Matthias Middell is a professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies and director of the Graduate Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Leipzig University for Ph.D. students, he also supervises the European MA program “Global Studies – A European Perspective”. Middell graduated from the history department of Karl Marx University in Leipzig in 1985. Pursuing graduate studies in the field of modern world history, he worked at the Moscow State University through the doctoral student exchange program and defended his dissertation in Leipzig in 1989. His research interests include the history of the French revolution and French modern history, history of science in the 19th and 20th century, the world and transnational history, cultural memory and comparative history of France and Germany. Middell belongs to a generation of French and German historians which formulated the concept of history of cultural transfer in the late 1980s and has promoted it thereafter. This generation also initiated a “cultural turn” in the structurally oriented traditional comparative history. Since 1991 Middell and Hannes Siegrist have edited the scholarly journal Comparativ, which is devoted to problems of global and comparative history. The editors of Ab Imperio addressed Matthias Middell with questions pertaining to methodology of comparative history. This interview continues the Ab Imperio’s practice of providing the readers with overviews of cutting-edge methodological debates.
The comparative approach is one of the oldest methods of historiography. Yet, in the twentieth century, comparative history has become an independent tool of historical writing and constructing the historical object. Ab Imperio questions are directed at this very tendency in the development of historical knowledge.

I. THE POLITICS OF COMPARISON

Ab Imperio: In the past decades, historians have done much to problematize and theorize the very principle according to which the objects of comparison are delimited. However, whether looking at the object of research as a self-evident given or consciously constructing it, the researcher commits a certain political act by building a taxonomy of similarities and a hierarchy of differences. What is behind the scholar’s decision to conduct a comparative analysis? Where does the added value come from if we analyze not one, but two or three objects? How can one convincingly ground the comparability of the objects of comparison?

