In the beginning phase there were several scholars at the Free University working on "Selbstzeugnisse" – Claudia Ulbrich and Gudrun Wedel, for example, to name just some historians, but there were far more. We discovered that there were scholars doing research on egodocuments in the classics department as well as in medieval, early modern and modern history, and also in japanology, Arabic studies and turkology, to name just a few.

The other starting point was university politics. Three years ago, in the course of restructuring faculties and making them much larger than before, there were several different subjects lumped together into one large "faculty of historical and cultural studies" ("Fachbereich Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften"), and – more important – encouraged to work together ("encouraged" means that there is some money and organizational help involved). It was then that we had the first meetings and started to think about a joint project. A first presentation took place in a session organized by Claudia Ulbrich (Berlin) and Kaspar von Greyerz (Basel) at the Historikertag in Aachen in 2000. Contributors were Desanka Schwara (Leipzig), Gerhard Wedel (Berlin), and Natalie Zemon Davis (Toronto). [1]

Some details on our group and organizational frame, as it has developed by now: The research will be conducted by ten scholars trained in different fields. The tasks of direction and organization are shared by professors of five different subjects: Arabic studies, history, studies of Islam, Japanology, studies of Turk languages and peoples. The heads of the project are Claudia Ulbrich (professor of history) and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele (professor of turkology). We are glad to co-operate with other scholars of the field on a national and international level, mainly in Japan (Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit), Turkey (Börte Sagaster), Switzerland (Kaspar von Greyerz), and the Netherlands (Rudolf Dekker). Among the researchers who contribute to the project are Gudrun Wedel, Lotte van de Pol, Petra Buchholz, and Gabriele Jancke, all of whom have already done larger research on egodocuments. [2] There are also some younger colleagues involved who intend to write their doctoral dissertations.

During our research and discussions it became clear that there is a large number and variety of egodocuments in all areas concerned and throughout the course of history. In Japan as well as in the Osmanic Empire or today's Turkey, in Arab as well as in European cultures autobiographical writing has been existing in various forms and literary traditions since well before modern times. On the other hand, autobiographies, narrowly defined, are rarely to be found anywhere before the eighteenth century. Hence, it does not make much sense for non-European and for all premodern historical studies to concentrate on autobiographies in a strict sense. Instead, it seems to be most rewarding to have a closer look at autobiographical writing in all its variety as it was and is being practiced in different areas and historical times. We therefore use the broad term "Selbstzeugnisse" to encompass writing about oneself, about one's own experiences and observations relating to oneself in all literary forms and traditions, including various genres such as travel writing, chronicles, family histories, biographical entries in reference works, diplomats' accounts, etc. Our starting points for this are Benigna von Krusenstjern's article "Was sind Selbstzeugnisse?" (1994) and the definition given in the series "Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit" (established in 1991). [3]

In all fields concerned little or no work has been done so far collecting all the relevant texts and making the findings available to other scholars. Nevertheless, much is to be gained by exemplary studies organized as a common enterprise. Our unique combination of scholars covering various fields, different areas, and time spans and working with different methodologies – ranging from literary criticism and traditional philology to historical approaches – enables us to discuss texts written in at least eleven languages: Dutch, German, English, French, Latin, Arabic, Japanese, Osmanic, Turkish, Persian, and Tataric. This opens up tremendous opportunities for comparisons. The aim is, of course, not to mix sources indiscriminately. The idea is rather to contextualize them and to understand autobiographical writing as a special form of agency, practiced by autobiographical writers in their respective personal situations and cultural contexts. This way, the focus lies on the writing and producing of these texts, and egodocuments are seen as ways of communicating and acting in society. Consequently, we try to develop an understanding of egodocuments as a social and cultural practice.

By means of a transcultural perspective, we especially want to find out about a person's own life as a topic of writing in different cultures, in different periods and in different geographical areas. We are interested in questions such as: How, why and in what literary forms and traditions did people write about themselves? What strategies of authentication and authorization did they develop? In what ways did they construct their selves? How did they adapt to different contexts and situations of writing? As to the answers, we are not focusing on single writers, but on the constellations and configurations they are embedded in as well as the concepts they make use of in perceiving themselves. Thereby, it will be possible to see culture(s) not as unified entities, closed in themselves. This will enable us to ask, for example, about cross-cultural networks or common characteristics of certain social groups such as nobles or scholars and in how far these might be lasting over time.

