Acta Didactica Norden Vol. 17, Nr. 2, Art.

Maria Deldén
Dalarna University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5617/adno.9224

©2023 Author(s). This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY
4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

The in-between: On Arendt’s metaphor go visiting and

empathy-in-history in students’ meaning making in history
education
Abstract
History education is built on a tension. Should the past be understood from its own
premises as a cognitive historical thinking act, or should we embrace aspects of
students’ feelings and reactions in the present when interpreting the past? The aim of
the article is to explore and deepen the understanding of the concept of historical
empathy by using the metaphor go visiting from Hannah Arendt, and with historical
feature film as the educational arena. The article has a theoretically exploratory
approach with focus on students’ meaning making in history education. The method of
abduction is used to explore and reinterpret the concept of historical empathy through
students’ experiences of historical feature films, and with help from the concept of in-
between and the visiting metaphor in Arendt’s political philosophy. A conclusion is that
personal experiences in students’ life worlds need to have their place in historical
meaning making and need to be in balance with the understanding of history that is
required from a curriculum perspective. The point is not to dismiss these personal
reactions and the historical meaning making they entail. Arendt’s visiting metaphor
makes it possible to embrace and nurture the inevitable dilemma of history education –
how to handle the relation between past and present.

Keywords: historical feature film, historical meaning making, historical empathy,

empathy-in-history, Hannah Arendt, go visiting

Det mellan-mänskliga: Om elevers historiska

meningsskapande utifrån Arendts besöksmetafor och
empati-i-historien
Sammanfattning
I historieundervisningen finns en didaktisk spänning. Ska det förflutna tolkas och förstås
utifrån sina egna premisser genom historiskt tänkande som en kognitiv handling, eller
bör aspekter av elevers känslor och reaktioner i nuet spela in? Syftet med artikeln är att
utforska och fördjupa förståelsen av begreppet historisk empati genom att använda
metaforen go visiting från Hannah Arendt, och med historisk spelfilm som didaktisk

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arena. Artikeln är av utforskande teoretisk karaktär med särskilt fokus på elevers

meningsskapande. Abduktion som metod används för att låta empiriskt material och
teori mötas och begreppet historisk empati utforskas och omtolkas genom att elevers
erfarenheter av historiska spelfilmer analyseras med hjälp av besöksmetaforen i Arendts
politiska filosofi. En slutsats är att personliga erfarenheter i elevers livsvärldar behöver
ha sin plats i deras historiska meningsskapande och behöver vara i balans med den
historieförståelse som krävs ur ett läroplansperspektiv. Poängen är att inte avfärda dessa
personliga reaktioner och det historiska meningsskapande de innebär. Arendts besöks-
metafor kan hjälpa till att göra det möjligt att omfamna och vårda den oundvikliga spän-
ningen i historieundervisningen, i hur man hanterar relationen mellan dåtid och nutid.

Nyckelord: historisk spelfilm, historiskt meningsskapande, historisk empati, empati-i-

historien, Hannah Arendt, besöksmetafor

Introduction

When feature film is used in teaching and learning history, an educational tension
arises that is connected to historical meaning making. On the one hand, historical
feature films have the potential to deepen students’ historical understanding and
engage them in difficult history; history that deals with complex and controversial
aspects of the past. However, on the other hand, there is a risk that students’
historical understanding is restrained because of the nature of film narration
(Marcus & Levine, 2007; Metzger, 2012; Stoddard et al.,2017; Deldén, 2017).
Feature film narration addresses the viewer’s feelings and thoughts in the present
context (Metzger, 2012; Donnelly, 2014; Deldén, 2017), and often has a moral,
social, and political standpoint that tells more about the time the film was pro-
duced than about the historical period the film plot represents (Jönsson, 2004).
This educational tension when teaching and learning history through film, is well
known and it is connected to historical meaning making in a broader sense. It can
be seen through the lens of the concept historical empathy, where different views
come to the fore. Should the past be understood from its own premises as a
cognitive historical thinking act, as argued by Peter Lee and others (Lee & Ashby,
2001; Foster, 2001; Lee & Shemilt, 2011)? Or should it embrace aspects of
students’ feelings and reactions in the present when interpreting the past as
suggested by Keith Barton, Linda Levstik and others (Barton & Levstik, 2004;
Endacott, 2010; Endacott & Brooks, 2013; Dahl, 2021; Ammert et al., 2022)?
This article addresses the theoretical understanding of historical empathy in
students’ meaning making by using the historical feature film as arena for history
education.
To see feature film as an educational arena can be motivated as Vivian
Sobchack describes it with the concept conflation. Conflation is used to show how
fact and fiction are intertwined in historical meaning making. It is impossible for
an individual to distinguish between historical knowledge that comes from aca-
demic history, and knowledge of history that is obtained through popular culture

