Contemporary History: Reflections from Britain and Germany

Abstract

A few years ago, in an attempt to lure suspiciously conservative audiences into programmes of twentieth-century music, the Philadelphia Orchestra dreamed up the slogan ‘All music was once new music’ – a claim somehow as unreassuring as it was incontrovertible. But can we say that all history was once contemporary history? In one way, obviously: every era has had its recent past, its history of ‘our’ time. In this sense ‘contemporary history’ is unlike other periodizations, whether grand ones like ‘the Renaissance’ or more modest chunks of time like ‘the interwar period’. Its dates pin down a moving target rather than a fixed set of book-ends. It denotes a succession of periods that are conventionally identified as that which lies within living memory, the outcome of which is not yet known. We even have an official ratification of ‘living memory’ in the thirty-year rule that has governed the delivery of official documents to the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) since 1967.1