contributions 1 (2) : 145 – 158

145

on the notion of historical

(dis)continuity: reinhart
koselleck’s construction of
the sattelzeit
Gabriel Motzkin
Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The concept of a bridging period such as a Sattelzeit depends firstly on the

idea that there was a before and after, and, secondly, that there was a peri-
od of transition linking both. Assuming that such periods can be distin-
guished from each other, a period of transition should somehow be con-
tinuous with the previous and subsequent period and yet remain a distinct
period. However, one could also adopt a second hypothesis according to
which a period of transition is somehow heterogeneous or diFerent in both
directions – not just in one direction, for otherwise it is not a period of
transition. As we shall see, however, periods of transition are in practice
conceived more in terms of continuity with either the preceding period or
the subsequent period, rather than as something sui generis. Furthermore, a
period of transition is either conceived as continuous or discontinuous in
both directions, and if a period is discontinuous in both directions, it can-
not be a period of transition. Since there is no coherent conception of a pe-
riod of transition that also includes a thoroughgoing concept of discontinu-
ity, one has to assume that a period of transition must display overarching
historical continuity.
However, that is not at all the structure of the concept of the “de-
cisive period” as articulated either by Koselleck or by Foucault. For both of
them a period of transition, such as a Sattelzeit, marks a discontinuity and at
the same time remains part of the new era that is about to begin. Conversely,
we could think of the characterization of the years between 1905 and 1917 in
Russia as a period of transition still placed within the pre-revolutionary pe-
riod. In each of these cases, the period of transition is a coherent concept be-
cause it is not disconnected from both previous and subsequent periods, but
clearly belongs to one of them.
146 It is both a historiographical and an ideological question whether a
period of transition should be assigned to the preceding or succeeding pe-
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

riod. This raises the question of how we assess our historical present. There
is then a substantive historical justification for assimilating the Sattelzeit to
the period that came after: I believe that the reason why both Koselleck and
Foucault make this move is that they wish to assimilate the period of transi-
tion to the modern period. We must then ask ourselves why. I want to exam-
ine the impulse to divide the traditional and the modern in this way, and the
reason for so much interest in locating this discontinuity at the beginning of
the nineteenth century or at the middle of the eighteenth century, etc. Indeed,
the origins of the modern can be placed sometime around the middle of the
eighteenth century and immediately thereafter as indicated by a shift in the
meaning of concepts. Yet there are many competing periodizations as, for in-
stance, Paul Hazard’s, which locates the discontinuity and the transition to
the modern at the beginning of the eighteenth century. 1 Regardless of how
dates are chosen, the assimilation of the period of transition to its succeeding
period makes one thing clear: as they look back, both Foucault and Koselleck
experience a sense of discontinuity with the past, one that in a certain way
makes them uneasy, and which they seek to explain. Moreover, assimilating
the period of transition to the succeeding period makes the break seem even
greater, although the counter-example of the Russian Revolution should en-
courage caution regarding this last hypothesis.
Yet before considering the reasons behind this desire to assimilate
the transition to the modern, one must inquire into both the kind of discon-
tinuity that is meant, and, more importantly, the notion of a sense of discon-
tinuity, which after all is a sense of discontinuity entertained by certain spe-
cific twentieth-century intellectuals. It is a matter of discerning whether the
discontinuity in question according to Koselleck, for example, is that of a dis-
continuity that continues to function as a living discontinuity in the present
or whether it is that of a more retrospective sense of discontinuity, according
to which history since that eighteenth century break has been continuous. A
retrospective sense of discontinuity is the only one in which it is possible for
a transition to belong to that which is on this side of the vanishing point of
retrospection, i.e. the age of transition is viewed continuously from the point
of view of the observer. Looking back, I now know I met my wife by walking
out onto a balcony in Berlin, but of course at the time I knew no such thing.
Still, there is a before and an after, and retrospectively, the period of transi-
tion, i.e. the period after I met my wife, seems more belonging to the period 147
after than to the period before. It is therefore natural to understand events

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

from a point of transition that attains its meaning long after the point of
transition itself. This point needs to be reinforced: in many ways the period
of transition belongs to the period before: after all we did not marry right
away, and in many ways my style of life continued to be what it had been, just
as the aristocratic style of life did not shift as fast as the sense of discontinuity
at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, retrospectively, the key point
is an epistemological point and not a social one, nor even one of awareness.
Socially, this period of transition belonged to the period before; yet in terms
of awareness, something had already shifted: perhaps one could define this
transitional awareness as an anticipatory awareness. Such an awareness is not
the epistemologically retrospective awareness that defines life since the tran-
sition, which is to say that my consciousness at the time and my consciousness
now, as I look back, have something to do with each other, but are nonetheless
distinct, since an anticipatory awareness has not yet been historically or bio-
graphically confirmed. It is only now that I am able to locate a retrospective
point of origin. The point about an anticipatory awareness is that it is not ret-
rospective – it evades the question of its origin and it is not a fully historical
awareness. Thus the concept of a Sattelzeit relies on the distinction between
contemporary awareness and retrospective consciousness. Consequently, the
primacy of epistemological determinations in mapping history does not im-
plicate in the protagonists’ complete self-conscious awareness.
But these relations between anticipatory awareness and retrospective
self-definition are not quite the same for every kind of transition: it depends
on whether the same relations between expectation and retrospection apply
to all types of transition or whether one can construct a typology of transi-
tion. Here I would like to inquire further into the possibility of being aware
during the transition itself. As mentioned earlier, this awarenness is impos-
sible to a certain extent, since any retrospection during a period of transi-
tion would be a fake retrospection, a perception and aGrmation of change
when perhaps none had occurred or was occurring. On the other hand, par-
tial awareness is possible. This partial awareness is not just anticipatory. Let
me specify: between the first and second world wars, many people knew that
they were living in an age of transition, and even thought that they could
identify and understand the prewar pre-transitional age, but no one during
the interwar period knew which political regime would emerge as the win-
148 ner. Thus they could not order epistemologically the period in which they
were living: they knew they had left one period behind, and they knew that
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

something new had begun, but whether they were living in an age of fas-
cism or an age of democracy was completely obscure. In turn, the incapac-
ity to epistemologically sort out the age in which one is living may not be a
constant, but may itself be a historically significant characteristic of certain
types of transition, one in which there is some awareness, albeit accompa-
nied by the uneasiness of being unable to impart coherent significance to the
age in which one is living. In turn, that means that such epochs should show
both a change in the meaning of key concepts and the lack of any settled con-
sensus about their meanings, since it could turn out that they mean diFerent
things. It could be inferred that intra-cultural communication is especially
diGcult during an age of transition, since diFerent people mean diFerent
things when using the same concepts. My point is that these diFerent mean-
ings revolve less around their inheritance and more around their anticipa-
tions of the outcome of their contemporary age of transition. Of course, that
would be more true for an age of transition with high awareness of transition
than one with low awareness.
Indeed, I have often wondered about the degree to which people liv-
ing in an age of discontinuity recognize that they in fact live in such a pe-
riod. After all, things continue to be the same so long as one is alive. In a
world not dominated by the media, one would know that some change has
occurred, but surely the end of an intimate relationship may seem to be
more of break in one’s life than say the creation of the State of Israel or the
day that World War II ended – and so forth. Moreover, is it because of my
perception of my own age or really because of something altogether diFe-
rent that I do not think that much change at all has occurred during my
lifetime? Feminism, automated tellers, the fall of Communism, the discov-
ery of dna, all seem somewhat undramatic from my own personal perspec-
tive. In comparison to personal experience, historical events that occured
before I was born – the First World War, Stalin, Hitler, World War II – seem
very dramatic indeed. Is that a true reading of history, or is it a function of
the sense of sameness and coherence perceived in one’s lifetime? Or is it, on
the contrary, the eFect of historical narrative, which may tend to maximize
the drama of an individually unexperienced history? Or, after all, is it due
to our perception of life as less dramatic than something that is told as a
story, such as the past?
 Countering this idea are two experiences, which are also possible 149
illusions, that need to be articulated: the notion that things were somehow

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

very diFerent when one was growing up – I call this the illusion of Philippe
Ariès (in his memoir Un Historien de Dimanche), 2 and the idea that world his-
tory is divided into two periods, then and now. The illusion that things were
somehow very diFerent when one was growing up is in direct contradiction
to the sense of continuity in one’s lifetime. It may also be a function of age:
by the time one is old, most people that one has known, and certainly any-
one who was around during one’s childhood, is long dead. Thus the world
of one’s childhood moves from being a public or a social world to a private
world, in contrast to the adolescent, who emerges from his private world into
a social world, who is alienated from him or herself, whereas the elderly are
alienated from the world. Perhaps these transitions from private to public
and from public to private are sources of the sense of discontinuity, which
thus aGrms in time the chasm between the individual life and that of the
world around us. Perhaps the sense of historical discontinuity emerges from
the experience of biographical discontinuity, which, as noted, is itself an un-
stable and tenuous experience.
The fantasy of then and now is a much more universal, a stronger
and more enduring fantasy. It too has always existed in some form: it sug-
gests that things must have been diFerent in a period that we can only re-
member through books or other relics. Note that the sense of “thenness” that
Ariès deploys and the senses of “thenness” that Koselleck and Foucault de-
ploy are not quite the same. The sense of “thenness”, for Ariès, is that of a
world that one has known personally, thus placing the individual ego and its
continuity in question, much as seventeenth and eighteenth-century memo-
rialists such as Retz and Saint-Simon did. For Koselleck and Foucault, “then-
ness” has to do with the past before one’s birth: it does not call into question
personal coherence, but calls into question the sense of historical continuity,
the sense that our lives form part of an unbroken continuity with the past.
According to this point of view, an unspoken assumption is that my being
alive is only possible as a déchirure from the past. I am always readily negat-
ing or erasing the past.
“Then” is, for example, the pre-modern age, whenever that existed,
and “now” is what has happened since the break. Sometimes a third moment
is added so that the sequence then runs: then, yesterday, and now. In this case,
however, the real present for the author is “yesterday,” e.g. the modern, and
150 the postmodern is by definition therefore unknown. One develops a coher-
ent present by locating it in the recent past: one can know and apprehend a
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

past of the present that is coherent, unlike the remote past, and even more
unlike the current present, which is much more mysterious on this account
than the recent past. Here one can see that one problem with dichotomies of
this kind lies in the point of view one adopts: either the point of view of now,
which raises the question of which point of view of now should be adopted,
or the artificial point of view of then, or of yesterday. In contrast to a retro-
spective perspective, which is a perspective of now, historians often adopt the
point of view of then, and then reach out to the known but artificially un-
known future, the future of the past, which is also always in the past. That is
what could be called the novelistic perspective, since there is no such thing as
adopting the point of view of then, especially the point of view of then while
knowing the future.
In any case, we have three conceptions here: the experience of the
dramatic break, the radical diFerence between the past and the present in
one’s own life, and the radical diFerence between the past and the present
in history. It should be noted that each of these has its own tense structure.
Thus the dramatic break has its anticipation, its present, and its past as a
story that is told. One’s own life story is nourished by the most radical di-
chotomies one can invent. And the radical diFerence between the past and
the present in history depends on a perception of the contingency of present
and past that is much more accentuated when applied to history than to one’s
own life. It is that sense of contingency that stimulates us to devote attention
to locating historical discontinuity.
The concept of a period of transition is something invented by his-
torians because they feel uneasy with the idea of a sudden change, one that
occurs at a single moment, because they are aware that people live through
events. This, however, makes us question whether concepts used in the pe-
riod of transition were unique to the period of transition or whether they
somehow participated and survived in the actual transition from the first pe-
riod to the second period. Moreover, one can conceive of such concepts and
notions in two diFerent ways: the first way is to conceive concepts as inter-
mediary. The second notion is the idea that the transition is statistical: thus
in the period of transition one uses some concepts that are part of the later
world-view and some concepts that are part of the earlier world-view, and
thus the question is which concepts belong to which world-view, which con-
cepts are decisive, and what is the proportion between the two sets of con- 151
cepts, the first set and the second set. In this latter conception, we have a

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

mixture but not a compound, whereas in the first conception, history evolves
through blending.
The first question we must ask, however, is whether the underly-
ing sense of the evanescence of the past that informs a concept such as the
Sattelzeit is a constant in human experience. Obviously, it is. However, it has
been dealt with diFerently at diFerent times. From Plato through Hegel to
Freud, leading thinkers have been concerned with denying the evanescence
of the past, either with the idea that nothing changes, or that everything
changes, but something still remains the same. What has recently changed
can be termed the decline of the desire to claim that the past is preserved.
Thus in considering a concept such as the Sattelzeit one really has to take two
diFerent historical periods into account: the “modern,” which denied the
past and changed its meaning, but did not claim that the past has vanished,
and the “postmodern,” which also claims that the past has vanished. It is
this latter claim which locates the postmodern in an ambivalent relation to
modernity, one in which the postmodern first claims that the past vanishes,
but then asserts that the modern is preserved (in the postmodern) while ev-
erything else has vanished, thus searching for some line of demarcation be-
tween the pre-modern and the modern.
I am reminded of my experience with Holocaust survivors, who,
quite frequently, can choose one of two pasts along with their post-Holocaust
present, but experience diGculty in maintaining both pasts at the same time.
Thus some Holocaust survivors remember the Holocaust quite well, but ex-
perience great unease when they are asked to recall the pre-Holocaust world
in which they grew up, while other Holocaust survivors have sought to for-
get the Holocaust, and then can remember the pre-Holocaust past. Of course
the option of forgetting everything exists, which seems to be quite the sim-
plest course. In the same way, Germans are constantly tempted to get around
the Holocaust, for it is a barrier to the past that proves quite diGcult to get
around. Analogously, we are confronted by the question of whether we can
get around the modern and return to tradition, or whether indeed we have
lost both the modern and the pre-modern.
In this way, modernity is now the barrier between us and tradition:
there is a perception that suggests that we can either choose tradition or mo-
dernity, but not both. This was quite evident in Leo Strauss’s work, in which
152 the seeker of wisdom or power also makes a conscious historical choice be-
tween historical contexts. In a way so does Heidegger, although he tries to
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

get around it by positing a reverse continuity to Hegel: for Heidegger alles

ist immer schlimmer. What informs their work is the possibility that the past
vanishes, a conclusion that Strauss rejects, and that Heidegger keeps chang-
ing his mind about.
This was not at all the situation in modernity if the core period of
modernity is defined as the period between 1750 and 1850 (and certainly it
was not the situation before then as well). People were conscious of their
diFerence from the past, but their entire eFort concerned the preservation of
the past in the present. The desire to deny history or tradition, to claim that
the past is inherently evanescent, only surfaced towards the end of the nine-
teenth century.
It could be argued that the nineteenth-century mania for pres-
ervation and even for archeology was a consequence of the sense of a cul-
tural break and especially of a political revolution. However, it should also
be noted that the revolutionaries themselves, after an initial outburst of de-
struction, furthered the idea of museums, the notion of the neo-classical, the
return to antiquity, etc. 3 In fact, the sense of a change can be read out of the
great eFort to recover the past, the interest in archeology, the desire to deci-
pher dead languages, and so forth. 4 The moderns were not interested in de-
fining their diFerence from the past, but rather in reconstructing their past
so that it could suit their present.
Thus the marking of a boundary between the past and the present,
where the past is the pre-modern and the present is the modern, as if the past
has vanished, is a retrospective demarcation, a line drawn much later. But in
order to eFect what? Namely this: the simultaneity of modernity. The con-
sequence of the notion of a Sattelzeit is the notion of contemporaneity with a
past that is already almost two centuries distant, and thus provides stability
to a culture sorely in need of long-range temporal perspective.
There is another way to view this, and to opine that the notion of
a Sattelzeit stems from the desire to locate the breakthrough to modernity
at a privileged point, one which would privilege one’s particular choice of
what is modern. Thus it is logical for a German to think that the transi-
tion to modernity occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century since
the German language did not really come into widespread intellectual
use until then. In the same way so many Protestants have conceived of the
Reformation as the breakthrough to modernity. I was once convinced that 153
the choice of date for modernity was a consequence of one’s national his-

