Gustav Klemm, Cultural History, and Kulturwissenschaft

This chapter examines a new material-based history of German culture and looks at how a study of material culture had since evolved into “cultural history.” It traces the history of culture in nineteenth-century Germany, at the same time puzzling out the ambiguity of such a category as it was applied during the period. Encompassing both high culture and low, the popular and the elite, cultural history has often seemed borderless and indefinite—leading even its admirers to “search” for it or to see it as a “problem.” The chapter then turns to a study of Gustav Friedrich Klemm (1802–1867), the most important of the cultural historians of the 1840s and 1850s. His General Cultural History (1843–1852) and General Cultural-Science (1855) are both significant works in the field.

Toward a Future Theory of the Historical Document

This concluding chapter emphasizes the importance of material culture studies, bringing up the differences between the laboratory and the library as sites of questioning. Where books or disciplines cut up knowledge in self-affirming and internally consistent ways, the world is indifferent to classroom categories. The gap between the two has been bridged by what we call “applied learning.” The chapter argues that our knowledge of the world will always remain incomplete, and maybe our sense of what constitutes knowledge itself will remain a little distorted, if we do not work from the world back to the books as often as we do from the books to the world. Thus teaching from objects, or landscapes, is a way of forcing an epistemological revolution.

Archaeology as a Way of Talking about Things, 1750–1850

This chapter turns to the study of antique literature, or philology, and the evolving understandings of the concepts of archaeology and antiquarianism during the late eighteenth century. This period saw a revolution in archaeology and in the awareness of it. The discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum c. 1750 stand at the center of this turn. But it was amplified by the spread of learned journals and institutes of higher learning, by the huge expansion in learned travel, and by the trickle down of ancient and archaizing style in art, architecture, and design from the highest social ranks to the lower. Despite such progress, however, even the very term “archaeology” stood as a rather ambiguous term, one which this chapter seeks to clarify.

Material Culture in the Amateur Historical Associations of Early Nineteenth-Century Germany

This chapter explores the ways amateur historical associations act as incubators of new thinking about how objects could tell stories. It draws from publications of German historical associations produced during the nineteenth century. Beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century as a patriotic gesture and continuing for another fifty years, a new genre of German history flourished. It was often conducted at the scale of the region or territory, not the state, under the auspices of local historical associations and published in their newly created journals. In these regional associations, what had previously been a means to an end—material sources—became an end in itself: the subject matter of German history.

Material Evidence in the History Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century Göttingen

This chapter considers the “material turn” in the latter half of the eighteenth century, particularly when the first academic curriculum for material culture studies was created. It happened at the University of Göttingen, a new foundation (from 1734, formal opening in 1737) that was envisioned as the model of an enlightened university, and was, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary hothouse for humanities research. With a professionalized training regimen for historians came the idea of required courses, and the auxiliary sciences of history were born. This curriculum lingered at Göttingen for a long time, though little effort has been made to study its development.

The Germanisches Nationalmuseum: Antiquitates and Cultural History in the Museum

This chapter discusses the significance of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Its founding made good Spon's claim that a historical argument could be told through artifacts at least as well as it could through books. It followed Klemm's vision of a museum of cultural history, albeit devoted to a single nation and not the entire world. There was also a political argument: the museum was a place of learning that was open to the people in a way that a scholarly literature was not. The chapter emphasizes that the story of the museum's founding and early years is an important subject for historians of scholarship and the museum alike, but also for museum practitioners thinking about the nature of their enterprise.

Things as Historical Evidence in the Late Renaissance and Early Enlightenment

This chapter surveys the antiquarians of the Late Renaissance to Early Enlightenment periods. It shows how Italy in the sixteenth century saw an even deeper and broader engagement with the antiquities, and the identification of a group of people devoted to the study of its material remains. Through objects, Renaissance scholars gained access to parts of the past that were not discussed in texts or were discussed in texts that no longer survived. By the end of the sixteenth century, antiquarianism had spread across Europe, and the chapter pinpoints these waves of progress in the history of antiquarianism through a number of key individuals: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), Jacob Spon (1647–1685), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

History and Things in the Twentieth Century

This chapter details notable instances of artistic and intellectual engagements with material culture during the twentieth century, including poetic ruminations on the metaphysical nature of objects as well as their value in artistic tradition. It portrays these material engagements not as a marginal phenomenon relegated to the sidelines of history, but as active influences which have pervaded some of the most significant cultural creation of the twentieth century. Thus, when academics started using the term “material culture” in the last decades of the twentieth century, they were joining a conversation that had been going on for a long time, although this phenomenon somehow remained largely neglected in more contemporary discussions.

Karl Lamprecht and the “Material Turn” c. 1885

This chapter looks back to an eminent predecessor of these twentieth-century antiquarians and artists, Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915). Arguably the most important historian for the twentieth century and yet one of the least known to non-specialists, Lamprecht fills the role of grandfather to the formulators of “material culture studies”—and father to the pioneers who wrote history from material sources without giving their vision a name. Today, Lamprecht is mostly recognized for the debate about his cultural history, the Lamprecht-Streit, which was as much a debate about what history should constitute as it was a debate about whether Lamprecht was a good historian. Yet Lamprecht's career goes further than that, as this chapter shows, and his academic work has left a strong influence on the twentieth-century proponents of material culture discussed in the previous chapter.

Why Historiography Matters

This introductory chapter stresses the importance of a history of the study of objects as historical evidence. It argues that there is more depth to the use of objects as evidence than we might think, and a more sophisticated inventory of approaches and arguments on which to draw than we might imagine. To expand on this point, the chapter introduces a brief background into the history of antiquarianism, with special emphasis on how people have thought about studying objects as evidence and with reference to antiquarian ideas and practices dating back to Ancient Greek times. The chapter also details the author's own explorations and extrapolations of the rich history of material culture.