Review: Bettina Brandt and Britta Hochkirchen, ‘Reinhart Koselleck und das Bild’
Review of Bettina Brandt and Britta Hochkirchen’s (eds.) Reinhart Koselleck und das Bild (Bielefeld University Press, 2021), 248 pages.
Abstract
This volume addresses the historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck’s longstanding, yet often underthematized interest in visual imagery and political iconography as well as his extensive private collection—around 30,000 objects— of photographs, everyday objects, and other items. The essays and visual materials contained in this volume have emerged from a 2018 exhibit in Bielefeld that delves into this collection and situates it in the broader context of his thought. This volume is a valuable guide for future engagement with Koselleck that seeks to bring his work into dialogue with ongoing scholarship in visual studies, cultural history, conceptual history, and media historiography as well as with important historical pioneers in these fields, and that explores new pathways into his published and unpublished works.
Reviewed by Sean Franzel
This volume promises to be an important touchstone for recent scholarship addressing Koselleck’s longstanding, yet underthematized interest in visual imagery and political iconography. Koselleck’s estate is a compelling and fruitful site for the ongoing reception of his work, and this book is a product of such engagement.[1] Peculiarly, the written and visual elements of Koselleck’s estate are not housed together; the Literaturarchiv Marbach holds his scholarly library and papers, and the Deutsche Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte in Marburg (DDK) houses his collection of images, which are now view- and searchable online.[2] Koselleck was an avid amateur photographer and caricaturist, he sometimes included his own photos in his essays, and he accumulated an extensive collection—around 30,000 objects— of what Hubert Locher, the director of the DDK, and Adriana Markantonatos call “rich and idiosyncratically organized visual material.”[3] Brandt and Hochkirchen’s volume of essays and visual materials emerges from a 2018 exhibit in Bielefeld that delves into this collection and situates it in the broader context of his thought.[4] Along with five article-length essays and a thorough introduction, the volume documents aspects of the exhibition and presents images created by photography students in Bielefeld that engage in different ways with his work; the result is a dynamic volume with merits both as visual artifact and scholarly collection. Koselleck und das Bild is also a useful complement to the 2013 volume edited by two contributors to the current book.[5]
Both volumes are part of a “shift in attention” (Markantonatos) in Koselleck reception that corresponds to a shift in his own writings in the 1990s from linguistic to visual semantics and to a guest professorship at the Warburg Haus in Hamburg in 1997.[6] Koselleck’s interest in what he calls political iconology date back to the beginning of his career, but the “lexical constraints (lexikalische Zwänge)” (as he put it) of the Basic Concepts in History (Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe) lexicon project are partially to blame for him not having the time to develop his study of visual culture more extensively. That said, as these scholars argue here and elsewhere, Koselleck’s interest in visuality runs throughout his work.[7] The 2018 exhibit and book are organized around key programmatic metaphor-concepts such as Zeitschichten (layers or sediments of time) and Erinnerungsschleusen (sluices of memory), and they address Koselleck’s interest in the involvement of sense perception in the political and social realms, or what he calls politische Sinnlichkeit. Along with containing photographs of various kinds of political monuments, Koselleck’s collection includes a variety of everyday objects, including an extensive array of horse figurines that reflect the once prominent place of horses in political monuments, one of the Bielefeld historian’s enduring fascinations. It is a compelling feature of the exhibit and the resulting essays that they bring his theory of history and his image collection into more explicit dialogue than Koselleck himself did, fleshing out what the contours of his full-fledged theory of the image might have looked like.