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

tory, but I no longer am: my argument is rather that the particular loca-
tion of a Sattelzeit has much more to do with one’s present than with one’s
choice of a past.
However, this argument should not be completely ignored. Let us
for a moment consider what other conception the location of the Sattelzeit at
the middle of the eighteenth century could be opposing. Namely, it could be
opposing the prominent nineteenth-century view of the Renaissance as the
transition to modernity, which is the notion I was taught in schoolbooks that
I read as a boy in America, and which stems from Michelet and Burckhardt.
The reinvention of the renaissance is probably the most successful notion of
the breakthrough to modernity in the last two hundred years, and we have to
ask why it is no longer relevant, or even well-understood.
This notion was primarily, as defined by Burckhardt, aesthetic. In
addition, it was anti-religious in a quite specific sense: namely it was anti-
Catholic, paradoxically locating emancipation from medieval Catholicism,
viewed as negative, at the center of the Catholic world itself, Italy, and es-
pecially Rome. The greatest secularists turned out to be some of the Popes,
and the Popes, through their sponsorship of renaissance art, contributed to
emancipation. Implicitly, the reason the Renaissance failed is the Protestant
Reformation, (here the story gets sticky) which scared the Catholics and con-
demned them to reaction (never mind that this is not completely true). The
story gets sticky because the terms of the merger between Renaissance and
Reformation are never completely clear, but this dual origin of secularism
and enlightened religion conformed very much to the needs of elites both in
Germany and the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, for
they were both Protestant and secular at the same time.
Influenced diFerently by Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, both rene-
gade Catholics, Foucault and Koselleck will have none of this, which they im-
ply is both naïve and ideological. Foucault privileges the primacy of the polit-
ical, and his story is a story of counter-enlightenment meant to show that the
modern is in no way more emancipated than what preceded it. Koselleck’s
take is quite diFerent from Foucault’s, for he is less concerned with the di-
alectics of representation as a form of the performance of power, and more
concerned with the sense of time and “pastness” that he views as key quali-
fiers of modernity, whether via acceleration, simultaneity, or historical per-
154 spective as mappings in time rather than space. In his account, there is no
necessary primacy of the political.
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

However, sotto voce, this characterization is not completely accurate,

since it could be argued that Koselleck is reacting against the primacy of the
political. His story is not the story of a belated (and politicizing) moderniza-
tion of apolitical Germans, but rather a story in which Germans are at the
forefront of modernity, since the conceptualization of these problems of the
relations between enlightenment and history took place to a large degree in
German. In the end, what Koselleck oFers is a metaphysical account of so-
cial modernity, and in doing so his real dialogue is with Hegel, Marx, and
Habermas.
Why then is he a historian? Namely because of this: for Hegel the
break with the past is himself, for Marx the break with the past will be in the
future, and for Koselleck the break with the past is in the past.
That could lead to a nostalgic point of view, in that the great moment
is already over, our yearning for historical drama will not be satisfied in the
present or the future; indeed the transition itself took place stealthily and
without any drama. Yet this lack of drama contains an advantage: namely ev-
erything that has happened since the break becomes contemporary; there is
no further break with the past, and therefore events since the break cannot
be judged relatively, since they belong to the same world, and are subject to
the same categories of judgment as actions in the present. This only ceases
to be true if one believes that there is still another break with the past some
time later, e.g. 1945. But that is not at all what Koselleck believes, and he is
completely right on this one point: in contrast to seventeenth century divines,
we do not take the divine right of kings as a serious political alternative (not
even Carl Schmitt considered this), but our categories for judging political
actions are much the same as they were in 1900: atrocities are atrocities, we
seek to improve the human condition, etc. Now if Hitler had won that would
be diFerent; we would indeed be living in a diFerent civilization.
Thus there is no nostalgia here at all. Rather, the question should be:
what is gained and what is lost by this demarche? What is gained is the incom-
parable advantage of providing the contemporary world with a background,
which is vaguely analogous to the way that Karl Heinz Bohrer wishes to cir-
cumvent the Nazi past by seeking to derive relevance from German Idealism
and Romanticism. However, Bohrer is nostalgic because he seeks to provide
a therapy for the present by importing the past, whereas Koselleck seeks to
capture and to depict the present against the background of the past. 5 Two 155
things are effected here: first, one has to buy the modern world entier, and,

