A Rift in Time: Reinhart Koselleck's Search for a New Theory of History - Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (University of California, Berkeley)

Reinhart Koselleck’s work has fascinated and engaged both historians and those interested in how to theorise about history. Spanning the late 1960s to the early 2000s, he formulated his own ever-evolving theory of history in response to catastrophic experiences of time in the twentieth century, including his own complicity in Nazi Germany's war of extermination as a young Wehrmacht soldier in Ukraine and his time as a Gulag prisoner in Central Asia. Drawing on these experiences of temporal rupture he offered a novel answer to the familiar alternatives which see history either as a teleology of progress or as a cycle of repetition. Based on a wealth of previously inaccessible archival materials, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann reconstructs Koselleck’s intellectual biography and parses out this late-twentieth century search for a theory of history.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is a Professor for Late Modern European 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 next year. Currently, he is working on a book-length essay on the history of human rights from its imperial beginnings to our present polycrisis.