A highly topical analysis of the end of historic certainties and contemporary history’s efforts to distance itself from the present.
In his farewell lecture at the Humboldt University Berlin, Martin Sabrow picks up where his inaugural lecture left off twelve years earlier and seeks to determine the place of contemporary history and the culture of memory in the present. He addresses the loss of traditional certainties that accompanies the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022 and is expressed in the much-cited talk of the »Zeitenwende«.
Sabrow explores the facets of this upheaval in the field of visualizing the past and describes it as the creeping dissolution of a basic historical-cultural consensus that had emerged in the last quarter of the 20th century. Based on the willingness to critically and self-critically deal with the burden of the past catastrophic century being established at all levels of state and society, Sabrow evokes an era of reappraisal. Today, our seemingly firmly established certainties are increasingly being called into question thereby suggesting a historical-cultural epochal shift from universalism to particularism.
