The Moment of Rupture: Historical Consciousness in Interwar German Thought (Intellectual History of the Modern Age) - Hardcover

Beck, Humberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812251598 ISBN 13: 9780812251593

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time.

According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity," a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Humberto Beck is Professor at the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

This book explores the rise in significance of instantaneous time—the sudden temporality of the instant (Augenblick)—in several currents of German thought during the first decades of the twentieth century. Between 1914 and 1940, in response to the experiences of abrupt discontinuity and social and political rupture, a new form of historical time consciousness was born in Germany, which articulated itself around the notion of instantaneity. Three German writers in particular—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulation of the instantaneous as a category of thought. Their work employed instantaneity as a conceptual framework for the description and interpretation of the experiences of rupture and discontinuity, both personal and collective. Together, they produced a constellation of concepts and figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of a distinct instantaneist "regime of historicity"—a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.

The creation of this new formula for the perception of temporality drew considerably from a modern tradition of reflection on the concept of the instant as a philosophical and aesthetic category, a tradition that spanned the poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire's theory of modernité, and the artistic and literary practices of the historical avant-gardes. Given the existence of this previous tradition of reflection on instantaneity, what was created in Germany during this period was not a qualitatively new idea of the instant—a philosophical concept that goes back as far as Plato—but, rather, the transformation of suddenness and abrupt discontinuity into the foundations of a new organization of the experience of time. Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin turned to the figure of instantaneity in order to intellectually represent an era marked by shocks in individual perception and other historical and political crises. Through their works, the instant became a defining figure of the era's historical consciousness.

Germany, 1914-1940: Experiences of Historical Discontinuity and Crisis

Between the years 1914 and 1940—that is, between the outbreaks of the First World War and the Second—Germany experienced an almost uninterrupted series of violent ruptures. The feeling of euphoric expectation that preceded the First World War was followed by the traumatic experiences of the troops on the battlefield and the devastation of a calamitous military defeat. At the conclusion of the war in 1918, the proclamation of the new Weimar Republic marked the beginning of a period of extreme social and political turmoil after which would come, in turn, the rapid establishment, in 1933, of a brutal dictatorship and the eruption of a new world war a few years later. Before these political upheavals, German society had already undergone shock-like experiences and perceptions brought about by new technologies and urbanization. Berlin, capital of both the Reich and the Republic, typified the new mass industrial metropolis. The entire European continent shared the experience of historical rupture brought about by war, revolution, accelerated modernization, and crisis, but in Germany the rupture was the most extreme. From 1914 to 1940, the nation endured a turbulent progression of events. War, military defeat, imperial collapse and change of regime, failed revolution, economic breakdown, general strikes, unsuccessful putsches, rule by emergency powers, the increase of political radicalism and violence, and the rise of a totalitarian dictatorship—these were just some of the events that crowded these tumultuous years. Their accumulation generated an intense sensation of discontinuity, both historical and perceptual. The recurrence of the feeling of discontinuity throughout the interwar years contributed to the formation of a sense of perplexity that became the characteristic feature of the experience of time during this unstable era.

Taking into consideration this historical context, The Moment of Rupture asks a question about the relationship between ideas and events in modern European intellectual history: What role did the concept of instantaneous temporality play in German thought between 1914 and 1940? My proposition is that instantaneity represents a crucial concept for the development of the historical and time consciousness of the period. The notion of the instant was understood as the isolated now of abrupt discontinuity. Its importance arises from a certain correspondence between the instant's conceptual features—above all, its connection with suddenness and rupture—and the nature of the interwar years as unstable and marked by recurrent radical change. Given the defining qualities of this period in German history, it is possible to speak of an "elective affinity" between the experiences of crisis and rupture and the instant as a conceptual device. The grounds for this affinity reside in the instant's ability, as a notion, to posit certain questions that would remain obscure under a conventional understanding of temporality as continuous duration. With its close connection to suddenness, the instant cultivates a sensibility attuned to the exceptional and the unexpected. This sensibility became fundamental to historical and time consciousness in Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Oswald Spengler, one of the most representative authors of the era, seems to have made an argument similar to mine in The Decline of the West when he wrote: "In the Classical world years played no role, in the Indian world decades scarcely mattered; but here [in Germany in 1918] the hour, the minute, even the second is of importance. Neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea of the tragic tension of a historic crisis like that of August 1914, when even moments seemed of overwhelming significance." Following this line of interpretation, I analyze historically and conceptually the variations on the theme of instantaneous temporality that were articulated during this period of German history. The history of these variations is significant for understanding fundamental aspects of twentieth-century intellectual history, such as the role of historicism and antihistoricism in modern visions of temporality, and transformations in the notion of individual and collective experience.

Previous approaches to this topic include Karl Heinz Bohrer's conceptualization of suddenness as a motif in European modernist literature; Anson Rabinbach's examination of the critical reactions of German intellectuals to the experience of catastrophe after the end of the two world wars; and Michael Löwy's study of the relations between Jewish messianism and libertarian socialism in Central European thought. Stephen Kern's panoramic analysis of the "culture of time and space" in Europe at the turn of the century and Modris Eksteins' characterization of Germany's perspective on the First World War as a central moment in the emergence of modern consciousness have also addressed the interaction between representations of time and historical events. The Moment of Rupture intends to contribute to this area of inquiry by constituting an intellectual history of the operation of the motif of instantaneous time in the work of three authors in whose writings instantaneity functions as a crucial notion for the conceptual mediation of the experiences of war, revolution, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812251598
• ISBN 13: 9780812251593
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland