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Repetition and rupture

Reinhart Koselleck, the last great theorist of history, sought in the apparent chaos of events
a science of experience

In the summer of 1947, two years after the end of the Second World War, the British historian
Eric Hobsbawm travelled to the British occupation zone of Germany to re-educate young
Germans. A recent graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had also joined the
Communist Party, Hobsbawm was working on his PhD dissertation and had just secured his
first appointment as a lecturer at Birkbeck College in London. Born in 1917 into a Jewish
family in colonial Egypt, Hobsbawm grew up in Vienna, his mother’s hometown, and
witnessed the street clashes between Nazi stormtroopers and Red Front fighters in Berlin in
the tumultuous last years of the Weimar Republic. His parents had died young, before 1933,
but most of his Viennese family was murdered in the Holocaust. The British government
didn’t make use of his German during the war, and his career in re-educating postwar
Germans, arranged by his Cambridge colleagues, was cut short by the anti-Communist
purges of the early Cold War.

A seminar at an imperial hunting lodge in the countryside of Lower Saxony was Hobsbawm’s
first encounter with Germans who grew up in the Third Reich. Among the participants was
Reinhart Koselleck, then in his first semester at Heidelberg University. Koselleck had joined
the Wehrmacht in February 1941, two months before he turned 18. The following year, a
German artillery wagon crushed his foot on the march towards Stalingrad, which probably
saved his life. Koselleck was sent home before the gruesome debacle of Hitler’s army began.
His two brothers were killed in the war – the younger brother during an Allied bombing raid
that destroyed the family home, and his older brother, a committed Nazi, in the final weeks
of the war; one of his aunts was gassed in the Nazi euthanasia campaign in 1940. In the last
months of the war, Koselleck was sent again to the Eastern Front, which by then had reached
German territory. His unit fought against the Red Army in Moravia. Captured by the Soviets
on 9 May 1945, he had to march on foot to Auschwitz for two days, together with thousands
of other German prisoners of war. There he took part in the dismantling of the IG Farben
chemical factories, which were sent by train to the Soviet Union for reassembly – the very
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same factories adjacent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where Primo Levi was forced to work until
the liberation of the camp by the Red Army in January.

By the end of the summer, the German prisoners were put on eastbound trains themselves. A
few weeks later, Koselleck arrived in Karaganda in central Asia, an industrial coalmining
city built on the Kazakh steppe, primarily by Stalin’s deportees of the 1930s and ’40s, many
of them Volga Germans and other ethnic minorities. Not all prisoners survived the transport,
and most were not initially in a condition to work at all. Karaganda, a territory almost the
size of France, was a bleak place with harsh cold winters and brutal summer heat, dotted with
Gulag camps, including separate camps for German and Japanese prisoners of war. Koselleck
survived the camp thanks to another inmate who recognised the symptoms of a potentially
fatal illness, and the special care of a German doctor, also a POW, who before the war had
been an assistant to his uncle, a pathologist at Leipzig University. After 15 months at
Karaganda and yet another surgery, this doctor declared Koselleck unable to work but strong
enough for transport back home. Arriving at the border between Poland and the Soviet zone
of occupation in Germany in September 1946, Koselleck was given a copy
of The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Later in the French
zone, where his family now lived, he was briefly arrested by the police, who took him for a
vagrant. American Baptists replaced his ragtag Soviet prisoner clothes and provided him with
a copy of the Bible. When Koselleck finally arrived home, his father politely asked for the
visitor’s name – he didn’t recognise his own son.

