Rise and Fall of the Sattelzeit: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Temporality of Totalitarianism and Genocide
Rise and Fall of the Sattelzeit: The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Temporality of Totalitarianism and Genocide
In this essay, I propose investigating Reinhart Koselleck's work, and specifically the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, with an emphasis on what seems to me its most glaring absence: political concepts invented in or active in the twentieth century. I argue that this lacuna is not incidental but reveals a highly significant weakness in Koselleck’s understanding of modernity. By restricting the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe to the Sattelzeit, conceptual history is incapacitated when it comes to the twentieth century. Concepts invented in the first half of the twentieth century, such as totalitarianism and genocide, are virtually the opposite of the concepts privileged by Koselleck, embodying a very different semantics of historical temporality. Instead of an open-ended horizon of expectation, they bring the catastrophic events of the twentieth century into the semantics of historical experience, emphasizing neither futurity nor acceleration but dystopia and deceleration. In the concluding section I attempt to demonstrate how totalitarianism and genocide incorporated this new structure of temporality. In other words, I show how the semantics of historical time were altered when the expectations of modernity were so tragically derailed.
Keywords: Reinhart Koselleck, Sattelzeit, totalitarianism, genocide, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, semantic stockpiles, deceleration
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