Seventy years have passed since Reinhart Koselleck organized the research group at the University of Heidelberg that produced the first volumes of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Since then, the practice of conceptual history has gone through so many changes in direction and emphasis that any volume proposing a new direction for the practice is compelled to begin by undertaking something of a conceptual history of conceptual history itself. This collection, which moves in the direction of cultural theory and art and literary history, is no exception. Against the backdrop of an increasingly multifaceted and innovational field of research, which the following introduction will make an (inevitably unsuccessful) attempt to outline, the chapters of this book form a series of experiments with what we term “applied conceptual history,” addressing questions such as:
In its initial conception, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe was to have only ten entries.1 The goal of the volume, which Koselleck undertook with Otto Brunner and Gunter Ipsen, was to provide ready overviews of the core concepts of German history, from Demokratie to Nation, during what Koselleck, a riding enthusiast, half-seriously referred to as the Sattelzeit, the period of immense upheaval and social transformation from 1750 to 1850. By the time of the project’s completion in 1992, after two decades of continuous expansion and emendation, it contained 119 articles from 109 individual contributors. The entries were no longer limited to Germany, but now encompassed the history of the entire Western world, from Greek antiquity to the present. The ostensibly serialized and open-sourced character of the project quickly inspired similar undertakings, like the Ästhetische Grundbegriffe in 2005, seeking to expand the project’s scope into the realms of literature and art, as well as the project Das 20. Jahrhundert in Grundbegriffen: Lexikon zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland, which is currently being conducted at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin in conjunction with the Leibniz-Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS) and the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam (ZZF). The project, whose explicit interdisciplinarity does not only engage with history and philosophy, but also with sociology, cultural studies, and life sciences, among others, aims to produce an additional hundred entries focused specifically on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.2
It scarcely needs saying that Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe was an enormous success in Germany, throughout Europe, and also, remarkably, in America, a country otherwise supremely resistant to the developments in German thought from the 1970s onward. The measure of this success can be taken not, as one might usually measure influence, by counting the number of citations of and monographs on Koselleck himself, but through the sheer usefulness of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, as well as its imitation-expansions, which provide scholars across the humanities with concise definitions of famously polysemous concepts like “freedom” or “citizen,” tracing the shifts, changes, and contradictions in their meanings in English, French, and German through the major developments of historical modernity. The success of conceptual history is also visible in its cross-fertilization with other traditions in contemporary historiography and intellectual history, such as the Cambridge School, with which it shares an interest in political language but which, as history shows, has turned out to be less prolific outside the scope of political theory.
Thus, even in a field as far downstream of the project’s initial scope as literary studies, it is by no means uncommon for an article on, for example, the programmatic realism of the 1850s to begin with a citation from the Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. These entries allow scholars access to a wealth of knowledge that would otherwise be obscured behind the veil of language, and by the sheer difficulty of obtaining physical access to many of the texts in which it is found. It is in this form, as a triumph of collective knowledge, anticipating similar open-sourced tools, like Wikipedia, that conceptual history is mainly practiced today, and will continue to be practiced, so long as concepts need defining and definitions need historical grounding. It should not come as a surprise, then, that two of the most ambitious ongoing projects in contemporary conceptual history, the aforementioned ZfL/IDS/ZZF project on interdisciplinary conceptual history as well as the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts, are conducted and published exclusively online, as ongoing works-in-progress.3
At the same time, as Koselleck himself foresaw, the very usefulness that recommends the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe is as much a blessing as it is a curse, not least in that scholars who “use” the Grundbegriffe tend rarely to engage with the project’s broader methodological implications. Precisely because it is so useful as a reference resource, a source of propositional statements and hard historical facts, it tends to be forgotten that when the Grundbegriffe came to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s it was recognized as belonging to the so-called “linguistic turn,” together with other contemporaneous “linguistic” approaches, including poststructuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, and even such diametrically politically opposed approaches as Habermas’s theory of communication and Luhmann’s systems theory.4 Seen from this perspective, conceptual history is no longer only a corpus of knowledge, waiting passively to be “applied,” but a philosophic-historical approach that makes emphatic claims about the regulative function of concepts for the horizon of historical and political thought and, still more significantly, for political action at any point in time. Conceptual history therefore also has a potentially explanatory character, especially when considered against a purely material approach—indeed, it is no accident that the Grundbegriffe came to prominence at a time when a more doctrinaire Marxism had lost its intellectual luster on the continent and a market for a non-materialist historicism emerged. Though it is rarely explicitly theorized as such, part of conceptual history’s success can be attributed to its position as a kind of intellectual “Third Way” between the old Marxist materialism, as well as the coming New Historicism on the one hand, and poststructuralism and the linguistic turn on the other. It embraced the archival, fact-based research agenda of the former and the conceptual approach of the latter, while shedding their dogmatism and skepticism, respectively. Especially after Koselleck’s death, the “practical” use of conceptual history has continued to sit in particular tension with the claims of the “linguistic” approach of contemporary theory, a difficulty that scholars who simply “use” the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe often gesture toward without ever fully engaging.
During the last few decades, conceptual history has significantly expanded well beyond the boundaries set by the original founders and established itself as a field of study in its own right. As emphasized by the editors of the inaugural volume of the European Conceptual History series, to which our volume is the latest addition, conceptual history has evolved from being “a somewhat esoteric venture within the domain of history” to “becoming one of the most important avenues to studying not just intellectual history and political thought but a broad spectrum of discourses ranging from comparative religion, emotional lexicons and welfare state policies to the natural sciences and science and technology studies.”5 Accordingly, the twenty-first century has witnessed the publication of a substantial number of monographs that draw, though not always explicitly, on Koselleck’s work and that address such concepts as politics (Palonen), absolutism (Blänkner), conservatism (Steber), political security (Marciniak), and the freedom of the press (Jordan).6 Collected volumes on politics (Steinmetz; Fernández-Sebastián), nationalism (Ihalainen and Holmila), parliamentarism (Ihalainen, Ilie, and Palonen), liberalism (Freeden, Fernández-Sebastián, and Leonhard), and democracy (Kurunmäki, Nevers, and Velde), just to mention a few recent collections, have contributed to the understanding of contemporary politics, extending the reach of conceptual history beyond the Sattelzeit.7 Other volumes edited by Ernst Müller and Falko Schmieder (Begriffsgeschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 2008), and by Michael Eggers and Matthias Rothe (Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Begriffsgeschichte, 2009), address the specific challenges associated with the supposedly unambiguous and objective language of science, pointing to the historicity and metaphoricity of scientific concepts.8
By the same token, Koselleck, the biographical person and his scholarly work, has become a research field of its own. Niklas Olsen’s book, History in the Plural (2012), is much more than merely an introduction to Koselleck’s work, as the subtitle suggests, but rather an intellectual biography that offers interpretations of some of his key contributions to history and the philosophy of time.9 Drawing on Koselleck’s unpublished estate (Nachlass), letters to Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, and Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular, Gennaro Imbriano’s Der Begriff der Politik: Die Moderne als Krisenzeit im Werk von Reinhart Koselleck (2018) engages with Koselleck as a political thinker who identifies the political with crisis and conflict.10 Similarly, Hans Joas and Peter Vogt’s 2011 volume, Begriffene Geschichte, investigates the biographical background and the sources and problems of Koselleck’s brand of conceptual history. In a separate section, containing eight chapters by Joas, Leonhard, and Jordheim, among others, the book delves into Koselleck’s conception of the Sattelzeit.11 A few years later, in 2013, Carsten Dutt and Reinhard Laube edited the volume Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte: Zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, which covers numerous topics in Koselleck’s writing, such as his theory of historical time (Jörg Fisch), his conception of Enlightenment (Hans Erich Bödeker) and modernity (Carsten Dutt), and his understanding of hermeneutics (Dominic Kaegi).12 During the 2023 Koselleck centennial, many more studies saw the light of day, for example Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann’s comprehensive Der Riss in der Zeit, Ulrike Jureit’s Erinnern als Überschritt, and Lisa Regazzoni’s Im Zwischenraum der Dinge,13 and many more can be expected in the wake of this celebration.
