Blurred Lines. History, Memory and the Experience of Time

Abstract

This article argues that fundamental controversial parts of the past – that since 1990 have been labeled as “catastrophic”, “post-traumatic”, “terroristic” and “haunting” – are overstretching the normal “historical” concept of “the past”. This is the case because historians normally presuppose that the past does “go away” – and therefore is distant and absent from the present. The presupposition that the “hot” present transforms into a “cold” past by itself, just like normal fires extinguish and “cool off” by themselves, has been constitutive for history as a discipline. This process of “cooling off” is often conceived of as the change from memory to history . The first part of this article connects the rise of history as the discipline studying “the past” to the invention of the “modern” future in the late eighteenth century and to the introduction of a linear and progressive notion of time. Next, the rise of memory as the central notion for understanding the past will be connected to the implosion of the future and of progressive linear time at the end of the twentieth century. This implosion was predominantly caused by the growing consciousness since the late 1980’s of the catastrophic character of the twentieth century. The second part argues that present definitions of the relationship between history and memory have typically remained ambiguous. This ambiguity is explained by the problematic distinction between the past and the present. Historians have been rather reluctant in recognising the fact that this fuzzy distinction represents a problem for the idea of history as a discipline as such.