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because it is intertwined in the construction of historical meaning. It is not about

high- and low-quality historical knowledge that can be kept separate, but rather
about different aspects of historical knowledge (Sobchack, 1997). Alison
Landsberg stresses that historical knowledge through historical feature film arises
from an analysis of the film’s narrative and stylistic strategies, including the
viewers’ affective engagement. Connected to this analysis, it is important to con-
sider the political implications of the produced historical knowledge (Landsberg,
2015b).
In this article, I approach feature film as an educational arena to explore his-
torical empathy. A theoretical path is taken by suggesting a deepened under-
standing of the concept with help from the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt
through her metaphor go visiting and the notion of the in-between. The article
addresses how the visiting metaphor contributes to visualizing different persons’
perspectives in time and space, and also the relations between the persons taking
or giving these different perspectives. The article contributes to an understanding
of the concept of historical empathy concerning the relation between past and
present, where the relational in-between is a key aspect.

The aim
The aim of the article is to explore and deepen the understanding of the concept
of historical empathy by using the metaphor go visiting from Hannah Arendt, and
with historical feature film as the educational arena. The article has an exploratory
theoretical approach with special focus on students’ meaning making. Therefore,
empirical material, in the form of students’ voices and film narration, is used to
illustrate and deepen the theoretical perspective.
To fulfill the aim, I start with an overview of the concept of historical empathy
in previous research and how it can be understood when linked to historical
meaning making through feature film. I then present the specific concepts from
Arendt’s philosophy and explore with help from students’ voices, and examples
from film narration, how historical empathy can be understood from an Arendtian
perspective.

Historical empathy and historical feature film

During the last decades we can see a shift in history teaching from an education
focused on fostering students’ historical grand narratives transferred by the
teachers, to an education characterized by fostering skills and competencies in
order to help students to develop historical thinking (Körber, 2015; Rantala et al.,
2016). In this development, several historical thinking skills have been identified,
among them historical empathy or perspective taking (Davis et al., 2001;
Lévèsque, 2008; Seixas & Morton, 2013). Empathy as an aspect of historical
meaning making is tricky because it highlights the problems with anachronistic

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responses when interpreting historical sources and it makes us deal with not only
cognitive processes of meaning making but also with the fact that emotions are in
play when we reconstruct the past as history (Blake, 1998; Landsberg, 2015a).
Consequently, there is a dispute in history research about how historical empathy
should be defined and what role it should play in history education. The main
disagreement lies in how to understand the affective dimensions of historical
meaning making where one standpoint is that historical empathy is mainly about
cognitive processes to understand the past from its own premises, that is to
recognize and understand past meanings (Lee & Ashby, 2001; Lee & Shemilt,
2011). The other standpoint embraces both cognitive and emotional aspects of
understanding history and sees a connection between interpretations of historical
sources and accounts, and experiences in the present. Here, both perspective
recognition and empathy as caring are important aspects (Barton & Levstik, 2004;
Endacott & Brooks, 2018; Ammert et al., 2022). Both standpoints, however,
underline the importance of contextualization, that is, the recognition of inter-
pretation of historical evidence in relation to the historical time. These standpoints
have been described excellently in previous texts (Rantala et al., 2016; Endacott
& Brooks, 2018).
This article sympathizes with the second standpoint described above but wants
to explore this further with help from Christopher Blake in his criticism of how
historical empathy has been defined (Blake, 1998; Retz, 2015). Blake introduces
the concept of empathy-in-history instead of historical empathy. By doing this, he
visualizes that it is precisely in the relation between questions to the past and
questions to the present that people give meaning to their lives here and now:
In short, we need to know as much about where we start from as we do about where we
aim to go. Such an outlook requires a dialectic between the present and past, one in
which the complexities of the here-and-now are dealt with by the historian as rigorously
and investigatively as is the past. Empathy can be a critical component of such an
investigation. (Blake, 1998, p. 28)

Blake puts emphasis on the understanding of empathy in itself, related to history

and other disciplines. He points out that by trying to define empathy in historical
empathy as something different from empathy in other disciplines we lose the
whole register of the notion of empathy, which is identification, imagination, and
sympathy. By embracing the very notion of empathy and connect it to history and
historical knowledge, we can reach a more interdisciplinary approach that reveals
more layers of historical understanding (Blake, 1998). I interpret Blake as putting
emphasis on the relation between thoughts and knowledge of the past and the
present through a focus on empathy.
In line with an interdisciplinary interpretation of empathy in history research,
Thomas A. Kohut (2020) defines empathy by turning to psychoanalysis. Kohut
defines empathy in historical understanding mainly as perspective taking (or role
playing) or/and as affective sharing (or emotional contagion). He is critical to
defining empathy as identification or sympathy like Blake does. Nevertheless,

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Kohut focuses on the importance of an internal, empathic position in history

research by recognizing the relation between the person in the present thinking
and feeling with persons in the past, and the persons in the past. It is necessary for
a productive use of empathy in history to be able to distinguish between one’s
own feelings and thoughts in the present, and the imagined lived past (Kohut,
2020). Kohut like Blake tries, by using empathy, to establish a subject-to-subject
relation between us here and now and people in the past.
How can we then understand historical understanding and empathy related to
historical feature film? How is it relevant for a fictional telling of the past? On the
one hand, there is a criticism towards the use of historical feature film as a means
for historical understanding since fictional storytelling never can be counted as
reliable historiography. On the other hand, several historians recognize the his-
torical feature film not only as a primary source but also as a historical account
that can produce historical knowledge even if the fictional narrative contains facts
that are not historically accurate (Rosenstone & Parvulescu, 2013; Landsberg,
2015a). In this perspective, the affective dimensions of historical feature film are
important and here is a link to empathy-in-history and perspective recognition. To
help the viewer to produce historical knowledge, the film narrative in a historical
film should invite to alignment with the film characters, but also alienate the
viewer by causing distance:
Films that effectively foster the production of historical knowledge do so by tempering
or interrupting viewers’ affective engagement through formal and narrative strategies
for blocking easy identification with the characters. (Landsberg, 2015b, p. 484)

This leads us to empirical classroom research on historical empathy related to

students’ experiences of historical feature film. What do students experience when
making meaning from historical feature film and how can we understand his-
torical empathy? Studies show that feature film has the potential to put emotions
in motion and this can awaken both deep historical and more generic reflections
about the past (Metzger, 2012; Deldén, 2014, 2017; Dahl, 2013, 2021; Donnelly,
2014). If the reflections get too generic, it can be difficult for students to under-
stand how, for example, genocide can occur. This is because the explanations for
such deeply traumatic events are usually found in the historical context, not in
generalizations about human nature (Metzger, 2012; Dahl, 2013). A historical
feature film can, through its strong audiovisual and emotional way of presenting
a historical event, lead students to miss relevant knowledge about the past. In
historical feature film, there is a tension between performance and authenticity
and students can experience or perceive the film narrative as true without reflec-
ting on historical evidence, which can be both complicated and contradictory.
Students are easily drawn into naive and uncomplicated parallels between the past
and the present. A strong historical feature film can also trick students into
thinking that they have understood what it was like to live during, for example,
the Holocaust (Metzger, 2012; Deldén, 2017). Both Metzger (2012) and Deldén

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(2014, 2017) show that the students participating in their studies, are interpreting
historical films they experienced in relation to their pre-understandings, both their
own and their families’, and in relation to the teachers’ statements, books, or other
films. The students generalized about the portrayed historical events outside its
historical context. Their empathy expanded to include affect-based reflections on
their own lives (Metzger, 2012; Deldén, 2014, 2017). Talking with the vocabulary
of historical empathy: if compassion becomes too strong at the expense of
perspective recognition, the historical empathy that is productive for historical
understanding does not arise. A problem with using historical feature films in
teaching can thus be the educational tension between historical empathy and other
learning objectives, such as the ability to use subject knowledge (Metzger, 2012).
But studies also show how students use historical empathy to gain historical
knowledge in a way that promotes awareness of both the past and the present
(Deldén, 2014, 2017; Dahl, 2013, 2021).
What earlier empirical studies conclude about students’ historical meaning
making regarding historical empathy when historical film is used, is interesting
for the aim of this article. They confirm the educational tension between students’
ability to recognize perspectives and contextualize the understanding of past
events, and students’ need to empathize with people in the past, engaging in strong
feelings belonging in the present (Barton & Levstik, 2004).
So far, I have given a background to different understandings of historical em-
pathy, among them Blake’s suggestion to use the concept of empathy-in-history.
I have also described empathy in relation to the arena of historical feature film in
history education. However, this background leaves us with some aspects of
empathy that need to be further explored; historical empathy as perspective taking
or perspective recognition gives us reason to ask questions about the different
perspectives, the relation between these perspectives, and about the in-between
perspectives.

Arendt and the metaphors go visiting and in-between

Arendt’s political philosophy is concerned with the interpersonal aspects of be-

coming a human being in relation to others and to society, and how to understand
human action and being. It may seem a long shot to use a political philosopher to
explore historical meaning making through film language. But as I will show, her
thinking on human activity in public life, by addressing the importance of showing
each other who we are, in order to promote plurality, corresponds both with objec-
tives for teaching and learning in history and social science (Ljunggren, 2010),
and with the possible imagination that film experience could initiate. Arendt
offers significant connections between imagination and politics (Harwood, 2009).
And as Harwood points out, Arendt talks about representative thinking, meaning
that political and moral judgment is based on the capacity to imagine how to feel

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and think in the place of others (Harwood, 2009). This can be fruitful for the
history classroom.
To explain the metaphor of go visiting, I first turn to the concepts of natality
and plurality that Arendt used to describe the conditions for a functioning public
arena. I then connect this to an educational perspective. Arendt describes human
becoming into the world in the sense of political subjects and unique beings. Who
we become is conditioned by the world already existing when we are born and
into which we start to weave our threads of life. Every person is unique and as we
live, we act in relation to the already existing through words and actions, and
thereby we contribute with something new. This condition of natality consists of
the double figure of having to interact with a world already existing, and by acting
and speaking we contribute to the world. The world shapes us, but we also shape
the world. In this way the human being by existing relates to the past, the present
and the future at the same time. Speaking as well as acting are expressions of will,
and by expressing a will we become political subjects (Arendt, 1998).
Arendt also puts a perspective of plurality on humans’ interaction in and with
the world. It is important that we act and react with others with curiosity of every-
one’s uniqueness. To visit the life experiences of someone else is not only a way
to understand others, but also a way to understand one’s own standpoints. Per-
sonal growth therefore presupposes plurality and the awareness of precisely the
space in between persons or groups that go visiting (Disch, 1997; Arendt, 1992).
So, plurality in the visiting metaphor is a recognition of the threads in one’s own
life, as well as of the threads in the lives of others. Plurality is a necessity to get
to know oneself as a unique being and a condition for humans to enable enlarged
thoughts, and it is a necessary condition for a functioning democracy (Arendt,
1998).
Regarding the visiting metaphor and connected to enlarged thoughts, I want to
underline that when we go to visit, we do it as ourselves, and from the standpoint
of ourselves we familiarize with other people's experiences. With the help of our
imagination, which is crucial, we can visit other people’s possible thoughts and
value judgments. Through the visiting experience, our own thoughts and value
judgments can be subjected to criticism and thus we can reach critical thinking,
which enables enlarged thoughts (Arendt, 1992).
Closely connected to and part of the metaphor go visiting is the notion of the
in-between. Arendt describes the in-between parting from the word interest. The
two parts inter and est (between being) put focus on the in-between when we as
beings speak and act with each other: “[…] it is an ‘agreed purpose’, […], which
varies with each group of people and serves to relate and bind them together”
(Disch, 1997, p. 142).
When we speak and act in the world, we share a common space with the person
or group we are communicating with. This common space both links and separates
the individuals and groups communicating. It is not about shared identities or
shared qualities in each individual or group, but rather about the shared space.

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This space is twofold, it comprises a worldly objective side and at the same time
this space in-between is a system of relations between human beings (Arendt,
1998; Disch, 1997). In this way plurality is manifested, in the sense that we share
the fact that we always will experience the same object but from different per-
spectives, thus binding us together and separating us. Lisa Disch uses Cubism to
picture how the in-between could be understood:
Cubism achieves visually what Arendt is trying to do conceptually: to challenge the
unitary assumption that sameness is necessarily coterminous with identity. Inter-est is
the same but nonidentical object of public concern. By proposing the concept inter-est,
Arendt attempts to afford a conception of political solidarity or sameness that is not
founded on a moral touchstone or an identical nature. (Disch, 1997, p. 143)

