‘Is the boundary between historiography and literature really illusory and indeterminable? [...] How should those who research and write about history behave in the face of the break-up of the classical conception of truth that can also be observed in the natural sciences?’ Jerzy Topolski, one of the most important Polish historians and theorists of history, has sought answers to these and related questions in his examination of recent historical theory. His collected reflections on this, published in the Polish original in 1996, are now being made available to a German-speaking audience for the first time in this translation.
The author discusses important concepts of historical theory, analyses the fundamental structure of narrative representations of history with a view to historiographical practice and discusses, among other things, the handling of time and space as well as the role of myths, theories, rhetoric, ideology and language. At the centre is the scientific nature of history, which has been called into question in the context of more recent, especially postmodern theorising: ‘The aim is to retain the category of truth (which is also a moral category) in historiography, while at the same time taking into account the more recent considerations in philosophy and the natural sciences on truth as well as the changing theory of history, including that influenced by postmodernism.’
Bd. 22: Jerzy Topolski: Geschichte schreiben und verstehen. Zu Theorie und Praxis erzählender Geschichtsdarstellung; übers. von Karsten Holste, mit Einführung von Jan Pomorski, Klio in Polen, Osnabrück 2024, S. 480, EUR 68,00 (ISBN 978-3-944870-85-4).
