Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 125, Issue 1, 2012

This article discusses how in the late nineteenth century the modernity of the world exhibition was an extremely ambiguous phenomenon. The world exhibition is not only the place par excellence where unbridled belief in the future is celebrated, but is also the place where tension and alienation can be observed. Here the notion of the spectacle has exceptional heuristic potential. On the one hand the spectacle alienates man from his social reality and encloses him in an endless circulation and consumption of images. On the other hand the spectacle attempts to neutralize the tensions that modernity brings, by expelling everything that does not fit within the image. The Antwerp world exhibition of 1894 well illustrates this ambiguity. In realistic mises en scènes, such as the Congo village and the Oriental neighborhood, the audience was invited to step into the image and take it as real. This immersive strategy was used to its greatest extent in Old Antwerp. In this highly accurate reconstruction of a sixteenthcentury quarter the visitor imagined that by plunging into history he could escape all the commotion and exhaustion of modern life.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the nervous illness neurasthenia received much attention in the medical world and in society at large. This article concerns the meanings which physicians and patients attached to this condition. Without losing sight of the mental and physical realities of neurasthenia, we claim that these meanings were determined largely by social and cultural factors, and also included gender-specific interpretations. Our sources are medical publications about neurasthenia, and patient files from the Sanatorium Rhijngeest near Leiden, dating from 1903 to 1920. First we briefly discuss medical views on the nature, causes, and treatment of neurasthenia at that time. Next we discuss how patients in Rhijngeest experienced their complaints and how physicians reacted to them. In the conclusion we examine the social-cultural and gender-specific meanings of this illness.

In 1928 Dutch physical anthropologist D.J.H. Nyèssen began a study of the racial characteristics of the Javanese. While initially he seemed a promising young researcher, his supervisors called off the project in 1930 because they now considered him a troublemaker with an ‘inflated ego’. Central to this article is the scandal that caused his demise. Nyèssen’s research practice, taking anthropometric measurements in the Javanese countryside and at an anthropological exhibition, caused unrest, and his attempt to set up his own anthropological ‘laboratory’ met with strong criticism. Because daily anthropological practices were now made public and rules and expectations articulated, this scandal gives us an insight in the role of anthropological science in the late colonial context. This article shows how the Dutch colonial government had hoped to demonstrate Dutch excellence in science but chose control over pursuit of knowledge when things got out of hand.

In this article the author challenges conventional wisdom concerning the Warsaw Pact by arguing that the smaller allies had much more room for manoeuvre than has generally been assumed. By means of an analysis of the impact of the second Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Split on the Warsaw Pact she shows that the first half of the 1960s witnessed a multilateral development within the alliance, surprisingly similar to that in NATO. Several non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members succeeded in using the alliance as a means to assert their own interests. The article concludes with a discussion of the PCC meeting in January 1965, which sealed the end of Soviet choreography. Precisely because the Warsaw Pact was such an empty shell in the first five years of its existence (1955-60), it provided its members with unforeseen opportunities to mould the alliance according to their own wishes.

The question of how nations should deal with a difficult past is one of the great subjects of our time, as is confirmed by the uninterrupted flow of scholarly publications and conferences on transitional justice. In this context Germany and Spain have often been recommended as models. The German model is based on the abolition in the early 1990s of the former German Democratic Republic and its incorporation into the Federal Republic of Germany, and in particular the exemplary way that the archives of the Stasi were dealt with. The Spanish model is founded on the transition from Franco’s dictatorship to parliamentary democracy. Based on a comparative study, this article reveals that the two models are diametrically opposed regarding the treatment of delicate archives as well as privacy policy. While the German paradigm is based on the right to know, the Spanish paradigm hinges on the right to forget. It is argued that, though the latter is an individual right, it can never be extended to become a collective right across an entire society, for in democracies the right to know – i.e. the search for truth – should always prevail. This conclusion not only concerns former dictatorships but also applies to the archival and privacy policies of countries with long-standing democratic traditions.

This article discusses the Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry (2000-02) that investigated Belgium’s role in the murder of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Although there is a long tradition of parliamentary inquiries in Belgium, the Lumumba Commission was relatively unusual because it focused on an older past and subcontracted a substantial part of its research to a group of academic experts. Supporters of this commissioned history pre-empted possible criticism of the politicisation of academics by stressing that there had been a clear division of labour between experts and politicians. However, it is argued here that this distinction between academia and politics was more problematic than it seemed. Two theses are defended: first that the Commission was not directed primarily to produce new knowledge, but instead (political) ‘acknowledgement’. Rather than as a substantial contribution to historiography, the work of the commission is considered here primarily as a ‘translationstruggle’ in which existing historiography was restyled to fit the procedure of parliamentary decision-making. In this ‘translation-struggle’ – the article’s second thesis – no clear line can be drawn between the work of the experts and that of the parliamentarians. On many levels the experts did more political work than the politicians. However, this did not result from partisanship by the experts, nor active interference by the politicians, but from attitudes of the experts: they (probably unconsciously) appropriated some of the meta-political values and the habitus of their law-making employers. This had a number of negative effects which are analyzed further.

The approaches of historical comparison and research into cultural transfers have ineffectively set out to distance historical research from the nation state. This analysis of histoire croisée against the background of historical comparison and cultural transfer concludes that this new approach adds to the historical arsenal by positioning reflexivity at its heart. By institutionalizing the reflexive turn it calls attention to mutual perception in human relationships, to the balance of power in these relations, and to the relative importance of different spatial frames for the historical actors in question. Histoire croisée bundles existing historical approaches which stress the perspective of the contemporaries, interwoven human relations, and their balances of power and self-reflexivity. It regards the nation state as just one of several interwoven frames, the importance of which to historical actors has to be explored. Thus histoire croisée does not try to replace the national framework, but turns it into a useful question for future research.