It is perhaps symptomatic that Steinmetz and Freeden do not mention art and literature in their summary. However, as they argue in their concluding remarks, “Conceptual history is not an orthodoxy, but continuously reinvents itself.”14 While the cultural sciences have, it may be argued, got off to a slow start, in the wake of Ästhetische Grundbegriffe conceptual history has proven to be comparatively fruitful in the study of literature, art history, music, media, and cultural studies, for instance. Koselleck’s own involvement in issues pertaining to art and literature, either previously ignored or recently discovered, has revitalized the cultural engagement with his work. Two extremely important collections of essays, Hubert Locher und Adriana Markantonatos’s Reinhart Koselleck und die politische Ikonologie (2013) and Bettina Brandt and Britta Hochkirchen’s Reinhart Koselleck und das Bild (2021), address Koselleck’s almost obsessive engagement with images, both as collector and as a ferocious photographer. The book chapters in the two volumes focus on everything from Koselleck’s work on concrete images, such as equestrian statues, and art history to his unfinished program for a political iconology and his notion of political sensuality (politische Sinnlichkeit).15 Sean Franzel’s study of Koselleck’s reading of Goethe in the 1993 lecture “Goethes unzeitgemäße Geschichte” construes the lecture as an articulation of Koselleck’s own theory of history as continuity rather than as periodization.16
Within literary studies, the volume Literaturwissenschaft als Begriffsgeschichte, which Christoph Strosetzki edited in 2010, is an ambitious endeavor that combines theoretical studies (by, for instance, Gottfried Gabriel and Thomas Leinkauf) with historical investigations of concepts such as mimesis and imitatio (Ulrike Zeuch and Riccardo Pozzo) and genres such as the novella (Helmut C. Jacobs).17 Operating in the field between the humanities, media science, and communication studies, the concept of media and its history is analyzed by Stefan Hoffmann in Geschichte des Medienbegriffs (2002), in which the author traces the concept’s dialectic between aisthesis and instrumentalism.18 More recently, Karen S. Feldman in her 2019 book, Arts of Connection, studies the historical transformation of the concept of connection, from Aristotle to twentieth-century phenomenology.19 In addition to offering a comprehensive theoretical and methodological account, Stefan Hajduk, in Poetologie der Stimmung (2016), interprets the concept of Stimmung in Goethe, Moritz, and Tieck.20
A plethora of perspectives, including aesthetic (Karlheinz Barck and Martin Fontius), literary (Harald Fricke), and musicological (Albrecht Riethmüller), is offered in Die Interdisziplinarität der Begriffsgeschichte (2000), edited by Gunter Scholtz, who in the book’s preface suggests that conceptual history is necessarily interdisciplinary, seeing as the concepts it analyzes are almost always transdisciplinary.21 On a similar track, Ernst Müller and Falko Schmieder’s monumental Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik: Ein kritisches Kompendium (2016) traces the tradition’s own history from the Enlightenment and its ramifications in numerous disciplines: philosophy, sociology, linguistics, and cultural studies. For our purposes, the extensive discussion of cultural studies in various guises, from Freud to Blumenberg, is crucial, as it points to the challenges of interdisciplinary conceptual history within the field of cultural studies, but also its benefits as a versatile tool for historical analysis and understanding.22
It is within this landscape, and for the benefit of scholars studying and teaching in it, that this volume seeks to take up the mantle, and the practice of conceptual history. Where other projects, like the aforementioned project at the ZfL, seek above all to correct and to chronologically, theoretically, and methodologically expand the original Grundbegriffe, the goal of this volume is to bring conceptual history to bear on those fields in which its practitioners and enthusiasts are, as a matter of academic fact, already active: from history, of course, to literary studies and art history and the broader, more capacious umbrella of Kulturwissenschaft itself. Rather than simply to “apply” or “expand” conceptual history, the goal of the contributions to this volume is to consider conceptual history both with and against other, dominant methodologies in these fields—deconstruction and semiotics, both still enjoying a long and happy afterlife in literary studies; statistical analysis, now more prominent than ever in the age of the digital humanities; and the more explicitly linguistic-theoretical approaches of genealogy and metaphorology, which bear a strong family resemblance to conceptual history, but whose use brings an entirely different set of meta-theoretical presumptions to bear. What can conceptual history produce that these approaches cannot? Alternately, what can it produce when brought alongside them? The contributions to this volume seek to find out.
Accordingly, this volume is divided into two parts. The first uses conceptual history to rethink the concept as such and its history, respectively, and reflects specifically on the methodology of Begriffsgeschichte in the work of Koselleck himself. It zooms in on the very foundations of conceptual history: the distinctions between fact and fiction, reality and image, invention and repetition, organizing and using.