Matthias MIDDELL: Comparison is a cultural technique we constantly use in everyday life, therefore it is only natural that it also enters historiography: first, comparisons made by historical actors themselves cannot but become objects of historical analysis, and force us to answer questions such as who compared what, at what time, for what purposes, and what were the results of this intellectual operation? This is certainly not new for historians. At the same time, historians are themselves stimulated to use a comparative method. This centrality of comparing results from the fact that everyone is confronted with and challenged by the experiences of cultural difference, and that there is a need to measure that difference both in terms of time (diachronic comparison) – in order to understand what separates us from our predecessors; and in terms of spatial distance (synchronic comparison) – in order to understand what distinguishes us from those living in the same world with us at the same time but at different places. This operation is fundamentally very naive. It translates cultural differences into a measurable system of indicators like distances from other historical periods or other world regions by significantly reducing the complexity and disarray of those differences. Thus, everyone learns at school that comparing is a very basic, not to say simple operation, which can be reduced to a schematic opposition of similarities and differences. However, no one who manages personal relationships with other people successfully would accept that measuring interpersonal differences is as easy as the usual simplistic table of similarities and differences suggests; e.g., students come to university with a strong conviction that comparing societies or states can be done in an unproblematic way. One explanation for this belief is the enormous influence of practices taken over from the social sciences, which seek to reduce complexity in order to arrive at research results that can be better controlled with relatively simple tools. In historiography, however, complexity can be minimized only to a certain extent, and in trying to do so, primarily through copying methods from the social sciences, it always risks decontextualizing its objects.
What always strikes me in this context is the wide acceptance of the often misleading term “similarities.” Marc Bloch, who devoted a long reflection to the comparative method,^[1] was well aware that objects compared over distances in time or space can never be identical, but only similar; and that the contextuality of these similarities has to be analyzed in greater detail, because it directly affects the comparative design. Things appearing similar may have undergone a process of mutual influence, and that may have led to a comparable vocabulary to describe them, but the meaning of these notions can vary enormously depending on the understanding given to it in different societies. Bloch explains this against the empirical background of the transformation of medieval forms of agriculture based on collective rights into modern forms of individual property rights, which he was familiar with from his research. What I find particularly interesting in his text, which is very often quoted as one of the fundamental inspirations for today’s comparative historiography, is the fact that immediately after claiming the advantages of comparison and after describing the two cases he has in mind (the English and the Mediterranean forms of this transformation), he comes to an interpretation based upon two insights: first, the importance of mutual influences between the cases and entities of comparison (Bloch underlines that objects of comparison without any such connection are, of course, possible but not very probable, at least if it comes to modern societies); and second, the role of historians themselves in constructing the objects of comparison.
Whether the position and the attitude historians incorporate – consciously or unconsciously – are necessarily political, as the question focuses on, or whether they imply political ideas, projects, and ambitions is harder to say. For sure, no scholar can distance him- or herself completely from the political, social, and cultural environment in which he or she is doing research. But again, this is not new and is already widely acknowledged within the discipline.
What I would like to draw your attention to, however, is the fact that Bloch’s text was made public for the first time in 1928 at the International Congress of Historians in Oslo! And I still find it striking that quite a few of the arguments made in this text, as well as in the debates that followed, reappear in current discussions on the comparative method and how to apply it. Though it is a matter of speculation as to why today’s sensitivity is much more in line with that of our predecessors before and immediately after World War I than with the arguments made during the 1950s or 1970s, I am convinced that it has something to do with the intellectual challenge accompanying the waves of globalization with which historians like Bloch or Lamprecht were confronted with at the beginning of the twentieth century, and which also troubles us. Therefore there are comparable challenges, inspirations and parallels in these debates.
Over the past decade or so in Germany we have seen an ongoing debate problematizing comparison as a sort of high road towards valuable and convincing results in historical research. This debate has been particularly intensive in Germany for two reasons.
At least one of the major camps in German historiography, the so called Historische Sozialwissenschaft (long known as the Bielefeld school, but now partly transferred to Berlin, and recently described by Jürgen Kocka as the Berlin school of social history), used its very systematic foundation in comparative approaches as an argument for its superiority over classical historicism, which was denounced as a more traditional fashion for writing history. The opposition was described in terms of analysis versus narrativity, social science based research versus the one remaining anchored in the old humanities, as well as more general explanations versus the emphasizing of single cases. The coalition with the social sciences and comparative work was meant to bestow more prestige and higher plausibility on the results of this type of historiography. And looking back at the results achieved, it has to be admitted that this approach has, indeed, inspired a lot of new research perspectives and convincing conclusions. The search for measurable indicators has encouraged the use of quantitative methods and an intensive search for empirical data in the archives. Professionalism among historians has been increased due to the introduction of a whole set of methods and standards for good research; international comparison has increasingly become a key feature of qualification for younger researchers. This development goes back to the inspiration of the French Annales school; for a very long time it was not really accepted in German historiography, but in the end it was smuggled in by various means of individual cooperation and an increasing interest in its reception in North America.
The picture would not be complete, however, without a quote from those social scientists who deplore the failure of the coalition between sociology and history. In their mind, historians incorporated methods offered by social scientists very selectively. This incomplete reception produced a number of cases of incongruence resulted from the outcomes of the borrowings not matching up some general epistemological frames. At the same time, historians realized that the transfer of approaches from social history strict sensu to a more culturally oriented historiography is not as easy as the notion of “social history with cultural extension” would suggest. Cultural phenomena are different from the corpus of data in traditional social history (e.g., income, family size, or social and geographical mobility), because they are linguistically mediated and strongly contextualized.
The second reason for the particularly heated debate about the status of comparison in German historiography is probably grounded in the specific relationship between historiography’s claim for, and work towards a post-national historical culture, and the politics of history in this country. The main question for all historiographical efforts was – for obvious reasons – the explanation of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. It invited diachronical and synchronical comparisons: How far back did an explanation of the support for the Nazis have to go, and what specific aspects of German society distinguished it from Western democracy? All the answers to these questions had an immediate impact on politics in a country that was trying to overcome its historical guilt. Of course, a normative interpretation of the course of modern history that would have allowed Germans to renounce the experience of dictatorship and war (or would at least have guaranteed that they will never again have to experience this sort of thing), is an inherent element of this intention. The contradictory element thus was that most German historians invested a lot in research looking for specificities of the German “Sonderweg” (specific path of historical development), while neglecting to a large extent the cases they used in comparison, so that comparisons very often proved what they intended to explain by taking it for granted from the very beginning. The general conviction of the public that there was a German Sonderweg and that only the Federal Republic was able to depart from it became the basis for West German historical culture. The slow erosion of this paradigm among historians from the 1980s onwards was not taken by the public as evidence for the failure of the whole program, but quite the opposite: it showed for many people that the paradigm was right and had achieved its goal of overcoming the old structural framings by leading Germany into a new democratic and post-national era.
Ironically, East German historians, much less concerned with self-criticism of German history (the GDR presented itself as the historical alternative to the German Sonderweg), followed a similar normative understanding of modern history when referring to Marx’s preference for British (and to a lesser extent for French) capitalism. It is less important for our purpose here that East and West disagreed in various fields of historical explanation. Much more important for our understanding of how they both used historical comparison is the fact that a normative idea of “good” historical development influenced the comparative conceptualization of research and narratives while at the same time it hindered truly comparative research activity combining the experience of archives in different cultural contexts. I suppose that this lack of comparative practice made theoretical reflections on comparative historiography fundamentally weak, despite the overall intensive debate – at least compared with what Marc Bloch has to tell us.
Today, we live in a world where the term globalization focuses our attention on connectivity and interdependence across boundaries of continents and cultures, and at the same time, politics tends to create new entities like the European Union, the Mercosur or NAFTA in the Americas, and the African Union, which seek to close certain areas from others and to homogenize internally. These processes invite comparison between two or more member-states. Therefore, not only the everyday experience of cultural differences, but the pressure to adjust and equalize within larger entities together require a much more intense reflection of differences and similarities. Thus, comparison and a more reflective understanding of transfer processes have become increasingly important to understand and act in the present-day world. This set of motives for comparing and aiming at a better understanding of interactions has encouraged a new wave of comparative historiography to go far beyond the limits of the comparative approaches of the 1950s or 1970s.

AI: How does a researcher position his or her own system of values vis-а-vis the objects of research? Can one single out “the universal and the particular” in different cultural and social phenomena without recourse to a clear and definite concept of “norm,” which would obviously be shaped by the researcher’s cultural milieu?

MM: As I said before, there is, of course, a great danger for normative concepts to influence careful comparative work from the very beginning. Today, we discuss this not only in the context of inter-European comparisons, but also with respect to the postcolonial condition. On the other hand, practice among historians is beginning to change fundamentally. After the first wave of professionalization in the late nineteenth century, and the second wave of professionalization (between the 1920s and the 1960s) with its emphasis on reflected data collection and new methods of interpretation in frameworks often borrowed from the social sciences, including Marxism, we are now experiencing a third period of professionalization that is characterized by an ongoing acceptance of cultural plurality of research groups and academic community, and by transnational careers, all influencing one another. This relaxes the relationship between the historian and his or her cultural milieu – not all over the world at the same time and in the same way, but as a norm for good historical work it is becoming more and more obvious that parochialism is no longer acceptable. We are learning that thinking the world in terms of “the universal and the particular” may lead us to research designs that do not fit when applied to archival material. Instead, we have to learn to interpret a rapidly increasing number of connections between different parts of the world, where historical actors play today as they played in former times with different horizons of belonging (called “jeux d’échelles” by the French historian Jacques Revel) matching their experiences with globalization, instead of being prisoners of a simple opposition of the global and the local. Historical research has shown that these jeux d’échelles were at work even in the nineteenth century and are not a totally new technique, even if they become more and more complicated at present by the delimitation of communication and by the number of spatial dimensions to be tackled.
This partly new situation encourages historians to develop transnational research practices, and these practices invite them to overcome old normative patterns of comparison. To mention only one example: those looking from a Western perspective for forms of civil society in India or Russia will probably discover a lot of empirical material when really going to the archives, and when entering an intensive debate with their colleagues there. Given this case, they will discover something different from what they have seen at home (or what they imagine as a norm for their own society). That may then lead to a new, enlarged concept of civil society or to a strong criticism of the Eurocentric origins of that concept, but at the same time they will learn that this concept may have its importance for people in India or elsewhere to develop a critical perspective on their own society. Comparing goes hand in hand with analyzing mutual influences.

AI: In your opinion, to what extent is the development of comparative studies in Europe connected to academic politics (the change of generations and generational paradigms), or to the circumstances external with regards to the research process (united Europe project, globalization, etc)? In general, how do you evaluate the presence of “politics” as a stimulating factor in the development of the comparative historical method?

