Extract

Reinhart Koselleck has emerged as the most cited and discussed German historian of his generation. While he remained outside the mainstream of social historians who dominated the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s—led by his colleagues at the University of Bielefeld, in particular his rival Hans-Ulrich Wehler—he has found new audiences with the rise of cultural history and the various methodological ‘turns’ that accompanied it. Hoffmann’s study, published in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of Koselleck’s birth in 1923, is among a number of publications that pay tribute to the originality of his work. Mostly based on previously published material, it provides an excellent introduction to the ‘life and works’ of Koselleck. The book does not contain a full intellectual biography, but opens with a succinct biographical chapter based on unpublished material held in Koselleck’s personal archive. This is followed by a chapter on Hannah Arendt’s importance for Koselleck’s historical anthropology, a section on his work on experiences of time during the Third Reich, a chapter on the reception of his work in Germany, France and the USA, and a concluding interpretation of his theory of historical times.

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