Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reissue, 5/15/2008
EAN 9780521062985, ISBN10: 0521062985
Paperback, 492 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm
Language: English
This book examines the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood and lived as historical identities during the 1800s. It examines the stages and conflicts in the process of 'becoming historical' through the works of prominent Prussian artists and intellectuals (Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Felix Mendelssohn, Jacob Grimm, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, Leopold von Ranke) who attached their personal visions to the reformist agenda of the Prussian regime that took power in 1840. The historical account of the evolution of analogous and inter-related commitments to a cultural reformation that would create communal solidarity through subjective identification with public memory is framed by the philosophical perspectives on historical selfhood provided by F. W. J. Schelling and his radical critics, Karl Marx and Søren Kierkegaard, thus drawing this story of building selves and communities in early nineteenth-century Berlin into debates about historical determined and contingently constructed identities.
List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Philosophical prologue
historical ontology and cultural reformation
Schelling in Berlin, 1841–5
Part I. Historicism in Power
1840 and the Historical Turn in Prussian Cultural Politics
1. Nation, church, and the politics of historical identity
Frederick William IV's vision of cultural reformation
2. 'Redeemed nationality'
Christian Bunsen and the transformation of ethnic peoples into ethical communities under the guidance of the historical principle
Part II. Architectural and Musical Historicism
Aesthetic Education and Cultural Reformation
3. Building historical identities in space and stone
Schinkel's search for the shape of ethical community
4. The generation of ethical community from the spirit of music
Mendelssohn's musical constructions of historical identity
Part III. Law, Language, and History
Cultural Identity and the Self-Constituting Subject in the Historical School
5. The tension between immanent and transcendent subjectivity in the Historical School of Law
from Savigny to Stahl
6. The past as a foreign home
Jacob Grimm and the relation between language and historical identity
7. Ranke and the Christian-German state
contested historical identities and the transcendent foundations of the historical subject
Antiphilosophical Epilogue
historicizing self-identity in Kierkegaard and Marx, 1841–6
Index.