Unstuck in Time. Or: The Sudden Presence of The Past': April 2002

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Performing the Past
Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe
Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds.)
Amsterdam University Press

Cover: Lewes Bonfire Night, procession of the Martyr's Crosses. Part of the Bonfire Night
celebrations on the 5th November in Lewes, Sussex. The burning crosses commemorate the
17 Protestant martyrs who were burnt at the stake in the town during the Marian persecutions
of 1555–1557.
Coverillustration: Andrew Dunn, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Cover: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Design: Paul Boyer, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
isbn 978 90 8964 205 9

e-isbn 978 90 4851 202 7
nur 686
© Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter / Amsterdam University Press, 2010
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the
written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort had been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced
in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact
the publisher.
Table of Contents
Preface 7
Acknowledgements 9
1 Introduction.
The performance of the past: memory, history, identity 11
jay winter
Framework
2 Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms

of constructing the past 35
aleida assmann
3 Repetitive structures in language and history 51

reinhard koselleck
4 Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past 67

chris lorenz
The Performative Turn
5 Co-memorations. Performing the past 105

peter burke
6 ‘Indelible memories’. The tattooed body as theatre of memory 119

jane caplan
7 Incongruous images. ‘Before, during, and after’ the Holocaust 147

marianne hirsch and leo spitzer
8 Radio Clandestina: from oral history to the theatre 175
alessandro portelli
Media and the Arts
9 Music and memory in Mozart’s Zauberflöte 187

jan assmann
10 The many afterlives of Ivanhoe 207

ann rigney
11 Novels and their readers, memories and their social frameworks 235
joep leerssen
12 Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation 257

frank van vree
Identity, Politics and the Performance of History
13 ‘In these days of convulsive political change’.

Discourse and display in the revolutionary museum, 1793-1815 287
frans grijzenhout
14 Restitution as a means of remembrance.

Evocations of the recent past in the Czech Republic and
in Poland after 1989 305
stanislaw tyszka
15 European identity and the politics of remembrance 335

chiara bottici
About the authors 361

List of illustrations 367
CHAPTER 4
Unstuck in time. Or : the sudden
presence of the past
chris lorenz
If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

Yitzhak (Ante) Zuckermann,
second in command during the Warsaw Ghetto
uprising (1944) in the film Shoah (1985)
From history to memory
Since 1989, the past is no longer what it used to be, and neither is the
academic study of the past – that is the Geschichtswissenschaft. No
historian had predicted the total collapse of the Soviet bloc and the
sudden end of the Cold War, the ensuing German unification and the
radical reshuffling of global power relations. A similar story goes for the
other two ‘epochal’ and ‘rupturing’ events of the past two decades:
‘9/11’ and the economic meltdown of 2008. 1 Therefore, academic
historians can claim very little credit for their traditional role as the
privileged interpreters of the present in its relationship to the past and
the future (and it is only a small consolation to know that the social
scientists and the economists performed only slightly better on this
score).
Maybe even more surprising – or disappointing – is the observation that
no historian had imagined the eruptions of the past into the present which
started in Eastern-Central Europe directly after 1989 – especially in the
form of genocidal war and of ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia.
68 Performing the past
Suddenly it seemed like the Croats and the Serbs had slipped back into the
Second World War.
Through these events both the ‘pastness of the past’ (which had been the
constitutive presupposition of academic history since the French revolution)
and the capacity of academic history to explain how the past is connected
to the present, suddenly lost their ‘evidential’ quality. If burying the dead
is equal to creating the past, as Michel de Certeau and Eelco Runia both
have argued, their funeral was suddenly interrupted, confronting
historians since 1989 with a ‘haunting’ past instead of with a – distant –
‘historical’ past.2 This change can undoubtedly be connected to an
experience of crisis, as Jan-Werner Müller has recently suggested:
‘According to John Keane, “crisis periods …. prompt awareness of the
crucial importance of the past for the present. As a rule, crises are times
during which the living do battle for the hearts, minds and souls of the
dead”. But the dead also seem to be doing battle for the hearts, minds and
souls of the living, as the latter often resort during times of crisis to a kind
of mythical re-enactment of the past’.3
Another constitutive presupposition of academic history since the early
nineteenth century – that the nation and the nation-state were the
fundamental subjects of history – also lost its plausibility around the same
time – as if there was a sudden consciousness that the mass killings of the
twentieth century had been caused by nationalisms run wild. Since then,
‘methodological nationalism’ is ‘out’ and debates concerning the question
which spatial units should replace the nation in history writing have been
rampant. Both sub-national units (cities or city-networks, regions,
borderlands, etc.) and supra-national units (like empires, cultures,
civilizations, networks, diasporas, or the entire world) have been
advertised as such. Therefore, not only the temporal dimension of history
has turned into a new object of discussion in academic history after 1989,
but also history’s spatial construction , spiraling into discussions about
‘transnational’, ‘global’, and even ‘big’ history.
Last but not least, the relationships between history and politics,
history and ethics, and history and justice have resurfaced in
unprecedented ways – all problems academic history claimed to have ‘left
behind’ by splitting off the ‘historical’ past from the ‘practical’ past when
history turned into an ‘autonomous profession’. The attempts to confine
academic history to the issues of epistemology and of methodology and to
fence it off from the domain of politics and ethics seem to have lost
whatever plausibility they had in the second half of the catastrophic
twentieth century.
Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past 69
Of course each individual issue had been raised at some point before 1989
and of course national history never had been the only show in university
town – most certainly not – but at no time had these questions collectively
unsettled academic history to a similar degree. Fundamental questions as
regards the ‘the founding myth’ of professional, academic history – its
‘objectivity’ – had started destabilizing academic history from the 1970s
onwards in the slipstream of multiculturalism, the ‘cultural wars’, and the
‘politics of identity’ – often referred to collectively under the name of
‘postmodernism’. Class, gender, ethnicity, and race were mobilized
successively and successfully in order to undermine the academic
historians’ claim to ‘objectivity’. These collective identities fragmented the
profession along different fracture lines and opposed history’s ‘objectivity’
to the notion of (class, gender, etc.) ‘experience’ and – increasingly and
most fundamentally – to the notion of ‘memory’. Illustrative for these
developments was the fact Peter Novick’s debunking book on the American
historical professions claim to ‘objectivity’ was rewarded with the AHA
Prize in 1988.4
The notion of memory became the common denominator for anchoring
the past in collective experiences of specific groups. Especially traumatic or
catastrophic memories became the privileged window on the past since the
1980s. Wulf Kansteiner formulates the present predicament of ‘memory
studies’ as follows: ‘The predominance of traumatic memory and its impact
on history is […] exemplified by the increasing importance since the 1970s
of the Holocaust in the ‘catastrophic’ history of the twentieth century.
Despite an impressive range of subject matter, memory studies thrive on
catastrophes and trauma and the Holocaust is still the primary, archetypal
topic in memory studies. […] Due to its exceptional breadth and depth
Holocaust studies illustrate the full range of methods and perspectives in
event-oriented studies of collective memory, but we find similar works
analyzing the memory of other exceptionally destructive, criminal and
catastrophic events, for instance World War II and fascism, slavery, and
recent genocides and human rights abuses. Especially with regard to the
last topic attempts to establish the historical record of the events in question
and the desire to facilitate collective remembrance and mourning often
overlap. In comparison, the legacy of relatively benign events is only rarely
considered in contemporary studies of collective memory.’5
In the following contribution I will analyse some of the implications of
the rise of memory for history as an academic discipline in the beginning of
the twenty-first century. Basically I will argue that the rise of memory
necessitates reflection both on the frames of representation of academic
history – especially on its temporal and spatial frames – and on its political
and ethical entanglements.
My analysis starts with going back to the origins of academic history in
the early nineteenth century and its connection to the nation/state. In the
first section I argue that academic history presupposed a specific
conception of space – that of the nation-state – and that it identified history
with the process of nation formation. I also argue that the specific claim of
academic history to ‘objectivity’ was directly based on and thus dependent
on this spatial unit.
In the second section I argue that academic history was based on a
specific conception of time – that of linear, irreversible and teleological
time. Following Koselleck and Hartog I interpret this time conception in
terms of the ‘modern regime of historicity’ and with Agamben I locate the
origins of this ‘modern’ time conception in a mixture of the Greek and the
Christian ideas of time. I also argue that the academic conception of history
as the process of nation formation is based on this ‘modern’ time
conception. Last but not least I argue that the storyline of national history is
derived from the narrative structure of the Christian bible and that both
imperial histories and class histories can be regarded as sub-genres of
national histories in this respect.
In the third section I argue with Nora and Hartog that the rise of
memory studies in the 1980s is related to the fall of national history and that
this development can best be explained in terms of a change of the
‘modern’ to the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity. Because their analysis of
presentism does not confront the catastrophic or traumatic character of the
present past explicitly, however, their diagnosis of ‘presentism’ is missing
important characteristics. With Spiegel, Langer, Bevernage, and
Chakrabarty I argue that the recognition of ‘historical wounds’ is an
essential ingredient of ‘presentism’ and that this presupposes a time
conception which is not ‘erasive’ and which can explain duration.
In the fourth section I go into some of the implications of my amended
version of ‘presentism’ (which could be called ‘catastrophic presentism’)
for academic history. Two implications are emphasized. First, given the fact
that the claim of academic history to be ‘objective’ is damaged beyond
repair, the ideal of ‘resurrecting the past’ must be abandoned for a
systematic reflection on the representational forms of history. The recent
debates about the spatial alternatives to national history in transnational,
imperial and global history can be interpreted as examples of this type of
reflection. Second, however, given the fact that the catastrophes in
twentieth-century history are present in such a manner that they have
undermined the claim that academic history can keep ‘distance’ from them,
academic history needs to reflect on its own political and ethical
investments. In Holocaust historiography, these issues have already made
it to the agenda. A reflexive academic history in the twenty-first century
can no longer afford to be only academic. Therefore I argue that a reflexive
kind of history writing does not only need to problematize its
(epistemological) choices of representation, but also its political and ethical
investments.
1. The rise of academic history and the rise of the

nation-state
Traditionally, history’s identity as an academic discipline has been

explicated in epistemological and in methodological terms, that is, in terms
of its truth claim, based on its source critical methods and its archival
foundation.6 The origin of this idea was usually ascribed to the founders of
what is known as the ‘Historical School’ in Germany: Barthold Georg
Niebuhr, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, last but not least, to Leopold von
Ranke. Therefore it was not surprising that the spread of academic history
over the rest of the globe was usually attributed to the spread of Rankean
ideas and of Ranke’s pupils – a diffusionist and Europe-centric picture for
sure (with the United States and Japan as the extra-European model cases).
During the last decades, however, this diffusionist picture of ‘scientific’
history, originating in Berlin, has been seriously questioned.7 Not only the
Antiquarians and the Enlightenment thinkers have increasingly been
recognized as important origins of academic history – by Momigliano,
Iggers, and Grafton, among others – but recently also history’s exclusive
European origins have been questioned. Edward Wang, for instance, has
argued that, fully independent of Europe, methods and traditions of
‘evidential learning’, similar to those of the Antiquarians, have been
developed in the Japanese, Chinese, and Islamic cultures. Thus although
for instance Japan and China actually did ‘import’ Rankean ideas about
‘scientific’ history in the nineteenth and twentieth century, this does not
imply that Rankean ideas about history were the only ones around and the
only ones effective. Transnational transfers of ideas rarely produce only
‘copies’ of the original, instead usually producing ‘local’ adaptations.8
However this may be, the spectacular rise of academic history as an
institution is usually explained by the direct connection between the
professionalization of history at the one side and the nation-state at the other.
Therefore academic history was basically conceived of as national history,

although in practice other varieties of history – like ecclesial, legal and local
history – continued to exist by its side. Moreover, quite a few nations defined
themselves as imperial nations, so the differences between national and
imperial histories were rather a matter of degree than of a kind.9
This case for the ‘special connection’ between academic history and the
nation-state been emphasized again recently by prominent experts in
historiography. ‘The rise of professional scholarship and of new “scientific”
history it generated were closely related to the strong currents of
nationalism’, Georg Iggers recently observed (although this of course does
not mean that Ranke was a German nationalist).10 Similar observations
have been made by Daniel Woolf who signals a broad consensus among
both the national historians and their (subaltern) critics about the crucial
importance of the nation for academic history: ‘History is the principal
mode whereby non-nations were converted into nations’ (declaims
Prasenjit Duara). ‘Nations emerge as the subjects of History just as History
emerges as the ground, the mode of being, of the nation’. Others concur:
‘There is no way’, one scholar has asserted (without apparent awareness of
his silent extrapolation beyond the West), ‘to write a non-national history.
The national framework is always present in the historiography of modern
European societies’ – and Woolf adds, ‘The qualifier “European” may be
unnecessary’, quoting historians from outside Europe. Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Gérard Bouchard, and Stefan Berger can be named as further support for
Woolf’s conclusion concerning the omnipresence of the national
framework in history writing outside Europe.11
For most academic historians of the nineteenth century, identification
with their state and nation (or ‘people’, ‘race’, and ‘tribes’, all of which were
used as synonyms of ‘nation’) only seemed natural, because they identified
the historical process itself with the genesis and development of nations
and ‘their’ states.12 Through this (Herderian) identification, national history
appeared as the adequate representation of the historical process – as its
‘natural mode of being’, in Woolf’s words. As far as world or ‘universal’
history was concerned, it was primarily conceived as a ‘sum’ of national
histories and therefore typically as a project for the future. It was no
accident that Ranke only turned to world history – characteristically
meaning the history of Europe for him – at the very end of his long career –
in the 1880s. The attempts at ‘world history’ originating in the
Enlightenment were rejected as ‘philosophical’ – as not based on archival
research and thus basically as premature syntheses without a foundation in
‘scientific’ analyses.13
Through this identification of the process of nation formation with history

itself (that is the fusion of romantic ethnic nationalism and historism)
national historians could also see their histories as ‘truthful’ and/or as
‘objective’. The discourse of ‘objective’ history and the discourse of the
nation/state were intimately connected from the second half of the
nineteenth century: striving after ‘objectivity’ was conceived as leaving
‘partisanship’ behind in terms of religious and political affiliations within
the national arena. This connection explains why most historians regarded
‘the’ point of view of ‘the nation’ as the ‘objective’ point of view and why
they did not experience a tension between their striving after ‘objectivity’
and their role as ‘half-priests and half-soldiers’ of their nation.14
Similar presuppositions would later support the Marxist identification
of history with the process of ‘class formation’ and of ‘class struggle’.
Marxist historians, too, would see themselves as ‘half priests and half
soldiers’ of their (socialist) ‘nation’ – that is: of the proletarian class. And
they, too, would conceive of history as an ‘objective’, teleological process –
in their case, of the ‘classless society’ in the making. Eric Hobsbawm’s early
publications such as Primitive Rebels (1959, 1971) and Bandits (1969) furnish
good examples of how this class view structures historical narratives. It
therefore makes good sense to view the Marxist concept of class on the
model of the nation and to view the ‘classless society’ as ‘the nation of
workers’ in the making. Therefore, for social historians too, there was no
way to write ‘non-national’ history – and this holds both for the ‘blends’ of
national and of class history produced by the social-democratic tradition in
Europe as for the ‘pure’ class histories by the later communist traditions.15
The ‘objectification’ of the nation-state by academic history was codified
in the ‘founding myth’ of Rankean history, that is, in its epistemological
claim to describe the past ‘as it really was’ (‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’) and in
its methodological claim to be beyond any form of partisanship, that is to be
‘objective’. This combination of a truth claim (in contrast to all fictional
genres) and a claim to ‘objectivity’ (in contrast to all non-academic,
‘partisan’ genres of history) has been the characteristic of most academic
history ever since.16 Max Weber’s defence of the Wertfreiheitspostulat and of
the ‘objectivity’ of the social sciences had the very same double foundation.
Critics of academic history and of the Wertfreiheitspostulat therefore have
usually questioned one of these two claims, or both.
On closer analysis, the claim to objectivity represents the ‘hidden
bridge’ between academic history and politics, because according to
Rankean theory, history’s ‘objectivity’ is institutionally safeguarded by the
impartial nation-state against all ‘partisan’ interests. The nation-state does
so by financing and thus by professionalizing its historians. By doing this

the nation-state releases them – at least in theory – from both ‘amateurism’
and frees them from economic dependence on ‘partisan’ interests, as had
been the case in earlier ecclesial and court histories, thus installing its
historians with the ‘objective’ authority to speak about the past. So the
methodological identification of academic history with ‘objectivity’ was
implicitly connected to the political theory of the ‘supra-partisan’ nation-
state, including the assumption that state archives were the primary
storehouses of ‘realistic’ information for historians.17 So, remarkably,
Foucault’s theory that epistemology and politics (‘power/knowledge’) are
always ‘blended’ in ‘truth regimes’ appears to have some foundation in the
case of academic history.18
It is thus not accidental that academic history and the institution of
centralized state archives have developed hand in hand during the post-
Napoleonic period: the archive came to be seen as the historian’s only true
workshop.19 Accordingly, those historians who would later explicitly reject
the theory of the impartial state, ranging from the Prussian School in the
later nineteenth century and all other proponents of explicit nationalism
(e.g. in the Volksgeschichte) to most proponents of Marxism in the twentieth
century, have usually rejected the idea of history’s ‘objectivity’ and opted for
some explicit form of ‘objective’ partisanship. Many nationalist historians
simply regarded furthering ‘the cause of the nation’ as legitimated by the
‘objective’ course of history. Likewise, Marxists who thought that their
partisanship could be founded in history’s ‘objective’ teleology
characteristically claimed to subscribe to an ‘objective’ partisanship or an
‘objective’ class perspective (‘objektiver Klassenstandpunkt’).20
The same logic explains why historians critical of the idea of the
impartial state have recently deconstructed the theory of impartial state
archives containing impartial documents as the raw material of academic
history. For post-dictatorial and post-colonial states this theory held little
credibility anyhow.21 As Marlene Manoff has recently summarized: ‘The
methods for transmitting information shape the nature of the knowledge
that can be produced. Library and archival technology determine what can
be archived and therefore what can be studied. Thus Derrida claims
‘archivization produces as much as it records the event’.22 Criticizing the
theory of state impartiality as an ideological concealment of power
relations, subaltern historians subscribe to Foucault’s theory that
knowledge and power are inextricably interrelated. This clearly held for
the colonial setting, and it can and has been argued that similar
mechanisms are at work in the national setting.
2. The modern regime of historicity and the

nation-state
As the nation became the almost ‘natural’ spatial framework of academic

history – replacing the older frameworks of the dynastical state and of
religious history – history’s temporal framework also changed
fundamentally. In order to characterize specific constellations between the
dimensions of the past, the present, and the future in history, Francois
Hartog has coined the concept ‘regime of historicity’ in this context: ‘The
regime of historicity […] could be understood in two ways. In a restricted
sense, as the way in which a society considers its past and deals with it. In
a broader sense, the “regime of historicity” designates the “method” of self-
awareness in a human community’ [-]. More precisely, the concept provides
an instrument for comparing different types of history.’23
Following Koselleck, Hartog signalizes a transition from the ‘classical
regime of historicity’ – captured by Cicero’s formula historia magistra vitae,
with the past being exemplary for the present and the future – to the ‘modern’
regime of historicity around 1800. Instead of the past being authoritative
for the present in the form of practical exempla, after the French Revolution,
the future became the point of orientation – in the form of a telos in the
making, especially ‘the nation-state’ in the making – and therefore national
history is intrinsically connected with the idea of a ‘special mission’ of each
nation resulting in its ‘special path’ in history. This way of viewing history
became possible only after history was no longer seen as a collection of
stories about the past and after history had been ‘objectified ‘ into a real
process with an origin and a telos of its own.24 Later on in the nineteenth
century we observe the same development in class history, when Marx and
Marxists designated ‘the classless society’ in the making as history’s telos
and class struggle and the special ‘mission of the proletariat’ as the ‘motor’
of the historical process, originating in the birth of class society.25
This change in regimes of historicity implied a fundamental change in
the relationship between the three dimensions of time. As far as the ‘lessons
of history’ under the ‘modern’ regime of historicity are concerned, Hartog
argued, ‘If there is any lesson, it comes, so to speak, from the future, no
longer from the past’26 (fig. 4.1-4.5).
Under the ‘modern’ regime of historicity, historical time is transformed
into teleological time, because history itself transforms into the process in
which (‘real’ or ‘historical’) nations are originating and developing in the
direction of autonomous statehood – or not: that is in the case of ‘failed’
Fig. 4.1. See coloursection p. 25. Fig. 4.2. See coloursection p. 25.
Fig. 4.3. See coloursection p. 26. Fig. 4.4 See coloursection p. 26.
nations which didn’t pass the ‘threshold-principle’.27 Therefore under the

‘modern’ regime of historicity, national history is typically represented as a
process of progress towards political autonomy alias statehood of the
nation – or, less typically, in its inverted form, as a process of decline and of
loss of political autonomy and statehood of the ‘failed’ nation.
In order to analyse this notion of time we can best follow Giorgio
Agamben in tracing its roots. According to Agamben the conception of time
in Western history derives from two sources: from the Greek cyclical
conception of time and the Christian conception of irreversible linear time.
Both ideas conceive of time in geometrical or in spatial terms: for the
Greeks, time basically was a moving point on a circle and Christianity
conceived of time as a moving point on a straight line. Although Christian
thinking replaced the Greek cyclical representation of time by a linear
representation, and also replaced the Greek directionlessness of time with a
direction and a – Godly – purpose, or telos, it retained Aristotle’s definition
of ‘fleeting’ time as ‘a quantified and infinite continuum of precise fleeting
instants’. In this view, time is something objective and natural that
envelops things that are ‘inside’ it: just as each thing inhabits a place, so it
inhabits time. Simultaneously, the Christian conception of time, having a
direction, implied that the flow of time became irreversible.28
Fig. 4.5. Secularized, capitalist version of the Promised Land.
The modern ‘academic’ conception of time thus is a secularized version

of the rectilinear, irreversible Christian time conception, stripped of its
notion of an end and reduced to the idea of a structured process. Process –
also known as temporal flow – therefore became the central notion of
academic history, with a hidden connection to the notion of ‘progress’ as
the teleological substitute of God in the secular versions of history.
Because time is conceived as a continuum of fleeting moments – or in
other words, as a flux or a flow of discrete points – time is destructive of the
here and now, as it ‘passes by’ and ‘carries’ it ‘away’, just like a flowing
river carries away everything it contains. ‘Fleeting’ time by itself creates
distance between the present and the past, by the very act of ‘flowing’.
Therefore Herodotus justifies his writing of Histories with the stated
intention ‘that time may not erase men’s undertakings’. Given the
destructive or erasive character of ‘flowing’ time, both history and memory
are always threatened by time. ‘It is the destructive character of time which
Histories wishes to combat, thereby confirming the essentially ahistorical
nature of the ancient concept of time’.29
Only this ‘modern’ conception of ‘flowing’, teleological time, enabled
historians to evaluate and explain developments and events (like revolts and
revolutions) in national histories in terms of being ‘timely’ (‘successes’), or
as being ‘untimely’: as coming (too) ‘late’ or as coming (too) ‘early’

(‘failures’). In several cases, national histories have merged with histories
of empire (e.g. Great Britain and Russia), but since imperial histories
usually have also been modelled on one hegemonic nation, they too can be
seen as a variant of national history. Similarly, national histories could also
have an ‘imperial’ structure when they revolved around one hegemonic
region within ‘the nation’ (e.g. Prussia within Germany in the nineteenth
century or Holland within the Dutch Republic). The same teleological time
conception can be found in class histories, also allowing for judgements of
historical ‘success’ and ‘failure’.30
National histories in Europe can be typified with the help of eight ideal-
typical characteristics. These characteristics were most outspoken in their
nineteenth-century versions, but usually persisted well into the twentieth
century.
First of all, a special character or a unique national identity has been
claimed for each nation in relation to other nations. The unique national
identity could be represented in terms of ethnicity (including a mix of
several ethnic entities like tribes), in terms of religious affiliation, in terms
of race, in political terms (e.g. state – nations) or as mixes of the
aforementioned criteria.
Second, such a unique identity was claimed on the basis of the exclusion
of others. Each nation was defined primarily by delineating it from either
internal foes/enemies and/or from other nations – usually neighbouring
nations, which were often physically present in the form of minorities
within the claimed territorial borders of the nation. National identity was
primarily established by negating other nations and other groups within
the nation.
Third, as a result of constructions of friend-foe relationships between
nations, wars and battles have furnished the dominant storylines for many
national histories. Smaller nations, however, could also construct their
histories around some kind of mediating role they claimed between larger
nations (e.g. the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium).
Fourth, the identity of the nation was located in the common origins of
its members and in their shared history ever since. All members of a nation
were represented as sharing common glories and common victories, often
presented as reasons for pride, and of common sufferings. This shared
national history was usually exemplified in a common set of national
heroes, martyrs, and villains. These also imply a gender dimension.
Historiographical struggles over national identity therefore always include
struggles over the nations’ origins.
Fifth, as the history of a nation was represented as continuity from its

origins to the present, a nation was typically represented as always having
been there. Its original identity is preserved through changes in time,
although it may have been interrupted for long stretches of time, thereby
creating the problem of continuity. The problem of continuity also arises in
historiography when political ruptures change the accepted representations
of continuity and parts of a nation’s history are rejected afterwards (e.g. the
Nazi period in German history and/or the Communist period in many
Central Eastern European states). Usually, the temporal structure of
national history follows the Christian/Hegelian pattern: a phase of original
birth and of flowering of an Urvolk is followed by a phase of existential threat,
decline, and/or ‘death’, and ending in the – conscious and intentional –
‘rebirth’ or ‘resurrection’ of the nation. So the basic temporal pattern is one
of progress amidst periods of decline.
Sixth, many nations were represented as a person (male/female) or as a
family. Representations of nations therefore implied gendering. Nations,
for instance, could be represented as being raped by other nations or could
be rescued by heroes and/or heroines.
Seventh, a nation was essentially represented as a harmonious unity
and only existing as a unity. This is already implied by the family model of
the nation, but also by the family model of the multi-ethnic empires. In this
sense, multi-ethnic empires were often represented as ‘a family of families’,
headed by the ‘father’ of the hegemonic nation. The lesson of national
history was unequivocally ‘united we stand, divided we fall’. This lesson
was the implicit or explicit practical function of the study of national
history, professional and otherwise. The nation itself knew of no internal
dividing lines – and therefore national historians often discredited class
history. The struggle against foreign oppression was usually represented as
the struggle for internal freedom for the nation as a whole.
Eighth, a nation was usually represented as serving the cause of justice:
‘God is on our side’ held for each nation. Many nations claimed a special
relationship with God including a special ‘protective’ Christian mission
vis-à-vis non-Christian ‘intruders’ – usually Muslims. Nationalism has
therefore been plausibly interpreted as the nationalisation of Christianity.31
It would take the two world wars before the future turned into a serious
problem for historians – the identification of history itself with the
‘progressive’ development of individual nations and ‘their’ states in
particular. It would take the Holocaust to discredit all essentialist notions of
ethnicity, nationality, and race – including all ideas of ‘special missions’ and
of privileged positions vis-à-vis others. After 1945, all essentialist forms of
ethical particularism lost their argumentative ground to ethical universalism

– at least on the level of discursive legitimation. The acceptance by the UN of
the ‘Declaration of Universal Human Rights’ in 1948 is often seen as the
‘point of no return’ in this respect. Another forty-five years – until 1990 with
the implosion of the Soviet bloc and with the end of the Cold War – was
needed to discredit similar essentialist notions of class.32 All conceptions of
collective identity – from ‘the nation’ and ‘ethnicity’ to ‘class’, ‘gender’, and
‘religion’ in academic history have been deconstructed increasingly since the
1970s as social and political constructions.33
With the deconstruction of all essentialisms, the very idea of History
with a capital H was discredited, and with it the very idea of ‘objective’
origins and of ‘objective’ teleology. Since then, every origin and telos in
history is being recognized as ‘man-made’. So, after almost two centuries of
linear and teleological temporality in the form of essentialist historicism
and essentialist nationalism, academic history is now forced to reflect on its
notions of time again.
Given the intimate connection between the temporal and the spatial
framework of academic history, it is not accidental that the ‘collapse of the
future’ and the ‘collapse of the nation’ went hand in hand. At the latest
since 1990, academic history is confronted by the ever-rising tide of world,
global history, and transnational history. Whatever the exact meaning of
those terms, they all clearly express the supranational wish to go beyond the
nation-state.34 The very same holds for the discourse on ‘regionalisation’
and on ‘borderlands’ as subnational ways beyond the nation.35 Charles
Maier’s recent introduction of the concept of ‘regimes of territoriality’ in
history is therefore very ‘timely’.36 The fact that simultaneously discussions
have been going on about the need to ‘Europeanize’ national histories in
Europe – journals devoted to ‘European’ history are definitely a growth-
industry – have certainly added momentum to this fundamental
questioning of the nation state as the fundamental spatial frame of history.37
All this does of course not imply that national history has become a
threatened species in practice – far from it – but only that it has lost its place
as the unquestioned hegemonic form of academic history.
The questioning of the nation-state as the dominant spatial framework
of academic history unsurprisingly also has led to a questioning of
history’s traditional claims to ‘objectivity’. Earlier on I already pointed at
the subaltern critique of the conception of the ‘impartial’ state, but similar
fundamental critiques of hegemonic forms of partisan ‘bias’ built into
academic history have been formulated by ‘others’ since the 1970s – ‘biases’
which were not recognized as impediments to writing academic history
before. In the case of Ranke and of Von Humboldt, for instance, subscribing
explicitly to the Christian religion had long not been regarded as being
‘partisan’ and as threatening history’s ‘objectivity’.38 For most historians
well into the twentieth century, nationality simply implied a specific (state-)
religion39. Nor had subscribing explicitly to the cause of the (German)
nation/state been regarded as such by most of the ‘Neo-Rankeans’ later on,
nor to a purely Eurocentric worldview, nor to a (male) gender-biased or a
(bourgeois) class-biased worldview. The very same held for the academic
historians outside Germany, so in retrospect, the discourse in academic
history concerning the identification of ‘biases’ and ‘partisanship’
(threatening history’s ‘objectivity’) just represents shifting boundaries
between what could be stated and what not could be stated ‘academically’.
Although this process of change has often been interpreted as a sign of the
discipline’s ‘progress’ – due to the decrease of ‘biases’ – as a result of these
combined critiques the long and happy marriage between the nation-state
and academic history was showing serious symptoms of dissolution since
the 1970s – or at least so it seemed.
3. The rise of memory and the crisis of academic

history: the transition from the ‘modern’ to the
‘presentist’ regime of historicity
According to the analysis developed above, the spectacular rise of gender,
ethnicity, religion, and, to a lesser extent, class as frameworks in history
since the 1970s all testify to the declining significance of the nation as the
‘natural’ framework of academic history. The same has been argued for the
rise of global, world, and transnational frameworks since the 1990s.
However this may be, from the 1980s onwards and especially after 1990,
another development can be observed which is undermining ‘the nation’
and, by implication, the ‘modern’ regime of historicity and the related
conceptions of academic history: the rise of ‘collective memory’ studies.
According to Jay Winter, collective memory even has taken the place in
historical studies formerly held by the notions of race, class, and gender, so
there are good reasons to reflect on this line of argument next.40
Specialists of memory studies all agree that the beginning of the
‘memory boom’ can be dated to the 1980s and that Pierre Nora’s lieux de
mémoire project has played a pivotal role in it.41 They also tend to agree that
the ‘memory boom’ and the ‘heritage boom’ are directly related – that is,
the sudden displacement of ‘history’ by ‘memory’, ‘heritage’, and
‘patrimony’. This displacement is a clear sign that the relationship to the

past in Europe is changing in a significant way since the 1980s and that
academic historians are losing their privileged, specialist position as the
interpreters of the (national) past to others – especially to the media –
although there are divergent diagnoses in play here.
Hartog, for one, does not regard the 1980s, but ‘1990’ as the beginning of
a new ‘regime of historicity’: the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity. He locates
the origins of presentism in the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and in the
dissolution of the Soviet Empire. In Hartog’s phrasing: ‘Historia magistra
presented history, or supposedly did so, from the point of view of the past.
On the contrary, in the modern regime, history was written, teleologically,
from the point of view of the future. Presentism implies that the point of
view is explicitly and only that of the present’.42 According to Hartog
‘presentism’ after 1990 is the consequence of the ‘collapse of the future’ and
of the linear, ‘progressive’ time conception that has been underpinning
national histories at least since Ranke’s days and which it shared with
previous Enlightenment histories of ‘civilisation’ and with Christian history.
Although Pierre Nora does not use the concept of ‘presentism’ he
clearly shares Hartog’s basic diagnosis. Moreover, he suggests explicitly
that there is a direct connection between the rise of memory and the fall of
– national – history.43 As long as history was predominantly national history,
the communities carrying memory and history coincided in ‘the nation’ and
there was no opposition between history and memory, and neither was
there an opposition between favouring ‘the cause of the nation’ and
history’s claim to ‘objectivity’. Characteristic for this – temporary –
‘symbiosis’ of history and memory beginning in the nineteenth century
was ‘a tone of national responsibility assigned to the historian – half
preacher, half soldier. […] The holy nation thus acquired a holy history:
through the nation our memory continued to rest upon a sacred
foundation.’44 So in Nora’s eyes ‘the nation’ is the only possible spatial
framework in (French) history. After ‘the nation’ had lost its ‘natural’
position academic history is therefore doomed to ‘fragmentation’.45
Patrick Hutton has developed a similar argument to Nora, explaining
why ‘memory’ was not perceived as a problem by historicism before the
1980s: ‘Historicists tended to emphasise the interplay between memory and
history. From Jules Michelet in the early nineteenth century to R.G.
Collingwood in the early twentieth, collective memory, construed as the
living imagination of the historical actors of the past, was perceived to be the
subject matter of historical understanding. Often sympathising with the
political traditions they studied, particularly that vaunted the nation state as
an instrument of progress, and historicists regarded history as an evocation

of memory’s insights. They studied history so as to recreate in the present
the past as it had originally been imagined. In evoking the images in which
the world was once conceived, they taught, historians could re-enter that
mental universe and so recover the presence of those times. The relationship
between memory and history was fluid and uncomplicated’.46
So according to Nora and Hutton, national history is – or at least was – a
form of ‘collective memory’ (or of what used to be called ‘tradition’), that
subsequently was undermined by academic history as a form of
institutionalized Traditionskritik during the twentieth century – especially
in the form of the Annales conception of history of Braudel’s generation,
which questioned both politics and the nation as frameworks of ‘scientific’
history. Nora’s distinction between history and memory thus is
unambiguously based on – and inspired by – a conservative and nostalgic
representation of ‘the Nation’ and of the traditional ‘science of the nation’,
that is: national history.47 With Steven Englund and Eelco Runia it therefore
makes sense to seriously question whether Nora’s confusing formulations
about the relationship between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ are helpful at all,
because they fail to make a workable distinction between the two.48
Nevertheless, it is also clear that the ‘memory boom’ and the ‘heritage
boom’ have been taking place and that these have changed the parameters
of academic history fundamentally since the 1980s. Not the past in itself, but
the diverse and conflicting ways in which the past has been experienced and
represented by specific groups has moved to the centre of the stage,
manifesting itself also in permanent public attention for controversies over
monuments, museums, trials, truth commissions, and reparations
payments around the world: ‘memory became virtually inescapable in
everyday life’ as Rosenfeld argues.49 Therefore the question should be
asked what this change consists of and how far Hartog’s explicit (and
Nora’s implicit) analysis of ‘presentism’ is an adequate diagnosis of the
changes in the dominant ways of experiencing time.
In a sense it is, but in my view both Hartog and Nora are ‘missing’ a
fundamental dimension of the post-1980 ‘presentism’, which has been
emphasized by Runia, Kansteiner, Chakrabarty, Bevernage, and Rosenfeld:
the fact that ‘presentism’ since 1980 means the presence of a traumatic,
catastrophic, and ‘haunting’ past – of a ‘past that won’t go away’ in the apt
phrasing of Ernst Nolte.50 This observation is important because traumatic
experience is based on a different time conception than the linear and
irreversible time conception that has been underpinning academic history
(and Enlightenment history prior to that). If the origin of academic history
has been based on the experience of a rupture or a radical break between

the present and the past – as has been argued by historians as diverse as
Koselleck, Pocock, White, de Certeau, and Ankersmit – it is clear that
traumatic experiences cannot be accounted for by the academic history and
its linear and irreversible conception of time because in trauma the past
stays present (and can return in ‘haunting’ forms). Hartog’s version of
‘presentism’ seems to be underestimating the continuing presence of the
traumatic past and also appears to be overlooking the circumstance that
when ‘the future collapses, the past rushes in’, as John Torpey formulated it.
Torpey concluded that, after the collapse of both socialism and of
nationalism as the two future-oriented ideologies of the twentieth century,
a serious distrust in any political grand scheme intended to plan the future
has grown. This distrust of the future is typically expressed in experiences
of ‘postness’ (e.g. in postmodernity).51
In order to make sense of the widespread experience of catastrophe,
Lawrence Langer’s distinction between ‘chronological time’ and
‘durational time’ may be helpful as a starting point.52 His point of departure
is Claude Lanzmann’s statement about the Shoah: ‘There is no greater
mistake you can make about the Shoah than to regard it as history’ –
emphasizing the continuing presence of the Holocaust. Langer described
the distinction between chronological and durational time as follows:
‘Chronological time is the “normal” flowing, passing time of “normal”
history while durational time resists precisely the closure – the putting an
end to the past – that chronological time necessarily effects; durational time
persists as a past that will not pass, hence as a past is always present’, as
Gabrielle Spiegel phrased it. It is for this reason that Langer, Spiegel, and
others have argued that the Holocaust has implications for history beyond
Holocaust historiography and this may explain its exceptional general
importance since the 1980s.53
With Chakrabarty it may be useful to introduce the general notion of
‘historical wounds’ in this context in order to make sense of the present
catastrophic predicament of the past. ‘Historical wounds’ are the result of
historical injustices caused by past actions of states which have not been
recognized as such. The genocidal treatment of the ‘First Nations’ by the
colonial states in the former white settler colonies represents a clear
historical example of this category. Quoting Charles Taylor’s analysis of
‘the politics of recognition’ Chakrabarty argues that ‘misrecognition shows
not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its
victims with a crippling self-hatred’. Here it makes good sense to speak,
along with Chakrabarty, of a ‘particular mix of history and memory’.
‘Historical wounds are not the same as historical truths but the latter
constitute a condition of possibility of the former. Historical truths are
broad, synthetic generalisations based on researched collections of
individual historical facts. They could be wrong but they are always
amenable to verification by methods of historical research. Historical
wounds, on the other hand, are a mix of history and memory and hence
their truth is not verifiable by historians. Historical wounds cannot come
into being, however, without the prior existence of historical truths’.54
Because ‘historical wounds’ are dependent on the recognition as such by
the ‘perpetrator groups’ – usually at the level of ‘their’ state – they are
‘dialogically formed’ and not ‘permanent formations’. As their ‘dialogical
formation’ is part of politics, their spatial framework is usually the same as
in national histories: the framework of the nation-state. As their formation
is group specific and partly the result of politics, the notion of a ‘historical
wound’ – like trauma – has predominantly been approached with
suspicion in academic history.
Now with the recognition of ‘historical wounds’ and of ‘durational
time’, the traditional notion of ‘objectivity’ also becomes problematic,
because since Ranke distance in time was regarded as an absolute
precondition for ‘objectivity’. Temporal distance and ‘objectivity’ were
directly connected because interested ‘partisanship’ (and interested actors)
– religious, political, or otherwise – needed time in order to disappear and
to give way to supra-partisan perspectives. This transformation from
interested ‘partisanship’ to supra-partisan ‘objectivity’ was identified with
the change from closure to accessibility of the state archives to historians.
Most historians regarded 50 years’ distance as the absolute minimum for
(warm) memory to ‘cool down’ and to transform into (cold) history but 100
years was, of course, safer.55 Temporal distance between the past and the
present was also seen as necessary because in historicism the consequences
of events and developments – their future dimension or Nachgeschichte, so to
speak – must be known before historians can judge and explain them
‘objectively’. This is another reason why the idea of ‘flowing’, linear time
was the basis of the traditional idea of ‘objectivity’ in history.
This view on the relation between time and ‘objectivity’ explains the
very late birth of contemporary history as a specialisation within academic
history. Only in the 1960s – that is: in the aftermath of the Second World
War and the Holocaust – did contemporary history slowly gain recognition
as a legitimate specialisation of ‘scientific’ history manifesting itself in
academic chairs, journals etc.56 Until then, contemporary history was
primarily seen as an impossible mix of the past and the present – as a
contradictio in adiecto. Since then contemporary history has been silently

accepted by the academic historical profession although its epistemological
credentials (including its claim to ‘objectivity’) have never been clarified.
With the rise of memory studies – which may be seen as a subspecies of
contemporary history because of its focus on the present experience of the
past – this clarification seems more urgent than ever.
4. Picking up pieces of the past under the

‘presentist’ regime of historicity: heritage’
studies,‘micro-history’,‘global history’, and
‘representationalism’ in historiography
Characteristic of the memory boom and the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity

according to both Hartog and Nora is the obsession with the archive and
with ‘heritage’ that marks the present age, attempting at once the complete
conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past. This
attempt is indicative of the ambiguity of the borderlines between the past
and the present and it is visible in the explosive development of archives,
museums and monuments – including archives consisting of recorded oral
testimonies. Not knowing what to preserve, one tries to preserve almost
everything – forgetting the practical necessity of forgetting.57 ‘In recent
years, the surge of patrimony, in phase with that of memory, has grown to a
scale that reaches the limit of what could be ‘everything is heritage. […] This
is a clear indication that the present is historicizing itself [-]’ according to
Hartog.58 Steven Spielberg’s initiative to record the testimonies of all the
survivors of the Holocaust – and similar projects inspired by it elsewhere –
seems to support their diagnosis in this respect. Even biotopes and
landscapes are archived as ‘sites of memory’ today.59
Since the nation and its origins no longer confer a unity and continuity to
the past, nor a telos in the future, history under the ‘presentist’ regime of
historicity therefore tends towards disintegration and discontinuity,
according to Nora and Hartog. In Nora’s phrasing: ‘Progress and
decadence, the two great themes of historical intelligibility at least since
modern times, both aptly express this cult of continuity, the confident
assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence –
whence the importance of the idea of “origins” […] It is this relation which
has been broken.’60 Instead of the search for identity in the continuity
between ‘us’ and ‘our forefathers’, which characterised the ‘modern’ regime
of historicity, the search for alterity in the discontinuity between the present
and the past is characteristic for the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity now in
place: ‘Given to us as radically other, the past has become a world apart.’ 61
Micro-history and history of everyday life according to Nora are
characteristic of this ‘presentist’ consciousness of the alterity of the past.
This is, he suggests, a consciousness of alterity paradoxically clothed in the
garb of directness (oral literature, quoting informants to render intelligible
their voices being the characteristic of these two historical genres); 62 ‘It is no
longer genesis that we seek but instead the decipherment of what we are in
the light of what we are no longer’.63 Although neither Nora nor Hartog
even mentions global and world history, following their argument, both
could also be seen as typical ‘presentist’ genres of history, because like
micro-history they seem to privilege the synchronic dimension over the
diachronical and thus discontinuity over continuity. The same goes for the
growing popularity of ‘network approaches’ in history.
This diagnosis based on Nora and Hartog remains one-sided, however,
if we don’t consider the tendencies which point in the opposite direction –
that is: genres of history writing reaffirming ‘the nation’, national history,
and its continuities. This includes the growth industry of histories of
Europe in which the history of the European Union is conceptualized on
the model of the (super) nation-state.64 Although seldom defended in
theory, national history still has an overwhelming presence in popular
history, in history education – the debates about the ‘historical canon’ are
just one symptom in case – but also – mirabile dictu – in memory studies
itself.65 Not only was Nora’s lieux de mémoire project itself fundamentally
based on a national framework, as Englund has convincingly argued, but
the same goes for all of its copies outside France.66 A growing number of
national states from Luxemburg to Latvia have developed their own ‘sites
of memory’ projects in the meantime – within a national framework. So
Müller certainly is right in pointing out that in many states – especially
those which have been subject to Soviet rule – ‘memory has become
shorthand for a glorious past that needs to be regained in the near future
(and the ‘near abroad’)’.67 The circumstance that recently also transnational
‘sites of memory’ are sought after does not alter this basic fact.68 Therefore
the relationship between the memory approach and the national
framework remains an ambivalent one because sometimes ‘memory’ looks
suspiciously much like an incarnation of national history.
However this may be, Nora is undoubtedly right about at least one
characteristic of the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity. I am referring to the
total abandonment of the ideal of ‘resurrecting the past’ after the nation lost
its status as the natural backbone of history, and to the ‘epistemological’
consequence of this ‘loss’: the central place occupied by the notion of

representation.69 Presentism, according to Nora, means the acknowledgement
of the fact that our relationship to the past is inevitably shaped by our
present modes of representation.
Hutton has located the renewed interest in narrative in this self-reflective,
‘representational’ stage of historiography, which usually is also connected
with the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. This stage started with Hayden
White’s Metahistory (1973) which manifested ‘the end of the traditional trust
in the ‘transparency’ of narrative and of the ‘uncritical faith of historians in
the neutrality of historical narrative, a faith whose bedrock was fact.’70
According to Hartog this self-reflective representationalism is the result
of the gradual ‘forgetting’ of the past and of the future with the omnipresence
of ‘the present’ as a result. ‘“Presentism” pretends to be its own horizon and
it tries to shape both the future and the past according to its own image, so
to speak, as a-temporal replicas of itself’.71
Hartog aptly exemplifies the ‘presentist’ condition in the transition from
the ‘monument’ to the ‘memorial’, ‘as less of a monument and more a place
of memory, where we endeavour to make memory live on, keeping it vivid
and handing it on’.72 Therefore the ‘memory’ being referred to under the
‘presentist’ regime of historicity is not a ‘real’ memory at all: ‘Heritage
associations demonstrate the construction of a memory that is not given,
and therefore not lost. They work toward the constitution of a symbolic
universe. Heritage should not be studied from the past but rather from the
present and concerning the present.’ 73
Another example – which Hartog does not mention – is the
phenomenon of the ‘interactive’ or the ‘experience’ museum which
probably represents the future model of all museums. Why would you
keep looking at bad black and white pictures taken at, for example, Verdun
in 1916 or in Normandy in 1944, if you can have the experience of being
virtually present in a muddy trench at Fort Douamont or taking cover
behind a dead GI on Omaha Beach? Strange as it may sound, the ‘re-
enactment’ and ‘resurrection of the past’ as ideals of academic history may
make their ‘comeback’ as ‘living history’ in the experience museum of the
future – in the form of digitalized and interactive virtual history.74
Like Nora, Hartog emphasizes that the nation-state is no longer under
control of ‘history-memory’, because its definition of ‘national history
memory’ is ‘rivalled and contested in the name of partial, sectarian or
particular memories (groups, associations, enterprises, communities,
which all wish to be recognised as legitimate, equally legitimate, or even
more legitimate).’ 75 So, if Hartog is right – and given the private origins of
many recent monuments and museums he at least has a point – those

groups which are promoting other ‘codes of difference’ than the nation
have been successful at the end of the twentieth century.
As argued, above Hartog’s analysis of ‘presentism’ appears to be
underestimating the presence of the traumatic past and therefore is in need
of a revision. The reason for revision is that ‘forgetting’ the past and
‘forgetting’ the future cannot be located on the same plane – as Hartog does
– because the (traumatic) past may be ‘haunting’ the present in a way the
future cannot. Although Hartog acknowledges both that the twentieth
century has a catastrophic character, and that ‘presentism’ as a mode of
temporal thinking has serious flaws – because the ‘repressed’ past and
present may ‘return’ – he keeps handling the past and present as equivalent
temporal dimensions.76 With Torpey, however, I think there are good reasons
to see the ‘return’ of the past and the ‘collapse’ of the future as directly
connected. And with Eelco Runia, Ewa Domanska, and Berber Bevernage I
think that it is about time to turn the ‘presence’ (and the ‘absence’) of the
past into a renewed object of historical and of theoretical reflection.77
Hartog illustrates the flaws of presentism with the illuminating
example of the presentist ‘museified gaze’ concerning the Berlin Wall after
1990 (fig. 4.6). The ‘museified gaze’ ‘would like to prepare, starting from
Fig. 4.6. Museumification of the Berlin Wall at the Bernauerstrasse.

Fig. 4.7. See coloursection p. 27.
today, the museum of tomorrow, assembling today’s archives as if they

were already yesterday’s, caught as we are between amnesia and the
desire to forget nothing’. As soon as the wall was destroyed in 1989-1990,
its instantaneous museification began as well as its immediate
merchandising.78 Similar observations could be made related to the
former GDR as such (fig. 4.7 and 4.8).
So, although apparently triumphant in the twenty-first century,
‘presentism’ seems fundamentally insecure of itself. In Hartog’s apt
phrasing: ‘The past is knocking at the door, the future at the window and
the present discovers that it has no floor to stand on’ 79 (fig. 4.9).
Like Nora, Hartog thus interprets the craze for memory and heritage as
a sign not of continuity between the present and the past, but as a sign of
rupture and of discontinuity due to the acceleration of change; ‘Heritage is
one way of experiencing ruptures, of recognising them and reducing them,
by locating, selecting, and producing semaphores. […] Heritage is recourse
in times of crisis.’ 80
So, if Nora and Hartog’s analyses are correct in connecting the craze for
memory and heritage with the experience of rupture and of crisis – as I think
they are – memory and patrimony appear to be the clear winners in their
competition with academic history since the end of the twentieth century.
After almost two centuries, distance in time – which until the 1960s was
regarded as a precondition of writing academic history and thus for being a
‘professional’ historian – apparently has very little left to recommend itself.
As Hartog observes; ‘The past attracts more than history; the presence of the
past, the evocation and the emotions win out over keeping a distance and
mediation’.81 The touristification and the commodification of the past fit
perfectly in this picture of vanishing distance.82
Fig. 4.8. Check Point Charlie as a tourist museum.
Fig. 4.9. The ‘presentist condition’ of history: ‘no floor to stand on’.
So, all in all, after ‘1990’ both the past and the future seem to have
collapsed as points of orientation, so to speak – and as a consequence
academic history is stuck in the present and is in need of coming to terms
with the presence of a catastrophic past.83 Indicative of this ‘collapse’ is, as
was argued earlier, that both the temporal and the spatial frames of
academic history have turned into topics of fundamental reflection and
debates (which sometimes are referred to as the ‘spatial’ and the ‘temporal
turn’). The earlier debates about micro-history and the ongoing debates
about transnational, comparative, global, and world history all indicate
that the nation-state is no longer the self-evident backbone – the spatial
frame – of history, although the place of national history in history
education is still quite strong. With the questioning of the nation-state, the
‘progressive’ future orientation of academic history is on the agenda, too –
unless historians will develop an exclusive preference for histories of
decline, that is: for the inverted forms of linear ‘progressive’ history. The
renewed interest in histories of disintegrating empires should remind us
that this is a real option to deal with anxieties about the future. In this
context one could think of the bestselling imperial histories written by Niall
Ferguson, Paul Kennedy, and Norman Davies 84 (fig. 4.10).
Fig. 4.10. See coloursection p. 27.
The only sensible thing academic historians can do under the ‘presentist’
condition, according to Hartog, is to reflect on their own temporal and
representational position in a comparative way and to argue for it explicitly.85
This does, of course, not ‘cure’ their temporal and representational condition,
but makes it at least self-reflective’.86
A similar self-reflective approach to history has been proposed by
Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann in their proposal for a histoire
croissée (‘crossed history’ or ‘entangled history’): ‘In contrast to the mere

