Quotes:
Zweig
”It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early begninings of the great movements which determine their times” Die Welt der Gestern
Wedgewood
”History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end befroe we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.”
Hobsbawm
”Retrospectiveness is the secret weapon of the historian.”
Croce
”All history is contemporary history” Theory and Histroy of Historiography
Bourdieu
”You do not become a good historian if you obliterate the present time from your brain – rather the contrary” Une revolution symbolique
Faulkner
”The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Epoche der Mitlebenden Hans Rothfels
He couldn’t write history after WWII as it had been done before.
One had to wait until everything were to calm down before that, in order to distance oneself from the event. Rothfels realised that history never leaves us, it never cools down.
At what point to put our caesurae? When do we start? When do we end?
According to Rothfels, we need to start with what still impacts us today. We need to start with those events that have not yet left us. For Rothfels this was 1917, due to the October revolution of Russia as well as the entry of the US into WW1. For Rothfels, this marked the entrance of ideology, of building a political entity purely on it. The creation of hegemony based on ideology. An entirely new world was born in 1917 for a person living in 1953s Germany.
Lead him to conclude that one must not only accept one’s own position in writing history, but rather make something useful out of that fact. The method of using one’s own position as a clearly explicated vantage point suddenly became realised and embraced.
For Hobsbawm, a Marxist thinker, instead, it seemed useful to structure contemporary history as the ”short 20:th century” (and the long 20:th century). This short one though, he specifically titled ”the age of extremes” due to there being a sense of very clear ideologies clashing with each other. This lasted between 1914-1989/1991. Hobsbawm similarly utilised the method of Rothfels.
Tony Judt’s ”Postwar” and ”cultures of memory” concepts encapsulates the ideas that Europe has become entirely defined by the aftermath of WWII. Something happened after the WWII which was historically new. Before, if you thought of history, in the public sphere, it was thinking about the heroes of history. You find these monuments of WWI all over Europe, national history is all about those sacrifices made for its existence. After WWII there were so many national developments that made their people critical of the very foundation of believing in a national history. He argued that this was the precondition for European unification. Finally Europe could put its differences aside and unite in the culture of memory.
When we write history, an important topic to decide upon, is where we mark out our caessurae.
Depending on which events we choose, we will end up with different results. It’s almost an arithmetic of events.
We can also think of caessurae in terms of paths of temporalities.
One such is the anthropocene: when we can start seeing the effects of man made change on the earth.
Great Acceleration: the idea that in the 50s, if you look at all kinds of developments, it seems that everything began happening way faster than before, at least in the West.
Second Modernity: vs classic modernity in 19th century, belief in technological progress and fordism. The starting point is generally the 2nd oil crisis.
Knowledge society, third modernity, liquid modernity and retrotopia (Zygmunt Bauman: we no longer think about the future in terms of how we want society progress, rather we feel only nostalgia for the past and want only the idealised image we have of that back).
Temporalities can all come in different shapes. They can be based on politics, social change, cultural change, technological change, legal change etc etc.
They can be based on spatialities: Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont in Koselleck; eg. Global north and global south developmental temporalities, East vs. West. Etc etc.
Furthermore, now a days there are entirely new modes of narrating reality, like graphic novels, visual novels, etc. etc. Now a days history is mainly consumed in completely different forms than purely the tomes that we are used to.
Challenges for research in contemporary history:
Studied problems and developments often not yet concluded; sometimes we name our own eras yet there is no conclusion on what is going on in any given crisis. When writing history about things that were currently ongoing, we write it completely differently than afterwards.
It is difficult to access sources to contemporary events. There are no clear archives, and much of it is done through unreliable sources.
Most archives of civil servants are only declassified about 30 years after the decisions were made. The idea is that it should take about 1 generation so that the old civil servants are out at that point.
Contemporary history has to be transnational. Important tendencies to be found in all or most Euopean countries. European focus offers chance to bring these to the fore.
The teleological history of the EU: ”All europeans went through two world wars and then suddenly realised that this was a bad idea and now need to unite into the European union.” A kind of history purported by those that founded and now defend the EU.
Europe has been provincialised in world history. It is no longer the major relevant force which all of the world must regard.
For the exam:
All texts and sources provided in Toledo. Read texts, there will be questions in exam addressing comprehension of texts.
Content of sessions (notes taken during sessions and slides)
see also information on exam on Toledo, example questions during course which are similar to Exam questions.
Some relevant books for the course:
Buchana Europe’s troubled peace
Judt A history of Europe since 1945
Kershaw Roller Coaster. Europe 1950-2017
Mazower Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
Sheehan Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe