Department of History and Civilization Beyond utopianism and relativism: History in the plural in the work of Reinhart Koselleck Niklas Olsen Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute Florence, 9 February 2009 EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE Department of History and Civilization Beyond utopianism and relativism: History in the plural in the work of Reinhart Koselleck Niklas Olsen Examining Board: Prof. Martin van Gelderen (EUI) - supervisor Prof. Sebastian Conrad (EUI) Prof. Lucian Hölscher (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Prof. Willibald Steinmetz (Universität Bielefeld) © 2009, Niklas Olsen No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author Table of contents Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………… iii 1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………… 1 2. Family – war – university: the various educations of Reinhart Koselleck …………. 13 3. Explaining, criticizing and revising modern political thought ……………………… 43 4. Social history between reform and revolution ……………………………………… 101 5. Program – project – straight jacket: the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe ………….. 165 6. Theorizing historical time and historical writing ………………………………….. 199 7. Commemorating the dead: experience, understanding, identity …………………. 265 8. The foundations and the future of Koselleck’s scholarly program ………………. 297 References …………………………………………………………………………......... 303 ii Acknowledgements This thesis is the outcome of more than four years of work at the European University Institute, Florence. Many people have helped me in numerous ways during the process. I would first of all like to thank my supervisor Bo Stråth, for his tremendous support and advice in all phases of the project. Reinhart Koselleck invited me to his home in Bielefeld in the autumn of 2003 in order to discuss matters related to German historical writing during World War II. Leaving Bielefeld deeply fascinated and puzzled, not only by Koselleck’s ideas about history and historical writing, but also by his exceptional willingness to listen to and discuss with young and inexperienced historians like myself, I soon after decided to write a thesis about his work. Later, he kindly gave me permission to access his letters in Carl Schmitt’s personal archives and granted me time for another informal interview specifically about his work. All of this has been vital for the writing of this thesis which would not exist without his remarkable openness. That he did not live to receive my gratitude for the attentive, critical and illuminating support with which he accompanied my efforts, remains a great regret to me. I would like to record my warm appreciation to Felicitas Koselleck for her kind and very helpful support and advice. From Reinhart Koselleck we know that primary experiences never correspond to the later secondary memories, to which historical writing pertain. Still, I hope that the most important arguments in this thesis will be recognizable for those who were there. Thanks moreover to Lucian Hölscher, Jörn Rüsen, Wolfgang Schieder, Willibald Steinmetz, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler for kindly agreeing to informal interviews at different stages of the project. I owe additional thanks to Rüsen for hosting me twice at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, where I (in the autumn of 2003) began preparing the project proposal and (in the winter of 2005) did important work in relation to the thesis. Thanks also the excellent library staff at Das Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut and at the European University Institute. I much appreciate the kind service and the enormous assistance that I received at both institutions. Acknowledgements are due to Lars Erslev Andersen, Janet Coleman, Thomas Etzemüller, Martin van Gelderen, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Poul Fritz Kjaer, Jeppe Nevers and Jens Troldborg. All of them provided me with useful criticism of various chapters and compelled me to write new and improved drafts. Thanks also to Lucy Turner Voakes for her excellent language correction of the thesis. I would also like to thank Maurice Olender for taking time to discuss issues related to iii World War II, morality and memory in the work of Reinhart Koselleck and Hans-Robert Jauss, in the course of an extensive exchange of e-mails in 2007-2008. Three persons deserve special recognition. The first is Jens Busck, who read and commented on the first full (and very messy) draft of the entire thesis and in this process helped me understand and formulate the overall aim of my study. In addition, he generously provided detailed commentaries and suggestions to all of my English translations of the German citations (needless to say, the responsibility for any errors is entirely my own). The second is Reinhard Mehring. From 2001 onwards, when I was working on my MA- thesis, I have repeatedly benefited from his vast knowledge in the field of German intellectual history. Not only has he patiently answered all of my numerous questions about the works of Reinhart Koselleck, Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke and the relations between them. By reading and commenting on various chapters, he has moreover been an invaluable source of inspiration in developing several of the central lines of argument in this thesis. The third is Henning Trüper, who from September 2004 and until the present day has been a very important sparring partner in framing this project and bringing it to completion. Henning has not only motivated me to constantly define and redefine the conceptualizations, contexts and interpretations informing the thesis, but also – first in Florence and later via excessive e-mail exchange – again and again commented on questions of detail and lines of argument, so that in many ways his enduring support unquestionably resulted in a thesis that I would never have managed to pull off on my own. Thanks also to the wonderful people, who made my time in Florence a wonderful social experience: Stine Andersen, Simone Antonucci, Javier San Julian Arrupe, Pinar Artiran, Eva Bauer, Carolina Blutrach, Carina Bischoff, Adda Djørup, Yannis Filandros, Janus Hansen, Lotte Holm, Lasse Lindekilde, Eduardo Romanos Fraile, Poul Fritz Kjær, Mette Langeberg Lund, Lone Kølle Martinsen, Ole Martinsen, Paolo Merante, Anne Mark Nielsen, Signe Olander, Morten Poulsen, Poul Noer, Alexis Rappas, Avner Shamir, Gunvor Simonsen, Sarah Simonsen, Henning Trüper and Janou Vorderwüelbecke. Special thanks are also due to my parents, Finn and Elisabeth, and my three sisters, Stine, Sara and Lykke, for their enduring support from afar, and for their many visits to Florence. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Nina for the fantastic time we have had together in Copenhagen, Seville, Beijing, Los Angeles, Brussels, Essen, Florence and on Frederiksberg, in the last decade, and for the extraordinary support she has given me in the past five years. In the most convincing of ways, she has at the same time managed to back up iv my academic projects and to remind me that the most important dimensions of the human Miteinandersein and Miteinandersprechen lie outside of academia. v vi 1. Introduction This study examines the work of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006). Its aim is to provide an inter-textual and contextual interpretation of Koselleck’s scholarly production. While a variety of articles, reviews, opinion-pieces and obituaries offer valuable insights into his work, there is as yet no monographic study examining Koselleck’s oeuvre in a comprehensive manner.1 The present investigation addresses this lacuna. Instead of highlighting one aspect of his historical writing on behalf of others (and presenting Koselleck simply under one label, e.g. as a ‘conceptual historian’, a ‘social historian’, a ‘historian of memory’ or as a ‘theoretician of history’, as other commentators have done), it draws a full thematic, theoretical and biographical – or instead intellectual – profile that takes into account Koselleck’s entire scholarly production and the intellectual and social contexts in which it emerged. The study not only reinterprets known and uncovers unknown aspects of his work; it also offers a new overall interpretation of Koselleck’s entire scholarly production. It describes a set of recurrent motifs and discursive features in Koselleck’s texts that reveal the contours of a unifying pattern and a common objective in his varied and multi-faceted body of work. Reinhart Koselleck entered the academic scene in the 1950s with his dissertation Kritik und Krise in which he traced the birth of modern political thought to the Enlightenment. He achieved his Habilitation in 1965 with the social-historical work Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution.2 Three years later he became professor in Heidelberg, where, in the so-called Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte, he played a key role in the development of modern German conceptual history. Koselleck’s name is furthermore, inextricably linked with the monumental encyclopaedia Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, a work based on a set of original hypotheses on how the transition to the modern world can be described through changes in 1 The most comprehensive interpretation of Koselleck’s work is found in Kari Palonen: Die Entzauberung der Begriffe. Das Umschreiben der politischen Begriffe bei Quentin Skinner und Reinhart Koselleck, Münster 2004. While this study draws