Zeitbegriffe und die Temporalstruktur der Moderne

In the joint project The 20th Century in Basic Concepts, a dictionary of historical semantics in Germany is presently being compiled at the ZfL in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF). Examining a selection of 150 concepts, the project aims to analyze changes in political, social, and cultural language from around 1900 to the present day. The first conceptual histories have already appeared online and will be published in a five-volume dictionary once all the entries have been finalized.

The dictionary project builds on the Basic Concepts in History (Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe) edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, but extends them not only temporally but also methodologically by analyzing the production and transformation of linguistic meaning under changing media, social and cultural conditions, including distant reading methods. One of the central findings of Basic Concepts in History was the thesis that the change in political-social vocabulary in the so-called “Sattelzeit” around 1800 signaled the emergence of a new, specifically modern conception of time and history. Such a progressive temporalization of time was paradigmatically expressed in collective singulars such as “progress” and “history.” However, in and since the 1970s, when the Basic Concepts in History emerged, the erosion of this understanding of time has been observed widely, without having been substantiated by conceptual history. At the workshop, we will therefore examine the change in central concepts of time and process in the 20th century and ask whether and to what extent this points to a change in modern temporal structures in our present.

For participation, please register by e-mail with Simon Specht (simon.specht@zzf-potsdam.de) and Rüdiger Graf (graf@zzf-potsdam.de) until 16 September 2024.

Fig. above: John Gast: American Progress (1872; detail), source: Wikimedia Commons