Survivor Testimonies and the Problem of Time

Testimonies of Holocaust survivors have had an essential influence on public engagement with the Shoah in recent decades. Given this importance, the imminent end of the “era of the witness” has sparked fears that the history of the Holocaust could soon be forgotten. The past decades have therefore seen unprecedented efforts to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors in order to safeguard the immediacy of their accounts. In this essay, I trace how different temporal entanglements have affected the narrated memory of Holocaust survivors and thus also shaped the knowledge of those born later. Focusing on four interviews conducted with a Jewish Holocaust survivor in 1946, 1995, 1998, and 2004 respectively, I explore how biological time, historical time, recording time, and the temporality of narrative have shaped the narrated memories. As I argue, the different temporal entanglements have allowed for starkly different reconfigurations and reconstructions of the past. This renders the study of the epistemic constitutive nature of entangled temporalities important not only for Holocaust studies, but also for the history of knowledge, a field which has recently turned to processes of forgetting and ignorance

Krise als Dauerzustand. Die Corona-Pandemie in der Geschichte der Gegenwart

Als empfundener gesellschaftlicher Ausnahmezustand provozierte die Corona-Pandemie frühzeitig eine Vielzahl zeitgenössischer Deutungen. Der Essay setzt sich mit zwei geschichtswissenschaftlichen Abrissen der Pandemie und der gesellschaftlichen Reaktionen darauf auseinander. Neben einem Vergleich beider Bücher fragt der Beitrag auch, wie die Autoren unser Verständnis der Zeit zwischen 2020 und 2021 erhellen, und diskutiert die Herausforderungen und Gefahren einer Krisengeschichtsschreibung. Krise, so argumentiert der Essay, ist mittlerweile fast immer – eine Tatsache, an der die Geschichtswissenschaft nicht ganz unschuldig ist. So produzieren die narrativen Konventionen der Geschichtswissenschaften das Überraschungsmoment, welches das Gefühl des Ausnahmezustands mit hervorbringt. Der Beitrag skizziert mögliche Gegenstrategien, die den Blick auf gegenwärtige und künftige Herausforderungen schärfen könnten.The essay engages with two historiographical outlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. After a portray and comparison of the two books, the essay explores how they may enhance our understanding of the time between 2020 and 2021 and discusses the challenges and risks of a crisis historiography. The notion of crisis, the essay claims, has become ubiquitous—a development history writing has played a role in. As I argue, the narrative conventions of historical scholarship tend to generate a sense of rupture and discontinuity that has often been perceived as crisis. The article outlines possible counterstrategies that could sharpen our understanding of present and future challenges.Peer Reviewe

Introduction: Entangled Temporalities

This introduction discusses knowledge production as the negotiation of entangled temporalities embedded in the materials, methods, and institutions of a variety of incongruous practitioners. We begin by exploring the reasons for the rise of temporal multiplicity as a thematic focal point in recent scholarship. From here, we proceed to show what studying entangled temporalities can offer histories of knowledge. First, it enables historians to trace affective and material connections in ways that break with accepted geographies, periodizations, and disciplinary borders. From medieval South Asia to modern-day Siberia, temporal negotiation seems prompted by anxieties over the loss of knowledge and the search for permanence; by the maintenance or foreclosure of bonds of empathy; and by the divergent and occasionally conflicting affordances of artifacts that configure and manipulate time. Second, a focus on temporal entanglements also challenges established conventions and practices of historiography, opening a pathway of reflexivity for historians to write in alternative ways

Economic Narratives

Peer Reviewe

Futurama. Business Forecasting and the Dynamics of Capitalism in the Interwar Period

The recognition of the key importance of economic stability after World War I sparked interest in business forecasting on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the creation and the rapid international and domestic dissemination of the Harvard Index of General Business Conditions in the early 1920s, which contemporaries celebrated as the first “scientific” approach to business forecasting. Drawing on multi-site archival research, the paper analyses the extension of the index by an information-exchange-based method in the 1920s and traces its influence on the survey-based forecasting approach employed by American companies in the 1930s. Engaging with the current debate on the temporal order of capitalism, the article argues that business forecasting was not only a means of stabilizing capitalism, but a factor and an indicator of a change in the dynamics of capitalism in the interwar period

Business Forecasting and the Dynamics of Capitalism in the Interwar Period

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The recognition of the key importance of economic stability after World War I sparked interest in business forecasting on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the creation and the rapid international and domestic dissemination of the Harvard Index of General Business Conditions in the early 1920s, which contemporaries celebrated as the first “scientific” approach to business forecasting. Drawing on multi-site archival research, the paper analyses the extension of the index by an information-exchange-based method in the 1920s and traces its influence on the survey-based forecasting approach employed by American companies in the 1930s. Engaging with the current debate on the temporal order of capitalism, the article argues that business forecasting was not only a means of stabilizing capitalism, but a factor and an indicator of a change in the dynamics of capitalism in the interwar period.Peer Reviewe

The Introduction of the Electronic Computer and the End of Business Forecasting at the NBER

For the greater part of the twentieth century, business forecasting has been a struggle against time. Forecasters needed reliable, comprehensive, and up-to-date data that would allow them to extrapolate trends for the months ahead. The collection and analysis of economic data, however, were laborious processes, and became even more so as the mass of statistical data grew. Focusing on the history of business cycle research conducted at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the article investigates how the introduction of large-scale computers in the early 1950s altered the field of business cycle research and forecasting. While the advent of large-scale electronic computers promised to solve the problem of timeliness, making it, for the first time, possible to process economic data within minutes, electronic computers brought about new problems of time. The complex and highly time-consuming task of programming and the scarcity of machine time pushed business cycle researchers to aim for ever greater standardization in the use of electronic computers. While this did indeed allow for an unprecedented acceleration in data processing, it also limited the possibilities of exercising trained judgment. As this article argues, this ultimately challenged the researchers’ concepts of economic change and called into question the very project of forecasting itself