Historiographies in Dialogue

Luiz Estevam de Oliveira Fernandes, Luísa Rauter Pereira & Sérgio da Mata1

Introduction: Historiographies in Dialogue

In the second half of the 19th century, faced with the extraordinary conquests made by the experimental sciences, the strategy adopted by the humanities to legitimize themselves as systematic forms of knowledge was to insist on their own “singularity”. In spite of the fact that this important effort directed at dif-ferentiation led to some excesses, it cannot be denied that in the humanities, unlike the hard sciences, the use of adjectivation that obeys the criteria of be-longing to a national or linguistic community is quite common. Thus, if on the one hand a Brazilian physics does not exist, nobody can deny that a Brazilian historiography does; one that answers specific questions posed by the society that produces it; a historiography that mirrors its society’s own thought style and history.

As a result, it becomes legitimate to inquire into the dynamics of the rela-tionships which over time different historiographic traditions establish with one another. One gets the impression that what, thirty years ago, Carlo Gin-zburg dubbed as “unequal exchange” in the historiographic market of ideas is more the rule than the exception. Not that we would defend here a kind of analogue of the dependency theory or seek for an “authentic” Brazilian writing of history. Romanticism had its period in the history of historiography and it is not appropriate to wish to revive it in today’s conditions. The exchange regime that Ginzburg refers to may be unequal, but appropriation almost al-ways implies a process of translation, of creative reconfiguration. That is true for Brazil and also for the European historiographies. None of them can be considered entirely autochthonous or completely self- contained. All of them at one time or another in their development mutually stimulated and enriched one another.

What we call the historical science constitutes itself at this crossroads of local knowledge and investigative protocols recognized by an international commu-nity of researchers; between the Sitz im Leben that presides over the formulation

1 Professors in the History Department of the University of Ouro Preto and members of the History of Historiography and Modernity Research Group (NEHM- UFOP).

10 Luiz Estevam de Oliveira Fernandes, Luísa Rauter Pereira & Sérgio da Mata

of an historical question and the methodic innovations, not uncommonly origi-nated in entirely different contexts, that make it possible to answer it.

It would be ingenuous, to say the least, to believe that the dialogues among different historiographic communities come into being spontaneously or idi-osyncratically. The choice of intellectual partners obeys different criteria such as the existence of previously established cultural links, elective affinities of all sorts (linguistic, and even ideological), reasons of prestige, and eventually, for reasons of State. Needless to say those relations also have their own history; they become institutionalized and acquire stability by means of circles of disciples, of the constant translation and dissemination of works, of the joint holding of scientific events and common research programs, of the greater or lesser social capital acquired at their cost and of their capacity to propel the emergence of new, innovative investigations. Such relations are liable to suddenly themselves in crises in the light of the sudden ascension of other historiographic paradigms or competing traditions – because it is clear that nothing is more inconvenient to the scholar of the past than to feel himself part of the past of his own dis cipline. It could perhaps be said that the vanishing point of this process, insofar as a com-munity of historians attains its majority from the intellectual standpoint, is the gradual pluralization of references, traditions, “paradigms”.

In that sense the history of the relations between Brazilian historiography and German historiography has a few surprises in store for us and it is a pity that it has not been considered worthy of detailed investigation in either of the countries. We will limit ourselves here to some brief observations in that regard, but which, nevertheless, justify the fact that in its 2013 edition, the Brazilian National Symposium on History and Historiography dedicated it-self to debating the theme “Theory of History and History of Historiography: Brazil- Germany Dialogues” (Teoria da História e História da Historiografia: Diálogos Brasil- Alemanha).

