Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Vanishing Point of German History
- 2 The Mirror Turn Lamp: Senses of the Nation before Nationalism
- 3 On Catastrophic Religious Violence and National Belonging: The Thirty Years War and the Massacre of Jews in Social Memory
- 4 From Play to Act: Anti-Jewish Violence in German and European History during the Long Nineteenth Century
- 5 Eliminationist Racism
- Conclusion: Continuities in German History
- Acknowledgments
- Index
1 - The Vanishing Point of German History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Vanishing Point of German History
- 2 The Mirror Turn Lamp: Senses of the Nation before Nationalism
- 3 On Catastrophic Religious Violence and National Belonging: The Thirty Years War and the Massacre of Jews in Social Memory
- 4 From Play to Act: Anti-Jewish Violence in German and European History during the Long Nineteenth Century
- 5 Eliminationist Racism
- Conclusion: Continuities in German History
- Acknowledgments
- Index
Summary
“The purpose of a historian depends on his point of view.”
Leopold von Ranke, Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494–1514When it comes to history, every student seems to understand that at the end of the day, the person with the Gatling gun determines who tells the subsequent story and how. There is, nevertheless, a richer way of looking at historical perspective; it derives from perspective in painting, and more precisely from the intersection between modern historical thinking and the discovery of linear projection.
In his dedication of The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici, Niccolò Machiavelli hinted at this intersection. “Just as men who are sketching the landscape put themselves down in the plain to study the nature of the mountains and the highlands, and to study the low-lying land they put themselves high on the mountains, so,” Machiavelli wrote in 1513, “to comprehend fully the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to comprehend fully the nature of princes one must be an ordinary citizen.” The perspective of an observer outside the thing being observed, Machiavelli implies, is the precondition for comprehension. For Machiavelli, perspective had a particular, painterly resonance. Roughly a century earlier, Filippo Brunelleschi had conducted his famous experiments leading to the discovery of linear perspective, which Leon Battista Alberti then systematized for the use of his fellow artists in his famous treatise, On Painting, published in 1436.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Continuities of German HistoryNation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 13 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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