Dialectics of ‘normative orders’? The Middle Ages of the GDR

Dr. Simon Groth

Duration of the research project 12/2017 – 06/2020

Based on the epistemological premise that the historian’s point of reference is not the past, i.e. that it cannot be a matter of describing a historical ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, but that historical science (too) inevitably has a formative reference to the present, my project was originally aimed at the still rather general ‘dialectics of normative orders’ within medieval research in the GDR. This has developed into a book project that focuses on the central theorem of East German medieval studies, feudalism.

In the GDR, the technical term ‘feudalism’ functioned as a meta-level for the Middle Ages, which was assumed to have a genuine function in the theoretical context of ‘historical materialism’. For by understanding the course of history as a development of human society determined by economic processes, history not only served as a science of legitimization, but was in fact the condition for its own political system.

The research project therefore examined less the development of a concrete normative order (although historiography was directly involved in this task) than the study of the concept of such an order within a specific political-state framework. Here it was necessary to consider whether and to what extent it makes sense to use the term ‘normative order’ in this twofold way and what possibilities for knowledge arise from this. As a ‘justification narrative’, feudalism was organically part of East German socialism, whereas GDR medieval studies in the tradition of Ranke actually (or: initially) paid homage to the epistemology of a supposedly objective ‘[Z]eigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen’.

Due to the location (or: the self-positioning) of my own project at the interface of medieval studies, contemporary history and the history of science, it initially required a broad embedding. For this reason, I first dealt with the substantive and epistemological foundations of (German) medieval studies in the 19th century, which resulted in three essays.
At the same time, the organization of a two-day conference on “The historical place of historical research. Feudalism and feudalism as concepts of normative order in the age of extremes’, the conference also presented its own approach to the history of science and initial findings on feudalism in the GDR for discussion. The conference contributions will be published in 2020 in an anthology in the series “Normative Orders” by Campus Verlag.

Against the background of a series of works from recent years, it cannot be overlooked that the topic of the normative social order of the Middle Ages is once again gaining importance within the economic cycles of research fields. In contrast to the more deconstructivist approaches since the turn of the millennium, the focus now seems to be more on the systematic or model-like understanding of this order. It might (also) be helpful here to conduct basic research into the history of science and to thoroughly analyze previous research on the ‘feudal system’ and ‘feudalism’ itself.

The research project thus pursues a number of concerns and has a dual point of reference. In line with the original orientation of the Cluster of Excellence, a very specific normative order of the past, which in medieval diction could be summarized as ‘feudalism’ or ‘feudalism’, forms the core of the research interest. In addition to the classical approaches, however, it is not the medieval sources that are to be evaluated as material for knowledge, but the results of research written on the basis of these sources. In general, therefore, my approach attempts to integrate the history of science – to a greater extent than has previously been the case – into the specialist debates of medieval studies and to use it as an instrument; in particular, my history of science of medieval studies (in) the GDR asks whether suggestions that have not yet been taken up can be found there for the ongoing study of the normative order of medieval society.