role within the framework of the bourgeois society and scholarship that nourish it, historiography under the wing of state Marxism is a discipline without autonomy or initiative. Certain lines of inquiry are cut off by rigid taboos that the discipline has made its own. Wherever tradition and special circumstances have made resurgence of autonomy and spontaneity possible, these impulses have been robbed of their vigor or suppressed by force. The fate of historians in Czechoslovakia is a case in point.
But bourgeois historiography is both able and obliged to make still another distinction within Marxism. There is not just one form of state Marxism, the state Marxism of the Soviet Union or of the "Chinese-Soviet bloc. " As early as 1964 Pravda spoke of the "cold war" that the Chinese leadership was waging against the Soviet Union,39 and by now the Sino-Soviet conflict has long become a given factor in world politics, a factor that has more or less split the communist parties of the world into two camps. Today, it is not only appropriate but essential to ask whether Marxism is not more likely to aggravate rather than lessen conflict between states, provided they are more or less equal in strength. It would seem at least possible that a world divided
38. "Der Sozialismus als Staatsmacht: Ein Dilemma und fUnf Berichte," in Kursbuch, 30 (Berlin, 1972).
39. Europa-Archiv (1964), Chronology, under September 2, 1964.
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up among four or five major Marxist powers would be futher removed from unity than a bourgeois system of a hundred national states held together by trade interests and also, of course, by what Marxists would call neoimperialism and neocolonialism.
In addition to these distinctions, bourgeois historiography will have to note still other features of Marxism and Marxist scholarship.
It is easy to explain the contrast between state and free Marxism because the Marxism of Marx and Engels is primarily a synthesis of bourgeois faith in progress, including an optimistic belief in expanding production, and the primitivism of the early socialists. This primitivism was based in turn on the oldest elements of human social order - tribal allegiance and village democracy - whose vestiges had survived into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with statements in Marx that represent his theory as the apotheosis of the Enlightenment, there are others that would make Marxism appear to be the very essence of Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment. 40These two elements, which can only be brought together in an intellectual structure, necessarily fall apart again as we leave the realm of the intellectual. In the last analysis, the con- cept of a classless society as a kind of global clan democracy proves to be nothing more, in Kant's terms, than a hypostatization of a regulative idea.
Bourgeois historiography is thus by no means a passive object of criticism for Marxist historiography. On the contrary, it, too, fulfills a critical function both comprehensive and fundamental in nature. It does so by refusing to accept the oversimplified image of two major and equal schools of thought standing in opposition to each other. Bourgeois and Marxist historiography are not mutually exclusive. Their relationship to each other is much more complicated than that, and within this relationship there is room for unity, disagreement, and interdependence. Such a relationship corresponds, in a somewhat different form, to the relationship between bourgeois and Marxist states. We are clearly not dealing with any mere historical sequence here, as a naive orthodoxy would have us believe. Lenin and Stalin after him were both fully aware that the "socialism" of their country was a "different" and more difficult path than that of the "advanced capitalistic states" but that it did not represent a "higher stage" of development that left the bourgeois states "behind by an entire historical epoch. " The "capitalism" of the West arose from specific historical premises. It has modified these premises, but it has not altered them completely. Indeed, it depends on them for its very existence. One of these premises was a political order based on the estates. Otto Hinze called this order the precursor of representative government in the history of the world. Another premise was the separation of church and state. Still a third was the relative autonomy of intellectual life; a fourth, the
40. MEW, XXXII, 51.
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growth of a relatively apolitical business community that was allowed to run the economy, or at least major portions of it, as though national economy were private enterprise.
From the essentially accidental and unplanned combination of these factors developed that overwhelming, world-encompassing, and - to the unsophis- ticated mind- "unnatural"force that constitutes the basic premise of all modern history and that Marxism, grossly oversimplifying, identifies as ''capitalism. " But the fact that the business community has not to this day become a political class, that it has never really ruled but has remained one faction among many and one that could be divided against itself at that - this is precisely what characterizes all the strengths and weaknesses of a social order that is the most unusual and complex in the history of the world. By contrast, the Marxist states have been and continue to be phenomena of social concentration and mobilization. They are led by a new class, a "tiny
seed," as Lenin put it,41 that means to transform and will transform everything. We could describe this class as a substitute bourgeoisie or, better yet, as a political bourgeoisie whose power is unchecked, undisguised, and publicly sanctioned. The historiography of state Marxism serves as its mouthpiece.
My considerations thus far may have created the impression that I would like to see Marxist historiography's claim to infallibility give place to that of bourgeois historiography and that I am developing a doctrinaire apology for my own society and state in imitation of the united front that Marxist historiography and the Marxist state present. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is obvious, of course, that in considering the history of its own society bourgeois historiography will not be animated by boundless indig- nation at social exploitation; and despite the recognition that some Marxist writers take of "progressive tendencies" in bourgeois society, this indignation remains the informing pathos of all Marxist historiography. The informing impulse of bourgeois historiography, on the other hand, is the need to under- stand, for this Marxist pathos is closely linked to the aspect of Marxism that most inspires the bourgeois historian's skepticism- utopian faith in the coming of a classless society and the resulting priority of political practice over the. cognitive act. Bourgeois historiography is also informed by the insight that isolated and unmitigated "exploitation" has occurred only in cer- tain historical periods, that as a rule any kind of organization or leadership will produce exploitation, and that the achievements of the "ruling classes"
therefore have to be evaluated above and beyond their relationship to any antiseptically isolated and constantly shifting body of "progressive ideas. "
"Bourgeois scholarship" is even less a Platonic and immutable entity than its Marxist counterpart. Today, for example, historians of the Federal Re- public, unlike their predecessors in the nineteenth century, work closely
41. W. I. Lenin, Werke, XXXIII (Berlin, 1966, 3rd ed. ), 428.
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together with American historians and form, in some respects, a single com- munity of scholars with them. Gerhard Lozek was not wholly arbitrary in his judgment when he spoke of NATO historians and designated Friedrich Meinecke as their precursor, but I think we can be legitimately proud of the fact that even at the height of the Cold War the corresponding term of "Warsaw-Pact historians" never appeared, to my knowledge, in any of our scholarly publications. In our present circumstances an unobjective glorifi- cation of the Bismarck government is an impossibility, and the critical atti- tudes that have long been dominant in American studies of Bismarck's Reich have now been widely accepted by German historians. The same is true to an even greater extent of current attitudes toward the Third Reich and the Fascist era.
But the difficulty and the importance of our task lies in resisting the tempta- tion merely to celebrate the break with the past or to decry the past's continu- ing influence on our present life. It is our job to accept both the break and the continuity as given and to illuminate them intellectually. No statesman, Russian or American, and no foreign historian can relieve us, as German bourgeois historians, of this obligation. We will never be able to meet it to our full satisfaction, and we will inevitably make mistakes, sometimes very grave ones. But it is precisely the difficulty of this task that makes it appealing to the mind and worthy of the mind's best efforts.
Free Marxism, with the help of its Archimedian point, has a less complex task, and we would do well to keep free Marxism constantly in view to orient ourselves by. State Marxism has before it a task comparable to ours if it is to make Stalinism and western Social Democracy subjects of serious inquiry. To do so, it will have to rid itself of those totally un-Marxian phrases it has been wont to use: the unfortunate cult of personality and the despicable treachery of corrupt working-class leaders. It is important for us to keep these parallels in mind.
IV. CONCLUSIONS -AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN IN THE "POST-COLD-WAR" PERIOD
Let me sum up my argument and draw a few final conclusions. Bourgeois and Marxist historiography are not opposites like black and white or even like black and not black. They share essential methodological similarities that justify describing them both as "scholarly. " On another level, they are divided by a difference that is essential and irreconcilable. They are related in their origins, but the fact that Marxist historiography is an offshoot of Western thought will make bourgeois historical scholarship appear to be the more original, comprehensive, and complex discipline. Both stand in peculiar and differing relationships to the societies in which they occur. An advantage of the "bourgeois" order rooted in liberal European society is evident in the
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fact that one school of Marxism belongs to this order and can only exist within it. A comparable situation has not evolved in Marxist societies. But this liberal European order is not, to cite Marx again, "frozen in immutable crystalline forms. "42Its capacity for change derives in part from the fact that it fosters relatively autonomous scholarship that calls both itself and the society in which it is based into question. The line of questioning it pursues is not absolute in intent, but it suffices for an understanding and, to a certain degree, for a justification of society.
