A Rift in Time. Reinhart Koselleck and the Theory of History

What possible futures does history contain? Reinhart Koselleck has become one the most widely read and cited twentieth-century German historians and theorists of history, not just for the new field of “global conceptual history” but essentially for anyone across disciplines writing about questions of time, temporality, and historical thought. Yet the recent uptick of interest in his work as part of the “temporal turn” obscures the fact that Koselleck was working throughout his life on something even more ambitious: a new theory of history or rather a theory of the conditions of possible histories, and hence possible futures, written by an historian in an age of catastrophes.

Based on a wealth of previously inaccessible archival materials, this talk explores Koselleck’s critique of the modern concept of History and what he called its “temporalization”—from Critique and Crisis to his essays on dreams and war memorials—and parses out his parallel search for an antidote in the form of a new theory of historical knowledge, most visible in his late essay collection Sediments of Time. We will ask what remains of Koselleck’s theoretical reckoning with ruptured time and repetition in history and whether it can be untangled from the experiences of loss and complicity of his generation.

Join the Modern Europe Workshop in learning more about and discussing Stefan-Ludgwig Hoffman's research. RSVP for refreshments.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, Der Riss in der Zeit. Kosellecks ungeschriebene Historik (Suhrkamp, 2023), will come out in English translation with Princeton UP in September 2027. Currently, he is working on two projects: a book-length essay on human rights internationalism from imperial beginnings to the present polycrises, and a monograph on everyday life in Berlin in the 1940s, as the city went from multinational capital of the Nazi Empire to shattered metropolis of the early Cold War. His previous two books traced the afterlives of Enlightenment concepts and social practices (sociability, humanity, cosmopolitanism, civil society) in the long nineteenth century and their late twentieth-century resurgence. Together with Samuel Moyn, he is the editor of the Cambridge series Human Rights in History.