Some Perspectives on Pictures Showing Possible Past Future

When we look back on a particular point in the past, can we make out possibilities, feasible or imaginable scenarios, that did not come about or came about in a manner that differed from the way they were originally envisioned? Which options for futures were open at that point in time alongside the one that eventually found realization? In assigning the core significance of these and similar questions to the historian’s remit, Lucian Hölscher offers his inspiring vision of “virtual history” in opposition to a historiography that excludes or deems irrelevant those histories that did not come to fruition. Hölscher’s view that “history is obviously more than what actually happened in the past” (p. 16) invokes a “virtual history” that encompasses all those ideas, desires, dreams, and alternatives that found expression in the past, but did not materialize in the history that in fact took place. Hölscher subtitles his vision an “expanded concept of history”; such a concept, in this spirit, would mean extending the territory covered by history’s subject, enabling these unrealized ideas, desires, and alternatives to take their place as central components of historical knowledge, to which historians must necessarily pay attention. Should this come to pass, artefacts from previously discounted textual genres, such as literary utopias and written accounts of dreams, would gain relevance to the act of historical interpretation. Hölscher regards these types of sources, now often overlooked or subjects of controversy, as serving a significant purpose in “virtual historiography,” as they enable historians to perceive links between what we know as reality and phenomena assumed not to hold this status of real and, through these perceptions, to experience the “contingent character” (p. 26) of all historical fact. “Virtual history,” then, “expand[s]” not just the concept of history itself, but also the range of genres in which historians seek its sources, incorporating those which tell of the possibilities of the past to which the course of history-as-it-happened denied emergence.

If, in this endeavor, historians turn their attention to the imaginary visions of the future that never found form in reality, pictures and works of art may be among the artefacts that compel their interest, due to their potential to give an eloquent account of ideas of the future, brought forth in a specific historical context. To use Hölscher’s terms, they may represent constructed manifestations of both “future pasts” and “past futures,” showing us potentialities of the past and the future even though they remained just that, potentialities. We might even consider pictures particularly vivid embodiments of the “virtual” as Hölscher defines it, given their “hybrid character” (p. 14) that provides the “fictional” with a new form of reality, or, more precisely, realizes it within the materiality of the picture. A possible or once-possible future, when it becomes manifest in a picture, has a place in the world, notwithstanding its non-emergence, or incomplete emergence, into reality. Imaginations of the future take visible or viewable form within pictures and, in so doing, gain the capacity to influence our actions and decisions.

Reading Hölscher’s vision of “virtual history” as nothing more than a simple expansion of the historian’s subject, or of the range of sources with which historians are to concern themselves, would do it an injustice. Instead, in a sense that remains implicit in Hölscher’s account of “virtual history,” the “expanded concept of history” it envisions would entail changes in how historians handle and interact with their sources. Reinhart Koselleck’s maxim that an artefact only becomes a source through the questions asked of it still holds here;  yet the content the source communicates is contingent, not only upon the questions asked of it, but also upon their type. One example in this context might be the analysis of pictures as sources. Much of academic history continues to adhere to a concept of “pictures” as effectively being reproductions or reflections of events from the past, that, as such, bear evidential witness to these happenings.  To a considerable extent, this idea of a “picture” is traceable to iconology, a method articulated and developed by art historian Erwin Panofsky in the first half of the twentieth century, that has remained, to this day, centrally influential in the analysis of pictures by academic historians.  Historians using this method seek to ascertain the degree of consistency and alignment between pictures and history as it took place; its purpose seems to consist in quantifying the degree of “reality” these pictures contain. Pictures thus find themselves conceptualized as reproductions of history as it happened.  Photography, in this context, may appear as an extreme instance of images’ endowment with the “property of a certificate of truth.”  Pictures that give visual form to alternative notions of the future, to possibilities or potentialities, still find themselves discounted by academic history. And yet, in pictures, what is “real” always shows itself in changed form, is transformed and depicted in a different manner. It is in this that the “hybrid character” of every picture’s virtuality is founded. And it is this difference whose trail we might follow when analyzing pictures, and which could potentially open up the whole wealth of possible past futures. Yet currently, the discipline of history generally does not examine pictures for their traces of such futures, with the result that it possesses scant awareness of their potential to render these visible to us. An “expanded concept of history,” then, requires us to likewise expand the repertoire of questions we ask in encounter with sources of various genres. Rather than proceeding invariably from the act of comparison and alignment with history as it was and as it came to be, we could seek to ask questions around the manner in which a picture depicts its subjects, thus dislodging these subjects, which are too often credited as reproductions of the realized past, from the center of our interest, and making room for the depiction that occurs in the picture, a depiction whose manner frequently uncovers alternative visions of what was then the future.

In the final analysis, the “virtual history” that Hölscher proposes remains, in some respects, abstract, and its specificity remains doubtful. He concludes his vision by defining limits to his concept, restricting it to only “those perspectives that contemporaries already considered quite realistic” (p. 28), and thus defining “[v]irtual historiography [as] includ[ing] only those perspectives that have already shaped history and could do so again in the future” (p. 28). Hölscher does not expand upon the criteria that could serve to determine the existence or degree of the effect, or lack thereof, exercised by specific past futures, given they did not, in fact, take effect. Should we measure such influence quantitatively, by the number of people who shared the future vision? Or do we set store by quality, by the “degree of reality” attached to an unrealized potentiality, by how close it came to becoming factual reality, its appearance as an arguable, a probable proposition, in relation to the history that did in fact happen? The restriction Hölscher places on his concept’s applicability may save us from the fallacy of equating a “virtual history” with a counterfactual narrative; yet it also runs the risk of turning realized history – the history that in fact happened – into the sole yardstick or the inclusion in, or exclusion from, any “virtual history,” thus causing the former to once again predominate over the latter.

Put somewhat provocatively, the fundamental epistemological pitfall of “virtual history” that becomes evident here appears to center on the matter of whether, and to what extent, it is even possible to put aside the history-that-happened so we can gain an unimpeded view of those past pos-sibilities that never came to fruition; do we not in fact always run the risk, in this endeavor, of needing the vantage point of realized history as a viewing platform for perceiving past futures and indeed recognizing them in the first place? Opening his vision of a “virtual history,” Hölscher himself raises the issue of historians’ “Standortgebundenheit” (Reinhart Koselleck) – that is, the inescapability of their position in space and time – by noting the encompassing influence of their present time on all historiography, or, put differently, the fact that history only gains validity as such once it is deemed relevant to a specific present (cf. p. 11). The “ephemeral nature of historical knowledge” (p. 9), as an epistemological conundrum, then appears, equally inescapable for “virtual history,” which, for all its focus on non-realized possibilities, alternate timelines, and visions from or of the past, may only recognize these for what they are against the encompassing backdrop of the “real present,” the “realized present”. An exhibition currently on show at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin may serve to exemplify this dilemma. Entitled Roads Not Taken. Or: Things could have turned out differently, the exhibition, which opened in 2022 and is scheduled to run until 2026, traces unrealized past possibilities around “14 distinctive caesurae in the German history.”  Its intends to demonstrate ways in which history could have, as the subtitle says, “turned out differently” and detail the circumstances that averted these alternate paths.  Its remit, then, seems to concur with the “virtual history” Hölscher proposes. Yet its exploration and examination of desires, visions, and possibilities proceeds from history-that-happened, specifically “14 distinctive caesurae” from 1989 extending back to 1848/49, and it is this history that governs the exhibition’s search for the histories that did not come to pass, and the benchmark by which the exhibition measures the alternatives it narrates. Unrealized histories, then, depend once again on realized history for their emergence into visibility; it is the “road taken” that leads us to the “roads not taken.” While this procedure certainly protects us from falling into speculation and counterfactual historiography, it is a constrictive safety net, reinforcing the authority of the present to define history’s reality and its non-realized alternatives. Yet I wonder: What past possibilities, what visions of futures might we access if we were to escape the matrix of history as a series of realized events – if, indeed, we even can? When Hölscher suggests that his concept of “virtual history” permits us to “expand the scope of history from the historically actual to that of the historically possible” (p. 14), I would add that this act of extension, this expansion of historical periods, of genres of sources, and the questions we ask of them, must necessarily prompt us to call into question the established systems of coordinates from which we are accustomed to generate history.

Translated by Katherine Ebisch-Burton