Upload
pete-sampras
View
214
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
7/24/2019 Plass - Review of R. Koselleck Future Past
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/plass-review-of-r-koselleck-future-past 1/3
Wiley and American Association of Teachers of German are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to The German Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
ReviewAuthor(s): Ulrich PlassReview by: Ulrich PlassSource: The German Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 140-141Published by: on behalf of theWiley American Association of Teachers of GermanStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27675909Accessed: 04-11-2015 23:21 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
This content downloaded from 129.97.58.73 on Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:21:59 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
7/24/2019 Plass - Review of R. Koselleck Future Past
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/plass-review-of-r-koselleck-future-past 2/3
140
German
Quarterly
Book Reviews
winter 2006
Koselleck, Reinhard. Futures Past. On theSemantics
of
Historical Time. Trans. Keith
Tribe.
New
York: Columbia
University
Press,
2004.317
pp.
$24.50
paperback.
Keith Tribe's translation of Reinhart
Koselleck's 1979 classic
Vergangene
Zukunft
is
a
welcome addition
to
the excellent
recent
edition of
Koselleck's The Practice
ofConceptual
History
(Stanford 2002).
Futures Past
is
a
revised and
corrected translation of
an
earlier
edition
published
by
theMIT
Press
in
1985.
In his
introduction,
the
translator
notes
that the
revisions
are
almost
entirely
stylistic,
seeking
a
more
accessible and less literal
rendering
of the
original;
in
the
process
a
few
errors
in
the
original
translation have been
identified and corrected
(vii,
n.
2).
Whether
this
new
translation
presents
a
stylistic
improvement
is
open
to
debate. Koselleck's deliberate
style
is,
at
times,
plodding,
and
the
frequent
use
of
impersonal
constructions
and the
passive
voice?necessitated
by
its
subject
matter
-
create
an
additional obstacle for
a
readable
English
translation.
None
theless,
Tribe succeeds
in
rendering
Koselleck's
style
in
admirably
precise
phrasings.
While
a
cursory
comparison
of the
new
translation with the older
one
reveals
a
good
number of
changes,
it
shows
no
significant
improvements.
However,
one
cannot
help
but stumble
across a
large
number of
typographical
errors.
Punctuation marks
are
often
missing;
even
entire
quotations
are
not
formatted
as
such
(for instance,
p.
142).
Mangled
sentences
like
Corresponding
to
this
we
might
one
could
[sic]
seek
interpreta
tion....
(220) prove
that
the
goal
of
providing
a
corrected edition has been
pitifully
missed.
Composed
in
connection
with Koselleck's
contributions
to
the
ground-breaking
Geschichtliche
Grundbegriffe,
the
essays
in
Futures
Past
serve a
dual
purpose:
on
the
one
hand,
they provide
studies of
specific
documents
of
reflective historical
inquiry
such
as
Lorenz
von
Stein's
essay
on
the Prussian
constitution;
on
the other
hand,
they
further
elaborate
on
Koselleck's
project
of
conceptual history.
For
example,
Koselleck bril
liantly
traces
the
semantic
genealogy
of modern
concepts
of
movement
such
as
revolu
tion
or
Neuzeit. All
essays share,
as
the title
suggests,
an
advanced theoretical
interest
in
the
structure
of
historical
time.
Tribe's felicitous
phrase
futures
past
reflects
the
plural
form contained
in
the German subtitle:
Zur
Semantik
geschichtlicher
Zeiten. The
splitting
up
of natural
or
chronological
time into
a
diversity
of distinct
historical
tempo
ralities
(geschichtliche
Zeiten)
signals
the
beginning
of the
modern
reign
of
history.
Koselleck's
point
is
that
we
must
seek
to
understand
modernity
as a
form of
temporal
experience
that
implies
an ever
changing
relation of
past
and
future,
of
experience
and
expectation,
of
memory
and
hope.
Such transformative
relations
can
be detected
on
the
onomasiological
and
semasiological
levels
of
historical
concepts.
Every
attempt
to
come
to
terms
with
a
past
experience
determines
an
inevitable
projection
of
a
future,
but the
relation between the
two
is
never
stable.
The
modern
experience
of
the
present
as
a
new
temporality,
a
former
future,
leads
to
an
increase in
the
weight
of the future
in
[one's] range
of
experience
(3).
This shift
in
historical
perspective
allows
Koselleck
an
elegant
superimposition
of the
categories
of
facticity
and
possibility, captured
in
the
phrase futures past. Despite this Heideggerian resonance, Koselleck's essays do not
present
a
monolithic
philosophy
of
history.
He focuses
on
linguistically
articulated
historical
situations
in
which
a
productive
tension
between
past
and future becomes
accessible
to
analysis.
One remarkable
instance is
Koselleck's
account
of dreams
by
concentration
camp
inmates. These dreams
cross
the
threshold
of literal historical
This content downloaded from 129.97.58.73 on Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:21:59 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
7/24/2019 Plass - Review of R. Koselleck Future Past
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/plass-review-of-r-koselleck-future-past 3/3
REVIEWS: German Studies
across
the
Disciplines
141
witnessing.
Instead of
recounting
the
terror
of the
camps,
these dreams
are
utopian
camp
dreams.
They
disclose
a
touching
image
of home
beyond
the electric fence
[...].
The
pure
facticity
of the
camp
is
blanked
out,
and the
past
transferred
into
wishes
for
the future.
(214)
This
example
exceeds
all others
in
the
book,
since it
presents
an
extreme
form of
temporality
in
which
the future
can
only
be
rendered?beyond
all
hope?as
a
future
past:
it is
the
only
historical
example
in
the book
in
which
the
essen
tial
element
of modern
temporality,
the
future,
has been
eradicated,
and Koselleck's
structuring pair
of
experience
and
expectation
no
longer applies.
Thus,
this
example
also marks the
limit of his
approach:
Such salvational dreams
[...]
resist
any
further
sociohistorical examination
(215).
More
than 35
years
after
the
original publication
of
this work, the acuity and range of Koselleck's analyses and theoretical reflections
remain
undiminished.
Ulrich Plass
Wesleyan
University
McClelland,
Charles
E.
Prophets,
Paupers,
or
Professionals?
A
Social
History
of
Every
day
Visual Artists
in
Modern
Germany,
1850-Present.
Oxford: Peter
Lang,
2003.
238
pp.
$52.95
paperback.
To
write
a
social
history
of
visual
artists
in
Germany
from 1850
to
the
present
in
slightly
more
that two-hundred
pages
is
a
daunting
task.
In
responding
to
this
chal
lenge,
Charles
McClelland has succeeded
in
producing
a
concise
introduction
to
this
broad
topic.
His
goal
is
to
cover
the
complete
range
of
artists,
indicated
by
his
emphasis
on
the
notion
of the
everyday
artist.
His
argument
for
its
significance
is
that the
masses of
everyday
artists,
such
as
those
working
in
the
industries
of
advertising
and
design,
have
a
greater
impact
on
the
public
than individual
celebrities....
(15).
Although
McClelland
speaks
of
everyday
artists,
this
is
not
a
history
of
the
day-to-day
lives
of
artists. He
is
concerned
chiefly
with
questions
of
professionalization,
education,
social
status,
the
art
market, incomes,
and
organizations,
but deals
scarcely
at
all
with artists'
actual
working
and
living
conditions,
marriage, family,
social
networks,
and other
themes
common
to
social
history.
McClelland
further circumscribes
the
study
with
another
concept?the
Interest
Community
of
Art
?which,
as
he
defines
it,
includes
a
wide
spectrum
of
people
and associations
affiliated
with full-time
professional
artists:
amateur
and
part-time
artists,
professors
of
art, curators,
dealers,
critics,
art
historians,
educated
consumers,
and
Kunstvereine;
he refers
to
the latter
as
the
organized
face
of the
local Interest
Community
of Art
(129).
On another
major
theme,
McClelland
declares
that no
profession
is
so
wrapped
in
myth
as
the artists
(167)
and
throughout
the
book,
especially
in
chapter
six,
he
examines
critically
the
myths
of artists
as
heroes,
geniuses,
visionaries,
prophets,
outsiders,
political
radicals,
and
starving
Bohemians.
McClelland's
approach
to the social
history
of artists is shaped
largely
by the
methodology
that
informed
his earlier
studies of the
professions
in
Germany.
The
first
question
therefore
is
to
define
who
is
an
artist
(chapter
two),
which he addresses
from
numerous
perspectives?education
and
training,
organizational
membership,
exhibi
tion
participation,
peer
recognition?but,
in
the end
an
unavoidable
subjectivity
under
This content downloaded from 129.97.58.73 on Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:21:59 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions