Leibniz Research Alliance

In the political and social disputes about the interpretation of the past, and particularly in view of an age characterised by new media and sometimes described as "post‐factual", the "value of the past" has become a resource of cultural self‐re‐assurance both sought after and contested, and today represents a battleground of identity. This comes as no surprise, because values find their justification not only in ethics, but above all through history – they may be understood as a "regulative idea" of societies undergoing historical change. Values are also attributes and qualities ascribed to things that are singled out as cultural heritage due to their social recognition and valorisation. At the same time, values always define belonging and otherness, sameness and difference, serving to build communities and exlude others: Value debates play a crucial role in political and social processes of exclusion and inclusion. The commitment to and call for values has thus acquired greater social urgency in recent years, while also becoming an object of social conflict. Universal, humanitarian, religious, progressive or European values are, like the past, a discursive constant and guiding tenet when it comes to addressing social cohesion.

The aim of the Leibniz Research Alliance "Value of the Past" is to inquire into the value that societies attach to the past, both throughout history and in the present day. The intrinsic value of the past is subject to change. A different practical utility has been ascribed to it at different times, its market value rises and falls; it is associated with values held to be grounded in history and tradition, and it occupies a higher or lower rank in the value hierarchy of a present oriented more towards the future or with a greater focus on the past. The increased value of the past manifests itself in the status that societies attach to the past for the present and the future as well as in the political use of history; it is evident in the history boom since the 1970s as well as in "historical amnesia" and in the marginalisation and appropriation of cultural heritage. At the same time, the exploration and communication of history has itself become an economic factor.

Historical scholarship, cultural studies and historically informed social and life sciences, as well as museums, collections, archives and memorial sites, see themselves as authorities on critical reflection. They respond to the major social challenges and transformations of the present day and contribute to an understanding of them through historical contextualisation and debates – whether in relation to the transformation of the political, of democracy and social cohesion, with regard to the significance of the European unification process, the challenges and opportunities of globalisation and migration processes, as well as the shifts discussed in the light of post‐colonialism in the relationship between the Global South and North. And sound historical expertise is likewise indispensable for an estimation of the transformation of the environment, biodiversity and technology, of the digital revolution and new forms of media usage. 

Our present times, however, are characterised by a renaissance of simplistic (history) rhetoric appealing once again to national, ethnic and populist differences, a rhetoric that recasts the relationality of historical and scientific understanding as a qualification and challenging of the same, and invokes "fabricated traditions" to promise order in the confusion of a globalised and mediaconnected world. In exploring these tendencies, the alliance analyses processes of value creation as well as competing values in order to reveal the privilege of interpretation and the historicity of values. 

The research alliance orders the enquiry into the value of the past into three overarching perspectives: it investigates the transformation of regimes of evidence, it addresses the spatiotemporal paradigms that underlie any attribution of value, and it asks how the past is used as a public resource.

To this end, the research alliance analyses the significance and status of the past for societies from antiquity to the present day in European and global dimensions. It postulates that particularly in times of political upheaval and in global, international and social crises and conflicts, processes of negotiating the value of history play a central role. It therefore focuses on political, social, cultural and material dimensions of valorisation practices concerning the past in societies caught up in conflict and undergoing transformation. The aim of the alliance is to gain an understanding of historical and current practices of assessing, rethinking, raising, decreasing and harnessing the value of the past in all their complexity, thus creating transparency with regard to historical processes of value creation and competing values. The research findings thus help resolve conflicts rooted in cultures of remembrance. They will be incorporated in recommendations for research facilities, research infrastructures and educational institutions and will inform advice for decision‐makers in politics and society.

Research Hub I enquires as to the regimes of evidence that frame and organise the representation of the past. With the double meaning of the term evidence in mind, signifying as it does both proof (evidence) and conviction (certainty), the focus is on the connection between lifeworlds and horizons of interpretation and the interrelationship between practices of evaluation and authentication deriving from language, objects and documentation.

Lab 1.1 Language, Performance and Lifeworlds

The creation of evidence and knowledge systems at the intersection of language, performance and lifeworlds will be explored in public discourses about the past.

Lab 1.2 Materiality and Mediality

Object‐based plausibility strategies will be examined by bringing together questions of museology and the history of science at the intersection of materiality and mediality.

Lab 1.3 Digital Heuristics and Digital History

In view of the challenges in the digital age of making information transparent and reliably accessible, the hub also intends to lay the foundations for a Digital Heuristics and Digital History, drawing especially on archival and library expertise.

Research Hub II explores spatiotemporal paradigms that shape value attributions concerning the past. It is based on the principle that the value of the past has in the first place a certain reach in that it refers to historical and political spaces and their intended or desired order, as is apparent, for instance, when we speak of "European", "occidental" or "oriental" values. Secondly, the description of cultures is generally based on certain attributions of temporality, as we can see in attributes such as "progressive", "traditional", "developed" or "emerging". The hub aims to strengthen the study of the interdependencies of conceptions of space and time by asking how historical and political spaces and their temporal structures are both the precondition and the result of value attributions – and what kinds of scaling may be observed and used to describe them from a historical and analytical perspective. The hub examines the relationship of the three temporal planes of past, present and future in different eras and institutions and their impact on the construction and interpretation of history.

Lab 2.1 Dynamic Spaces

This lab examines dynamic spaces that appear as spatiotemporal constructs such as continents, states, cities, centres and peripheries, and whose perception and description in historical perspective is fluid and thus able to challenge values that once served as benchmarks or points of reference and replace them with new ones.

Lab 2.2 Temporalities of Historical Culture

In research on temporalities of historical culture, the alliance explores the extent to which the culture of remembrance creates its own conceptions of space and time.

Lab 2.3 Dissolutions of boundaries: Time‐Space Perceptions in the Anthropocene

In ecological discourse, through the dissolution of spatiotemporal thought in debates about the Anthropocene, the past is not a place of nostalgic reminiscence, but rather a repository of geological, biological and ecological knowledge that will be of great importance for the maintenance of stable ecosystems in the future. 

Research Hub III is concerned with the past as a public resource. In contrast to the depletion of natural resources, the past initially appears to be an inexhaustible reservoir. But the past, too, is taken possession of, selectively invoked and "exploited". As a public resource there is always a battle being waged for its ownership; it is the starting point for struggles over distribution and recognition, serves as raw material for the formation of identity, just as it constitutes a source of revenue in its public revaluation and instrumentalisation. In three approaches, the hub examines how social actors make history public, reappraise it, reject or reinterpret it.

Lab 3.1 Contested Value of the Past

In the lab Contested Value of the Past, the focus is on the resulting conflicts, such as those between social majorities and minorities or between different religious groups and their relationship to secular actors.

Lab 3.2 Practices of Appropriation

The lab Practices of Appropriation is devoted in particular to modes of appropriation in the context of the transformation of the media and asks how historical subjects and events are repeatedly consulted and deemed relevant once again.

Lab 3.3 Valorisation and Commodification

The lab Valorisation and Commodification addresses the influence of economic factors on the production and communication of historical knowledge.