How trustworthy are they? for what are they good for?—such questions must be asked by all historians who rely on personal documents, such as diaries, memoirs or oral history. The first question relates to the reliability of information gained from sources of this kind, the second  concerns the kind, quality, and level of truth recognizable in, and comprehensible from, personal documents. Historiography somewhat uniformly declares that such sources are not adequate for framing a valid concept of truth in the study of events. This rejection is characteristic not only of traditional historiography, which —in the wake of Ranke—places all its trust in the written sources, of these, however, he regards personal documents as the least reliable. Even historians who favor oral history don’t have a very different opinion. Two considerations prompt these views. According to one, oral history sources are in themselves inadequate for the formation of a general concept of history. As the Cambridge historian Gwyn Prins remarks in his assessment of Paul Thompson’s oral history monograph The Edwardians, although the rich oral history source material compiled with the participation of 500 men and women of different social classes undoubtedly lends color to the depiction of British social history in the years preceding the First World War, the main line of the argument, the backbone of describing social reality is still grounded on the “sensitive use” of written sources.1
According to Prins, Thompson uses the oral history material to supplement a construction which rests on sources of a different type, essentially the traditional ones, despite the fact that he, Thompson, is perhaps the best-known theoretician and champion of oral history today.  This is probably because the information yielded by his interviews allowed no other conclusions.2
The view taken by András Kovács is very similar. He also argues that one cannot paint a truthful picture of the past on the basis of oral accounts. “Can we,” he asks, “regard the oral accounts of participants in important historical events as historical sources? If we wish to reconstruct the actual course of events from the episodes spoken of, then the answer is ‘no’.”3 If all that oral history sources tells us about the past cannot be fully credited, and, furthermore, if these sources are unsuitable for giving a comprehensive historical picture, then is it worth struggling at all with the pursuit of oral history, and does the diligent collecting and lengthy analysis of the source material really deserve the effort? I believe the answer is “yes”, as I shall argue in the course of what follows.

The  psychology  of  remembering

The first question goes like this: can everything that remembering tells about the past in a spoken account be believed? The problem here is constituted by the epistemology of remembering—that is, the epistemology of the representation of events that once happened to us, and the experiential events taking place in our own consciousness. What is the precise value of such remembering, any recalling of the past, from the standpoint of getting to know reality and its reconstruction in retrospect? A psychology of remembering (and not memory) is needed to act as our guide when we attempt to answer these questions.
To put things simply, in the 20th century two principal trends, or “classic laws”, of the psychological concept of remembering have emerged. According to Maurice Halbwachs in a basic work, published in 1925, memory as a purely personal state of consciousness is merely an image, which relates to the individual and which is not connected to words. Remembering without words, however, is not possible, but language is an expression of a relationship between associated individuals. In other words, it is language itself which creates the possibility of recalling the past.4
According to the British psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett,5 however, memory is not a duplicate copy of events that happened to us, or of psychological processes that once occurred in us, since during remembering we do not reproduce but construct reality.
Bartlett claims that during remembering, a person constructs with the aid of a certain “scheme”, and this guides him in finding and organizing his memories. Recalling is thus the product of a construction based on a general impression formed through perception and on a matching attitude, and in return reflects these.
It is not my business to expound Bartlett’s exciting theory, which has recently become highly fashionable again thanks to cognitive psychology. However, it is worth noting that personal involvement decisively affects what we perceive and also how we remember. Bartlett makes a distinction between the modifying effects of desires and instincts, and interests and ideals on perception and remembering, and attributes great importance to the first two in the early stage of organic development, while emphasizing the latter two on the human level. To sum up, remembering is always nourished by the present, and this is true even when the memory material produced by the interviewee, or author of a memoir, is extremely rich.
If, on the other hand, remembering is not simply a more or less accurate reproduction of the events at one time, then forgetting cannot be explained away by saying that the ability to recall invariably deteriorates with the passage of time. Some historians have themselves looked on forgetting as a kind of mental error. A well-known medievalist writes: “Concerning forgetting we can even say that with the passage of time not only do memories give out, but the order of events becomes confused in consciousness, the flow of the story changes, and names are confused. It can be noticed in the chronicles that the further back in time they go, the more the credibility of the description of facts diminishes, but with regard to events that occurred seventy years before the order breaks down completely, and reality gets mixed up with products of the imagination.” He later adds by way of explanation: “The reason is that when people live to their eighties there are no peers to correct and supplement each other when remembering what they went through, and to illuminate the cause-and-effect relationships. In 1111, at the time of  King Coloman, they could still find twelve old men in Nyitra county whose memories stretched back seventy-three years earlier, to the time of Saint Stephen, the “holy king”. For events that happened earlier, the chronicles recorded only vague oral traditions.”6
Even if it is not wholly unwarranted to value the accuracy of the memories of old people more highly than memories mediated by oral tradition, nevertheless the principal question is this: how do we know which kind of memory is the more accurate? The author quoted starts out from the unspoken assumption that perception supplies us directly with authentic experience of reality, hence a memory of it is much more reliable than any form of mediated memory. But in the light of the psychological theory briefly summarized earlier, this hardly appears to be well founded. Bartlett simply writes that perception is highly selective and schematic even in early childhood. During later phases of life, when interests and events both become more dominant, this tendency grows stronger, rather than weaker. Owing precisely to the constructive character of perception and remembering, the link between different memories and reality needs to be handled more cautiously than usual. The nature of this link will be discussed in what follows.

Remembering as narration

The logic of constructing is ensured by textual editing: remembering itself is an act of narration, systematization and representation. We remember in such a way that we arrange our memories within the framework of a coherent story. “The telling of a life story that is the paradigmatic reconstruction of a life course is therefore not a simple description of events, of things that happened, but the depiction, presentation, and representation of these.”7 In other words, the “realistic” nature and credibility of the events recalled are ensured not by their relationship to actual events in the past—a relationship which cannot be verified anyway, or which can be verified only with great difficulty—but by their relevance from the point of view of the story. And since in the narrative structure remembering is, as a matter of course, retrospective in character, we actually tell not of the experience of the past processed in a narrative mode, but of a past revealed from the perspective of the present.
We have an enormous need for this primarily in order to create a self-identity. The ensuring of the continuity, unity, and integrity of the ego is the task of the continuously re-edited life story, as stated by the psychosocial theory of the personality.8 The editing operation is determined by distance in time from the past and especially by what happened subsequently. Compared to this, what we once perceived is of secondary importance. Therefore (also) there is or can be a divergence between what the memories of old men living in the 12th century preserved from the past, which was their own past as well, and between that which direct posterity considered important enough to store in its own memory.
From the above it is clear that the epistemological nature of personal documents, and oral historical sources in particular, constitute another argument for the hermeneutic determination characteristic of all types of historical sources. Taking Gadamer’s idea as a starting point, we can assume that the past is nothing other than how it presents itself when seen from the present. This is not to say that the historian simply projects the present onto the past. This could not occur, because the present itself also grows out of tradition, since the past lives on in the present as tradition. Gadamer speaks of Wirkungsgeschichte, by which he understands that the past, the horizons of people who have lived, and the present, of those looking back on the past, blend into one. Therefore the demand,  formulated at one time in historical anthropology, that the past should be reconstructed from the “logical connections” concealed in the sources is not completely warranted. The concept of Wirkungsgeschichte also suggests that the historian’s horizon does not offer sufficient guarantee that the concept of a restorable past is free of all kinds of retrospective projection.9 Given this, we can agree with András Kovács, who doubts whether events can factually be reconstructed on the basis of oral history accounts. It is questionable however whether the factuality of history is merely as much as can be established from “official” written sources. That itself is in need of evidence.
It needs evidence because Kovács also recognizes that the experiential world of participants in events (doers, mere survivors, or sufferers) in some way is also part of the historical event as a fact. “From the accounts of witnesses to important historical events”, he acknowledges, “we can gain valuable historical information: sometimes about the event itself, but first and foremost about how those asked experienced the event in question, about the meaning the historical event had for them.” Later he summarizes his position this way: “From their accounts we do not get to know the truth, although we do get to know their personal truth.”10
This discourse is characteristic in its own way as it perpetuates the historiographical tradition which says that the historian’s task is to discover what really happened. The past limited to political history thus requires first and foremost a narrative of events. In the light of this, the way things happened and the state of mind, mentality, and attitudes of those who were participants in the events are both merely secondary or collateral factors.
Here I do not wish to argue at length against this idea, and shall only refer to the new concept of social history. Social history serves as an alternative to political history, a  historicization focused on the modern nation-state. Instead of historicizing of the “imagined community” of the nation, social history endeavors to reconstruct group identities. In this it goes as far as to present, as microhistory, the average individual as the subject of its investigations. This manifests a historiographical conviction that collectivities cannot be regarded as natural entities in themselves, subsequently studied by using various analytic concepts (e. g., class, nation). On the contrary, a collectivity is a social identity constructed continuously, one which manifests itself by representations of symbolic actions for both those who participate and those who undertake the subsequent recognition and understanding.
Therefore we cannot simply speak only of facts that have occurred, since these facts are actually accounts given in narrative form about the past itself. And looking at the nature of the thing, there is no really significant difference between the accounts given by the sources and the account given by the historian from a greater distance in time. This is what Hayden White worked out as his well-known and much-debated tropology theory of representation.11
It is not my business to pursue this issue further and I shall therefore say only that oral history can help us to a reading of the past that is just as valid as political history though its importance is not primarily in explaining but in understanding. Oral history is clearly a good tool serving this purpose. One could even say that it serves this purpose  better than political history  based on written sources.
But there is something else too. Kovács—concurring with the majority of historians—assumes that written sources are invariably, and even without taking into account the oral sources available, more suitable for uncovering the truth than spoken accounts. He draws his conclusion from an analysis of the rich oral source material connected with a minor episode from the history of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary. According to the authors of another case study (also connected with 1956), however, the situation is never as simple.
Along with Gábor Hanák, his colleague in recording the interviews, György Kövér, a historian, tried to clarify in an objective way the facts concerning the death in prison of Géza Losonczy (an associate of Imre Nagy), the circumstances of his death, and the precise order of events. He found that the use of the two types of sources together was indispensable for the subsequent construction (as opposed to simply the reconstruction) of the most likely story of Losonczy’s death. This story, they frankly acknowledged, “was unequivocally produced by the historian as a biographical fact, jointly from the audiovisual and the written sources, or from the absence of sources”.12
Without oral history and other subjective sources, real history would sometimes also be presented in a very deficient way. This has so far proved evident mainly in modern political and diplomatic history, and therefore special attention has customarily been paid to the recollections of politicians and other persons in public life, regardless of whether they are available in memoir or in interview form. However, as regards the true story of Losonczy’s death the situation is a little different, since the testimony comes from people who at that time were relatively unimportant (guards, prison doctors). More precisely: recollections recorded decades later served, or had to serve, as decisive evidence about events the “true” story of which could not be told using the official written sources (because these sources were silent on the subject, or else they provided a mass of demonstrably false information). But not (only) for this reason have both oral history and other subjective historical sources suddenly emerged as important sources, but perhaps because they serve as an adequate starting-point for historiographical endeavors which aim at understanding the past. Oral history is merely one possible source material for such a historiography and within the broader circle of personal documents, diaries, private letters and memoirs, it has acquired an outstanding role particularly in connection with the 20th century. But what is the specific compared to other similarly subjective-type sources? Before we briefly discuss this question, a look is needed at the common features of all subjective sources.

What kind of remembering of
what kind of a past?

