Abstract

What do historians do when they interpretate the past ? Narrativists hold that they organize factual statements into a meaningful whole, the story, which itself has nothing to do with past reality. Others, like David Carr and Paul Ricoeur, defend a relation between the narrative whole and the experience of time. An altogether different approach to the question of the unity of history is that of Johan Huizinga. Huizinga does not place the meaningful unity of history in the text, but in the aesthetic conception of the past. The past is not like a reservoir of signs, which acquire meaning by being put in a self-invented order, nor is it a story-like structure which can be interpretated and translated like a text. History is a cultural reality which we experience as full of symbolic meaning. Interpretation is the search ofthat meaning. The centre of historical conciousness is not in the story, but in the mental imageswe create when we see historical objects, search through documents or read a historians interpretation. In this article I try to clarify Huizinga's concept of the „historische sensatie“ by relating Huizinga's ideas to those of the Dutch writer Lodewijk van Deyssel. Secondly I try to show how the imagination of the (past) world can be regarded as a fundamental form of truth by confronting Huizinga's ideas with those of the philosopher Martin Heidegger and artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Vincent van Gogh