MM: It has been a centuries-old discussion to what extent historiography is related to the political processes of constructions of belonging and identity. The spectrum of answers ranges from those emphasizing the scientifically controlled opposition to all political aspirations (often in the form of an emphasis on academic autonomy and freedom), to those openly declaring their intention to influence collective identification. As a historian of historiography I have tried to analyze in greater detail the different forms of “balances” between political intentions and intra-professional factors influencing the products of historians, as well as their relation to the products of other actors in the field of historical representations. A simple answer to your question does not seem to be appropriate here. The system in which the different factors play their role is much more complicated. As a point of departure for such an analysis I would prefer to concentrate on the demands by society for historical explanation undermining old forms of belonging and proposing new ones. From there, one moves forward to those trying to provide solutions to this demand, whose ranks include not only historians, but politicians and other representatives of the public (like the semi-professionals in the media dealing with history, architects, artists, or those using historical references for purposes of publicity). These ranks will also include high school teachers who mediate between their students and a diffuse “state of the art”that often consist of more or less well-remembered lessons from their years at university, the points of reference in curricula, and the historical aspects in present-day politics. Within this system, historians have a strong position with their professional authority and the public belief in scientism, but, of course, they are not the only ones defining the agenda. In a current project on “Writing the Nation in Europe,” funded by the European Science Foundation, we are trying to show that the activity of European historians cannot be reduced to a simple translation of political messages into historiographical illustration, but that they produce (and have produced for a long time) conflicting narratives. The decision of whether there is master narrative in a society or whether there exists a plurality of different narratives is not made by historians alone. Of course, there are conflicts within the profession – which has both a social and an intellectual dimension – and there is an ongoing competition for access to the media in order to give one’s own narrative more voice and plausibility; but I cannot see any Praeceptor Germaniae (or for any other countries) who would be able to impose his or her interpretation on society if he or she did not respond to the demand for a historical explanation. That good historical work could also wake this demand is another aspect not to be underestimated, and it makes innovation worthwhile; but here again: it will only have a chance if there is a considerably large social group or adequate cultural milieu to support the new interpretation.
For a very long time, the division of Europe into Eastern and Western parts has influenced comparative work a great deal by concentrating narratives and research strategies on this opposition. But even this long-lasting framing of historical interpretations has become decentered over the past two decades – first by those criticizing the invention of the Balkans or Eastern Europe; and second, by those looking for new framings of transnational, intercultural, and eventually global histories.
Here again, plurality as the signature of the new phase in historiography helps us to overcome established stereotypes.

II. THE PROBLEMS OF METHOD

AI: In order to minimize the extra-scholarly component of comparative studies, historians develop complex methodological tools and work on ways to compensate for the element of arbitrariness in comparing the a priori unique phenomena. How can a scholar achieve a distance from the objects of research, let alone “objectivity?”

MM: I am not sure whether all historians would agree with the idea of minimizing the relationship between their research and its political context. After all, social and political responsibility together with accountability is still acknowledged by some scholars as deeply linked to academic research. Moreover some would even argue that a lot of inspiration can be found from the extra-scholarly component. But, of course, we have to assure that, first of all, this connection of research and its socio-political context becomes as explicit as possible in order to be controllable by other academics and by the public. Instead of trying to overcome all influences by the political circumstances under which we write and achieve a somewhat illusionary “objectivity,” it might be preferable that reflexivity increases, by both the author and the public, in order to enable all of us to participate competently in the negotiation of new interpretations of the past. I would suggest that comparing two things should no longer be in itself proof of a better form of historical understanding, but it should be questioned at the very beginning of those studies why exactly this or that design was chosen.
A second aspect becomes important from the turn towards modern history, mainly as a history of interaction and connectness, shared experiences, and mutual constitution that we have seen operated over the past decade. Comparison no longer should be done without emphasizing the cultural connections or transfers between the two entities under comparison.

AI: How can one achieve a comparable scale for comparison, and where can one put the border while singling out the objects for comparison in different cultural, social, political, and economic contexts? (E.g.: Could two scholars be compared regardless of the specifics of local academic institutions and traditions; two professions regardless of the context of economic systems and social relations; two parties regardless of the systems of state and government?)

MM: If we take the idea of different spatial horizons of belonging and acting as a valuable point of departure, the conclusion will be that there is no single scale for comparisons we can describe as objectively given. Different actors will frame there activities differently, and therefore comparison first of all has to analyze what framing is, which is intriguing both for the question under research and for the historical actors central to that question. That may lead to asymmetric comparisons, because actors who are central in that respect in two or more societies, will not prefer the same spatial framing following the different types of organization of their societies or the different possibilities to act in those contexts. If we take the spatial turn in the humanities seriously, we will have to accept that frames for individual and collective action are always constructed, including spatial frames. The same holds true for all other aspects of the framing: institutions might have different functions, and forms of organization that look similar might have totally different marges de manoeuvre. Thus, comparison looks much more difficult to carry out than following the simplistic scheme of similarities and differences.

AI: How can we combine the structural synchronic analysis of the comparative approach with the diachronic logic of studying each particular phenomenon? In other words, how might it be possible to synchronize in time two phenomena which are parallel dynamic processes developing along their own trajectories?

MM: Here again, the concept of cultural transfer will help considerably in emphasizing the mutual diachronic influences. No transfer is isolated; rather, it refers to former mutual interactions and perceptions of the “Other”. Studies of transfer show not only the process of intermediating and perception, but also the transformation of the appropriated cultural element into something that looks like an original element of the perceiving culture. Cultural transfer is at work all the time. Without respecting this dimension of interaction between two or more compared phenomena we decontextualize to an extent that will falsify the results of comparison. Such decontextualization may be appropriate for pragmatic reasons during one single stage of research, but it cannot be the final point of analysis.

AI: How can studies of culture complicate or enrich comparative history? Is it necessary to return to the clear epistemological principles of the Enlightenment to designate a point of departure, a common level, to comparatively study culture?

MM: The problem in your question seems to me to be that it assumes that we have to decide whether culture forms a smaller or larger portion of history that should be analyzed separately, or whether there is any history that is not cultural history (as many authors argue after the recent “cultural turn,” and as so many books on economic history as cultural history or in new political history, etc., try to demonstrate). While I would argue that cultures are not objectively given, they do constitute one another by interaction and reciprocal reflexion. Culture, in my mind, is not another dimension to be added to historical analysis (by using different methods from the study of those dimensions not “infected” by culture), but it is the very essence of history; therefore we have to overcome that understanding and the use of our methods that are not compatible with the analysis of the dimension of cultural activity.

AI: What appear to you as the most important advantages and disadvantages of the concept of cultural transfer, and to what extent is this concept capable of solving the problem of cultural relativism and mutual intranslatability of historical experiences?

MM: To my understanding there have been many advantages of this concept in the arena for some twenty years now. It has turned down the old concept of the study of influences, which was connected with the image of closed (e.g., essentialized) cultural entities and the idea of stronger cultures influencing weaker ones (or a superior society dominating an inferior one by its cultural influence, as it was conceived in the so-called “Kulturraumgefälle”). While this “influentology” leads immediately to the strange idea of false perception, the concept of cultural transfers does not know any of these normative assumptions, but gives priority to the context of perception. All studies of cultural transfers begin with the motivation within a culture starting the process of transfer by being interested in learning, forced or voluntarily, from others. This interest and motivation may be represented by individuals or institutions, but what is important to me in this respect is the fact that we first look at those entering into contact and provoking interaction, for whatever reason. The second step then looks at the intermediates; and here a wide spectrum of people, media, and channels of communication between two or more societies and cultures offers numerous possibilities for good research in the field of a social history of culture. Good examples are provided by those studying small communities of emigrants, the world of goods, merchants and trading practices, or the scene of publishers, as well as by those establishing huge databases allowing us to measure the impact that translations and other forms of intellectual importation (notions, symbols, monuments, etc.) have on perceiving culture. The third step then is devoted to the analysis of how the perceiving culture deals with its newly acquired cultural elements – recontextualizing them after a process of decontextualization by intermediates.
This kind of study helps us to overcome the difficulties you mention in your question, i.e. a simple confrontation of two cultures and the assumption that they are “objectively” intranslatable. Instead of falling into that trap, cultural transfer studies will allow us to measure to what extent historical actors have been able (and willing!) to translate elements from other cultures into their own. This kind of concrete analysis of interaction gives way to the impression that modernity is a product of the interconnectedness that societies face when negotiating their transformation in the modern era. This idea may be generalized as a “European” feature of being increasingly interested in the rest of the world, and of intensifying imports and exports in order to extract profit for its own development from the interaction with other regions of the world. It seems to me, actually, that this a very interesting and largely unsolved problem; it forces us to ask whether this is something that distinguishes the different modernities, and is there a point of no return where more or less all societies in the world have had to accept this as the new global condition. The other pattern of explanation would be that multiple modernities probably have different ways of learning from other cultures. Whatever the result of this interesting and ongoing debate might be, mutual interest in the translation of intellectual achievements of others has become a driving force and the major aspect of the global condition we are experiencing now.

