Lecture: Paul Fleming: Geschichte/n: Anecdotal History in Montaigne, Koselleck, Kleist, & Fineman

In “historia magistra vitae,” Reinhart Koselleck famously argues that only in the eighteenth century does the collective singular, die Geschichte, emerge to replace the older plural form, Geschichten, the reservoir of exempla by which history served as a ‘teacher of life.’ The demise of exemplary Geschichten in the face of progress and the acceleration of time gave way not only to the Geschichtsphilosophie, but also to the anecdote as a genre uniquely poised at the nexus of the historical and the literary. While also no longer being exemplary (i.e., a ‘teacher of life’), the anecdote introduces the notion of contingency into the succession of events and, thus, repeatedly challenges the integration of event into a larger context that makes universal history possible. This talk explores the tense relation between the exemplum’s successors, history and anecdote, around 1800, particularly in the work of Heinrich von Kleist.