Abstract
Historians have publicly intervened in discussions around the COVID-19 pandemic, using their expertise on past crises to analyze the present. The article first presents three models of how the past, the present and the future relate to each other, drawing mainly on the work of Reinhart Koselleck: history as a teacher, the parting of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation and finally, the crisis. It then highlights the specific role of historians in a crisis, arguing that this role might ideally engender not structures of repetition, but radical newness. The text therefore invites a renewed discussion on the position of historians, including our present and future functions.
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