Geschichte von unten
Chronist des Widerstands: Ein Nachruf auf den Historiker Howard Zinn
Von Johannes Schulten *
Bis zum Schluß redete Howard Zinn Klartext, etwa über Barack Obama: »Ich habe intensiv nach einem Highlight gesucht. Das einzige, was dem einigermaßen nahekam, war seine Rhetorik.« Daß Zinn diese Zeilen zwei Wochen vor seinem Tod verfaßte, zeigt, daß der linke US-Historiker auch im Alter von 87 Jahren nichts von seiner Schärfe eingebüßt hatte. Am Mittwoch starb Zinn an einem Herzinfarkt während einer Urlaubsreise in San Marino (Kalifornien), wenige Stunden vor Barack Obamas Rede an die Nation.
Zinn war eine der bedeutendsten Personen der US-amerikanischen Linken. Er schrieb annähernd 50 Bücher über die US-Außenpolitik, die Kriege in Vietnam und Irak sowie die Geschichte des Widerstandes in den Vereinigten Staaten. Er verfaßte Dramen über die Anarchistin Emma Goldman und Karl Marx. Sein bekanntestes Werk ist »Eine Geschichte des amerikanischen Volkes« (siehe jW vom 28. Dezember 2009).
Zinn wurde am 24. August 1922 als Sohn einer armen jüdischen Einwandererfamilie in Brooklyn geboren. Sein Vater war Kellner, seine Mutter arbeitete in einer Fabrik. Bis zu seiner Einberufung zur US-Armee im Jahr 1941 verdiente Zinn sein Geld als Hafenarbeiter. »Zu sehen, wie meine Eltern trotz harter Arbeit nicht weiterkamen«, sagte er vor einigen Jahren in einem Interview, sei die prägendste Erfahrung für sein politisches Selbstverständnis gewesen. Den Weg an die Universität fand er erst im Alter von 27 Jahren dank eines Stipendiums für Kriegsveteranen. Er studierte Geschichte und Politik, promovierte 1958 mit einer Arbeit über den ehemaligen Bürgermeister von New York, Fiorello LaGuardia. Später arbeitete er u.a. an der University of Boston.
Auch wenn er den größten Teil seines Lebens an Hochschulen verbrachte, beschränkte sich Zinns politisches Engagement nie auf den Hörsaal. 1963 feuerte man ihn von seiner Position als Dekan am Spelman College (Atlanta), einer Bildungsanstalt für schwarze Frauen, weil er sich mit protestierenden Studentinnen solidarisierte. Zinn war entschiedener Kritiker der amerikanischen Außenpolitik und aktiv in der Bürgerrechts- und Antikriegsbewegung.
Überhaupt lag ihm der akademische Habitus, den auch viele seiner linken Kollegen nur zu gerne pflegen, fern. Zinn verstand seine Arbeit immer als politisches Vermittlungsprojekt: »Denn Menschen, die ihre Geschichte nicht kennen, sind leicht zu täuschen.« Seine Bücher mußten deshalb vor allem eins sein, verständlich. Fast alle wurden Bestseller. Zinns größter Erfolg war freilich seine »Geschichte des amerikanischen Volkes«. Mit ihr stellte er die bisherige US-Geschichtsschreibung auf den Kopf. Zinns Protagonisten waren nicht mehr die Präsidenten und großen Lenker, sondern die Ausgebeuteten und deren Widerstand. Er erzählt die Entdeckung und Besiedelung (Nord-)amerikas aus der Perspektive der Ureinwohner und der Sklaven, die Industrialisierung aus der Sicht der jungen Frauen in den Textilfabriken und den New Deal vom Standpunkt der Schwarzen in Harlem.
Mit Zinn verliert die Linke weltweit nicht nur eine ihrer wichtigsten Persönlichkeiten, sondern auch einen ihrer wichtigsten Chronisten.
* Aus: junge Welt, 30. Januar 2010
Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
by Henry A. Giroux **
In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at
Boston University. One reason I went there was because
Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high
school teacher, Howard's book, "Vietnam: the Logic of
Withdrawal," published in 1968, had a profound effect
on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense
of commitment that I admired as a high school teacher
and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy,
but it captured something about the passion, sense of
commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of
Howard's working-class background. It offered me a
language, history and politics that allowed me to
engage critically and articulate my opposition to the
war that was raging at the time.
I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met
or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading
James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley
Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it
meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory and often
scorned location. But reading Howard gave me the
theoretical tools to understand more clearly how the
mix of biography, cultural capital and class location
could be finely honed into a viable and laudable
politics.
Later, as I got to know Howard personally, I was able
to fill in the details about his working-class
background and his intellectual development. We had
grown up in similar neighborhoods, shared a similar
cultural capital and we both probably learned more from
the streets than we had ever learned in formal
schooling. There was something about Howard's
fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not
just his academic position, but also his life, that
marked him as special - untainted by the often
corrupting privileges of class entitlement.
Before I arrived in Boston to begin teaching at Boston
University, Howard was a mythic figure for me and I was
anxious to meet him in real life. How I first
encountered him was perfectly suited to the myth. While
walking to my first class, as I was nearing the
university, filled with the trepidation of teaching a
classroom of students, I caught my fist glimpse of
Howard. He was standing on a box with a bullhorn in
front of the Martin Luther King memorial giving a talk
calling for opposition to Silber's attempt to undermine
any democratic or progressive function of the
university. The image so perfectly matched my own
understanding of Howard that I remember thinking to
myself, this has to be the perfect introduction to such
a heroic figure.
Soon afterwards, I wrote him a note and rather
sheepishly asked if we could meet. He got back to me in
a day; we went out to lunch soon afterwards, and a
friendship developed that lasted over 30 years. While
teaching at Boston University, I often accompanied
Howard when he went to high schools to talk about his
published work or his plays. I sat in on many of his
lectures and even taught one of his graduate courses.
He loved talking to students and they were equally
attracted to him. His pedagogy was dynamic, directive,
focused, laced with humor and always open to dialog and
interpretation. He was a magnificent teacher, who
shredded all notions of the classroom as a place that
was as uninteresting as it was often irrelevant to
larger social concerns. He urged his students not just
to learn from history, but to use it as a resource to
sharpen their intellectual prowess and hone their civic
responsibilities.
Howard refused to separate what he taught in the
university classroom, or any forum for that matter,
from the most important problems and issues facing the
larger society. But he never demanded that students
follow his own actions; he simply provided a model of
what a combination of knowledge, teaching and social
commitment meant. Central to Howard's pedagogy was the
belief that teaching students how to critically
understand a text or any other form of knowledge was
not enough. They also had to engage such knowledge as
part of a broader engagement with matters of civic
agency and social responsibility. How they did that was
up to them, but, most importantly, they had to link
what they learned to a self-reflective understanding of
their own responsibility as engaged individuals and
social actors.
He offered students a range of options. He wasn't
interested in molding students in the manner of
Pygmalion, but in giving them the widest possible set
of choices and knowledge necessary for them to view
what they learned as an act of freedom and empowerment.
There is a certain poetry in his pedagogical style and
scholarship and it is captured in his belief that one
can take a position without standing still. He captured
this sentiment well in a comment he made in his
autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving
Train." He wrote:
"From the start, my teaching was infused with my own
history. I would try to be fair to other points of
view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted
students to leave my classes not just better informed,
but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence,
more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice
wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for
trouble."
In fact, Howard was under constant attack by John
Silber, then president of Boston University, because of
his scholarship and teaching. One expression of that
attack took the form of freezing Howard's salary for
years.
Howard loved watching independent and Hollywood films
and he and I and Roz [Howard's wife] saw many films
together while I was in Boston. I remember how we
quarreled over "Last Tango in Paris." I loved the film,
but he disagreed. But Howard disagreed in a way that
was persuasive and instructive. He listened, stood his
ground, and, if he was wrong, often said something
like, "O.K., you got a point," always accompanied by
that broad and wonderful smile.
What was so moving and unmistakable about Howard was
his humility, his willingness to listen, his refusal of
all orthodoxies and his sense of respect for others. I
remember once when he was leading a faculty strike at
BU in the late 1970s and I mentioned to him that too
few people had shown up. He looked at me and made it
very clear that what should be acknowledged is that
some people did show up and that was a beginning. He
rightly put me in my place that day - a lesson I never
forgot.
Howard was no soppy optimist, but someone who believed
that human beings, in the face of injustice and with
the necessary knowledge, were willing to resist,
organize and collectively struggle. Howard led the
committee organized to fight my firing by Silber. We
lost that battle, but Howard was a source of deep
comfort and friendship for me during a time when I had
given up hope. I later learned that Silber, the
notorious right-wing enemy of Howard and anyone else on
the left, had included me on a top-ten list of
blacklisted academics at BU. Hearing that I shared that
list with Howard was a proud moment for me. But Howard
occupied a special place in Silber's list of enemies,
and he once falsely accused Howard of arson, a charge
he was later forced to retract once the charge was
leaked to the press.
Howard was one of the few intellectuals I have met who
took education seriously. He embraced it as both
necessary for creating an informed citizenry and
because he rightly felt it was crucial to the very
nature of politics and human dignity. He was a deeply
committed scholar and intellectual for whom the line
between politics and life, teaching and civic
commitment collapsed into each other.
Howard never allowed himself to be seduced either by
threats, the seductions of fame or the need to tone
down his position for the standard bearers of the new
illiteracy that now populates the mainstream media. As
an intellectual for the public, he was a model of
dignity, engagement and civic commitment. He believed
that addressing human suffering and social issues
mattered, and he never flinched from that belief. His
commitment to justice and the voices of those expunged
from the official narratives of power are evident in
such works as his monumental and best-known book, "A
People's History of the United States," but it was also
evident in many of his other works, talks, interviews
and the wide scope of public interventions that marked
his long and productive life. Howard provided a model
of what it meant to be an engaged scholar, who was
deeply committed to sustaining public values and a
civic life in ways that linked theory, history and
politics to the everyday needs and language that
informed everyday life. He never hid behind a firewall
of jargon, refused to substitute irony for civic
courage and disdained the assumption that working-class
and oppressed people were incapable of governing
themselves.
Unlike so many public relations intellectuals today, I
never heard him interview himself while talking to
others. Everything he talked about often pointed to
larger social issues, and all the while, he completely
rejected any vestige of political and moral purity. His
lack of rigidity coupled with his warmness and humor
often threw people off, especially those on the left
and right who seem to pride themselves on their often
zombie-like stoicism. But, then again, Howard was not a
child of privilege. He had a working-class sensibility,
though hardly romanticized, and sympathy for the less
privileged in society along with those whose voices had
been kept out of the official narratives as well as a
deeply felt commitment to solidarity, justice, dialogue
and hope. And it was precisely this great sense of
dignity and generosity in his politics and life that
often moved people who shared his company privately or
publicly. A few days before his death, he sent me an
email commenting on something I had written for
Truthout about zombie politics. (It astonishes me that
this will have been the last correspondence. Even at my
age, the encouragement and support of this man, this
towering figure in my life, meant such a great deal.)
His response captures something so enduring and moving
about his spirit. He wrote:
"Henry, we are in a situation where mild rebuke, even
critiques we consider 'radical' are not sufficient.
(Frederick Douglass' speech on the Fourth of July in
1852, thunderously angry, comes close to what is
needed). Raising the temperature of our language, our
indignation, is what you are doing and what is needed.
I recall that Sartre, close to death, was asked: 'What
do you regret?' He answered: 'I wasn't radical
enough.'"
I suspect that Howard would have said the same thing
about himself. And maybe no one can ever be radical
enough, but Howard came close to that ideal in his
work, life and politics. Howard's death is especially
poignant for me because I think the formative culture
that produced intellectuals like him is gone. He leaves
an enormous gap in the lives of many thousands of
people who knew him and were touched by the reality of
the embodied and deeply felt politics he offered to all
of us. I will miss him, his emails, his work, his smile
and his endearing presence. Of course, he would frown
on such a sentiment, and with a smile would more than
likely say, "do more than mourn, organize." Of course,
he would be right, but maybe we can do both.
Editor's Note: Howard Zinn and Henry A. Giroux not only
shared a long personal friendship but also many
professional and political connections. Henry A. Giroux
recently joined the Truthout Board of Directors. Howard
Zinn was a member of Truthout's Board of Advisors and
his comments and suggestions about our work will be
greatly missed by all of us.
to/vh
** t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed; Thursday 28 January 2010; http://www.truthout.org/howard-zinn-a-public-intellectual-who-mattered56463
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