Рublic lecture “Die Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen: Not long ago, when the age of innocence ended, and everything was possible”

03.04.2019 | 10:58

On April 12, 2019, at 6 pm, at the Lviv city council Marci Shore will deliver a public lecture “Die Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen:
Not long ago, when the age of innocence ended, and everything was possible”.

Location: Grand session hall of the Lviv City Council (Rynok square, 1)

For Habsburg author Stefan Zweig the First World War brought forever to an end the “age of innocence”: after the war, one could no longer travel without a passport. And this was not all: now, without a passport, one would not even be treated as a human being. The temporal rupture effected was violent, and irreversible. No one then knew that soon enough, a still greater, more violent war was to come.

What we today, retrospectively, call “the interwar years” came about due to two moments of radical contingency: if on 28 June 1914 nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip’s bullet had missed Franz Ferdinand, if in April 1917 anything at all had derailed that sealed German train car and Lenin had not arrived in Petrograd. . .the whole twentieth century as we know it would not have happened. These two Augenblicke—moments of hasard objectif, as the surrealists liked to say—ignited breathtaking conflagrations: a world went up in flames. Four historic empires—the Ottoman, the German, the Habsburg, and the Tsarist—fell. All the old rules ceased to obtain. What the new rules were—or would be—no one yet knew.

The lecture is a part of the international workshop “Ludwik Fleck and His Thought Collectives”

More at http://www.lvivcenter.org/en/chronicle/news/?newsid=3088