Central European by Choice, or Ex Ungue Leonem

Author: Prof. Pavel Kolář

In der Sonderreihe „Mehr als Eigensinn – Das Schaffen von Thomas Lindenberger“ werden zu Ehren Thomas Lindenbergers, der zum 1. Oktober 2024 in den Ruhestand eintrat, Texte seiner Weggefährtinnen und Weggefährten publiziert. Mit diesen Beiträgen werden persönliche Erinnerungen an und mit Thomas Lindenberger freigelegt und damit ein Einblick in sein umfassendes und vielfältiges Schaffen gegeben. Bis zum Ende des Jahres wird immer donnerstags ein neuer Beitrag auf dem Blog veröffentlicht.

In seinem Beitrag widmet sich Pavel Kolář der besonderen Offenheit von Thomas Lindenberger gegenüber und seinem wahren Interesse an der Geschichtsregion Ostmitteleuropas. In seinen Augen war Thomas Lindenberger nicht nur ein glänzender Alltagshistoriker, sondern auch ein Wahl-Mitteleuropäer, da er sich mit zunehmend leidenschaftlichem Interesse diesem „peripheren“ Raum zwischen Deutschland und der Sowjetunion widmete.

Shortly after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, a slim volume of essays by Timothy Garton Ash titled ‘Central European by Choice’ (Středoevropan volbou) was published in Prague.¹ In this book Garton Ash explored the question of how a typically Western, Oxford academic could approach life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, or even become part of it. I think that in the time that I have known Thomas, that is, the last twenty-two years, he has also become a kind of Central European by choice. For his West German generation, this was not obvious, even though a certain attraction to Central Europe might have already materialised through his life in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. But becoming a Central European was not a matter of course even after Thomas, based at the newly founded ZZF in Potsdam from 1993, threw himself into the research on communist dictatorships and soon became a recognised authority in the field. It took something more to become a Central European by choice.

When I started working at ZZF in summer 2002, the leader of my Abteilung, Martin Sabrow, showed me around the then newly opened building of the institute Am Neuen Markt. It was the usual introduction of a new young colleague to the academic staff. On that day Thomas was not in his office, and Martin Sabrow commented: ‘He is the smartest head in the institute’ („Er ist der klügste Kopf im Haus”). This is what one tends to remember, and indeed I was soon to experience Thomas’s intellectual brilliance, breadth of learning and analytical acuity. But what struck me most was his overall Herangehensweise – not just the way a scientist grasps the object of his inquiry, but also, in a more literal sense, the way he observes and explores the world around him. It was a genuine interest in the noise of human life, in the shaking of the earth; an astonishing gift for hearing the grass grow. As a true Alltagshistoriker, Thomas indulged in what might be called the ex ungue leonem (knowing the lion by his claw) method, that is, seeing through small parts a larger whole, a bigger picture. For me, his propensity to pay attention to (sometimes seemingly unimportant) details explained Thomas’s increasingly passionate interest in that ‘peripheral’ space between Germany and the Soviet Union, largely ignored by the mainstream German academia.

I adopted Thomas’s curiosity about the interaction between small parts and the larger whole, between local ground tremors and global tectonic upheavals, and tried to nurture it in my own work. We were both affected – albeit in different generational and geographical contexts – by the experience of the collapse of the Marxist paradigm: Thomas in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s by the disintegration of the radical left, I by the collapse of state socialism and its ossified doctrine in Czechoslovakia. But after the unsettling period of the 1990s, full of categorical condemnations and fleeting fashions, efforts to rethink the ‘Marxist legacy’ crystallised. In the early 2000s, parts of the historical discipline began to sober up from the culturalist delirium of the previous decade, reclaiming the notion of society and politics as spheres shaped, but not entirely determined, by culture, as expressed in language, symbols and images. The interest in what E. P. Thompson memorably called ‘something that is not culture’, a non-derivative, raw material of life-experience, gingerly returned.² It was, I suspect, in this intellectual conjuncture that Thomas rediscovered physical violence as a key aspect for understanding modern societies, both dictatorships and democracies. Violence, again, was for him rather a small part of a larger question (how does domination perpetuate itself over time?). Although the bodily experience of violence, pain and suffering did not reappear as a determining ‘Basis’ outside history, a conception prevailed, formulated by the late Alf Lüdtke, of corporeality as a dimension of human life that is more difficult to capture textually than others (or, for that matter, by the late Reinhart Koselleck, who entirely rejected the ability of posterity to encapsulate in writing the experience of bodily violence, which was ‘burnt into the body and disappears with this body into death’).³

At the end of the first decade of the millennium, our paths diverged. I went to Florence, while Thomas took over the directorship of the Ludwig BoltzmannInstitute for European History and Public Affairs in Vienna (I confess that I usually feel a sense of loss and sometimes horror when some of my intellectual comrades assume important leadership positions). Whether the Vienna chapter consolidated Thomas’s Central Europeanism or, on the contrary, led to disillusionment, I dare not judge. In any case, we carried on our common projects and conferences, mainly on physical violence in communism and beyond, and continued to explore the shaking of the ground across Europe. Thomas’s fondness for Italy (including peculiar Florentine delicacies like the irresistible lampredotto) helped to foster this collaboration. In 2017, Thomas became director of the Hannah-Arendt-Institute for Totalitarianism Studies in Dresden, and his ability to hear the grass grow has again come to fruition in the development of original research perspectives, whether on post-communist transformation or the recent rise of the far right. He has tried, with considerable success, to translate his personal intellectual curiosity for detail and his desire to understand larger processes by examining small parts into the Institute’s way of working. Where else, of course, but in ‘peripheral’ Central Europe? I am sure he will maintain this interest in ‘unimportant’ marginalia in the new phase of his life.

Zitiervorschlag: Pavel Kolář, „Central European by Choice, or Ex Ungue Leonem”. In: Denken ohne Geländer. Der Blog des Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung e.V. vom 14.11.2024: https://haitblog.hypotheses.org/6285.

Beitragsbild:

Bild 1: Workshop “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism” @ EUI Florence 20th-21stOctober 2011 by Pavel Kolář

1. Timothy Garton Ash, Středoevropan volbou. Praha: Institut pro středoevropskou kulturu a politiku 1992. [↩]
2. E. P. Thompson, Postscript, in: E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory or an Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press 1995 (1978), pp. 287–303, here 289. [↩]
3. Alf Lüdtke, Anregungskraft und blinde Stellen. Zum Alphabet des Fragenstellens nach Marx, in: Alf Lüdtke (ed.), Was bleibt von marxistischen Perspektiven in der Geschichtsforschung? Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 1997, pp. 7–32, 29–32; Reinhart Koselleck, Der 8. Mai zwischen Erinnerung und Geschichte, in: Rudolf von Thadden and Steffen Kaudelka (eds.), Erinnerung und Geschichte. 60 Jahre nach dem 8. Mai 1945. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2006, pp. 13–22, here 14. [↩]

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