What is the epic preterite?

Tomorrow was Christmas ...

Käte Hamburger was always both a literary scholar and a philosopher to equal degrees. She combined philosophical and literary issues even when she was a young student herself (studying History of Literature, Philosophy and History of Art, first in Berlin, then in Munich, where she completed her PhD in Philosophy in 1922), and in especially so in her PhD thesis entitled "Schiller's analysis of human nature as the basis of his philosophy of history and culture". In her work, she also tried to include poetic statements within the field of logic.

Her main work, "The Logic of Literature", which she completed in 1956 at the age of 60 as her post-doctoral dissertation at what was then Stuttgart College of Technology, highlights the relationship between reality and fiction in various genres of literature. In it her main concern is to reflect on the basic grammatical preconditions of speech. She highlights the grammatical phenomenon of the "epic preterite". The stock formula of fairy tales "Once upon a time there lived ..." refers to a narrative time and nothing else. Only in literature can a sentence such as "Tomorrow was Christmas" make sense – a context in which we don't even notice its apparent grammatical impossibility.