To all the above  mentioned documents I apply the term “subjective source”, which expresses the fact that those who speak out in them strike a personal note and talk about themselves continuously. This is the case even when seemingly public affairs are mentioned, since personal documents always present external events from the point of view of the narrator and in the light of his or her interpretation. All this results from the fact that more recent historical periods, which have provided highly favorable conditions for the creation of personal sources, have strengthened the tendency to individualization: “while according to the traditional concept, life acquires its structure from a succession of external events—for example, events linked to history or the change of seasons—according to the notion of the history of the development of man in the modern age, life is organized around the self and by the self”.13
Thus, being personal is at one and the same time the merit and the limitation of these sources, which, according to an apt formulation, convey merely trivial things about important people and important things about trivial people.14
Oral history and other subjective sources tell us directly about the personal, the unrepeatable, and the accidental. And if, as Charles Tilly alleges, it is worrying that in the social sciences (and, of course, also in historiography), we deduce the structure of the whole from a series of observations of the individual,15 then the conceptual extension of the isolated individual case is especially problematic. This is the problem of representativity, of general validity, an important subject to which, unfortunately, I cannot devote sufficient space here. We can note, however, that a biographical narrative gives an account of the particular events not only of an individual. Since the main function of such narratives is to present the relevant life-course invested with meaning, “the life history is a symbolic manifestation of an individual’s personal and social identity”. I follows that the individual life history narrated “contains much more a picture of a community, a society, or a historical situation as filtered through the fabric of an individual’s life” than the world of an individual in itself.16
But what differences do actually characterize the various types of personal documents: to what extent are they trustworthy or what is one or the other good for? How do they differ from each other in their relationship to reality, or their use for whatever purpose?
If the psychological observation is true that the process of individual remembering is not significantly impaired with the passage of time, then we have no reason to assume that the relived experiences of old people are further away from reality than the almost synchronous testimonies of diaries. During perception and in the subsequent short period of time (lasting for a few minutes), remembering is photographic, but with the passage of a short time the selection and editing of empirical facts begins. The results of these processes are the lasting memory traces, which might change later, but with their existence remembering will always be determined by the construction of memory material. This is why what we recollect from the distant past might change with time. It is especially interesting from the point of view of oral history how our memory alters with age. In children up to the age of four the amount of lasting memory material is usually small. This is followed by a transitional stage of life lasting roughly to the age of eleven in which, in the majority of children, memory still records empirical reality with photographic accuracy, but at the same time they are particularly susceptible to rote learning, which is already rare in adults. Following the eleventh year, and especially the thirtieth year, the ability of direct recalling (photographic memory) rapidly declines, while the whole store of memory becomes ever richer. Thus, the ability to remember in old people (if they are of sound mind, of course) is not at all inferior to that of young adults, as it is regulated by substantially unchanged mental mechanisms.17
It follows logically that an experience put down in writing contemporaneously with events, or recalled (in diaries or in private letters) in the period immediately following its occurrence is on the one hand not necessarily the same as the experience related when remembering a good deal later on, and on the other hand does not yield the same story. The difference between the two stems partly from the two ways in which memory operates, and partly from the fact that in the beginning the narrative character is not yet as decisive as it afterwards becomes. This is simply because the systematization of events, more closely of the experiences acquired through events, is, at the moment of perception, not a finalized issue yet. Later, memory-images activated from a perspective of another kind can be arranged into a more coherent construction, which, due to the intentional—that is, desired—remembering can activate images of the past which then, in the flow of events, had not yet properly risen to the level of consciousness. There is something else still: the especially rich remembering in connection with traumatic and dramatic events can acquire an increased significance afterwards, and at the same time can become richer in content as a consequence of the fact that a given event can only subsequently be identified as having exceptional importance in the life of an individual. This is when—as we say—we were not yet aware, and we could still be aware, of the true significance of things at the time they happened. This fact generates a strong psychological motivation for the reliving of the experience, and brings to our mind things in connection with it to which we did not attribute any significance at the time these events occurred. Therefore, even if we had the opportunity to remember (for example, by keeping a diary), we would not have mentioned the event. And, of course, forgetting also acquires a role at this point. According to Halbwachs the richness of the memory-image is determined by its relation to the “memory frame”. If these frames, or a part of them, disappear with time, then forgetting inevitably occurs.
Finally, the directedness of remembering is an important issue—in other words, how empirically exact and detailed remembering is, as well as what kind of narration conveys the re-lived experience, and how much both depend on the genre characteristics of personal documents. The diary is the most personal, and the most intimate, form of manifestation, one which—ignoring a few exceptions—is not written for someone else. Therefore the fashioning, the tailoring of contents to external references, is least apparent in the case of diaries.
With the memoir the situation is somewhat different, as the author intends it for publication. In it a “structured self-image” (Péter Niedermüller) speaks, which tries to accord with current social conventions (in language as well as in the norms of the public acceptability of the individual’s life path). Finally, directedness from the outside is entirely forced in the case of the interview (oral history), where the interviewer directly and personally represents society and constantly asserts its presence. Here one cannot speak of an autonomous rememberer: in this interactive process the interviewer himself or herself emerges as a text editor and shares this role with the interviewee. Although: “An interview is not a dialogue, or a conversation. The whole point is to get the informant to speak.”18
Nevertheless: this kind of social situation makes the person re-living the experience “vocationally” aware of the expectations of society in a direct form, and prompts him or her to meet these expectations as far as possible. As a matter of course he or she can only speak about things the interviewer is interested in. Or, with his questions, occasional contributions, and corrections, the interviewer shifts the interviewee’s account in a particular direction.
If the highly fragmented and raw narrative of a diary is a so-called integral part of the past (which, of course, we understand from the horizon of the present),19 then its narrative as oral history is an intellectual construction belonging more to the present. From this, however, the lesson to draw is never that oral history is entirely worthless as source material, but that in its “factual material” it differs from the contents of both memoirs and diaries. Moreover, unlike these, it matches more those expectations which society usually has of the historical representation of the past by way of a historian.
This is the reason why the narrative of oral history is a rather close neighbor to historiographic narration, and this even explains the increase in historical works composed of structured oral history narrations linked by the comments of a historian.
What kind of memory of what kind of past makes oral history interviews and other personal sources indispensable documents? In the light of this source material a notion of history is formed by the historian which imperceptibly combines myth and reality. Orally narrated remembering tells in an authentic way both about myth, which is as deeply embedded in the real experience of the past as it is in the experience of the present, and about the events of the real world.
The historian is thus given the exceptional opportunity to open a window onto the past process of a continuous change both of the collective and individual consciousness, in which facts and fantasy, present and past, all have their own places. “The mythical elements in memory, in short, need to be seen both as evidence of the past, and as a continuing historical force in the present.”20 This opens a path for a historiography which seriously reckons with the force of traditions (collective myth), and at the same time is fully aware of the relativity of its own narrative constructions.

