method – 9 – No Chronology

No Chronology – Historians typically present history and stories chronologically, but within us they lie unsorted and undated, and they are always present. History is an egalitarian, inner, timeless reality within us that spans countless generations. When you sit at your desk and immerse yourself in historical processes and human experiences, everything happens all at once.

On the bulletin board, it looks like this: in your mind, you find yourself in 1935 in eastern France—five years before the occupation by the German Wehrmacht—and at the same time, you witness the German Bundestag’s memorial service for the victims of National Socialism on January 27, 2019, via a live broadcast on public television.

In the photo on the left, recruits near Verdun in 1915, and on the right, the fire at Notre Dame in Paris on April 16, 2019

In such moments of deep immersion in history, we come to understand that this is, in essence, the natural state of things—namely, the simultaneity of events and, with it, the absolute closeness to historical events within us through a feeling we possess and which is given to us by that feeling within us—which we are now discovering. We are then deeply connected to reality. But if we are not aware of history, we are completely at its mercy and vulnerable to any upheaval, no matter how significant it may be. We react, but we lack the historical perspective that would give us the distance needed to assess the situation appropriately and rationally.