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"...The growing success of popular print accounts of 'The German State' after victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the formation of a German Empire was something about which Nietzsche was evidently concerned. He was also worried, though, about the increasingly 'religious' tone of representations of history in monuments, festivals and public imagery. There was, he believed, an excess of history. To distance himself from the history-loving middle class and scholars like Immanuel Kant, Leopold Von Ranke, Georg Hegel and Fredrich Schiller, Nietzsche outlined three models of history - two problematic, and one 'life affirming' - which he labels respectively the 'monumental', 'antiquarian', and the 'critical'.
A 'monumental' understanding of history entails the presentation of and support for a grand or master narrative of historical progression culminating in a foundation of myth for the present. He explains that for monumental historian,
...The great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain, that this chain unites mankind across millennia like a range of human mountain peaks, that the summit of such a long-ago monument shall be for me still living, bright and great - that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history...Of what use, then, is the monumentalistic conception of the past, engagement with the classic and rare of earlier times, to the man of the present? He learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again; he goes his way with more cheerful step, for the doubt which assailed him in weaker moments, has now been been banished.
*Source: Fifty Key Thinkers on History by Marnie Hughes-Warrington (Routledge 2nd Ed.)
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