III. PERSPECTIVES

AI: Do you see any added research value in studying the complex and composite space of empires through the comparative logic, especially if compared to comparative studies of national polities? If so, can you offer, in general terms, recommendations or even a research program of comparative analysis “within the empires”? What is your take on attempts to pursue comparisons between different empires? What do you consider a promising direction of research in this respect?

MM: To some extent the actual debate on empires strikes me in its ambiguity. I would distinguish at least three dimensions within this debate. The first and most obvious one is about historical metaphors; its protagonists try to figure out if and to what extent today US foreign policy is comparable to former imperial approaches. Some prefer the comparison with Ancient Rome and underline the overstretch of imperial power as experience to be respected, while others compare the United States to the British Empire and offer their historical conclusions on the historicity of all imperialisms. Hardt and Negri use the term “Empire” in a different way, but also in a more metaphoric one. I would not criticize that; I can understand the political motivation and also the background (at least for some of the authors) in former discussions about imperialism. But using metaphors is not comparing in the strict scientific sense; and we need the distinction between a political manifest in historical terms and a truly historical research. Of course the latter will not produce “objective truth,” but with its more methodologically controlled approaches it offers us at least the possibility to formulate a critique towards those using the historical material only for their political messages.
The second dimension is less concerned with commenting on today’s politics in historical terms; and here authors reopen the (long neglected) chapter of the history of empires by asking if the traditional narrative sequence “from empire to nation-state” is really convincing, and to what extent those states we are used to perceiving as classical nation-states also have their imperial(ist) element. (I have in mind the especially exciting study by Christophe Charles on France, Germany and the Habsburg Empire between 1870 and the 1940.) The postcolonial motive of an “empire that strikes back” has opened a lot of doors to a fruitful research agenda. And the turn within British imperial historiography stating that England and Great Britain are deeply characterized by the imperial past – to the point that one has to call them truly imperial societies – invites for comparison with other societies in continental Europe and overseas. It questions whether it is only British history that is so much influenced by colonial experience and imperial attitudes, and not others as well. As historians, we all can only profit from this renaissance of imperial history – assuming that we have learned our lessons from the confrontation with postcolonialism. To me, modern imperial history is among those alternatives for the writing of national history (together with global, European, and regional history) that we owe today’s plurality in historical approaches. It helps us to de-hierarchisize a spatial order introduced by those elites supporting the nationalization of societies since the late nineteenth century. It helps to challenge an attitude which is called methodological nationalism and which mechanism is based on bringing all spatial references into a system that privileges nation.
Therefore a third dimension of the discussion about empires strikes me as the most promising. Instead of writing a Whig-history of the nation-state by describing the imperial past as the pre-modern “Other”, the question here is, what might be the result from the synchronic existence of societies organizing space and social order differently? Such a co-existence of nation-states, empires, supranational organizations, and transnational networks (to mention only a few of those types described in greater detail by recent scholarship) is the result of permanent de- and re-territorialization processes. Expanding into new markets and defending them against competitors; social integration by insisting on culturally defined borders and intensive learning from other societies as a condition for successful participation in globalization; the search for control of all flows by territorialization and the increasing dependency on migration and interaction with other societies – all these dialectics disturb the time-stable spatial units. People have pondered the effectiveness of spatial organization of societies in different time and with different criteria of effectiveness. This gives us rich material for comparison: empires with empires, but also empires with nation-states and the relation of both to transnational flows. It seems to me that one of the most fascinating topics is to study this historically in greater details – inspired by ongoing debates about the same problem for our times.

IV. PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

AI: We would like to inquire about your personal experience of comparative studies, at the level of “ego-histoire.” You studied in the GDR and Soviet Union, and then integrated into the academic world of unified Germany. From the point of view of personal experience, what were the differences between the professional historical corporations of the USSR and GDR in the 1980s, between “socialist modernity” and “western” scholarship? To what extent, do you think, has your personal experience made you more open to professional self-reflection as a comparativist?

MM: First of all, I have to confess that I profited less from the general situation in East German historiography (I tried to give a nuanced picture of its overall development in the last part of my book about writing world history in Germany from the 1890s to the 1990s^[2]); but I did benefit from meeting a number of excellent academics during my studies and the years as a PhD student at Leipzig. People like Walter Markov,^[3] and Manfred Kossok,^[4] offered excellent training in the modern history of Western Europe and Latin America. Others introduced us to the history of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and non-Western history within a world history approach. Those scholars were not only unusually open-minded, but they encouraged us to become critical intellectuals. They clearly oriented themselves to international standards in historiography and attempted for their part to influence the international debates in general historical interpretations and methodology, instead of confining themselves to exercising academic power behind the iron curtain. Thus, as students, we learned from the very beginning of our studies that standards for good scholarship are not set by the superiority of ideology or the use of a single method, but that you always have to adapt the chosen methodological tools (including comparison) to the problem under research, and that you have to look for the best books in the field as benchmarks for your own effort, even if you face restrictions in access to the latest publications, to interesting conferences, or archives you may need. I cannot say that this kind of training was very common in GDR historiography, but it was possible to get such training in this country even under the conditions of a strict and politically controlled system, due to the fact that international recognition was an asset for the dominant party almost as much as gaining control over society. I am very grateful for that experience. Of course, we all became increasingly anxious about the restrictions in access to the necessary material for an international competition we felt prepared for. That was one of the reasons for my six-month stay in Moscow in 1987. While the leading scholars in my field of research, the history of the French Revolution, came to Leipzig from France, the US, West Germany or even China to give lectures and to discuss with us first drafts of our research papers, the only one we had a chance to visit ourselves was Anatolij Ado, an eminent specialist in the history of early modern peasant revolts, from Moscow State University. His disciples in Moscow, whom I met during my research trip to the Soviet capital, explored the much better possibilities for source-grounded research in archives and libraries, for the study of French nobles, leftist movements in France, and other topics. Thus, I joined them for half a year on their way to the INION (the special library for publications from foreign countries) and the Lenin State Library, as well as to the reading room of the archives of the Communist Party, which was the depository of the papers of “my” French emigrants from the late eighteenth century, and which I used for a thesis on the formation of the French counter-revolution during the years between 1788 and 1792.
Of course, the early reform years of Gorbachev were also very interesting and stimulating for comparisons with the situation in the later years of the GDR, where the Communist Party declared itself immune against the bacillus of reform. Both the historical analysis of revolutions and the processes of ongoing social transformation invited comparative reflection; and at the same time, the climate within a small group of internationally oriented scholars seemed to be so similar, whereas the general situation of the historiographies seemed much more difficult to compare. This twofold experience invited much more caution in using comparisons.
From the background of my academic socialization I was convinced that comparison guaranteed a better historical understanding. I came from an institute which had started a massive research project on the comparison of decolonization processes in the 1950s, and had enlarged its agenda to a systematic comparison of revolutions in modern times from the fifteenth to the twentieth century in the late 1960s. While we learned a lot about the connections between this agenda and the Dobb-Sweezy debate,^[5] or Robert Brenner’s efforts to summarize recent research into the transformation of the agrarian societies,^[6] we were also confronted with the criticism of a large-scale structuralist comparison of political processes by Theda Skocpol or Charles Tilly. Albert Soboul’s skepticism about a comparative approach in analyzing the social and political history of the French Revolution influenced us at the same time as Michel Vovelle’s turn to a more cultural interpretation of 1789 and the difficulties resulting from that new attempt for the traditional comparative approach. But what struck me most in this respect was the recurring confrontation to the Eurocentric perspectives (including Marxist ones) by scholars dealing with Latin America and Africa. The institute in Leipzig was one of the very few at that time that discussed the transformation towards modernity, not only by intra-European comparisons or the one with North Atlantic, but with a strong emphasis on “North-South” comparisons. It seems to me that this approach helped a lot to reduce the Eurocentric perspective you can find in Marx’s Capital as well as in Max Weber. It came – at least at that time – less from a theoretical meeting with postcolonial thinkers than from the practice of the scholars involved. (e.g., in the 1980s the University of Leipzig supported Leftist intellectuals from Chile through discussing the history of Latin America in exile and exploring the possibilities of a regime change in their home country by offering them an institutional basis for their research.)
Meetings with people doing research on other world regions also influenced a locus classicus of European history like the revolution of 1789. At that time the research on the French revolution was shaped by the world-wide concert of the bicentenary of the fall of the Bastille. To mention just three elements of a new interpretation that has increasingly gained attention in the field of specialists, and which also has something to say on how to do a comparative study of history:

a) The exceptionality of the French Revolution compared to other revolutionary or reform processes in modern times has led to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a model revolution and that all normative approaches in the comparative history of revolutions will miss the point. To some extent this first conclusion looks like a roll-back towards old fashioned historicism, however it was not the result of the study of France alone but the outcome of a comparative analysis.
b) This resulted in a more positive attitude to reforms as an alternative to revolutions (for a long time seen in a very negative light by Marxist historiography, and emphasized as a way of avoiding revolutions only by conservative thinkers). It opened people’s minds for a calculation not only of the gains of a revolution but also for its cost – violence, destruction of all forms of former social coherence, etc. The somewhat heretical statement (at least from a traditional Marxist view of revolutions as “the locomotives of world history”) was about reform as the usual way of social transformation (and this is the important extension in this argument), once a point of no return for new socio-economic and cultural patterns had been achieved by (often very violent) revolutionary processes.
c) At the same time, revolutions like that of 1789 influenced the following socio-cultural transformations for a long time, as well as the world wide spectrum of symbols used for the description of ongoing social changes and the aspiration to express them in the future. But at the same time, those revolutions forming a breakthrough at that point of no return are not only the center of influences spread all over the world, but at the same time moments in history where messages from other parts of the world are perceived with particular sensitivity – the relationship between the Haitian revolution and the transformation in the metropole can be taken as one of the most striking examples, and the same holds true for the dialogue between the Americans (first from the North but later on, in Bolivar’s time, also from the South) and for the French Revolution.

I could add a number of other examples, but what I would like to explain here is that comparative history became increasingly nuanced right in the 1980s, and international historiographical debates played an important role in this process – the French Revolution was confirmed as a field of special fecundity for methodological questions. Comparative history opened towards the study of cultural transfers and rediscovered Bloch’s statement about the mutual influences (or even mutual constitution) of compared objects, while the cultural turn and the postmodern challenge invited scholars to rethink their own role in the constitution of the objects under research. No doubt, the late 1980s became the moment where the “objectivity question” (Peter Novick) was raised more and more frequently. The ongoing erosion of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm and the explosion of its political credibility resulting in the revolution of 1989 met with a process that was not restricted to Eastern European historiographies. Probably, as Reinhart Koselleck has argued sometimes, the sensitivity for the weaknesses of former concepts is higher among those coming under public criticism.
At the same time, the first phase of German unification (and of confrontation of historians coming from both sides of the wall) was a high-water mark of comparison: almost everyone felt drawn to make comparisons (comparing old images and new realities, comparing Eastern circumstances with Western norms, etc.). The integration into the new academic elite was a result of comparing competences learned under the conditions of an old regime with the needs of a post-revolutionary society. The clash between the more normative ways of comparing and the flexibility gained during the methodological debates of the 1980s became obvious. It may well be that this open contradiction made some East Germans more attentive to innovative approaches as proposed in other historiographies, like the concept of research into cultural transfers as advocated by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner since 1985. It seems to me a possible explanation for the fact that this new idea first gained resonance among East German historians while it was very critically perceived by comparativists in the West during the early 1990s. But at the same time Espagne and Werner, whose concept in its first descriptions and applications to concrete historical objects was somehow related to an analysis of mutual influences among nation-states and nationalized societies, led to an opening towards cooperation with East German historians by reflecting the role of the regional, as it was shown in the first conferences on Saxon-French relationships since the seventeenth century. From here, it was only a small step to the theoretical conclusion that space is not a given in comparison or transfer studies, but that space matters on the one hand, and that space is the product of social activities (spatialization) on the other. Here again, the East German condition, where various actors had been searching very actively for the right spatial framing of their efforts – playing with all the possibilities from the local to the not-very-well-defined regional, depending on how far back you go in looking for the “right” region, to the “former-GDR,” coming to the new national (federal) dimension and the European one, not to mention the increasing discourse on globalization – was more disposed to understand that space is not a container for social change, but an active factor in these processes.
I would not overemphasize the role of origin of historians, I guess with the increasing importance of transnational practices we become more and more influenced by cross-cultural experiences. But the post-revolutionary decade in East Germany (and the same holds true for other post-revolutionary or post-reform situations too) was an invitation to reflect in more depth on the relationship between everyday experiences and the methodology we use in writing history.