| Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity | The American Historical Review, 106.5

Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity

PETER FRITZSCHE

"Man does not have a single, consistent life," explained François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand, the nineteenth-century French diplomat and celebrated memoirist, as he reflected on his return as a young man many decades earlier, in the 1780s, to Saint-Malo, the place of his birth: "He has several laid end to end, and that is his misfortune." "Friends leave us, others take their place," Chateaubriand added, "there is always a time when we possessed nothing of what we now possess, and a time when we have nothing of what we once had."¹ 1

     This is an eloquent if gloomy apprehension of discontinuity. Chateaubriand did not feel able to repossess the past, which repeatedly evaded his efforts at recollection. The felt absence of a firsthand connection and resulting apprehension of loss at the moment of secondhand reflection prompted feelings of "misfortune." These are recognizable as the melancholy of nostalgia. Phrasing his observations in a sonorous universal ("Man does not have"), Chateaubriand clearly indicated that his nostalgia was not merely the hurt of a single individual but was sensible as shared experience. At the same time, the declaration is something of a revelation: Chateaubriand found the knowledge of corpses sufficiently revealing to account for it by writing his memoirs. The studied terms of his examination—lives "laid end to end" in longhanded reconsideration and "laid end to end" again before readers—suggest a perplexity generated by specific circumstances of unsettlement. Although the graveyard he has stumbled upon is his own, it is a newly configured place in which the remains of past lives are registered as ghostly presences that arouse mourning and nostalgia. Chateaubriand's self-reflection exposes the nineteenth-century context of revolution and war in which a modern history of remembrance and nostalgia can be conceived. 2

     Chateaubriand's graveyard is not the sanctuary of an eccentric old man. Exhuming his bygone lives, Chateaubriand participated in a fundamental reconsideration of history from one based on correspondence and fulfillment to one alert to rupture and difference. His alienation was not personal, an accident of bad luck, or a question of temperament, nor was it a universal, like death. The broken pieces that made up the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, which Chateaubriand wrote and rewrote for forty years before his death in 1848, were the specific debris of the French Revolution. "The old men of former times," Chateaubriand insisted, "were less unhappy and less isolated than those of today: if, by lingering on earth, they had lost their friends, little else had changed around them; they were strangers to youth, but not to society. Nowadays," that is, since 1789, "a straggler in this life has witnessed the death, not only of men, but also of ideas: principles, customs, tastes, pleasures, sorrows, opinions, none of these resembles what he used to know. He belongs to a different race from the human species among which he ends his days."² In Chateaubriand's view, the revolution had shattered lines of social continuity, casting the present off from the past and thereby creating a "different race," exiles who had become strangers in their own time and read contemporary history as dispossession. The force of this narrative is so violent that it provided the memoirs with their root metaphor: "I had scarcely left my mother's womb when I suffered my first exile"—which was his consignment to a wet nurse—Chateaubriand wrote at the outset, and in the six volumes that followed, he told and retold his life as a series of abrupt leave-takings.³ 3

     Chateaubriand's acknowledgement of multiple, disconnected lives is indicative of a broader reconfiguration of temporality in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The author's deliberate rupture of "a single, consistent life" into several is an action that relies on distinctly modern concepts of historical discontinuity and historical periodicity that first came into wide circulation at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lines of rupture preoccupied the Western imagination in the nineteenth century to such an extent that the past turned into a problem of knowledge and became a source of disquiet, a nagging, unmasterable presence of absence. My intention here is to investigate reports of dispossession in which contemporaries no longer felt the "givenness" of tradition or progress, articulated instead an unfamiliar sense of being out of place or of having died an untimely death, and attempted to partially recover the cast-off past. It exposes a catastrophic version of modern history. To be sure, it is not altogether surprising that aristocrats and émigrés felt nostalgia for the ancien régime. Nonetheless, the enormous production (and consumption) of memoirs and other individual testimonies and the rendering of autobiography as a kind of journey into exile suggest a more telling shift in historical consciousness, one in which the fate of nobles such as Chateaubriand spoke to the disorientation of "stragglers" more generally. Long after the revolution, literate Europeans returned again and again to the particular circumstances of counter-revolutionaries, because these seemed pertinent and poignant. However unrepresentative the experience of exile actually was, it was represented and repossessed in new, formative ways, and exile increasingly served as a remarkable signature of displacement in the modern age, "nowadays," in which a comprehensive process of destruction pushed the past away from the present. A study of nostalgia, the melancholy feeling of dispossession that is the result of this pushing away, reveals a sharper sense of temporal identity in both public and private lives during the thirty years after the French Revolution. It thereby contributes to the history of memory and to knowledge about the historicizing self, which has been repeatedly called for in these pages.⁴ 4

     I argue that nostalgia is a fundamentally modern phenomenon because it depended on the notion of historical process as the continual production of the new. This promiscuous sense of time was closely related to the French Revolution's ideological dramatization of difference, and contemporaries increasingly recognized themselves playing various parts in an encompassing historical drama that extended throughout Europe, across the Atlantic, and beyond. This narrative dimension is crucial, because if the revolution and the wars that followed had simply been apprehended in terms of material devastation, they would not have prompted deep feelings of dispossession. Both in Europe and in the United States, the memory crisis of the nineteenth century was not the function so much of actual losses but of reconfigured structures of temporality that lifted losses out of obscurity and rendered them meaningful by giving them a historically specific locale. Secondly, narratives of loss not only presupposed the internalization of historical time but also authorized individual, subjective renditions, so that as more and more Europeans and Americans felt part of history, they insisted on their personal views and accounted their own damages. As a result, the figure of the exile or the site of abandoned graves resonated deeply in the nineteenth-century imagination, in songs, stories, and autobiographies. Finally, I contend that the recognition of temporal difference among the lives laid "end to end" enabled both the construction of distinct national identities and also a more individual and solitary sense of the self. In this way, nostalgia expressed an imaginative and often radical subjectivity. 5

     A growing but fragmented body of scholarship has pointed to fundamental breaks in the Western consciousness of time, which in turn structured the way Europeans viewed their place in history, their connections with the past, and their ability to fashion themselves as active political subjects. In a series of brilliant essays, Reinhart Koselleck argues for a notion of modern time in which the last two or three hundred years have been distinguished by the continual reproduction of the new and different. (The stress is on sensibility and perception, since Koselleck is tracking not material change itself but the imaginative categories that apprehend it.) In the early modern period, he asserts, "the present and past were enclosed within a common historical plane" in which contemporaries believed themselves to inhabit the same moral and political universe as their Greek and Roman forebears and called upon classical examples to make sense of contemporary dilemmas. While seventeenth and eighteenth-century absolutist politics admitted a large number of variations, they were limited by a comprehensible set of institutional and economic variables, and "history was comparatively static." "Nothing particularly new could happen," Koselleck concludes about history conceived in this way.⁵ The basic commensurability of yesterday, today, and tomorrow was not at odds with an older Christian or millennial view of time in which the coming apocalypse had the effect of flattening out the variability of profane time that preceded it, or with more ancient ideas of the Golden Age, in which the subsequent diminishment of human society simply ran the Christian model in reverse. A sense of restless, profound transformation in the present was missing. And although Enlightenment conceptions of historical process, in which a singular logic moved human society toward the completion of a rational plan or universal scheme, upset the static nature of early modern time, they retained faith in the legibility and knowability of history.⁶ In this evolutionary model, past and present remained in balance with one another. Both the retrograde aspects of the past and the rational endeavors of the present provided unmistakable evidence for progress unfolding. Well into the eighteenth century, Western ideas of history did not scrutinize temporal difference. 6

     Regarded at first as a further installment in the orderly development of social and political life, the French Revolution quickly confounded authoritative notions of continuity. Again and again, observers came to report on their disorientation, on the fallibility of their interpretations. For Edmund Burke, it was precisely the revolution's defiance of "the great principles of government" and "the ideas of liberty," which, as he ascertained in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, were "understood long before we were born," that made the rebellion such a "hideous phantom."⁷ In the face of "this chaos of levity and ferocity," Burke admitted in 1790, "everything seems out of nature."⁸ Revolutionaries themselves repudiated the authority of the past, and a gap widened between what Koselleck usefully conceives of as "the horizon of expectation" and the "space of experience."⁹ 7

     In the shadow of the approaching "horizon of expectation," extravagant conceptions of time filled the historical imagination of the nineteenth century: disconnection from remembered life-worlds, the exhaustion of tradition, an irretrievable sense of loss, a fleeting experience of the present, and an often ominous anticipation of the future. Koselleck himself explores in some detail the dramatization of "new time," in which the present gave way to the future and encouraged modern subjects to imagine "making" history. It is at this point, in the decades after the French Revolution, that utopian politics became possible. But ideas of the past were transformed beyond recognition as well. This was so not only because the eruption of "new time" shattered the legitimacy of experience and thus disconnected present from past but because its explosive, repeated arrival and marauding effects upset persistent attempts to find an overall coherence to historical change. It is thus possible to distinguish in Romanticism a partial recapitulation of an earlier Christian line of change that is "right-angled: the key events are abrupt, cataclysmic, and make a drastic, even an absolute, difference," as M. H. Abrams writes.¹⁰ But, in contrast to the Christian worldview, modern time did not admit a final conclusion of judgment or rebirth but, rather, gave way to a growing recognition of the ceaseless iteration of loss, so much so that Richard Terdiman points to a far-reaching "memory crisis" at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The "massive disruption of traditional forms of memory" that was the result of the growing illegitimacy of tradition and the incongruity of experience after the French Revolution opened up new ways to approach and consume the past.¹¹ Well-articulated despair over the disappearance of the past combined with growing insistence on the need to work at its recollection; while the past was no longer present, it was constantly, even obsessively, represented in reflection and mourning. 8

     Terdiman's emphasis on "memory crisis" permits a historicization of the term "nostalgia." Although nostalgia has the feel of the nineteenth century, it is a seventeenth-century term, coined by Johannes Hofer, a medical student who in 1688 cobbled together the Greek words nostos (return home) and algos (pain) to describe the strange melancholy of Swiss soldiers serving abroad. Fixated on a single idea, "the desire to return," Hofer's stricken Swiss had become indifferent and infirm, refused food and water, and even collapsed and died.¹² Nonetheless, it was in the middle of the nineteenth century that nostalgia found a secure place in household vocabularies, its general usage made tenable by the massive displacing operations of industrialization and urbanization, which also standardized its meaning as a vague, collective longing for a bygone time rather than an individual desire to return to a particular place. Nostalgia retains this general and temporal meaning; it distills the "dispirit of the age." 9

     What has remained constant since Hofer's time is the assumption that nostalgia manifests an inability to make oneself "at home in a constantly changing world," as Marshall Berman puts it.¹³ Nostalgia is typically seen as a symptom of erratic cultural stress due to social complexity and rapid change.¹⁴ (Hofer's soldiers fared worse the farther they were from home and the more remote the place they had made their homes, which is why the mountainous Swiss appeared to suffer so acutely from nostalgia.) In their search for security, nostalgics failed to cultivate abstract relations among strangers in formal settings. Familiar intimacies compensated for lack of social adeptness, so that nostalgia appears to most observers as sweet but dumb. A diminished outlook, it is based on repetition rather than novelty, order rather than juxtaposition. What these functionalist readings miss, however, is an appreciation for the way in which nostalgia is predicated on thoroughly modern structures of temporality. Historians have not accounted for the improbable form that nostalgic longing takes or the remarkable discernment of difference in the categories "past" and "present" it assumes. Moreover, they miss how nostalgia expresses a culture of victims that proposes an alternative version of history as catastrophe. In the end, an ominous ideological operation is at work when traces of another time are condemned for their sentimentality and dismissed as "irrational, superfluous, and overtaken."¹⁵ 10

     A more useful way to think about nostalgia is to see it in correspondence with the emergence of the historical age. Nostalgia not only cherishes the past for the distinctive qualities that are no longer present but also acknowledges the permanence of their absence. It thus configures periods of the past as bounded in time and place and as inaccessible, and thereby adheres to notions of periodicity that James Chandler regards as fundamental to historical understandings of the early nineteenth century. "The normative status of the period becomes a central and self-conscious aspect of historical reflection," he writes, and as such it introduced a high degree of discontinuity over time; such thinking also took an epoch to be distinctive and particular, individualizing the historical moment, and thereby undermined claims to the universal applicability and self-evident nature of the present.¹⁶ What the ghostly remains of other pasts recall is the fact of other presents and other possibilities. It makes sense, then, to reconsider nostalgia not as blindness but as sightfulness, which completes the modern experience of time with its insistent perception of disaster and its empathy to strangers stranded in the present. 11

     Woven in among nineteenth-century narratives of progress, whether in liberal or Marxist versions, nostalgic sentiments caressed the scars of history. Part of modern experience was a deepening sense of melancholy, a feeling of disconnection with the past, a growing dread of the future, and uncertainty over the capacity to act or reform. This apprehension was not entirely new; both Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau explored the fragmentation of the self.¹⁷ But the relentlessness with which the motions of modern history were dramatized, the promiscuity of political projects during the French Revolution, and the violence of economic and demographic change that followed all had the effect of intensifying feelings of loss and making them socially germane. What distinguished postrevolutionary society, notes Suzanne Nash, was that it was represented as much in terms of "what it had lost—as debris or ruins, quagmire or sewer"—as it was in terms of "the solidity of its foundations."¹⁸ This presence of absence is worth paying attention to, for it has had the effect of repeatedly scribbling up the clean slates of modern development and raising unbidden questions about the origins of social identity, the givenness of the here and now, and the possibility of contrary movement in the flow of history. To get at these ghostly matters, I will analyze the recognition of difference in the movement of time in the years after the French Revolution, use the figure of the exile to examine the growing sense of dispossession, and explore how the partial recovery of the past enhanced the sense of historical distinctiveness and helped define sovereignty and subjectivity. 12

The nineteenth century was full of people who mourned the past and explored the specters of history in ways that the eighteenth century was not. That Talleyrand's famous aphorism about the sweetness of life before the French Revolution became a standard nineteenth-century cliché suggests how commonplace narratives of dispossession had become. The thousands of émigrés who fled France had particular reason to take Talleyrand's words to heart, and in many ways he spoke directly to them. A veritable publishing industry took off with the Bourbon Restoration, circulating texts in which former exiles recalled memories of the old kingdom, reported on years of hardship abroad, and conjured up a postrevolutionary world permanently out of joint. These narratives of displacement, including Chateaubriand's celebrated memoirs from "beyond the grave," were early installments in what would become a vast literature of modern exile, and they attracted and fascinated readers well into the twentieth century.¹⁹ 13

     Even in the next generation, among children of aristocratic survivors, feelings of trauma persisted. The literary protagonists of this cohort—Astolphe de Custine, Benjamin Constant, and Alexis de Tocqueville—"were themselves ruins," Irena Gross notes, "remnants of the Ancien Regime." Tocqueville, who as a boy had witnessed his father's hair turn white overnight and whose mother never recovered emotionally from the revolution that had executed her relatives, rewrote sociology in light of the upheavals.²⁰ For their part, groups of faithful republicans mourned the eclipse of the revolution rather than the end of the monarchy. They, too, felt out of sorts in smug postrevolutionary society. "That time is past with all its giddy raptures," wrote a lachrymose William Hazlitt after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 had foreclosed on reform in both France and Great Britain.²¹ 14

     In more abstract terms, European philosophers and historians thought deeply about the legacy of the past and lines of continuity, trying in their historical and political investigations to account for the movement and duration of the revolutionary quarter-century. Never before had tradition been so closely or self-consciously examined.²² And for every Edmund Burke, Friedrich von Schlegel, or Joseph de Maistre, there was a society of antiquarians or an association of archaeologists busily surveying and preserving ruins and raising alarms about public indifference toward the past.²³ The revolutionary intention of fashioning citizens and creating constitutions, as well as the appalling losses suffered by ordinary people, who bore the brunt of the revolution's conscription orders, money levies, and labor corvées, left deep traces. Talleyrand spoke for them, too, insists George Steiner, who argues that the public reach of the revolution destroyed the "spaces and temporalities of personal consciousness" and pulled people inexorably into the possibilities and dangers of historical time.²⁴ 15

     What made even the recent past seem so far away to nineteenth-century observers was the deep rupture in remembered experience that came with the French Revolution. Two intertwined forces were at work in this period: the revolution's massive dislocation, and the narration of that dislocation as the eruption of the new, which was seen to extinguish tradition. Without the machinery of narration—histories, prefaces, memoirs—material changes could not have been interpreted as of one piece or identified as an encompassing historical passage that elevated parochial tragedies into meaningful, legible common fates. And without the restless mobilization of men and women into new economic arrangements, new geographic places, and new political services, the narration would have lost its pertinence, authority, and urgency. 16

     As a result, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, material unsettlement combined with a new historical sensibility. Europeans had known devastating upheavals before—the Reformation and Thirty Years' War—but these were not comprehended in terms of fundamental change and so did not drastically alter the temporal identities of contemporaries. "All human beings were subject to general disaster or exploitation as they were to disease," Steiner explains. "But these swept over them with tidal mystery," and did not revise the way most people thought about history; "it is the events of 1789 to 1815 that interpenetrate common, private existence with the perception of historical processes." Steiner gets to the essence of the changes in these revolutionary years with his wonderful remark that, when "ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge, they saw bayonets passing."²⁵ Steiner is not simply referring to the presence of large mobilized armies, which were not so different from the grand armies of the seventeenth century, but rather to the ongoing dramatization of events in terms of a recognizable, comprehensive transformation that shaped private lives and gave the ensuing disruption a meaningful social context by providing experience with narrative form—the story of revolution "across the garden hedge." 17

     Nostalgia is a characteristic component of this revolutionary narrative because it took history to be a swift, encompassing process of transformation in which differences over time assumed overriding importance.²⁶ While nostalgia takes the past as its mournful subject, it holds it at arm's length. The virtues of the past are cherished and their passage is lamented, but there is no doubt that they are no longer retrievable. In other words, nostalgia constitutes what it cannot possess and defines itself by its inability to approach its subject, a paradox that is the essence of nostalgia's melancholia. There can be no nostalgia without the sense of irreversibility, which is often lost on those critics who simply deride its sentimentality.²⁷ At the same time, there can be no more than sporadic nostalgia without the consciousness of history acting in a general way that gives credence to individual ideas of estrangement. If yesterday is different from today merely because disaster has occurred and misfortune has come to pass, the status of yesterday is not really challenged, and yesterday's fortune might well persist in some other place not afflicted by catastrophe. In the next valley, the world would still be whole and indifferent. Nostalgia therefore acts as a mechanism that uses the discontinuities that have been made available by revolutionary narrative in order to make parochial misfortunes socially meaningful. 18

     The French Revolution rearranged previously authoritative structures of temporality by redrawing the horizon of historical possibility and thereby manufacturing a set of differences that separated past, present, and future. Cultural historians have drawn attention to the invention of a new political community animated by newly realized historical subjects. According to Lynn Hunt, who builds on the work of François Furet and Mona Ozouf, "the will to break with the national past distinguished the French from previous revolutionary movements." Particularly in ritual and ceremony, French revolutionaries dramatized "the instant of creation of the new community, the sacred moment of the new consensus." In so doing, they also invented the ancien régime, which persisted to haunt the new French, whose republican virtue in what Hunt terms the "mythic present" depended on severing ties to the depraved past. With astonishing deliberateness, republicans set out to destroy the landmarks of the past: churches, abbeys, castles, and the graves of French kings at Saint-Denis. To get a sense of how radical was the French reorganization of time, Furet compares the French with the American revolutionaries who had preceded them by twenty years. Few if any of the principals in 1776 saw it as their mission to "snatch [America] from its past," he argues, or to repudiate the prerevolutionary, colonial epoch.²⁸ Only in France did revolutionaries propose a new calendar, unraveling the customary weeks and months and replacing the Christian year 1792 with the republican Year 1. 19

     It is difficult to overemphasize the extent to which the French Revolution disrupted Western conceptions of historical continuity. Again and again, commentators laid aside well-worn rhetorical templates by which they compared modern with ancient revolutions and instead picked up a new vocabulary that articulated the unprecedented force of events between 1789 and 1815. Johannes von Müller, at the time perhaps the most noted historian after Edward Gibbon, was tormented by the fear that the universal history of civilization and empire he had just completed had been made obsolescent by the revolution in France. In a series of heartfelt letters to his brother, he wrote repeatedly of his bewilderment at the eighteenth century's unpredictable, furious end: alles wird so ganz anders—"Everything is becoming so different."²⁹ Müller's exclamation echoes the intentions of revolutionaries to remake the world, and it is reechoed throughout the next two hundred years. Although fundamental transformations had roiled earlier centuries, modern testimony insists on seeing it just like this: "Everything is becoming so different." Müller and Burke at the very end of the eighteenth, Chateaubriand, G. W. Hegel, and Karl Marx in the nineteenth, and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Fischer, and Eric Hobsbawm in the twentieth century all follow the logic of this emplotment, even if they differ on particulars.³⁰ The fundamental difference between the modern and the non-modern on either side of 1789 is the robust role that difference and incommensurability play in the self-location of the former and the still exemplary status of ancient and other classical models in the latter. 20

     This apprehension of difference made it difficult to understand what was going on. Historical precedents did not seem to apply, which is why Burke considered the French Revolution so unnatural. After seventeen revolutionary years, de Maistre, another conservative, could still write: "Nothing resembles this epoch, and history does not provide any datum or analogy as an aid to judgment."³¹ Events proceeded outside "the standards of experience," agreed the historian Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and like-minded statements abound. "The pen quivers in the hand of the historian who takes hold of it in order to try to portray the scenes of a year [1793] which seem to have surpassed human powers of description and feeling and which future generations will hardly believe actually took place," wrote Wilhelm von Schirach, editor of Hamburg's Politisches Journal, a sympathetic observer but who found no other formula than to repeatedly, if inelegantly, reiterate: "Never before" has "such a monstrosity been so wicked"; "never before" were so many "murderous battles fought"; "never before . . . have we seen such broad attacks and retreats."³² The revolution proved so confounding that several historians failed to complete their work. Müller, for example, admitted that events had overtaken his published conclusions, while Friedrich Gentz, the influential adviser to Metternich, filled one thick folio volume after another with his reflections on the revolution without publishing them, because he found his own explanations inadequate. Gentz was so confused that he appended astrological epilogues to his political epistolaries. "What do you say to the meteor in Wesel?" he asked fellow conservative Adam Müller, "and to the snow that fell on the 11th of October in Vienna, and in Lyon as well? And what about the flooding of the Danube right during the horrible days of Ulm!"—the last a reference to a key battle the Austrians had lost to Napoleon in 1805.³³ The revolution was profoundly strange to contemporaries—the eventful year 1815 convinced Rahel Varnhagen that "we are not headed toward the future," which one approaches and foresees; rather, "the future comes from behind," by surprise, an idea that "is breaking my head apart."³⁴ 21

     What was particularly strange about the French Revolution was its authorization of so many new historical subjects. The explicitly ideological nature of the revolution, its rejection of the past, and its celebration of the people and the nation broke apart the rules and standards by which political history had previously been analyzed. Johannes von Müller, for one, had no trouble identifying the source of the trouble: "Nothing in the world is worse than the rabble's destruction of order, than the demagogue's corruption of everything respectable, than the phrasemaker's humiliation of humanity."³⁵ The Politisches Journal also commented on the new curbside politics of revolution. "Never before was the spirit of the times so subject to passions and preconceived ideas"; "everyone has his party," the editors complained.³⁶ In the somewhat stilted language of Partheylichkeit (factiousness), editors in Hamburg put their finger on a key aspect to the French Revolution, namely its dramatization in ideological positions that incorporated contested visions of the future. Now that "every reader" had "his own opinion and his own prejudices," the calamities of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were experienced as struggles over the authority and legitimacy of the past, and over the shape of the future, which was increasingly seen as wide open.³⁷ William Words-worth summarized the new situation when he referred to a "multitude of causes, unknown to former times . . . now acting with combined force."³⁸ What this cumulative testimony expressed was sensitivity to the idea of living in a new time and, more abstractly, to the distinctiveness of this and, it followed, any other epoch. Thinking in terms of differences between historical periods challenged prevailing assumptions about continuity and commensurability and the teaching by example they authorized. 22

     The revolution left such a deep impression in the way Europeans thought about the past and the future because it mobilized millions of people who, happily or not, came to participate in its drama. Moreover, the revolution took place across Europe over an entire generation, creating a common historical field in which contemporaries could exchange impressions and recognize themselves as participants in a shared historical process. (It is important to see the French Revolution working on the European imagination well after 1794; indeed, commentators found the revolution troubling not least because events after Thermidor did not bring closure or peace or any facsimile of restoration.) Koselleck comments on this transformation of far-flung events into the protracted "collective singular" of "History": "Freedom took the place of freedoms," he writes, "Justice that of rights and servitudes, Progress that of progressions and from the diversity of revolutions, 'The Revolution' emerged."³⁹ This "singularization" should not be mistaken for unisonality of opinion; rather, it indicated the universal reach of political claims and the common form to political discourse. This "collective singular" was most apparent in the intense correspondence among literary and political figures and in the common political stage to post-Napoleonic novels, but it also bent the conversations of everyday life. In other words, one aspect of the authorization of new historical subjects was the self-recognition and self-positioning of the subject in the new histories. Follow Sulpiz Boisserée, the Cologne art collector, around a crowded market boat on the Main River in summer 1815: "A carpenter, tailor, or cobbler in a reserveman's uniform, with a meerschaum pipe in his mouth, speaks to a traveler, a noncommissioned officer, an Italian or a Pole, about Napoleon . . . recounting how Frankfurters ran to see Talleyrand: 'He too belongs on St. Helena!'" Boisserée makes his way to "the big cabin," where "someone is reading aloud a newspaper, a Jew is listening and so is a farmer . . . The black-bearded Jew believes that Napoleon will still escape." As for the farmer, he laughs at a story about Blücher punishing the French. "After dinner, a small cabin in the back"—Boisserée has moved on: "a Catholic priest has gathered a crowd . . . he's from Nassau and complains about the Russians, about the Germans, and particularly about the Prussians and their pride. They demand twice as much, and wheel and deal at the innkeeper's expense—'those are liberators?'—he snorts his tobacco . . . Soon the discussion turns to world affairs. Jacobins in Berlin, in Vienna . . . then a fairy tale about the Peace of Tilsit . . . and back to generalities: France; Napoleon still has his fingers in everything; the French are not doing well; Napoleon is the smartest creature alive, only pride corrupted him." Other passengers tell "the Italian or the Pole," Boisserée doesn't know which, stories about serving in the wars in Spain and in Sicily. In the front cabin, an English Hussar, who lost his leg in "Pamplona '13," chats with some peasant boys, who themselves have fought in the wars of liberation.⁴⁰ 23

