History in the Plural

An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck

Niklas Olsen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857452962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of "grand theory, " Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a "great thinker" and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.

1

FAMILY—WAR—UNIVERSITY

The Various Educations of Reinhart Koselleck

The present chapter describes Koselleck’s intellectual formation in a broad sense: a process of the formation of a scholarly individual, defined in part by habitus and in part by a specific set of intellectual aims, in his interrelations with a given variety of historical contexts. Attention is paid to background and to a perspective on Koselleck as an agent of his own formation, by means of the interpretations through which he attempted to grasp what was happening to himself. While Koselleck’s academic identity was being shaped, he was also shaping himself. The concept of “generation” is of particular importance in this respect, as it expresses this negotiation between the inexorable forces of context and the agency of the scholar in the making.

The organizing themes of the chapter are: Koselleck’s family background in the German Bildungsbürgertum; his experiences during World War II and captivity, and the way in which he used these experiences as an instrument for constructing a generational as much as a personal identity; and postwar academic life and the discipline of history as the prime environments in which his education was completed and his identity staged with the monumental characters of Koselleck’s teachers as temporary protagonists. The contexts covered in this chapter, then, are somewhat diverse; yet in the case of Koselleck they were bound together by temporal coherence and by their function as stages in a unified process. What emerged as the result of this process were the contours of a peculiar scholarly persona and his intellectual program.

Family Background

Reinhart Koselleck was born on 23 April 1923 in Görlitz, then in the Prussian province of Lower Silesia (now located in Saxony, on the border to Poland), one of three sons of Arno Koselleck and his wife Elisabeth. Embodying a typical blend of Prussian patriotism, liberal Republicanism and Protestantism,¹ his family formed part of that influential section of German society, the Bildungsbürgertum (roughly, a segment of the middle class distinguished by its devotion to education), which emerged from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards and became the primary carrier of scientific and humanistic scholarship, cultural life, and some parts of state service.²

Most of his immediate forebears were academics, primarily university professors, doctors and lawyers with careers in state administration.³ His father was a historian and a professor of a teacher training college; his mother had studied French, geography and history, and had, moreover, studied the violin. Koselleck grew up—as he has vividly described it—in the famous Bildungsbürgerliche traditions of “house music, reading and more reading, visits to concerts and museums, pride in the family history and in letter writing.”⁴ Goethe, Schiller and Kleist were read, both alone and aloud; poems, drawings and melodies were composed for individual and common pleasure.

Koselleck in many ways identified himself with, took pride in and attempted to maintain certain of the social practices, values and norms of his family background.⁵ To a large extent focused on the literary canon, art and aesthetics, and of course the Bildungsbürgertum, Koselleck’s choice of academic topics testifies to this view.⁶ The same can be said of his habitus as a historian. Koselleck was never a scholar who carried out his research in isolation from his colleagues. On the contrary, his was an academic persona, who deeply appreciated intellectual exchange, and he was known for his ability to listen to and discuss with his colleagues and students in a liberal and open-minded fashion. “He was a Bildungsbürger and a learned man,” a former colleague said of Koselleck, “but he also had bohemian traits. He enthused and influenced students. He loved conversation, discussion, dispute, even polemic, but he never intended to hurt anyone.”⁷

Similar to other (but certainly not all) members of the Bildungsbürgertum, he made himself known as a teacher committed to educational ideals (Bildung) and a politically engaged citizen, who continually commented on the times in which he lived. His social-political engagement was first of all expressed in historical writing and in public debates, but he also habitually captured his impressions of the world around him in caricature-drawing.⁸

In fact, as a young man, Koselleck wanted to pursue his talent for drawing by attending the academy of arts, but his father wanted him to study something “reasonable” and pushed him into a scientific career.⁹ Arno Koselleck had been active in the movement of educational reformers of the 1920s. Starting out as a history teacher, in 1928 he became director of the Heilig-Geist-Gymnasium zu Breslau, and two years later, in 1930, he founded the Pädagogische Akademie in Kassel. The academy was closed shortly after the Nazis came to power in January 1933. According to his son, Arno Koselleck was dismissed at the same time owing to his republican views, and he remained unemployed for three years, before finding a provisional job as a professor in historical didactics in Saarbrücken.

Arno Koselleck’s dismissal was one of many effects that the rise of National Socialism had on Koselleck’s family—and for the bürgerliche (bourgeois) layer of German society more generally.¹⁰ Already in a process of disintegrating, the social-cultural status and traditions of the German bourgeoisie were facing serious challenges during the Weimar Republic, characterized as it was by political instability and cultural crisis. Many members of the bourgeoisie reacted to the societal developments by adopting National Socialism as a political solution. This solution—it has been said—“seemed on the one hand to promise the continuity of certain elements (for example private property), but on the other hand it included the individual in a larger collective and thus reinstated a vanished orientation, though the price was a loss of individual independence and bourgeois freedom.”¹¹

Still according to his son, Arno Koselleck was “republican and liberally minded,” and although his unemployment led to a lower standard of living for his family, he was not among those who were attracted to Nazism. He did, however, with certain reservations, sympathize with the contemporary “Pan German-national and anti-semitic” (großdeutsch-national-antisemitisch) ideas, and during the late 1930s he adapted to the regime, among other things, by joining the Reiter-SA.¹² More enthusiastic about National Socialism was Koselleck’s older brother. Initially unhappy with the compulsory transfer from one of the German youth movements to the Hitlerjugend, within a period of three months he was promoted to the rank of Hitlerjugendführer in Dortmund, where Koselleck and his family were living at the time.¹³ Reinhart Koselleck entered the Hitlerjugend in 1934, when he was eleven years of age, and, when the family eventually moved from Dortmund to Saarbrücken, he joined the equestrian Hitlerjugend.¹⁴

Due to the geographical moves necessitated by his father’s career and the unstable societal-political situation in Germany in general, over the course of his childhood Koselleck lived in five different cities and went to eight different schools. The last of these was the Ludwigsgymnasium in Saarbrücken.¹⁵ While at the gymnasium in Saarbrücken, at the age of nineteen, Koselleck volunteered along with his entire class for duty in the German army, and soon after—in May 1941—he was drafted.¹⁶

It is difficult to provide a more detailed description of Koselleck’s reasons for going to war and his reactions to growing up during National Socialism—to its ideology, organizations, foreign policy achievements, and to its impact on his family—as he never commented directly on these issues in his published writings, memory pieces or interviews.¹⁷ In these texts, however, next to growing up in the enjoyable family traditions of the Bildungsbürgertum, Koselleck described societal disintegration, conflict, and uncertainty as some of the key experiences of his childhood. As such, he linked this period of his life to the key theme of his autobiographical texts: his experiences of World War II and his attempts to deal with these experiences in his historical writing. One example of how Koselleck linked the two periods appears in a 2004 speech: “In my childhood, I experienced—very closely in the brawls in elementary school—the breakdown of the Weimar Republic. The liberals were gone. What followed, in my youth, was the rise of the National Socialistic movement . . . ; and then, while I was a soldier, war, total bombing, multiple death; then intensification and at the same time a dissolving of the totalitarian system; finally, breakdown and Russian captivity.”¹⁸

But what, more exactly, did Koselleck experience in the war—and how did he relate these experiences to his historical writing?

War and Captivity

Koselleck first served in the German artillery in the Soviet Union in 1941–42. After an accident in which he hurt his foot as the army advanced toward Stalingrad, he was transferred to service in Germany and France. As part of a radar company, he became responsible for the electronic instruments which supplied the German anti-aircraft and aircraft with information. His military participation in World War II ended when, as an infantry soldier on 1 May 1945 at Oderberg in Mähren, he was captured by the Soviet Army.¹⁹

On 8 May, under Soviet command, Koselleck and his fellow German soldiers started on a long walk that ended in Auschwitz, where for some weeks he carried out working duties,²⁰ before being transported to a Soviet prisoner camp in Karaganda (Kazakhstan) in central Asia.²¹ Koselleck spend fifteen months there. He was released with the help of a friend of his family, a German doctor, who cited Koselleck’s foot injury to diagnose him unable to do any more work, but able to survive the four weeks of transportation via train to Germany. At the end of 1946, Koselleck arrived in Germany and returned to the family’s apartment in Saarbrücken, where his mother lived.²²

In many later interviews and writings, Koselleck described his experiences as well as his reactions and emotions during and especially after the war. Among the central elements in these accounts is the immense fear that he and his fellow German soldiers felt during and after their capture by the Soviets in May 1945; the state of existential insecurity during the demanding walk to Auschwitz; the shocking confrontation with the—at first unbelievable—information about the German mass killings that had taken place there; the renewed fear when transported to the Soviet Union; and the conditions of hunger and suffering in the camp in Karaganda. Koselleck’s accounts of these experiences are narrated as a long series of extreme experiences, which made a deep and permanent impression on his mind. “There are experiences”—he once said of his war experiences—“that flow into the body like red-hot lava and petrify there. Irremovable, they can be retrieved at any time without changing.”²³

In line with this, Koselleck often emphasized how his decision to study history, as well as his scientific interests and beliefs, were deeply influenced by what he experienced in World War II and in Russian captivity between 1941 and 1946.²⁴ That is to say, he presented his work as personally motivated attempts to grasp the historical background of the modern world, in particular World War II, including how it was experienced, and how it could ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Family—War—University: The Various Educations of Reinhart Koselleck
• 2. Explaining, Criticizing, and Revising Modern Political Thought
• 3. Social History between Reform and Revolution
• 4. Program—Project—Straight Jacket: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe
• 5. Theorizing Historical Time and Historical Writing
• 6. Commemorating the Dead: Experience, Understanding, Identity
• 7. The Foundations and the Future of Koselleck’s Scholarly Program
• Bibliography
• Index