“Eras have their surfaces,” writes the German historian Karl Schlögel. “They can be smooth or rough. They can vanish or dissolve. They can be felt. What wrapping paper was and what it meant is something one only begins to understand now that it has disappeared … in the flood of plastic bags.”
Even when it focuses on ordinary people rather than grand statesmen, we tend to think of history as a narrative of wars and laws, replete with stark facts: 13 million unemployed, 40 million dead in a famine. But it is also how people experienced these things, and how they felt about them, and about the myriad places and objects and habits that constitute what Prof Schlögel calls a “lifeworld” in his forthcoming book The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World. It is a kind of montage of coarse wrapping paper, dusty museums and Lilac eau de parfum. It nods as well to what is missing – the lost sounds of the early morning ring at the door, announcing your house was about to be searched; the turn of a key in a cell’s lock.