In his memoirs Interesting Times (2002), published more than 50 years later, Hobsbawm
recalls his 1947 conversations with Koselleck, his first encounter with an eyewitness of
Stalin’s extensive camp system. Among the Koselleck papers, only a drawing of the young
Hobsbawm (with enormous sunglasses and a gap between his teeth) documents the meeting.
Apparently, the two men, who couldn’t have been much more different, got along well. But
it’s safe to presume that Hobsbawm listened to a former Wehrmacht soldier’s report from
Stalin’s Gulag with a dose of scepticism. Conversely, it must have been odd for Koselleck to
have a British communist teaching him democracy only a few months after he underwent the
Soviet-style mix of ‘re-education’ in Marxism-Leninism plus redemption through forced
labour.
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Koselleck in 1992. Photo by AKG London

Hobsbawm went on to become one of the most prolific historians of the 20th century, one
with a global audience. His writings in social and economic history were crisp and
commercially successful, and animated by the belief in the political and moral necessity of
an alternative to the catastrophe of capitalism – for Hobsbawm, the systemic cause behind
the rise of fascism. For Koselleck, too, the midcentury crises necessitated a new
understanding of history. He sketched out his Historik (or historical theory) in the form of
elegant, abstract theoretical essays, written over several decades. Koselleck’s work is less
accessible than Hobsbawm’s sweeping accounts, but it’s also groundbreaking and has been
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translated into many languages, especially in recent years. At opposite ends politically, both
Koselleck and Hobsbawm pioneered critical approaches to the study of the past, spurred by
the crises of their time.

Hobsbawm never left the Communist Party and, after the collapse of global socialism in the
1980s and ’90s, liberal historians such as Tony Judt and François Furet scolded him for his
obstinacy. Today, however, Hobsbawm’s prediction of our world of endless wars, enormous
inequalities, looming environmental disasters and other ruins of neoliberalism in the epilogue
of The Age of Extremes (1994), his history of the 20th century, appears prescient. Koselleck,
politically closer to Furet, stubbornly refused to distance himself from Carl Schmitt, the
Weimar conservative political theorist and jurist who (without success) tried to impress the
Nazis after 1933 with his anti-liberal and thinly veiled antisemitic conceptions of
international law. Schmitt became one of Koselleck’s postwar mentors and remained a
lifelong influence (their extensive correspondence during 30 years was published in German
in 2019). His intellectual affiliation with Schmitt contributed to Koselleck’s reputation as a
brilliant yet politically suspicious ‘philosopher of history’, especially in the Anglophone
world.

To call Koselleck a suspicious philosopher of history isn’t without irony. Unmasking the
dangers of modern philosophies of history propelled him to sketch out a completely new
understanding of history. For Koselleck, these modern philosophies were essentially a
secularised version of eschatology, that is – theological prophecies of future salvation, an
interpretation he adopted from his Heidelberg teacher Karl Löwith. Koselleck aimed for a
truly secular history, non-providentially rooted in the evidence of past experiences.
Following the catastrophes of two world wars, Koselleck, in 1953, and still at the beginning
of his career, postulated that we need to discard the conceptions of history that provided
ammunition for the ideological furies of the 20th century – Nazism, but also the dangerous
confrontation of Soviet communism and American liberalism in the nuclear age – and start
rethinking from scratch what constitute the actual ‘conditions of possible histories’. For
Koselleck, all modern ideologies claimed to have the ‘laws of history’ on their side to justify
violence by all means. Dismantling the concept of history and coming up with a new theory
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of how histories actually unfold – chaotic, contingent, messy and ferocious, yet with
discernible patterns – was therefore the most important task for historians.

This remained a theme to which Koselleck would return time and again, up to his very last
published essay. In ‘What Repeats’, written the summer before he died unexpectedly in 2006,
Koselleck claimed that we can make novel experiences only if there are structures of
repetition within the chaotic stream of events that we call history. History is neither just more
of the same – that is, constant and circular repetition (Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of ‘eternal
recurrence’) – or the experience of Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, in which we
start over, again and again. Both repetition and rupture are conditions of possible histories.
The urge to understand what’s new motivated Koselleck to identify structures of repetition
in history: geographical and climatic preconditions that, independent of humans, make all
life possible; biological conditions, such as birth and death, human sexuality and generations;
our institutions, for instance work and law, but also language that captures human
experiences; and finally historical events themselves (such as a worldwide pandemic), which
contain their own repetitive structures. Only by understanding what repeats can we discern
what’s new and unprecedented in our present. As we find ourselves again in a world of global
convulsions and crises, in which events have surprised many, Koselleck reminds us to sort
out what repeats in a moment of rupture. This is perhaps why today there is an uptick in
interest in Koselleck’s work. Suddenly, Reinhart Koselleck, the theorist of history, reads like
our contemporary.

Koselleck wrote only two monographs in his life (and one textbook on Europe in the age of
revolutions, together with Furet). Critique and Crisis, the revised version of his dissertation,
became an instant classic after its German publication in 1959. In this slim book, Koselleck
unfolds one central argument. He locates the origins of 20th-century ideologies, which all, in
one way or another, claimed to fulfil the laws of history, in the political constellations of the
late-18th century. Excluded from actual political power, French and German Enlightenment
philosophers circulated in the new social spaces of the salons or Masonic lodges. They
formulated a moral critique of the Old Regime by employing new concepts such as ‘history’
or ‘humanity’. This new, seemingly nonpartisan morality eroded the state’s legitimacy and
power, culminating in the terror of the French Revolution. A version of this argument has
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been a staple of conservative critics of the Enlightenment since 1790, from the Irish
philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke to the aforementioned Schmitt, but Critique and
Crisis offered a more original and enduring insight, what Koselleck later termed the
‘temporalisation of all modern concepts’.

As he explains in the preface to the English translation (belated by almost 30 years), Critique
and Crisis aimed to be more than an interrogation of the philosophies of history that triggered
the dissolution of Old Regime. Koselleck had aimed:

to highlight more persistent structures of the modern age which may be seen as elements of
historical anthropology: the sense that we are being sucked into the open and unknown future,
the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathlessness ever since …

For Koselleck, the Enlightenment philosophies of history propelled the world into the vortex
of an accelerated ‘modern time’ (in German literally ‘Neuzeit’, that is ‘new time’), a new
conception of temporality that views the present and the past from the perspective of a
redemptive future. Communism, for example, was a political movement that was entirely
built on expectation. For 20th-century ideologies, it’s the future that dictates how to act, not
present political exigencies or past experiences.

Different layers of historical experience are present at any given moment

The urgent, pessimistic tone of Critique and Crisis became muted in Koselleck’s writings in
the 1960s. His second monograph, ‘Prussia Between Reform and Revolution’, published in
1967 (and never translated into English), is a social, legal and conceptual history of the failed
attempt by Prussian educated elites to contain the impact of the French Revolution by
introducing constitutional reforms. The monograph was Koselleck’s habilitation, the German
entry ticket for a full professorship. Based on extensive archival research and at more than
700 pages, it was held together by a theoretical argument as well. According to Koselleck,
different temporal structures of repetition – in the case of post-1789 Prussia: the law, a
reform-minded state bureaucracy, and new social movements, which are each analysed
separately in three different parts of the book – move at different velocities. By definition,
the law and administration are always running behind the explosive social movements, which
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themselves are triggered by reforms. The clash between the different times of law,
administration and social change erupted in the Revolution of 1848. ‘Prussia Between
Reform and Revolution’ was also a subtle commentary on the eruptive transformation that
West German society was about to make during and after the student protests. As much as
the reform-minded parts of the political class in West Germany were willing to accommodate
the demands of new social movements, they weren’t able to contain the violence of 1960s
radicalism completely. It was the new Social Democratic, nominally ‘progressive’
government that had to deal with the terror of the Red Army Faction after 1970.

In 1968, Koselleck was a professor at Heidelberg, giving seminars on Marx with freshly
minted Marxist (or Maoist) students, but also, just as unusually for a German historian of his
generation, on Nazi concentration camps. In 1973, he accepted a chair at the brand-new
university at Bielefeld, built in the Brutalist modern style as a campus in one enormous,
spaceship building outside the city. Bielefeld was one of several so-called reform universities
that were meant to expand and democratise German elite education, and Koselleck belonged
to the founding advisory board that set up its innovative structure and recruited new faculty.
A city in eastern Westphalia so nondescript that an early internet conspiracy theory jokingly
claimed it’s not a real place, Bielefeld became one of the most vibrant German universities
of the late-20th century.

The 1970s and ’80s were the heyday of West German academic publishing, funded by
generous public research grants for collaborative work, especially if interdisciplinary in
nature. Most of Koselleck’s time and energy during this time went into editing what became
arguably the most impressive accomplishment of postwar German historiography.
Internationally without parallel, the lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (‘Basic Historical
Concepts’) would bring together historians (who were, like the entire profession at the time,
almost exclusively male) with scholars in other disciplines, from law to philosophy, who
collaborated over years on lengthy articles. Published in eight hefty volumes between 1972
and 1997, the articles of this ‘historical lexicon of the political and social language in
Germany’ chart the evolution of concepts from their classical origins to their 18th- and early
19th-century usage primarily in German, French and English. Ancient concepts such as
‘republic’ or ‘democracy’ gained new meanings, and new concepts such as ‘class’ or ‘race’
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reflected and fuelled the social and political upheavals of the modern age. Koselleck
intellectually held together this enormous project with more than 100 contributors. He co-
wrote several articles (for example, on ‘crisis’ and ‘history’), which were often the length of
a monograph, and he published a number of methodological essays that
established Begriffsgeschichte, or conceptual history, as a method.

Koselleck argued that concepts such as ‘the state’ or ‘the people’ are used by different sides
in a historically specific social and political contestation – in our time, for example, for and
against the ‘welfare state’. These basic concepts are contested but also unavoidable for
making political arguments. Conceptual history is therefore a history of these (synchronous)
contestations. Anglophone historians of political languages such as John Pocock or Quentin
Skinner would agree, but would view as ‘metaphysics’ Koselleck’s insistence that concepts
contain (diachronically) different layers of historical experience that are present at any given
moment. For Koselleck, the whole point of conceptual history is to uncover the potentiality
of concepts in the present, even or especially if those social and political agents who employ
these concepts (for or against ‘the state’, in the name of ‘the people’) are unaware of their
past usages and possible unintended consequences (for example, the unavoidable question of
who belongs to ‘the people’ and who doesn’t). Always ahead of historiographical fads,
Koselleck and his students also explored how the meaning of social and political concepts
shifts in translation from one language to another, taking ‘citizenship’ as an example.
Conceptual history became closely identified with Koselleck’s name, and he remains the
touchstone author for a methodological approach that, like much else, has gone global in
recent years.

By the late 1980s, however, Koselleck felt that the lexicon format and conceptual history as
a method had increasingly become a straitjacket for his more ambitious interest in a new
theory of history. Ironically, the conceptual historian Koselleck became more and more
interested in historical events that can’t be captured by language (or by late-20th-century
concepts such as ‘trauma’ or ‘memory’). After his retirement in 1988, Koselleck accepted
visiting professorships at Chicago, Columbia and Paris. Around this time, his work was
finally translated into English and French, and he accepted invitations for conferences and
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lectures around the world, which he would use (unwittingly for his audiences) to map out his
theory of history.

For his lectures, Koselleck would sketch out on a few handwritten pages the main line of
argument in the form of numerical points; these notes looked like sketches (whenever he was
bored, Koselleck made satirical drawings, first of his teachers; later in life, of his colleagues).
Asked to turn his lecture into a journal article or chapter for a conference volume, he would
slowly expand on these notes by reworking formulations and adding quotations (from folders
of material on particular concepts accumulated over the years, starting with a cigar box of
index cards for his dissertation, now among the Koselleck papers at the German Literature
Archive in Marbach). His friend, the Classics historian Christian Meier, reports that it once
took him more than a couple of years of constant reminders and exasperated appeals to
receive the manuscript of Koselleck’s lecture (on the connection between the experience of
defeat and paradigm shifts in historical knowledge, one of his most important essays) in
written form.

After another decade or two, Koselleck would again revise these miscellaneous publications
for collections of his essays, only two of which appeared in his lifetime: Vergangene
Zukunft (1979), published in English as Futures Past (1985), and Zeitschichten (2000). Two
further volumes of essays appeared posthumously; another two selections
were translated into English: The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts (2002) and, most recently, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (2018). The
thematic range of these essays is breathtaking. Koselleck’s approach led him to write about
topics that became fashionable across the humanities only much later, for example, on dreams
and prognoses, death and iconography, war monuments and memory, and always, in new
variations, on time: the times of law, history, justice, concepts, events and what is now called
‘deep time’, that is – the time before the Anthropocene.