The volume presents Koselleck as photographer, collector, and theorist of the image, connecting his theory of history (Historik) to his engagement with visual images across different media. Pairing ‘Koselleck’ and ‘the image’ also serves to foreground the topic of media in his reception, including the specific scholarly and quasi-artistic cultural practices in which he engages as historical theorist. Koselleck’s insistence that dreams and fictional texts can serve as historical sources that require their own method of mobilization for historical argument has always had something unconventional about it from the perspective of traditionalist history writing.[8] This volume makes it clear, if it was not already, that Koselleck accords images, sculpture, and monuments a similar status. That said, there are certain limitations to probing Koselleck’s work on and with images; his essays and unpublished writings on political iconology do not rise to a fully systematic theory and the art historians he engaged with were often outsiders in their field. Furthermore, his photographs occupy an ambivalent position between art object, documentary intervention, and touristic souvenir; they might remain a mere biographical curiosity if it were not for their sheer number and his practice of carefully cataloguing them. Many of his photos from the 1990s seem altogether typical of a German Bildungsbürger exploring the German cultural and political landscape of post-1989 Germany, with photos of monuments and other iconic sites under construction taken from a moving car or ICE train. Koselleck’s activity as “photographical lay person and collector” (Locher) offers a unique avenue for finding new in-roads to his work, but his use of techniques of photographic blurring, for example, seems only partially comparable to the sustained engagement with photography and historical memory by figures such as Gerhard Richter.[9] Further exploration of Koselleck’s estate promises to shed additional light both on his specific scholarly and medial practices and on his relations to contemporaries, and this volume offers helpful and original direction.
As Brandt and Hochkirchen show in their introduction, his interest in the image is part of his broader anthropological approach to embodied sense perception and historical experience. For Koselleck, images function as complex historical phenomena with real-life political import, as heuristic models for visualizing complex temporalities, and as catalysts for critical reflection, revealing the limitations of political formations and ideologies. According to Brandt and Hochkirchen, running through the entirety of his work is “a method of opening spaces for thought that Koselleck applies in a continuous and systematic manner (eine kontinuierlich und systematisch angewandte Methode der Öffnung von Denkspielräumen)” that relies at key moments on visual and linguistic images. Brandt’s own chapter explores photography as an experimental framework for approaching multi-layered historical experience. It is a basic principle of Koselleck’s theory of history that a plurality of historical experiences and narratives result from the divergent perceptions of multiple historical actors, and Brandt finds this principle manifested in his photographs. Photography thus has the potential to make visible the temporal complexity and perspectival refraction characteristic of historical time more generally. Brandt also shows how images can shed light on key features of concepts: whether in the site-specific use of a given concept or in the act of viewing an image (what she addresses in terms of the presence of the image, or Bildpräsenz), concepts and images can manifest multiple historical times. This is the case because images and concepts both function for Koselleck to store temporally distinct contents, whether different connotations of a concept (the sixteenth versus nineteenth century concept of revolution, for example) or different iconographical material (the nineteenth-century horse and rider and the modern electrical grid). Brandt also explores Koselleck’s predilection for taking a series of photographs of individual monuments. This interest in seriality resonates with themes of repetition and variation in his historical thought as well as with the many experiments in serial form characteristic of twentieth century art and journalism across multiple media modalities, including painting, drawing, film, photography, and periodicals. Hochkirchen’s chapter delves more deeply into the central role of sight in Koselleck’s historical theory, which is based in an anthropological understanding of human experience. Rehearsing configurations of sight familiar from the Enlightenment, Koselleck views images in terms of their ability both to manipulate viewers and to encourage critical reflection, and thus as foundational for an embodied politics (i.e. politische Sinnlichkeit). Relatedly, she shows how techniques of comparison are in effect in the different series of photographs collected by Koselleck, e.g. in his series of horse and rider monuments or in his photographs of a Marx monument in Chemnitz. Drawing on Hochkirchen’s reflections, one might also probe conceptual history for the techniques of comparison and juxtaposition at work in the concrete philological tasks—or cultural techniques, to speak with recent media theory[10]— of tracing the history of given concepts.
