Founded in 1992, our university, as an academic educational and research institution with its central historical link to the Zittau University of Applied Sciences and its focus on energy technology, primarily commemorates and honors university lecturers in this group of subjects (which today are often referred to as STEM disciplines). However, the university also draws on the humanistic traditions of important educational institutions and thinkers in Zittau and Görlitz, exemplified by Jakob Böhme, the great theological philosopher from Görlitz (1575-1624), the Oberlausitzische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften founded in 1779 and the economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902-1977).

What's more, with the Faculty of Economics and Industrial Engineering, the Faculty of Management and Cultural Studies, the Faculty of Social Sciences and several research institutes, the university today has teaching and research units that deal with the problems and future opportunities of contemporary societies from an economic, social and cultural science perspective (so-called GSW subjects). It is true that the tradition in this area is certainly less pronounced than in the natural and technical sciences. However, it does exist and the university is called upon - especially in view of the tasks of shaping our future - to take up this tradition more strongly than before, to convey it to students, to reflect critically on it and - also in this way - to demonstrate and further develop the attractiveness of the cross-border cultural and scientific region in the border triangle.

Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006), who was born in Görlitz, embodies this line of tradition and the ability to connect with current teaching and research at our university in an outstanding way. The centenary of his birth on 23 April is being widely discussed and celebrated by relevant academic institutions, but also in the feature pages of the major daily and weekly newspapers in Germany - from the Süddeutsche Zeitung to Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Allgemeine. Why is this happening and why should we, as the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences, be more aware of this historical theorist, university lecturer and intellectual of stature and engage with him and his work?

Biography

Reinhart Koselleck was born on April 23, 1923 in Görlitz as one of three children of the history teacher Arno Koselleck and his wife Elisabeth, née Marchand. After a short time, the family moved first to Saarbrücken, then to Munich, where Koselleck also attended grammar school. Like so many young men of his generation and background, Reinhart Koselleck volunteered to join the National Socialist Wehrmacht in 1941 and was deployed in the war against the Soviet Union until 1945 - including in the Ukraine and in regions that are once again the targets of bloody attacks, including on the civilian population, in Russia's current war. Shortly before the end of the war, he was taken prisoner by the Russians, but was released in the fall of 1946. Immediately afterwards, he attended a re-education program of the British occupation army for denazification. At the age of 24, Koselleck began his desired studies of history, but also philosophy, law and sociology at the universities of Heidelberg and later Bristol (UK), where he attended or was even supervised by such influential and at the same time intellectually and politically highly different scholars as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, but also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Löwith, Ernst Forsthoff and Alfred Weber.

With the support of his teachers, Koselleck already focused on an academic career during his studies and began his dissertation, which he successfully completed in 1954. This dissertation, which was published in 1959 - slightly revised - as a book under the title "Kritik und Krise. A Study on the Pathogenesis of the Bourgeois World", made Reinhart Koselleck famous in one fell swoop. Alongside almost enthusiastic praise for his original research work, there were also many harsh criticisms of the conservative view of the world (and its presumed sources - such as Carl Schmitt) as well as the supposed criticism of progress and democracy (see below).

Koselleck began his university career as a lecturer at the University of Bristol (1954-1956) before joining the Department of History at the University of Heidelberg, where he completed his habilitation in 1965 with the study "Prussia between Reform and Revolution" under the sponsorship and supervision of the great modern historian Werner Conze.

Reinhart Koselleck took up his first professorship - interestingly for political science - at the Ruhr University Bochum in 1966, before returning to the University of Heidelberg in 1968 as Professor of Modern History and in 1973 being appointed to the new University of Bielefeld - which he also helped to shape in terms of its structure and orientation - where he held the Chair of Theory of History until his retirement in 1988. Both during these decades as a full professor and after his retirement, Koselleck was a sought-after guest professor in Europe and abroad (including the USA, France, Japan and the Netherlands). He was appointed a member of numerous national and international academies and colleges, including the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (1987-1989), the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the British Academy, to name but a few. He also received important prizes and awards, including honorary doctorates from Dutch and French universities and the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose (1999).

On February 3, 2006, at the age of almost 83, Reinhart Koselleck died in Bad Oeynhausen (North Rhine-Westphalia).

Significance and topicality

In this brief remembrance and tribute, it is of course only possible to address a few aspects of his work and influence, although we will focus on some aspects that are (still) relevant to us today and have a particular impact on our university and its research. Of course, it is not possible to offer more than highly subjective outlines.

1 Throughout his academic life, Koselleck has dealt with history in the sense of a historiographically based "theory of history". He has published widely on this subject, although he has not left behind a summarizing work in the sense of a monograph. However, the building blocks of his historiography are available, including important contributions to the understanding of history as the quasi real continuum of the complexly mediated actions and omissions of people under concrete conditions on the one hand and as the plural perception, writing and understanding of history(ies) on the other, whereby both dimensions are themselves complexly intertwined. In this respect - according to Koselleck - there can never and certainly not only be an "objective history" or "historiography", but at best an(ex post constructed) truth of events that appears as a mosaic of the diverse voices of all those involved. "The recourse to the diversity of perceptual histories that constitute a story raises doubts as to whether the continuation of only one variant can catch up with the "meaning" of a particular story. To presuppose its meaninglessness is therefore already a better epistemological basis for dealing with what is commonly called history" (Koselleck 2010: 18). And because the (itself again plural) subjective and the (no less: plural) objective of history(ies) are constitutive for the historical process, historical science - according to one of Koselleck's famous formulations - is not only "in need of theory", but also requires an intensive engagement with perceptions, images, descriptions, concepts and language - in historical events as well as in their appropriations and evaluations.

Koselleck has carried out pioneering work in the history of concepts, semantics and iconology as well as leading and realizing major research and publication projects. His work as one of the three editors and one of the leading authors of the eight-volume work of the century "Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe", which was published by Klett-Cotta (Stuttgart) from the end of the 1970s, deserves special mention. The topicality of this theoretical perspective on history and society is obvious - not only the narratological and discourse-analytical research, but also today's debates on interpretations and interpretative sovereignty with regard to, for example, the history of the GDR, that of the transformation and unification period after 1989 and the associated concepts and ways of speaking (but also with regard to more recent historical-political issues) make Koselleck's work appear as relevant as it did 20 or 30 years ago.

2) Koselleck was - also with regard to the linguistic dimension of history just mentioned - a historian of time in an unusual sense. Hardly anyone in German historiography has dealt so intensively with the dimensions, modes and consequences of temporality for the historical process - and thus formulated highly valuable findings that complement a sociology of social change. He thematized temporal formations of genre-historical and epochal character as well as repetitive patterns or acceleration processes (for example, and outstandingly in the 19th century) and action-powerful horizons of expectation under concrete conditions of action. Here too, in the current times of upheaval on a regional, but also global level, the reflection of these very different and yet interacting "layers of time" is a necessity, for which Reinhart Koselleck has provided us with important guiding ideas and analytical guidelines.

3. since the 1970s, Reinhart Koselleck has worked intensively on the positioning of historical studies in the concert of the humanities and social sciences and has developed a substantial concept as well as institutional solutions for practical interdisciplinarity that are not limited to platitudes or appeals, but rather allow the individual disciplines' peculiar potentials to be uncovered and further developed, as well as allowing the respective potentials to be cleverly brought into conversation with each other and linked productively in teaching and research projects in a way that generates added value. He was particularly committed to this at the reform university in Bielefeld and played a key role in the management committees of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (1974/75 also as Managing Director). These approaches are also of continuing, indeed increasing importance for us as a university of applied sciences in a region undergoing structural change and should be noted.

4) One final relevance should be mentioned, which has already been alluded to above: In his furious first work "Critique and Crisis" (1959), Koselleck problematized the conditions, content and consequences of the intellectual Enlightenment movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries for the social, not least: political development conditions and formation logics of the "bourgeois world". In a nutshell, a central argument could be summarized as follows: Where the absolutist state granted freedom to the individual, but left it as merely individual freedom of conscience in the symbolic and private sphere (and in this respect massively restricted it), the philosophical-publicist Enlightenment of the 18th century asserted the possibility and real opportunity of a reconciling emancipation of state, freedom and reason. Using historical-philosophical figures of argumentation, the utopia of a society was outlined in which rational freedom could become the principle of the state and the society of moral individuals as a whole. Koselleck discovered here the intellectual foundations not only for a hubris of reason, but also of morality (of intellectuals), which - as the French Revolution showed - could quickly turn into dictatorship and terror, even under democratic auspices; a possibility that - as the 20th century impressively and horribly demonstrated - pushed towards reality.

Whatever one's view of this explanatory approach and horizon of values (including historical absolutism) may be; The fact that enlightenment and rationality do not simply guarantee the human 'good', but - to paraphrase Horkheimer/Adorno - are also subject to a "dialectic" that (can) turn them into the opposite, is just as true and common knowledge today, more than 60 years after their first publication, as the thesis that intellectual moral rigorism not only obscures pronounced ambitions of domination, but is also capable of undermining even developed democracies in their participatory content and functionalities. In this respect, it is still worth reading this work and many of Reinhart Koselleck's subsequent analyses and reflections on this topic today - critically and reflectively, mind you.

In short, for me there is no doubt that - wherever one situates oneself academically or socio-politically - the study of Reinhart Koselleck's work remains highly 'thought-provoking', challenging, intellectually educating and - this should be emphasized here in conclusion - in its literary quality a by no means everyday reading pleasure. It is therefore strongly recommended reading and intellectual debate for all those interested in the topics addressed in teaching, (self) study, research and transfer.