독일의 역사학자 볼프강 몸젠의 <원치 않은 혁명, 1848>(푸른역사, 2006)이 출간됐다. 작년말이다. '몸젠'이란 이름이 낯설지 않아서 찾아보니까 내가 들어본 몸젠은 다른 '몸젠들'이었다. 그의 조부는 고대 로마사연구로 노벨상까지 수상한 테어도어 몸젠이고, 아버지 역시 <비스마르크>(한길사, 1997) 등의 저서를 갖고 있는 저명한 역사학자 빌헬름 몸젠이다. 내가 이 볼프캉과 혼동했던 역사학자 한스 몸젠은 그의 쌍둥이 형제였다. 이 만한 가계면 적어도 역사학계의 다윈가나 헉슬리가 정도 되지 않을까 싶다.
소개에 따르면 볼프강 몸젠은 "1968년부터 1996년 은퇴할 때까지 독일 뒤셀도르프 대학교에서 근세사 부문 정교수로 재직했다. 주요 전공은 제국주의 시대이지만, 그가 관심을 가졌던 시기는 자유주의에서부터 1차 세계대전에 이르기까지 매우 넓다. 막스 베버에 관한 전문가로서 베버 전집 간행 작업을 총괄했으며, 1988년부터 4년간 독일 역사학회 회장을 역임했다." 이 간략한 이력에 출생과 작고 년도는 빠졌는데, 1930년 11월 5일에 태어나서 2004년 8월 11일에 세상을 떠났다. 그의 형제 한스는 아직 생존해 있다.
일단 독일을 대표하는 역사학자의 저작이란 점에서 눈길을 끌지만, 책은 부제대로 '1830년부터 1849년까지 유럽의 혁명운동'을 자세하게 다루고 있다는 점에서도 흥미를 끈다. 러시아 지성사에서 사실 1789년보다 더 중요한 의미를 갖는 해가 바로 1848년이기 때문이다(얼마전에 관련 기사를 옮겨온 적이 있는 알렉산드르 게르첸 같은 경우도 1848년 혁명에 환멸을 느껴서 서구파에서 중도적인 슬라브파로 '전향'하게 된다). 그간에 이 시기는 홉스봄의 책들 정도로 카바하고 있었는데, 몸젠의 책이 '본진'의 역할을 해줄 수 있을 것으로 보인다. 책소개에 붙어 있는 역자의 말을 참조해보면 이렇다.
영국의 역사가 에릭 홉스봄이 강조했던 것처럼, 19세기 서양의 역사는 "혁명의 시대"로 일컫기에 부족함이 없었다. 1789년 프랑스 대혁명에서부터 1830년 7월 혁명과 1848년 2월 혁명, 그리고 1871년 파리 코뮌에 이르기까지 유럽의 역사는 정치적 소용돌이와 휴지기가 연속적으로 교차하면서 진행되었다. 이 모든 사건들 가운데서도 역사가들이 1848년 혁명에 특히 주목하는 이유는 두 가지다.
첫째, 부르주아지와 더불어 새로운 산업사회의 주축을 이루게 된 노동자들이 하나의 세력을 형성하면서 정치의 전면에 등장한 것이 바로 이때라는 점이다. 둘째, 1848년을 계기로 유럽이라는 거대한 수레를 움직여 온 자유주의와 민족주의의 양대 바퀴가 엄청난 파열음을 내기 시작했다는 사실이다. 자유주의와 민족주의의 충돌은 그 후에 닥쳐올 수많은 파란과 비극의 시원이 되었다.
문득 드는 생각은 그 '파란과 비극'의 구도 안에 있다는 점에서 한국사회는 1987년 체제이면서도 세계사적으로는 1848년 체제에 속해 있는 게 아닌가 싶다. 1987년 체제 전환을 위한 개헌논의가 한창 벌이질 듯한데 거기에 덧붙여 좀 거시적으로 1848년 체제에 대한 성찰도 시도해보는 것은 어떨까. 아래는 몸젠의 타계 이후에 나온 가디언지의 추모기사이다. 저자에 대한 유익한 정보들을 포함하고 있어서 옮겨놓는다.
Wolfgang Mommsen
A leading German historian, he brought academics together to further the understanding of his country's past
Richard J Evans
Tuesday August 17, 2004
The historian Wolfgang Mommsen, who has died of a heart attack while bathing in the Baltic Sea at the age of 73, was a leading member of a remarkable generation of liberal and left-leaning historians who championed a more critical attitude to the German past from the 1960s onwards.
He came from a famous family of scholars: his great-grandfather was Theodor Mommsen, a leading late 19th-century liberal and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for his trilogy on the history of ancient Rome. Visitors to Wolfgang's family home in Düsseldorf, overlooking the Rhine, could not escape noticing the large gallery of photographs of the many eminent professors whom he numbered among his ancestors and relatives. His father, Wilhelm Mommsen, was also a historian.
