17. The Experience of Rupture and the History of Memory

Abstract

Chapter seventeen the experienCe of rupture and the history of memory Brecht deseure and Judith pollmann in the last three decades, the idea of modernity has become tightly bound to the study of historical consciousness. having abandoned the notion that there is only one path to modernity, more and more scholars have come to define modernity above all as a cultural habitus. modernity is now less about doing objectively 'modern' things than about a form of selfawareness that makes people think of themselves or others as modern. in this definition, modernity implies above all an awareness of change and a sense of the past as non-repeatable, in short a 'modern' form of historical consciousness.1 although scholars have differing views on the pace and nature of the emergence of this sense of a non-repeatable past, nearly all of them share the notion of a chronologically irreversible transformation, somewhere between 1500 and 1900, of pre-modern into modern ways of making sense of the past. typically, binary concepts are used to describe this transformation: from traditional to modern, from cyclical to linear, from continuous to discontinuous. modern ways of dealing with the past are thus assumed not to have complemented but to have replaced pre-modern ones.2 Both modernists and early modernists have long argued that the key catalyst for such a transformation of attitudes towards time and the past is the experience of rupture and crisis.3 schematically put, the argument 1 marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air. The experience of modernity (1st ed.

The experience of state formation. Chronicling and petitioning on the Dutch island of Ameland (c. 1780–1815)

“…At least three historiographical traditions can be discerned. A first tradition originates in the work of Reinhardt Koselleck and includes advocates and critics of the idea that extreme experiences of rupture caused by dramatic events during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras may be held responsible for new, 'modern' forms of historical awareness and concepts of time (Baggerman, 2011;Becker, 1999;Berman, 1982;Deseure & Pollmann, 2013;Fritzsche, 2004;Hartog, 2003;Koselleck, 1979;Koselleck & Reichardt, 1988;Terdiman, 1993). A second tradition, which builds on the older German Alltagsgeschichte, focuses more in particular on the (military and economic) experience of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to understand what impact they had on people's lives (Aaslestad & Joor, 2015;Forrest, Hagemann, & Rendall, 2009;James, 2013;Planert, 2007;Planert, 2009).…”

“…A number of these texts are known to have survived from the Netherlands around 1800, but little in-depth study has been made of them so far (a notable exception is Baggerman & Dekker, 2009; cf. for the Southern Netherlands Deseure, 2010;Deseure & Pollmann, 2013). This contribution offers a close reading of one such text, somewhere between a diary and a chronicle, written by Cornelis Sorgdrager, an inhabitant of Ameland.…”