Only in retrospect does it become clear that all of these scattered essays revolve in different
iterations around one central question: what are the conditions of possible histories?
According to Koselleck, three basic oppositions structure all historical experience. Every
possible history is conditioned, first, by before and after, for example the anthropological
span between birth and death that makes each life singular and part of a shared experience
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distinct from other generations, times and experiences. The possibility for new beginnings is
as much a part of the human condition as the necessity of death or the ability to kill. Second,
all possible history can’t escape the political difference between inner and outer (or, in a
conflict, friend or foe). Hence, Koselleck’s repeated critique of the idea that human difference
can be morally resolved and not just politically mediated. Only the recognition of difference
allows for compromise. Finally, Koselleck claims that the opposition between above and
below, ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in the terminology of Hegel and Marx, structures all social
relations in history. This isn’t to say that more equality and freedom can’t be gained in the
course of events, but that social hierarchies permeate all forms of human community,
generating new conflicts and hence new histories.

‘This is when events emerge: chains of events, cascades of events that withhold themselves
from language’

What we call ‘history’, in Koselleck’s understanding, is the rush of contingent events that’s
conditioned by these formal oppositions. There’s neither reason in history nor some kind
of Hegelian teleology or theodicy. History itself is without meaning or direction. Only
historical analysis, theoretically informed, might begin to discern the pattern of its ‘absurdity’
and ‘abysmalness’. The analytical grid that Koselleck suggested as the baseline of his theory
of history – before and after, below and above, inner and outer – also conditions historical
writing itself. It’s crucial for the viewpoint of historians, whether they are a contemporary or
born later, and are thus an eyewitness or a retrospective narrator of events, respectively;
whether they are situated higher or lower in social or political terms, for example, whether
they are on the side of the winners or losers of the conflict they are describing; and, finally,
whether they belong to the political, religious, social or economic community whose history
they are writing about, identifying themselves more or less critically with it, or whether they
are looking on from outside.

For Koselleck, the decisive distinction between his theory of history and hermeneutics (or
Michel Foucault’s ‘discourse analysis’) is his insistence that not all experiences can be
captured by language. As he explained in a lecture delivered in honour of his teacher Hans-
Georg Gadamer in 1985:
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When the flexible distinction between inside and outside is intensified into an impassioned
dichotomy between friend and enemy, when the relation between above and below leads to
slavery and irrevocable humiliation or to exploitation and class struggle, or when the tension
between the sexes leads to degradation – this is when events emerge: chains of events,
cascades of events that withhold themselves from language, to which every word, every
sentence, every speech can only react.

It’s precisely these cascades of events that we’re struggling to put into words that interested
Koselleck as a historian and theorist.

Some of his most compelling essays explore the limits of language. One example is ‘Terror
and Dream’, written originally as the afterword to the German edition of the German-Jewish
writer and émigrée Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams (1966; English translation
1968), a remarkable collection of excerpts from about 300 dream protocols that Beradt had
collected from her Berlin neighbours and smuggled out of Nazi Germany before war and
genocide. In this essay, subtitled ‘Methodological Remarks on the Experience of Time during
the Third Reich’, Koselleck argues that these dream protocols capture the past reality of the
Third Reich more than any other historical source. For dreams are prelinguistic
manifestations of Nazi terror in eventu, that is, at this very moment; they reflect not only the
fear and humiliation of previous days or weeks but are themselves a form of terror that is
unfolding in and through these dreams. In this respect, these nightmarish dreams anticipated
the totalising terror of the camps more precisely than any political commentary at the time.

