Comments on: Wie es eigentlich gewesen

By: des

des — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:52:52 +0000

Working link. Gombrich counters by calling the ist he added "redundant but harmless", and this was surely not in 1824.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:35:22 +0000

Hmm. Chickering notwithstanding, a little googling appears to show that this is an accurate quotation, with citations in French, Danish and Norwegian as well as English. And no shortage of German quotations either. I'd only guess that German grammar was less fixed in 1824, because today you'd definitely need an ist, war or sei to round out the clause. Maybe we need a historian to tell us how it really was.

By: des

des — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 13:36:17 +0000

for some weird reason it's gotten popularized among English speaking historians in the shorter version.

One reason, slightly weird:

[Gombrich] slightly misquotes Ranke's much-misunderstood, marvelously modulated phrase "how it actually happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen). This, moreover, was not intended as "an injunction to the historian." Rather it was his youthful, modest assertion in his very first book, written when he was still in his twenties, that his work was aspiring not to the "high offices" that had previously been assigned to history: "It wants only to show what actually happened" (er will blos zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen).

So it's an accurate quotation which happens not to stand alone grammatically. (My German still aspires to execrable, though, so I wouldn't have noticed.)

By: Henry Farrell

Henry Farrell — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 01:41:22 +0000

Dunno Doug – like yerself, all I know about German historiography, I learned from Roger Chickering.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 00:16:13 +0000

but for some weird reason it?s gotten popularized among English speaking historians in the shorter version Weisst Du warum, eigentlich?

By: Keith

Keith — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 22:45:59 +0000

I’m about 75 pages nto Quicksilver and enjoying it very much. the anachronisms are subtle and slip in unnoticed, especially if you aren’t a historian. I’m looking forward to the second book in the cycle coming out this spring.

By: Henry

Henry — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 04:51:50 +0000

Strictly speaking, yeah, but for some weird reason it’s gotten popularized among English speaking historians in the shorter version. I hummed and hawed a bit before deciding not to include the ‘ist’ – but in my defence, I did know that it’s not very good German grammar before sticking it up (my German is mediocre but not that mediocre).

By: leo

leo — Sat, 21 Feb 2004 04:24:44 +0000

Surely you mean, “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist“.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 22:58:34 +0000

Oops on the permalink. It’s actually at http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/perma22004.html, but I forgot to put it at the bottom of the regular scroll. Something that will have to wait until tomorrow.

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 21:47:26 +0000

“Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities.” Beautifully put. That’s what I’m always looking for in historical fiction.