What are sources?
Sources are “all texts, objects or facts from which knowledge of the past can be gained.”1 This is Paul Kirn’s much-quoted definition of what historical sources are. Historians therefore define sources as all evidence of human activity that arose in the past and that is still preserved today – in whole, in fragments or in a changed form. However, such texts, objects and facts only become sources through the specific questions we ask of them in our historical work. This enables us to utilize the information contained in the sources for our research. Historians try to reconstruct the past as well as possible with the help of as many sources as possible.
Texts, objects and facts?
Historians deal with their sources in a similar as craftsmen do with their materials – depending on the nature of the material, the working method is adapted. To make sources as fruitful as possible for historical work, we therefore divide sources into different classifications. Depending on the characteristics of the sources, we can then choose our methods, approaches and auxiliary sciences for analysing the source.
One of the criteria’s for classifying sources relates to their written form. We thus divide them into written and non-written sources. Non-written sources are particularly relevant in ancient and medieval historiography, while written sources are of particular importance in the early modern period and especially in modern history. Due to the ever-increasing spread of writing among populations, segments of people who previously had hardly any possibility to leave behind sources were now able to put their perspectives, experiences and perceptions on paper, giving us completely new insights.
Another classic source classification judges the source in terms of its intentionality. If, for example, it is clear from the source that the author had a clear intention in producing the source to inform posterity about a certain fact, then we speak of a tradition source. If, on the other hand, this is not the case, as is the case with private correspondence or items of clothing or similar objects, we speak of remains.
A final means of source classification relates to the proximity of the source to the historical event. If the source is characterized by its immediate proximity to the subject of the report, or if it was part of the historical event, then we speak of it as a primary source. However, if it refers to another source on which it is based and is therefore already a formed tradition and an attempted reconstruction of the event, we speak of secondary sources.
It is important to emphasize, however, that none of these source classifications represents a silver bullet. For each of the categorizations, there are examples that cannot be clearly assigned to one side or the other. However, this is not a problem for historical work, as the classification is not an aim in itself, but serves to adapt our analytical tool to the basic material.
What can sources tell us?
The term source implies the 19th century idea that through them we can “get to the sources” of things and find out “how it actually was.” But even if all the historians in the world were to evaluate all the sources available at the present time, it would still be impossible to reconstruct a historical truth. All knowledge about the past must always be seen as relative, as the result of analysing all available sources on a particular research topic and as an interpretation and reconstruction of the possible past from the here and now. However, new sources can constantly falsify, revise and change the constructions of the past. We must be aware that the historical reconstruction of the past is only ever a kind of keyhole for us. Although we can catch a glimpse of the past through it, it will never be complete, as it depends on chance for which processes, events, etc. we have sources for and which we do not.
References
- Cf. Paul Kirn, Einführung in die Geschichtswissenschaft, Berlin 1968, 5th ed. [1947], 29.; Translation by the author.
- For details on this “veto right of the sources”: Stefan Jordan, Vetorecht der Quellen, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 11.02.2010, https://docupedia.de/zg/Vetorecht_der_Quellen, accessed on 06.12.2022.