Sent in the spring of 1961 the young historian Reinhart Koselleck his mentor Carl Schmitt a 1947 selection from the writings of a Benedictine abbot named Rupert Kornmann. Kornmann lived from 1757 to 1817 and in 1803 had lost his abbey – Prüfing near Regensburg – during the large expropriation of German church property in the “Reichsdeputationshauptschluss”. Since then he lived as a learned writer who practiced sharp-tongued contemporary diagnosis. The upheavals of the epoch, which had directly affected Kornmann, had to be understood. As a philosophically trained Catholic, Kornmann possessed an eccentric position as an observer, which led him to an unusual analysis of the revolutionary age that was unique to him.
The book gift from 1961 did not trigger a response from the addressee, although an apocryphal Catholic historical thinker was a suitable gift for Carl Schmitt. All the more striking is Kornmann’s constant presence in Koselleck’s theoretical treatises up to the end of his life. Based on the unsuccessful book shipment, Jan Eike Dunkhase has now evaluated all published and unpublished traces of Kornmann in Koselleck – including excerpts and traces of reading in the estate – and presented them together with a small selection from the Benedictine’s writings. This turned into a brilliant thriller based on the history of ideas, which leads all the way to the Bielefeld swimming pool where Koselleck stored a few thousand volumes from his huge library.
The historian and co-editor of the standard work “Historical Basic Concepts” Reinhart Koselleck
(Photo: imago stock&people)
What made Kornmann so interesting for Koselleck? On the one hand, Kornmann was a perspicacious diagnostician of the acceleration that had entered history with the revolutionary age. On the other hand, Kornmann denied that this acceleration also means that the processes, which have become extremely fast, are fundamentally new. Still nothing new under the sun, only ten times faster than before, is Kornmann’s reflection in the briefest form: “Our contemporary history is a brief repetition of general world history.”
Kornmann unfolded this idea in numerous parallels, which combined into a system of “repetitive structures”, to use Koselleck’s word. Kornmann observed that the “commanders of the great Enlightenment” – that is, politicians who acted in the name of progress – “did within their sphere of activity the same thing of which they had been accused in the past.” Kornmann called crusades, inquisition, constraint, colonization. “But let’s change the names and we’ll find all these apparitions again under the burning sun of Enlightenment.” Particularly repulsive among them is “the lying figure of humanity” in whose name terror was practiced.
Jan Eike Dunkhase: Kornmann’s truth. A story from the saddle age. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2022. 111 pages, 12 euros.
When you read Kornmann, you quickly start taking notes, he is so sharp-tongued: “Victories over devotions and abuses of old women were just as little worth a trumpet blast as Domitian’s triumphal marches over slain flies.” Acceleration, but no “progress”, Kornmann thus occupied exactly the strategic position at which Koselleck had settled his theory of historical times: it combined the perception of a pressure to change affecting all areas of life with simultaneous skepticism against optimistic or apocalyptic philosophy of history. History is racing, but it still has no destination.
This skepticism was intended to protect against those totalitarian self-empowerments with which revolutionary actors walked over dead bodies in the name of “history”. And it is possible that the topos of history as the teacher of life (“Historia magistra vitae”), which Koselleck’s most famous treatise was devoted to, which had been dissolved “in the horizon of modern, moving history”, had not had its day. It just had to be supplemented with a theory of historical times, then it could still serve against the violent presumptions of the philosophy of history.
Koselleck had found a brother in spirit in the skeptical, sharp-tongued Catholic who resisted all restorative temptations – there could be no return to an intact pre-modern era for Kornmann either. And even for today’s readers, the caustic abbot keeps disturbingly apt: “God has not said: Destroy the earth, but fill it up.”
“The more police (regulation) binds the language, the less it knows.”
“The spirit of invention, in the times of refinement, has invented new killing machines and improved the old ones.”
“You can probably silence the present, but not posterity.”
Such a writer should not be abandoned.