After 1945

[Dave Monroe]

After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

What is it the legacy that humankind has been living with since 1945?
We were once convinced that time was the agent of change. But in the
past decade or two, our experience of time has been transformed.
Technology preserves and inundates us with the past, and we perceive
our future as a set of converging and threatening inevitabilities:
nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation. Overwhelmed by
these horizons, we live in an ever broadening present. In identifying
the prevailing mood of the post-World War II decade as that of
"latency," Gumbrecht returns to the era when this change in the pace
and structure of time emerged and shows how it shaped the trajectory
of his own postwar generation.

Those born after 1945, and especially those born in Germany, would
have liked nothing more than to put the catastrophic events and
explosions of the past behind them, but that possibility remained
foreclosed or just out of reach. World literatures and cultures of the
postwar years reveal this to have been a broadly shared predicament:
they hint at promises unfulfilled and obsess over dishonesty and bad
faith; they transmit the sensation of confinement and the inability to
advance.

After 1945 belies its theme of entrapment. Gumbrecht has never been
limited by narrow disciplinary boundaries, and his latest inquiry is
both far-ranging and experimental. It combines autobiography with
German history and world-historical analysis, offering insightful
reflections on Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan, detailed exegesis of the
thought of Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre, and surprising
reflections on cultural phenomena ranging from Edith Piaf to the
Kinsey Report. This personal and philosophical take on the last
century is of immediate relevance to our identity today.

http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=22540

Exellence 2012: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: "After 1945: About the
emergence of a new relation to time"

http://vimeo.com/41344114

In 1926: Living on the Edge of Time

Travel back to the year 1926 and into the rush of experiences that
made people feel they were living on the edge of time. Touch a world
where speed seemed the very essence of life. It is a year for which we
have no expectations. It was not 1066 or 1588 or 1945, yet it was the
year A.A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh and Alfred Hitchcock
released his first successful film, The Lodger. A set of modern
masters was at work—Jorge Luis Borges, Babe Ruth, Leni Riefenstahl,
Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Greta Garbo, Franz Kafka, Gertrude
Stein, Martin Heidegger—while factory workers, secretaries, engineers,
architects, and Argentine cattle-ranchers were performing their daily
tasks.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht opens up the space–time continuum by exploring
the realities of the day such as bars, boxing, movie palaces,
elevators, automobiles, airplanes, hair gel, bullfighting, film
stardom, dance crazes, and the surprise reappearance of King Tut after
a three-thousand-year absence. From the vantage points of Berlin,
Buenos Aires, and New York, Gumbrecht ranges widely through the worlds
of Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America. The reader is allowed
multiple itineraries, following various routes from one topic to
another and ultimately becoming immersed in the activities,
entertainments, and thought patterns of the citizens of 1926.

We learn what it is to be an “ugly American” in Paris by experiencing
the first mass influx of American tourists into Europe. We visit
assembly lines which turned men into machines. We relive a celebrated
boxing match and see how Jack Dempsey was beaten yet walked away with
the hearts of the fans. We hear the voice of Adolf Hitler condemning
tight pants on young men. Gumbrecht conveys these fragments of history
as a living network of new sensibilities, evoking in us the excitement
of another era.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674000551