Introduction: Translating Koselleck

Abstract

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

Emotions and Temporalities

“…It is no wonder that the image of temporal layers that Koselleck used to depict the contemporaneity of the past was borrowed from geology. The past may be there, but in most cases it will be hidden and in need of an intervention by present-day archeologists for its excavation (Koselleck & Gadamer, 2000;Hoffmann & Franzel, 2018). Much as this seems natural to us today, historically this was not the only way to think about temporalities, nor need it be the only way we can conceive of time.…”