Watching the day before yesterday a history documentary of the recent Syrian civil war I was thinking about our thread about the Spanish civil war and our ungoing thread about history writing:
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t121-history-is-it-science-or-artI was surprized how difficult it is to write honest unbiassed history, even with all the nowadays factual input via testimonies, cross checking research from correspondents at place and an endless stream of information.
As I "studied"
in the time the Yugoslavian and the more older Algerian War, I became aware of the limits of gathering unbiassed news from the different sources. Even an event, to come to the Syrian Civil War, as the gassing of civilians by the Assad regime is in my opinion never cleared because there were never unbiassed witnesses at place and only the testimony of the so-called White Helmets (from the rebel party) and the doctors from Turkey, who was one of the supporting parties in the Syrian Conflict, were taken into account.
Of course the documentary that I saw about the Syrian War
https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/087438-000-A/syrie-les-dessous-du-conflit/(click on German to have it spoken in German)
is not a real historiography of this recent war as the author is not a historian but more as I see now a freelance writer
Andrezj Klamt.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrzej_Klamt (tranlation by google)
"At the age of 15, Klamt and his parents moved to West Germany in 1979. After graduating from high school, he studied film studies and Slavic studies from 1985 to 1990 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. In 1989 he spent an academic year in the USSR (Moscow / Novosibirsk).
Andrzej Klamt has lived and worked in Wiesbaden as a freelance writer and director in the documentary film sector since 1990. In 1994 he founded “Halbtotal Filmproduktion” in Wiesbaden.
From 1995 to 2013 Klamt wrote and produced articles as a freelance writer for the TV magazines “Kulturzeit”, “Aspects” and “Foyer”."
And I hear already the voice of nordmann: Well that is not history writing, while the author has not the skills of a real academic formed historian...
And of course is he right, but nowadays the reading and watching of a public interested in history is mainly feeded by such so called historical documents, which are based on research not supported by a real historian's "craft".
And so their knowledge and appreciation of all those would-be historians will nowadays come from these unacademic sources?
But I wonder if even the "skilled" academic historians can do it that much better? Perhaps they will be always better because they have learned by their training to differ between honest representation and construction of the facts and the unchecked bias of the "(wo)man in the street"?
Paul.
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