It is well known that German historical thinking never actually threatened the preeminence of the French intellectual tradition in Brazil. In 1882, Tobias Barreto remarked that “among us, philosophy and science continue to be a kind of clothing made in Paris”, a diagnosis reaffirmed by Caio Prado Junior half a century later: “Everything written in Brazil in the last quarter of the 18th century, which was when something actually began to be written among us, bears the stamp of French thinking”.2

2 Caio Prado Junior. Formação do Brasil contemporâneo. São Paulo: Brasiliense/Publi-folha, 2000, p. 385.

Introduction: Historiographies in Dialogue 11

While French ascendency cannot be denied, the influences from beyond the Rhine have never been completely absent. Beginning with the programmatic es-say written by the naturalist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794- 1868), which became known in Brazil with the title “How the History of Brazil should be written” (The original was less normative in its pretensions and bore the title Bemerkungen über die Verfassung einer Geschichte Brasiliens “Notes for writing a history of Brazil”). The significance of Von Martius’s essay has already been the object of an ample discussion among the Brazilian specialists and its impor-tance has been widely recognized by classic figures of Brazilian historiography like Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Silvio Romero and Capistrano de Abreu. Von Martius was the first to systematize the thesis that the great civilizational originality of Brazil lies in the synthesis of three great ethnic and cultural trunks – the European, the Indigenous and the African.

Naturally, his Notes for writing a History of Brazil did not encounter the same resonance among those in Germany who took an interest in the trajectory of the young Latin American nation. At the end of the 1820s, guided by entirely different premises, Eduard Lebrecht’s Geschichte von Brasilien (1827) and Ernst Hermann Münch’s Geschichte von Brasilien (1829- 1829) appeared. Both books were part of large collections of universal history and can be classified as popu-lar historiography.3 They narrate the discovery of Brazil, the construction of the administrative apparatus, the foreign invasions and, of course, the arrival of the royal family and the process of independence. What struck Lebrecht and Münch most as being our outstandingly unique feature was not so much the ethnic- cultural hybridization as Brazil’s maintenance of its territorial unity. In spite of that, they were still careful to make the ethnographic registrations that were so typical of the late enlightenment’s historiography in Germany.4 Those histories of Brazil do not begin with the arrival of the Portuguese but rather with a care-ful description of the indigenous tribes. The famous quilombo of Palmares, a huge community of escaped slaves in what is today the state of Alagoas, was also granted generous space in Lebrecht and Münch’s books.

In the second half of the 19th century, the kind of valuation that is the prem-ise of all historical interest had been displaced. That can be shown by considering the first great history of Brazil to be published in Germany, the one by Heinrich Handelmann. In the eyes of Germans, Brazil had become a phenomenon of political

3 Cf. Martin Nissen. Populäre Geschichtsschreibung. Historiker, Verleger und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit (1848- 1900). Köln: Böhlau, 2009, p. 23.

4 André de Melo Araújo. Weltgeschichte in Göttigen. Eine Studie über das spätaufklärer-ische universalhistorische Denken, 1756- 1815. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013, p. 70.


continuity in a Latin America that had almost entirely switched over to the Republi-can form of government. However, there was another reason that made it the target of interest: reports of the degrading conditions that many German immigrants in Brazil lived and worked in were beginning to multiply to the extent that, in 1859, the Prussian government prohibited the display of any kind of publicity in its territory of companies intermediating migration to Brazil. It is therefore not surprising that Handelmann, a professor at the University of Kiel, had dedicated the entire last sec-tion of his work to the perspectives of the German colonization. In spite of not hav-ing enjoyed the same prestige as his compatriot Von Martius, his references made their mark here. In his well known manual of Brazilian history of 1900, João Ribeiro admitted that he had partially based himself on “Handelmann’s excellent work”.5 Translated and published by the Review of the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute at the beginning of the 1930s, the Geschichte von Brasilien was to enjoy a long life, especially in the German Institutes of Latin American History where it was widely used as a manual up until the end of the 1990s.6

Germany’s geo- political ascension after the end of the 1870 war and the for-mation of the Reich had their cultural implications in Europe and beyond. As Estevão de Resende Martins points out in his contribution to this volume, the growing prestige of “German science” was first mirrored in Brazil by the Recife School. With the exception of Tobias Barreto, it is likely that not one member of that group could rightly be typified as a Teutophile in the strict sense. Neverthe-less there was a clear affinity in regard to German philosophical and historical thinking at the end of the 19th century. Learning German had by then be came the order of the day, a necessity and a criterion of distinction. The authors be-ing read were Savigny, Strauss, Ranke, Jhering, Mommsen, Schmoller, Ratzel, Wundt, and even Max Müller – whom Silvio Romero, author of the fist great history of Brazilian literature referred to as one of his masters.7

5 João Ribeiro. História do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Cruz Coutinho, 1900, p. 316. On Handelmann, cf. Renata Pistilli Eberhard. 150 anos da História do Brasil de Heinrich Gottfried Handelmann – algumas considerações sobre o autor e sua obra. Staden Jahrbuch, v. 58, p. 81- 102, 2011.

