The Continuation of History and The Search for Stability Amidst War and Chaos: Part II

In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin details the power of storytelling and the ways that stories do more than just relate the events in a character’s or society’s lives. Stories span time and history, moving forward. They highlight the “insignificant” who move through history, those who don’t appear in the records of the age, those who exist as the historical moments occur. We are all like that, experiening history and not realizing it. We think of the past as the past and not about how our current moment is already past and will be looked at through a historical lens when we pass.

To detail the movement of history throughout time, Benjamin looks at a passage in Johann Peter Hebel’s “Unexpected Reunion,” a story about the death of a man in a mining accident on the eve of his wedding and his fiancée. Years later, as workers excavate the ground, they find the man, appearing the same way he did when he died, encased in earth and remove him from the ground to have a funeral. His aged fiancée remained faithful to him, and after they bring him up from the abandoned tunnel, she in turn dies as well.

Instead of just writing the number of years between the man’s death and recovery or actually detailing, in winding pages, that span of time, Hebel lists events that readers…