Abstract

History, Kern remarks in his introduction, could be written by looking at parliaments, families, or bourgeoisies. Kern chooses rather to focus on the broadest common denominators of historical experience: time and space. Specific understandings of time and space can be identified in any political, artistic, technological, or philosophical practices one may choose to study. This is particularly evident in the period of European history between 1880 and 1918, the age of the airplane, the telephone, and the wireless, of Cubism, cinema, and simultaneous poetry, of Bergson, Einstein, and Joyce, of a war whose dimensions and methods were made possible only through radically new senses of the nature of time and space.