Virtual History - Perspectives on an Expanded Concept of History

At first glance, the term ‘virtual history’ may evoke images of computer-animated fictions of the past – an artificial rendition of a reality that never existed. However, the matter is more complicated: In the present context the term ‘virtual’ is used to describe as much the non-existent in reality as that which could exist or could have existed. In this sense, the following essay explores historical scenarios that could have occurred but never did; scenarios that are embedded in the past and will never completely disappear. Such a concept expands the concept of history beyond what has actually happened to what was, is, and always will be possible.

#The Ephemeral Nature of Historical Knowledge

One of the gravest weaknesses of history as a science is undoubtedly the temporal limitation of the validity of its publications, provided we accept the timeless validity of findings as a measure of their scientific character. This is not only due to the fact that, as in all other sciences, existing knowledge is constantly being overtaken by new findings and discoveries, so that an increasingly accurate picture of “how it actually has been” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen,” Leopold von Ranke)  will emerge only with the passage of time, but also to a specific characteristic of historical narratives: Since most historians have lost faith in the possible timelessness of their representations of the past, historical narratives contain a temporal index that binds them to the time and situation in which they were created.  As a result, even if they are factually correct, the validity of their representations is bound to be short-lived.

This loss of validity can occur in different ways - for example, by the fact that the story told runs toward the present and can therefore only be read as its pre-history: As soon as the present has shifted, the pre-history of the present will also be different. For example, a history of the German Weimar Republic, written in retrospect in 1933, will certainly differ from a history written in retrospect in 1950 or later: Seen from 1933, it will primarily have to address the collapse of the Republic under the onslaught of Nazism, and its causes; seen from 1950 or later, it will also have to address which elements of the Weimar Republic survived the Nazi regime. Many historical narratives, even if they do not deal explicitly with the present, contain such an implicit reference to the present: One only needs to think, for example, of Theodor Mommsen’s “History of Rome”: First published between 1854 and 1856 (translated into English in 1862–1866), it covered only the period from the foundation of Rome to Gaius Julius Caesar. At the same time, however, it indirectly addressed, and thus tried to rekindle and remedy, the lack of republican spirit in Germany in Mommsen’s own age. 

Another reason for the loss of historical validity of historiographical works is the historians’ changing methodological approaches or theoretical assumptions, not least in terminology. Friedrich Meinecke’s “Idee der Staatsräson,” published in 1924, was convincing only at a time after World War I when the History of Ideas as a theoretical concept was booming in Germany. Only half a century later, however, it was criticized by social historians claiming that its author had not sufficiently identified the actors that had promoted the idea, and that his description therefore lacked a social basis.  It was not with the facts that Meinecke had collected that his critics found fault, but with the theoretical concept with which Meinecke sought to describe and explain a historical change.

Various times produce different images of the past, even if they report the same events. That does not mean that some are necessarily more correct than others, but each of them belongs to the time, place, and social group that identifies with it. And as soon as they have lost this validity over the course of time, either by the death of their protagonists or changes in the basis of experience or research methods, they also belong to the time in which they were considered to be an accurate representation of the past. Although there are often different, sometimes even contradictory, scholarly accounts of a fact or a past situation, there is just as often a consensus among experts and ordinary people on what was real, at least for a time, making it possible for later historians to speak of a general agreement at a past time.

In this sense, modern historiography is necessarily always bound to the point of view of its pictures of the past. In German historiography thisperspective view on history is called “Standortgebundenheit”: Only the stand point from which a story is told provides the perspective that gives a historical judgment its persuasive power.  But this attachment to thehistorical place and moment in which the historical narrative was createdseems ambivalent: On the one hand, it guarantees the topicality of historiographical works. On the other hand, however, it also necessitates ever newattempts to portraythe past as it appears in the present dayand time. Thus, the mountain of possible narratives and interpretations of past times continues to grow over time. Historical works are usually accepted by the publicfor only a brief timespan, subjecting scholarly resources to an enormousamount of wear and tear.

#The Identity of Past Facts

Historians have gone to considerable lengths to make their accounts of the past more durable. One of their hypotheses is an assumed identity of the facts of the past: Historians are aware that there may be many different accounts and interpretations of past events, yet they assume that all these accounts are about one and the same past reality. While this fundamental principle of modern historiography has been challenged in recent decades by some radical constructivist historians,  most historians continue to maintain that even different views of historical reality cannot call into question its identity as such. Otherwise, there could be no dispute about how and whether something happened as reported by certain historians. The possibility, at least theoretical, of conducting and deciding such a dispute still seems to be an indispensable prerequisite for historical research today, if it is to continue to fulfil its task of truthfully depicting the reality of the past.

