What I Thought I Understood

With characteristically poor timing, I began my career as an academic historian in the year that history ended. As I stumbled through lectures on the unification of Germany and the origins of the First World War, the political structures brought about by these events collapsed. Of course, 1989 did not really see the ‘end of history’. In some respects, history came alive like a fossil in a museum smashing out of its display case, but the transformation of Europe by dramatic and unpredictable events did mark the end of history in a limited sense: it made it more difficult to sustain a certain way of writing and teaching Europe’s history. 

 All this has created a curious mood among historians of Europe. The great French historian Annie Kriegel entitled her memoirs (1991) Ce que j’ai cru comprendre (‘What I thought I understood’). Most of us probably feel a similar degree of confusion (though we may be less conscious of, or honest about, the end of our own certainties). Simply looking at the assumptions that once governed the teaching of European history is a revealing exercise.