About the project

The disciplines that are called the humanities usually reflect their own history. The classics are no exception in this respect. The history of the classics, by which is meant a wide spectrum of disciplines – ancient Greek and Roman literature, classical philology, the history of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient epigraphy and papyrology, the archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman world – has been mapped continually and thoroughly since the beginning of the 20th century.[1] With a certain degree of regularity, we may say, conferences and workshops on the state, evolution, and development of the classics and perspectives on them were organised in the past. This is no surprise because the classics were not only the core of education in the humanities but also a very strong component of the high school curriculum. At German universities it happens very often that the state of the classics and perspectives on them are made a subject of inaugural and honorary lectures.[2] Especially Western classical scholars and, among them, distinctively German scholars tend to meditations on the history, state, and perspectives of Altertumwissenschaft/the classics.[3] But as far as we know no serious attempt has ever been made to systematically map the subjective aspects of the evolution of the classics, by which we mean the individual histories and self-narratives of scholars who have worked in this scientific field in the 20th and 21st centuries. Narratives of individual “intellectual paths”, a sense of the past and present, and one’s professional career are something which remains behind the curtain of objectivity of scholarly writing about the history of the classics. There is no chance to find out anything about individual hopes and expectations at the beginning of a career or the process of socialisation into the discipline, not to speak about feelings of failures and upswings regarding one’s own discipline, political and other pressures influencing the discipline and career in the objectively written histories of classical scholarship, etc. The aim of this project is, then, to record the individual histories of Czech, Polish, and Italian classical scholars and thus to uncover the history of this discipline, which was, up until recent times, extremely influential,[4] in the experience of scholars. The focus is twofold. The first goal is to create a database of interviews with Czech, Polish, and Italian scholars; the second is to analyse their narratives and construction of the meaning of the discipline and the self.

The method of oral history cannot be described as an exclusively historical method. Indeed, many and various disciplines use it, for example cultural anthropology and folkloristics. This qualitative method started developing rapidly after the Second World War and became extremely popular among historians. After sixty years of various focuses and reflections on the problems[5] which oral history involves, we may say that it is now an established qualitative method[6] for recording memories and narrative analysis which has made many valuable contributions to the study of history and society. As Lynn Abrams (2010:2) states: “oral history is a catch-all term applied to two things. It refers to the processes of conducting and recording interviews with people in order to elicit information from them about the past. But an oral history is also a product of that interview, the narrative account of past events. It is then both a research methodology and the result of the research process.”[7]

The term ‘oral history’ was coined by Allan Nevis, who, in 1948, started interviewing representatives of the executive, military, and diplomatic elites in order to gain an insight into the character of the process of decision making.[8] In addition to recording the historical memories of witnesses, oral history was used with a political or ideological accent in order to give voice to oppressed people, minorities, and the marginalized. Oral history thus became a way of engagement.[9] Naturally, oral history had a major impact on regional historiography and microhistory, as well as the history of conflicts.[10] We would like to go back to the roots and use oral history for the scrutiny of an elite; the scientific elite. By using this method we aim at not only recording/taping and documenting historical memories but also at focusing on the ways scholars give sense to their professional life and discipline and how their narratives are socially and politically framed. The interviews will be conducted according to the methodological guidelines formulated by Breckner (1994) and von Plato (2000).[11]