The scholarship of state Marxism has always been up to now the scholar- ship of a hard-pressed state caught up in the arduous process of "self- assertion" and "catching up" with rival states. In this condition approxi- mating military mobilization, the serenity was lacking that is crucial for the existence of anything like autonomous scholarship. But state Marxism, like free Marxism, has always - in principle at least - clung to the universal perspective that makes Marxism of any stamp superior to a bourgeois scholar- ship that isolates itself in its own national state or limited methodology.
I am presenting these ideas at a specific time and in a specific place. I would not offer a series of lectures on the Cold War if I were not convinced that those who consider the Cold War over now are at least in some sense correct. The essential feature of the Cold War was that a special constellation of events, opinions, and actions created in the Western world a state of tension and general ideological unity comparable to those which had always been taken for granted under state Marxism. Up to a certain point in the Cold War, free Marxism fought in the front lines for the Western cause. But this tension, this new Thirty Years' War, was alien to the Western system and therefore gradually eased. This university, which was founded at the height of the Cold War and is a product of it, was to feel this change more acutely than any other institution in our society, and no other is in a more difficult situation during this period that is no longer one of war but is not yet one of peace. The following conclusions seem to me inescapable:
Free Marxism has its legitimate place in this university and in other uni- versities of the Western world. But it must realize that the very fragmentary freedom bourgeois society provides is at the same time very real in its im- perfection, and for free Marxism it is, in a much more precise and inviolable -ense than it was for the workers' movement, what Engels described as "air, light, and room to grow in. "43Free Marxism must also commit itself to a clearly defined position. It must try to be beyond both major social orders, and within the one in which it is based it must surely remain provocative, but it should not be critical only of "the other side. "
We should grant state Marxism and its adherents a voice and guest status
42. MEW, XXIII, 16. 43. Ibid. , XXXV, 270.
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at our universities, but full reciprocity is not yet possible, although it would seem justified in the abstract. A certain amount of exchange seems essential to me, but we should take up a dialogue only with those historians of the GDR or the Soviet Union whose work meets scholarly standards. The examples cited at the beginning of our discussion suggest what constitutes both accept- able and non-acceptable standards.
These views may well elicit astonishment; they will also elicit objections from many - and not just from Marxists. I understand and appreciate the great concern that weighs on many people and many scholars now as they consider the new shift in our political situation and the possible effects of that shift. There are clearly great risks involved if bourgeois and Marxist scholars, if men primarily interested in historical truth and others primarily interested in the effects of political activity, come together in this part of the city, regardless of what form their meeting takes, while in the other part of this same city there is no possibility of their meeting at all. But I think we can put our confidence in the power of thought. Thought quickly demon- strated that the polarity with which we began our considerations here does not in fact apply. And what else is thought but the human instrument by which we, as finite, historical beings, constantly redefine our relationship to history as a whole? A theory that seeks to codify this relationship for all time and for some perfect and post-historical being cannot be valid. Marxism does not propose such a theory, but one element of the tradition that forms an integral part of Marxism would have it so. Thought will alter Marxism, just as the course of history will alter the nature of Marxist states.
In the coming years, free Berlin and its Free University could assume a role every bit as important as the one they assumed during the Cold War, provided they remain alert and are not guided by naive trust. They could provide an arena in which new developments could arise and in which poli- ticians and historians of the GDR might even dare to admit- as Friedrich Engels did eighty years ago44- that history had proved them wrong in some important respects. But I do not want to create the impression here that I am out to find political dodges and subtle tactics designed to weaken the other side. What I do want to say can perhaps be best summed up as follows: The history of this century has so shaken us all, both bourgeois and Marxist historians of every conceivable variety, and so thoroughly toppled our most cherished assumptions that we would all do well to relinquish our dogmatism and join forces as thinking men.
44. Ibid. , VII, 514 and 516.
[Translated by ROBERT and RITA KIMBER]
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