     The description is marvelous. Boisserée wandered from cabin to cabin, catching snippets of publicly informed conversation, pointing out the newspapers, the uniforms, and the ordinary mix of travelers, and revealing just how the revolutionary wars created a shared historical awareness. Figures such as Napoleon, Talley-rand, and Field Marshal Blücher, and red-lettered events, some quite recent, others eight years' past (Tilsit), belonged to the repertory of conversation, but their significance was not self-evident; this has to be argued out, according to the guesswork and opinions of cobblers and tailors, Jews and farmers, Poles and Italians, who do not hesitate to place their own experiences ("Pamplona '13") into the larger picture. What is striking is not simply all the talk about the revolution and the wars, which is taken up again and again, before dinner, "after dinner," cabin to cabin, or even the wood-hewn setting on the market boat, but also the exchange of opinion and evidence whereby well-known public events are retold in various personalized versions. The travelers participated in a common historical drama by which they organized and connected the events of their time and through which they told their own stories and found others who were interested. They insisted on registering their sense of history. Carefully setting the scenes—"the small, more elegant room in the back," "the big cabin," "a small cabin," "in the front cabin"—and attentively transcribing talk and back talk—Boisserée enhanced the dramatic qualities of the social exchanges he witnessed. He wanted readers to see people seeing history, and he took such care with his stage effects because he was aware of how novel was this dramatization of experience as the evidence of history. 24

     The market boat crowded with travelers and soldiers evokes the raucous movement of the revolutionary epoch. The extensive mobilization is easily surveyed: the levée-en-masse of French citizens, the soldiering across all of Europe, the mustering of home guards, the ebb and flow of refugees and exiles, the tax and capital levies in occupied regions, the dissolution of religious orders, the introduction of the Napoleonic Code, the anguished anticipation and joyous celebration of peace, the commemorations of the victories at Leipzig and Waterloo—all this maneuvered ordinary men and women into the flow of history and made them increasingly aware of the present taking them away from remembered pasts. 25

     Nothing dramatized the revolution as much as war, which extended the ideas of the revolution in at least crude form to millions of people from all classes. Up to 2.5 percent of the French population served in the revolutionary armies of 1794, and at least twice as many did in the years 1813–1815; in Prussia, the figure reached 6 percent in 1813. The small British army of 40,000 men in 1789 had expanded sixfold twenty-five years later; the navy increased from 16,000 men to 140,000 in the same period. Many hundreds of thousands of citizens also took part in the island's volunteer militias, especially during the invasion scare of 1802–1803. Death rates were even more drastic: one in every five French born in the first years of the revolution (1790–1795) was killed in its last years (1806–1815).⁴¹ From the thousands of French who took up domiciles on the left bank of the Rhine to the scarlet-coated British officers who stepped into the lives of the Bennett sisters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to the poor soldiers from Saxony and Bavaria whom townspeople encountered in ones and twos as they straggled back from Russia in 1813, the revolutionary wars mobilized and garrisoned more men than had any other previous war. This gave the military an unprecedented visibility in daily life. One day, there were no soldiers; on the next, they had decamped on the marketplace and taken up lodgings in private homes. Indeed, the obligation to house soldiers was such a familiar burden during this period that aunts and uncles greeted visiting relatives with the half-alarmed cry, "Die Inquartierung kommt!" (The troops are here!)⁴² 26

     The upheaval of war pressed the revolution into the private lives of countless Europeans. From the outset, the French Revolution was seen as something that demanded judgment and opinion. Thus the handful of French troops housed in a middle-class home in Cologne found a ready welcome at the family dinner table—despite the fact that their wooden shoes readily identified them as "sans-culottes"—because "our Herr Vellnagel was a great friend of the French," at least until his tablemates whom he placed at his left and right addressed him with the familiar "tu" and stole his pocket watch.⁴³ Even this disappointing scene indicated the ways in which the most ordinary encounters between civilians and soldiers acquired an unprecedented political aspect. As they debated the merits and the justice of the revolution's aims, families divided into ideological camps and friends broke apart. "Knebel is simply mad," wrote Charlotte von Stein to her friend Charlotte Schiller: "we disagreed so furiously about the French that he has stayed away for eight days now."⁴⁴ The arguments went on for twenty-five years, right up to the eve of the invasion of Russia, when Leo Tolstoy has Pierre and the vicomte de Montemorte quarrel about Napoleon at Anna Pavlovna's soiree in the opening pages of War and Peace. 27

     The differences themselves should not obscure the ways in which the revolution pulled contemporaries into a common orbit. As readers and writers, they reviewed the revolution again and again, and the revolution, in turn, prompted renewed reading and writing. "So much writing and talking," complained Hannah More from her outpost in rural England about the uproar concerning France, revolution, and political reform.⁴⁵ Indeed, one scholar attributes part of the rise in literacy at the turn of the nineteenth century to the general desire in Britain to read commentaries on the revolution, to follow Burke, Tom Paine, and William Godwin.⁴⁶ Across the Atlantic, American exceptionalism did not keep the French Revolution from being a commonplace item of discussion; "whatever is connected with Napoleon promises deep interest," the editors of Godey's Lady's Book noted as late as 1832.⁴⁷ Reading, writing, talking—almost immediately, the French Revolution constituted a remarkable republic of letters that stretched throughout Europe and across the Atlantic to North America. 28

     The shared terms of this republic came into view again and again as observers recognized the general revolution in specific events. When crossing Morecombe Bay to Rampside after visiting relatives one day in early August 1794, Wordsworth "carelessly inquired if any news were stirring." A ferryman transporting travelers from Ulverston cried out, "Robespierre is dead!"⁴⁸ Given Wordsworth's detailed response to this event, his biographer Kenneth Johnston regrets not knowing where the poet "was standing when he heard the news of the fall of the Bastille," which was "one of those world-shaking events that tend to isolate spots of time for everyone."⁴⁹ But surely the reason for the presence of a detailed account in 1794 and the absence of a corresponding account for 1789 is not an archival accident but the fact that, in the intervening years, the French Revolution had come to be recognized as a universal drama. It made a claim on an ordinary band of travelers and a ferryman and on the most careless inquiries in ways not imaginable at the time of the fall of the Bastille. Similar events such as the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Napoleon's coup d'état in 1799, or his escape from Elba in 1815 were remembered as what is today labeled "flashbulb" memories precisely because they illuminated with bright clarity the historical drama that Europeans had come to share. The shock was one of recognition.⁵⁰ 29

     The philosopher Georg Lukács was right when he insisted on the novelties of soldiering in this period. "What previously was experienced only by isolated and mostly adventurous-minded individuals, namely an acquaintance with Europe or at least certain parts of it," he argued in his analysis of the "inner life" of the nineteenth century, "becomes in this period the mass experience of hundreds of thousands, of millions." Even more important than the fact of travel were the categories in which the travelscape was understood. These terms were distinctly historical and revealed "the social content, the historical presuppositions and circumstances of the struggle," making it possible to connect the war with "the entire life and possibilities of the nation's development."⁵¹ What more and more people saw "across the garden hedge" were not natural occurrences but political phantasms, audacious attempts to remake or undo the conditions of social life. For that reason, the revolution pressed itself into the lives of private Europeans with unusual force. Whether the world was in a state of decay or advance, nineteenth-century critics spoke easily about the "spirit of the age" and "signs of the time," and quite knowingly—rather in the manner of having discovered a master code—distinguished reactionaries and revolutionaries, old and new, and things pregnant with the future and things anachronistic and past, denoting as they did the present as a distinct period of transition.⁵² The gestures of hailing for the latest news, by asking strangers, writing letters, or reading newspapers, could only flourish in an age conscious of itself as such, that is, of having taken itself to be a distinctive epoch in which the differences between today and yesterday and today and tomorrow were dramatized as visible and regarded as pertinent. Martin Heidegger drew attention to this representation of difference when he argued that "the world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age."⁵³ The terms of this "world picture" enabled the nineteenth century's nostalgic look backward. 30

The world in the newly drawn world picture admitted strange places. The process by which the future colonized the present with the settlements of the new generated a genuine sense of anticipation and hope, and it is on this meliorist sensibility that historians of the nineteenth century have usually focused, but it also sustained feelings of dread and alienation, since so many people felt disconnected to their past lives. This unease with the idea of living in modern times deserves closer attention. Of his contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s, Tocqueville remarked: "They do not resemble their fathers; nay they perpetually differ from themselves, for they live in a state of incessant change of place, feelings, and fortunes."⁵⁴ In Tocqueville's view, the burden of modern identity was to live amidst unrest and strangeness. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to conditions of exile and homelessness, which are taken to be as constitutive of social formations as ties to place and home. Diasporic, postcolonial, and other hybrid identities highlight patterns of unsettlement in an age of unprecedented transnational mobility and global exchange. With great sensitivity, historians and anthropologists have described the conspicuous sense of dislocation and the exigencies of improvisation among migrants, refugees, and other twentieth-century travelers.⁵⁵ The French émigrés at the very end of the eighteenth century belong to this group: they had become strangers in the modern world because the republican community was remade in their absence and on the basis of their exclusion. Even after they returned home, they continued to feel out of place. Like Tocqueville, they reported on the postrevolutionary world with the eyes of archaeologists, following lines of rupture and tracking evidence of wreckage and unsettlement. 31

     The first émigrés—the brothers of the king and their respective courts—left France in the first week after the fall of the Bastille, but they had little sense of permanent dispossession. Like Burke, royalists reviled the revolution as illegitimate, and since they thought in fundamentally juridical, not historical, terms, most early opponents gave the revolution little staying power. Moreover, the condition of exile had been shared by seventeenth-century Protestants and Frondeurs and was therefore not considered unusual. "One or the other of my wife's ancestors left the kingdom for religious reasons," one early émigré, M. de Bacquencourt, consoled himself: "that's the way the world turns."⁵⁶ The assumption prevailed that France would return to prerevolutionary moorings. The moment of restoration seemed at hand in the summer of 1792, when armies of the French princes joined those of Austria and Prussia to invade the new republic. There was no mistaking this royalist force of legitimate return: a self-assured Joseph Thomas d'Espinchal reported that "our princes have expressed a wish that every one of us, whether mounted or unmounted, shall provide himself with a white scarf . . . in addition to his cockade and white plumes."⁵⁷ But the easy victory at Verdun in August turned bad in the muddy rout at Valmy in September. Suddenly, the collective force and unquestioned confidence of the grand seigneurs broke apart: "Now everyone went about solitarily, no one looked at his neighbor," testified Goethe in his firsthand account, "Campaign in France."⁵⁸ 32

     Observers at the time and memoirists who recollected after many years the events in September 1792 endowed the defeat at Valmy with great historical power. Goethe, who accompanied the duke of Saxe-Weimar as a kind of "field-poet," recognized the endurance of the revolution when he famously remarked that "from this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history."⁵⁹ Other witnesses came to the same conclusion, for they lingered at the sight of the ruins of the nobility: correspondents told about the roads north from Valmy littered with broken pieces: "the debris of broken carriages," "the unburied bodies of dead men and horses."⁶⁰ The extinction of the nobility as a class appeared close at hand. By the end of 1792, not only had the king been arrested but the perpetual banishment of exiles and the sale of their properties were announced. Refugees streamed into Germany and the Netherlands and remained in motion as revolutionary armies advanced in subsequent years. The revolution continually threatened to overtake the exiles: "What catastrophes! What accumulated ruins!" wrote Abbé Martinant as he recalled fleeing one German town after another in the summer of 1795. Over the next months, Martinant made his way to Augsburg, south to Constance, and eventually back east to Hof, but even there, in July 1796, "I made haste to leave, fearing once again the invasion of the French."⁶¹ Thousands of priests, nobles, and other opponents of the republic shared Martinant's fate as they crowded into border towns and suffered the suspicions of local inhabitants, who viewed them as both harbingers of revolutionary disorder and obstacles to peace with France. After Valmy, emigration had become banishment, and individual feelings of loneliness or isolation emptied into a general sense of dispossession. Moreover, the continued presence of the revolution throughout Europe kept most exiles from finding a psychological or physical haven. "Every idea I have is sad; there is not one that consoles me," wrote a father after his service in the Bourbon armies: "The future is so uncertain, we are so unhappy."⁶² Even if memoirs were embellished after many decades, the point remains that exile came to stand for a rupture far greater than the alternations of fortune implicit in Bacquencourt's imperturbable view of the world. When in the autumn of 1792 one anonymous exile commented dispiritedly, "time passes," it was without anticipation of an eventual rehabilitation; it served as a severe measure of losses incurred.⁶³ The experience of the French émigrés was defined by the fundamental suspicion that they would not resume the course of their old lives but were lost in the world forever. 33

     The émigrés eventually returned to France, yet their arrival was ambiguous. Memoirs surveyed a postrevolutionary world not set right. Emigrés not only returned to find their properties in ruins or sold off, but they recognized alarming traces of the revolution and discerned the graffiti of republican virtue—"ou la mort"—still visible through the coats of whitewashing lime: the old order had not been fully restored, nor had the revolution been entirely destroyed.⁶⁴ Despite a ferocious outcry, nobles whose lands had been sold as "national goods" after 1792 were not indemnified until 1825 and then only in the form of an annual pension, which did not undo the revolutionary act of disinheritance. Although most émigré nobles recovered some property, pieces that either had not been sold or had been transferred to relatives, many continued to think of themselves juridically and sentimentally as a distinct class of displaced persons. They thereby invited others to treat them as nostalgic relics. This was certainly the case with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, who placed the most refractory émigrés in what he aptly named The Gallery of Antiquities and described one Old Regime household in Lily of the Valley: "family silver without uniformity, Dresden china which was not then in fashion, octagonal decanters, knives with agate handles, and lacquered trays . . . I was delighted in these quaint old things."⁶⁵ There was no definitive return for those caricatured as the living dead. Elsewhere, as in Chateaubriand's René, the old house is a vacated ruin, haunted by memories of prerevolutionary life. Haunted houses are evidence of how changing ideas of historical time rearranged the sense of place. Resonating with the "half-repressed memory of . . . cultural defeats," argues Katie Trumpener, they are the remnants of a past that can no longer be reconciled with the present.⁶⁶ 34

     A painful process of relocation composed the imagination of exile. Exiles at once mapped the center at which they had once stood and the margins to which they had been displaced. Indulging memories of the securities of the past, reporting on the uncertainties of the future, the émigrés pictured history as a comprehensive disaster that had left them homeless. Their narratives always manifested an articulate historical sensibility about the epochal significance of 1789, but they also rendered experience in highly personal terms, which served to emphasize real distress and to denote the particular, individual effects of general historical forces. This imbrication of the personal and the public is a key aspect to nostalgia. Without the availability of a general narrative about the movement of history and the primacy of the revolution, the exiles would not have felt stranded in a "new time," and their experiences would have accordingly lacked historical poignancy. Their individual experiences could only be brought forward once a general frame of meaning had been constructed to constitute and absorb such evidence. The narrative acts of exile rested on Müller's assumption that "everything is becoming so different." Once such a frame was in place, however, evidence was easily summoned by all sorts of witnesses, and counternarratives rapidly appeared to contest the dominant version of events, only to multiply in countless variations.⁶⁷ 35

     Chateaubriand is emblematic of how nineteenth-century autobiographies assimilated increasingly authoritative cultural assumptions about the passage of time. The memoirist placed the French Revolution at the very center of his life-writing. His exile as a political émigré structured the composition of his autobiography, his "orphan," who surveyed the separations and shipwrecks, and the revolutions that left him alone. The orphan or the straggler embodied new structures of feeling in the nineteenth century: the decomposition of the community of tradition and the individual's solitary, often involuntary passage to new affections and new places. In the face of this homelessness, however, Chateaubriand did not despair, because he fixed his identity in the circumstances of contingency. "I believe in nothing except religion," Chateaubriand announced, and so "I distrust everything."⁶⁸ He made an awkward republican in America, cut a poor figure as an émigré in England, and infuriated his fellow legitimists during the Restoration. He described himself as a swimmer in the course of events who refused to try to reach the banks on either side despite turbulent conditions. "Each age is a river that carries us off according to the whims of the destiny to which we have abandoned ourselves," Chateaubriand explained. "There are those (the republicans) who cross it headlong and throw themselves onto the shore opposite. The others are perfectly happy to remain where they are, without plunging in. Trying to move with the times, the former transport us far from ourselves into an imaginary realm; the latter hold us back, refusing to enlighten themselves, happy to be men of the fourteenth century" at the end of the eighteenth.⁶⁹ For his part, Chateaubriand preferred to remain cast away. He cherished the past, acknowledging its devastation without ever abandoning its remnants. Wreckage swirled around the swimmer, who gave up on any attempt to gather up the debris and found solace in hanging on to this or that piece. Chateaubriand is such a compelling figure in the aftermath of the French Revolution because he made rupture the acknowledged pivot of his political and personal sensibilities, of his literary labors, and of his self-estimation. Behind the counterrevolutionary émigré lurked a modern exile who anticipated quite contemporary concerns about the place of home in the modern world. 36

     The fugitive identity that Chateaubriand constructed for himself can be found in less stylized versions throughout the revolutionary period. Aware of their alienation from developments in France and their fragile position in society, émigrés proved open to differences in custom and culture in the world around them. In exile and on the run, they became, in Mallet du Pan's felicitous phrase, "cosmopolitans despite themselves." Self-consciously comparing the old places they had left and the new places in which they found themselves, exiles gained a kind of epistemological privilege as they acknowledged people on the margins of conquest or those left behind by catastrophe.⁷⁰ Well-born French travelers to the United States, for example, felt a genuine affinity with Native Americans, who were no longer regarded as noble savages but as savaged nobles, dispossessed by an expanding commercial world.⁷¹ The "denial of coevalness," which Johannes Fabian argues has been central to the Western anthropology of primitive "others," was itself denied by the duke de Liancourt, Michel Crèvecoeur, and Chateaubriand, each of whom recognized himself in the untimely death of the Iroquois. This was a startling moment when alternatives to the logic of European colonialism could be imagined.⁷² Fernand Baldensperger, whose 1924 study of the émigré literature remains unsurpassed, commented on the nature of this cosmopolitan knowledge. What eventually triumphed, he maintained, was "a sense of the diversity of the world, one that paid attention to local color, to the picturesque presentation of reality, but also to juxtaposition and dispersion: the dramas and elegies of the emigration played themselves out in an increasingly incoherent universe."⁷³ It is not at all surprising that Stéphanie de Genlis, who had been closely connected to the Bourbons, eventually published a practical guide to local customs, a Manuel de Voyageur in six languages, containing, as the English-language edition put it, "the expressions most used in travelling, and in the different circumstances of life."⁷⁴ The last fateful phrase indicates the extent to which French émigrés anticipated the traveling cultures of the present day and found clues to their subject positions in foreign places. Indeed, it is difficult to regard émigré or otherwise estranged travelers without the foreign destinations that enabled the exploration of their own dispossession: the United States in the case of Chateaubriand and Tocqueville, Spain and Russia in the case of Astolphe de Custine, Germany and Italy in the case of Germaine de Staël.⁷⁵ 37

