• Corpus ID: 16160019

Aleida Assmann Transformations of the Modern Time Regime

@inproceedings{Assmann2014AleidaAT,
  title={Aleida Assmann Transformations of the Modern Time Regime},
  author={Aleida Assmann and F. C. d' Audretsch},
  year={2014}
}

• Aleida Assmann, F. Audretsch
• Published 2014
• History

Graham Swift writes in his novel Waterland: 'Once upon a time, in the bright sixties, there was plenty offuture on offer.' 1 His book was published in 1983. After only two decades the future of the sixties had already lost much of its glamour. The future, as historians have instructed us in the meantime, has its own history. While it had been generally assumed that the working domain of historians is the past, they discovered in the 1970s that this past also included different futures. Reinhart Koselleck developed this idea ivi an influential book entitled Futures Past. 2 That the future is no Ionger what it used to be is an insight that is accessible to anyone with a long enough memory. There was indeed plenty of future on offer in the bright sixties. Let us take as an example the speech that philosopher Ernst Bloch delivered when he received the so-called Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade) in the Frankfurt Faulskirehe in 1967. In his acceptance speech, Bloch declared: 'A map on which you cannot find the land Utopia is not even worth looking at.'3 For Bloch, 'utopia' was a metaphor for a vision of a future in which those who have been notoriously exploited and humiliated in the past are given a just place in a better world. Hisnotion of utopia entailed the conviction that the way to a better futurewas to be paved and enforced by 'justified revolutions' (menschenfreundliche Revolutionen). For Bloch, they were the opposite of wars that are fought to conquer and