'Labour biographies and prosopography', 41st conference of ITH, Linz, 15-18 September 2005

The 41st ITH conference brought together eighty historians around the theme 'Labour biographies and prosopography'. More precisely, it was the theme of collective biography or prosopography that provided the focus for the majority of papers and they key debate. The choice of the theme demonstrates the aim of the ITH to open itself up to approaches and methods which in recent years have contributed strongly to the renewal of the historiography of the working class movement as the dominant social movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The biographical approach, and more particularly that of collective biography, have recently experienced a considerable development, not only in history, but in the social sciences more generally. The results have been especially interesting in the fields of labour and social history.

The basic aim of the conference was to take stock of a number of projects, already complete or in the course of realisation, in the field of the collective biography of the working class movement; and within a comparative context to discuss their different methodological aspects and research findings and any problems of realisation.

The first part of the conference was devoted to the consideration of a number of particularly significant prosopographical projects. After a general introduction by Bruno Groppo, Claude Pennetier described the experience of the Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement Ouvrier Français, an enormous enterprise undertaken by Jean Maitron in 1955. This has since served as both a pioneering example and a point of reference for subsequent biographical dictionaries of the labour movement having a scholarly character. Feliks Tych recalled the political vicissitudes and methodological of the Biographical Dictionary of the Polish Workers' Movement, a project that was launched at the beginning of the 1960s and remains in progress today. Compared with analogous experiences in the former GDR and Hungary, the Polish example provides evidence of the difficulties caused by the political control of biography exercised by ruling communist parties, but also that the situations were characterised by considerable diversity and a certain specificity of the Polish case. Horacio Tarcus stressed that in Argentina, like other Latin American countries, there still do not exist solid works of scholarship on the collective biography of the workers' movement. He then described his own project, still in the course of progress, of a biographical dictionary of the Argentinian left. He explained the rationale for this particular emphasis - a dictionary of the left, and not of the working class movement as such - the selection criteria he has adopted and the methodological problems that are inherent in this type of work.

Klaus Tenfelde, in his contribution analysing the problem of generations within German social democracy, brought into the discussion one of the key concepts in any reflection on collective biography. This question of generations was also central to the presentation of Jürgen Mittag, who reported on a prosopographical project directed by Wilhelm Schröder on social democratic members of the Reichstag and Länder parliaments between 1870 and 1933. This work, which can now be accessed via the website of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, provides an especially convincing demonstration of the usefulness of the prosopographical method for the study of the workers' movement. As a particular field of research linked with that of the labour movement, the co-operative movement formed the subject of Patricia Toucas-Truyen's paper, which presented the principal results of research into the biographical trajectories of co-operative movement activists in France. Claudie Weill concluded the first day's proceedings with a paper on jewish socialist activists in Russia.

The second day was given over specifically to problems of collective biography in the historiography of the communist movement, particularly since the opening up of previously inaccessible communist archives in Moscow and elsewhere. Thanks to the accessibility of these archives, considerable advances have been made in this field since the beginning of the 1990s and the conference presentations bore witness to a number of these. Michael Buckmiller described the objectives, methods and results of a vast prosopographical project at the University of Hannover on the cadres and collaborators of the Comintern. The project database, which comprises more than 28,000 biographies deriving from the Comintern archives in Moscow and other sources, is a precious research tool for historians of communism internationally. Klaus Meschkat presented a brief paper on another Comintern-related project which in 2004 resulted in the publication of a biographical dictionary of the Comintern in Latin America produced by a team of specialists including Peter Huber, Lazar Heifetz and Viktor Heifetz. The Comintern was also at the centre of José Gotovitch's communication on the prosopographical project on French-speaking cominterniens that resulted in the biographical dictionary Komintern: l'histoire et les hommes. Kevin Morgan reported on the CPGB biographical project at the University of Manchester and highlighted a number of questions of method and interpretation confronted during the course of the project. Hermann Weber explored the biographical dimension of German communism between 1918 and 1945 in describing the biographical manual he has recently published with Andreas Herbst, which brings together 1400 biographies comprising practically all the key cadres of the KPD during the period of the Weimar republic and nazi dictatorship. These biographies reveal the often tragic fates of so many communist activists in this traumatic period. Bernard Pudal offered an original interpretation of the communist world as a biocracy. Pudal's argument was that the importance attached by communist parties to biographical management and verification as instruments of legitimation stemmed necessarily from their focus on political capital, not scholarly capital or capital per se, as a means of social differentiation: the criterion on which social hierarchy was based in the world of communism was that of biography and the account of each individual's social and ideological history.

Two short presentations closed the second day. Drawing primarily on judicial archives, Ottokar Luban explored the biographies of activists in the Spartakus group centred on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht between 1915 and 1918. Ulla Plener sketched a collective portrait of certain German women, exiled in France during the nazi period, who played a part in the resistance movement.

As points from the papers were taken up in discussion, the conference above all provided an opportunity for the comparative evaluation of different approaches and the results obtained by them. The conference clearly demonstrated that the method of collective biography opens up genuinely new perspectives in the field of labour and social history, exactly as in other fields of historical scholarship. By focusing attention on individual trajectories, it encourages the posing of fresh questions and a better understanding of the complexity of motivations of activists. It is very much a live field of research, as shown by the various examples of national projects and the fact that projects that have already reached fruition are providing a reference point and stimulation to similar enterprises elsewhere, for example in Latin America. Numerous issues remain unsettled and will continue to provoke debate. These do not just concern the field of social history, but other social sciences such as sociology or anthropology.

The scholarly direction of the conference was provided by a team coordinated by Bruno Groppo and comprising Feliks Tych, Michael Buckmiller, Claudie Weill, Claude Pennetier, Bernard Pudal, Berthold Unfried, Christine Schindler and Winfried Garscha. Eva Himmelstoss was responsible for the technical organisation. The Centre d'Histoire Sociale du XXe Siècle (Université Paris I) was closely involved with the preparation of the conference.

Bruno Groppo, Paris