All these questions and methodological approaches are intended to deal with one of the central topics of traditional scholarship on autobiographical writing: "individuality". This label is especially relevant for studying premodern and non-European egodocuments. It is conventional wisdom that the development of individuality and autobiographical writing are closely related and that this is a typical European model. Accordingly, Martin Danahay states in the recent "Encyclopedia of Life Writing": "The histories of life writing and individualism in Western culture have moved in parallel." [4] Research on non-European egodocuments continues to take this as a starting point and a standard according to which the sources are to be measured. Applied that way as a general paradigm, "individualism" obstructs seeing the respective cultures in their own history. At the same time it leads to focussing discussion on shortcomings and delayed developments. The problem is not to use egodocuments at all for exploring individuality. Of course, they are relevant sources. The problem arises in two respects: (1) from viewing individuality to the exclusion of other concepts of persons also found in these sources, and (2) from using only egodocuments and no other types of sources for exploring forms and contexts of individuality. With our research project, we hope to open up ways of perceiving the various possibilities of describing the self in European as well as in non-European egodocuments and thus contribute to a non-Eurocentric and non-modernist understanding of cultures.

To achieve this, we decided to take four different thematic approaches. Several projects will analyze autobiographical writing as a cultural practice, mainly concerned with the process of writing and questions of genre (directed by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit). In addition, there will be three historically orientated fields exploring configurations we assume to be important for constituting and articulating selves. These are (i) situations of extreme pressure, for example in the case of Japanese prisoners of war made to write down their lives by their Chinese imprisoners (directed by Angelika Schaser); (ii) breaks and ruptures, experienced e.g. by medieval Arab biographers in the process of colonization, by a modern Turkish scholar in the process of Westernization, or by the first Japanese industrialists in the process of industrialization (directed by Barbara Kellner-Heinkele); (iii) ritualized ways of life, practiced e.g. in early modern European and Osmanic societies, at European courts, by Osmanic and European diplomats, and in the context of hospitality (directed by Claudia Ulbrich).

We have split up these four larger fields into ten single projects, and there will be no common frame as to time span or nationality. Our intention thereby is to question unifying concepts and absolute categories such as race, class, gender, nation. Instead, we want to focus on the interrelation between the agency of individual persons and the cultural repertoires they can make use of, as Natalie Zemon Davis has described it, for example, in her study "Women on the Margins" [5].

We hope that fund-raising for this research project will be successful. Further information will be available as soon as this might be the case.

Dr. Gabriele Jancke

 

Annotations:

[*] This essay is part of a lecture given at the meeting of the "Werkgroep (Auto)biografie" (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam), organized by Rudolf M. Dekker on September 13, 2002. The complete text can be found as online-publication in "Zeitenblicke" 1,2 (2002) (www.zeitenblicke.historicum.net).

[1] Claudia Ulbrich / Kaspar von Greyerz: Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspektive, in: Max Kerner (Hg.): Eine Welt ‑ Eine Geschichte? 43. Deutscher Historikertag in Aachen, 26. bis 29. September 2000. Berichtsband, München 2001, 48-55.

[2] Gudrun Wedel: Lehren zwischen Arbeit und Beruf. Einblicke in das Leben von Autobiographinnen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert. (L’Homme Schriften 4), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2000; Lotte van de Pol/Rudolf M. Dekker (eds.): Franciscus L. Kersteman: De Bredasche heldinne. (= Egodocumenten 1), Hilversum 1988; Petra Buchholz: Schreiben und Erinnern. Über Selbstzeugnisse japanischer Kriegsteilnehmer. München (im Druck); Gabriele Jancke: Autobiographie als soziale Praxis. Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. (Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit 10), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2002.

[3] Benigna von Krusenstjern: Was sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, in: Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994), 462-471. Selbstzeugnisse der Neuzeit, Berlin 1991-1996, Köln / Weimar / Wien 1999ff.

[4] Martin Danahay: Individualism and Life Writing, in: Encyclopedia of Life Writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms, edited by Margaretta Jolly. 2 vols. London / Chicago 2001, pp. 466f., here p. 466.

[5] Natalie Zemon Davis: Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Cambridge, Mass. / London 1995.