     What is remarkable about this early literature of exile, which was almost exclusively autobiographical, is the authority it acquired. "Nearly the entire world," concluded the Journal littéraire et bibliographique de Hambourg in 1799, "regards the emigration as an inexhaustible source for novels."⁷⁶ Why was this the case? To some extent, accounts of the emigration had all the elements of the adventure stories that had been popular in the eighteenth century. The escapades of Madame de La Tour du Pin certainly contributed to the enduring appeal of her memoirs.⁷⁷ But the hardships of exile also resonated among readers across Europe who themselves suffered the calamities of war. "In all the novels that deal with the French Revolution," observed Agnes von Gerlach from French-occupied Berlin, "it is always the case that unhappiness separates families and divides lovers, and now I find this to be the case."⁷⁸ 38

     After the wars had come to an end, the production of autobiographical texts continued unabated. Indeed, the French Revolution prompted an outpouring of memoirs equaled only by the survivor literature after 1945, Marilyn Yalom argues. Of course, the Holocaust and World War II are traumas of a different order, but the point is that dispossession invited proliferate self-reflection about loss in the present and remnants of the past and a consideration of history as catastrophe. For over one hundred years, friends and relatives assiduously cultivated the émigrés' opposition to republicanism, handing down stories about displaced royals and anguished exiles, preserving handwritten recollections, and editing published versions. That the nineteenth century stood out as a "century of memoirs," as Mme. de Fars Fausselandry proclaimed in 1830 on the first page of her autobiography, was due to the insistent press of public events on private lives and the pertinence of the reconsideration of those lives in the light of historical change. In gestures of recollection, the émigrés easily found for themselves the role of special victim; their eyewitness accounts presupposed a personal relationship to public history and marked out a collective identity. But the particular misfortunes of the exiles resonated among a much wider range of readers for whom "hybrid chronicles that track[ed] the convergence of an individual destiny with national destiny" corresponded to a general sense of displacement in what was quickly shorthanded as the Age of Revolution. Literary scholars argue that memoirs found readers precisely because readers recognized the historical nature of the hardships of their own lives: it was not so much the hardships that were new but the historical pertinence they acquired. Memoirs reenacted the founding premise of the nineteenth century's privileged literary form, the novel, which was that the story of private people expressed the general experiences of society.⁷⁹ 39

     The publication and circulation of so many accounts of exile made the early nineteenth-century world look completely different, because it scattered across its face the ruins of its people. The literary embellishment of the story of "Frenchman's Island" on Lake Oneida, New York, well illustrates this archaeological rendering of the modern world. The "Frenchman" was Louis Des Watines, a nobleman who had left France before the revolution and settled with his family on the lake's westernmost island in 1792–1793. He cleared the land but soon discovered that the island belonged to someone else and returned to the mainland. After a few years of fruitless financial speculation, the colonist sailed back to France in 1799. Apparently, Des Watines was an unpleasant, forgettable man, but his stay on what became known as "Frenchman's Island" caught the imagination of neighbors, who savored the idea of "our French Robinson." That Des Watines' wife gave birth to a daughter in an Indian camp across from the island only sharpened their curiosity. This tale of a life "amongst savages" gained power when the German novelist Sophie von La Roche transformed the unlucky Des Watines (about whom she had learned from her son Fritz, who lived in the United States) into a lamentable French exile who had fled the guillotine with his young wife. La Roche dramatized the tension between the well-born origins of the Frenchman and his lowly state on Lake Oneida. She also juxtaposed the farm on Frenchman's Island to the American village on one shore and the Indian settlement opposite, thereby upholding both the differences that separated the aristocratic Des Watines from the rude commercial enterprise of the colonists and the alignment of the exile with the endangered "free" natives. La Roche's Frenchman was quite unlike Des Watines; the turns of history had forced him into the wilderness and, once there, transformed him into a "cosmopolitan despite himself." Retold by La Roche, the story of Des Watines poignantly recapitulated the fate of the émigrés. Published in 1798, La Roche's book was successful enough to appear a few years later in a condensed version for young readers. Thanks to this popularization, the actual traces of Des Watines' homestead that remained after the family's departure acquired the aura of a ruin, which stood for both the misfortune and resilience of the exiled nobility. It attracted numerous pilgrims over the years, including Tocqueville and Charles Beaumont in the 1830s. They found what they were looking for: "a few fragments falling into dust," precisely what evoked the losses and ruptures and absences of the forty years that had passed since the revolution. It was the perspective of the exile that allowed La Roche, Tocqueville, and Beaumont to look for and find the ruin of Frenchman's Island.⁸⁰ Estrangement and homelessness emerged as such dominant themes in the nineteenth century due in large part to a literary tradition elaborated by the French émigrés. They encountered the new century from the interiorized, obsessively subjective perspective of displaced persons. 40

The story of Frenchman's Island is only one of many in this period that drew attention to the strange displacement of individuals, their disorientation in new social and political places, and the difficulties they encountered in retrieving traces of their past lives: for example, Washington Irving's tale, "Rip Van Winkle," which measures the political distance from King George to George Washington, or the case of Kaspar Hauser, the son from nowhere who appeared without memories on Nuremberg's Unschlittplatz in May 1828.⁸¹ The experience of the émigrés became increasingly paradigmatic, evocative of a wider experience of exile that served as a way of seeing and taking the measure of social and economic calamity. It was not so much that history had become more catastrophic, although that argument could be made for the nineteenth century, but rather that history was interpreted in a more catastrophic way, so that Johannes von Müller's lachrymose aside—"Everything is becoming so different"—in fact became the signature, the conceit of modernity. By crumpling up the temporal structures of the present, the French Revolution made the displacements of what became known as the Industrial Revolution stand out. The political revolution encouraged contemporaries to think of industrial transformation as a swift and comprehensive process that broke fundamentally with the past. Raymond Williams takes note of an "escalator" of historical perspective in which successive generations in the modern era dated the ruin of rural England to their childhoods or just before, but the genre itself originates in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The highly stylized rural scenes in early Victorian literature and painting register what "is no more."⁸² Even Americans in 1800 shared an awareness of "firstness," a sense of living in a period of unprecedented change that was marked not only by exceptional rates of westward mobility (and thus the abandonment of older places) but by the growing political sovereignty of all white men.⁸³ At least for this constituency, the past was increasingly seen as something distant and the present as a place of new encounters and new dangers that had not been anticipated before. Given this dramatization of discontinuity, the past became an object of intense scrutiny as contemporaries attempted to recover traces of former lifeways. For the rest of the nineteenth and, arguably, into the twentieth century, Western culture remained engrossed in the work of memory. More and more aware of their dispossessions, contemporaries endeavored to reestablish some sort of connection to the past, one that was tenuous but also enriching and suggestive of the possibilities available in historical time, past and future. 41

     One of the most striking operations of the reconfiguration of Western temporality at the turn of the nineteenth century was the production of ruins. Suddenly, traces of past lives appeared everywhere, like the "fragments falling into dust" on Frenchman's Island. The physical landscape as much as personal autobiography became a rendition of archaeology. Contemporaries constructed a "world pic-ture" scattered with the ruins of other worlds (not the disrepair of their own) and scarred by the traces of calamity and destruction and conquest (not simply misfortune or carelessness). While debris recounted devastation and ruin, it also demarcated specific cultural traditions that even in fragmentary form defied the logic of imperial conquest and imperial sameness. For all its melancholy aspects, the evidence of loss corresponded to an acquisition of wealth because markers of rupture indicated possibility and variability. Ruins reidentified the variety of subjects available in the vicissitudes of history. They raised the specter of alternative modernities.⁸⁴ The construction of German identity in the period of French empire is perhaps the best example of the way in which the nationalisms of the nineteenth century relied on the visibility of ruins. 42

     The collection of cultural debris to reconstitute German tradition was the singular achievement of the Brothers Grimm. They described the fairy tales they had transcribed as fragments of a shattered whole, comparing the oral stories to small shafts of grass that had been protected by hedges and bushes after storms had flattened fields of crops.⁸⁵ To retrieve these lost pieces, they urged collectors to bend down close to the ground: "quietly pick up the leaves and carefully bend back the twigs, so as not to disturb the Volk and to furtively glimpse this small, rare part of nature, smelling like fallen leaves, meadow grass, and fresh rain." This work of collecting had to proceed quickly, the Grimms urged, before "total decomposition ensues," making clear that the summer storm was not merely a recurring seasonal danger but a very particular historical catastrophe. The revolutionary armies that the brothers had seen move back and forth across their native Hessen, and the surveyors and roadbuilders who arrived in the decades that followed, flattened fields as surely as any summer's storm, wiping away older lifeways in the name of progress. Folk songs, a few books, and "these innocent fairy tales" were all that remained. Even these bits and pieces survived only along the edges of ordinary life: among hedges and "around the fireplace, the kitchen stove, the cellar stairs."⁸⁶ 43

