‘Strange whim of the people’—writes Heinrich Heine—‘to ask for its own history from the poet, instead of the historian’. But the ‘people’ is right, and its whim is anything but extravagant. If Plato says that poets lie, what words could ever define official historiography? The method it uses, the sources it draws on, the problems it confronts, all these condemn it to adopt the point of view of the ruling classes. History as a science can only describe externally the concrete process with which it must be concerned. Historiography speaks of peoples, states, classes and nations. It mirrors everything except real men.

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you find the names of kings.
Was it the kings who dragged the masses on?
. . . Where did they go, the night the Chinese wall was finished,
The builders?

Only literature, and more than any other literary genre, the novel, can give an answer to these Questions of a worker-reader, which Brecht posed in a celebrated poem.