1/ In February, I had written a piece about how our perception of historical time had undergone a change and in it, I had briefly alluded to a German historian, Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006). This thread is about his work.
2/ More accurately, this thread is about one particular essay, which I think is a very instructive way to think about how our perception of time has undergone change & more obliquely about contemporary efforts to think of the past as an undifferentiated whole.
3/ The essay I refer to is Koselleck’s inaugural lecture as professor of history in Heidelberg, 1965. First published as “Vergangene Zukunft der frühen Neuzeit”; later translated & is part of his essay collection ‘Futures Perfect’, published by @columbiaup.
4/ He begins this essay (“modernity and planes of historicity”) by asking us to look at the painting by Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538). It was commissioned by Duke William IV of Bavaria for his new summer home.
5/ The painting is called ‘Alexanderschlacht’ in German, which is translated as ‘The Battle of Issus’. The historic battle of Issus took place in 333 BCE, between the Greeks under Alexander & the Achaemenids under Darius III (not to be mistaken for the famous Darius). 
6/ Issus was the beginning of the end of the Achaemenid Empire. The Persians lost and Alexander captured Darius' wife, Stateira I, his daughters, Stateira II and Drypetis, and his mother, Sisygambis.
7/ Nearly 1850 years passed between the original battle of Issus and the paintings for a Bavarian duke’s viewing pleasures. To understand the grandeur of Altdorfer’s work, it is important to see it up close. Two details I found on the internet are here:
8/ Over and beyond the intricacy of the battle scenes he depicted, what is important to notice is that the Persians of Alexander’s era have been recast as Ottoman Turks while the Macedonians have been rendered as knights of medieval Europe.
9/ Nearly two millenia of historical time had been merged to present an historical retelling that was both contemporary as well as historical.
10/ Why is this interesting? Up until 1600s, time in Europe was bound with the “history of expectations”, an awaiting for the imminent end of the world.
11/ The ‘end of the world’ (the eschaton) remained a powerful idea and permeated in ways unexpected. This painting by Altdorfer was no exception. For him, Alexander’s victory over the Persian’s was an early foretelling of how the end times would play out.
12/ 300 years later, sometime in the early 1800s, Frederich Schlegel, the German poet and critic, came across this Altdorfer painting and was blown away by it.
13/ On seeing it (“sighting this marvel”), he was full of praise. But he was also clear that this painting was a byproduct of a specific historical epoch, an art that had come down from the bygone medieval age (“the greatest feat of the age of chivalry”).
14/ What for Altdorfer was natural (the fusing of history and contemporary politics while waiting for the end times) by the time of Schlegel made little sense.
15/ For Schlegel, there was no (con)fusion: the painting was a product of the medieval age, the scenes it claimed to depict were from antiquity, and his own time was different.
16/ In the 300 years between Altdorfer and Schlegel — the very concept of how to think of historical time had undergone a transformation.
17/ Time, which in Altdorfer’s age, was an index that passively marked a waiting till the end of the world occurred; by Schlegel’s era, time had acquired an active function with calls to hasten the emergence of a utopia of freedom & happiness.
18/ How did this difference come about? One, despite it being the age of horrific religious wars in Europe — the absence of any cataclysmic end to life deflated the idea that end times was imminent.
19/ Two, astrology was very powerful (remember, this was the age of Nostradamus) and the astrologers kept pushing end times further into the future. Newton, no slouch in matters of astrology, wrote in 1700s that the Papal world would end in the year 2000.
20/ Three, the end of the Holy Roman Empire and rise of the State system (post Westphalia) meant keeping political peace was now the duty of the sovereigns. Before long, the End of the World was pushed further down — now to 50,000 years later.
21/ Four, the rise of the State system meant the State was in the business of forecasting the future. Any prophet who declared otherwise could “expect lifelong imprisonment”.
22/ Grotius in 1625 writes: “Protect yourselves, overbearing theologians; protect yourselves, politicians, from overbearing theologians.”
23/ By the time Schlegel saw Altdorfer’s paintings, there had also burst to fore the most radical of all events that saw a different kind of future: The French Revolution. Robespierre famously says: “The time has come to call upon each to realize his own destiny
24/ The progress of human Reason laid the basis for this great Revolution, and you shall now assume the particular duty of hastening its pace.”
25/ Why is all this important? In parts because, when we see political movements today that speak of the past — we think of the past and its actors as an undifferentiated whole. We think of them as, not just physical ancestors, but also as intellectual ancestors.
26/ We think of their understanding of time having led to our understanding time. But in fact, world over, human understanding of how the past informs present has undergone changes, to say nothing of how we saw the future that was to come.
27/ To end: in 1800, Napoleon took the Alexanderschlacht painting and hung it in his bathroom. It was his favorite. Perhaps it was also an appropriate way to mark the end of an era: in the privacy of one’s home, history could still be myth and the present.
28/ But outside, the times had changed. Time itself had undergone a transformation.