     Given how violently and thoroughly the storm of modern development had acted—"flattening a whole field of crops"—how fragile individual customs had become—collectors had to "carefully bend back the twigs"—and how hard the traditional villages were to find—places "where few paths led"—the Grimms insisted on preserving old folkways as they found them. They conceded that the stories and legends were no longer integral elements in the larger society that collected them, and argued that, as a result, efforts to translate them into a more accessible vernacular would ruin them. On the one hand, the folk tales formed a link to a distant past, which justified their collection, preservation, and dissemination. On the other, they had to be accepted as artifacts of a broken whole that could no longer be repaired. "The past" (das Alte) could not be "transplanted into our time, where it no longer belongs," Jacob Grimm concluded. The wording suggests that today had once been commensurate with yesterday, but it was "no longer." Following Stephen Bann's distinction between exemplary specimens and recovered relics, a "shift in terms" around 1800 that "alerts us to a radical change in conceiving the relationship of the historical object to the past," I would argue that the tales entered nineteenth-century culture as relics.⁸⁷ That modern scholarship has disproved the Grimms' claim for the rustic, Germanic origins of the folk tales in no way invalidates the brothers' and their readers' engagement with the stories as recovered treasures. The "strange, noble creatures" that Jacob imagined his tales to be appeared as eloquent expressions both of the grandeur and of the alienation of the past. Giving depth to national history, they also withheld an immediate link to it.⁸⁸ Readers responded in similar fashion, embedding the tales in a national literary tradition over which family members—usually mothers and grandmothers—exercised guardianship. By the end of the nineteenth century, the fairy tales and the illustrations that accompanied them provided an iconography enabling contemporaries to recognize what they had not seen before: Germany's distinctive historical (and later touristic) landscape.⁸⁹ 44

     The proposed completion of the cathedral in Cologne had much the same effect. It was difficult to overlook the huge, unfinished structure, but throughout the early modern period it did not seem particularly interesting because it was broken down, left behind by the political developments that had taken place since the Thirty Years' War. After the French Revolution, however, it was seen afresh. An impressive array of intellectuals came to cherish it as a monument to a specifically German "prehistory." In their view, the resumption of work on the cathedral (which began in 1842 and was completed in 1880) made it possible to imagine following up the lost itinerary of German prehistory and introducing a new greatness and lost cohesion to German actions once the French had been defeated. For the journalist Heinrich Steffens, Cologne's cathedral beckoned an "indeterminate future," a space in which the various possibilities of history remained alive. The subjunctive future corresponded to the conditional past, in which defeat and demolition were no longer regarded as foreordained. To complete the Gothic cathedral in Cologne, to collect Germanic tales and customs, or to identify ruins along the Rhine River, which revealed itself as a "huge national museum"—all were critical elements in the dramatization of difference that allowed nineteenth-century Germans to fashion for themselves a new national subject and a new national history.⁹⁰ 45

     A similar process took place in France, where Charles Nodier, Alphonse de Cailleux, and Isidor Taylor embarked in the 1820s on a publishing venture to produce gigantic picture albums—the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'ancienne France—depicting the regions of France. Rather than assemble historical events along a continuum, the authors traced indistinct origins, noted disruptive invasions, and described archaic religiosity, and thereby embellished France's rich and diverse past. Ruined castles, chateaus, and convents attracted the attention of antiquarians because these landmarks constituted evidence of political and religious struggles and brought into view a fabulous landscape of passion and belief. The determined demolition work of French revolutionaries in the 1790s only enhanced the sublime aesthetic of the prerevolutionary past.⁹¹ 46

     Of course, French revolutionaries were not the first to wreck a church, but the fact that nineteenth-century observers loitered around the particular sites of revolutionary destruction indicated how recent history had come to be dramatized as a series of abrupt endings and new beginnings. Moreover, the French Revolution raised the specter of destroying the traces of the past and thus of alternative histories altogether. Whereas there was little concern in the eighteenth century about the perishability of the ruin, which was regarded as part of a natural landscape of decay and regeneration, in the decades after the revolution antiquarians launched extensive efforts to preserve the evidence of trauma, extinction, and difference.⁹² Obliterating the ruin was tantamount to annulling kinds of lives and varieties of belief. According to Chateaubriand, for example, the French Revolution was horrific not only for creating ruins—washing up émigrés on foreign shores—but for destroying monuments to the past. Again and again, he took his readers to the abbey of Saint-Denis, outside Paris, where in August 1793 revolutionaries had plundered the royal tombs and smashed the bones of France's kings.⁹³ To take away "the bones of their fathers," he wrote in another context, "you take away their history," robbing people of "the proofs of their existence and of their annihilation."⁹⁴ In what became a signature of conservative descriptions of the revolutionary place, German visitors, too, condemned France for being a country without memory. Upon arriving in France from Germany, Friedrich von Schlegel purported to be immediately aware of the dullness of the landscape. It was without remarkable features, pretty but superficial, lacking the wild residue of Germany's history.⁹⁵ Even in Paris, he reported, "luxury is the all-absorbing deity that governs the hasty revolutions of the fleeting day, amid an universal irregularity of existence, buildings, garments, and the ornamental refinements of life, interrupted only by the fantastic caprice of ever-varying fashion."⁹⁶ 47

     What is interesting is not whether Schlegel was right but how forcefully he and his contemporaries on both sides of the Rhine started to make judgments about places without memory, the value of ruins, and the stories imputed to them. In this view, then, it was the perpetual present, the ruin of the ruin, that constituted the real destructive potential of modernity. The preservation of the ruin, by contrast, made it possible to think about distinct, half-hidden pasts of which Europeans were the potential legatees and guardians. They came to represent their collective identities as bounded in time and place, making the case for their own historical specificity and for the particulars of the "spirit of the age," which laid the basis for the particularities of French, German, and British history. It is difficult to imagine European nationalisms without the visibility of the ruin and the apprehension of the past as a site of cultural disaster, imperial conquest, and national survival. 48

     Reconfigurations in the structure of public time, which had severed the past from the present, had the additional and profound consequence of altering perceptions of the continuity of private life. Readers and writers became more self-conscious of breaks and disruptions in their own lives, performing for themselves the discontinuities that dramatized public life. The age of history was insistently autobiographical, a genre that made manifest the transforming work of time and dramatized lifelines with its emphasis on rupture and development. Literary scholars point to an explosion in the production of personal forms such as memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries beginning in the nineteenth century.⁹⁷ At the same time, ever larger numbers of readers consumed those texts and validated their publication. 49

     In the first place, the broad and unmistakable public consciousness about the marauding movement of history after the turn of the nineteenth century had the effect of creating a common denominator to individual experiences, and people could recognize a general cause behind particular effects. This is why Wordsworth and the ferryman shared news about Robespierre at Rampside: they were both swept up in the same history and approached each other as contemporaries. The result was an extraordinary production and consumption of quite vernacular versions of general history. "Since the interesting era of the French Revolution," commented one British observer in 1824, "the people of these Kingdoms have been an inquisitive, prying, doubting, and reading people. Their feelings received then an extraordinary impetus."⁹⁸ One efficient way to grasp the sudden interest in autobiography is to consider the memoirs of ordinary soldiers. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that soldiers and sailors began to emerge as empathetic figures with whom readers might identify. Before then, soldiers were regarded as mercenaries, unlucky at best, criminal at worst, and subject to a harsh and brutal life that was as remote as it was horrible to the great majority of literate Europeans. These views changed slowly, but massive wartime mobilization, which extended the reach of the army into many more families, the difficult burdens that both civilians and soldiers shared during the continental wars, and finally new notions of citizenship made the soldier increasingly sympathetic, a representative of "everyman," even a model of emulation. "The campaign in the Peninsula is the first in British history to be written up by a score or so literate men from the other ranks," notes Clive Emsley about Wellington's army in Spain in 1812–1813; "the common man's participation in war was recognized as important by him and by his readers."⁹⁹ 50

     But the revolution had an even more profound effect: its presence in daily life was not so much political as temporal. In this period, personal memories became increasingly stranded in an "old-fashioned" past that historical consciousness had molded and separated and cut off from the present. Indeed, the everyday use of adjectives such as "old-fashioned" or "old-time" dates from the early 1800s. It is also clear that autobiography as a genre was invigorated by the crisis of memory, which made the past an object of concern while denying complete access to it. According to Jerome Buckley, "autobiography sets the self-portrait in time and motion, presenting, as it does, a changing personality, developing, declining, remembering, regretting, rather than a fixed and finite impression."¹⁰⁰ In other words, newly validated experiences of dislocation and displacement nourished both the observing self and the autobiographical gestures it enacted. A telling example of this is the myriad recollections of childhood that became commonplace in nineteenth-century autobiography. It was from the perspective of the lost child that autobiographers apprised the discontinuity between past and present. "The fact is," writes Richard Coe, "that the origins of Childhood as a genre," with its sense of bitterness, frustration, and loss, "coincided from the outset with a major period of upheaval, with the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution each in its own way hard at work destroying the past."¹⁰¹ Joyce Appleby agrees; in her study of life narratives in the United States, she finds that the literal and the literary construction of an individual life in the tumultuous fifty years after the revolution was related to "the collapse of venerable hierarchies and the scattering of family members," which "caught Americans unawares" and set them off on "different avenues of emotional release."¹⁰² Given the emerging structure of temporality, which facilitated distinctions between the "I Now" and the "I Then," it was increasingly possible for the observing self to see itself anew in terms of a past that was far away and closed off; in turn, the acknowledged distance from and concern for a prior self prompted renewed, more strenuously self-conscious reflection.¹⁰³ And, since public life in large part fashioned the narrational devices by which private lives came to be understood as discontinuous, it is possible to conceive of the constitution of the private by the public. 51