restitution of an “already there”, histoire croissée places an emphasis on
what, in a self-reflective process, can be generative of meaning’. ‘Histoire
croissée raises the question of its own historicity through a threefold process
of historification: through the object, the categories of analyses, and the
relationship between the researcher and object’.87
Interestingly, Hartog ends his reflections on academic history by
returning to its origin, that is: to national history: ‘How should we write
national history without reactivating the patterns of nineteenth century
historiography: that is to say, the close association of progress and the
nation (the nation as progress and history as progress of the nation), or
without presenting the nation as a paradise lost? It is here that it would be
especially useful to be able to reopen the past, and look at it as a set of
possible pasts which were at one time possible future and to show how the
way of the national state, with its national or nationalist historiography,
generally won out’.88
Hartog does not indicate what the alternatives for national histories would
look like, nor is he very specific about the form that historiographical self-
reflexivity should take. I think it is possible to be more precise than Hartog
in this respect, among others by drawing on the debates in transnational
and global history and by drawing a lesson from the history of national
history writing. The basic track to follow suggested here is, I think, to
analyse and historicize the conceptual frames in history in their
epistemological, political, and ethical struggles with competing frames –
thus in a sense taking Foucault’s idea of power/knowledge seriously. In
case of the national frame of history – which, as argued above, has been
regarded as the ‘natural’ frame by academic historians for almost two
centuries – this implies conceptualising the alternatives for national history
in a systematic way by tracing them over time in their competition and
struggle with national histories.
From the political point of view a self-reflexive approach would mean to
take the politics of history seriously in at least three senses. First, this
implies to acknowledge and to analyse the inherent political dimension of
academic history through its inherent connection to the state. This implies
a farewell to the traditional idea that there is any direct connection between
the state and ‘supra-partisanship’ or ‘objectivity’. The deconstruction of the
‘neutral’ notion of the state archive is a case in point.
Second, it means to acknowledge and analyse the discipline of history
itself as a ‘disciplinary field’ in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu and of Michel
Foucault, in which the struggle for power manifests itself in the vocabulary
of epistemology and of methodology.89 In short, this means to analyse all

definitions of boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate statements
in a discipline as ‘essentially contested’ and therefore as inherently
political.90
Third, it means to analyse the ‘politics of time’, because the temporal
demarcations used in history (e.g. ‘progressive’ and ‘backward’, ‘timely’
and ‘untimely’) are as politically contested as the spatial demarcations (e.g.
‘national’, ‘European’ and ‘colonial’). Remarkably, the issue of ‘chronopolitics’
until now has primarily been addressed by anthropologists and not by
historians. Bevernage, however, has recently been addressing this issue up
front.91
From the ethical point of view a self-reflexive approach in history
would imply taking the ethics of history seriously – and not just as a side
dish for special festival occasions or as a hobby of some reflexive emeriti.
The catastrophic practical consequences in the twentieth century of all
sorts of ethical particularism (especially in their ethnic, national, racial,
and class variants) have created the ‘historical wounds’ I referred to earlier
on and have caused the overwhelming presence of a traumatic past in the
twentieth century.92 In this way the ‘exclusion of The Other’ has moulded
the catastrophic history we are facing in the twenty-first century. Therefore
the ‘inclusion of The Other’ – usually in the form of including the
perspectives of all sides involved in histories – are on the agenda of history
for some time now and so is the issue of universal human rights.93 Because
the very recognition of ‘historical wounds’ is dependent on the
recognition of universal human rights, the politics of recognition are
constitutive of the very subject matter of academic historians. Antoon de
Baets certainly has a point in naming the Declaration of Universal Human
Rights (1948) one of the most important texts also for present-day
historians.94
From the epistemological point of view, a self-reflective approach in
history would imply a reconstruction and deconstruction of the frames of
representation which are competing with each other in history. Epistemo-
logically self-reflective history would pursue the same objectives that Arif
Dirlik has formulated for world history: ‘My rehearsal of the historicity,
boundary instabilities, and internal differences – if not fragmentations – of
nations, civilisations, and continents is intended to underline the
historiographically problematic nature of [world] histories organized
around such units. These entities are products of efforts to bring political or
conceptual order to the world – political and conceptual strategies of
containment, so to speak. This order is achieved only at the cost of
suppressing alternative spatialities and temporalities, however, as well as

