The publicist Annika Brockschmidt has written a bestseller about the influence of the "religious right" in the United States ("Amerikas Gotteskrieger", Rowohlt).

The reviewer of the FAZ, the theologian Benjamin Dahlke from the Catholic University of Eichstätt, praised the presentation as multifaceted and stated about the author's method: She "evaluates numerous sources and is also based on existing scientific studies".

But she did not enter the country for her book about God's so-called own country.

Matthew Karnitschnig, the European correspondent for the digital news magazine “Politico”, has now found this out by asking her and reproached her in an article and on Twitter.

He criticizes Brockschmidt for not conducting interviews and other first-hand surveys,

The invective offers all kinds of material for dense descriptions of transatlantic discourses.

A Springer organ criticizes the empirical methods of science-based democracy observation.

And an American sees a German's warning of the influence of ultra-religious white circles as "hate writing" against his country, which is particularly popular because it serves German "anti-Americanism".

Ironically, Karnitschnig's accusation of liberal-progressive clerical scholarship also imitates the criticism of western methods of measurement, descriptions of degeneration and analyzes of deficiencies from afar, which subaltern and post-colonial voices from the Global South have practiced.

Contemporary history without time travel

The accused replied that she had written a contemporary historical study, not a report.

Various colleagues seconded the historian on Twitter with methodological statements.

Political scientists explained that a trip to America is not empirical social research.

Historians say they have researched the end of World War II but have never been in 1945.

Beyond the political polemics, the controversy gives rise to a public debate about social science empiricism and the role of the historical method.

Do you have to know from your own experience what you are trying to analyze?

One only seemingly escapes this question if the objects are past and only accessible via representations of past reality, called sources.

Of course, it is necessary to know sources from personal experience, not just hearsay, "quoted from" the press or research literature (except for archaeologists, who meticulously document their finds so that other researchers can work with them).

Historians need to see representations of past reality as firsthand as possible in order to interpret and contextualize them correctly.

So their journeys through space mostly have the purpose of traveling into the past, that pruned past that archives preserve.

In addition, the contemporary witnesses are available to contemporary history.

In surveys, they could provide the “first-hand information” that Karnitschnig misses with Brockschmidt.

Journalists call these people "sources."

As such and as “eyewitnesses” to historians, they seem to certify authenticity.

Qualitatively working social scientists use a similar type of person in the interview as empiricism.

And Annika Brockschmidt, as a historian and journalist, could of course have interviewed such people online.

However, the majority of contemporary historians refrain from working with contemporary witnesses in their research, for reasons of source criticism, which also cast doubt on the resilience of qualitative interviews.

Sources that emerge as evidence of empirical reality,

If first-hand sources can be consulted where the analysis is taking place, one does not have to go to New York to write about New York.

Even the correspondent's position offers only one perspective of reality, which, while able to give the audience impressions of the atmosphere of the place, does not necessarily provide a more reliable analysis of individual problems.

Karnitschnig compared Brockschmidt to Karl May.

If one goes beyond the imperative of one’s own view, then one would ultimately have to ask what Karnitschnig, who has already worked as Germany correspondent for Bloomberg, Reuters, “Business Week” and the “Wall Street Journal”, is empirically authorized to say after twenty years of absence to provide information on current conditions in the United States.