ed. with chris lorenz breaking up time

8/18/2019 Ed. With Chris Lorenz Breaking Up Time

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Schriftenreihe derFRIAS School of History

Edited by Ulrich Herbert and Jörn Leonhard

Volume 7

www.frias.uni-freiburg.de


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Breaking up Time

Negotiating the Borders betweenPresent, Past and Future

Edited by Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht


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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication inthe Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic dataavailable online: http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-3-525-31046-5ISBN 978-3-647-31046-6 (e-book)

© 2013, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen/

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht LLC, Bristol, CT, U.S.A.www.v-r.deAll rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with-out prior written permission from the publisher.Typesetting by: Dörlemann Satz, LemfördePrinted and bound in Germany by Hubert & Co, GöttingenPrinted on non-aging paper.


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5

Table of Contents

IntroductionBerber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz:Breaking up Time –Negotiating the Borders between Present, Part and Future . . . . . . 7

1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy 37

Aleida Assmann:Transformations of the Modern Time Regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Peter Fritzsche:The Ruins of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Peter Osborne:Global Modernity and the Contemporary:Two Categories of the Philosophy of Historical Time . . . . . . . . . 69

2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars 85Sanja Perovic:Year 1 and Year 61 of the French Revolution:The Revolutionary Calendar and Auguste Comte . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Claudia Verhoeven:Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’ . . . . . . . 109

François Hartog:The Modern Régime of Historicity in Face of Two World Wars . . . . 124

Lucian Hölscher:Mysteries of Historical Order: Ruptures, Simultaneity andthe Relationship of the Past, the Present and the Future . . . . . . . . 134


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6 Table of Contents

3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches 153

Jonathan Gorman:The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Distinctions . . 155

Constantin Fasolt:Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self-Assertion andKnowledge of the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

4. Time outside Europe:Imperialism, Colonialism and Globalisation 197

Lynn Hunt:Globalisation and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Stefan Tanaka:Unification of Time and the Fragmentation of Pasts in Meiji Japan . 216

Axel Schneider:Temporal Hierarchies and Moral Leadership: China’s Engagementwith Modern Views of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236

William Gallois:The War for Time in Early Colonial Algeria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

Notes on Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274


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Introduction 7

Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz

Breaking up Time – Negotiating the Borders betweenPresent, Past and Future. An Introduction

For three centuries maybe the objectification of the past has made of time the unreflected category of a discipline that never ceases to use it asan instrument of classification.1

Michel de Certeau

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.2

William Faulkner

Die Zeit ist ein Tümpel, in dem die Vergangenheit in Blasen nach obensteigt.3

Christoph Ransmayr

Historians have long acknowledged that time is essential to historiography.Marc Bloch famously called history the ‘science of men in time’.4 Similarly,Jacques Le Goff labels time the ‘fundamental material’ of historians, and Jules

Michelet once described the relationship between time and history with thewords ‘l’histoire, c’est le temps’.5 Many historians have also recognised the im-portance of the distinction between different temporal scales and rhythms –think of Fernand Braudel and Reinhart Koselleck, for example. Surprisingly,however, very few have investigated the subject of historical time in depth.6

1 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, 2006), 216.2 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York, 1951), 92.3 Christoph Ransmayr, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis (Frankfurt am Main,

2005), 158.4 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (Paris, 1997), 52.5 Jacques Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire (Paris, 1988), 24.Michelet, cited in Albert Cook,

History/Writing: The Theory and Practice of History in Antiquity and in Modern Times(Cambridge, 1988), 11.

6 As Peter Burke remarks, the notion of the future was placed on the historian’s agendaonly relatively recently, when it was pioneered by Reinhart Koselleck in the latter half of twentieth century. Peter Burke, Reflections on the Cultural History of Time, Viator XXXV,2004, 617–626, 620. There are, of course, important exceptions to the general absence of re-flections on historical time. See, for example, Robin George Collingwood, Some Perplex-ities about Time: With an Attempted Solution, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XXVI,1925–26, 135–150; Wolfgang Von Leyden, History and the Concept of Relative Time, His-tory and Theory II, 1963, 3, 263–285; Siegfried Kracauer, Time and History, History and


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8 Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz

At least this was the case until recently. In the last couple of years a numberof historians and philosophers have addressed the problem of historical timein an increasingly sophisticated way. Following in the footsteps of Koselleck,several historians – in particular Lucian Hölscher, François Hartog and PeterFritzsche7 – have started historicising time-conceptions previously taken forgranted. In the philosophy of history, the relationship between past andpresent recently moved to center stage in debates about ‘presence’, ‘distance’,‘trauma’, ‘historical experience’, etc.8 Independently, postcolonial theoristsand anthropologists have added momentum to the growing interest in timeby deconstructing the ‘time of history’ as specifically ‘Western’ time.9

1. Questions Raised

This book aims to fill in the gaps in the all too fragmental literature on his-torical time and the temporal distinctions between past, present and future.10

Theory VI, 1966, 65–78; Pierre Vilar, Histoire marxiste, histoire en construction. Essaide dialogue avec Althusser, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations XXVIII, 1973, 1,165–198; Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten(Frankfurt am Main, 1979); John R. Hall, The Time of History and the History of Times,History and Theory XIX, 1980, 2, 113–131; Krzysztof Pomian,L’ordre du temps (Paris, 1984);Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History (Dordrecht, 1987); Donald J. Wilcox,The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time

(Chicago, 1987); Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (Paris, 1985); David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN, 1991); Elisabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History : Postmodern-ism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, 1992); Jean Chesneaux, Habiter letemps: Passé, présent, futur: esquisse d’un dialogue politique (Paris, 1996); Lucian Hölscher,Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Jean Leduc, Les Historiens et leTemps, Conceptions, problématiques, écritures (Paris, 1999); Jörn Rüsen, Zerbrechende Zeit .Über den Sinn der Geschichte (Cologne, 2001); Daedalus (theme issue on time), 2003; Frie-drich Stadler/Michael Stöltzner (eds.), Time and History (Kirchberg am Wechsel, 2005).

7 Hölscher, Entdeckung der Zukunft ; François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité Présen-tisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003); Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present : ModernTime and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA, 2004) The American Historical Re-view CXVII, 2012, 5, Forum: Histories of the Future, 1402–1461..

8 Eelco Runia, Presence, History and Theory XLV, 2006, 1, 1–20; Forum on ‘Presence’,History and Theory XLV, 2006, 3, 305–375; Historical Distance: Reflections on a Metaphor,theme issue of History and Theory L, 2011, 4; Holocaust und Trauma: Kritische Perspek-tiven zur Entstehung und Wirkung eines Paradigmas, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Ge-schichte XXXIX, 2011.

9 See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000); Ashis Nandy, History’s Forgotten Doubles,History and Theory XXXIV, 1995, 2, 44–66.

10 This book originated in a workshop (7–9 April 2011) organised by the editors andhosted by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). We would like to expressour gratitude to FRIAS and especially to Jörn Leonhard for his comments.


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Introduction 9

We have invited some of the world’s foremost experts on these subjects toaddress a series of questions that we feel are highly relevant and that have not

yet received the attention they deserve.The first question we raised was the following: How do cultures in general,

and historians in particular, distinguish ‘past’ from ‘present’ and ‘future’,and how are their interrelationships constructed and articulated? Althoughsince the birth of modernity history presupposes the existence of ‘the past’ asits object, ‘the past’ and the nature of the borders that separate ‘the past’, ‘thepresent’ and ‘the future’ until very recently have attracted little reflectionwithin the discipline of history. This ‘omission’ is remarkable because cul-tures and societies have fixed, and still do fix, the boundaries between past,

present and future in quite different ways. Moreover these differences alsovary depending on the context in which this distinction is made. In the mod-ern West, for instance, legal time functions differently from historical timeand both are different from religious time.11

It has been argued that cultures also have different dominant orientationsin time. ‘Traditional’ cultures are generally supposed to be characterised by adominant (political, ethical, cultural, etc.) orientation to the past, while‘modern’ cultures characteristically have a dominant future-orientation.12

‘Postmodern’ cultures, however, are supposedly characterised by a domi-nant orientation towards the present. Yet, how these temporal orientationshave changed – and whether they simply succeed each other or coexist – hasnot been analysed in depth. It is symptomatic that François Hartog’s thesisthat Western thinking about history is characterised by a succession of three‘regimes of historicity’ – from a past-orientation until the French Revo-lution, to a future-orientation until the 1980s, and then a present-orien-tation in the years since – has hardly been empirically tested.13 Therefore, thequestions about the unity, the dominance, the spatial extensions, thetransfers and the transformations of ‘time regimes’ (are there no competingor overlapping ‘sub-regimes’?) are badly in need of further conceptual andempirical analysis.

The second question raised in this book is: Is distinguishing between past,present and future rather a matter of ‘observing’ distinctions that are ‘given’,

11 The difference between historical time and religious time was addressed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor : Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1996), 40–42, andin William Gallois, Time, Religion and History (London, 2007). The focus on ‘legal time’ iscentral in criticisms on legal positivism. See especially Drucilla Cornell, Time, Decon-struction, and the Challenge to Legal Positivism: The Call for Judicial Responsibility, Yale

Journal of Law & the Humanities, 1990, 2, 267–297.12 For a classical discussion of the past-orientation of ‘traditional’ cultures, see Mircea

Eliade, Le mythe de l’éternel retour (Paris, 2001 (1949))13 Hartog, Régimes d’historicité .


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or does it involve a more active stance in which social actors create and re-create these temporal distinctions? Usually ‘the past’ is somehow supposedto ‘break off ’ from ‘the present’ on its own by its growing temporal distanceor increasing ‘weight’– like an icicle. Although few probably would hold thattemporal distinctions are directly and unambiguously ‘given’, even fewerhave paid attention to the ways in which the distinguishing of the three tem-poral modes can be analysed as a form of social action connected to specificsocial actors.

The question of the historian as (social or political) actor has recently fig-ured prominently in the debate on so-called ‘commissioned history’, as itmanifests itself, for example, in the work of government-appointed histori-

cal commissions and truth commissions. Yet the issue in this case is of amore general and fundamental nature. It belongs to those characteristics of ‘doing history’ which have traditionally been repressed.

Even when all appearances are against them, professional historians tra-ditionally claim to occupy (or to strive after) the position of the distant, im-

partial observer and not the position of the active participant . The notion of an ever-increasing temporal ‘distance’ as automatically breaking up past andpresent has been of central importance for safeguarding this distinction be-tween the ‘involved’ actor and the ‘impartial’ observer.14

The American historian Elazar Barkan recently addressed this problemwhen he argued in favour of an ‘engaged’ historiography in the service of ‘historical reconciliation’.15 The problem with pleas for engaged history isthat participation in ‘historical reconciliation’ smacks of ‘activism’, ‘parti-sanship’ and ‘presentism’, all of which professional historians usually regardas deadly sins. Yet according to Barkan, ‘this is all beginning to change’, be-cause historians are beginning to understand ‘that the construction of his-tory continuously shapes our world, and therefore has to be treated as an ex-plicit, directly political activity, operating within specific scientificmethodological and rhetorical rules’.16

14 The stress on the importance of temporal distance was especially prominent in de-bates on the emerging field of contemporary history. See, for example, Gerhard Ritter,Scientific History, Contemporary History, and Political Science, History and Theory I,1961, 3, 261–279. Also see Rüdiger Graf/Kim Christian Priemel, Zeitgeschichte in derWelt der Sozialwissenschaften. Legitimität und Originalität einer Disziplin, Vierteljahres-hefte für Zeitgeschichte LIX, 2011, 4, 1–30, and Kiran-Klaus Patel, Zeitgeschichte im digi-talen Zeitalter: Neue und alte Herausforderungen, Vierteljahreshefte für ZeitgeschichteLIX, 2011, 3, 331–351.

15 See Forum – Truth and Reconciliation in History, American Historical Review CXIV,2009, 4, 899–913.

16 Forum – Truth and Reconciliation, 907.


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Introduction 11

Lucian Hölscher recently pointed to the same ‘blind spot’ concerning therole of historians as actors in present-day politics and attributed it directly toa blindness for the future dimension of the past. Hölscher contends that his-torians have to free themselves from the traditional ‘prejudices’ that profes-sional history is autonomous from society and politics, and that history ‘is apure ‘observing’ discipline, that is not simultaneously directed at action’.17

He thus makes clear his view that the idea that professional history stands ina distanced (observer’s) position vis-à-vis politics is a misconception. Oncloser analysis, the professional historian’s concern for the past simulta-neously implies a concern for the future.

In view of the recent ‘performative turn’ in history and in many other

human and social sciences, it is remarkable that temporal distinctions havehardly been analysed as performative distinctions – that is, as the results of linguistic or other forms of action. Although both historians and philo-sophers have emphasised the important role played by catastrophic politicalevents – such as revolutions and major wars – in ‘breaking up time’, the ef-fects of these ‘transformative events’ on notions of temporality have hardly been studied in a comparative perspective.

The third and last question concerns the political nature of the bordersthat separate these temporal dimensions. François Hartog has rightly arguedthat terms such as ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ are invariably invested withdifferent values in different regimes of historicity.18 When taken to its logicalconclusions, this observation suggests that historians must ask whether his-torical time is a neutral medium or whether it is in fact inherently ethical andpolitical.

Ulrich Raulff is one of the few historians who has pointed out the closerelationship between the political allegiance of historians and the use of periodisation in historical writing. Raulff analyses the preference of the An-nales historians for the longue dureé 19 and traces the origins of this preferencefar back into the nineteenth century. He argues that both conservative andprogressive thinkers who, for different reasons, abhorred specific politicalevents in the past – such as the French Revolution in conservative thinkingand the Restoration in Marxist thinking or a lost war in nationalist thought –used periodisation for political ends. According to Raulff, the preference for

long-term approaches is based on a politically motivated rejection of certainevents. These events may be at a long or at a close ‘distance’ from the his-

17 Lucian Hölscher, Semantik der Leere. Grenzfragen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göt-tingen, 2009), 146.

18 Hartog, Régimes d’historicité .19 Ulrich Raulff, Der unsichtbare Augenblick: Zeitkonzepte in der Geschichte (Göt-

tingen, 1999).


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torian in a chronological sense. In Braudel’s case, his political rejection wasof the sudden fall of France in the 1940s. He wrote his Méditerranée as aprisoner of war, and the longue dureé enabled him to discount both theFrench defeat and the later collaboration of Vichy-France as merely ‘ephem-eral’ events in history. Thus the choice historians make when they focus oneither ‘events’ or ‘structures’ is ‘not just a choice between two modes of tem-poralisation, but also a choice that has aesthetic, ethical and political conse-quences’.20

Very recently Frank Bösch came to similar conclusions in a short reflec-tion on the influence of break-ups and caesurae on periodisation in contem-porary history.21 He criticised the tendency to regard only (national) politi-

cal events as borderlines of periodisation and argued that longer lasting(transnational) ‘silent revolutions’ – such as the oil crisis of 1973 and theeconomic crisis of 1979 – may have been experienced as more important by contemporaries. Therefore, claims about ‘breaking events’ and correspond-ing periods often also involve political aspects. Because of the plurality of possible points of view and their implied caesura, Bösch argues in favour of Geoffrey Barraclough’s definition of contemporary history as a problem-oriented – and thus not period-oriented – discipline.The period which is rel-evant for the contemporary historian depends only on the particular pres-ent-day problem he or she is trying to clarify.22

Raulff and Bösch provide us with good reasons to ask whether historianstoo engage in a ‘politics of time’, as the anthropologist Johannes Fabian andthe philosopher Peter Osborne held to be the case in their respective disci-plines.23 We believe it is time to start scrutinising how these politics of his-torical time function in practice.

As a first step toward such an analysis of the performative ‘break-up’ of time, we focus on the way historical time has traditionally been related tomodernism and progress. We contend that this connection was recently questioned – partially under the influence of the so-called ‘memory boom’

20 Ibid., 48.21 Frank Bösch, Umbrüche in die Gegenwart: Globale Ereignisse und Krisenreak-

tionen um 1979, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History , Online-Ausgabe, 2012, 9, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Boesch-1–2012.According to Goschler and Graf, the very concept of contemporary history is based on theexperience of unexpected ruptures in time and the need to interpret the present in thelight of these ruptures. See Constantin Goschler/Rüdiger Graf, Europäische Zeitgeschichteseit 1945 (Berlin, 2010), 15–16.

22 See Forum – The 1970s and 1980s as a Turning Point in European History?, Journal of Modern European History IX, 2011, 1, 8–26.

23 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other : How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983); Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London,1995).


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Introduction 13

and the development of new ways of dealing with the legacy of historical injustices.

Secondly, we observe that, although many historians have noticed thesedevelopments, only few have developed new conceptualisations of historicaltime. Even though the traditional notion of (linear) time has been heavily criticised in the decades since Einstein’s relativity theories, the time-con-cepts of historians, as well as philosophers of history, are still generally basedon an absolute, homogeneous and empty time. Not accidentally, this is thenotion of time presupposed by the ‘imagined community’ of ‘the nation’, asBenedict Anderson famously suggested.24 There are, however, some import-ant exceptions – thinkers who did theorise the ‘historical relativity’ of time.

We briefly discuss the cases of Koselleck, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Hölscher.Next, in the third section of this introduction, we demonstrate how some

historians and philosophers of history reacted ambiguously and defensively or even with outright hostility to the new forms of historical consciousnessand the questioning of classical notions of historical time. By discussing thework of, among others, the French historian Henry Rousso, the Dutch his-torian Bob de Graaff and the German historian Martin Sabrow, we arguethat claims about ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ approaches to time (or about his-torical and a-historical time) are used to guard the borders of the disciplineof academic history. These claims are used to draw a line between ‘real’ and‘pseudo’ history and to protect the former against ‘intruders’, such as mem-ory movements and surviving contemporary witnesses, alias Zeitzeuge. Wepoint out that this disciplinary ‘protectionism’ is typically accompanied by ataboo on the very question of how to draw the borders between past, presentand future. This boils down to whisking away the performative and politicaldimensions of historical time.

In the last section, we argue that the cultural and political roots of thememory boom increasingly call on historians and philosophers of history toelucidate the basic assumptions that underpin their notions of time. Thisholds most importantly for their assumptions concerning the ‘past-ness’ of the past and the ‘present-ness’ of the present. Again we discuss some excep-tional thinkers – in particular Preston King – who do reflect on the basic no-tions of modern Western historical consciousness. Their conceptual appa-

ratus can be put to use in future analyses of how and why historians break uptime in historical practice.

24 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), 22–26.


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2. History in/and Changing Times

Philosophers of history have often remarked that academic historiography fits very well with ideas of modernism and progress. Paradoxically, scientifichistory flourishes in an intellectual environment that stresses the constantemergence of the new and the ‘supersedure’ of the past by movement to-wards a more advanced future. Koselleck argued that modern historical con-sciousness came into existence towards the end of the eighteenth century,when social and technological innovations and changing beliefs about thenovelty of the future created a new ‘horizon of expectation’ (Erwartungs-horizont ) that increasingly broke with the former ‘space of experience’ (Er-

fahrungsraum).25 According to Koselleck, the historical and the progressiveworldviews share a common origin: ‘If the new time is offering somethingnew all the time, the different past has to be discovered and recognised, thatis to say, its strangeness which increases with the passing of years.’26

Koselleck pointed out that the ‘discovery’ of the historical world and thequalitative differentiation between past, present and future had great me-thodological implications for historiography. Temporal differentiation andconcomitant claims about the ‘otherness’ of the past allowed historiography to present itself as an autonomous discipline that required methods of itsown. Although the idea of the absence of the past has often been presented(usually by empiricists) as a challenge to the epistemological credentials of historiography, historians were able to use the idea of an ever-increasingtemporal ‘distance’ to their advantage. They did so by presenting distance asan indispensable condition for attaining ‘impartiality’ and ‘objectivity’.

Similarly, the progressivist idea that time does not bring random or direc-tionless change but a cumulative change directed at a more advanced futurehas successfully buttressed historians’ claims concerning the ‘surplus value’of the historical ex post perspective and their related claims of epistemologi-cal superiority over the perspectives of contemporary eye-witnesses ( Zeit-zeugen).

Michel de Certeau has likewise suggested that modern historiography tra-ditionally begins with the differentiation between present and past: It takes

25 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past : On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York,2004).

26 Idem, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford, 2002), 120. The claim by Kosel-leck mentioned here did not remain uncontested. Niklas Luhmann, for example, arguesthat the development of the modern time perspective started with a reconceptualisationof the present rather than the future. The ‘open future’, according to him, was preceded by more than a hundred years by a ‘punctualisation’ of the present, which gave rise to an ex-perience of instantaneous change. Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society (New York, 1982), 273–274.


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Introduction 15

the ‘perishable’ (le périssable) as its object and progress as its axiom.27 Many feel uncomfortable by the idea of living in a world in which ‘all that is solidmelts into air’ (Karl Marx) and in which the present is continuously ‘con-tracting’ – what Hermann Lübbe has called Gegenwartsschrumpfung – mosthistorians simply presuppose this worldview as ‘natural’.28 The reason fortheir blind acceptance of this worldview may well be that precisely this (al-leged) condition of an ephemeral or even contracting present has enabledhistorians and philosophers of history to legitimate the writing of history asa necessary form of ‘compensation’. 29

It is a matter of ongoing controversy when exactly the modernist and pro-

gressivist worldviews came into existence and whether they were ever domi-nant enough to legitimise claims about the existence of modernity in an epo-chal sense, or whether this historical category simply resulted from aself-legitimising ‘politics of periodisation’.30 This issue will be discussed inseveral of the contributions to this volume. Yet, whatever the periodisationand the precise historical status of modernity, two observations seembeyond dispute: That the modernist and progressivist ways of conceiving of historical time and of the relationship between past and present have beenfundamental and constitutive for academic history writing. However, it isalso clear that these very same modernist and progressivist worldviews havebeen severely questioned during the last few decades – ‘postmodernism’ isthe catchword here – and that this has important implications for histori-ography.

This recent questioning of progressivist worldviews in academic histori-ography can be fruitfully examined in relation to a similar scepticism aboutthe nature of time which has emerged in juridical contexts in the last few decades. If there is one feature that characterises current international politi-cal and juridical dealing with the past it is the combination of an increasingdistrust of progressivist notions of time and doubt about presumptions of

27 Michel De Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris, 1975), 18.28 Hermann Lübbe, Die Modernität der Vergangenheitszuwendung. Zur Geschichts-

philosophie zivilisatorischer Selbsthistorisierung, in: Stefan Jordan (ed.), Zukunft der Ge-schichte. Historisches Denken an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2000), 26–35,esp. 29.

29 Hermann Lübbe, Der Streit um die Kompensationsfunktion der Geisteswissen-schaften, in: Einheit der Wissenschaften. Internationales Kolloquium der Akademie der Wis-senschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1991), 209–233. For a fundamental critique of the ‘compen-sation theory’, see Jörn Rüsen, Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit, in: Jordan (ed.), Zukunft der Geschichte, 175–182. Rüsen emphasises the orientational function of the past vis-à-visactions aimed at the construction of the future ( Zukunftsentwürfe).

30 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty : How Ideas of Feudalism and Secular-ization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008).


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‘temporal distance’, or about an evident qualitative break between past, pres-ent and future. Many of the salient phenomena in international and do-mestic politics of the last decades – reparation politics, the outing of officialapologies, the creation of truth commissions, historical commissions andcommissions of historical reconciliation, etc. – revolve around a growingconviction that the once commonsensical idea of a past automatically dis-tancing itself from the present is fundamentally problematic, and that thebelief that the past is superseded by every new present has been more a wishthan an experiential reality.31

This changing experience of time is of course not confined to the spheresof jurisdiction and politics: The challenging of classical historicist concep-

tualisations of temporal distance is a central feature of the so called ‘memory boom’32 – that again is related to the growing recognition of universalhuman rights and of historical injustices33 – and of the growing influence of memorial movements.34 ‘Since roughly the end of the Cold War,’ John Tor-pey claims, ‘the distance that normally separates us from the past has beenstrongly challenged in favour of an insistence that the past is constantly, ur-gently present as part of our everyday experience.’35 According to Torpey thisdevelopment directly relates to a ‘collapse of the future’, or a growing inabil-ity to create progressive political visions. As he puts it, ‘When the future col-lapses, the past rushes in.’36

31 Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice(New York, 2012). Typically, compensation theorists such as Lübbe interpret the practiceof offering apologies for historical injustices differently: as a category mistake for histori-ans and as a ritual of repentance for politicians. See Hermann Lübbe, »Ich entschuldigemich.« Das neue politische Bußritual (Berlin, 2001).

32 Expression from Jay Winter, The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Mem-ory Boom’ in Contemporary Historical Studies, Bulletin of the German Historical InstituteXXVII, 2000, 3, 69–92. Geoff Eley, The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and theContemporary. Journal of Contemporary History XLIV, 2011, 3, 555–573.

33 See Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Re-sponsibility (New York, 2007), 121–139.

34 Another important challenge to the classical notion of historical distance, accordingto Bain Attwood, comes from oral history because it stresses the entanglement of ‘then’and ‘now’ and ‘because its very practice brings the historians into closer proximity withthe past’. Bain Attwood, In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, ‘Dis-tance’, and Public History, Public Culture XX, 2007, 1, 75–95, esp. 80. For the rise and fallof the Zeitzeugen in German history, see Wulf Kansteiner, Dabei gewesen sein ist alles,29 Dezember 2011, Die Zeit , 21

35 John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed (Cambridge/MA, 2006), 19.36 Torpey, Making Whole, 23.


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3. Historicising Historical Time

Many academic historians have clearly sensed the trend towards a question-ing of the notions of historical distance and of the break between past andpresent. A mere look at the frequency of expressions such as ‘present pasts’,37

‘everlasting pasts,’38 ‘pasts that do not pass,’39 ‘unexpiated pasts’40 and ‘eter-nal presents’41 in recent academic works gives an indication of this growingpreoccupation with the ontological status of the past and the relationshipbetween past and present. The enigmatic and paradoxical wording of someof these expressions reveals, moreover, the puzzlement that issues of timeand temporal breaks continue to create.

Yet puzzlement about the ontological status of time of course goes furtherback than the twentieth century, at least as far back as Ancient Greece, and itis still with us today. In 2008, Lynn Hunt could still begin her book Measur-ing Time, Making History by quoting the two fundamental questions abouttime that Aristotle asks in his Physics: ‘First, does it belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist? Then secondly, what isits nature?’42 Many historians probably would think that Hunt’s question –‘Is time historical?’ – is a weird one, because, as we saw earlier, they simply identify history with time or with temporal change and take it for grantedthat time is somehow ‘real’.

Most historians seem to have assumed that time is what calendars andclocks suggest it is: 1. time is homogeneous – meaning every second, every minute and every day is identical; 2. time is discrete – meaning every mo-ment in time can be conceived of as a point on a straight line; 3. time is there-fore linear; and 4. time is directional – meaning that it flows without inter-ruption from the future, through the present to the past; 5. time is absolute –meaning that time is not relative to space or to the person who is measuringit.

Stephen Hawking in his A Brief History of Time characterised absolutetime as follows: ‘Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. Thatis, they believed that one could unambiguously measure the interval of timebetween two events and that this time would be the same whoever measuredit, provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separated from

37 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stan-ford/CA, 2003).

38 Eric Conan/Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris, 1994).39 Luc Huyse, All Things Pass Except the Past (Kessel-Lo, 2009).40 Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford, 1999), 20.41 Michael Ignatieff, Articles of Faith, Index on Censorship V, 1996, 110–122.42 Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008), 4.


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and independent of space. This is what most people would take to be thecommon sense view’.43 This also holds for historians.44

Since Einstein’s theory of general relativity physicists know that this pre-supposition of an absolute time is erroneous, because time is relative to thespatial position of the observer. Since Einstein, physicists also know thattime is not independent of space. What Newton did for space – provingagainst Aristotle that all spatial movement is relative to the observer’s posi-tion, and that therefore there are no absolute positions in space – Einsteindid for time: proving against Newton that all temporal movement is relativeto the observer’s position. Relativity theory, however, has not yet promptedmany historians to rethink their conception of absolute time.45

Nevertheless, since the path-breaking work of Koselleck in the 1970s,some important insight into the historical relativity of historical time has de-veloped. Koselleck argued that the modern notion of historical time orig-inated only in the second half of the eighteenth century because it was di-rectly connected to the modern notion of history as an objective force andunified process – with, in his phrasing, Geschichte as a Kollektivsingular .

Since the end of the twentieth century, modern historical time has alsobeen relativised by postcolonial theorists. They criticised this time concep-tion as being fundamentally calibrated to Western history – in its period-isation, for instance – and as being inherently teleological, positing thecourse of the West as the implicit historical destiny of the rest of the world.This implicit teleology is, according to postcolonial critique, not only pre-supposed by all brands of modernisation and globalisation theory, includingMarxist versions, but by the Western ‘historicist’ conception of history assuch.46 Thus, what is happening in the modern Western conception of timeand history, according to theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, is the ‘spa-tialisation of time’, meaning: the implicit connecting of space and time by di-

43 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York, 1988), 18.

44 In Le Poidevin’s words most people – including historians – are ‘objectivists’, mean-ing that they assume that time is somehow real and not an entity that does not exist inde-pendent from what clocks measure by some standard. The latter position is taken by so-called conventionalists. See Robin Le Poidevin, Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time (Oxford, 2003), 5–8.

45 This question of the possibility of a ‘post-Newtonian’ historical time is interestingly raised in Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past .

46 See for the inherent teleology of national history writing, Chris Lorenz, Unstuck inTime. Or: The Sudden Presence of the Past, in: Karin Tilmans/Frank van Vree/Jay Winter(eds.), Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe (Amsterdam,2010), 67–105, esp. 71–81. See for the argument that globalisation theories are a branch of modernisation theory, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge,History (Berkeley/CA, 2005), 91–113.


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Introduction 19

viding the world in regions that are ahead in time and regions that lag be-hind, waiting to ‘catch up’.47 So how historians measure time is apparently dependent on where they are located in space. With a bit of imagination onecould regard this ‘spatialisation of time’ as a delayed reception of Einstein’srelativity theory in history.

However this may be, Koselleck’s student Hölscher has taken the histori-sation of time a step further by pointing out that the abstract and empty timeand space that historians have taken for granted actually did not exist beforethe modern era.48 Notions of empty space and of empty time developedslowly, between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. For people livingin the Middle Ages, events and things had concrete positions in time and in

space, but they did not have a concept of empty, abstract time and space assuch. In other words: things and events had temporal and spatial aspects, buttime and space did not exist as realities. Space and time referred to adjectives,not to substantives.

For Christianity, time was basically biblical time, meaning that it had aclear beginning (God’s creation of the Earth) and a fixed end (JudgmentDay). Time was basically ‘filled in’ by the creation plan of God. There was notime before nor any after . Therefore, the modern notion of an infinite his-tory, as expressed in our calendar, which extends forwards and backwards ad infinitum, cannot be explained as a secularised version of the Christian ideaof history, as both Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt have arguedagainst Karl Löwith.49

4. History, Memory and Time

The reactions of historians to the problematisation of time have been am-bivalent. Some have taken the changing and alternative visions of timeunderlying reparations politics and the ‘memory boom’ as a welcome op-portunity to critically rethink classical notions of historical time. Moreoften, however, historians have focused precisely on allegedly ‘non-histori-cal’ or ‘deviant’ approaches to time in order to fence off their discipline vis-à-vis memory or reparation politics, and to support its claims to ‘hegemony

in the closed space of retrospection’.50 It is remarkable how often historians

47 However, see Frederick Cooper’s critique of Chakrabarty’s ‘homogenisation’ of ‘theWest’ in his Colonialism in Question, xxx.

48 Hölscher, Semantik der Leere, 13–33.49 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeut (Frankfurt/Main, 1966); Hannah

Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 2006),esp. 68.

50 Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris, 2000), 458.