covering over processes that went into their making. A [world] history
organized around these entities itself inevitably partakes of these same
suppressions and cover-ups.’ 95
So just like Hartog and Werner/Zimmermann, Dirlik argues that only
through the historification of the representational codes and of the
conceptual frameworks of history, can their contingency and their
relationships with suppressed alternatives be restored. If there is no way
out of our ‘presentist’ condition – and this appears to be the conclusion
following from the arguments developed in this article – the best we can do
is to face it and reflect on its consequences for the ways in which we are
dealing with the past.
Notes
1. Samuel Huntington, who had predicted ‘a clash of civilisations’ in 1993, was a political
scientist.
2. Michel de Certeau, The Writing History of History, New York 1988; Eelco Runia, ‘Burying
the Dead, Creating the Past’, in: History and Theory 46/3 (2007) 313-326.
3. Jan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe. Studies in the Presence of
the Past, Cambridge 2002, 4.
4. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream. The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical
Profession, Cambridge 1988.
5. Wulf Kansteiner Compare Pierre Nora’s statement ‘whoever says memory says Shoah’,
cited in Müller (ed.), Memory and Power, 14. Given the paradigmatic role of the
Holocaust as Urtrauma in history, it is remarkable that Frank Ankersmits’ recent attempt
to give a philosophical account of historical experience leads him to the conclusion that
the Holocaust does not represent a trauma. See F.R. Ankersmit, De Sublieme Historische
Ervaring, Groningen 2007, 387.
6. See Rüdiger vom Bruch, ‘Geschichtswissenschaft’, in: St. Jordan (ed.), Lexikon
Geschichtswissenschaft. 100 Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart 2002, 124-130; Georg Iggers,
Historiography in the Twentieth Century. From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern
Challenge, Hanover and London 1997; Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: a Curious History,
London 1997; Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography,
Berkeley 1990.
7. For a global perspective, see D. Woolf ‘Historiography’, in: M.C. Horowitz (ed.), New
Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York 2004, xxxv–lxxxv.
8. Q. Edward Wang‚ ‘Cross-Cultural Developments of Modern Historiography. Examples
from East Asia, the Middle East, and India’, in: Q. Edward Wang and Franz Fillafer
(eds.), The Many Faces of Clio. Cross-cultural Approaches to Historiography. Essays in Honor
of Georg G. Iggers, New York/Oxford 2007, 189, 193, 194. Q. Edward Wang, ‘Beyond East
and West: Antiquarianism, Evidential Learning, and Global Trends in Historical Study’,
in: Journal of World History 19/4 (2008) 489-519.
9. For the variety of history, see D. Kelley (ed.), Versions of History from Antiquity to the
Enlightenment, New Haven and London 1991; F. Stern (ed.), Varieties of History. From
Voltaire to the Present, London 1970; Woolf, ‘Historiography’.
10. Georg Iggers, ‘The Professionalization of Historical Studies’ in: Kramer and Maza (eds.),
Western Historical Thought, 234. Further see: R. Thorstendahl and I. Veit-Brause (eds.),
History-Making. The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline, Stockholm1996;
Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Klio: historisch.-sozialwissenschaftliche. Studien zur Herkunft
und Karriere deutscher Historiker und. zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft 1800-1970,
(Frankfurt am Main 1987); Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in
France, 1818-1914, Princeton 1998; Gabriele Lingelbach, Klio macht Karriere. Die
Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und in den USA in der zweiten
Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen 2003.
11. Daniel Woolf, ‘Of Nations, Nationalism, and National Identity. Reflections on the
Historiographic Organization of the Past’, in: Wang and Fillafer (eds.), Many Faces of
Clio, 73; Stefan Berger, ‘Towards a Global History of National Historiographies’, in:
idem (ed.), Writing the Nation. A Global Perspective, Houndmills 2007, 1-30. Gerard
Bouchard, The Making of the Nations and Cultures of the New World: An Essay in
Comparative History, Montreal and Kingston 2008.
12. See Joep Leersen, ‘Nation and Ethnicity’, in: Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds.), The
Contested Nation: Religion, Ethnicity, Class and Gender in National Histories, Houndmills
2008, 75-104. Ranke as a conservative, however, still identified states more with their
ruling dynasties than with nations.
13. Leopold von Ranke: ‘Aus dem Besonderem kannst du wohl bedachtsam und kühn zu
den Allgemeinen aufsteigen; aus der allgemeine Theorie gibt es keinen Weg zur
Anschauung des Besonderen’, in: Leopold von Ranke, Die großen Mächte. Politisches
Gespräch (ed. Ulrich Muhlack), Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, 90.
14. For the history of the very idea of objectivity see Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison,
Objectivity, New York 2007, for the nineteenth century, see T. N. Baker, ‘National History
in the Age of Michelet, Macaulay, and Bancroft’, in Kramer and Mah (eds.), Companion
to Western Historical Thought, 185-201. Further see Woolf, ‘Of Nations, Nationalism, and
National Identity’.
15. See Thomas Welskopp and Gita Deneckere, ‘Nation and Class’ in: Berger and Lorenz
(eds.), The Contested Nation, 135-171.
16. For the ideas of ‘scientificity’, see Heiko Fellner, ‘The New Scientificity in Historical
Writing around 1800’, in Heiko Fellner and Kevin Passmore (eds.), Writing History.
Theory and Practice, London 2003, 3–22. For Ranke’s ideas of ‘objectivity’ see Rudolf
Vierhaus, ‘Rankes Begriff der historischen Objektivität’, in: R. Koselleck, W.J.
Mommsen, and J. Rüsen (eds.), Objektivität und Parteilichkeit, Munich 1977, 63-77.
17. Grafton, Footnote, 59-60, argues that Ranke himself was guilty of identifying specific
archival information with ‘the past’ itself: ‘It became evident that he [Ranke, CL] had
unjustifiably accepted certain classes of documents – like the official reports of Venetian
ambassadors to their senate – as transparent windows on past states and events rather
than colourful reconstructions of them, whose authors wrote within rigid conventions,
had not heard or seen everything they had reported, and often wished to convince their
own audience of a personal theory rather than simply to tell them what had happened’.
Grafton also argues that ‘in his reliance on central archives and great family papers
Ranke had accepted, without reflecting hard enough, a certain interpretation of history
itself: one in which the story of nations and monarchies took precedence over that of
peoples or cultures [-]’. For the problem of the ‘scientificity’ of national history in
France, see Steven Englund, ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’, in: Journal of Modern History
64/2 (1992) 307-310.
18. For Foucault see Joseph Rouse, ‘Power/Knowledge’, in: Gary Gutting (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge 2005, 95-122.
19. See Jo Tollebeek, ‘“Turn to Dust and Tears”’: Revisiting the Archive’, in: History and
Theory 43/2 (2004) 237-248.
20. See Koselleck et al. (eds.) Objektivität und Parteilichkeit. For Volksgeschichte see Peter
Schöttler (ed.), Geschichte als Legitimationswissenschaft.
21. See for South Africa: Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds.), Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht-
Boston-London 2002.
22. Marlene Manoff, ‘Theories of the archive from across the disciplines’, Portal: Libraries
and the Academy, 4/1 (2001) 12; Terry Cook, ‘Archival science and postmodernism: new
formulations for old concepts’, Archival Science 1 (2001) 3-24.
23. F. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International, 57, 227 (2005) 7-18, 8.
24. Koselleck has therefore rightly observed that the Geschichtswissenschaft and the
Geschichtsphilosophie came into existence simultaneously: ‘It is no accident that in the
same decades in which history as a singular discipline began to establish itself (between
1760 and 1780), the concept of a philosophy of history also surfaced’.[…] ‘History and
philosophy of history are complementary concepts which render impossible any
attempt at a philosophization of history’. See Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra
Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical
Process’, in: idem, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge MA 1985, 32.
25. Harold Mah, however, has traced the direct connection of origin and telos in historicism
back to the very origins of Historismus: ‘Both Herder’s and Möser’s historicist histories
required the assumption of a mythical past. A mythical event or development
functioned for them as a privileged origin establishing a standard whose continuous
influence was then perceived to be disseminated throughout the rest of history, so that
subsequent events or developments could be measured against it or legitimated by it.
That originating event or development thus overshadowed what came after it; it
reduced or even cancelled out the historical significance of subsequent events. German
tribalism thus defined the truly German, while the French culture that many of
Germany’s rulers had adopted in the eighteenth century was rejected as alien or anti-
German’. ‘Historicism, in other words, can paradoxically be seen as the expression of a
desire to overcome history, whether it was the cosmopolitan influence of French culture
or other undesirable developments and political life’. […] ‘The importance of this
ahistorical classical thinking in a deeply historicizing philosophy is a paradox that
suggests the same motive that is suggested in historicist myths of origin – namely, that
one attends to historical development in its most elaborate way in order to overcome
history, to transcend its contradictions, transience, and mortality’. Harold Mah,
‘German Historical Thought in the Age of Herder, Kant, and Hegel’, in: Kramer and
Sarah Mah (eds.), A Companion to Western Historical Thought, 143-166, here: 160-161.
26. F. Hartog, ‘Time, History and the Writing of History: the Order of Time’, in: R.
Thorstendahl and I. Veit-Brause (eds.), History-Making, 85-113, 97.
27. See E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality,
Cambridge 1992, 31-32, 157-158. The recent discussion about ‘failed’ states can be
directly connected to the idea of ‘failed’ nations.
28. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Time and History. Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’, in:
idem, Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience, London and New York 1993, 91-
105. Also see Berber Bevernage. ‘Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice’, in: History and
Theory 47/2 (2008) 149–167; and Berber Bevernage, ‘We victims and survivors declare the
past to be in the present’. Time, Historical Injustice and the Irrevocable, Ghent 2009.
29. Agamben; ‘Time and History’, 94.
30. See Welskopp and Deneckere, ‘Nation and Class’.
31. See Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, ‘National Narratives and their “Others”: Ethnicity,
Class, Religion and the Gendering of National Histories’, in: Storia della Storiografia
/Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung 50 (2006) 59-98.
32. See Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles (Series History: Concepts, Theories and Practice),
Harlow 2007.
33. See Chris Lorenz, ‘Representations of Identity. Ethnicity, Race, Class, Gender and
Religion. An Introduction to Conceptual History’, in: Berger and Lorenz (eds.), The
Contested Nation, 24-60.
34. See Geoff Eley, ‘Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a
Name’, History Workshop Journal 1 (2007) 1-35, and Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels
Petersson, Die Geschichte der Globalisierung, Munich 2003, 12-15. As for transnational
history, Michael Geyer has signaled a ‘growing consensus’ of what it is not: ‘The
emerging consensus is also suitably vague. […] Almost everyone, it seems, agrees on the
basic presupposition that there is history ‘beyond the nation state’ and that this history
is more than national and inter-national history; that this history mandates a ‘global’ or,
in any case, grander-than-national horizon for thought and action’. […] ‘For the time
being [it] rather amounts to a project with many loose ends than a distinct approach and
it is more of an orientation than a paradigm’, At: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de
/rezensionen/2006-4-032, (visited on 25-10-08).
35. See Celia Applegate, ‘A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-
National Spaces in Modern Times’, American Historical Review 104/4 (1999) 1157-1182;
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-
States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History’, American Historical
Review 104/3 (1999) 814-842; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Entangled Histories:
Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?’, in: American Historical Review 112/3
(2007) 787-800.
36. Charles S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality 1600–2000’, in: G. Budde, S. Conrad
and O. Jansz (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, Göttingen
2006. 32-56; F. Hartog, Régimes d’Historicité. Presentisme et Expériences du Temps, Paris
2003; F. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, Museum International, 57/227 (2005) 7-18.
37. See for example Ute Frevert and David Blackbourn, ‘Europeanizing German history’,
Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. 36 (2005) 9–33. For global and
world history, see Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical traditions and modern
imperatives for the restoration of global history’, Journal of Global History, 1 (2006) 3-39;
A. Dirlik, ‘Performing the world: reality and representation in the making of world
history(ies)’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, 37 (2005) 9-27.
38. See my article ‘Drawing the line: “Scientific” History between Myth-making and Myth-
breaking’, in: Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock (eds.), Narrating the
Nation. Representations in History, Media and the Arts, New York/Oxford 2008, 35-55.
39. See James C. Kennedy, ‘Religion, Nation and Representations of the Past’, in: Berger and
Lorenz (eds.), The Contested Nation, 104-135.
40. Jay Winter, ‘The generation of memory: reflections on the “memory boom” in
contemporary historical studies’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington,
DC 27 (2006) 69-92. The notions of memory and of collective identity are intertwined,
however, as Müller, Memory and Power, 18, observes for national identity: ‘Wherever
“national identity” seems to be in question, memory comes to be the key to national
recovery through reconfiguring the past […]’.
41. See Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory. History, Television and Politics after
Auschwitz, Athens OH 2006, 11-39; Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in
Historical Discourse’, in: Representations 69 (2000) 127-150.
42. Hartog, ‘Time, History and the Writing of History’, 109.
43. P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26
(1989), 7-25, esp. 8-9. For an overview see Aleida Assmann, ‘History and Memory’, in:
N. Smelser and P. Baltus (eds.), International Encyclopaedia of the Social & Behavioural
Sciences, vol. 10 (Oxford 2001) 6822 –6829; P. Hutton, ‘Recent Scholarship on Memory
and History’, The History Teacher, 33/4 (2000) 533-548.
44. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 11.
45. For Nora’s own deep nationalism see Englund, ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’, 299-320. For
a comparison with the US, see Allan Megill, ‘Fragmentation and the Future of
Historiography’, in American Historical Review, 96/3 (1991) 693-698. (reprinted in his:
Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Chicago 2007).
46. Hutton, ‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History’, 535.
47. See Berger and Lorenz, ‘Introduction’ of The Contested Nation. Also see Wulf Kansteiner,
‘Postmodern Historicism: A Critical Appraisal of Collective Memory Studies’, 5
48. See Englund, ‘Ghost of Nation Past’, 305: ‘So why call it memory if you mean history?’.
Also see Eelco Runia, ‘Burying the dead, creating the past’, in: History and Theory 46/3
(2007) 315-316.
49. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of
the Memory “Industry”’, in: The Journal of Modern History 81 (March 2009) 122–158.
50. Runia locates the presence of the past in the ‘mémoire involuntaire’. Although he does not
mention traumatic memory explicitly it can easily be interpreted as a part of the
‘mémoire involuntaire’. See Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, in: History and Theory 45/1 (2006) 1-
20; Eelco Runia, ‘Spots of Time’, in: History and Theory 45/3 (2006) 305-317; Forum on
‘Presence’ (with contributions of Eelco Runia, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Frank
Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, Michael Bentley, and Rik Peters), in: History and Theory
45/3 (2006) 305-375; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘History and the Politics of Recognition’, in:
Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (eds.), Manifestos for History, New York
2007, 77-88.
51. John Torpey, ‘The Pursuit of the Past: A Polemical Perspective’, in: Peter Seixas (ed.),
Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto 2004, 242.
52. This problem and distinction in fact has been with history and philosophy since St.
Augustine. See Herman Hausheer, ‘St. Augustine’s Conception of Time’, in: The
Philosophical Review 46/5 (1937) 503-512: ‘The essence of time is the indivisible instant in
the present, which knows itself to be neither long nor short’ (504).
53. Gabrielle Spiegel, ‘Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time’, in:
History and Theory 41/2 (2002) 159.
54. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘History and the Politics of Recognition’, in: Keith Jenkins, Sue
Morgan, and Alun Munslow (eds.), Manifestos for History, New York 2007, 77-78.
55. See M. Phillips, ‘Distance and Historical Representation’, in History Workshop Journal, 57
(2004) 123-141; M. Phillips, ‘History, Memory and Historical Distance’, in P. Seixas (ed.),
Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto 2004, 86-109. See further, B. Taylor,
‘Introduction: How far, how near: distance and proximity in the historical imagination’,
History Workshop Journal 57 (2004) 117-122. The point of view formulated by the Chinese
statesman Chou En-Lai (1898-1976) was not foreseen, however. In 1971, Henry
Kissinger asked Chou, who had been specializing in the French Revolution in his youth,
‘What do you think of the significance of the French Revolution?’ Chou answered him
after thinking for some time: ‘It is too soon to tell’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/
spl/hi/asia_pac/02/china_party_congress/china_ruling_party/key_people_events/
html/zhou_enlai.stm (20 April 2008); http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=1411
(20 April 2008).
56. Alexander Nützenadel and Wolfgang Schieder (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Problem.
Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung in Europa (Sonderheft Geschichte und
Gesellschaft), Göttingen 2004: Martin Sabrow et al. (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte.
Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945, Munich 2003.
57. On the literally sickening effects of the failure to forget, see: Jessica Marshall,
‘Unforgettable’, in: New Scientist 197 (2008), Issue Feb 16-Feb 22 2008, 30-34.
58. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, 12.
59. See Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, 12-14. Also see http://sites-of-memory.de/main/
resources.html#scholarship for an overview (date of last access: 8 March 2009).
61. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 17. However, Nora does not use Hartog’s terms
‘regime of historicity’ or ‘presentism’.
62. Nora’s diagnosis and imagery of the present state of history is also developed in F.R.
Ankersmit, ‘History and Postmodernism’, in: F. Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The
Rise and Fall of Metaphor, Berkeley 1994, 162-182; more precisely in Ankersmit’s
comparison of ‘modern’ or ‘essentialist’ history with a tree and ‘post-modern’ history
with its leaves (pp. 175-6), and in his identification of history of everyday life and micro-
history as the typical ‘present’ (or ‘postmodern’) genres of history (pp. 174-7).
63. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 17-18. Ankersmit develops a similar argument in
‘The sublime dissociation of the past: or how to be(come) what one is no longer’, in
History and Theory 40/3 (2001) 295-323.
64. See e.g. Jan Ifversen, ‘Myths in writing European histories’, in: Stefan Berger and Chris
Lorenz (eds.), Historians as Nation builders. Micro studies in National History, Houndmills
2010 (forthcoming).
65. For the debates about the historical canon see Maria Grever and Siep Stuurman (eds.),
Beyond the Canon. History for the Twenty-First Century, Basingstoke 2007.
66. See ‘“Lieux de memoire” in Europe: National Receptions and Appropriations of a
Historiographical Concept’ at: http://www2.iisg.nl/esshc/programme9606.asp?selyear
=8&nw=&find=lieux+de+memoire (8 March 2009); Pim den Boer, ‘Geschiedenis,

herinnering en “lieux de mémoire”’, in: Rob van der Laarse (ed.), Bezeten van vroeger.
Erfgoed, identiteit, en musealisering, Amsterdam 2005, 40–59. Further see Englund, ‘Ghost
of Nation Past’.
67. Müller, Memory and Power, 8 and 9: ‘[…] the question of memory is often at the heart of
issues about national self-determination, arguably the most salient political issue in
eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War’. See also 17: […] ‘the approaches to
memory have been significantly different in different national contexts’.
68. See Jacques Le Rider, Moritz Czaky, and Monika Sommer (eds.), Transnationale
Gedächtnisorte in Zentraleuropa, Innsbruck 2002.
70. Hutton, ‘Recent Scholarship on Memory and History’, 535. For the background see also
Ann Rigney, ‘Narrativity and Historical Representation’, Poetics Today 12/3 (1991) 591-
605, and Allan Megill, ‘“Grand Narrative” and the Discipline of History’, in: F.
Ankersmit and H. Kellner (eds.), A New Philosophy of History, London 1995, 151-174. For
Hayden White, see Herman Paul, Masks of Meaning. Existentialist Humanism in Hayden
White’s Philosophy of History, Groningen 2006.
73. H. Glevarec and G. Saez, Le Patrimonie saisi par les Associations, 263, quoted by Hartog,
‘Time and Heritage’, 14.
74. See Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Alternate worlds and invented communities: history and
historical consciousness in the age of interactive media’, in: Jenkins et al. (eds.),
Manifestos for History, 131-149.
76. Hartog, ‘Time, History and the Writing of History’, 108-109; Hartog, ‘Time and
Heritage’, 16: ‘After the catastrophes of the twentieth century, the many wounds and the
significant accelerations in the actual experience of time, neither the sudden appearance
of memory nor that of patrimony in the end come as a surprise. The question could even
be: “Why did it take so long?”’
77. Runia, Forum on ‘Presence’; Bevernage, ‘Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice’.
78. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, 14. Also see: Joachim Schlör, ‘It has to go away, but at the
same time it has to be kept’: the Berlin Wall and the making of an urban icon’, in: Urban
History 33/1 (2006) 85-105.
81. Hartog, ‘Time and Heritage’, 16. Müller makes a similar point: ‘There is also a rather
vague sense that the preoccupation with memory is part of the changed structures of
temporality at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.
Against the “acceleration” of time through technical progress, the elimination of
distance and the general blurring of territorial and spatial coordinates in an age of
globalization, the recovery of “memory” aims at a temporal re-anchoring and even the
much-talked-about “recovery of the real”. Rather than a simple exhaustion of utopian
energies, memory might signify a resistance to the new utopia of globalisation and to
teleological notions of history’ […]. ‘If one cannot change the future, one can at least
preserve the past’. See Müller, Memory and Power, 15-16.
82. See Rob van der Laarse, ‘Erfgoed en de constructie van vroeger’, in: idem (ed.), Bezeten
van vroeger, 1-29; David Lowenthal, ‘Heritage and history. Rivals and partners in
Europe’, in: Van der Laarse (ed.), Bezeten van vroeger, 29-40.
83. See also John Torpey, ‘The future of the past: a polemical perspective’ in Seixas (ed.),
Theorizing Historical Consciousness, 240-255, esp. p. 250; ‘The discrediting of the twin
forces that dominated the twentieth-century history – namely, nationalism and
socialism/communism – has promoted a pervasive “consciousness of catastrophe”
among the educated segments of Euro-Atlantic society’.
84. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1988; Norman Davies, The Isles, 1999;
Niall Ferguson, Colossus. The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, 2004.
85. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison: histoire croissée
and the challenge of reflexivity’, History and Theory 45/1 (2006) 30-50.
87. Werner and Zimmermann, ‘Beyond comparison’, 32-33.
89. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The specificity of the scientific field’, in: Ch. Lemert, French Sociology.
Renewal and rupture since 1968, New York 1981, 257-293; Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (edited by Colin
Gordon), New York 1980. See also George Steinmetz (ed.), The Politics of Method in the
Human Sciences, and Durham/London 2005.
90. See my article ‘Drawing the line: “Scientific” History between Myth-making and Myth-
breaking’ for a case study concerning the disciplinary genre of national history.
91. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York
1983; Bevernage, ‘We victims and survivors’. For another exception in history see:
Sebastian Conrad, ‘What time is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural)
Historiography’, History and Theory 38/1 (1999) 67-83.
92. Werner Müller, Memory and Power, 12-13, arrives at a similar conclusion arguing that
‘historical and social scientific research about memory indeed cannot be entirely
separated from normative questions – not least because so many memory tales are shot
through with normative claims’, and 19: ‘The memorialisation of history is at the same
time its moralisation […]’.
93. See John Torpey, ‘Making whole what has been smashed’, in: Journal of Modern History;
A. Dirk Moses, ‘White, Traumatic Nationalism and the Public Role of History’, in:
History and Theory 44/3 (2005) 311-332; Hayden White, ‘The public relevance of
historical studies: a reply to Dirk Moses’, History and Theory 44/3 (2005) 333-338.
94. Antoon de Baets, ‘The Impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the
Study of History’, in: History and Theory 48/1 (2009) 29-44. This does of course not imply
that there is one set of ethical values historians should subscribe to, as Müller, Memory
and Power, 32, rightly argues: ‘[-] it is important to recognize that there might be
genuinely tragic choices between incompatible or even incommensurable values here [-
]. There might be unsolvable dilemmas in attaining truth, justice, reconciliation and
democracy all at the same time’.
95. Dirlik, ‘Performing the world’, 18-19.
Performing the past 25
Fig. 4.1. The ‘modern’ regime of historicity: the (sacred) future

orients the present and the past.
Fig. 4.2. The Christian model of the Promised

Land: Moses looking at the Promised Land.
Fig. 4.3. ‘Beloved Stalin – the people’s happiness!’: Secularized, Communist version of
the Promised Land.
Fig. 4.4. ‘Continuous on Revolution road to strive for highest victory’. Secularized,
Maoist version of the Promised Land.
Performing the past 27
Fig. 4.7. The Berlin Wall as a museum of art: graffiti Thierry Noir.
Fig. 4.10. The Course of Empire: Destruction? (1836),Thomas Cole.
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‘Unstuck in Time. Or: the sudden presence of the past’

Article · April 2002

Curriculum Vitae (CV) View project

Universities, Neoliberalism and New Public Management View project

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Karin Tilmans, Frank van Vree and Jay Winter (eds.)

Amsterdam University Press

Coverillustration: Andrew Dunn, Cambridge, United Kingdom

isbn 978 90 8964 205 9

2 Re-framing memory. Between individual and collective forms

3 Repetitive structures in language and history 51

4 Unstuck in time. Or: the sudden presence of the past 67

The Performative Turn

5 Co-memorations. Performing the past 105

6 ‘Indelible memories’. The tattooed body as theatre of memory 119

7 Incongruous images. ‘Before, during, and after’ the Holocaust 147

Media and the Arts

9 Music and memory in Mozart’s Zauberflöte 187

10 The many afterlives of Ivanhoe 207

12 Indigestible images. On the ethics and limits of representation 257

Identity, Politics and the Performance of History

13 ‘In these days of convulsive political change’.

14 Restitution as a means of remembrance.

15 European identity and the politics of remembrance 335

About the authors 361

If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

From history to memory

1. The rise of academic history and the rise of the

Traditionally, history’s identity as an academic discipline has been

Therefore academic history was basically conceived of as national history,

Through this identification of the process of nation formation with history

so by financing and thus by professionalizing its historians. By doing this

2. The modern regime of historicity and the

As the nation became the almost ‘natural’ spatial framework of academic

nations which didn’t pass the ‘threshold-principle’.27 Therefore under the

Fig. 4.5. Secularized, capitalist version of the Promised Land.

The modern ‘academic’ conception of time thus is a secularized version

as being ‘untimely’: as coming (too) ‘late’ or as coming (too) ‘early’

Fifth, as the history of a nation was represented as continuity from its

ethical particularism lost their argumentative ground to ethical universalism

3. The rise of memory and the crisis of academic

‘patrimony’. This displacement is a clear sign that the relationship to the

an instrument of progress, and historicists regarded history as an evocation

has been based on the experience of a rupture or a radical break between

contradictio in adiecto. Since then contemporary history has been silently

4. Picking up pieces of the past under the

Characteristic of the memory boom and the ‘presentist’ regime of historicity

consequence of this ‘loss’: the central place occupied by the notion of

many recent monuments and museums he at least has a point – those

Fig. 4.6. Museumification of the Berlin Wall at the Bernauerstrasse.

Fig. 4.7. See coloursection p. 27.

today, the museum of tomorrow, assembling today’s archives as if they

Fig. 4.8. Check Point Charlie as a tourist museum.

Fig. 4.10. See coloursection p. 27.

croissée (‘crossed history’ or ‘entangled history’): ‘In contrast to the mere

of epistemology and of methodology.89 In short, this means to analyse all

suppressing alternative spatialities and temporalities, however, as well as

=8&nw=&find=lieux+de+memoire (8 March 2009); Pim den Boer, ‘Geschiedenis,