Reinhart Koselleck
Manfred HettlingBernd Ulrich
Mittelweg 36
Eurozine
Mittelweg 36
Shapes of the Bourgeoisie
Reinhart Koselleck
This interview with Reinhart Koselleck, historian and social theoretician and professor emeritus at the University of Bielefeld, begins by taking up issues linked to the historical semantics of civic society. These questions are examined within the framework of the constitution of the young German Federal Republic (founded in 1949) and its cultural self-understanding. In the second part, the interview focuses on Professor Koselleck's autobiography, exploring both the characteristic history of a bourgeoisie family between the two world wars and the intellectual climate of the German university town of Heidelberg in the 1950s. Koselleck portrays encounters with Carl Schmitt, Viktor von Weizsäcker and Martin Heidegger, among others, and the formative effect of such contacts on his intellectual physiognomy.