Memorial complex "Katyn" - an international memorial to victims of political repression. Photo: Alyeksyey Melkin / Wiki.
I feel sorry for the past. That realisation was the catalyst and starting point for this series of articles. After all, the past has become the most widespread and the least valued currency of our times. It’s incessantly written and rewritten, actualised and constructed, instrumentalised and politicised, challenged and defended, nationalised and transnationalised, commemorated and cast aside… What isn’t done with - or rather, to - the past these days? And what does this inflation of the past actually mean?
Eternally present
The German thinker Aleida Assmann ties this situation with the new sense of time we have been experiencing over the last few decades. As she writes in her book Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne (Is Time out of Joint? The Rise and Fall of the Temporal Regime of Modernity, 2014), in the modern period (the beginning of which she dates around 1770), the past was exclusively the realm of historians, while all hopes and actions were obsessively directed at the future. Today it is obvious that there is no future, at least not in this modernist conception - and the present is satiated with the past.
