Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 123, Issue 3, 2010

Many historians believe that the aim of their work is to produce an objective and accurate reconstruction of the past, disposed of moral and political judgements. Analysing various scandals and controversies regarding the history and memory of World War II , Dutch colonialism and the Dutch involvement in Srebrenica, the authors aim to show that pleas to free historiography from the traditional patriotic moral schemes did not led to a supposed ‘scientific neutrality’. In contrary, we saw other values rise to predominance, stemming from the common sense idea that most people just try to survive and that life actually depends fully on fate. Within this ‘grey perspective’ any notion of social and moral responsibility is dissolved, while at the same time perpetrators and victims are implicitly equated. To escape the trap of a naive empiricism and to avoid traditional patriotic moralism as well as the ethical indifference of what has been called the ‘grey perspective’, the authors point to more sophisticated strategies to assess the (changing) attitudes, beliefs and acts of historical personae, departing from a multifocal perspective, just like Saul Friedlander did in his magnum opus on the Third Reich and the Jews.

The trade in both the Baltic and Norway was in Hanseatic hands in the Late Middle Ages. Hollanders ventured to penetrate both markets and attained growing success in the Baltic. A lesser known story is that they failed to do so in Bergen, Norway. This article explores the reasons behind the failure in the period c. 1440- 1560 and advances the view that local conditions should be considered.

The Consulate is the last of the many regimes of the First French Republic. During these four crucial years the de facto head of state, Napoleon Bonaparte, gradually accumulated so much power that in the end he seemed to occupy an almost royal position, foreshadowing his imperial dignity. Although Bonaparte tried to keep up a façade of revolutionary symbols and republican customs, it became more and more difficult to find excuses for the monarchical way in which his power was represented. Especially his magnificent entourage of palaces, service personnel, ceremonial pomp and the delicate rules of etiquette had all but by name the appearance of a genuine royal court. Many a staunch republican uttered his anger or annoyance at this apparent return to the detested practices of the ancien régime. But because Bonaparte acted with utmost prudence, patience and dissimulation there was never a general outcry or a serious attempt at obstruction. Thus, when in May 1804 the First Consul was proclaimed Emperor the foundations for his imperial court were already in place.

In the second half of the nineteenth century an amalgam of European and American adventurers travel towards the unknown centre of Africa. Confrontations with powerful Arab traders in equatorial Africa discharge into a bloody colonial war: king Leopolds ‘Arab Campaigns’. This article attempts to spread a new light on the Arab question, by examining, from a cultural point of view, Western perceptions and representations of the Arabs and their practices in the Central African context. How do European expeditions deal with Arabs? By which standards do Europeans evaluate the Arab grade of civilization? What images and explorational activities or mentalities lead towards the war? Throughout the article, the goal is to reveal how different cultures of exploration interact with Arab presences.

Since Herder, Germans have looked upon the cultural legacy of Iceland as part of their own Volksgeist, and thus as a key to finding clues about their own Germanic ancestry. This imagological paper focuses on the development of this idea in the discourse of Neo Romanticism and in Nazi Germany, and on the differences and similarities between these two. After the academic and philosophical roots of the National Socialist Iceland policy have been examined, the travel journals of SS members Paul Burkert and Otto Rahn are analyzed. From this can be concluded, that the National Socialist image of Iceland was not as monolithic and undisputed as one might expect from a totalitarian dictatorship. Discussions on Iceland were of a more moral nature, which sets them apart from the more pragmatic or political discourses in German Westforschung.

During the Second World War, the Dutch government in exile and the illegal press in the occupied Netherlands on several occasions discussed the question what to do with Germany once the war ended. Strikingly, they both resented a harsh treatment of post-war Germany. There was a plain reason for this: the economic importance of Germany to a recovery of the Netherlands was of fundamental concern. This led to moderate views on the treatment of the enemy. The Dutch Minister for Foreign Affairs, E.N. van Kleffens, embodied the opinion of the Dutch community in London: Germany was not to be humiliated as had been the case after the First World War, but to be allowed to retake its place in Europe. The same voices were heard in the Dutch illegal press. Economic considerations were the impetus for this lenient posture. Only during 1944, when the Germans flooded large parts of the Netherlands, started demolishing the ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the western part of the country was weighed down by a dramatic famine, the views of Van Kleffens and in his wake the Dutch government stiffened. Annexation of German soil was named as an opportunity. The illegal press, however, with some notable exceptions, was reluctant. Here also, economic considerations were the main motivation for a lenient posture towards the enemy.

Rather than being the dawning of a secular age, the 1960s were also the start of religious transformation and revitalization, in which ‘those Dutch Catholics’ internationally stood out. Instead of focusing on the usual suspects (bishops or the Vatican), this article analyzes the finest hour of social scientists. These played a significant but hardly acknowledged role in the introduction of new narratives of crisis and renewal. Social engineers became trustworthy analysts within the realm of church as well as society, applying social sciences, e.g. opinion polls. The article focuses on the practices through which these engineers, among whom the Franciscan Walter Goddijn (director of the Pastoral Institute of the Dutch Church Province PINK) played a crucial role, applied the technique of social polling. It focuses in detail on the making of and the effects of the opinion poll among Dutch priests on the matter of celibacy. It shows how the aspirations of the engineers actively influenced the outcome of the polling. Furthermore, it analyzes how the interpretation of this polling staged a celibacy crisis that gained further momentum through media exposure, setting of an altering relationship between church and society.

Historical narratives consist of three different kinds of information: information about past events (the inventory of the past), information about other historical narratives (the historiographical thesis), and information about the meaning of the past (the historical thesis). These different aspects of historical knowledge together constitute a coherent view on a certain period in time. This article examines these forms of information and their interaction by examining Georgia J. Cowart’s book The Triumph of Pleasure. Louis XIV & the Politics of Spectacle (2008) as a case study. Her work shows how artists undermining the Sun King’s propaganda of absolute kingship were expressing an ideology of social equality and harmony, anticipating eighteenth century Enlightenment. These criticisms of absolutism are part of the inventory of the past. The view that those criticisms should be highlighted when interpreting late seventeenth-century France is the historiographical thesis of the work. What makes the criticisms of absolutism meaningful is that they function as examples of the new ideology of social equality and harmony. Historical narratives exemplify the past in order to express a thesis about the past.