Beyond the Limits of a Biographical Approach for Transregional History?

The biographical method inherently overrepresents individuals in the public spotlight who leave rich (personal) archival materials. Other methodologies, such as a prosopography or a systematic comparison of different cohorts of historical agents, have been used to enrich and diversity our understanding of lived experiences and life courses. This contribution shows how a transregional focus makes it more difficult to use such methods, because of the way in which sources have been compiled and preserved. Offering examples from my ongoing research about veterans within what we today call the Greater Region after the First World War, I show how I extract new historical knowledge about the way borderland inhabitants experienced time and space. Advocating for a hermeneutic approach, I encourage scholars to explain how their research materials were preserved, searched for, accessed, selected, and published within the constraints of applicable archival laws, practices and research funding, so as to grasp “not just facts but their integration into a meaningful whole” (Zimmermann 2015, 2).