Individual proper time is necessarily fitted into the length of a lifetime. Longer periods of experience are open to society; even if, as the core of the systematic reflection of historiography requires, it arranges sequences, and gives them meaning, to rearrange them again in the light of later, fresh experiences, the various modalities in which people's experiences produce history are still 'stratified', in a temporally graduated fashion. Simultaneity has already been treated here, and it recurs in the form of the possibility of narrating the experiences of those involved', as the historian Reinhart Koselleck believes. He focuses on various ways of gaining experience. The first kind of experience is always as unique as it is unrepeatable. It is the experience which is the result of surprise, since somebody has an experience who has to be surprised'. Hence it also has to be repeatedly undergone afresh by every single person. What is repeated is simply this fact. The second possibility of gaining experience is that which is repeated, whether in the life of a single person, or as the result of a process of accumulation, and hence through the experience of many people. Experience is stabilized in the medium term here, and experiences are specific to one's generation to an increased extent. They result from the biological handicap alone, which moulds every individual life through the temporal discrepancy between parents and children, but they receive their social signature through the political and social events experienced in common, as a generation. Although they are differently perceived and undergone, such phases of experience nevertheless evoke a minimum of common interests, comprehending all age-groups. Once these are institutionalized, they establish a common history.
To these two interlinked and mutually interdependent levels of time – the unique level and that conditioned by one's generation – a third level can be added, that which in the long term, whether insidiously or in phases, alters all established experiences, and changes the balance of experience altogether. Such long-term historical changes, which influence every current conflict or help to cause it, remain present as a background experience, even if they are raised into consciousness only by questions of historical method.
The Illusion of Simultaneity
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