Koselleck also spent decades studying visual representations of mass death. He catalogued
literally thousands of photographs (often taken by him) of war memorials all over Europe
and North America that he used as material for essays on the iconography of the veneration
of the dead. Despite some national differences in the imagery, the message of most war
memorials independent of their particular cause is the same. Not dying but ‘to die for’ is the
theme of war memorials. They claim to commemorate the dead but are built by and for the
survivors, for whatever social and political identity the winners and losers deem to secure for
the future. These identifications change over time, Koselleck shows, which is why most war
memorials lose their meaning for the next generation, or are eventually defaced and toppled.
Only the more intimate monuments endure, which represent death and mourning itself
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without any political identification for the survivors – such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans
Memorial (1982) or Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture The Grieving Parents (1932), the memorial
for the loss of her 18-year-old son Peter, who was killed on the battlefield in Flanders during
the First World War. These monuments speak to us not by commemorating what was once
deemed a worthy cause or sacrifice, but because death and dying are part of our lives as well.

The Grieving Parents by Kaethe Kollwitz at the German WWI military cemetery in Vladslo,
Diksmuide, West Flanders, Belgium. Photo by Uwe Zucchi/picture alliance via Getty

Koselleck’s wartime experience pulsates through his analytical essays, as does his distaste
for ideologies of any kind. A short and charismatic man, sociable, curious, always with a
quizzical expression, he walked with a slight, hardly noticeable limp, a reminder of events
that can’t be put into words, that ‘flow into bodies like a mass of lava – immovable and
inscribed’, another geological metaphor that he employs for his theory. History was for
Koselleck nothing less than the ‘science of experience’ (Erfahrungswissenschaft), a
repository of past experiences that we can and should narrate from different viewpoints but
also dissect in search of our blind spots, structures that were there before us and that will –
most likely – be there after us. Koselleck’s historical theory, his Historik, is therefore the
exact opposite of a philosophy of history and has little in common with more contemporary
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philosophical or literary theories of history à la Hayden White or Paul Ricœur. It’s the only
theory of history sketched out by a historian after the ‘age of extremes’.

Many diagnoses of crisis that described his own time as unique have become historical
themselves

From his early critique of the philosophy of history (and of the naive positivism of most
historians) to his theory of the different layers of historical experience that are present at any
given moment in time, Koselleck draws a surprising conclusion. History itself teaches us
nothing, but the ‘science of experience’ allows us to anticipate how possible histories will
unfold. Historical events are always new and replete with surprises for those living them. But
if, as Koselleck demonstrates in his essay ‘The Unknown Future and the Art of Prognosis’,
some predictions turned out to be true, ‘it follows that history is never entirely new, that there
are evidently longer-term conditions or even enduring conditions within which what is new
appears.’ To give a different example, Hobsbawm’s belief in the coming of a new communal
society, without inequality and injustice might have been misguided since it was entirely
based on expectation. But from his own experiences with global capitalism in the 1930s,
Hobsbawm formulated in 1993 a more realistic scenario of our post-Cold War era than his
liberal triumphalist critics, who were celebrating ‘the end of history’.

‘As more temporal layers of a possible repetition entered into the prognosis,’ that is, the more
the prognosis is based on previous experiences,

the more likely the prediction was to turn out to be correct. The more a prediction referred to
and relied upon the incomparability and uniqueness of the coming revolution, the less likely
it was to be fulfilled.

This theoretical distinction, which Koselleck drew from the example of the German poet and
writer Christoph Martin Wieland’s predictions in 1787 about the coming revolutions in
Europe, also holds for Koselleck’s theory of history. Many – not all – diagnoses of crisis that
described his own time as unique and surpassing all previous experiences have, from our
perspective, become historical themselves. This isn’t the case, however, with the theoretical
grid in which all histories unfold – before and after, inner and outer, above and below – that
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he carefully parsed out. If we know the conditions of possible histories, we will not be entirely
surprised by what the future holds for us.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
is an associate professor of late modern European history at the University of California,
Berkeley. With Sean Franzel, he translated and edited Sediments of Time: On Possible
Histories (2018), a collection of Reinhart Koselleck’s essays.
Texto tomado de la web: https://aeon.co/essays/reinhart-kosellecks-theory-of-history-for-a-
world-in-crisis