In “Dreams, Lies, and Secrets: Koselleck’s Fictions,” Helge Jordheim sets out to explain Reinhart Koselleck’s somewhat awkward relationship with fiction and to answer the question of why he was reluctant to engage with literary texts qua literature. Despite many references to major writers of the German and French canon, Koselleck rarely appreciates these figures for their literary skills—instead, they are reduced to source material for analyses of historical reality. Thus, Koselleck replaces the question of fiction in historiography with a vaguer conception of human experience. Fiction, Jordheim concludes, is transformed from a form of linguistic representation to a set of phenomenological experience and political practices, and can be captured in three fundamental elements of human life: dreams, secrets, and lies.
In the following chapter, “The Temporal Synopsis of Concepts: The Image as a Modeling Framework in Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte and Theory of Historical Times,” Bettina Brandt draws out the heretofore understudied aspect of image theory in Koselleck’s work. Looking at Koselleck’s early thinking about images, which would go on to influence his history of the concept of Bildung, Brandt argues for the fundamental interdisciplinarity of Begriffsgeschichte by stressing the extent to which Koselleck drew on art history, and especially Max Imdahl’s notion of “Ikonik,” to formulate the layered, temporal character of the concept. She also places special emphasis on the photograph as the decisive medium for this intervention, as a framework where different perspectives and complex temporal heterogeneities become perceivable, and where language can present narratives of continuity and identity.
Sean Franzel’s chapter, “Koselleck’s Inventories: Notes on the Media Practices of Conceptual History,” zooms in on intermedial aspects of Koselleck’s practice of making inventories. Franzel posits the concept of inventory as a useful heuristic for thinking through processes of collecting, cataloguing, organizing, and displaying knowledge about history and historical experience. The chapter offers a brief conceptual history of the inventory, and argues for its centrality to a number of key historical and theoretical paradigms emergent in the past fifty years, including and especially Begriffsgeschichte. The chapter closes with a reflection on the cultural technical roots of conceptual history itself, and, conversely, of the theory of cultural techniques as conceptual history.
In “The Tragedy of the Commonplace: On the Erosive Use of Language in Modernity,” Jakob Norberg explores a different kind of relationship between concept and catastrophe, namely, the catastrophe of meaning that afflicts overused and exhausted concepts, causing them to lose both the explicative and mobilizing power hypothesized by Koselleck in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Against Koselleck, Norberg draws on the figure of the “tragedy of the commons” to argue for an inverse relationship between the frequency of a concept’s use and its efficacy. And while Koselleck stresses the regulative power of conceptual language, Norberg shows that language itself resists regulation, and that consequently there can be no remedy for overuse.
Finally, Eva Geulen’s “When Time Becomes Form: Pseudomorphosis in Spengler, Jonas, and Blumenberg” considers Oswald Spengler’s reading of Goethe’s morphology as an alternative to conceptual history. Morphology, Geulen argues, takes up many of the same concerns as Begriffsgeschichte, namely, the interpenetration of ideas and historical time, but from a different perspective. In a reading of Spengler, Hans Jonas, and Hans Blumenberg, Geulen articulates the possibility of a rival resolution to the problem of chronology and the ideo-temporality of cultures.
The second part of this volume focuses specifically on the interdisciplinarity of concepts, attempting to apply conceptual history to fresh contexts to see what results. In “Genealogies of the Artificial,” Stephan Kammer argues for a theoretical approach to an understanding of the “artificial,” noting the extent to which the concept’s meaning and valence changed on the threshold of modernity, as it migrated from the realm of procedural knowledge, namely, the arts, over to ontology. Kammer shows that, where the artificial once designated the use of some practice and procedure, it soon came to designate the negative of the natural. He closes by calling for a cultural, rather than merely conceptual, history of the artificial.
In her contribution, “Das Volk dichten: Herder’s Volksbegriff and the Metaphorology of Conceptual History,” Chloe Vaughn applies a similar approach to the concept of Volk to test Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s claim that metaphorology should inherit the legacy of Begriffsgeschichte. By comparing the entry on “Volk” in the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, in which Herder figures prominently, to Herder’s own remarks on the term from his Volkslieder project, Vaughn argues that the constitution of certain concepts, like Volk, is as much metaphorical as it is conceptual. She closes, consequently, by pleading for the return of the authorial presence and the reaffirmation of the practice of close reading in the understanding of concepts.
Against Vaughn, Mattias Pirholt’s chapter, “‘Is Everything Then Poetry?’: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses of the Early Romantic Concept of Poesie,” consists of quantitative and qualitative analyses of the concept of poetry during the modernization, temporalization, and acceleration of the Sattelzeit. Using large data sets provided by Google Books, Pirholt charts the frequency of the use of the concept of Poesie, and traces its co-occurrence with other basic concepts of socio-political language. Pirholt’s analysis reveals that these concepts and Poesie are coterminous with Romanticism, peaking at the turn of the century, and once again around the revolutions of 1848, and argues for Poesie as a pragmatic concept of movement and action that aims to romanticize, that is, continuously accelerate, reality.
Michael Lipkin’s chapter, “Realism as Versittlichung,” argues for the reintegration of the critical-conceptual apparatus that developed around poetic realism during the 1840s and ’50s to contemporary scholarship on the period, which tends to bracket it. Drawing on the hypotheses of Koselleck’s Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Lipkin argues that “realism” is wholly a concept of the Sattelzeit, subject to the same dynamics that Koselleck and his collaborators identified across the conceptual universe of the period. Looking at the critical writing around realism from this perspective points to a more capacious understanding of realism as a lived practice and tool of social formation, rather than the unreflected reflection of reality with which the critical writing is typically charged.
Leonie Ettinger’s chapter, “The Rise and Fall of the Youth Concept: Intergenerational Conflict in Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn and Hanns Johst’s Schlageter,” flips the position of conceptual history and literary studies, using two works of literature from the early twentieth century (Hasenclever and Johst) to trace transformations in the concepts “father” and “son.” Ettinger’s literary analysis shows how these concepts relate to changes in socio-cultural dynamics in the years leading up to Germany’s fascist regime, like the valorization of youth and the decline of the patriarchal bourgeois family. Rather than important conceptual histories from outside, Ettinger’s article ultimately mounts a case for practicing conceptual history within and through the study of literature.
Jonathon Catlin, finally, presses the pictorial character of the concept in another direction in “Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and the Idea of History as ‘Permanent Catastrophe,’” namely, into conversation with Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and their thinking on the “permanent catastrophe.” Catlin picks up the dialectical tension in the correspondence of the two flagship thinkers of the Frankfurt School between an understanding of catastrophe as a singular, cataclysmic rupture in the fabric of historical time, and as constitutive of history itself. This tension, Catlin argues, can be resolved in Benjamin’s notion of the “thought-image” and the “conceptual prism,” which, rather than simple definition, is a practice of stockpiling, arranging, and juxtaposing events to produce illumination. Catlin closes by positing that only the thought-image of the permanent catastrophe is adequate to grasp the ongoing “slow catastrophes” of late capitalist modernity, particularly anthropogenic climate change.
The eleven chapters, covering such different disciplines as art history, comparative literature, German studies, intellectual history, media archeology, and rhetoric, together form an interdisciplinary dialog, which aims to cross-fertilize these disciplines and conceptual history and offer theoretically reflected experiments in conceptual history. Read together, they contribute to the continuous reinvention of conceptual history that Koselleck envisioned and that Freeden and Steinmetz emphasize in the introduction to the inaugural volume of the European Conceptual History.
Mattias Pirholt is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University (Sweden). He has written extensively on Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz, and the German Romantics. His book publications include Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism (Camden House, 2012), Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (Winter, 2018), Art, Nature, and Self-Formation in the Age of Goethe (co-ed. with Camilla Flodin and Gerad Gentry, De Gruyter, 2024), and Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture (co-ed. with Thorsten Carstensen, Brill, 2025).
Michael Lipkin is the Academic Director and Senior Instructional Professor of the Program for Public Thinking at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively on the longue durée of realism in Germany, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, in publications such as the German Studies Review, the Colloquia Germanica, and the Gottfried Kellers Moderne project. His writing on culture and politics has appeared in American and European publications, such as The Baffler, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Merkur. His translation of Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth (Tadellöser & Wolff) was published with New York Review of Books Classics and Granta in 2023.