6 New German syntheses of the history of Brazil would only appear at the turn of the millennium: Walther Benecker / Horst Pietschmann / Rüdiger Zoller. Eine kleine Geschichte Brasiliens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000; Stefan Rinke/ Frederik Schulze. Kleine Geschichte Brasiliens. München: C. H. Beck, 2013. This last- mentioned book offers a very useful historiographic balance in its final pages.

7 Silvio Romero. Zéverissimações ineptas da crítica, repulsas e desabafos. Porto: Officinas do Commércio do Porto, 1909, p. 126.


A recurring feature of the reception of German historical- social thinking in Brazil was (and perhaps still is) the tendency to obliteration of the fundamen-tal distinctions and of the theoretical antagonisms that existed in the intellec-tual context of origin. The profound theoretical incompatibility between the hermeneutical- critical tradition on one hand and positivism or social Darwin-ism on the other was either not apprehended or underscored by our scholars or else it was simply silenced. It was not unusual to evoke, in one and the same paragraph, a representative of the historicist tradition and another of the social biologism so much in vogue at the time. The great Germans scholars were bonnes à penser and that was what mattered most.8 That eclecticism was already present in the works of Tobias Barreto, Silvio Romero, João Ribeiro and Capistrano de Abreu before it became transformed into a program re- baptized as cannibalism by the Modernist Movement.

The first truly important German historical monograph on Brazil only ap-peared in 1921. Its author, Heidelberg University professor Hermann Wätjen, had become interested in the period of Dutch colonial domination of the Brazil-ian northeast. Wätjen studied under Hermann Onken, an exponent of German liberal historiography who had kept up close relations with Friedrich Gundolf, Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber. After a prolonged period researching Dutch archives, in June 1914, Wätjen embarked on a trip to Brazil visiting Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife. On returning to Germany he was surprised by the outbreak of the First World War. He was arrested by the English and imprisoned for almost four years. The impressive story of how he wrote his work Das hol-ländische Kolonialreich in Brasilien (On the Dutch Colonial Empire in Brazil) which was done during his imprisonment in England, is in no way inferior to the story of Henry Pirenne’s Histoire de l’Europe written during the same period and in similar circumstances in Germany. In his introduction Wätjen explains that he had intended to produce a brief history of Brazil, but that never actually happened.9

8 It is not intended here to ignore the existing nuances or the reformulations which an author’s thinking may undergo with the passage of time. If in the 1870s Capistrano de Abreu occupied himself with Taine and Buckle and thought that sociology would be the salvation of history, his Capítulos da história colonial (1907) reveal his use of a completely different theoretical reference framework. Cf. Rebeca Gontijo. O velho vaqueano. Capitrano de Abreu (1853- 1927): memória, historiografia e escrita de si. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2013, p. 274- 320.

9 Hermann Wätjen. O domínio collonial holandez no Brasil. Um capítulo da história colonial do século XVII. São Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional, 1938, p. 20.


The 1930s decade was marked by the production of great interpretive essays on Brazil.10 It is no exaggeration to say that such a notable effort was largely promoted on the basis of categories and perspectives to be found in the works of German authors. The advent of historical materialism in Brazilian historiogra-phy was visible in Caio Prado Junior’s work Evolução política do Brasil; in Franz Boas and Rüdiger Bilden sustentation of an inverted version of the perspective of miscegenation proposed in Gilberto Freyre’s Casa Grande & Senzala, and in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s ponderings on the Raízes do Brasil in the light of the thinking of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler.11

The reception of the Spengelerian morphology of history in Latin America in the 1930s and 1940s was outstanding and it influenced Argentinean soci-ologist Ernesto Quesada and even the young Jorge Luis Borges.12 In 1933 the integralist militant Aben- Attar Neto founded a “Oswald Spengler Center” in Rio de Janeiro and Spengler’s death, three years later, was widely reported by the Brazilian national press.13 With the advent of the Second World War and the German catastrophe, Spengler’s impressionism and Caesaristic tendencies became inconvenient and he was quickly abandoned as a literary canon. The same cannot be said of Max Weber, whose work continued to be held important by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and José Honório Rodrigues, two of the founding fathers of contemporary Brazilian historiography.

The times when the German language was cultivated among our historians was left behind. From the 1950s on, contact between the two historiographic traditions was so slight that it practically disappeared. The situation in the so-cial sciences, however, was completely different. There Gilberto Freyre and

10 Cf. Fernando Nicolazzi. Um estilo de história. A viagem, a memória, o ensaio: sobre Casa- Grande & senzala e a representação do passado. São Paulo: Unesp, 2011.

11 Ricardo Benzaquem de Araújo. Guerra e paz: Casa- Grande e Senzala e a obra de Gil-berto Freyre nos anos 30. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1994; Robert Wegner. A conquista do oeste: a fronteira na obra de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2000; Maria Pallares-Burke. O triunfo do fracasso: Rüdiger Bilden, o amigo esquecido de Gilberto Freyre. São Paulo: UNESP, 2012; Julio Bentivoglio. Caio Prado Junior, the 1930s Generation and the Brazilian Historical Imagination. Storia della Storiografia, v. 65, p. 89- 102, 2014.

12 Michael Goebel. Decentring the German spirit: the Weimar Republic’s cultural rela-tions with Latin America. Journal of Contemporary History, v. 44, n. 2, p. 221- 245, 2009; Anke Birkenmaier. Scenarios of colonialism and culture: Oswald Spengler’s Latin America. MLN, v. 128, n. 2, p. 256- 276, 2013.

13 Morreu na Allemanha o pensador Oswaldo Spengler. Correio da Manhã, May 9, 1936, p. 1.


Laudelino Medeiros constructed close links with Helmut Schelsky, the most highly renowned German sociologist of the post- war period.

It is worth noting that, beginning in the 1960s, the protagonist role on the German side was taken on by the Brazilianists in the Soviet Union’s satellite re-gime of East Germany. At a time when Marxism was spreading rapidly among sectors of Latin American society, when the impacts of the implementation of socialism in Cuba and the military coup’s on the continent were being felt, the study of what Manfred Kossok conceived to be “peripheral revolutions” became a priority for historiographers in what was then the German Democratic Republic.14 Chair professor of Latin American history in Leipzig, inheritor of a tradition dating back to the times of Karl Lamprecht, Kossok was the pioneer of a comparative history of revolutions on the South American continent. Three of his disciples at the “Interdisciplinary Center for Comparative Research on Revo-lutions” wrote important historical monographs: Erich Kalwa addressed the fin-est details of the Tenente revolts, Jürgen Hell examined the historical dynamics of slavery- based manufacture in Brazil, and Jens Henschke analyzed the formation of the Estado Novo dictatorship.15 With the fall of the Berlin wall and the reuni-fication of Germany that followed, that renewed Marxist historiography came under suspicion (Ideologieverdacht) and none of its representatives ever found a place in the sun in the new German “post- wall” academic landscape.16

In short, in view of all that has been set out here it can be said that the great rupture that Germany lived through in the course of the 20th century severely jeopardized the historiographic relations between our two countries.

Our Brazilian classics took a long time to make their scarce appearances in German. While it is true that the translation of Freyre’s Casa- Grande & Senzala and Sobrados e mucambos was concluded in the mid- 1960s, the two books were only actually published by the Klett- Cotta publishing house in 198217 and the

14 Débora Bendocchi Alves. Jürgen Hell e a produção historiográfica sobre o Brasil na ex- República Democrática Alemã. Locus, v. 12, n. 1, p. 161- 179, 2006.

15 Erich Kalwa. Der brasilianische Tenentismo: Die Armee im nationalen bürgerlichen Revolutionszyklus (1889- 1930). Dissertation, Leipzig, 1977; Jürgen Hell. Sklavenman-ufaktur und Sklavenemanzipation in Brasilien 1500- 1888. Berlin: Akademie der Wis-senschaften der DDR, 1986; Jens Hentschke. Estado Novo. Genesis und Konsolidierung der brasilianischen Diktatur von 1937. Saarbrücken: VfE, 1996.

16 Cf. René Gertz / Silvio Marcus de Correa. Historiografia alemã pós- muro. Experiên-cias e perspectivas. Santa Cruz do Sul/Passo Fundo: EDUNISC/UPF, 2007.

17 Hans-Albert Steger. Gilberto Freyre y Alemania. In: Fátima Quintas (org.) Anais do seminário internacional Novo Mundo nos trópicos. Recife: Fundação Gilberto Freyre, 2000, p. 101.


German versions of Os Sertões and Raízes do Brasil only appeared in the mid- 1990s. Those books were not sufficient to arouse greater historical interest in Brazil, a country whose language, according to Curt Meyer- Clason, is still seen to be the “Chinese” of Europe. In Germany, academic production targeting Latin America was, and still is concentrated in the field of literary and linguistic stud-ies.18 The role played by studies of the history of Brazil in the Lateinamerikanistik is even more peripheral.

Clearly the scene is discouraging. However, in recent years signs of an in-creasing mutual interest have been multiplying. Not only authors like Jörn Rüsen and Reinhart Koselleck, but also classic authors like Chladenius, Ranke, Burckhardt, Gervinus and Droysen are gradually becoming available to the Brazil ian reader. It is a pity that other great names in the Germany historiogra-phy of recent decades such as Thomas Nipperdey, Wolfgang Mommsen, Hans- Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Hardtwig and Jürgen Osterhammel are, to this day, unknown in Brazil.

On the German side there is no observable predominance of any specific field of interest among the Brazilianists. Studies have been made of the history of Lu-theranism, of slavery, of the messianic movements of the northeast and, more re-cently, of the history of concepts.19 In turn, on the part of the Brazilian historians, thanks to the tireless efforts of mediators like Manoel Salgado Guimarães, René Gertz, Luiz Costa Lima, Jurandir Malerba and Estevão de Resende Martins, the focus of research has been on the field of German theory of history and history of historiography.20

18 Cf. Erich Kalwa. Die portugiesischen und brasilianischen Studien in Deutschland (1900- 1945). Ein institutionsgeschichtlicher Beitrag. Frankfurt am Main: Domus, 2004.

19 Hans-Jürgen Prien. Evangelische Kirchenwerdung in Brasilien. Gütersloh: Mohn, 1989; Mathias Röhrig Assunção. Pflanzer, Sklaven und Kleinbauern in der brasilianischen Provinz Maranhão 1800- 1850. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1993; Dawid Danilo Bartelt. Nation gegen Hinterland. Der Krieg von Canudos in Brasilien: ein diskursives Ereignis (1874- 1903). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004; Christian Hausser. Auf dem Weg zur Zivilisation. Geschichte und Konzepte gesellschaftlicher Entwicklung in Brasilien (1801- 1871). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2009.

20 Cf. E. de Rezende Martins. Historiografia alemã no século XX: encontros e de-sencontros. In: J. Malerba / C. A. Rojas (orgs.) Historiografia contemporânea em perspectiva crítica. Bauru: Edusc, 2007; Pedro Caldas. El hombre culto: una aproxi-mación a la Historia de la Cultura Griega, de Jacob Burckhardt. Historiografías. Revista de Historia y Teoría, v. 1, p. 23- 34, 2011; Francisco Murari Pires. Ranke e Niebuhr: a apoteose tucidideana. Revista de História, n. 166, p. 71- 108, 2012; Sérgio da Mata. A fascinação weberiana. As origens da obra de Max Weber. Belo Horizonte:


This volume is the result of presentations made at the 7th National Sympo-sium on the History of Historiography (University of Ouro Preto, August 12- 15, 2013) and is witness to the slow process of renewed rapprochement diagnosed above. Lately there has been a visible increase in the number of German histo-rians visiting Brazilian universities and an intensification of the flow of young Brazilian historians going to German universities. Interest in the German lan-guage may not have achieved the heights it did in the generation of 1870 but it has long stopped being seen as a mere exoticism. German authors are constantly present in the discussions on German historical thinking in the pages of the Bra-zilian journals História da Historiografia and Revista de Teoria da História. It is to be hoped that the recent re- editing of translations of the books of Euclides da Cunha and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda may produce an analogous effect among our German peers.

Nothing seems to indicate that the “unequal exchanges in the historiographic marketplace” will give way to a less asymmetrical situation in the near future. What is important, however, is to recognize that today we enjoy privileged con-ditions for taking up once more, and making more profound a dialogue which, in spite of its ups and downs, has never been entirely absent. If, as some declare, it is doubtful whether it is possible to learn from history, it can at least be said that historians are capable of learning from one another.

In the same vein, Estevão de Resende Martins (University of Brasília) has given a more in- depth treatment to some of the themes mentioned, in order to place them their proper place, that is, he has made a comparative analysis of the different historiography’s roles in the process of constructing both national identities. Alternating the analysis of German and Brazilian cases during the 19th and 20th centuries he questions the relation between historical research and the Bildung ideal. Martins concludes with a plea for an “interconnected history that the global times seem to demand”.

The panel entitled “Alexander von Humboldt and the American Experience” was organized with the intention of reflecting on the relevance of the experience of the New World for the production of the great Prussian naturalist who has been read and appropriated on both sides of the Atlantic; and also to do the re-verse: reflect on the Humboldtian contributions to the sciences on our continent.

Fino Traço, 2013; Arthur Alfaix Assis. What is History for? Johann Gustav Droysen and the Functions of Historiography. New York: Berghahn, 2014; André de Melo Araújo (op. cit.).


In his text, Helmut Galle (São Paulo University) reminds us there have been some analyses made of the rhetorical and discursive resources in Humboldt’s work but here have been very few critics that have concentrated on the narrative structure of his texts. Lately there have been several studies made of the aesthetic quality of Humboldt’s writing and, indeed, the traveler devoted a lot of attention to that aspect, given that he wished to transmit a holistic experience, integrating sensory and intellectual perceptions instead of merely providing positive data. Thus Galle’s article studies the narrative strategies of Ansichten der Natur in a bid to show why, in spite of those techniques being more typical of fiction literature, they did not convert Humboldt’s work into fiction.

Another panel participant was Vera Kutzinski (Vanderbilt University) who wrote a very original work questioning whether Humboldt was ever in Brazil. Obviously not. We know he intended to come but he never managed to get per-mission from the Portuguese authorities. Even so, based on a colored engraving made in the 19th century purportedly showing Humboldt in Brazil, Kutzinski interweaves the reading of texts, multiple contexts and images to show how Humboldt was swallowed up by the then emergent industry of natural tropical products which later branched out into the production of colored engravings that accompanied the sale of industrialized food products. The unusual connec-tions proposed by her innovative interpretation are evident in her text and lead us to re- think the question of Humboldt in Brazil and arrive at a different answer than the one we are accustomed to.

Completing the panel on the erudite Prussian, Luiz Estevam de Oliveira Fernandes (University of Ouro Preto) discusses how Humboldt conceived a past for New Spain in his “Political Essay on New Spain” (1811) and how that text, in turn, was appropriated by Mexican historiography during the 19th cen-tury. To that end, the author analyses the way in which the traveler made use of American sources, particularly those based on the texts of the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, written shortly before the end of the 18th century. Finally Fer-nandes shows us some of the Humboldt’s conceptions of text and history with a special emphasis on the place of the indigenous individual in the composition of his reasoning.

Another panel was dedicated to the theme “The legacy of 19th century German historical thinking: rediscovering the subject and humanism”, with the presence of Arthur Alfaix Assis (University of Brasília) and Leopoldo Waizbort (São Paulo University).