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

second, one is turned defenseless against a further change in episteme, since
he or she has to succeeded in situating and justifying the present historically,
and that without a paradigm that could explain future historical develop-
ment. The force of the old philosophy of history consisted in its predictive
power.
There is a further point, and it relates to discontinuity rather than
to continuity: namely both Foucault and Koselleck seem from my point of
view to have lived through one of the greatest discontinuities of all time. Now
they would perhaps not see it this way, since as stated they were not born af-
ter the Second World War, and so there is no literary-biographical motive for
them to dramatize their lived past. Nonetheless, this sense of discontinuity
informs their eForts to understand history as a succession of discontinui-
ties rather than continuities, one that is then balanced by the sense of the ex-
tended present. In order to gain coherence, one needs to extend the present.
However extending the present can render the notion of continuity incoher-
ent, because even a static present must end, as Husserl understood so well.
I have not given Koselleck his due, because although Foucault is bet-
ter known at the present time, I do not think that this will be true in the
future. Namely, while Foucault and Koselleck have a family resemblance in
that both seek to hold something constant, Foucault’s epistemes assume the
priority of space over time: if everything is constant, then Kant’s dictum of
space as the simultaneity of inner intuition and external experience takes
eFect. Koselleck rather seeks to uphold the primacy of time over space, and
therefore to show language not as a static reflection of embedded structures
of meaning, but rather as a refraction of changed points of view. The meta-
phors may be spatial, but concepts such as experience and expectation all em-
bed historical reality in an intuition of time rather than of space. Thus this
model is less beholden to a contemporary intuition of the relations between
time and space. Such a model is more appropriate to a sense of historical ex-
perience as unfolding in time.
Too little has been made of the notion of yesterday in historical ex-
perience, since it has often appeared in the century in which yesterday was
a site of odium. This rejection of an old regime did not begin with our re-
action to the Second World War: look at the invective that Ernst Jünger re-
served for the nineteenth century, of which he was so preeminently a product.
156 If we wish sometimes to escape the past, Jünger and others like him sought
actively to destroy it, much as French revolutionaries took pleasure in burn-
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

ing archives. Revolutions are often accompanied by burning archives, if only

to destroy the record of property ownership, and therewith the lien of the
meaning of the past.
Yet none of this appears in Koselleck’s work, which rather depicts
how the past could be neutralized by new conceptions of meaning, entailing
the superseding of the past, but not its destruction. For Koselleck it is a ques-
tion of whether the period since the eighteenth century is a “today” or a “yes-
terday.” But underlying this question is the problem of whether “yesterday” is
relevant for “today.”
Yesterday is so crucial because it is in the yesterday that the paths of
retrospective memory and narrative history intersect. The only way we can
make sense of a distant past is by narrating its development, but the only way
we can make sense of our memory is by retracing backwards and forwards
our development to and from our origin. Yesterday is so diGcult because it
is both memory and history, and therefore it is either continuous with us and
discontinuous with the past, or continuous with the past and discontinuous
with us, all at the same time. Yesterday is continuous with us at the cost of be-
ing historically discontinuous, and historically continuous if it is discontin-
uous with us. Thus the Sattelzeit is not really a purely historical concept, nor
is it an episteme. It rather probes this meaning of yesterday, which is both
historical and a post-historical replacement for the philosophy of history. By
extending continuity, it addresses the simultaneity of the discontinuous in
the present.
notes 157

reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

1
Paul Hazard (1935).
2
Philippe Ariès, with the collaboration of Michel Winock (1980).
3
Stephen Bann (1984).
4
Peter Fritzsche (2004).
5
Karl-Heinz Bohrer (2001), 20.
158 bibliographical references
reinhart koselleck’s construction of the sattelzeit

Ariès, Philippe, and Michel Winock (collaborator). 1980. Un Historien Du

Dimanche. Paris: Seuil.
Bann, Stephen. 1984. The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History
in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bohrer, Karl-Heinz. 2001. “Erinnerungslosigkeit. Ein Defizit Der
Gesellschaftlichen Erinnerung.” Frankfurter Rundschau, June 16, 2001.
Fritzsche, Peter. 2004. Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy
of History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hazard, Paul. 1935. La Crise De La Conscience Européene (1680-1715). Paris:
Boivin.

abstract
The author contends that a transition period is conceived in terms of its con-
tinuity with preceding or subsequent periods, rather than an entirely discon-
tinuous temporal unit. Thus, in order to conceive of a period of transition,
one must assume an overarching historical continuity. This contrasts with
Reinhart Koselleck’s and Michel Foucault’s conception of the period of tran-
sition to modernity which is at once a break and part of the modern period.
By analyzing how time is experienced in terms of contemporary awareness
and retrospective consciousness, the author maps out the epistemological
determinations that allow for the conception of a period of transition to mo-
dernity such as Sattelzeit.

keywords
Historical continuity, periods of transition, Sattelzeit, Reinhart Koselleck,
Michel Foucault.