Chapters by Locher and Markantonatos both ask readers to view Koselleck as much as a thinker of the image as of the concept. Locher’s article explores Koselleck’s engagement with art historical scholarship in in post-1945 West Germany, in particular in relation to questions of the image as a medium of political communication. The 2013 volume edited by these two scholars delves more deeply into the specific connotations of “political iconology,” the title of a 1963 draft written by Koselleck.[11] This term is relatively unconventional, but it has clear roots in German art historical discourse in both the first and second halves of the century, including in the Nazi period. In contrast to ‘iconography’ as the cataloguing of the different contents of images, ‘iconology’ addresses the logic or rationality of the image per se. Both chapters here suggest how, as Markantonatos puts it, “Koselleck brings figures from the periphery of art history” – P.A. Riedl, Max Imdahl, Arnold Gehlen— “into the heart of the theory of history via a critical history of seeing.”[12] The concluding chapter of the volume by Helge Jordheim shifts to the linguistic realm, exploring how visual metaphors inform key concepts of Koselleck’s historical theory. Koselleck is quick to point out the visual and metaphorical element of language—as he notes in the 1963 manuscript “On Political Iconography,” “a metaphorical layer is always immanent in our language (eine bildhafte Schicht bleibt unserer Sprache immer immanent)”— and Jordheim explores some of his most important and enigmatic coinages. As Jordheim argues, Koselleck deliberately establishes productive tension between different conceptions of time and history on the level of the linguistic image. Jordheim thus lingers with the metaphorical content of words such as Sattelzeit, Zeitschichten, and Erinnerungsschleuse, probing their at times paradoxical connotations. Throughout his work, Koselleck emphasizes the need for spatial metaphors in order to describe temporal structures, and Jordheim argues that these metaphors give rise to productive and fruitful tensions that spur on further historical thought, rather than resolving into clearly defined concepts, not unlike, one might add, the Denkbilder (thought images) of Walter Benjamin or Aby Warburg. Like his at times elusive visual images, Koselleck’s Sprachbilder (linguistic images) call out for further interrogation.
[1] As the historian Christian Meier notes, “Eine ungeheuere geradezu übermenschliche Summe von Arbeit [steckt noch] in Reinhart Kosellecks Hinterlassenschaft.” Christian Meier, “Gedenkrede auf Reinhart Koselleck,” Reinhart Koselleck 1923–2006. Reden zur Gedenkfeier am 24. Mai 2006, mit einem Beitrag von Melvin Richter, edited by Neithard Bulst and Willibald Steinmetz (Bielefeld: Bielefeld University, 2007), 7–34, 21.
[2] https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/fotomarburg/nachlass-reinhart-koselleck. Last accessed October 15, 2021.
[3] “in eigentümlicher Weise geordnetes Bildmaterial” Hubert Locher and Adriana Markantonatos, “Vorwort,” Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie, edited by Locher and Markantonatos (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013), 6.
[4] For an informative English language discussion of this exhibition, see Jonathon Caitlin’s online piece: https://jhiblog.org/2018/12/12/koselleck-and-the-image/ Last accessed October 15, 2021.
[5] See note 3.
[6] Adriana Markantonatos, “Er-fahrungen. Eine Sichtung von Reinhart Kosellecks Bildnachlass aus kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie, 32–53, 39.
[7] See in particular Markantonatos’s as of yet unpublished dissertation.
[8] For one attempt to remedy this situation, see the recent volume The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, edited by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Berghahn, 2018).
[9] On blurring in Koselleck’s photography, see Jörg Probst, “Ikonologie und Prognose. Unschärfe in der Bildsammlungn Reinhart Kosellecks,” in Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie, 70-83. See also a recent article that addresses Koselleck’s photography in light of various modernist artists: Tobias Weidner, “Der Historiker als Fotograf: Reinhart Kosellecks Blick(e),” Reinhart Koselleck als Historiker: Zu den Bedingungen möglicher Geschichten, edited by Manfred Hettling and Wolfgang Schieder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 276-301.
[10] See Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
[11] This manuscript is reproduced in Reinhart Koselleck und die Politische Ikonologie, Locher and Markantonatos eds.
[12] Adriana Markantonatos, “Reinhart Koselleck- Geschichtsdenken zwischen Bild und Text,” Koselleck und das Bild, 201.
Sean Franzel is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, and has published widely on media discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent projects include a co-edited and co-translated volume of essays by Reinhart Koselleck. He is currently working on a monograph on seriality and time in nineteenth-century periodical literature.
Email: franzels@missouri.edu