Notes

* Taken from Budapesti Könyvszemle—BUKSZ, Fall 1998, pp. 297–302.
1 Gwyn Prins, “Oral History”. In: Peter Burke, ed.: New Perspectives in Historical Writing. Pennsylvania., The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 134–135.
2 Thompson is the author of the best handbook so far on the methodology of oral history, The Voice of the Past, first published in 1978. He also edits the scholarly journal Oral History.
3 András Kovács, “Szóról szóra” (From Word to Word). In: BUKSZ, Spring 1992, p. 94.
4 Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Alcan, 1925.
5 F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge, 1932.
6 György Györffy, “Múlt—emlékezet—történetírás” (Past—Memory—Historiography). In: Magyar Tudomány, May 1992, p. 516.
7 Péter Niedermüller, “Élettörténet és életrajzi elbeszélés” (Life Story and Biographical Narrative). In: Ethnographia, 1988/3–4, p. 381.
8 János László, Szerep, forgatókönyv, narratívum. Szociálpszichológiai tanulmányok (Roles, Scripts, Narratives. Studies in Social Psychology). Budapest: Scientia Humana, 1998,
p. 139.
9 Gábor Gyáni, “Mirôl szól a történelem? Posztmodern kihívás a történetírásban” (What is History About? The Postmodern Challenge in Historiography). In: 2000, January 1998, pp. 40–41
10 András Kovács, op. cit., p. 94.
11 Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973; idem: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; idem: The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
12 Gábor Hanák–György Kövér, “Biográfia és oral history” (Biography and Oral History). In: Tibor Valuch, ed., Hatalom és társadalom a XX. századi magyar történelemben (Power and Society in Twentieth-Century Hungarian History). Budapest: Osiris–1956-os Intézet, 1995.
13 Martin Kohli, “Gesellschaftszeit und Lebenszeit. Der Lebenslauf im Strukturwandel der Moderne”. In: J. Berger, ed., Die Moderne Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren. Göttingen: Schwartz, 1986, p. 185.
14 Gwyn Prins, op. cit., p. 120.
15 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984, pp. 25–26.
16 Péter Niedermüller, op. cit., pp 386–387.
17 Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past. Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 116.
18 Paul Thompson, op. cit., p. 209. Incidentally, Chapter 7 of the book offers a useful methodological guide to the conducting of oral interviews.
19 See also Gábor Gyáni, Az utca és a szalon. A társadalmi térhasználat Budapesten 1870–1940 (The Street and the Salon. The Use of Social Space in Budapest, 1870–1940). Budapest: Új Mandátum, 1998, pp. 56–57.

Our e-mail: books @c3.hu

http://www.c3.hu/scripta