Precarious Times

In Precarious Times, Anne Fuchs explores how works of German literature, film, and photography reflect on the profound temporal anxieties precipitated by contemporary experiences of atomization, displacement, and fragmentation that bring about a loss of history and of time itself and that is peculiar to our current moment.

The digital age places premiums on just-in-time deliveries, continual innovation, instantaneous connectivity, and around-the-clock availability. While some celebrate this 24/7 culture, others see it as profoundly destructive to the natural rhythm of day and night—and to human happiness. Have we entered an era of a perpetual present that depletes the future and erodes our grasp of the past?

Beginning its examination around 1900, when rapid modernization was accompanied by comparably intense reflection on changing temporal experience, Precarious Times provides historical depth and perspective to current debates on the "digital now." Expanding the modern discourse on time and speed, Fuchs deploys such concepts as attention, slowness and lateness to emphasize the uneven quality of time around the world.

Anne Fuchs is Professor and Director of the University College Dublin Humanities Institute. She is author of After the Dresden Bombing, Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse, and Die Schmerzensspuren der Geschichte. Follow her on X, @AnneFuchsUCD.

Stuck in an expanding present, we paradoxically seem never to manage to fit everything in. While this might feel particular to our current moment, there is a longer history of precarious times, which Anne Fuchs revealingly traces in a German cultural context. Her book offers a broad perspective on current debates in our digitalised present with added historical depth. Analysing works of fiction, photography and film from the modernist period to now, Fuchs shows how their subjective experiences of time overturn the imperative to be always connected.

Anne Fuchs provides a meticulous account of existential temporality in her study of post-modern pictorial and text artists, utilising sensitive readings of a wide range of literary works, films and photography reflecting on the profound cultural anxieties precipitated by experiences of atomisation, displacement and fragmentation which, she argues, 'brings about a loss of history and of time itself.

Anne Fuchs brilliant analysis shifts between careful close readings of texts and images and insightful linkages to key thinkers. The result is a highly readable and fiercely intelligent book.

In this extraordinary and timely book, Anne Fuchs examines the contingent precarity of living in the present, offering a clear and comprehensive analysis that interrupts prevalent deterministic interpretations of modern temporality. Fuchs delivers a rigorous, extensive, and elaborate re-examination of the modern discourse on time that includes works of literature, film, and photograpy.

Fuchs's study engages with a magnificent range of theoretical and cultural engagements with time to explore fundamental questions raised by the temporal shifts of the twenty-first century. The book stands out for its far-reaching and careful exploration of a diverse range of theory and art[.]

Masterfully achieved, this work instills in the reader the contingent precarity of existing in the present. Reading it, one is transported to a time before the global pandemic when the issue emanated more of a theoretical than literal nature. Located on the other side of the tipping point, scholars from cultural, media, and literary studies, along with their general reader counterparts, encounter the uncanniness and become flâneurs of the past.

R.C. Conard, University of Dayton:

Fuchs first documents the effect of speed on society and looks at how the rapid pace of change suppresses the past and clouds the future...In the final chapters, she rightly recognizes that in the last 30 years the most profound effect on German culture was the "overnight" fall of the Berlin Wall. Fuchs's treatment of German unification is the book's most important contribution.

Aleida Assmann, University of Konstanz:

Fuchs' rich and important study energizes the theoretical discussions of time. Her sensitive readings reconnect time to space and provide historical depth for contemporary expressions across a wide range of literary texts, works of photography and films. By probing their aesthetic pulse, the author reveals the highly precarious quality of time as cultural frame, connector of social life and measure of individual experience.

Jane O. Newman, University of California, Irvine:

Fuchs interrupts conventional, deterministic accounts of modern temporality, mechanization, and modernization with her meticulous accounts of the work of postmodern German image and text artists. A wide-ranging and compelling review of photography, film, and fiction from the Wende through the refugee crisis of 2015 and its aftermath.