This article addresses persistent attempts to rework and rehash the concept of Bildung since its Romantic-era inception. 1 The tendency for individuals and institutions to return to "classical" ideas of Bildung has been on show most recently in Berlin, with the 2010 two-hundred-year anniversary of the Humboldt University and the project to rebuild the Prussian Royal Palace on the Museumsinsel, but it has also been a consistent feature of modes of scholarship and cultural representation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why and to what end do contemporary institutions recycle Romantic ideals and ideologies of Bildung? What is the significance of invocations of Bildung at various historical moments, both as establishment boilerplate and as oppositional points of leverage? I explore these questions by cycling back through several engagements with the concept, including Friedrich Nietzsche's consideration of the fate of early nineteenth-century reforms, Wilhelm von Humboldt's theory of Bildung as individual and philosophical-historical development, and the large-scale rebuilding of the Prussian Royal Palace and the housing of the "Humboldt-Forum" therein, a project that broke ground in the summer of 2013 (see Apin).It goes without saying that the notion of Bildung is deeply implicated in German official culture, academic life, and national identity. On the one hand, this concept is closely tied to the emergence of the modern research university. A certain dominant account of the history of the German university relies on narratives of continuity between the contemporary institutional framework and the emphatic notion of Bildung from the reform period around 1810. Not surprisingly, narratives of discontinuity between the present and a "classical," Humboldtian past also proliferate: the ideal of individual or collective Bildung is unrealizable in the modern university, so the argument goes, due to specialization and disciplinary differentiation, the fact that so-called Humboldtian ideals were never implemented in the first place (see Paletschek), or recent misguided reforms that have bureaucratized every last bit of freedom, individual self-exploration, and spontaneity out of higher education. It is characteristic of 1 A special thanks to the participants of the 2013 German Studies Association seminar on the topic of "Recycling Romanticism" (and in particular to the organizers Laurie Johnson and May Mergenthaler) for their feedback on an earlier version of this essay.

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Reinhart Koselleck's writings display a keen interest in individual linguistic expressions that are historically specific but also have a more general, formal reach, extending beyond the situations that gave rise to them. To take one example, he opens the essay "Structures of Repetition in Language and History" (chapter 10 in this volume) by quoting a witticism by the mid-nineteenth-century Viennese playwright and actor Johann Nepomuk Nestroy: "'The strange thing with all these love stories is that they always revolve around the same thing, but how they start and end is so endlessly different that watching them never gets boring!'" As Koselleck notes, reading this in standard German (or English), rather than in the original dialect, one misses the unmistakable Viennese cadence of the original, even though the basic idea remains accessible. Koselleck goes on to translate Nestroy's remark, which originated in the world of nineteenth-century comic theater, into a more general thesis about the formal structure of historical events. Events are singular occurrences that surprise those who experience them. Yet this singularity unfolds historically in recurrent ways, recorded by the formulations of singular experiences by previous generations. Koselleck is attuned to historical specificity but also believes in a modest form of translatability, such that experiences captured in language can be applied to historical events that are potentially far afield from their original contexts. If singular events and experiences reoccur and are translated into language at different moments in time, wouldn't it be imperative for the historian to catalogue and theorize such reoccurring structures? To propose, not a philosophy of history that claims to know how all possible human stories start and end, but rather a set of abstract categories, serving as an analytical grid, that tell us what

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