Oral History

Definition

Oral history is the method of generating historical source material through interviews with living witnesses (Zeitzeugen), used in this volume by Lutz Niethammer to reconstruct the experience of the GDR's "generation of construction." Niethammer's technique is "always to request a life-history narrative in a form chosen by the respondent," followed by "direct questioning … on all aspects of his/her life, public, professional, and private" (Niethammer, p. 253). Its theoretical warrant is stated against the objectivism of archival/structural history: "the dimension of subjective reality is lost in the process of bureaucratic reporting" (p. 254). Interpretation begins from the investigator's puzzlement before a statement that is "highly suggestive, significant yet obscure" (Irritation prägnanter Unverständlichkeit), asking "how much (pre)history does the text require in order to communicate its message?" and, for narrative "molecules," "how much implication of history … does the private anecdote contain?" (pp. 256, 267). Niethammer is candid about the limits: respondent selection is "chance," memory "selective," and case studies can make only "a modest contribution" to larger questions (pp. 253–256).

Key Thinkers

• Lutz Niethammer — the volume's oral historian, whose Ruhr and GDR projects "have become a kind of paradigm for numerous other projects" (Lüdtke, p. 25; no author page yet — see log).
• Dorothee Wierling & Alexander von Plato — Niethammer's co-interviewers in the GDR project.
• Alf Lüdtke — frames oral history within alltagsgeschichte and notes that in oral-history projects "there is the possibility of feedback, channeling (intermediate) findings back to those investigated" (p. 29).

Related Concepts

• Microhistory — the scale and case-based logic oral history shares.
• Historical Experience — the subjective dimension oral history accesses.
• Experience Types — Niethammer's typological generalization from life histories.
• Memory — the faculty and resource on which oral history depends.
• Alltagsgeschichte — the field that legitimates the method.
• the GDR "generation of construction" — the object of Niethammer's study.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Niethammer's chapter "Zeroing in on Change" (pp. 252–303) in full: the 150 interviews, the interpretive maxims, the six biographical cases (Ludwig Haber, Pia Diemer, Siegfried Homann, Sieglinde Erger, the Karrers), the "experience types," and the quantitative tables.

Open Questions

• Can the interviewer's own "puzzlement" be a reliable guide to historical significance, or does it privilege the culturally strange over the ordinary?
• What does oral history do with the finding that memory itself is shaped by later political pressures — as when antifascist witnesses' memories are judged "erroneous" by the party? Niethammer's Haber case makes this a central methodological problem, not an external one.