| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Peter Fritzsche. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. 268. $27.95.
This book provides a very interesting take on the rise of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Western Europe and the United States. Peter Fritzsche argues that a new mode of "producing the past" develops in the wake of the French Revolution, and that this production of the past runs through high and popular culture. From the production of ruins to the creation of autobiography, from folktales to philosophy, Fritzsche sees a new and melancholic attitude toward change taking hold in the West. The attitude is new because it arose out of the particular dynamic of political revolution, and it is melancholic because those who see time passing in this way are always focused on what has been lost.	1
Fritzsche begins with the French Revolution because it is here that he sees a change from a cyclical view of time (everything comes round again) to a view of time as a departure from something. The extraordinary impact of the revolution and of Napoleon Bonaparte mobilized people in ways that forced them to confront change, which Fritzsche understands as confronting loss. François René de Chateaubriand is a key figure for him because of the romantic's continual consideration of what can never be recovered. Art, like history, can represent loss, but it cannot redeem it.	. . .

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