In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

PRESENT VS. PAST 317
have become grown-ups, are now able to see their parents with more
justice" (W.E.S., 191). Bertolt Brecht, who is just now developing his
public role as a Marxist enfant terrible, strongly protests such a lack of
revolutionary energy: "Statistically, it may be true that the number of
fathers murdered recently has slightly decreased. And these murders may
be due solely to the fact that they help keep the wrist flexible. Still, such
a decrease should not encourage the older generation to feel safe ... Mr.
Thomas Mann suggests that children have become older (meaning more
understanding). In this formulation, children are of course as uninteresting
as understanding children normally are. 'More interesting means
new, and new means older' -that would be precisely to Thomas Mann's
taste!" (Brecht, 41).
At the same time, the generation-concept brings the historian's distanced
view of Past and Present closer to more subjective (if not more
personal) ways of experiencing the passage of time. Geistesgeschichte,
the flourishing German version of intellectual history, is eager to mediate
between the subjective dimension and less personal records of the Past:
"It is in this indissolubly mutual relationship, in this interdependence
between the subjective (psychological) and the objective (phenomenological)
appearance of the vital problems of the spirit, that Geistesgeschichte
finds its meaning and its essence" (Unger, 191). Such emphasis
on the existential dimension of time stems from the impression
that it is increasingly difficult to grasp time as a social phenomenon. A
painting by Edward Hopper entitled Eleven a.m. shows a naked woman
with long brown hair sitting in an easy chair and looking through the
large window of a well-furnished apartment (Levin, 274). From the
perspective of the everyday social world, eleven a.m. is just the wrong
time of day to be in a state of undress. Is this woman waiting for a lover,
who mayor may not show up? Whatever Hopper has in mind, this
woman's time-state is not coordinated with "objective," social time. He
paints her existing in subjective time-a time that cannot be represented
by any clock, a time in relation to which "eleven A.M." is nothing but a
random number. [see Timepieces]
The multiple difficulties that emerge in delineating the shape of the
Present underscore both the fragility of objective time structures and the
need to rely on time as a dimension of subjective experience. Martin
Heidegger's Sein und Zeit is part of this philosophical situation. His
chapter "Der existenziale Ursprung der Historie aus der Geschicht-