     John Gillis, in his important book A World of Their Own Making, points to an "epochal turning point in Western family life" at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "What sets our age apart," he explains, "is that each family is now the creator and custodian of its own myths, rituals, and images." Homes were increasingly invested with new meanings and resembled "mini-museums, filled with heirlooms, mementos, and souvenirs of family," with what Harriet Beecher Stowe later happily described as "household fairies."¹⁰⁴ Historians of private life concur: the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of letter writing, diary keeping, scrapbook pasting, and portrait taking, above all in the middle classes, but the trend was general. Families took more care to commemorate personal occasions, birthdays, and holidays. Memories were "hoarded like capital," writes Anne Martin-Fugier.¹⁰⁵ Changing structures of temporality after 1800 refurbished private space in the family as well: wardrobes and attics and old houses, like the hedges along the Grimms' fields, were reconstituted by time, gaining richness and texture as repositories of memory. They were spaces in which the presence of other pasts had been scrambled, as Susan Stewart writes, "into a simultaneous order which memory is invited to rearrange: heaven and hell, tool and ornament, ancestor and heir, decay and preservation."¹⁰⁶ 52

     Strange places at the beginning of the nineteenth century such as Frenchman's Island, and also attics, haunted houses, and the remote villages the Grimms believed they had stumbled upon, indicate the extent to which everyday material life bore the marks of newly imagined ruptures of history. They contained a past increasingly regarded for its incongruencies with the present and approached as a separate place in time: bounded, distant, and intransparent. It would be silly to argue that suddenly the vast majority of Europeans and Americans consciously upheld this new historical consciousness or identified with the experience of exile or consorted with ghosts. What is striking, however, is the degree to which the past was represented in terms of public and private loss and the degree to which memory work became an obsession both for nations and families. An awareness of the breaks of the past made nostalgia for a different lifetime a familiar emotion: the reconfiguration of time necessarily impinged on the emotions of men and women and parents and children. To an increasing degree, the sense of nineteenth-century selfhood depended on the recognition and exploration of loss, which can be considered one of the "sources of the self" and a constituent part of "the modern identity."¹⁰⁷ Loss is a particularly useful way to explore the emergence of the modern self, because the apprehension of displacement relied on common structures of temporality that had the effect of connecting purely individual misfortunes to larger social processes, thus inviting narration, reflection, and mutual recognition. It also gave historical process an ordinary scale and a quotidian aspect. As a result, losses were understood in distinctly personal terms, and they made salient the subjective positions of contemporaries. Thus trivial stories had powerful resonance as testimony to the ways in which individuals fit themselves (however awkwardly) into history and allowed history to make sense of their own lives. The interplay between grand narrative and the individual evidence of experience produced a compelling interior voice that was characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It bared the "naked heart" to which Peter Gay refers and made possible a myriad of personal journeys by way of recollection and imagination to the broken regions of the past. As historians explore the historical nature of private realms and personal subjectivity, a useful point of departure might well be the interiorized versions of public history that express themselves as nostalgia. 53

     At the same time, nostalgia and the recognition of loss have profound political implications. The singularization of history that Reinhart Koselleck identifies in the turbulence of the French Revolution opened rather than closed historical alternatives because it created a mutually comprehensible discursive field in which vernacular narratives and counter-narratives flourished; it helped pull together a sentimental community in which loss and pain could speak up and be validated.¹⁰⁸ The visibility of ruins, for example, reconstituted (national) difference in an age of empire in ways that remain pertinent today. Moreover, nostalgic renditions of contemporary history offered a critique of the claims and pieties of the present. These proved to be so compelling because they were alert to the individual scale of loss and dislocation.¹⁰⁹ Narratives of displacement, exile, and nostalgia dramatized difference and incommensurability, prompting empathy in the face of catastrophe and skepticism in the face of the present. 54

     A study of nostalgia also clarifies the competing claims of social and cultural history, with their different emphasis on the categories "experience" and "perception." I have argued that nostalgia is a sightfulness that gives meaning to experiences that might otherwise have gone unremarked. Without a historical narrative, experience would have remained immediate and diminished in social meaning. At the same time, however, without the brutal penetration of new political and economic arrangements into ordinary lives, there would be only a tenuous recognition of larger historical narratives and little general interest in cultural relics and gestures of remembrance. Nostalgia requires both a discursive field in which discontinuity is given particular historical form and the material evidence of disruption in order to give historical forms the poignancy that allows them to be recognized over time and space. It is worth considering the shape of nostalgia in the present, when fragments of the past are energetically manufactured and avidly consumed but do not necessarily correspond to the evidence of experience. The interiorized voice and vernacular location of nostalgia have been made more obsolescent by the ability of the mass media to package and repackage the past in a way that facilitates its omnipresence and sensuousness—what Susan Stewart refers to as "desire for desire"—but diminishes its pertinence to particular lives. (Consider, for example, Reminisce, since 1990 "the magazine that brings back the good times," signified mostly through bygone ads and fads.) Bits and pieces of the past are scattered about all around us, but insofar as they lack provenance they do not have the power to tell their own version of history or to undermine the versions of others. This is nostalgia without melancholy. Its ability to indict the present and imagine the future is accordingly lessened. Commodified in this way, the past is no longer a different place, and the troubled, tenuous connections that made historical self-awareness so satisfying are lost in easygoing consumption.¹¹⁰ 55

     The possibility of envisioning in the present day a version of nostalgia without melancholy recalls the historicity of the phenomenon. Nostalgia corresponds to the historical age, one that was not only saturated with narratives of transformation and movement but keenly aware of the estrangement that those motions called forth. At the very moment that the calamities that befall individuals are no longer comprehended in terms of a shared, knowable historical process, nostalgia threatens to simply shrivel into bad luck and fails to generate wider social meanings. This was the case before the onset of the historical age some two hundred years ago. A study of nostalgia suggests how fragile has been historical consciousness and how apposite is Chateaubriand's nightmare of an eternal present, a place that is undisturbed by the difference of the past because it cannot fashion the narratives to assimilate the signs of yesterday's lives. 56

Peter Fritzsche earned his degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, and is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of numerous books, including Reading Berlin 1900 (1996) and Germans into Nazis (1998). In 1999, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to complete a history of nostalgia in the modern world, and he is continuing research on history and memory, ethnographies of the past, and the production of historical knowledge.

Notes

I am very grateful for the perceptive comments made by Aleida Assmann, Clare Crowston, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Diane Koenker, Reinhart Koselleck, Harry Liebersohn, Kathy Oberdeck, Glenn Penny, Mark Steinberg, and John Whittier-Ferguson, and by the anonymous readers for the AHR, and for financial support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
¹ François-René de Chateaubriand, The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, selected and translated by Robert Baldick (New York, 1961), 73. In the complete edition, The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, trans., 6 vols. (London, 1902), the quote appears on 1: 93–94.
² Baldick, Memoirs of Chateaubriand, 174. A less fine translation can be found in the complete Memoirs, 2: 38–39.
³ Baldick, Memoirs of Chateaubriand, 12.
⁴ Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," AHR 102 (December 1997): 1386–1403; Margaret Atwood, "In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction," AHR 103 (December 1998): 1503–29, as well as the comments made by Lynn Hunt; and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, "Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory," AHR 106 (June 2001): 906–22.
⁵ Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 4, 15.
⁶ Koselleck, Futures Past, 31. See also Christian Meier, "Historical Answers to Historical Questions: The Origins of History in Ancient Greece," Arethusa 20 (1987).
⁷ Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), quoted in Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Introduction," to Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth, 1968), 9; and Burke, Reflections, 92, 181–82.
⁸ Burke to A. J. F. Dupont, March 29, 1790, cited in O'Brien, "Introduction," to Burke, Reflections, 23.
⁹ Koselleck, Futures Past, 275–76. Koselleck's argument is consistent with older historiographical reflections, and his philosophical premises have provided contemporary theorists invaluable components for a definition of modernity around the notion of "unrepeatable time." See in particular Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C., 1987), 13; Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London, 1995), xii; and Rudy Koshar, Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 18; as well as Klaus Behrens, Friedrich Schlegels Geschichtsphilosophie (1794–1808): Ein Beitrag zur politischen Romantik (Tübingen, 1984); Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1966); Richard Glasser, Studien zur Geschichte des Französischen Zeitbegriffs (Munich, 1936); David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985); Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, Elliott Coleman, trans. (Baltimore, Md., 1956); Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993); and Rudolf Wendorff, Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewusstseins in Europa (Opladen, 1980).