Histories of the Unsayable: Reinhart Koselleck’s Aesthetic Anthropology

This essay reviews Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (2019), a collection of essays by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006), edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Written during the last three decades of Koselleck’s life and drawn from three German-language books of essays that came out in the new millennium, Sediments of Time introduces English-language readers to Koselleck’s historical anthropology—a central dimension of his oeuvre so far largely unavailable in translation. This essay argues that Koselleck’s historical anthropology is always also an aesthetic anthropology, which helps explain Koselleck’s recurring engagement with literary writers such as Shakespeare, Kleist, and Melville. At the core of Koselleck’s work lies an argument about the mutual interdependence of history and fiction. Herein resides Koselleck’s provocation for literary studies: if, for the historian, fiction provides insights into historical experience in condensed form, the reverse of this claim may engage literary scholars; for them, Koselleck suggests, the extraliterary, extralinguistic realm of historical experience is of crucial importance as a necessary condition for fiction.