To develop this further in line with the aim of the article, I now connect the
Arendtian metaphors to an educational perspective. Entering a classroom is
entering a “community of thought and action” (Ljunggren, 2010, p. 19). For this
community of thought and action Carsten Ljunggren (2010), with departure in
Arendt’s political philosophy, argues for an agonistic recognition in education,
where the recognition encompasses both an external and an internal inter-
subjective understanding. This brings a clarifying connection between Arendt’s
metaphors used in this article and the understanding of empathy in history
education. The point Ljunggren makes is that the constant becoming of the student
is not only linked to interaction and meeting with others, but also “related to the
unknown subject-self disclosed by ‘thinking’” (Ljunggren, 2010, p. 33). Follow-
ing this thread, I can see how a deepened understanding of historical empathy can
be reached by opening it up for the dimension of agonistic recognition. It is not
just about knowing something, or to explain something in the past, but rather a
virtue to understand something in a deeper way, which Ljunggren connects to the
ability to think in the sense of judgment. To be able to do that, the student needs
to shift between disclosure and withdrawnness of the self (Ljunggren, 2010, p.
22). And in this process, I mean that empathy is an important component, and I
develop this further in the following sections. But before that some words on
narration, which in Arendt’s political philosophy plays a key role.
It is through acting and speaking that we communicate to each other who we
are. By communication through acts and speech we make plurality visible. But
communication can be disrupted when individuals’ experiences of the shared
world are alienated from the experiences of who we are. There is a risk that we
use narratives that not fully allow us to express ourselves as unique beings
(Arendt, 1998, 2004). Ljunggren stresses the importance of a critical perspective
on how to understand communication in the classroom that encompasses a
withdrawnness of a “certain kind called ‘thinking’ and where the agonistic aspect
in that thinking means a provocation with the world that always is a response to
our own appearance and self-understanding as well” (Ljunggren, 2010, p. 20).
Concerning historical knowledge, Shari Stone-Mediatore develops Arendt’s
thoughts on narration, and she writes that historical knowledge is more than just

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knowledge of historical facts. Because we as humans live in a historical continu-

um, we narrate, interpret, and understand these facts being part of this continuum
(Stone-Mediatore, 2003). These narrative processes of both historical content and
narrative forms in any specific present, puts the spotlight on the maybe impossible
mission to understand the past from its own premises. We therefore need to under-
stand the narrative processes and that everybody sees and hears from a different
position (Arendt, 1998; Stone-Mediatore, 2003). This connects to the aim of the
article; to explore and deepen the understanding of the concept of historical em-
pathy. To make this clearer, we move to the classroom and to students watching
and interpreting historical feature films. But before that, I describe the method and
the empirical material used in the article.

Method

In this article the method of abduction is used, a method that recognizes an inter-
pretation of the relationship between theory and empirical material (Alvesson &
Sköldberg, 2018). Abduction recognizes both an analysis of empirical facts and
the use of theoretical preconceptions in the research process, a process which
“alternates between (previous ) theory and empirical facts (or clues) whereby both
are successively reinterpreted in the light of each other” (Alvesson & Sköldberg,
2018, p. 5). The method of abduction is here used to let both empirical material
and theory meet with previous definitions of historical empathy to deepen the
understanding of the concept. This means that I let the empirical material and the
theoretical concepts from Arendt interplay in the analysis, in order to highlight
and grasp new aspects of historical empathy.
The empirical material used in this article was generated as part of my PhD
project (Deldén, 2014, 2017). Here, I use selected parts of that material but from
a new angle, that is to explore the concept of historical empathy. The empirical
material from the PhD project is twofold. First, it consists of individual interviews
with upper secondary students conducted during 2012 and 2013. I interviewed
students about their experiences of historical feature film, related to their his-
torical meaning making. The films were part of a unit in history education where
the students were supposed to select an event in the past and analyze how the
event is represented in film and compare it with representations in other historical
sources and accounts. The students worked with the assignment individually, and
they therefore selected different historical events – and films. Two interviews
were performed, one shortly after the students had seen the films, and the other
after they had finished their assignment. During the first interview the students
were asked to pick one or two scenes that they felt had an impact on them, and we
saw these scenes together while the students shared their thoughts and feelings. A
content analysis of the interview transcripts was undertaken. The analysis fol-
lowed the model of stepwise deductive-inductive method according to Aksel

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Tjora (2012), and the results showed various aspects of students’ historical and
emotional meaning making when historical film is used as educational resource
(Deldén, 2017). Among the aspects were expressions of historical empathy from
some of the participants identified, but not fully examined in the doctoral project.
For the aim of this article, two empirical examples of students’ expressions related
to historical empathy were selected to further contribute to the exploration of the
concept.
The second material consists of the films that the students from the interviews
were watching during history class, Hotel Rwanda and Letters from Iwo Jima.
The films’ narratives were analyzed with focus on the film scenes that had been
mentioned by the students in the interviews (Bordwell et al., 2017). The aim of
the article is not to analyze the empirical material per se but rather to let the
students’ voices and the film narration interact with the theoretical perspectives.
By doing so, the empirical materials act as components together with the theor-
etical perspectives, to explore historical empathy and to deepen the understanding
of the concept.

