AThere is no alternative – that is a term that has seen its best days for a long time. The fact that there was supposedly no other possibility, that everything had to happen as it did, is mostly just a sign of doubt and uncertainty on the part of those who sell this assertion as an irrefutable certainty. This is not only true in politics.
Even historians who declare the course of events to be inevitable often only cover up a lack of imagination. Or an unwillingness to think about a past where there was more than one option. To paraphrase the historian Reinhart Koselleck: Our present was once a past future. She was open and unknown to her contemporaries.
The fact that there were crossroads where other paths could be taken, “Roads not Taken”, is the conceptual prerequisite and the title of an exhibition that opened this weekend in the German Historical Museum in Berlin and bears the additional title: “It would have can also come differently”. The historian Dan Diner came up with the idea, and the DHM curatorial team implemented it together with him.
Danger of war after the Wall was built – tanks at Checkpoint Charlie on October 27, 1961.
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Image: German Historical Museum
It’s an unusual project, not entirely without risks. Historians can quickly become unpopular with anyone suspected of flirting with the philosophy of history or dealing with counterfactual history – even if this counterfactual history, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, does not pursue simple what-if questions, but developed some very elaborate scenarios.
The rather positivistic historical science prefers to stick to what is supposedly certain – and does not even notice that even when thinking about the plausibility of judgements, about scope for action and causalities, counterfactual assumptions unconsciously play a role.
Look over the railings of reality
Quite apart from that, counterfactual models are very popular in popular culture – from Robert Harris’ Fatherland and The Man in the High Castle series, in which the Nazis win World War II, to Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasies if he in “Inglourious Basterds” blowing up Hitler and the entire Nazi leadership in a cinema.
Dan Diner, as he says in an interview, has little time for that. The narrative – and the arc that the exhibition draws is of course also a specific narrative – must not deviate into the counterfactual. He prefers to use the image of the “railings of reality” over which he bends “in order to open up possible developments that are based on reality, but which did not materialize”. This is based on a historical-philosophical question: “Whether what happened ultimately had to happen.”
Diner does not deny the importance of intuition, the “childlike, almost anthropological curiosity to question history as to why it had not taken a different path”. For example, from an early age he had asked himself why the Reichswehr did not intervene in January 1933 when Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler Chancellor.
