Is there such a thing?

Författaren Mark McKenna har skrivit en biografi över en av Australiens tydligen mest kända historiker, Manning Clark. I den har han uppdagat att en av de episoder i som Clark själv ofta omtalade som avgörande för hela sitt liv omöjligen kan ha ägt rum.

Clark lär nämligen ofta ha återkommit till upplevelsen av att ha anlänt till Bonn morgonen efter Kristallnatten. Han såg förödelsen med egna ögon, och upplevde alltså själv de direkta följderna av denna historiska händelse. Men, berättar McKenna i denna radiointervju,

He arrived on November 26. Kristallnacht was 16 days prior to that. So there's no question that he was not there. He was not there. He was in Oxford. And what I discovered was, through reading letters from Dymphna, his wife, that she was the one who witnessed the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht and he was still in Oxford.

Mark Colvin, journalisten som intervjuar, ifrågasätter om Manning därför inte bör betraktas som "a fraud", men McKenna vill inte gå med på det. Diskussionen blir intressant:

MARK COLVIN: A lot of people when they think about a historian expect to be thinking about somebody who has a deep respect for the facts and doesn't allow the emotions to cloud those facts.

MARK MCKENNA: Well, the truth of Manning Clark is that the emotion is always involved with the facts. He doesn't divorce his emotion from whatever he writes, whether it's autobiography, whether it's history, whether it's fiction.

I mean, emotion and feeling is I think one of his great gifts to the writing of Australian history.

What I'm doing in this essay is to acknowledge and admit and tease out all of the circumstantial evidence that shows he was not there and the possible explanations for why he may or may not have remembered.

But I'm stopping short of saying Manning Clark is a fraud. I'm stopping short of saying he was consciously setting out to deceive.

MARK COLVIN: But if emotion is always in the way of the facts, then is he really a historian? Isn't he something else, maybe a novelist?

MARK MCKENNA: He's the historian artist. You know he's trying to do something with history…

MARK COLVIN: … Is there such a thing?

MARK MCKENNA: Yes, yes and many historians have tried to write with that vision of history in mind. I mean it's a 19th Century vision essentially. It's certainly not a late 20th Century one.

But Clark does try to keep to that ideal as a historian.

MARK COLVIN: But you are very critical for instance of his grasp of detail.

You say that it's just a maze or a minefield trying to track down his sources. When you track down his footnotes you just can't find where the quotes come from. I mean this is not something that's conducive to trust in an historian is it?

MARK MCKENNA: It's not conventional history as we would know it, no.

Alltså: antingen är man en konstnär som slarvar med detaljer eller så är man Historiker som visserligen håller sig till sanningen, men som knappast "försöker göra något med historien".

Pax att vara konstnären!