Students’ film reception in relation to go visiting

The student Peter experienced the film Hotel Rwanda during history class. As
mentioned above, I interviewed him shortly after he had seen the whole film and
asked him to pick a scene that had made a special impact on him. He chose a
sequence where the protagonist Paul Rusesabagina and his employee Gregoire are
out on a mission. They are on their way home to the hotel where Paul has given
refuge to persons from the Tutsi population who are victims in the Rwandan civil
war in the 1990’s. In the film scene it is foggy and hard to see the road. Paul is
driving and Gregoire is in the passenger seat. The road is shrouded in fog, and the
car shakes and jumps. Paul stops the car and gets out. As he gets out of the car, he
falls and he sees what has caused the unpleasant ride, dead bodies. Paul gets up
on his feet and sees many more dead people along the way. The camera follows
Paul’s gaze as it wanders over the corpses. The scene is filmed in such a way that
the viewer can grasp the information together with Paul. The camera is alternately
positioned so that the viewer sees Paul, and what Paul sees. When the viewer sees
what Paul sees, subjective point-of-view shots are used so that a sense of sharing
the film character’s experiences arises. Slowly it lights up in the film scene, as the
day begins. This happens as Paul and Gregoire understand what they are seeing.
Peter describes what he sees and how he understands it:
It was there when they went and fetched goods because they had no food and then they
would go back and then it is foggy and so they see nothing and so everything starts to
bounce. Then they get out of the car and then the fog lifts and then they see that there
are bodies everywhere. It evokes very strong emotions. And also, to see Paul and how
he reacts. That he becomes very scared and anxious. And then when he comes back to

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the hotel, he just goes into a room alone, and breaks down and refuses to meet people.
And since Paul in the film has appeared like a strong person who doesn’t get sad so
easily, and then he gets so sad. Then it really feels like it is extreme. And that makes me
sad. (Peter, from interview 2012, my translation from Swedish)

What Peter expresses above could be understood through the lens of go visiting.
Peter follows the experiences of Paul, and he explains to me that it is through
Paul’s breakdown he reaches an understanding of the horror of the civil war. This
does not occur through the film scene about the actual situation with the dead
bodies, but through the scene about the aftermath at the hotel (from interview,
2012). An interpretation is that the film narration invites the viewer, in this case
Peter, to oscillate between the affective reaction in the present, and knowledge
production from the past events as represented in the film, where information from
the film plot conflates with the viewer’s own experiences and with possible pre-
knowledge of the conflict in Rwanda in the 1990’s (Landsberg, 2015a; Sobchack,
1997).
In the case of Peter, the interview reflects how the visit to Paul Rusesabagina’s
life experiences helps him to deepen his historical knowledge of the civil war in
Rwanda, and of the Western World’s reactions, not only through the film narra-
tion but also with help from other historical sources that he seeks after experi-
encing the film. It is as if the visit to Paul Rusesabagina’s life world puts Peter in
relation not only to Paul’s life world, but to himself and his historical and cultural
context. Peter wonders during the interview about responsibility for the war from
various perspectives, also from his own. This kind of thoughts about guilt and
responsibility awakened by and in line with the film’s narration is also seen in
earlier research (Dahl, 2013). Peter expresses that even though the emotional
reaction is strong and evokes feelings of guilt in him, he can understand the
difference between himself and his reactions and Paul’s feelings in the past, as
narrated in the film. They are not the same but with imagination he can understand
something about the civil war in Rwanda, and about his own reaction, that he had
not experienced before. I can see that Peter communicates a will to understand,
and the ambiguity in his thoughts and feelings could be seen as an agonistic
recognition of himself (Ljunggren, 2010), that is a struggle to handle contradic-
tions between Western and Rwandan perspectives, as well as personal feelings of
both guilt and compassion, in order to deepen an understanding of the self as well
as an understanding of the conflict.

The student as film viewer, the in-between and empathy-in-history

In relation to interpretation of historical feature films, the in-between upholds a

possibility to focus not only on the film narration, that is the representation of the
past, or only on the viewer’s reception, but on what happens in-between the
viewer and the representation. This invites us to shift focus and to explore the

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space in-between ourselves and the human beings we visit. In the next part, I
invite you to experience this together with the student James from the empirical
material.
James can help us to concretize how the notion of the in-between can deepen
the understanding of empathy-in-history. He saw the film Letters from Iwo Jima
and was emotionally and cognitively engaged in the story, portraying the Japanese
soldier Saigo from a Japanese perspective of the US conquest of the Japanese
island Iwo Jima during World War II. James’ experiences of Letters from Iwo
Jima highlight how the film’s violent narration of the battle of the island affects
his understanding of war. He says:
But it was understood in the film that it [the war] was not [a good thing]. It was kind of
dangerous there and you did not want to be there really, because nobody wants to be at
war even if people try to make it sound good. (James, from interview 2012, my trans-
lation from Swedish)

The specific shift between experiences of empathy and antipathy that the film
elicits in James may have helped him to understand that this was not a film that
followed the usual genre pattern for war movies. The film was not one of those,
as James describes it, where the hero survives everything and shoots down as
many as possible without being killed himself. This is a film that tries to show
what war really is. Just because Letters from Iwo Jima does not follow the tradi-
tional genre pattern of war movies, as James sees it, it emotionally seizes him in
a way that makes him understand war in a way he has not done before. He
describes how the film depicts ordinary people who just want to live their lives,
they do not want to be at war. He also expresses during the interview that there is
a romanticized description of war in other films that this film does not accept
(Deldén, 2017).
It is, among other things, the film’s portrayal of the character Saigo that causes
James to ponder over his own understanding of the situation of the Japanese
during World War II. The film’s structure of storytelling contributes strongly to
this, and James does not question the film narration. His reading of the film fol-
lows the film’s message, in the same way that Peter’s reading of Hotel Rwanda
does. In Letters from Iwo Jima the viewer gets to know Saigo partly through the
depictions of the island of Iwo Jima and the battle, and partly through letters he
writes home. In the film, proximity and distance are mixed, which means that the
viewer gets to shift between proximity and distance in the empathy with Saigo, in
the antipathy to the violence and in the interpretation of what war really means.
The proximity to Saigo lies in allowing the viewer to share the horrors and con-
sequences of the war with him in the letter writing. But just as the letters express
proximity, they also signal distance. Saigo is distanced from everything that
matters to him. He cannot be with those he loves, and the letters become a symbol
of this distance. James says:

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And then I was a little sad that they didn’t want to be there. They are forced there. They
have to leave their wives and children at home. And they know that their men will die.
All of them. And they accept it anyway. So, it was a little sad. (James, from interview
2012, my translation from Swedish)

James describes that the film’s ability to illustrate the individual’s vulnerability in
war gives him a greater understanding of people in the past. They were people of
flesh and blood just like we who live here and now. When he read about the battle
before he saw the film, he had not realized that behind the numbers of dead were
real people. The film narration helps James to reflect on how the individual human
being is influenced by historical events and how the personal history is interwoven
with history in a bigger perspective. A form of self-understanding in motion can
be the result, because by being challenged in his view of others, James is given
the opportunity to reflect on how his identity is shaped in relation to others here
and now. This also points to an understanding of the world related to both time
and space as James’ image of the war as phenomenon changes with the experi-
ences of Letters from Iwo Jima.
Go visiting implicates a possibility to think one’s own thoughts but from the
place of somebody else (Arendt, 1992, 1998). In relation to film reception, it
represents a position where individuals’ understanding through historical feature
film encompasses both a historical position as well as a position of personal reflec-
tion in the present. This oscillation between distance and nearness can enable
enlarged thought, but this depends on how historical feature films’ narration
facilitates or obscures a conscious position of the viewer (Landsberg, 2015a). A
development of individuals’ historical understanding through feature film high-
lights the importance of the space in-between the past and the present, in-between
humans, and in-between the student and the subject of history. This space con-
nected to the mediation of history through feature film also encompasses a
rethinking of the notion of historical empathy towards a critical method of
intersubjectivity in the historical process (Blake, 1998; Retz, 2015; Ljunggren,
2010). The awareness of precisely the space in-between and the importance of the
inter-est is a theoretical key to further understand empathy-in-history when
history is mediated through film narration.

Discussion and conclusion

The aim of the article has been to explore and deepen the understanding of the
concept of historical empathy by using the metaphor go visiting from Hannah
Arendt, and with historical feature film as the educational arena. The article has
an exploratory theoretical approach and with special focus on students’ meaning
making. Therefore, empirical material, in the form of students’ voices and film
narration, has been used to both illustrate and deepen the theoretical perspective.

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Previous research on historical empathy opens for further exploration of the

concept, due to different views on how to interpret and understand the notion of
empathy connected to history and to historical knowledge (Landsberg, 2015a;
Kohut, 2020; Blake, 1998). In this article, the contribution to this matter emanates
from the question on how to relate understanding of the past with understanding
of the present. A conclusion to that question is that the relational in-between is a
key aspect.
To come to this conclusion, the article has explored the relation between
understanding of the past and understanding of the present with help from the
political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. The metaphor go visiting makes it poss-
ible to shift focus from emphasizing either the past or the present when trying to
understand the concept of historical empathy. It puts focus on the in-between and
it makes it clearer that we are dealing with empathy in history in a continuum of
time, rather than historical empathy as empathy in relation to a specific historical
time. Maybe it is about getting perspective rather than taking perspective (Eyal et
al., 2018), or as Barton and Levstik (2004) put it, about recognizing perspectives.
Being aware of the in-between when we visit others gives us the possibility to be
“open to what other’s story has to tell us and, at the same time, be careful to think
for ourselves” (Stone-Mediatore, 2003, p. 164). It is precisely this kind of perspec-
tive experience that the students in the article show us, that at the same time binds
and separates the narration of the past from the narration of the present.
What can this mean for history education and for students’ historical meaning
making? We know from empirical studies which explore the use of historical
feature film in history education that the emotional impact is strong in experiences
of historical events in the form of film narration. We also know that the emotional
experience is related to students’ life worlds and that it influences the historical
meaning making. As has been expressed in previous research, personal experience
in the students’ life worlds needs to have its place in historical meaning making
(Deldén, 2014, 2017; Dahl, 2013, 2021; Metzger, 2012). I mean that this needs to
be in balance with the understanding of history that is required from a curriculum
perspective. The point is not to dismiss these personal reactions and the historical
meaning making they entail. On the contrary, we need to explore and understand
them, and the variety of in-betweens that exists. To do that, the article suggests
Arendt’s political philosophy along with Blake’s critique of the interpretation of
the concept historical empathy. With this theoretical perspective, a space for
differences and variety in students’ historical meaning making concerning the role
of empathy can come to the fore. This in turn makes plurality in history education
possible. In line with this, a proposal for further research is to empirically study
this dynamic empathetic relation between past and present and not only with his-
torical feature film as arena. One area of importance where this kind of research
is lacking is historical meaning making related to the Anthropocene, research in
need of knowledge about how empathy works for the understanding not only of
the past, but also of present and future perspectives (Simon & Tamm, 2021).

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Finally, I want to reconnect to the didactical tension described in the intro-

duction, whether it is possible for students to understand the past from its own
premises, or if the past is best understood by a recognition of the interpretation
through the lenses of the present. I here argue for an acceptance of this tension as
both a condition and an asset for historical understanding. The tension may be
seen not as a tension but rather as an entanglement between theory and practice,
between methodology and theory within the historical discipline and the historical
meaning making in everyday life. It is precisely in the connection between
students’ diverse life world experiences and the subject history, that enlarged
thought is possible. In the in-between.

About the author

Maria Deldén is senior lecturer in educational work at Dalarna University. She is

also representative for the discipline educational work at the School of Teacher
Education. She has long experience of teaching both as upper secondary school
teacher and as teacher educator. Her research is empirically oriented both in
history didactic research and in teaching and learning in a broader sense. Maria is
involved in a classroom research project that studies students’ identity-forming
processes in social science classroom and has finished a participatory research
project together with a non-governmental organization in Colombia. She is also a
co-author of the new report Education for sustainable development in courses in
teacher education at Dalarna University and the recent report Disagreeing well
together. Her most recent research project is a participatory research project with
an upper secondary school in Sweden on the theme motivation and learning.
Institutional affiliation: School of Teacher Education, Dalarna University, 79188
Falun, Sweden.
Email: mde@du.se

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Sources
Interviews conducted with:
James Letters from Iwo Jima 2012-10-17 and 2012-12-05
Peter Hotel Rwanda 2012-10-23 and 2012-12-05

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