Oral history offers an opportunity for leaders to speak about difficult periods in their professional lives, especially when they have retired and have the time to reflect on their own past. As is clear from the police commissioner’s comments, leaders in general are afraid that their acts and contributions will be misunderstood, or even worse, forgotten. This is not only a matter of arrogance or of thinking that their life has been interesting enough to be remembered in history. In extreme cases, neglecting someone’s contributions can be a case of damnatio memoriae.
Damnatio memoriae is the ancient practice—most common during the Roman imperial period—of damning or condemning an individual’s memory. Their fame and reputation were canceled, condemned, and literally written out of history.56
Damnatio memoriae was a formal sanction by the Senate to posthumously destruct the memory—understood as the very essence of being—of bad emperors like Nero or Caligula by removing them from history and from the collective consciousness of society.57 This destruction consisted of removing the names of the offenders from official lists, burning their books, proclaiming their birthday as a day of evil, and most famously by chiseling their names and portraits away from monuments and mutilating the faces of their statues.
Damnatio memoriae has also had its effect on historical and biographical texts, which can be considered “a deliberate rewriting . . . of history and society [by means] of the emperor’s evil deeds and moral inadequacies.”58 It is even suggested that texts formed the preferred instruments of choice for damnatio memoriae because mutilated statues could be replaced, but texts could never entirely be evoked.59 Through this sanctioning mechanism, a new authoritative narrative of the past was shaped by a new generation to control the past.60 Damnatio memoriae not only has consequences for the public reputation of a leader, but—as is to be expected—considering the traumatic effects of dismissal, it also has a far-reaching impact on the private life of the damned leader, his family, and his descendants.
In our oral history project on leadership, we witnessed this damnatio memoriae in a modern form: not posthumously, but aimed at active people who made an unfortunate slip (in the eyes of the public and of journalists) for which they were ostracized, condemned, ridiculed and deprived of their part in history. One Dutch example comes from a successful minister who became the chairman of a corporation after his public service ended. Shortly afterward the corporation went bankrupt. After his subsequent sudden removal from office, he entered a stage of, what he called in his autobiography, “public death”:
This writing comes to you from the societal hereafter. There is indeed a life after public death. The road to it is grim and hard going. Unfortunately, you see many miserable people along the road who are exhausted and just can’t go on. The tragedy is that these are often young people, in the prime of their lives. They have collapsed under the heavy weight of a path on which they had a societal life with a job, friends and girlfriends, money and expectations . . . and have come to a life without society, without expectations for the future, without friends and with only spare time. Nobody really helps them. It is tragic and unnatural.61
A former CEO with whom we spoke with told us about a time when he had to step down as a manager and became the public embodiment of bad management—especially after a book was published about his “mistakes.” He had spent his entire working life at the company, starting as a middle manager and working his way up to CEO, that he had been forced to leave. Then, quite suddenly, he was knocked off his perch, forced to leave:
You must imagine that I was literally bullied for months by the boys of the late night talk shows. In the end they offered me the complete hour of their show, I would be the only guest, just to let me tell my story. But I decided: I won’t do it. I’m not doing anyone a favor by doing that, starting with myself. Let the myth live on. I’m not going to try and put it right, because it’s hopeless.
Well, I was of course considered a scoundrel in corporate Holland and corporate life. So the way in which colleagues and commissioners reacted—and the way in which later all of corporate Holland reacted—was by ignoring me, by not inviting me to join supervisory boards. I can cope with that rationally. I was a part of that world, so I was not surprised. But that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t hurt by it on a personal level. Because I think I did not deserve that at all. It was completely undeserved. And when you see which losers are then all offered decent commissioners positions . . . . So yes, it hurts. It’s very unpleasant. But like I said: It is not that I cannot understand it. I can rationalize it and therefore I can live with it.
When you are the CEO [of this company] . . . you are an important man in the Netherlands. It doesn’t matter who holds the post, or if they like you or not, that doesn’t matter. You are important and people act in a way that fits that importance. Then, when the moment comes for you to retire, even if you were decent and venerated, you cease to be that important man. That black hole, that fracture will come inevitably. But under normal circumstances it is a gentle touch down, with a few plush commissioners’ positions, for status only. The fact that you are expelled is annoying. It hurts, that does hurt.
The same can be said for another former CEO who had to resign after many years of success due to charges of fraud. After several years of proceedings, he was cleared on almost every point by the court, but by that time the damage to his personal position was irreversible:
The people around me tell me that they think that I’m rehabilitated. But does the general public see me differently? I don’t think so. That will never be fixed. I am a persona non grata.
When we subsequently asked him how he thought he would be remembered in history, he told us:
To be honest, I haven’t thought about how I will be remembered. In the past [before his dismissal] I did think about it when I was CEO, but now I can’t do that anymore. Because everything has become so unmistakably futile.
In fact, he told us, that he did not dare to think of his own remembrance. He could not face his own past nor think about his successful years of leadership and de facto he damnatio memoriae on him. Still, like the other CEOs, he longs to be rehabilitated. All of the aforementioned CEOs were grateful that academic historians were willing to listen to them, allowing them a chance to tell their story without being subject to judgment.
From the perspective of oral history, these interviews offer an extraordinary opportunity to compare “official” history with personal stories. After all, many leaders are historical actors in jubilee volumes, historical narratives, and public memory. Moreover, oral history accounts of elites offer us a chance to learn about the role of emotion and trauma in the business and elite world, which is an underdeveloped theme so far. Oral historians can take the lead in further developing this theme, as they are professionally trained, interested in life stories and have the capability to deal with emotion and trauma.

Conclusion
In this article, we have shown how oral history can benefit from (and be enriched by) paying attention to developments in the field of organizational research and business history, as well as by creating oral histories of business organizations and leaders. Such a “next step” broadens the scope of the traditional field of interest of oral history. Significantly, it is consistent with all four principles of oral history: making archival, scientific, democratic, and therapeutic contributions. Oral history can contribute to a “historic turn” in organizational and leadership research in business history and so bridge the gap between business history and oral history. Conversely, oral history can profit from business history’s oral history accounts and archives.
We have argued that a great deal of information is not written down in organizations or about leaders. As oral culture becomes increasingly important, oral historians have to take responsibility for creating archives. Also, life stories of leaders and members of organizations are often neglected by oral historians, as are slick corporate histories, because business history is regarded as unscientific by many oral historians. These results in two detrimental effects on oral history practitioners: they forget to pay attention to methodological developments within business and organizational history and they overlook many interesting oral business archives. Once oral historians take up their adagio of “learn to listen,” for example by connecting Alexander von Plato’s work with the Learning History Method, a great dealt of exciting oral history projects on organizations and leadership will be initiated.
Using oral history for research on leadership and for the development and progress of organizations is democratic. We have shown that the Learning History Method is indeed democratic because—in contrast to the quick scans by consultants—representatives of all levels of the organization are taken into account and approached critically. After the construction of its narrative, an organization can comment on the process and the narrative in an effort to make that narrative everyone’s story, making it available for both scientific and organizational learning. Moreover, we have argued that leaders seldom feel free to speak on every issue during their active careers and that it is difficult for them to reflect upon public perceptions of them.
Finally, oral histories of business organizations and leaders are of therapeutic value as well. Through oral history, people from all segments of an organization are offered an opportunity to testify. Many were eager to do so because it gave them a chance to talk about traumatic experiences. Organizational change is one of the most traumatic life experiences one can encounter, certainly in an environment where people do not feel safe. The farthest reaching therapeutic use of oral history became apparent when leaders were interviewed who had faced damnatio memoriae. This made clear that oral historians possess the necessary tools for analysis of organizations and leaders.

56 Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 1–21.
57 Friedrich Vittinghoff, Der Staatsfeind in der römischen Kaiserzeit: Untersuchungen zur ‘damnatio memoriae’ (Berlin, Germany: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1936), 12–42.
58 Varner, Mutilation and Transformation, 7.
59 Ibid., 8.
60 Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 276–83.
61 Berend-Jan Udink, Tekst en uitleg. Over sturen en gestuurd worde, ervaringen in politiek en bedrijf (Baarn, The Netherlands: Anthos, 1986), 274.

*Sjoerd Keulen and *Ronald Kroeze
Correspondence to be sent to: E-mail: S.J.Keulen@uva.nl and dbr.kroeze@let.vu.nl

sourse: Oral History Review, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2012, pp. 15-36

*Sjoerd Keulen is a Ph.D. candidate and teaches courses on Dutch history at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His doctoral research focuses on the history of policy and activities of Dutch public administration in relation to society, business, and politics between 1945 and 2000.

*Ronald Kroeze is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in political history at the VU University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the history of good governance, corruption, and leadership in politics and business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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