This is precisely what distinguishes historiography from the literary treatment of mythical material, where the question of how it really happened seems meaningless. The intention of Benjamin Hederich, the leading lexicographer of Greek mythology in eighteenthcentury Germany, to work out not only the fabulous traditions of the Greek myths, but also how they “really happened,” therefore seems a pointless undertaking to us today.  Myths, such as the story of the Greek king Oedipus, who unknowingly fathered children with his mother, bringing upon himself the gods’ revenge, can certainly be told in different versions without forcing the reader to decide which one is the correct, authentic account. If, on the other hand, the myth may be based on a historical event, like Odysseus’ return to his home on the isle of Ithaka in Homer’s epic Odyssey, then it would make perfect sense to search for it, as it actually happened.

The assumption of the existence of an objective identity of the past is the foundation underlying the techniques of source criticism, which form the core of the scientific methodology of historiography. They aim to reconstruct past events authentically by systematically comparing different sources. Such a comparison would not be possible at all if it were not based on the assumption that different, independently created accounts address the same events. Similar to hearing different witnesses in a court case, such a comparison of different sources guarantees the general validity of its findings and thus gives them a lasting “scientific” character. According to the “veto of the sources” (Reinhart Koselleck), historians are not allowed to ignore such verified facts in their accounts of the past without refuting them. 

However, the scope of source-critical procedures is limited: They cannot prevent new experiences and new questions, different choices of sources, and different theoretical presuppositions from giving the historical narrative, in which such scientifically elucidated events are assembled into a coherent narrative, an appearance of its own, making the picture of the past vary from one work to the next. As a result, while historians may agree on the elements that make up a historical narrative, they may not agree on the way in which they are selected and put together. The nature of historical narratives, depending on the point of view from which they are told, is not touched by them, but only the factuality of their elements is ensured by secured historical sources.

The following considerations therefore are not meant to question the perspective character of all historical narratives as such but rather aim to do better justice to the time-bound nature of such perspectives than has previously been possible. The problem for historiography is precisely the great number of possible histories that have been produced over the last two centuries. If they cannot be reconciled, their multiplicity contradicts the theorem of identity and unity of historical reality. 

Originally, in the eighteenth century, the theory of perspectivity (Theorie der Standortgebundenheit) was developed only for multiple concurrent perspectives on an event: Seen from different simultaneous perspectives (“Sehepunkte”), events appear differently, as the author of this theory, Erlangen historian Johann Martin Chladenius, argued in 1752. It is therefore necessary to synthesize the different perspectives of an event to obtain an overall picture of it.  Far more difficult than synthesizing simultaneous perspectives, however, is the diachronic multi-perspective view on past events, arising from the fact that historians look back on the same historical sequence of events at different times. These diachronically different perspectives cannot be brought together to form a vivid overall picture as easily as synchronous perspectives of different observers in the older doctrine.

Unless they expand our knowledge of historical objects by adding new aspects, they tend to replace an older image with a newer one: but only in the sense of an immediate claim to reality of today’s descriptions of the past, superseding earlier ones: Just as a modern map replaces older, say, medieval cartographic representations of the same region in our mind. On another, fictional level, the older representations of past events often keep their significance, whether in the form of a “classical,” “mythological,” “nostalgic,” or otherwise qualified representation of the past. As a kind of artwork, they can then unfold a timeless truth that lifts them out of historical reality and thus makes them meaningful for the present and the future in a different, non-historical sense. 

What follows, then, is not an attempt to unite the various historical views of different epochs into an overarching entity, but rather to work out the relationships between the perspectives of different times of one and the same event: In this way, the historical picture of the present is complemented by the pictures of the past and even of the future, making a multi-layered image of past realities emerge. The main purpose of this operation is to liberate historiography from its static attachment to the present moment and thus, to a certain extent, to make historical narrations “dynamic.” As I want to demonstrate, history consists not only of the ephemeral and contingent images of the past created by the present age, but also of the images that were created in the past, and that will be created in the future.

However, this requires an important extension of what we call ‘history’: Since today, we cannot predict future images of the past with any certainty, such a diachronic series of historiographical images turns to the world of possibilities – those historical images of the past and present that could one day be shaped by future generations. Thus, we expand the scope of history from the historically actual to that of the historically possible. I call this ‘virtual history’ or ‘virtual historiography,’ using the attribute ‘virtual,’ as I pointed out in the beginning of this essay, in the double sense of a history that can be thought and imagined as well as a history that has not actually occurred. In doing so, the concept of the ‘virtual’ is distinct from the concepts of the ‘fictional’ and the ‘unreal’ in that it reveals the unreal as only seemingly unreal; and that it elevates the fictional to a new kind of reality.  It is precisely the hybrid character of the virtual that gives the term its relevance today.

In the future, a virtual historiography must be concerned with exploring the space of what was once possible, for several reasons: Firstly, because not only what actually happened, but also what could have happened, is in some sense a historical fact, namely as an intellectual idea; secondly, because what really was and is in the past or present ultimately turns out to be just one possibility among many others; and last but not least, because what once seemed possible may one day become a reality again in the future.

#Not Only is the Real Possible, but also the Possible is Real

Ever since the concept of history came to embrace the whole of historical reality,  modern historiography has sought to exclude from the realm of history the unrealized possibilities once imagined by contemporaries: According to a widespread prejudice that goes back at least to Leibniz and Hegel, what has not happened could never have happened.  According to this prejudice, one only has to consider the facts closely enough to understand that what really occurred was the only thing in the past that was possible. 

In the age of historicism, it seemed to be the historians’ task to prove this hypothesis. And historians believed they could do this all the better because common sense was always on their side: As we know from everyday life, what has not happened sooner or later loses the character of reality. The same is true in politics: In 1990, when the GDR collapsed, civil rights activists could still hope that the successor state to the GDR would pursue a reformist socialist course, whereas a short time later, this appeared to be a mere illusion. Options for the future, no matter how likely, desirable, or threatening they may once have been, are in most cases dismissed as illusions only a short time later when they have failed to materialize. The further back in time a landmark decision was taken, the more historically inevitable it appears in hindsight. This can be seen, for example, in the transition from the Roman Republic to the Caesarism of Augustus and his successors in the first century BC: For Cicero, who had experienced and tried to shape Caesar’s autocracy, the alternative of republican rule as an option for the future was still very much alive. But within a short space of time after him, this possibility had disappeared. According to the new reading, by describing the transition as a ‘crisis,’ the Roman Republic had been carrying the seeds of its imminent demise no later than since the attacks of Marius and Sulla half a century earlier. 

At the moment of change, political constellations usually present multiple possibilities that would drive the course of events in different directions.  In the case of the GDR, it was the moment of indecision when people took to the streets of Leipzig, demanding the opening of the Berlin Wall; in the case of the fall of the Roman Republic, it was the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC. It is only when new events occur that some of these possibilities are eliminated, and then they quickly take on the character of illusions. In retrospect, their hopelessness sometimes even seems to have been predestined. In this way, past constellations lose their openness over time, and realistic options and possibilities become illusionary assumptions and castles in the air. The fact that they were not illusionary assumptions from the beginning, but only became so ex post, is then quickly lost on both historians and contemporaries. They often write about what happened in the past as if there had been no alternative. To avoid this shortcircuit, historians must keep in mind what they know from their own experience: As contemporaries, they are well aware of the fact that there are alternatives in almost any situation.

#Past Designs for the Future Do not Die with Their Momentary Failure but Live on Latently

This leads to the further conclusion that history is obviously more than what actually happened in the past: There are also the events and processes that were once possible but did not happen; and with them, different contemporary perspectives into the past and future. It is worth taking a closer look at the futures of the past, in particular, because they sometimes behave strangely: Contemporaries expect some events to have a long future, while denying others any future at all. For example, with the end of the Second World War, the National Socialists’ “millennial” horizon collapsed, while in 1871, Socialists and Communists reinterpreted the crushing of the Paris Commune as a herald of even more certain success in the future.

