| Abstract | As bell hooks has suggested, autobiography can be like a hope chest, where certain memories are stored for safekeeping.(22) Aufsess also reflected on the attraction of storing stories. Both the autobiography and the honest friend become repositories for the condemned man's memories. Aufsess calls himself "Historiker" only in reference to the honesty of readers, not to himself as researcher. This curious proviso (that honesty is less crucial to his status as historian than it is to his humanity) actually reminds the reader that Aufsess is conducting historical research, while simultaneously distancing Aufsess from the historical requirements by bringing the discussion back to morality. Aufsess doubts that many readers would understand that his personal history could be honest in both senses (personally and historically), and he is alert to the probability that readers will judge him strictly as a sinner. Thus his selected audience, chosen for its "safekeeping" ability, understands the dual purpose of historical preservation and moral judgment. In Aufsess's consciousness as a sinner, moral judgment is as necessary as it is painful; but for the historian, it is more important to conduct the preservation, regardless of the pain, and this necessity is also visible in the meticulous cross-referencing and citation Aufsess makes within his own text to his assembled sources. The documentation of guilt is necessary for the fuller understanding and continual reworking which is required of his Protestant consciousness, in hopes of a redeemed future.
Aufsess's savvy appeal to the "real estate" interests of the nobility (a double pun: he claims, on behalf of the "real historical" [noble] estate, ownership of the property of historical consciousness, which itself comes from the land or real estate of their Heimat) is more than a marketing ploy. The success of historicism within the historical profession, which ostracized dilettantes like Aufsess, had been sealed by the rising nationalism and eventual unification of the German states. With the professionalization of history, the rise of historicism and the collapse of the distinction between Historie and Geschichte, history came to be understood not only as the property of the nation, but also as the property of the historical profession. Aufsess's attempt to rally the nobility was seen as a challenge to the dominance of the profession on the very grounds ("real estate") that it now sought to claim for itself: the soil of the Nation, the very entity that for historicists defined the historical actor (whereas for Aufsess, we will recall, the "subject of history is man" or the Volk). Local nationalism such as Aufsess's, which permitted each locality to represent the totality, stubbornly persisted in thwarting the unifying nationalist intentions of historical scholars. When [Leopold von Ranke] and the philologist and historian of philosophy Friedrich A. Trendlenburg were called in by the Prussian state to evaluate Aufsess's museum, academia voiced its unanimous condemnation of the dilettante's historical competence -- while crediting his historical consciousness, historical instincts, and even service to the state.(29)
The ambiguities of "history" persist in confusing the ways in which we talk about the "personal" aspect of historical consciousness. How does history become "personal" -- only when it is survived, or only when private lives become public knowledge? What constitutes an "experience" of history -- "being there," being told about it (telling it), being taught it (teaching it), reading about it, writing it? Or does history become "personal" when an individual cares about it? The production of history is fully integrated into its transmission; history does not exist apart from our thinking it. Clearly, there are as many ways of experiencing history as there are histories to experience. But if "history" is considered as the professional, scientific production of a text based on research, discussion and interpretation, then the personal experience of "history" is limited to producing or reading a text. Personal "history" is thus limited to two possibilities: when an individual participates in historical events -- "historical" because they qualify as the subject of later history -- and the individual can refer a personal memory to collective memory; and secondly, when an individual writes, teaches or otherwise transmits historical knowledge. In both cases, the personal experience of "history" is framed by historical representation practices.
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