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Two Tales of Modernity and Its Discontents
Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. By Peter Fritzsche. Harvard University Press, 2004. 288 pages.
Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914. By Harold Mah. Cornell University Press, 2003. 240 pages.
Recently two books have appeared, both sweeping in temporal coverage, comparative in analysis, and grand in intellectual ambition: Harold Mah's study of France and Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and Peter Fritzsche's study of those two countries during roughly the same era but also of England and America. One side benefit awaiting the audience of these two volumes is that readers will discover they have an unusual opportunity to observe-especially in Mah's case-whether the historians and literary critics of our day have learned how to engage in a meaningful dialogue. The major benefit, however, is to enjoy two fast-paced, breathtaking journeys across the littered landscape of modernity and its discontents.
The burden of Fritzsche's Stranded in the Present is to show how deeply the French Revolution wounded the psyches of nineteenth-century Europeans, and to examine the innovative if sometimes desperate measures by which persons from different walks of life sought to find consolation. Tradition had to be supplanted by history when past and present parted company during the great upheavals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The new historical consciousness was about loss, loss that could never be repaired. "The losses of the past are irreversible; this is what constitutes the melancholy of history" (8).
When Fritzsche speaks of the growth of historical awareness, he sometimes refers to formal historical narratives such as those written by Adolphe Thiers, François-Auguste Mignet, or Prosper de Barante. "Liberal historians strained mightily to impose structure, pattern, and necessity onto the French Revolution," he notes, "and to narrate the great event in terms of a unifying and rational process" (46). To which one might add that the French liberal historians felt obliged to grapple with the very tricky problem of recommending what Emmanuel Sieyès said about the Third Estate while deleting the radical political philosophy in terms of which the author of What is the Third Estate? (1789) made his argument. Where Sieyès had spoken about natural rights,...