Collecting and Historical Consciousness in

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

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

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

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Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials