Content and Editorial Note
Content and Editorial Note

Summary/Abstract: The crumbling of the humanities In the summer 2010 issue of Modern Age, its editor R.V. Young notes that over the lifetime of humanities professors now approaching retirement, humanities at American universities evolved from being a treasure house of memory to a means of weakening communal memory. Novels and poems used to be read as records of times past and verbal expressions of human passions and desires. Works of history were treated as attempts to find out wie es eigentlich gewesen, although Ranke himself could be contested in his brutally biased account of Teutonic dealings with Germany‘s eastern neighbors. Nevertheless, the principles and assumed goals of research were clear and sources could be rationally contested. Practically anyone could understand texts of even the most prominent teachers of history and literature.

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