THE BIRTH OF MODERN MEMORY

Extract

John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp. xxiv + 466.

George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. pp. xiv + 428.

Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp. 268.

Each generation chooses its own objects of historical inquiry. Over the past decade or two, many historians have moved away from perennial topics in social and political history, turning their gaze on more ethereal questions in the realm of “memory studies.” The three splendid books under review here examine elusive phenomena in nineteenth-century Europe: the transformation of historical consciousness, the invention of national myths, and the emergence of nostalgia as a prominent element of European culture after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic age. Taken together, these works vividly illustrate both the value and the challenges of scholarship on the modern historical imagination.