Reinhart Koselleck’s last volume of treatises, now published 17 years after his death on his 100th birthday, shows an unexpected structure. You can read it in two directions. If you read it from beginning to end, from the studies on the “political cult of the dead”, as it was expressed above all in war memorials, to Koselleck’s own memories of the Second World War and captivity in the Soviet Union, then he shows a path away from the general to the particular, from fixed pathos to personal pain experience. A descent into the narrow, black and deep, almost like in Dante’s hell, to where memories are written in the body as “clogged lava”, according to Koselleck’s picture, and are immovable, as “present past” and remain indelible.
Reinhart Koselleck: “Coagulated Lava” – Culture
