Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany

by Crane, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780801437526
• ISBN10: 0801437520
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

This provocative book challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of historical consciousness in Germany. Susan A. Crane argues that the ever-more-elaborate preservation of the historical may actually reduce the likelihood that history can be experienced with the freshness and individuality characteristic of the early collectors and preservationists. Her book is both a study of the emergence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany of a distinctively modem conception of historical consciousness, and a meditation on what was lost as historical thought became institutionalized and professionalized.

Public forms of remembering the past which are familiar today, such as historical museums and historical preservation, have surprisingly recent origins. In Germany, caring about the past took on these distinctively new forms after the Napoleonic wars. The Brothers Grimm gathered fairy tales and documented the origins of the German language. Historical preservationists collected documents and artifacts and organized the conservation of cathedrals

Author Biography

Susan A. Crane is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
The Historical Sublime	1	(37)
Asleep among the Ruins	1	(3)
The Rhetoric of ``Waking and Winning''	4	(15)
Of Ruins and the Sublime	19	(16)
History-Perceived, History-Created	35	(3)
The Collection and Preservation of Historical Objects	38	(22)
The Rhetoric of ``Saving''	38	(6)
Collecting Immobile Objects: The Denkmaler Inventories	44	(16)
Collective Collecting in ``The Age of Associations''	60	(45)
Figuring the Collector	60	(3)
Collectors Alone and in Association: Correspondences	63	(11)
Generations as Collectives	74	(7)
The Historical Associations	81	(13)
Correspondences: Gender, Family, and Emotion	94	(11)
Finding Form for the Content: Historical Museums	105	(38)
The Museum Context	106	(10)
Objects and Copies: Journals as Museums	116	(13)
Imagined Museums	129	(8)
Real Museums	137	(6)
Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness	143	(36)
``Historical Memory and Collective Memory''	149	(12)
Collective Memory and Personal Property	161	(5)
Public Spheres, Public Opinion	166	(8)
Individual, Collective, Historical Memory	174	(5)
Bibliography	179	(14)
Index	193