So, too, was Wolfgang's identical twin brother Hans, whose career matched his with uncanny precision. After studying in Marburg, Wolfgang obtained his doctorate in Cologne in 1958, in the same year as his brother was awarded his PhD in Tübingen. Both were appointed to chairs in the same year, 1968: Hans in Bochum, Wolfgang a stone's throw away in Düsseldorf.
To attend a German historical conference where both were present was an uncanny experience, as each, in true professorial style, flitted from one parallel session to the next, making participants who did not know them wonder why the same historian had to make two different contributions to the same discussion within the space of a few minutes. Hans smoked and drank, while Wolfgang did not; and seeing them together was like seeing the effects of 40 years of alcohol and tobacco on the same body: Wolfgang was undoubtedly the leaner and fitter of the two, though even he perhaps was throwing caution to the winds when he plunged fatally into the cold waters of the Baltic.
While Hans eventually became an important historian of Nazi Germany, Wolfgang specialised in the Imperial period, from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the first world war. His dissertation, on Max Weber and German politics, published in English in 1984, must surely be one of the most brilliant debuts a historian has ever made: it revolutionised our understanding of the 20th century's most influential sociologist by setting him firmly in the context of his times, and showing him to be a liberal nationalist and imperialist, much to the horror of many of his admirers. He went on to demonstrate that a knowledge of Weber's political thought and action was essential if we were to grasp accurately his theory of power. This was an outstanding achievement, and Wolfgang followed it up by playing a leading role in editing a new, comprehensive edition of Weber's works; his dynamism was essential in pushing on towards its completion.
The Mommsens were related to Weber by marriage, so there was something particularly iconoclastic in Wolfgang's book, which caused a huge storm when it first appeared. Building on this, he went on to produce a wide range of studies on German liberalism and on imperialism. But in the central period of his career, it was as an academic politician and administrator that he made his mark. A spell as a British Council scholar in Leeds at the end of the 1950s had made him into something of an Anglophile: it was a mark of his acculturation that the best gift one could take him on a visit to Germany was a packet of plain English tea - Liptons, PG Tips or Brooke Bond, not the fancy concoctions that are all one can obtain in German grocery stores. So it seemed natural that he should take over as director of the recently founded German Historical Institute in London in 1977.
Wolfgang's energy quickly made the institute into the most important centre for British historians working on Germany. He raised large sums of money, building up a well-stocked library and moving the institute into spacious and elegant new premises on the corner of Great Russell Street and Bloomsbury Square. He attracted a brilliant generation of young German historians as research fellows. And above all, perhaps, he organised a string of important conferences, of which the most influential was held in 1979, on state and society in Nazi Germany. The vehemence of the clashes between those who argued that it all came down to Hitler, and those who argued for the primacy of structural forces, took many observers aback, and still reverberates today.
In such a setting, Wolfgang was in his element. His love of controversy found another outlet in his cogent contributions to the debate that raged in Germany in the mid-1980s over whether the time had come to draw a line under the Nazi past: Wolfgang was sharply critical of those, such as the rightwing historian Ernst Nolte, who thought it had. All of this was too much for the conservative government led by Helmut Kohl that came to power in West Germany in 1982, however, and Wolfgang was effectively forced to return to his chair in Düsseldorf in 1985, leaving the institute in less energetic hands.
Wolfgang quickly found another role as president of the Association of German Historians from 1988 to 1992, and in this capacity took a lead in arguing against those who saw German reunification as the opportunity for a more nationalist view of the German past. In the mid-1990s he produced his masterwork, a huge, two-volume history of Germany from 1850 to 1918, elegantly written, comprehensive, and full of stimulating insights and material scarcely known even to specialists. On their simultaneous retirement in 1996, the Mommsen twins spoke jointly at a seminars in London and Cambridge: their mutual competitiveness had not diminished with time, and it was almost impossible for other participants to get a word in edgeways as each launched into a string of criticisms of the other's paper.
Wolfgang was not always an easy character to work with; he could seem arrogant and self-important, though those who knew him well could see through these traditional social attributes of the German professor to the real man underneath. He was particularly kind to younger British historians, and made those of us who knew him feel that we were making an important contribution to explaining his country's past, whether we really were or not. His infectious, braying laughter enlivened many an academic occasion and revealed a lighter side to his nature.
His perpetual restlessness and youthful energy led him, in his 60s, after his children had grown up and left home, to leave his wife for a graduate student. However, the relationship did not last, and Wolfgang spent his final years in a bachelor apartment in Berlin, continuing to work on the Weber edition and to publish books, the most notable of which was a study of Germany's part in the origins of the first world war. He is survived by his wife Sabine and their four children.
07. 01. 10.