An Exhibition has just opened in the "Haus der Kulturen der Welt" in Berlin with the title, "Globale Geschichten - Global Stories", whose basic theme is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Yesterday evening, the historian, Timothy Garton Ash presented an historical hypothesis. Up to 1989, Berlin played a central role in global political symbolism. On top of the ruins of the centre of Nazi fascism, one could travel in ten minutes from a liberal western democracy to a communist centre. The fall of the Wall in November 1989 was an event in which Berlin reached a symbolic climax as a world focus. The aftermath saw the beginning of a new era in which the world was no longer determined by the conflict of European ideologies, centrally in Europe, and became simultaneously more united (globalisation) and splintered into multi-polar interests, politics and cultures. The Age of European Ideologies, beginning in 1917 with the October Revolution, was over, and the world-wide significance of Europe - and Berlin as a symbol of the clash of ideologies - had disappeared. (For those who understand German, the following podcast goes into more details: http://ondemand-mp3.dradio.de/file/dradio/2009/02/20/dlf_20090220_1752_1c92165e.mp3) The basic function of historians is to structure the past, to discover (invent?) structures, lay out connections of significance and thus, by putting forward interpretative hypotheses, help us to understand our world(s) and ourselves better. There are always many more than one model available in history and it is the interaction of various models and interpretations which keep historians in work, discussion, and controversy with each other. I find new historical models and interpretations fascinating because they can give us a sudden new view on the world as it was and as it is today. Garton Ash's interpretation, for example, takes us beyond many conventional views of historical structures (from a European point of view) which focusses our attention on eras delineated by the two world wars of the 20th. Century. If we follow his model, WWI is better seen as the last gasp of the 19th. Century world order and WWII as the cataclymic military expression of an ongoing experiment in defining the world according to ideology. I remember having a similar experience while reading Fernand Braudel's masterpiece, "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II." >From the point of view of the historian, the events since 1989 are too recent to seriously comment on. Trends and structures develop over time, and we need a certain distance before we can recognise patterns. Still, I suspect that future historians will at least be organising one chapter into (working titles);1989-2008: Globalisation, Phase I, or, 1989-2008: The Dominance of the Dollar, or 1989-2008: The Period of the Mighty Financial Markets. Francis --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Minds-Eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
