The European Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp.

3747, 2001
Liberation from the Past
1
,
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MASSIMO MASTROGREGORI
,
,
What is the religion of the past which has dominated European culture over the
last two centuries? When had we imposed on us the unlimited concern for past events,
the retrievalcautious, but inspired by enthusiasmof every legend and fairy tale, the
nostalgia for what no longer exists, the habit of digging through time to reconstruct
new stories, fortied with proof, deductions, scientic demonstrations?
2
How has it come about that ruins have been transformed into archaeological
gardens, piles of dusty les into treasured archives, cracked kitchenware into museum
pieces, old junk furniture into sought-after antiques? When did the cult of monuments
3
and public memorials, which has littered our towns with statues and symbols, lled our
days with ofcial commemorations, begin? We must begin with these questions, if we
want to comment on the liberation from the weight of the past.
4
No doubt to speak in a literal sense of liberation or of weight of the past is
hazardous. It is, in both cases, a complex metaphorical image, which has a long history
in itself, and contains the idea that memories oppress our souls and stop our actions: an
idea that is not fair to memories at all. For my essay, these two metaphors have simply
been an opportunity for discussing the historical importance of memories in our culture.
More precisely, rather than the weight of the past we should perhaps speak of the
power of memories. It is not the past, in fact, which exists or has ever existed (if not as
a simple perception of time or as a Kantian noumenon), but memories,
5
tales still alive,
or trails in space, pure material, of those no longer with us. Lasting objects and signs
exist,
6
hold out against time and destruction, the hand of fate and that of men. Objects
such as these last, be they cities or artefacts, skeletons or miracles of loveliness, be they
rich in signs to be interpreted or completely bare. And they speak to the conscience of
the living, whence, from the meeting with those objects and signs, with visible marks,
memories ow; and become tales, at once doubted, at times rejected, at times
fascinating and wonderful as gentle light dreams, at other times terrifying as nightmares.
Here in the Eternal City, the Temple of all the gods, majestic, with its vault open to
the heavens, and hereon the bottom of the Sea of Otrantothe hulk of a ship of
refugees sunk on a holiday by a naval corvette: from a porthole the arm of a corpse
hangs in the eddies.
Some of these objects seem to speak to our minds, our hearts; others are silent,
after having been attractive to our forefathers for so long a time; some, so to speak, are
,

Via Diego Simonetti, 29, 00122 Roma (Ostia), Italy.

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ 1470-1316 online/01/010037-11 2001 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770020026717
38
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MASSIMO MASTROGREGORI
real, others fade into unreality, and while present are invisible. Only from the former,
then (from those we have called real), do we receive something: a spirit which moves
in the approval, the discussion and the transcending of our old ideas: the feeling of a
greater experience of things; the enchantment of beauty; the pride of power; painful
wounds, in short, or the breath of hope, which causes illusions and life.
And so from what past, spirit, experience, sorrow, beauty, from what hope ought
we to liberate us? But of course: from the past which gives the prestige of power and
leads to domination: that imperial past, for example, which left Leopardi unmoved in
Rome in 1822,
7
or made Lucien Febvre shiver with indignation in 1953, to the extent
of his lumping Karl V and Hitler together in the same censure;
8
or from the past which
causes pain. And so here we are drawing up an impossible list of evil, of the past which
must be removed. Let only the past which promises hope remain: was not the author
of tragedies, Frinicus, ned and them kicked out of Athens for having portrayed his
peoples ills on the stage? Let Christ remain, not Pilate or the Borgia Alexandre VI;
Seneca, not Nero.
But can we really choose the past which we would like to take as an example and
the one we have to free ourselves from? Has the historical experience of the last two
centuries from Kant to Croce and Benjamin perhaps demonstrated the contrary?
Between past and present there is a transcendental relationship: the present must refer
to a determined past, which thus acquires reality and visibility; free, independent of the
present, and only the past which we have called unreal.
The present, therefore opens up a space of knowability
9
within which it is possible
to perceive the only past possible. Political, economic, religious, moral and esthetic
conditions converge in a determined present to mold the visible past (a possible one
which can become real). Only within a form of this kind do the problems arise which
pass through memory and history, and the conditions which determine the fate of the
visible traces of the past: several great thinkers of this closing century of ours would
agree on this point: from Croce, for whom all history is contemporary history,
10
to
Benjamin, for whom every present bears within itself particular conditions of knowabil-
ity to Maurice Halbwachs,
11
for whom memories are made possible by present social
conditions (the cadres sociaux de la me

moire).
Now, the core element of this argument is that at the end of the eighteenth
century an absolutely new horizon of knowability came into being; an unprecedented
relationship with the past. Up to now it has mapped the course not only for
historiographic problems and issues, but also for the life of our collective memory and
the actual conditions of our tradition regarding the memories and visible traces of the
past. This brings us back to the initial point raised; and now we must pause to look at
the characteristics of this new relationship with the past.
The horizon of knowability which opened up at the end of the eighteenth century
is, rst of all, unlimited: since then the past of all times, places and social classes is of
interest and to be reconstructed.
There is not the slightest event which is not, at least in theory, worth being
studied, known, taught. This is another basic novelty: the past teaches everyone.
History becomes a subject to be taught from the very beginning of our studies,
something which had never happened until the eighteenth century.
12
Initially distinct,
the two phenomena end up by converging: the nineteenth century not only redeems
Liberation from the Past
,
39
that medieval past which disgusted the men of the Enlightenment, but extends its eld
of research into every geographical corner, for example into the Orient. The experts in
the thousand branches of history are thus teachers of history; the number of them, still
fairly limited in the late nineteenth century, is today staggering, and to be estimated in
tens of thousands.
The same is to be said of the output books of history and learning, scientic
reviews, history conferences, bibliographic catalogues and sources: prior to the fore-
mentioned turning point, the way for which was paved during the eighteenth century,
they were almost nonexistent, and are now legion. Initially it was the nation-state
which fostered the knowledge of the past (national, naturally), endowing university
chairs and nancing source research; but in the course of the twentieth century this
national bias disappeared and research became international. Two basic elements are
linked to this scientic aspect of the cult of the past: the development of archaeological
excavations which aims at bringing again to light the buried treasures of the past, and
the transformation of archives from arsenals of the ruler, stored by preceding
administrations instrumental to power, into goldmines of material; evidence, for
historians with the revolutionary distinction, drawn for the rst time in history at the
very beginning of the nineteenth century, between administrative, working archives
and historical ones.
13
Disclosure of the latter is prescribed, although it has in effect
remained (for quite some time and still today) a mere illusion.
At the basis of this ofcial interest in history lie profound changes in the
relationship with the past. For example, in the late eighteenth century a new view on
things human takes root: it is the discovery of historical individuality which Friedrich
Meinecke has reconstructed in his book on the Origins of Historicism, with its culmi-
nation in Goethe. During that period the modern novel too was born, and in the rst
thirty years of the nineteenth century, with Stendhal and Balzac, the portrayal of daily
reality in literature ripens: it is the great discovery of Eric Auerbach, found in his
Mimesis, written in exile and undocumented, in Istanbul.
This discovery must be, doubtlessly, integrated with the more recent one of
Francesco Orlando, according to whom, in the period we are dealing with, outdated
objects, ruins, relics, rarities, junk, furniture and clothes shabby with age explode in
literary images.
14
In this way the past is placed at the center of European culture: what creates its
attraction is its individuality, representing reality, making us perceive the weight of time
on things. It puts forward, too, a new idea of individual memory, much more tragic and
painful: Chateaubriand invites the reader of his memoires to follow him along the trails
of his sorrows, like a wounded man on the trails of his blood. Such a feeling of time
passed is intensied and transformed by contact with the city, now seen as an
archaeological labyrinth
15
where one wanders and loses ones bearings.
It is, in fact, the city of last century which functions as a transformer of
memories: its streets swarm with symbols; the decorations on the buildings and the
names of the streets are historical encyclopedias; without mentioning the interiors, rich
in objects and styles. The bricabracomanie, as Goncourt calls it, is born, the mania for
collecting the most varied objects. A sort of short-circuit between private collections,
public collections, auctions and museums is created; amongst the latter the profane and
secularized version is the large department store.
16
The new man of the nineteenth
40
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MASSIMO MASTROGREGORI
century needed objects in order to think and this is still true for us. One must not
forget, however, that these objects are also memories.
The innite capacity of industry and technology multiplies these objects and makes
the production of innumerable pieces of evidence of the past possible: it is enough to
consider merely the world of photography.
The meticulous research, cataloguing and interpreting all possible evidence of the
past, including that which is buried, at the hands of experts; the assiduous teaching of
all possible history; the huge production of new, visible traces, and commerce in them;
the resolute conservation of the greatest possible number of them; the passion for
memories and things of the memory: these are the original characteristics of the new
horizon of knowability which opened at the end of the eighteenth century and which
to a great extent is still with us.
True, the passion for memories, too, is a striking historical phenomenon. The
proliferation of studies on the historical memory is the result of a large demand for
knowledge to which historians, initially, were extraneous. The topic has taken hold, it
would seem, for many reasons. There was, above all, a political side to the question,
where the claim of the memory of the conquered and oppressed were expressed (let us
not think only of the lower classes).
But the almost obsessive presence of this attraction for memory, which has
dominated the scene from the end of the 1970s (after having characterized a good part
of the century: Bergson and Proust!), is a highly important cultural fact, of a general
nature, where the political motive ends up by converging and disappearing. In this case
psychoanalytic culture has played an important role. Memory has procured, even from
this area, a conspicuous central position in recent mass culture; even memory epidemics,
allied to enormous means of communication, are linked to it: as in the case of the
multiple personality syndrome,
17
widespread in the USA from the early 1980s. Some
successful lms have brought the topic to the attention of the broad public. In Ridley
Scotts Blade Runner (1982), Deckard, the android hunter, subjects the lovely Rachel to
the test which will reveal her replicant nature, designed and built by the Tyrrell
Corporation. Rachel is unaware of her nature, but Tyrrell himself says that she is
beginning to suspect. How can a replicant, Deckard then wonders, nourish suspicions?
Tyrrell: More human than human is our motto. Rachel is an experiment: we began
to recognize in them [the replicants] a strange obsession. After all they are emotion-
ally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which
you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or pillow
for their emotions and consequently, we can control them better.
Deckard: Memories! Youre talking about memories
The idea of articial memories is often to be found in the short stories of the American,
Philip K. Dick: it is rst mooted, for example, in a story of 1966, Memories for Sale. But
Dicks novel from which Blade Runner is adapted is from 1968 (Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?); since then the theme has traveled: in the lm Strange Days by Katherine
Bigelow (1995) the grafting on of articial memories is, in fact, a business venture
comparable to that of videocassettes today, and in the recent Dark City by A. Proyas
(1998) evil aliens search in vain for secret of the human soul in individual memories
with which they carry out complicated experiments, even continually modifying
Liberation from the Past
,
41
materially, by night, domestic surroundings, places, objects (and in the rst place
the city itself). All the discussions on computers, the memory of the future and
knowledge storage systems, have contributed to the cultural centering of the memory
theme; and, on the other hand, all the discussions on the conservation of the artistic
heritage of the past. Thus, due to this dominant attention in recent mass culture,
memory has become the object of historical studies: from a survey carried out on the
general catalogue of English and Irish libraries (Copac) we learn that in 1975, out of
fty-three titles concerning memory, none had as its subject historical memory; that in
1985, out of fty-four titles, only two were history books; and that, instead, in 1995,
out of 141, a good twenty-three were concerned with historical memory. The
explosion, therefore, took place, if these statistics do not lie, more or less in the last
fteen years.
* * *
It is difcult to say exactly when and how this new horizon of knowability came about.
It is not possible to mark the precise starting point of this new relationship to the past.
In this essay, the end of the eighteenth century has so far been assumed as initial
reference. The single facts that compose this relationship are all visible, simultaneously,
from the last decades of the nineteenth century on. They will even develop themselves
in a extraordinary way in the twentieth century. Taken separately, instead, these
phenomena have a long previous history: the unlimited concern for past events, in the
geographical as well chronological sense, is already common to the seventeenth-century
erudition, but it ourishes in the second half of the nineteenth century; the interest for
legends and myths goes back to the ancient world, but it becomes scientic in the
German Romantic culture of the rst half of the nineteenth century; before assuming
the current meaning, and until the beginnings of the twentieth century, the term
nostalgia was strictly a medical term, but the thing itself, the nostalgia of the past, is
naturally a much more ancient one; the idea of scientic demonstrations that fortify the
historical narrative grows in the German historiography of the nineteenth century and
is disseminated then by the positivist culture; the great archaeological excavations
campaigns begin around 1720, but they become immensely more intense in the course
of the nineteenth century; at the same time, the excavations sites become archaeological
gardens (as an example, the rst idea of the Via Appia Antica archaeological site in
Rome is dated 1809); the cult of monuments is very ancient, but only in the late
nineteenth century G. Carducci coined the word monumentomania; as regards the
archives, their historical value is perceived diffusely only around 1830; last, the use of
valuable pieces for furnishing and their exhibition in museums goes back at least to the
sixteenth century, but only in the nineteenth century can it be said to be an ordinary
practice.
Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century the simultaneous presence of
these (and other) phenomena, joined to their unprecedented amplitude and dissemi-
nation, witnesses the existence of a new relationship to the past, whose rst indications
are already visible from the rst years of the century.
At the same time, the combination of these various activities (historical narrative,
archives, museums, history teaching, lieux de me

moires, etc.) gives life to an ofcial

42
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MASSIMO MASTROGREGORI
religion of the past, which later becomes popular religion and general opinion: to
respect what happened is a moral obligation, to forget is almost a crime.
The phenomena that produce the deepest changes in our relationship with the past
are certainly linked to important political and economic events: can one avoid
mentioning the impact of the late eighteenth-century political revolutions and the
spread of the industrial revolution on the European continent? But perhaps the most
direct historical link, the element of transmission between grand history and the
relationship with the past, was the birth of a new kind of individual
18
who, during the
nineteenth century, obtained civil and political rights. He is or tends to be well-to-do,
works during the day (that is, he does not belong to what was called in the eighteenth
century la classe disponible) uses commodities and information (commodities which are
information), lives in a city, more or less isolated in a limited circle of acquaintances,
collects objects (he is a collector), can enjoy leisure time and go on trips (he is a tourist).
A person of this kind is thus, at one and the same time, citizen, property owner,
worker, consumer, isolated, tourist and collector (male, above all, until recently, then
female too). This person is the real key gure in the new relationship with the past, as
described.
He is the one who history teachers try to make learn facts, dates and concepts: too
often in vain; he is the one who visits museums and archaeological sites, but often
hurriedly and without particular interest; he is the one for whom household goods and
furniture are produced, well-designed objects and souvenirs (or gadgets), but he easily
loses and forgets them, looking elsewhere, attracted by new fashions; the administrative
documents on his comings and goings are conserved but no-one will ever look them
out; hundreds of photographs exist portraying his life, journeys, family, but rarely does
he bother with them, and easily loses or leaves them; his rather isolated life does not
permit him to swap experiences and memories with others, beyond certain limits; in his
role as a busy worker he has no time to think of the past,
19
unless with melancholy or
nostalgia; and then as a citizen he may with equal ease be a bourgeois in the Third
French Republic, a Fascist in Mussolinis Ventennio regime, or a puzzled voter for
Schroeders SPD.
Therefore, it is true that around him, and in fact for him, history is studied and
taught, collections and museums inaugurated or restored, archives conserved, huge
traces of material produced, memories preserved, nostalgia nourished; but he, citizen,
man of property, tourist, collector, etc. has no real interest in all this, even though it
is the very air he breathes.
He is, as it were, the indulgent spectator about whom Nietzsche spoke,
20
the
reader, amused or sleepy, of the many writers who make fun of historians from George
Eliot to Ibsen, from Gide to Beerbohm and Sartre.
21
So it happens that the same historical forces that open a new horizon of
knowability of the past, and set in motion a system where an enormous number of
memories variously circulate, producein the gure of the multifaced individualthe
element which dissolves and contradicts the original characteristics of that view over the
past.
One arrives along this avenue at the situation today, where forces are in play that
lead in many directions: not only in favor of history and interest in the past, however,
but also against history. One does not only have in mind the futurism, anti-historicism
Liberation from the Past
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43
of which Croce and Mann spoke,
22
structuralism or the logical research of Wittgenstein
(particularly his notes on Frazers Golden Bough) but all cultural phenomena where
history is intrinsically denied. There are more modern and subtle ways of annulling the
value of the past. For example, the quite recent way of considering the past a storehouse
of forms, a supermarket of styles, an open catalogue of signs to be dipped into as
required. Emptied of every precisely determined characteristic, the past wastes away
until it vanishes. It is not by chance that postmodernist culture, which extols this
intensive reuse of images of the past, runs parallel to concrete development, like digital
technology or research on mutant materials,
23
which leads to the decline of the old
concept of visible traces of the past. The texts and digitalized images are uid and
changeable at the touch of a button, without it being possible to materially trace the
changes that have taken place; also the objects produced in a mutant material are of no
use as signs of the period: they do not last in the same shape. These cultural changes
and recent technology are, in a certain sense, already working to liberate us from the
past: the future will probably be almost totally devoid of all those visible traces in which
our present, from the end of the eighteenth until today, is still rich.
Observing the presence of the past in todays situation, one uncovers a difcult
state of interaction between the great weight of the past in our culture in the very
material of our civilization and the tenacious action of forces at work to dissolve every
experience into eeting visions. Hence the maneuver to liberate us from the pastas
already explainedmay appear arduous, on the one hand, but, on the other, one
discovers that it is under way and near completion.
But would that observation and this discovery be perhaps possible without the
outline, here proposed, of an historical investigation? We cannot but agree with
Goethe:
24
it is the writing of history itself (not erudition) that is the only possible way
towards freedom from the past.
25
* * *
Yet, as soon as one raises ones eyes from these pages, this solution, where reason
inevitably leads one, is exposed as out of date: eighteenth century, in fact. Might it not
be that that said horizon of knowability is fading away, that no-one any longer believes
in the religion of the past, apart from the high priests of memory, who are believers by
profession: the thousands of archivists, historians, professors, administrators, curators,
etc? Might it not be, above all, that the idea of having to or being able to know the
past has become hollow, and another possibility looms on the horizon, where the past
is pure discontinuity, a storehouse of incomprehensible fragments?
26
We set out, with Kant and Croce, from the inevitability of a relationship with the
past: the categories of judgment are transcendental. Given the inevitability of the
relationship and in view of the historical forces which variously mould it, much as their
function may be free, the past can be known and possibly overcome, not eliminated.
In this case the conclusion is that freedom from the past is not possible. The relationship
with the past, whatever it may be, is made up of experience. An experience that is, at
the same time, projected into an immediate future, which it claims to control, regards
with condence, and for which it plans projects tirelessly. Even if all traces of the past
were to be destroyed, however, it would not necessarily mean there would be less
44
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MASSIMO MASTROGREGORI
knowledge about it. The case is quite different were historical forces to prevail that
create a world where Kant and his regulating judgment no longer have any meaning,
where the logical dominion over the past no longer exists. One could say that this has
already taken place and that this is, in fact, the postmodern condition: it is sufcient to
glance at Foucault who writes to no longer have a face, and who has the object of
his acquaintanceship dissolve, that man who could vanish like a face in the sand by the
edge of the sea. It is clear that our problem would then be put in quite different terms.
Freedom from the past becomes possible. Tradition interrupted,
27
fragments mixed
together with superciality, reused and recycled: but the new function that they take
on is a symbolic game. Our urban landscape ends by resembling the post-atomic world
of the lm Mad Max or a shiny version of African cities, full of recycled rubbish and
color. The free contamination among traditions is the norm. The religion of the past
is substituted by that of the present: the blessed present, as the writer Gianni Celati,
calls it. Plans for the future disappear, full control over time and things is abandoned.
Unforeseen effects would ensue: let us do without many things, until we stop
accumulating objects and property; let us overcome the isolation, ingrained and fortied
by the traditions of the past (family, national, religious of caste and politics). The
possibilities of contact are certainly many. After all, the citizen, tourist, man of property,
collector would disappear. But at this point reason has given way to a vision (or
hallucination).
NOTES
1. The liberation from the past: B. Croce, La storiograa come liberazione dalla storia, in idem, La
storia come pensiero e come azione (Bari: Laterza, 1943), 302; H. Arendt, Between Past and
Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), chaps. 1 and
2; H. White, The Burden of History, in idem, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism
(Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 2750; P. Nora, Le
fardeau de lhistoire aux Etats-Unis, in Me langes Pierre Renouvin. Etudes dhistoire des relations
internationales (Paris, Presses Universitaire de France, 1966), 5174; E. Shils, Tradition
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981); T. Todorov, Les abus de la memoire (Paris:
Arlea, 1995); J. Revel, Le fardeau de la memoire. Histoire et memoire dans la France daujourdhui,
in Contributi alla storia socio-religiosa. Omaggio di dieci studiosi europei a Gabriele De Rosa
(Roma/Vicenza: Istituto Luigi Sturzo, 1997), 12340.
2. New stories, fortied with proof, deductions and evidence: E. Weil, Wert und Wurde der erzahlenden
Geschichte (Go ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), 2.
3. The cult of monuments: A. Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus, in idem, Entwurf einer
Gesetzlichen Organisation der Denkmalpege in Oesterreich (Wien: Bundesdenkmalamt, 1903).
4. The weight of the past: G. Mastroianni, Il peso della tradizione, Storiograa 2 (1998):
4156.
5. It is not the past which exists, but its memories. There is to be attributed to the past, as I have
said in my paper, the existence which Kant called noumenal; it is to be added that the
importance of affairs, of the res gestae, and the fullness of their consequences play a
primary role in the process which gives life to the tradition of memories. Besides, only for
convenience did I speak exclusively of the visible traces of vanished realities, neglecting the
signs of time passed on our still living reality. On the problem of the tradition of memories:
M. Mastrogregori, La tradizione dei ricordi. Osservazioni e postille, Storiograa 2 (1998):
5799.
6. Lasting objects and signs exist. Until the eighteenth century, important developments gave life
to traditions. The correlation is not perfect, in the sense that not all important developments
Liberation from the Past
,
45
give life to traditions (it is enough to glance at the historical role of secrets, taboos, the
sacred and the inexpressible); but up to that date, in general, existing traditions derived from
developments that were, in their own way, important. From the nineteenth century
onwards, instead, we witness a proliferation of traditions freed from the importance of facts.
The whole archive of a government ministry is preserved, on principle, and the need to
select the most important documents whilst getting rid of the others is dictated only by the
lack of material space. The dominant historicist principle, in a broad sense, is that everything
must be preserved, because one day everything could become important.
7. Leopardi unmoved in Rome in 1822: G. Leopardi, Le lettere (Milano: Mondadori, 1955), 342.
8. Lucien Febvre, Karl V and Hitler: L. Febvre, Crise de la civilisation, avenir de lEurope
(Strasbourg, mars 1953), in Rivista di storia della storiograa moderna XIV, no. 12 (1993):
128: Charles Quint, considere comme un des grands realisateurs de lEurope!!!Merci bien.