Arthur Assis conducts an original exercise on the theory of comparative history based on the books of Johan Gustav Droysen, Charles Langlois & Charles Seign-obos, and Eduard Bernheim, demystifying the idea that the professionalization of


historical research in the second half of the19th century was based on the model or methods of the experimental sciences. After detailed comparative analysis of the three manuals and their posterior reception, Assis shows that what ended up prevailing in the international sphere was the most “popularized” perspective of the problems related to method.

Analyzing Erich Auerbach’s well- known book Mimesis, Leopoldo Waizbort sees in that work a literary history of the different self- perceptions of the condi-tio humana. Based on that essentially anthropological foundation, the German philologist reconnected the literary phenomenon to the life- world. To Waizbort, in Auerbach the “presented reality” becomes transformed in the light of the new modalities of historical consciousness. Mimesis is supported, as Auerbach him-self declares, less on the theoretical premises than on the relative spontaneity of the contemplative act: Keine Theorie, sondern paradigmatische Anschauung vom Menschengeschick.

The texts from Gunter Scholtz and Valdei Lopes Araujo, prepared for their participation in the panel “Current perspectives in the History of Concepts”, make a critical evaluation of the trajectory and importance of the German Begriffsgeschichte tradition in current historiography in Brazil and elsewhere.

Speaking from a standpoint inside that very tradition, professor Scholtz (Ruhr- Universität Bochum), a former member of the editorial committee for the History of Concepts Yearbook alongside figures like Hans- Georg Gadamer, makes a careful analysis of the origin of the history of concepts within the philo-sophical debates that took place in 18th century Germany and seeks to elucidate the constitution of what has been its most important task up until now, namely, defending the historicity of any human thought from the systematic and nor-mative pretensions of philosophy and the humanities. To Scholtz that mission continues to be its fundamental meaning for the human sciences and especially for historiography today.

Valdei Lopes Araujo (University of Ouro Preto) seeks to understand the as-cension of the history of concepts in Brazil from the 1970s on as being a symptom of the final crisis of the modernity project in both the political sense and from the point of view of the humanities. At that moment it became fundamentally important to endow the modern conceptuality with historicity in the light of the crisis of the great explanatory paradigms of the human sciences and the grand historicist perspectives of national development. In Valdei Araujo’s view, how-ever, Begriffsgeschichte comes into being in Brazil to fulfill the critical historical role attributed to it by Gunter Scholtz. At a later moment in the text, Araujo embarks on considerations regarding the limits of the historical- conceptual approach in the world as it is today, not only in reference to the cultural and


political environment but also from the point of view of the development of the fields of History and Historiography.

Moving with equal freedom in the public sphere of his own country and that of Germany, Moshe Zimmerman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) proposes in his closing lecture that we should reflect on the possibilities and limitations of history in its aspect of being a privileged space of “political education” ( politische Bildung). In the light of his experience as a member of the Truth Commis-sion of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the social- democratic government of Gerhard Schröder, he shows how the climate of the historio-graphic debate in Israel is even more elevated given that it takes place against the background of the Arab- Israeli conflict. In Zimmerman’s view in both Germany and Israel “the information about the past serves as an extremely important political arsenal to be used for political aims”.

The editors wish to express their deep gratitude to a series of peoples and institutions that made it possible to hold the 7th National Symposium on the History of Historiography and to publish the present volume, namely: Deutsches Wissenschafts- und Innovationshaus (São Paulo), Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, CAPES, FAPEMIG, Office of the Dean of Research and Postgradu-ate Studies at the University of Ouro Preto, Postgraduate Program in History at the University of Ouro Preto, Brazilian Theory and History of Historiography Society, History of Historiography and Modernity Research Group, Larissa Breder, Luna Halabi, Vera Kutzinski, Gangolf Hübinger, and to the translators Joseph F. Quinn III (essays by Estevão Martins, Luiz Estevam Fernandes and Leopoldo Waizbort), Martin Charles Nicholl (introduction and Valdei Araujo’s essay) and Kevin T. Hall (Gunter Scholtz’s essay).

Historiographies in Dialogue

Documents