Necrológica del Outsider Reinhart Koselleck: el «historiador pensante» y las polémicas de los historiadores

Abstract

Reinhart Koselleck is an author difficult to classify, since his conceptual history is rejected, and at the same time taken advantage of, by both philosophy and historiography. This paper analyses Koselleck’s attitude, sometimes tactful, at other times passionate, towards the polemics of the historians and philosophers of his country, and particularly towards the controversy concerning the involvement of both groups in Nazism—a controversy that has provoked a debate, still open, about the affections and disaffections between the science which studies the past, and memory, and has also unleashed a dispute about memorials motivated by the monument to the victims of the Holocaust. Koselleck tracks down the main modern milestones of the attempt to develop an iconography of violent death and an aesthetics of memory. Historical semantics possesses all the ingredients required to enliven the public use of historical reason, and it becomes a means for a selfclarification of the present.