The title of Reinhart Koselleck's extensive collection of mostly scattered, partly posthumous writings and notes, which was published just in time for the centenary of the historian's birth on 23 April, comes from the author. Koselleck wrote "Coagulated Lava" over the first sheet of a ring folder with handwritten and typewritten texts, which allegedly lay constantly on the desk of his study in Bielefeld. The majority of these autobiographical notes, written at scattered times, relate to the year he spent in Soviet captivity in the Karaganda camp in Kazakhstan. Only in passing are these pages of remembrance the previous military service, for which he had volunteered in 1941 as a high school student in Saarbrücken.
Patrick Bahners
Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".
- Follow I follow
The three editors of the volume have also placed the volcanological picture on scientific and journalistic texts, the fragments of Koselleck's research project of recording and interpreting equestrian monuments as a special form of war memorial and his polemical contributions to the monument debates in reunified Germany. Objectively, the decision to bring together disparate texts under a book title umbrella in the pathetic signal style of Zaha Hadid can be linked to the fact that Koselleck himself used the phrase from the coagulated lava to illustrate the functioning of memory in order to determine the tasks of public remembrance in contrast to the burdens of personal memory.
No path to paradigm
He uses the image to describe the captivity, but also the non-transferability of direct, extreme experiences, using examples of the survival of mortal danger in situations of total surrender secured by superiority. However, it is questionable whether one should speak of examples here at all. For if such an experience cannot be conveyed to anyone who has not had it, then it is not suitable, for example, and certainly not as a paradigm in the context of scientific series and theory formation.
However, it remains ambiguous in Koselleck's case whether such experiences were also made in a weakened form by people who had not been in the camp. When he gives the figure an anthropological twist, he cites the experience of love as a type of this volcanic experience. Koselleck emphasizes the physical, bodily character of the raw material of the memory work. "Memory may be jagged and mobile, but at times it is immovable and unsurpassable, unique and lasting. A coagulated mass of lava that has once poured into the body glowing and flowing in order to establish layers on which all further life is built or steals around it."
The point of this naturalism is epistemological: the presence of the preserved memory is supposed to vouch for its correctness, at least for those who preserve it within themselves and feel it unchangeably. The insistence on the corporeality of strong memory is Koselleck's biological, phenomenological contribution to the problem of the authentication of historical knowledge, which occupied him in the context of his project of a historic, as the traditional name he adopted for a theory and methodology of historical science is.