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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
Peter Fritzsche. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, Pp. 288. $27.95 cloth.
In August 1815, the German art collector Sulpiz Boisseree traveled by market boat from Cologne to Mainz. During the journey, he recorded his observations less of what he saw passing outside than of what he heard being discussed below deck. Artisans, tailors, cobblers: everyone was talking about European politics, expressing conflicting points-of-view shaped by diverse experiences which nevertheless, according to Peter Fritzsche, shared a common frame of meaning: the French Revolution and its social, intellectual, and ideological aftermath. Albeit unconcerned with what made the French Revolution possible, Fritzsche identifies it as the prime mover of nearly everything in its wake; this, of course, is not an unfamiliar story. But Fritzsche's book surveys the culture of everyday, postrevolutionary life, turning up a surprising range of provocative details about the melancholy that the rupture of the French Revolution effected, creating the sense of the past as lost. Drawing mainly from letters, memoirs, biographies, journals, fiction, and poetry, rather than "official documents" of the period, Fritzsche's study brings us closer to the intimate effects of large-scale historical change, above all to the self-conscious "historicization of private life" (161). Fritzsche's cultural history, moreover, is clear, accessible, and engaging and its chapters self-contained enough to make them useful even when considered separately--for instance, for the purpose of an assigned reading in an undergraduate course.
The first chapter revisits...
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