It is remarkable that collective perspectives for the future sometimes do not disappear even when they seem refuted by their “defeat” in historical constellations, such as the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945 or of the Communist regime in Eastern Europe in 1989. Sometimes this happens because small minorities perpetuate the old narratives that have been ostracized by mainstream society; sometimes they are rediscovered by newly emerged groups that use them to make their concerns heard. As we can learn from many cases, they can be revived in new, more favorable constellations. The hopes and fears they arouse seem to live on beneath the surface, just waiting to be revived. The history of Europe in the twentieth century is full of such latent perspectives, ranging from the belief in a communist ‘future society’ to the belief in a fascist ‘Volksgemeinschaft’; from the vision of a liberal constitutional state to that of an ecological recycling economy.  Such historical visions are surprisingly durable and resistant to contrary experience. And so, they continue to exist today, their supporters expecting that they will be confirmed and strengthened by new constellations and developments.

Considering such repetitive structures opens up new ways of representing the past, for example, writing parallel histories of twentieth-century European history. Each would present historical events from the perspec-tive of a different political camp. This is what Sami Adwan, Dan Bar-On and Eyal Naveh did in their histories of Israel and Palestine in 2015.  Such a historiography even offers the chance to outlive changing political constellations more than any standard-bound historiography that is conceived only from the current historical perspective, for it does not depend solely on the temporary evidence and value system of its own present. Instead, it recognises that historical events and narratives mean different things to different people at different times.

#The Mechanisms of Historical Recognition

In observing enduring historical expectations over long periods of time, it is important for both historians and politically engaged contemporaries to recognize the basic patterns of pre-existing narratives in the new events and experiences they are living through. The Christian belief in the coming of the kingdom of God on earth is the most astonishing model for such processes of recognition: Since the ancients were repeatedly disappointed in their expectations, the eschatological expectation of Christians underwent ever new interpretations and mutations in the course of the centuries, adapting it to each historical constellation.  At the same time, it immunized itself against premature temporal determinations early on by the statement, attributed to Jesus himself, that it was not for humans, but only for the “Father” himself to know when the kingdom of God would dawn (Matthew 24:36). For the Christian community, the perspective of redemption was more important than the date on which divine prophecy was actually to be fulfilled.

This applies to all long-term expectations of the future. A good recent example to study this is the ecological or environmental movement. When it emerged in the 1960s, it was able to build on a previous conservation movement that dated back to the dawn of the twentieth century. From its perspective, just as in 1900, the main dangers of future social development resided in the destruction of natural resources and the dominance of individual economic interests over the life interests of the broad majority of the population. The differences between the older conservation movement and the newer environmental movement, for example the greater international ambitions of the new ecological movement compared to the older, more narrowly nationalist nature protection movement, receded in the perception of the environmentalists. 

It is these mechanisms of recognizing the old in the new that can breathe new life into the possibilities of the past. Thus, even if they seem to have been “disproved” by new historical experiences, such as the fascist ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (people’s community) in 1945 or the socialist ‘Zukunftsstaat’ (future society) in 1989, once prominent historical perspectives rarely lose their historical significance in the long run. Faced with such experiences, who today would deny the possibility of a future revival of fascist or socialist movements? The mechanisms of translation and deconstellation are always central to the possibility of regenerating historical perspectives on the future. They are the means by which desirable connotations are captured and undesirable ones repelled.

#On the Facticity of Past and Future Possibilities

In historiographical practice, the present is often perceived as the solid ground on which historical images of the past and forecasts of the future are based.  However, this assumption is deceptive: What we call our present is an overly complex conglomerate of very different and incoherent experiences and impressions that only seem to come together into a coherent period of time when viewed from an external perspective, that is, from other periods in time. It is from this that the theory of history has drawn its most important justification in the last two hundred years: Only if we know where we come from and where we are going, historians taught us, would we also know who we are.  Therefore, given the uncertainty of where we have come from and where we are going, it is also highly uncertain who we are today. The present is not a solid ground on which we can build our images of the past and of the future.

In order to determine what our own present might actually be, constructs of future pasts as well as reconstructions of past futures can make a valuable contribution: Future pasts are fictional designs of the past, created from the perspective of a (fictional) future point in time.  Such constructs, which always play an important role in political debates, are usually aimed at providing a more detailed description and assessment of the present situation. For example, they create scenarios of a looming war between Russia and the European Union in order to show the European Union’s current inability to defend itself adequately. I call this a ‘retrospective present.’

Reconstructions of past futures, on the other hand, are designs for the future that were once unfolded and widespread, but then usually did not materialize.  While future pasts thus create a picture of the current state of things, past futures focus on the contingency of the historical course of events, i.e. the reasons and circumstances why things turned out differently than once expected. I call this a ‘prospective present.’ To give just two examples for both, future pasts and past futures: On the one hand, it is possible to explore how German history would have unfolded if a consistent nature conservation policy had been pursued since the beginning of the twentieth century (past future); on the other hand, it is also possible to conceive how the current situation would look in retrospect if a climate catastrophe were to actually occur in the future (future past).

Both types of construction, the construction of future pasts and the construction of past futures, are fundamental to virtual historiography because they extend the scope of history beyond factual events to include past and future possibilities that are embedded in it but not fully realized. Such considerations are also of practical relevance for politics: Global warming is likely to lead to a significant deterioration in living conditions for many people in large parts of the world in the coming decades. Such a prospect can trigger very different reactions in the present: We can try to take countermeasures to contain global warming as much as possible. However, we can also accept global warming as unavoidable and count on the adaptability of the global population. We can therefore already anticipate today how we might look back on today’s decision-making situation in the future: Will it be seen as an abdication of responsibility on the part of humanity as a whole, or will the demise of parts of the earth’s population be attributed to a succession of disasters, no different from other catastrophes that humanity has faced? Whatever we do, however, the expected future becomes a fact in our own present, which would be of great importance for the course of history even if it did not come to pass. Of course, this also applies to past decision-making situations and the future plans on which they are based. In the historicist historiography of the nineteenth century, they were not sufficiently considered, even though they are clearly important for judging the past.

#Virtual History is not a Counterfactual History

In his 1930 novel “The Man Without Qualities,” Robert Musil argued that if one assumes that man possesses a “sense of reality,” then one must also grant him a “sense of possibility.” He further specified that this sense of possibility should not be understood as the “sense for real possibilities,” known to anyone who ever had the choice of spending a certain sum of money in different ways; but as the “sense for possible realities” as only the visionary of future states possesses, i.e. a sense for alternatives to the existing state of things: “Thus the sense of possibility could be defined virtually as the ability to think everything that could just as well be, and not to take what is more important than what is not.”  A very similar expansion of the concept of history was implied in Reinhart Koselleck’s distinction between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” of historical societies.  For what else could a concept like “space of experience” refer to but the sense of reality among contemporaries, and what else could the concept of “horizon of expectation” refer to but their sense of possibility?

However, by studying historical horizons of expectation, history enters a field it had shunned in the age of historicism. It seemed too close to the mostly unfounded speculations of “counterfactual” historiography, which explores questions such as what would have happened if Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not travelled to Sarajevo in late June 1914; or if England had not entered the war in early August, as the German government had apparently hoped for a while. Such speculations usually get out of hand very quickly and tell us more about the wishful thinking of those who make them after the event than about the possibilities that actually existed at the time of such events and constellations. 

Such speculations are different from the contemporaries’ own visions of the future, their justified fears and aspirations, sometimes expressed in dreams, images, and literary fiction. Often, they had already made provisions for their realization, drawn up plans and scenarios, or taken other precautions.  We sometimes have considerable source material on them, showing how intensively contemporaries had already prepared for such possibilities.  The fact that they did not materialize says little about the likelihood of their realization. There are always reasons why things did not happen, including the possibility that they did not happen precisely because contemporaries were so prepared for them to happen. In any case, they point to the unlimited contingency and randomness of the events and constellations in which history takes its course. Therefore, such alternative possibilities also belong to an extended concept of virtual history, as presented here. A focus on alternative historical courses that contemporaries themselves envisioned considerably narrows the field of possible and conceivable historical courses. Although things may still turn out quite differently from what was foreseen, there is a natural tendency to recognize in the new the old, an already conceived possibility. This increases the likelihood that the expectations of the past will be revived in the new experiences.

#Reality as a Historical Possibility

Up to this point, we have been discussing the possible alternative courses of history. It is necessary to include them in writing history, not only because they help us understand the motives of the contemporaries, but also because they continue to accompany history subconsciously as future possibilities. I will now show that the historical facts themselves are contingent according to their inner constitution.

It is helpful to look at historical ‘facts’ and the timelines in which they are embedded not retrospectively or prospectively, as is common in the historical and social sciences, but as they are in the moment they unfold, in order to show how contingent they really are:  As they unfold, it is usually yet unclear into which temporal context the present events will one day be inserted. To take a current example: Anyone who has been following the war in Ukraine in recent months knows only too well that its time frame is currently (February 2024) wide open: Not only is it conceivable that either side may win or lose, but also that there might be a stalemate. In addition to political, cultural, and economic stakes, one country or the other will also lose significance or impoverish in the long-term. 

We generally have only a vague idea of what will actually happen next, and usually only in the sense of what is likely, what can be expected, and what can be assumed. It is therefore difficult to predict how events will unfold. But we usually need – and do have – ideas about how things could evolve. And these alternatives remain part of the story even if they do not come to pass later, because on the one hand, they obviously could have happened, and on the other, they might still happen later. A historian is therefore well advised to keep them in mind.

Transferred to the past, such a shift to the contemporaries’ perspective of the future also opens up new interpretations of past events. For example, in Germany, even economic experts welcomed the massive economic stimulus provided by the constant supply of new money during the great inflation of the early 1920s. They saw the current high inflation as a prerequisite for the desired economic recovery. It was only when inflation got out of control in 1923, leading to a huge destruction of material assets, that inflation turned into the catastrophic crisis we still remember today. If we did not know what hopes contemporary experts initially placed in inflation, we would, in retrospect, have to consider their economic policy decisions as irresponsible.

To regard a specific time figure like progress or decline as an essential structure of empirical processes, as social scientists and historians usually do, can have grave consequences. It suggests that the course of time is its substance, its nature.  Time, however, is not a substance, but a mere form, acquired retrospectively or prospectively and coagulated in time figures.  It is also a fluid form that can change in an instant if things turn out differently than expected. We must therefore consider time itself as a space of possibilities that places not only existing but also possible things in temporal proximity to one another; as a space in which things/events can, but do not have to, communicate with each other. It is this quality of time that matters when we speak of a “space of possibilities.”

As an example, I would like to come back to the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig in September and early October of 1989. These demonstrations would have taken a completely different course if the Communist Party leadership had decided to suppress them, as the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party did in Tiananmen Square in Beijing a few months earlier. From the contemporary point of view, the ultimately peaceful course of the protest in the GDR was one possibility among others, and not even the most probable. 

#Transcendental Relations

Those events and event relations that we refer to as ‘real’ are also to be described as ‘possible’ because they are based on the construction of contingent categories of perception. As we know from our encounters with other languages and cultures, we could name things differently. That we name them as we do is contingent in this sense. There are many examples of descriptive categories influencing the historical character of events. They range, to give just a few examples, from the contemporary designation of the “Great War” of 1914/18 as a “World War” (which it was not at all in the beginning), to the annihilation of European Jewry as the “Final Solution” or as the “Shoa” and “Holocaust,” to Putin’s designation of the Ukrainian war as a “Special Military Operation.” A well-known anecdote of a Chinese scholar illustrates how semantic labels change the character of things: While filling in his entry form for the USA on the plane, he found that his spiritual roots in the tradition of Confucianism were regarded here as a “religion,” which he had to then check as his religious affiliation as opposed to Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and others. This classification had been completely unknown to him until then. It made Confucianism something different from what he was used to.

There is a transcendental relationship between historical events and their conceptual designations. Reinhart Koselleck’s historiographical program of reconstructing the linguistic and anthropological “conditions of possible histories”  ultimately served to identify such linguistic specifications, which he regarded as contingent factors of historical events, given to contemporary actors. Historical experience, he was convinced, is based on linguistic categories, and contemporaries cannot avoid using them if they want to give voice to what is. But such a dependence also goes the other way: Koselleck alluded to this when, for example, he described concepts as “saturated with experience” (erfahrungsgesättigt).  By this, he pointed to the fact that they not only made experience possible but also reacted to experience. Thus, not only do the possibilities, in this case the possible histories, depend on the linguistic instruments as their conditions, but, conversely, the linguistic conditions depend on the historical possibilities, too.

To illustrate this, let us first consider the case Koselleck himself had in mind: Political conflicts, such as those that have recurred in the “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm), can certainly be broken down using the categories of ‘master/servant’ and ‘friend/enemy’ introduced by Carl Schmitt in the 1920s.  But conversely, the conflicts of this period also gave rise to these categories of thought: for it was only because the conflict situations proved the concepts right that they could establish themselves as general categories of thought saturated with experience.

Another example of the reciprocal transcendental relationship between language and historical experience is provided by the concept of ‘utopia’:  In the context of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, the term has come to denote a state of affairs that, as the word itself says, is never and nowhere possible. But the historical critique of utopias in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Louis Blanc to Ernst Bloch, already provided several examples (for example, the abolition of the death penalty) to show that what once seemed impossible soon became possible and was even realized shortly thereafter. Conceptualization reacted to this:
Influenced by the realization of earlier ‘utopias,’ the concept of ‘utopia’ mutated in the twentieth century into designating a mere relative limit of the possible, even a pragmatic goal of political action. The condition of a possibility had been transformed into the possibility of a condition.

#The Existential Interdependence of Past, Present, and Future

The manifold interdependencies between historical realities and historical possibilities have profound and far-reaching consequences for historiography:  From the fact that, firstly, what once was can only be determined in retrospect, and, secondly, that our own present stands in a relationship of contingency, of mere possibility, to the past, it follows, thirdly, that what we experience and register as historical reality is inconceivable without taking into account past and future possibilities. For it is only in the light of possible pasts and futures that the present becomes comprehensible to us at all as a distinct period of time.  With regard to the future, we are sufficiently familiar with this perspectivism from our preoccupation with current problems of global survival, such as a possible nuclear war or a global climate catastrophe; with regard to the past, from our preoccupation with National Socialism and other dictatorships. They all form the backdrop against which our own present stands out as an epoch with a specific character. However, such references to future and past provide only one reading of the present, alongside which there are others.

The existential status of possibility thus not only denotes the contingent character of historical facts, i.e. that which could also be different, but also serves to profile that which actually constitutes our image of the present world: For in a world in which much could be described as reality, the present is only profiled as reality from the perspective of a possible future or past – as much as past and future are profiled from the perspective of a possible present. That means that we have to take historical times not as something “given” but as actions through which possibilities become realities.

#Prospects for a Future “Virtual Historiography”

Such an understanding of what I call a ‘virtual history’ opens up a view on the multitude of possible past, present, and future histories that surround all real histories like a wreath: to people’s hopes, to their fears of real and imagined dangers, to their dreams, to their precautions and planning games, to their risk assessments and miscalculations, to their inept or appropriate images and conceptualizations, in short, on everything that could, can, and will guide and paralyze the actions of human beings. In doing so, virtual historiography will expand into new materials that it has so far failed to cover, or has done so only rarely and marginally.

In order to produce such a virtual history, entire sub-disciplines will have to be redesigned, such as the conceptual history of statistical categories, a broad historical interpretation of dreams, and a historical contextualization of literary utopias. They could serve to reveal the virtuality of historical facts and the historical references of seemingly unreal phenomena, such as dreams and fictional texts, to reality. In this way, the methodological boundaries between historical reality and fiction could become clearer in their significance for historiography.

The question then arises how to construct such a story discursively: The first conclusion from this essay is that the stories we present as historians no longer emanate from a fixed point of origin, nor do they lead to a fixed point of destination. Rather, they will be formed in the tension between the past present and changing futures and pasts, reconstructing different temporalities in past events. In this process, different possible futures are repeatedly juxtaposed and set in relation to one another, and different pasts are presented in their relation to the changing present.

Concerning the temporal structure of history, such a virtual history will no longer be chronologically linear. Rather, in such a history book, many temporalities will often intertwine and sometimes only communicate with each other at punctual touchpoints: simultaneities and repetitions that form a network of coincidences that touch each other at certain points. The intention of such historiography is to identify the past as the past present, the present as the past future and the future past. It will be done less in the tone of an indirect prophecy and more in the tone of a discussion that raises a variety of issues. For the aim is not to fix the past, present, and future permanently, which is never possible, but to reveal the possibilities they hold, so that we can better find our bearings in the time of history and thus better shape the time that lies ahead of us.

Taken together, all this should help expand the short shelf-life of historical works and remedy their fixation on the ephemeral present in which they are written. It is true, by extending its scope to the world of historical possibilities, virtual history opens itself up to events that never really happened. But the associated danger of a boundless expansion of history is not as great as opponents of counterfactual history might believe: for in virtual history, this expansion is narrowly limited to those perspectives that contemporaries already considered quite realistic. Virtual historiography includes only those perspectives that have already shaped history and could do so again in the future. Without them, even what has actually happened would ultimately remain incomprehensible.