Mais pourquoi pas une medaille de Napoleon 1? ou de Hitler? (there was at that moment
an ofcial European project of striking a medal for Karl V).
9. The present opens a space of knowability: W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, band V, Das
Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), chap. N 7a, 8 (Reections on the
theory of knowledge). Knowability is the translation of Benjamins term Erkennbarkeit.
10. Croce and the contemporary history: B. Croce, Teoria e storia della storiograa, Bari, Laterza
(1927), chap. I: Storia e cronaca, p. 117; see also idem, Il carattere della losoa moderna
(Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1991), chap. I: Il concetto della losoa come storicismo assoluto,
928.
11. Halbwachs: cf. M. Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la memoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1925),
chap. III: La reconstruction du passe, 83113.
12. The teaching of history and the development of national history: A. Momigliano, Lintroduzione
dellinsegnamento della storia come soggetto accademico e le sue implicazioni, in idem, Tra storia e
storicismo (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1985), 7596; C. Simon, Staat und Geschichtswissenschaft in
Deutschland und Frankreich 18711914 (Bern/Frankfurt/M./New York/Paris, 1988); W.
Weber, Priester der Klio (Frankfurt/M./Bern/New York, 1984); W. Keylor, Academy and
Community. The Foundation of French Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1975); Ch.-O.
Carbonell, Histoire et historiens. Une mutation ideologique des historiens franc ais 18651885
(Toulouse, 1976); O. Dumoulin, Profession historien: un metier en crise (19191939), The`se
de IIIe cycle, EHESS, Paris, 1983; P. den Boer, Geschiedenis als beroep. De professionalisering
van de geschiedbeoefening in Frankrijk (18181914) (Nijmegen, 1987); D. S. Goldstein, The
Professionalization of History in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Century, Storia della storiograa no. 3 (1983): 327; P. R. H. Slee, Learning and a Liberal
Education. The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester,
18001914 (Manchester, 1986); M. Moretti, Storici accademici e insegnamento superiore
della storia nellItalia unita. Dati e questioni preliminari, Quaderni storici XXVIII, no. 1
(1993), 6198, n. 82; K. D. Erdmann, Die Oekumene der Historiker. Geschichte der Interna-
tionalen Historikerkongresse und des Comite International des Sciences historiques (Goettingen,
1987).
13. Current and historical archives: cf. R.-H. Bautier, La phase cruciale de lhistoire des archives:
la constitution des depots darchives et la naissance de larchivistique (XVIe-debut du XIXe
sie`cle), Archivum XVIII (1968) 13949.
14. Meinecke, Auerbach, Orlando: F. Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Muenchen u.
Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1936); E. Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlandis-
chen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1944); F. Orlando, Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della
letteratura. Rovine, reliquie, rarita`, robaccia, luoghi inabitati e tesori nascosti (Torino: Einaudi,
1993); as regards Chateaubriand, see F. R. de Chateaubriand, Memorie doltretomba, vol. I
(Torino: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1995), 107.
15. The city as archaeological labyrinth: cf. G. Celati, Il bazar archeologico, in idem, Finzioni
occidentali (Torino: Einaudi, 1986), 187215.
16. Museums, large department stores, objects for thinking and photographs: G. Saisselin, Le bourgeois et
le bibelot (Paris: A. Michel, 1990); M. Douglas and B. Isherwood, The World of Goods (New
46
,
MASSIMO MASTROGREGORI
York: Basic Books, 1979); S. Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1990
[1977]), chap. I: In Platos Cave.
17. Multiple personality syndrome in the USA: I. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality
and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
18. Tocqueville and the individual. At the end of his nineteenth-century journey in America,
Tocqueville came to the conclusion that one result of democracy was that of making each
person x his attention on himself. See A. De Tocqueville, De la De mocratie en Amerique,
deuxie`me partie, chap. II: De lindividualisme dans les pays democratiques.
19. He has no time to think about the past. More precisely, he has no time to have experience of
the real past, but only of fantastic images and myths. If, in fact, the reality of things is, as
Vladimir Nabokov suggests, the gradual accumulation of information and experience about
them, where a lily is more real for a botanist than for a orist and is more real for the orist
than for his customerif this is reality, the modern individual has no taste for the reality
of the past. He lingers on the surface of the traces of the past, from the nineteenth century
on, huge, colorful and eventful.
20. Nietzsches indulgent spectator: F. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, zweites Stuck:Vom
Nutzen und Nachteilen der Geschichte, Section 5.
21. The novels which make fun of historians: see Hayden White, The Burden of History op. cit.,
3241. In George Eliots Middlemarch (187172) the heroine, Dorothea Brook, marries a
historian, Edward Casaubon, a mind weighed down by unedited material, a Bat of
erudition, who spends his honeymoon in Rome studying manuscripts in the Vatican
Library, and whose incapacity his young bride is not slow in recognizing. Edward Casaubon
is not an isolated gure. In 1890 we nd another pathetic gure in the eld of history:
Georg Tesman, husband of Ibsens Hedda Gabler (who also enthusiastically collects docu-
ments for his book on Cottage Industry in Medieval Brabant during his honeymoon) and in
1902 Michel in Andre Gides Immoralistwho as an expert is aware of his own stupidity,
is enraptured by the revelation that he is also a man, and concludes that culture,
stemming from life, kills lifeand he too is a historian. An amusing satire on academic
history is to be found even in Max Beerbohms fantasy novel, Zuleika Dobson (1911).
22. Anti-historicism: B. Croce, Antistoricismo, in idem, Ultimi saggi (Bari: Laterza, 1935); C.
Antoni, Storicismo e antistoricismo, in Civilta` moderna no. 2 (1931): 320; for the
dialogue with Thomas Mann, see Carteggio Croce-Mann, ed. E. Cutinelli-Re`ndina (Napoli:
Pagano, 1991), 3; as regards Wittgenstein: cf. L. Wittgenstein, Note sul Ramo doro di
Frazer (Milano: Adelphi, 1992).
23. Mutant materials: P. Antonelli, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1995).
24. Goethe and the liberation from history: the allusion is to the Maximen und Reexionen.
25. To think of history and tell it, the only possible liberation from the past. It is to be underlined, even
if obvious, that we are dealing with history that inspires us with a lust for truth, not dry,
pedantic erudition, which does nothing but bury the past, producing only illegible
tombstones.
26. The past, a storehouse of incomprehensible fragments, and the mystery of experience. Cf. Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Petrolio (Torino: Einaudi, 1992), 2623: Ci sono delle cose che si vivono solo
attraverso il corpo cosicche il mistero dellesperienza esistenziale e` un mistero per
eccellenza del passato: non solo del Passato come esso ci appare nel Presente (mistero dei
padri), ma anche del Passato come esso ci appare nel Futuro (mistero dei gli). () Tale
continuita` invade tutta la vita, e` il suo registro continuo. La stabilizzazione del Presente, le
Istituzioni e il Potere che le difende, si fondano su questo sentimento del Passato, come
mistero da rivivere: se noi non ci illudessimo di rifare le stesse esperienze esistenziali dei
padri, saremmo presi da unangoscia intollerabile, perderemmo il senso di noi, lidea di noi.
() Ce` qualcosa di assoluto nel pensiero del potente che vuole stabilizzare il Passato;
mentre ce` qualcosa di precario nel pensiero della vittima che vuole distruggere il passato.
27. Discontinuous tradition. Cf. Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963), chap. VII: Perhaps history this
century is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated at the bottom of a
Liberation from the Past
,
47
fold, its impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however,
of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous
cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy
any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the
30s, the curious fashions of the 20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We
produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a
phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous
tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.