#jetztzeit

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness 

History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit].

Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is put on the scale again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places - into his sunshine. There is no telling what may yet become a part of history. Maybe the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!

Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Maxim 34, Book 1)

Roman antiquity itself: how violently and yet naively it laid its hand on everything good and lofty in the older Greek antiquity! How they translated things into the Roman present! How deliberately and insouciantly they brushed the dust off the wings of that butterfly called 'The-Twinkling-of-an-Eye'! [...]  As poets they were averse to the antiquarian inquisitiveness that precedes the sense for history; as poets, they did not accept these utterly personal things and names and all those things that serve as the mask and costume of a city, coast, century. Rather they quickly replaced them with what was contemporary and Roman. They seem to ask us: 'Should we not make new for ourselves what is old and put ourselves into it? Should we not be allowed to breathe our soul into their dead body? For it is dead, after all: how ugly everything dead is!’  

ibid. (Maxim 83, Book 2)

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. 

ibid.

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome.