2023-04-23 13:05:13
ZAround Reinhart Koselleck’s 100th birthday on April 23, Suhrkamp Verlag published three books that show how Koselleck influenced the development of historical science and at the same time critically commented on the history policy of the Federal Republic, often in a polemically exaggerated manner. The extensive volume “Gerunne Lava” bundles Koselleck’s “Texts on Political Death Cults and Remembrance”, in which the “Traces of Experiences of War Participants and Prisoners of War” are published for the first time. “The Rift in Time” is the name of the detailed attempt by historian Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, who teaches at Berkeley, to reconstruct “Koselleck’s unwritten history”. Finally, the correspondence between Hans Blumenberg and Reinhart Koselleck is reminiscent of a past university culture in which the preferred social medium was the offprint.
More so than other German scholars of his generation, the experience of the war not only shaped Koselleck’s biography, but also determined his choice of research areas and his working methods. Since 1965 he had been collecting memories of the war and imprisonment in a black ring binder that was always within reach on his desk. At the age of 17, writes Koselleck, he volunteered for artillery as a “convinced Greater German freedom fighter”.
Koselleck was a soldier in Russia for nine months and spent ten months in the hospital after an accident. In the last weeks of the war he was ordered back to the front and was taken prisoner by the Russians in Moravia on May 1, 1945. In Auschwitz, liberated by the Red Army, he had to load the remains of the IG Farben factories onto freight trains bound for the Soviet Union before being taken to a labor camp in Kazakhstan’s Karaganda, in Solzhenitsyn’s words “the largest provincial capital of the Gulag archipelago.” From there he was released in the fall of 1946 because he was unable to work.
Encounter in Auschwitz
In Auschwitz, there was a heated argument with a former Polish concentration camp prisoner, who threatened Koselleck to smash his skull in: “You gassed millions.” But the prisoner suddenly made it clear to him: “That can’t have been invented.” In retrospect, Koselleck spoke of a “primary experience” that was not transferrable, people could have the same experiences, the memories of it remained contradictory.
Against the boom in research on “collective memory”, the historian Koselleck insisted on the “right of veto of personal experiences, which blocks any appropriation in a collective memory”. For the immovability of the individual memory, Koselleck found the image of the “coagulated mass of lava, which once poured itself glowing and flowing into the body in order to fix immovable layers on which all further life is built or steals around”.
Source: Suhrkamp Verlag
Professor in Heidelberg, Bochum and Bielefeld, Koselleck has only written two monographs: in 1953 the dissertation “Criticism and Crisis”, a rejection of utopian philosophy of history, in 1967 the habilitation thesis “Prussia between Reform and Revolution”. Unlike fellow historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler or Thomas Nipperdey, who claimed the label of an “opus magnum” with their multi-volume works, Koselleck remained an essayist throughout his life. A retreat into intellectual self-restraint was not associated with it, often written elegantly and suggestively, always jargon-free and opinionated, Koselleck’s essays form a mosaic that is characterized by a wealth of perspective and a wealth of surprises. Two groups can be distinguished: texts on the political cult of the dead and on the politics of remembrance on the one hand, and attempts at history, a theory of history, on the other.
Three weeks before his death on February 3, 2006, Koselleck asked a colleague for photographs of a war memorial in the small parish village of Lossow in Brandenburg. The letter is the last document in Koselleck’s work on the political cult of the dead, which began in 1979 with the characteristic of “war memorials as identity foundations for the survivors”. Koselleck created his own field of research here, the range of topics and originality of which is documented in the volume “Geronne Lava”.
Source: Suhrkamp Verlag
Koselleck recorded his visits to thousands of warrior monuments and tombs over a period of four decades in a “private image archive of violent death”. It was only logical that he should take part in the monument controversies of reunified Germany. For him, the only appropriate place to commemorate the victims of Nazi crimes was the “Topography of Terror” in Berlin. On the other hand, the “anthropophagic Plusterdame” – the Pietà by Käthe Kollwitz, four times larger than the original, which Helmut Kohl had placed in the Neue Wache, provoked him to violent polemics. Koselleck also foresaw that the erection of the Holocaust memorial dedicated to the murdered Jews would have to lead to demands for memorials for other groups of victims.
