Reinhart Koselleck
Reinhart Koselleck was a prominent German historian and theorist born on April 23, 1923, in Gorlitz, then part of Prussian Lower Silesia. He grew up in a middle-class Protestant family that valued education, but his early life was marked by the rise of the Nazi regime, which influenced his family's dynamics and his own experiences. After serving in the German Army during World War II and enduring imprisonment, Koselleck pursued higher education at Heidelberg University, where he studied under notable figures like Johannes Kuhn and Carl Schmitt.
Koselleck's doctoral thesis, "Critique and Crisis," explored the historical concepts of critique and crisis, setting the stage for his future work in conceptual history. He later co-created the influential seven-volume project "Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe," which examined key political and social terms in German history. Throughout his career, he held academic positions at several institutions, including Bielefeld University, where he founded the Center for Interdisciplinary Research. His theories on historical time, particularly in his work "Futures Past," proposed that humanity's understanding of time has evolved significantly with modernity and may continue to shift under global influences. Koselleck's legacy as a leading figure in conceptual history was recognized with numerous awards, and his work gained renewed interest in the 2010s, affirming his impact on historical scholarship. He passed away on February 3, 2006.
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Reinhart Koselleck
Historian
- Born: April 23, 1923
- Birthplace: Görlitz, Lower Silesia, Germany
- Died: February 3, 2006
- Place of death: Bad Oeynhausen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Significance: German historian Reinhart Koselleck was known for his theory of historical time, a concept that accounted for the impact the arrival of modernity had on humanity's understanding of the past, present, and future. Koselleck was also responsible for producing a comprehensive encyclopedia of German history presented within this theoretical framework. Koselleck did not limit himself to the study of history with his works and regarded studies in linguistics, anthropology, and epistemology when constructing his texts.
Background
Reinhart Koselleck was born on April 23, 1923, in the town of Gorlitz, which was then located in the Prussian province of Lower Silesia before it became Saxony, Germany. The son of Arno and Elisabeth Koselleck, he was one of three brothers raised in a middle-class Protestant family. His father worked as a professor at a teacher training college and was a historian. Koselleck's mother studied French, geography, and history and played the violin. His family was part of a German social class known as the Bildungsbürgerliche, whose tradition of devotion to education involved activities such as concerts, museum visits, house music, intensive reading, and letter writing.
Koselleck grew up during a tumultuous time in German history. When the National Socialists—more commonly known as Nazis—came into power in 1933, Koselleck's father's academy closed. His father remained unemployed for three years before finding a job as a professor. Arno Koselleck later began sympathizing with the National Socialist movement and a concept known as Pan-Germanism, an idea that promoted the political unification of all Europeans speaking Germanic languages. These sympathies led his father to adapt to the Nazi regime, and he later joined the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary group of the Nazi Party. The family eventually moved to Saarbrucken, where Koselleck joined the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) when he was eleven years old.
His father's military career required the family to move constantly. Throughout his childhood, Koselleck lived in five different cities and attended eight different schools. His final schooling years were spent at the Ludwigsgymnasium Saarbrücken grammar school. At nineteen, he volunteered to join the German Army and was drafted into service in May of 1941. He was stationed with an artillery unit positioned in the Soviet Union until an injury in 1942 led to his transfer to Germany and then France. Koselleck was then assigned to a radar company and learned to use electronic instruments that supplied German air forces with information.
As the war ended in the spring of 1945, Koselleck's unit was captured by Soviet forces. His yearlong imprisonment included a walking journey to Auschwitz concentration camp, where Koselleck first learned of the mass killings of the Holocaust. He was treated harshly at the prisoner camp and often starved. Koselleck escaped the camp with the help of a family friend and returned to Germany in 1946. His experience during the war shaped his future in academia.
Life's Work
After the war, Koselleck enrolled at Heidelberg University, where he studied history, philosophy, and sociology. He eventually earned his doctorate. He studied under Johannes Kuhn, whose publications on the historical problem of tolerance influenced Koselleck's doctoral thesis. He also helped develop Carl Schmitt's theory about how the "vanquished" people of history have a unique insight into historical events. Schmitt served as a mentor to Koselleck. Koselleck's work also was influenced by the theories of Martin Heidegger, whose work Koselleck viewed from an anthropological perspective to apply to his research. He presented his doctoral thesis Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society) in 1953. The dissertation examined the development of the ideas of "critique," and "crisis" in historical thought and delved into the notions of revolution and politics from ancient Greece to the Age of Enlightenment. Koselleck later published the dissertation.
After presenting his thesis, Koselleck briefly taught in England before returning to Germany in 1955. He took a position at Heidelberg University, where he became friends with fellow instructor Werner Conze. Conze was an important influence on Koselleck's career, and the two later collaborated on many projects. Koselleck published his second book, Prussia between Reform and Revolution, in 1967. The text examines the period between 1791 and 1848, covering the drafting of the Prussian law code to the outbreak of the German bourgeois revolution, and focuses on the societal advantages and disadvantages that resulted from the Prussian constitutional reform.
In the early 1970s, Koselleck and Conze began assembling an extensive reference work on German history. The duo spent two decades compiling and editing research for the publication, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, which became a seven-volume encyclopedia later translated into English as Basic Concepts in History: A Historical Dictionary of Political and Social Language in Germany. The pair released a new volume of the work periodically over the next twenty-five years. In 1973, Koselleck took a teaching position at Bielefeld University, where he founded the Center for Interdisciplinary Research. In 1979, he published a collection of essays, Vergangene Zukunft, later published in English as Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. The collection focused on Koselleck's theory of historical time, which posits that humanity's concept of the past, present, and future was forever changed by the emergence of modernity. Koselleck also proposed the possibility of another shift in historical perspective as events such as globalization affected the world.
Koselleck retired from Bielefeld in 1988 but continued to guest lecture at institutions around the world during his later life. The final volume of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe was published in 1992. In 2002, a collection of Koselleck's essays were translated into English and published as The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concept. The collection tracks the evolution of Koselleck's theory of historical time from the 1980s onward. Koselleck died on February 3, 2006, in Germany.
Impact
Koselleck's contributions to the field of conceptual history made him one of the most influential historians and theoreticians of the twentieth century. His work earned him several honors, including the Reuchlin Prize (1974), Historical College Award (1989), Sigmund Freud Prize for academic writing (1991), and City of Münster Award (2003). Fairly unknown among American academia for many years, his work received renewed interest in the 2010s with the publication of Niklas Olsen's History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck in 2012.
Bibliography
Chignola, Sandro, and João Feres Jr. "In Honor of Reinhart Koselleck." Contributions to the History of Concepts, vol. 2, no. 1, Mar. 2006, pp. 3–6.
Dahlstrom, Malin. Review of "History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck." Institute of Historical Research, www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1276. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Olsen, Niklas. History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck. Berghahn Books, 2012.
"Reinhart Koselleck." Waterstones, www.waterstones.com/author/reinhart-koselleck/509148. Accessed 18 Apr. 2017.
Richter, Melvin. "Koselleck, Robert (b. 1923)." A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. Edited by D.R. Woolf, Garland Publishing, 1998.