Toews, John. Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.
This book focuses on a remarkable group of nineteenth century Berlin artists and thinkers to examine the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood and experienced as components of historical identity. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Felix Mendelssohn, Jacob Grimm, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke became associated in 1840 with the cultural agenda of a regime that hoped to forge solidarity among its subjects by encouraging identification with a constructed public memory.
- Encompasses the languages of architecture, music, philosophy, historiography, linguistics and law - great variety of sources.
- Ties issues of nineteenth-century historicism to current debates about discursive determination and subjective agency in the formation of personal and cultural identity.
- Provides new perspective on significance of the 1840s as a seminal period for the production of new ways of conceiving selfhood as historical identity.