Koselleck experienced the catastrophe of war and imprisonment as a “rift in time”. Another rift in time led him to the theory of history, to the attempt “to thematize the time structures peculiar to the historical movement and the time experiences that can be derived from them”. Koselleck was fascinated by what he called the “saddle period”, which began around 1750. In it, the divergence of experience and expectation marks the beginning of modernity: “The less experience, the greater the expectation, this is a formula for the temporal structures of modernity.” Different speeds characterize history, it is “continuity and catastrophe, Inhibition and acceleration” at the same time, but never coagulates “into fixed forms, everything is execution and withdrawal in one”. Koselleck was an enemy of any philosophy of history; for him, history had neither meaning nor direction. The historian was left with the search for formal criteria of historical action and decision-making, and Koselleck described history as “the study of the conditions of possible stories”.
“Knowing is better than knowing better”
Fascinated by the Sattel period, Koselleck played a key role in the success of a work that Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann rightly calls “the most impressive joint scientific project in the old Federal Republic”. It is the monumental, nine-volume “Historical Basic Concepts” and the “Historical Lexicon on Political-Social Language in Germany” that Koselleck conceived together with Otto Brunner and Werner Conze and finally completed as editor and author. It has established its reputation as the “pillar saint” of conceptual history, which in its best contributions forms a bridge between social history and history of ideas.
The letters and offprints that Koselleck and Hans Blumenberg exchanged between 1965 and 1994 record the workshop conversation between two scholars, of whom only one taught the other. The strict Blumenberg gave Koselleck’s lecture from 1970 “Why still history?” on one of his notorious index cards a tight “III”, Koselleck in turn may have thought of Blumenberg when he wrote: “Knowledge is better than knowing better”.
Source: Suhrkamp Verlag
Whether it was the working group for social history, the research group “Poetics and Hermeneutics” or the newly founded University of Bielefeld – Koselleck was characterized by a high degree of loyalty to the institutions. He appreciated taking part, Blumenberg preferred not to attend. For Blumenberg, the “lonely desk” was the appropriate workplace for a scientist, while the “fertile breeding warmth of the collective”, which also attracted Koselleck, he ridiculed as a symptom of a second youth movement.
Blumenberg was a master at summarizing individual research results into large syntheses. Koselleck repeatedly made attempts at a systematic theory of time – and finally almost grumpily rejected questions about it. The claim that he was now bored with the subject was actually a suppressed sigh. The fact that the article “Time” is missing from the “Geschichtliche Grundbedingungen” has a family point: the polyhistor Jean Henri Samuel Formey, a Huguenot ancestor of Koselleck on his mother’s side, contributed the article “Temps” to the “Encyclopédie” by d’Alembert and Diderot .
Koselleck’s sigh is reminiscent of the sentence with which Marcel Proust ends the “Search for Lost Time”: “At least if I had enough strength left to complete my work, I would find the people in him (and if they then also monstrosities) as beings who, in addition to the limited amount of space reserved for them, have in contrast an immeasurably vast space – since they are at the same time like giants who, immersed in the depths of the years, lie very far apart Wander through epochs between which an infinite number of days have passed – take over in ZEIT.”
New publications on Reinhart Koselleck
Reinhart Koselleck: Coagulated Lava. Texts on political death cults and remembrance. Edited by Manfred Hettling, Hubert Locher and Adriana Markantonatos. Suhrkamp, 572 pages, 38 euros.
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann: The crack in time. Koselleck’s unwritten history. Suhrkamp, 392 pages, 24 euros.
Hans Blumenberg/Reinhart Koselleck: Correspondence 1965-1994. Edited by Jan Eike Dunkhase and Rüdiger Zill. Suhrkamp, 181 pages, 32 euros.
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