The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (46. évfolyam, 177. szám)
Ignác Romsics: Letters to a Fellow Historian from Dalmatia. A Subjective Afterword to a Twentieth-Century History of Hungary
When it came to investigating social phenomena, the texts that I have always admired were those that did not provide ready-made answers but presented me with the facts, the data needed to construct an answer. It is very well for the author to have a point of view, but he should not seek to ram it down my throat— rather allow me to decide for myself whether I agree with him or not. Moreover, I believed in the far from original recognition (though it counted as heretical in relation to the 'monotheism' of the Marxist conception of history) that no such thing as objective historiography is possible, due to the very nature of historical knowledge: every historical interpretation is subjective, to a greater or lesser extent. I put that in writing for the first time in 1989, in the preface to my biography of Count István Bethlen, though I had formulated it in my own mind a good while before then, in the late 1970s. As best I recall, I came to that conclusion after having read Max Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey; Benedetto Croce, Heinrich Rickert and R.G. Collingwood were known to me only by name, not through their writings. On the other hand, I never concurred—and still do not concur—with the extreme view, as exemplified most typically by Hayden White, that historians are as free as poets or novelists are in constructing their texts. Among the fundamental differences that set historiography and literature apart, one of the most important, to my mind, is the divergent positions they take as regard the past. A writer may, without further ado, rely on his own free imagination to elaborate on a historical event, inventing ad absurdum. It is a historian's duty to survey the accessible source material on any event that is to be reconstructed, and to select, weigh up and evaluate that as best he can, in accordance with his convictions. Moreover, any pronouncement he makes is part of a professional discourse that, depending on the topic, may stretch back for centuries but which it is his duty to be aware of. The historian's hands are more tied, and even if his assertions are not unappealable, they rest on a much sounder and, above all, more verifiable basis than those of the novelist. (Alun Munslow, the author of Deconstructing History (1997), would categorise this approach as a variety of 'practical realism’ that one could interpret as intermediate between the traditional reconstructionist and the postmodern deconstructionist approaches.) These, then, are the experiences, considerations and motives that lie behind the 'detached', 'fact-packed', 'self-effacing' character of my book. I was never able—and never sought—to put on the airs of either a prosecutor or a defence counsel; indeed, I shrank even from a juridical posture. It is so easy, with the wisdom of hindsight, to allocate brickbats and praises among the figures of the past; I would rather try and understand them. Accordingly, I see my role—to stay with the judicial simile—as more along the lines of a court reporter. In other words, I seek to recount both what the prosecutor and counsel for the defence submitted in evidence, and finally strive to give a fair summary of the judge's verdict and the reasoning behind it. Still, if you read my book attentively, you will of course notice—as indeed you did notice—that there are many cases where the reporter 48 Tlie Hungarian Quarterly