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  • In 2020/21 it was first and foremost the Covid pandemic that many experienced as a major turning point; now the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine since 24 February 2022 has added a whole new set of events of existential significance, whose medium- and long-term consequences we can only partly foresee. The title of a book published in the spring of 2022, Der 11. September 2001 – (k)eine Zeitenwende? (11 September 2001 – A Historical Turning Point?), has come to sound like something from a bygone age. The question ›Is this the beginning of a new era?‹ is now posed under altered circumstances, and a ›historical turning point‹ and the ›end of globalisation‹ are proclaimed in equally adamant fashion. An academic – in the best sense of the word – conference on ›New Eras and Epochal Change‹ in April 2022 acquired an unanticipated immediacy. The organising team wrote: ›We have been outrun and perhaps even rendered irrelevant by events.‹ But humanities scholarship also entails a certain scepticism towards hasty diagnoses of the times and proclamations of turning points, as scholars including the Indian-born political scientist Parag Khanna have underscored: ›We should avoid grandiloquent proclamations that seek to encapsulate our times. Such characterisations can only capture the moment that has just passed and are guaranteed to quickly be outdated.‹ Of course even such a ›guarantee‹ that any statements can only be provisional may seem questionable when there are ›unmistakable symptoms of upheaval, of profound rupture‹, as the historian Jörn Leonhard has emphasised. With reference to Reinhart Koselleck, he underscores the fundamentally close link between ›rupture and repetition‹, between the ›singularity of history‹ and its ›recurrence‹.

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Metadaten
Author:Jan-Holger KirschGND
URL:https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/editorial/6016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-2411
Parent Title (English):Zeithistorische Forschungen – Studies in Contemporary History
Publisher:ZZF – Centre for Contemporary History: Zeithistorische Forschungen
Place of publication:Potsdam
Document Type:Journal Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2022/09/19
Date of first Publication:2022/09/19
Release Date:2022/09/15
Volume:19
Issue:1
First Page:12
Last Page:16
ZZF Chronological-Classification:ohne epochalen Schwerpunkt
ZZF Regional-Classification:ohne regionalen Schwerpunkt
ZZF Topic-Classification:Historiographiegeschichte
Web-Publications:Zeithistorische Forschungen
Studies in Contemporary History: Articles:1 / 2022 Offenes Heft
Licence (English):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)