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are claiming different, ‘improper’ temporalities as an implicit or explicit ar-gument for the ‘objectification’ of memory and its presentation as ‘mythical’or ‘pathological’ – or at least as not providing a viable alternative to ‘real’ his-tory.51

Even an unconventional historian like Hayden White, for example, seemsto pay tribute to traditional temporal divisions by subscribing to MichaelOakeshott’s distinction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘practical’ past.52

Gabrielle Spiegel, too, rejects theories that posit a reciprocal relationship be-tween history and memory by claiming that the ‘differing temporal struc-tures’ of history and memory ‘prohibit’ their ‘conflation’. Memory can never‘do the ‘work’ of history’ or ‘perform historically’ because ‘it refuses to keep

the past in the past, to draw the line that is constitutive of the modern enter-prise of historiography.’ Indeed Spiegel writes: ‘The very postulate of mod-ern historiography is the disappearance of the past from the present.’53

Similar claims about the proper conceptualisation of historical time andabout the relationship between past and present have figured prominently inHenry Rousso’s arguments against the judicialisation of history and in hisrefusal to function as an expert witness in the French trial against MauricePapon. Rousso’s refusal to appear in the courtroom was based, among otherconsiderations, on his conviction that historians have to improve the‘understanding of the distance that separates [past and present]’54 or on the

51 Martin Broszat’s remark about the supposedly ‘mythical’ character of the – ex post –

centrality of the Holocaust in ‘Jewish’ history writing on Nazi-Germany, as opposed to thesupposedly ‘distant’, ‘scientific’ character of ‘German’ academic history writing, inducedSaul Friedländer to compose his opus magnum: Nazi-Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination 1939 – 1945 (New York 2007), in which linear time is supplanted by non-linear, ‘modernist’ time in a pathbreaking way, as Wulf Kansteiner has argued. See Wulf Kansteiner, »Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading SaulFriedländer 35 Years after the Publication of Metahistory «, History & Theory 47/2 (2009),25–53.

This tendency to stress the particularity of ‘historical time’ in order to institutionally defend professional history is of course not new. See Thomas Loué, Du présent au passé: letemps des historiens, Temporalités: Revue de sciences sociales et humaines VIII, 2008.

52 Hayden White, The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses,History and Theory XLIV, 2005, 3, 333–338. Typically time hardly plays any role in his

Metahistory . Also see Hayden White, The Practical Past, Historein 10, 2010, 10–19. Frank Ankersmit has argued that time does not constitute a proper object for the (narrative)philosophy of history. See his Over geschiedenis en tijd, Groniek, 1989, 11–26.

Oakshott was clear about the temporal status of the ‘practical past’, which accordingto him was not ‘significantly past’ at all. Michael Oakshott, On History and Other Essays(Oxford, 1985), 39.

53 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Memory and history: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,History and Theory XLI, 2002, 4, 149–162.

54 Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France ( Philadelphia, 2002), 8.


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Introduction 21

slightly, but markedly different conviction, that a good historian ‘puts thepast at a distance’. Rousso, however, believed that the attempts at retrospec-tive justice in France were influenced by a politics of memory, or even a ‘re-ligion of memory’ that ‘abolishes distance’ and ‘ignores the hierarchies of time’. In contrast: ‘The historical project consists precisely in describing, ex-plaining, and situating alterity, in putting it at a distance.’55 The historians’craft, according to Rousso, therefore offers a ‘liberating type of thinking, be-cause it rejects the idea that people or societies are conditioned or deter-mined by their past without any possibility of escaping it.’56 Historians mustresist the role of ‘agitators of memory’ and the growing societal ‘obsession’with memory. They must do so by allowing what many want to avoid: ‘the

selection of what must remain or disappear to occur spontaneously’.57Similar claims about the task of historians are made by Dutch historian

Bob de Graaff in a tract on the relationship of the historian to (genocidal)victimhood – a text visibly influenced by his experiences as a member of theresearch team that was commissioned by the Dutch government to scruti-nise the Srebrenica massacre. Again, the argument focuses on proper andimproper understandings of (historical) time. Victims or survivors, deGraaff claims, often live in an ‘extratemporality’,58 or in a ‘synchronic’ ratherthan ‘diachronic’ and ‘chronological’ time. For them the ‘past remains pres-ent’, to them it seems as if atrocities ‘only happened yesterday or eventoday’.59 In this regard de Graaff follows Michael Ignatieff, who held that‘victim time’ is ‘simultaneous’ and ‘not linear’.60 Of course the historian re-cognises the fact that the past can be ‘called up’ again, but in contrast to thesurvivor, he does this voluntarily. Moreover, he ‘registers’ that facts of thepast are ‘bygone’, ‘definitely lost’ or have ‘come to a downfall’.61 In reality, deGraaff claims: ‘Victimhood is historically determined. It comes about in aparticular period. It has a beginning, but it also has an end.’ In this context itis the task of historians ‘to place events, including genocide, in their time, lit-erally historicising them.’62 The historian has to do this by trying to ‘deter-mine the individual character of particular periods/epochs and by that de-marcate one period vis-à-vis the other’. To cite de Graaff once again: ‘[The

55 Rousso, The Haunting Past , 26.56 Ibid., 28.57 Ibid., 3.58 Bob de Graaff, Op de klippen of door de vaargeul: De omgang van de historicus met

(genocidaal) slachtofferschap (Amsterdam, 2006), 27. [Our translation]59 Ibid., 28.60 Michael Ignatieff, The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Wake up, in: idem,

The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London, 1998), 166–190.61 de Graaff, Op de klippen, 28, 71.62 Ibid., 28.


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historian] brings the past to life or keeps it alive and kills it by letting the pastbecome past. With that he not only creates a past but he also offers a certainautonomy to the present.’63 ‘Historisation’ in this sense of ‘closing an epochby recognising its entirely individual character’ is not only a professionalduty of historians. There also is a social justification to ‘draw a line undervictimhood.’ De Graaff therefore concurs with the literary author Hellema:‘It became about time to put the past in its place.’64

As the above examples illustrate, one could metaphorically describe his-torians’ recent approaches to their profession as involving a kind of ‘borderpatrol’65 of the relationship between past and present. Yet the examples alsoshow that, although these historians are quite clear when declaring the need

for ‘border guards’, they are much less clear when it comes to assessing whatthis ‘guarding’ actually consists of and how it relates to the borders it claimsto patrol. Indeed, although there can be little doubt that these historians op-pose an ‘open’ border policy when it comes to relating past and present, it isnot clear from their arguments whether they can best be metaphorically rep-resented as merely observers watching over borders between established‘sovereign’ states, or as activists aggressively engaged in a repatriation policy,such as the one that intends to defend the ‘fortress of Europe’ against ‘illegal’intruders, or as implying a more straightforward, performative setting of borders that creates new states, such as the ones that created West and EastGermany or, more recently, North and South Sudan.

When it comes to relating past and present, historians increasingly seemto waver between a merely contemplative stance and a more active one.Rousso, as we have seen, sometimes defines the role of historians as that of ‘understanding’ the distance between past and present, while on other occa-sions he describes it as one of ‘distancing’ past and present. On the one hand,the historian has to allow ‘the selection of what must remain or disappear tooccur spontaneously’; on the other, the historian’s liberating potential issituated in ‘putting [the past] at a distance’. It is also far from clear what theprecise status is of the ‘hierarchies of time’ that are not respected by memory.

De Graaff ’s approach, despite his references to the drawing of lines, seemsequally ambiguous. At first sight, his thesis that it is necessary to demarcateperiods by recognising their ‘entirely individual’ character seems quite un-

problematic, but it is amply shown in critical theory on periodisation thaton a historiographical level the very notion of the individuality or particu-larity of periods is (at least partly) dependent on their demarcation alias

63 Ibid., 28.64 Hellema ‘Een andere tamboer’, cited in: ibid., 30.65 Expression used by Joan W. Scott, Border Patrol, French Historical Studies XXI,

1998, 3, 383–397.


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Introduction 23

their ‘periodisation’ – which in its turn relates to a particular cultural, relig-ious, gendered or ethico-political logic.66 From a ‘nominalist’ perspective, itis indeed quite senseless to even speak about ‘periods’ before time is some-how periodised. Yet even from a more ‘objectivist’ or ‘realist’ perspective, it isas puzzling as it is important to know what exactly historians are doing whenthey are ‘letting the past become past’, and how historians can tell ‘when’exactly ‘it is time’ to ‘put the past in its place’. When, indeed, is this act ‘timely’ and thus ‘legitimate’?

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that the question of the legitimacy of breaks in time is strongly entangled with the concept of the‘epoch’ itself.67 This quandary, for Blumenberg, was especially latent in mo-

dernity’s claim to realise a radical break with tradition – a claim that, accord-ing to him, was incongruent with the reality of history ‘which can neverbegin entirely anew’. ‘The modern age,’ Blumenberg argues, ‘was the firstand only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in doing so, simulta-neously created other epochs’. Due to this performative aspect, an adequateunderstanding of the concept of epoch cannot be reached so long as onestarts from a historicist logic of ‘historiographical object definition’ – whichaccording to Blumenberg, can never transcend the longstanding dilemma of nominalism versus realism. Though Blumenberg primarily focuses on mo-dernity (and intellectual history) his argument applies to all attempts tounderstand the change of epochs in ‘rational categories’.

The fact that the problems of historicist logic are still very prominenttoday can be illustrated by Martin Sabrow’s recent attempt to come to gripswith the problem of time in contemporary history. Sabrow thoughtfully de-velops historicism to its logical end – without transgressing its borders, how-ever.68 Starting from the (at least in Germany) classical definition of Zeitge-schichte by Hans Rothfels as the ‘epoch of the contemporaries and theirhandling by academic history’, he observes that this definition does not ‘fit’the current practice of contemporary historians in Germany anymore. Sab-row’s argument is the fact of ‘1945’, a ‘fact’ he describes as follows: ‘The endof contemporaneity [ Zeitgenossenschaft ] did not succeed in bridging theepochal caesura of 1945 in German contemporary history, although this hadbeen predicted just before the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship in 1989/90

and even more afterward.’69 Because the criterion of having experienced the‘contemporary’ past does not hold water anymore – World War One, in Sab-

66 Irmline Veit-Brause, Marking Time: Topoi and Analogies in Historical Periodiz-ation, Storia della Storiografia XXVII, 2000, 3–10.

67 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main, 1966). Hereaftercited in its English translation The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge/MA, 1983).

68 Martin Sabrow, Die Zeit der Zeitgeschichte (Göttingen, 2012).69 Sabrow, Zeit der Zeitgeschichte, 2.


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row’s view, did not stop being part of ‘contemporary’ history even thoughthe last (French) war veteran died in 2008 – Sabrow proposes a new criterionbased on controversial nature and intensity of memory :

The capacity to produce social meaning of counter-narratives, based on experience andmemory, distinguishes contemporary history fundamentally from other periods in his-tory. This capacity endows contemporary history with a changing temporal position,crossing over the borders of any specific period and defining its particular unity. The timeof contemporary history is rather oriented by the intensity of memory or by the publicconfrontation with the past as a mix of memory and knowledge.70

So again, it is allegedly not the historian who decides where the borders of Zeitgeschichte are to be drawn because the borders, according to Sabrow, are

somehow out there to be ‘registered’. Because the failed German revolutionof 1918–19, the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power are no longerhotly debated, they are no longer part of ‘contemporary’ history. The perse-cution of the Jews, the Holocaust and totalitarian rule, however, are still ob-

jects of ‘hot’ controversies and therefore, in Sabrow’s view, ‘contemporary’ –even though they are in part chronologically simultaneous with ‘Weimar’and Hitler’s rise to power.

Sabrow, therefore, is obliged to draw the surprising conclusion that someparts of the history of the twentieth century belong to ‘contemporary’ his-tory, while others do not, and that their chronological location is not the de-ciding criterion. Only their being part of ‘hot’ memorial controversies is

decisive. Zeitgeschichte, according to Sabrow, is therefore fundamentally Streitgeschichte. As long as that is the case, the contested parts of the Germantwentieth century are like ‘remaining islands of contemporary history in asea of progressing historisation’.71

Only after having deconstructed the temporal borders of the object of Zeitgeschichte does Sabrow shift his attention to the constructive activities of the Zeithistoriker . In this respect he is less original because he holds with theeighteenth-century German historian Johann Martin Chladenius that his-torians develop an organising point of view – a Sehepunkt – in their recon-structions, which lends an ex post narrative unity to temporal diversity. Thisunity, according to Sabrow, is fundamentally dependent on a certain ‘clo-sure’ in time. Therefore clear-cut ruptures or ‘break-ups’ in time – as in 1945

and in 1989 – are of crucial importance for the contemporary historian.Again, according to Sabrow, the Zeithistoriker does not actively ‘break up’time; rather he ‘registers’ what is ‘out there’. Therefore Sabrow suggests thatwe think of Zeitgeschichte as: ‘ … the period or those periods that precede thelatest fundamental change of the point of view and that can therefore be dis-

70 Ibid., 5.71 Ibid., 6.


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Introduction 25

tinguished from the succeeding period by the presence of different political,economic and cultural societal norms.’72 In the end, therefore, Sabrow, inspite of himself, presents a new – and temporal – definition of contemporary history, beginning with ‘totalitarian’ Nazism in the 1930s and ending withthe end of the Cold War in 1989 – which he apparently regards as the latest‘objective’ break in time.73

What is also remarkable here is that after he has thrown the (linear) tem-poral borders of contemporary history out the front door, Sabrow reintro-duces them through the backdoor – by assuming that epochs and breaks ap-parently are ‘out there’ and succeed each other. It is therefore only logicalthat Sabrow needs to introduce a new epoch and new kind of history suc-

ceeding ‘contemporary’ history – that is, after the last ‘objective’ break orcaesura in time, the so-called ‘history of the present’ or Gegenwartsge-schichte – which in Germany begins in 1989. Its distinctive characteristic isthat because this part of history is not yet ‘closed’ by a recognisable ‘break’ intime; there is no point of view to orient the historian who might wish towrite it. As a result, the history-writing of the present is … impossible:‘Without a break between experiencing and understanding, which is pro-duced by a change in point of view, the writing of history remains a specu-lative activity based on shifting sands of interpretation, because its pa-rameter and storylines can change continuously.’74 No ‘objective’ break intime, according to Sabrow, means no break between the experience (Er-leben) of the contemporary eyewitnesses – the Zeitzeugen – and the ex post understanding (Verstehen) of the professional historian, and thus no break between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, that is: ‘real’ history.75

With Sabrow historicism has come full circle: The arguments he formu-lates against the possibility of Gegenwartsgeschichte are identical to the argu-ments historicists have traditionally advanced against the possibility of Zeit-

geschichte.76 Again we observe the clear and typical wavering between thehistorian’s passive ‘recognising’ and his active ‘producing’ breaks in time.

72 Ibid., 7.73 Ibid., 8.74 Ibid., 8.75 Also see Martin Sabrow, Die Historikerdebatte über den Umbruch von 1989, in:

Martin Sabrow et al. (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Große Kontroversen seit 1945(Munich, 2003), 127. For the notions of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ history, see: Chris Lorenz, Ge-schichte, Gegenwärtigkeit und Zeit, in: Dietmar Goltschnigg (ed.), Phänomen Zeit: Di-mensionen und Strukturen in Kultur und Wissenschaft (Tübingen, 2011), 127–135.

76 See Alexander Nützenadel/Wolfgang Schieder (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Problem: Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung (Göttingen, 2004); Zeitgeschichteheute – Stand und Perspektiven, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary His-tory , 2004, 1.


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This issue also pops up when Sabrow tries to draw a border between Zeit- geschichte as a discipline and the rest of the Erinnerungskultur in which con-temporary historians participate by joining in public debates. By his or herparticipation in public historical culture, the Zeithistoriker/in is not only ob-server but also actor according to Sabrow.77 He insists, however, that thepublic activities of the Zeithistoriker/innen should not be conceived as politi-cal action. His main argument in this regard seems to be that historians, incontrast to other carriers of memory culture, have a ‘method’ and a reflectedrelationship to time that enables them to keep ‘distance’ and avoid ‘partisan-ship’ vis-à-vis the past, even when the past is very present.

Two rules of conduct in my view are extraordinarily important. The first consists inadopting a conscious partisanship in favour of a distancing historisation of the past andagainst a partisan making present of the past. The task of the discipline of contemporary history is to explain the past and not to produce a normative evaluation, and even less apublic advise. The second strategic rule of conduct that would guarantee contemporary history a legitimate existence within the general culture of memory instead of in opposi-tion to it, consists of the capacity of metahistorical self-reflection. Contrary to the other‘players’ in the field of ‘working with the past’, contemporary history disposes of an ar-moury of methods that enable it to create a distance to its own activities, that makes up fora lack of temporal distance with analytical distance.78

How exactly the ‘analytical’ distance of the Zeithistoriker compensates for alack of temporal distance is not clarified. Apparently, a good Zeithistoriker –in contrast to the Zeitzeuge and the memorialist – just knows.

5. ‘Past-ness’ and ‘Present-ness’

The cultural and political reality of the ‘memory boom’ has compelled his-torians in search of a new professional role and theoretical legitimation forhistory to make explicit what was previously based more often on implicitpresuppositions than on formal arguments – e.g., such notions as the past-ness of the past and the present-ness of the present. As Ulrich Raulff convin-cingly demonstrated, novelists were well ahead of historians in problematis-ing the relationship between the past and the present. On the basis of his study of fictional literature, he characterises the twentieth century as‘the century of the present’ (Gegenwart ) in contrast to the nineteenth cen-tury, ‘the century of history’ (Geschichte). Instead of the questions about ori-gins that dominated nineteenth-century historical reflection, the problem of

77 Sabrow, Zeit der Zeitgeschichte, 20: ‘Zeithistorie agiert in unserer Gegenwart notge-drungen als Beobachterin und Gestalterin zugleich.’

78 Ibid., 20–21.


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Introduction 27

presence (Präsenz ) and actuality ( Aktualität ) have come to dominate the lit-erature of classical modernity. 79

It is remarkable that historians have rarely engaged in explicit reflectionon the problem of the present and of presence, for it is clearly central to theirnotion of historical time and, through the logic of negation, to their notionof the past. Their failure to address the problem may partly be explained by the longstanding taboo among professional historians on the writing of con-temporary history or any historiography that does not respect a certain wait-ing period – defined most often by the opening up of archives or the dyingof Zeitzeugen, but sometimes defined in straightforwardly chronologicalterms, e.g., forty years.

So, despite the fact that they include the words ‘time’, ‘contemporaneity’or ‘present’ in their very names, the breakthrough of the subdisciplines of

Zeitgeschichte, contemporary history and histoire du temps présent has notled to much critical reflection on these notions. A few exceptions notwith-standing, the widespread tendency among historians is to focus on ever-more recent events. This trend, which Lynn Hunt has criticised as ‘pres-entism’,80 has paradoxically rarely led historians to raise the questionwhether, and in what sense, their object of study can still be called ‘past’.

Philosophers of history have also not reflected much on the meaning of the notions ‘past’ and ‘present’. It is significant that, although philosophersof history are very fond of pointing out that the word ‘history’ is polysemi-cal – referring both to historical events (res gestae), as well as to narrativesabout these events (historia rerum gestarum) – and that this is no accidentbut a meaningful fact, they seldom note that the same can be said about theword ‘present’, which can refer both to the (temporal) presence of an ‘in-stant’ or a ‘now’, as well as to the (material) presence of objects.

Again, there are exceptions. Recently Zachary S. Schiffman has offeredsome innovative insights in his The Birth of the Past based on the argumentthat a differentiation has to be made between the common sense idea of thepast as ‘prior time’ and the historical past defined as a time ‘different fromthe present’.81 Earlier Preston King offered a profound reflection on the dif-ferent meanings that are attributed to the notions of ‘present’ and ‘past’.82

King differentiates between four distinct notions of ‘present’ (and cor-

relative notions of ‘past’), which are based on a ‘chronological’ notion of time as an abstract temporal sequence on the one hand and a ‘substantive’

79 Raulff, Der unsichtbare Augenblick, 10.80 Lynn Hunt, Against Presentism, Perspectives XL, 2002, 4. [www.historians.org/pers-

pectives/…/0205pre1.cfm]81 Zachary S. Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, 2011).82 Preston King, Thinking Past a Problem: Essays on the History of Ideas (London,

2000).


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notion of time as a concrete sequence of events on the other. Relying onchronological time and depending on their duration, two senses of the pres-ent can be discerned: a first called the ‘instantaneous present’ and a secondcalled the ‘extended present’ . Both presents are boxed in between past and fu-ture and have a merely chronological character. While the first, however, de-fines itself as the smallest possible and ever-evaporating instant dividing pastand present, the second refers to a more extended period of time (e.g., a day,a year, a century) whose limits are arbitrarily chosen but give the presentsome ‘body’ or temporal depth. Because of the meaninglessness and arbit-rarily chronological character of these presents and corresponding pasts,historians often use a more substantive frame of reference based on criteria

that are themselves not temporal.One of these substantive notions is that of the ‘unfolding present’. As long

as a chosen event or evolution (e.g., negotiations, a depression, a crisis, awar) is unfolding, it demarcates a ‘present’. When it is conceived of as com-pleted, the time in which it unfolded is called ‘past’. King remarks that this isthe only sense in which one can say that a particular past is ‘dead’ or ‘overand done with’. Yet, he immediately warns that any process deemed com-pleted contains ‘sub-processes’ that are in fact not. So, it is always very diffi-cult to exclude any ‘actual past’ from being part of, working in or having in-fluence on this unfolding present.

In addition to the three presents already summed up (the instantaneous,the extended and the unfolding), King names a fourth which he calls the‘neoteric present’. Drawing a parallel to the dialectics of fashion, he notesthat we often distinguish things that happen in the present but can be experi-enced as ‘ancient’, ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’, from phenomena we view as being characteristic of the present, which we designate ‘novel’, ‘innovative’or ‘modern’.

Historical periodisation on first sight primarily depending on the ex-tended present, according to King, is primarily based on the dialectics of theneoteric present. While every notion of the present excludes its own cor-relative past, this does not hold for non-correlative senses of the past. Thepresent can thus be penetrated by non-correlative pasts that in a substantivesense stay alive in the present: ‘The past is not present. But no present is en-

tirely divorced from or uninfluenced by the past. The past is not chronologi-cally present. But there is no escaping the fact that much of it is substantively so.’83

King’s analysis is important because it offers an intellectual defenceagainst arguments that posit or, as usually is the case, simply assume theexistence of a neat divide between past and present, and portray the past as

83 King, Thinking Past a Problem, 55.


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‘dead’ or entirely different from the present. On the basis of his inquiry intothe nature of past and past-ness, as well as his critical analysis of notions of present, present-ness and contemporaneity, he is able to counter both argu-ments that represent history as entirely ‘passeist’ and arguments that repre-sent history as entirely ‘presentist’. In other words, King on the one hand re-

jects arguments that claim that the writing of history is solely ‘about’ thepast, but on the other hand he also dismisses the claim that historiography isexclusively based on present perspectives or that ‘all history is contemporary history’. On an analytical level, King’s sophisticated differentiation betweendiverse notions of past and present seems to ‘solve’ the riddles of historicaltime and the relationship between the past and the present – and we could

add: the future.84 However, King does not say much about the extent towhich his analytical categories can be found in the work of historians or inbroader social dealings with historicity, nor does he point out the concrete(epistemological, cultural, political, etc.) implications of his insights.

In this book, we are interested precisely in the question of these morecomplex ‘actual’ dealings with and performative creations of pasts and pres-ents. Focusing on ‘actual’ pasts and presents means transcending their clear-cut analytical descriptions and looking at how they emerge in impure forms,and how they are entangled and confounded. On this ‘actual level’ one may,as Peter Burke rightly observes, expect to find out that ‘times are not her-metically sealed but “contaminate” one another.’85 It may thus be worth-while to pay attention to the way chronological conceptualisations of timecombine with and influence more substantive concepts of temporality inhistorical practice. It can be asked, for example, what status exactly shouldbe accorded to ideas about ‘short centuries’ or ‘long centuries’, and how ex-periences and expectations of a ‘ fin de siècle’ influence the way historians andhistorical actors ‘consign’ events and processes to history.86 Focusing on theempirical level implies asking what we actually do when we talk about past,present and future and their ‘borders’. How is the naming and demarcationof these categories politically and ethically charged, and to what extent arethey actually a matter of contemplation or rather of performativity? Can weany longer take for granted the common idea, as expressed for example by Nathan Rotenstreich, that our relationship to the past is one of reflection,

84 Helge Jordheim, in his recent article Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities, History and Theory LI, 2012, 2, 151–171, offers an interpretationof Koselleck’s theory of temporalities which points in the same direction as King.

85 Burke, Reflections, 625.86 Expression used by Charles S. Maier, Consigning the Twentieth Century to History:

Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, The American Historical Review CV, 2000, 3,807–801.


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while we relate to the future through ‘intervention’? Or does our relationshipwith the past involve specific types of performative ‘intervention’ as well?87

With Michel de Certeau it makes sense to ask whether and in on what ex-tend ‘historical acts’ ‘transform contemporary documents into archives, ormake the countryside into a museum of memorable and/or superstitioustraditions’. Within the current political and cultural context it certainly seemsfruitful to scrutinise de Certeau’s thesis that the ‘circumscription’ of a ‘past,’rather than being the product of mere contemplation, involves an active ‘cut-ting off ’ or an active creation of an opposition. This means taking de Certeau’sclaim seriously that within a context of social stratification, historiography hasoften been ‘defined as “past” (that is, as an ensemble of alterities and of “resis-

tances” to be comprehended or rejected) whatever did not belong to the powerof producing a present, whether the power is political, social, or scientific’. 88

It should also be clear that, by opting for the focus in this book that we have just described, we do not intend to settle any ‘border conflicts’ between past,present and future, nor do we want to make dramatic claims like those of Eli-sabeth Ermarth who describes/declares ‘historical time as a thing of the past’.89

We do believe, however, that Ermarth’s deliberately ironic phrasing does raiselong-neglected and important questions. Indeed, we think it is about timeto ask about the historicity of historical time, not just in the conventionalsense of scrutinising its (intellectual or cultural) genesis or genealogy, but alsoin the sense of its relationship to the past, future and above all to the present.These, then, are the questions that form the framework of this volume.

6. Overview of the volume

We have divided the contributions to this volume into four sections:

1. Time and Modernity: Critical Approaches to Koselleck’s Legacy

The first part of the volume assembles three contributions that directly buildon the heritage of Reinhart Koselleck’s analyses of time and modernity.

In her essay ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, Aleida Ass-mann elaborates on an insight that is fundamental to Koselleck’s work: that

87 Nathan Rotenstreich, Time and Meaning in History (Dordrecht, 1987), 21.88 de Certeau, Heterologies, 216. As de Certeau claims in another of his works: ‘Une so-

ciété se donne ainsi un présent grâce à une écriture historique.’ de Certeau, L’ecriture del’histoire, 141.

89 Ermarth, Sequel to History , 25. Also see Elisabeth Deeds Ermarth, Ph(r)ase Time –Chaos Theory and Postmodern Reports on Knowledge, Time & Society IV, 1995, 1, 91–110.


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time has its own historicity. Assmann argues that a ‘continental shift’ is tak-ing place in our experience of temporality, a shift that not only involves a fu-ture that is losing its lure, but also brings a renewed interest in the past. Fromthe perspective of this recent change, she offers a schematic but precise over-view of what she sees as five central aspects of the moribund ‘modern timeregime.’

In the second chapter, ‘The Ruins of Modernity’, Peter Fritzsche offers ananalysis of heterogeneous ‘shapes of time’ existing in modernity by usingchanging perceptions of ‘ruins’ around the early nineteenth century as hispoint of departure. He identifies four types of ruins that, in his view, reflectand reinforce contrasting (geo)politics of time. Fritzsche uses his analysis of

ruins to reflect on the sociopolitical role of historians. History as a genre, heargues, can reanimate alternatives and raise the question of the permanenceof the present, but it can equally close down other alternatives and thus‘stabilise’ the present.

In chapter 3, ‘Global Modernity and the Contemporary’, Peter Osbornepresents a philosophical analysis of ‘global modernity’, which he mainly criticises on a geopolitical level and for which he proposes, as an alternative,the notion of a global ‘contemporary’. He maintains that Koselleck’s analysishas always been rather restrictive on a historical and a philosophical leveland is now, more than ever, restrictive due to the ‘emergence of new struc-tures of temporalisation of history’. On a conceptual level, Osborne relatesthis new temporalisation to two processes: on the one hand a ‘globalisation’of the (Western and colonial) concept of modernity, and on the other handthe ‘becoming-world-historical’ of a notion of the contemporary.

2. Ruptures in Time: Revolutions and Wars

In the second part of the volume, four contributions have been assembledthat analyse the effects of major ‘transformative events’, like revolutions andwars, on the ways temporal distinctions between present, past and future areconstructed.

In chapter 4, ‘Year One and Year 61 of the French Revolution: The Revol-

utionary Calendar and Auguste Comte’, Sanja Perovic focuses on the ques-tion of how time’s measure – apparently abstract, universal and invariable –relates to the lived experience of historical events. How does ‘chronological’time, defined primarily in quantitative terms, relate to a more qualitative no-tion of ‘event-time’? According to Perovic, ‘failed’ calendars, such as the rev-olutionary calendar and Comte’s calendar, reflect alternative and more com-plex experiences of modernity which, though lost to us, (partly due to ourcurrent politics of measurement) can potentially grant fruitful new insights


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on modernity and more specifically on the way transformative events havebeen and are still being dealt with.

In chapter 5, ‘Wormholes in Russian History: Events “Outside of Time”,’Claudia Verhoeven focuses on the way in which the radical Russian intelli-gentsia around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentiethcentury created visions of historical time that significantly differed frommore classical historicist thinking. This classical train of thought concerninghistorical evolution represented Russia as backward and as far removed frommodernity and certainly from the modern revolution. It is known that thiswas also Lenin’s view. Yet Verhoeven sees Lenin’s stance as following a longtradition of intellectual efforts by the radical intelligentsia to break out of

time by creating what she calls ‘temporal wormholes’. These were motivatedby a wish to break with the past and to forge a new age, often by using politi-cal violence and terror as the preferred means.

François Hartog in chapter 6, ‘The Modern Regime of Historicity in Faceof the Two World Wars’, elaborates on the author’s influential theory aboutregimes of historicity. He focuses on the modern regime of historicity andraises the question of how and to what extent this regime of historicity –firmly based on the categories of future and progress – was able to survivethe First and Second World Wars. What, Hartog asks, does it mean to believein history in the period between 1918 and 1945? And what consequences dothe different experiences of the victorious and the defeated nations have forconceptions of time? Hartog develops the thesis that already before 1914, themodern regime of historicity had undergone a series of changes and refor-mulations that made it more resistant to periods of crisis.

In chapter 7, ‘Mysteries of Historical Order: Breaks, Simultaneity and theRelation of the Past, the Present and the Future’, Lucian Hölscher addressesa question similar to Hartog’s, but offers a different answer. Hölscher startsfrom the observation that history in the twentieth century, since the FirstWorld War, was no longer experienced as a meaningful and continuouswhole, the way it had been experienced in the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies. Beginning with three autobiographical analyses of our present‘postmodern’ historical condition, Hölscher investigates how it was pos-sible for thinkers before 1918 to perceive of the relationship between past,

present and future so differently. Hölscher argues that in the eighteenthcentury the notion of simultaneity made it possible for Enlightenmentthinkers to conceptualise a connection – a Zusammenhang – between eventsthat went beyond their purely temporal connection. This idea made it pos-sible to conceive of an Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitichen and to think of temporal order in a spatial sense. ‘Civilised’ societies in present day Europecould be represented as the future of ‘primitive’ societies elsewhere. Itwould take a world war and (colonial) genocides to destroy this meaning-


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ful temporal order and to render both past and future dependent on thepresent.

3. Thinking about Time: Analytical Approaches

In the third section of the volume are two contributions that approach theproblem of breaking up time from a more philosophical angle.

In chapter 8, ‘The Limits of Historiographical Choice in Temporal Dis-tinctions’, Jonathan Gorman offers a theory of historical time that trans-forms Quine’s (pragmatic) notion of a ‘web of beliefs’ into a ‘rolling web of

beliefs’ and provides a fruitful way of thinking about our historical – that is,our diachronic – beliefs. He suggests the notions of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ as thebasic temporal distinctions within any ‘rolling web of belief’. The only for-mal criterion regulating their use is the criterion of consistency. All othercriteria in use are merely conventional. After having fixed the temporal no-tions of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’, Gorman addresses ‘the present’. He notes the du-rational or extended character of ‘the present’ always includes parts of thepast and the future. All ‘swathes of time’ distinguished by historians – fixedcenturies or more indeterminate periods, such as ‘post-revolutionary’ – havea conventional character like Wittgenstein’s ‘common sense certainties’.Only in historical hindsight do alternatives become visible. The temporaldistinction between the present and the past is thus purely conventional, al-though it need not be consensual.

In chapter 9, ‘Breaking up Time – Escaping from Time: Self

ed. with chris lorenz breaking up time

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