The 20th Century in Basic Concepts. A Dictionary of Historical Semantics in Germany

So far, concept-historical approaches have rarely been applied in the exploration of the 20th century. A joint project which is supported by the Leibniz Collaborative Excellence program now aims at creating a lexicon of this century’s basic concepts. It is headed by the ZfL in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF). In collaboration with scholars who historically work across disciplines in the humanities, cultural and social studies, the project explores the socio-political and cultural semantics in Germany. With its experimental approach and its orientation towards social history and the history of knowledge, it is expected to serve the humanities, cultural, social, and historical studies. The dictionary is edited by Ernst Müller, Barbara Picht, and Falko Schmieder in cooperation with Mark Dang-Anh, Alexander Friedrich, Rüdiger Graf, and Stefan Scholl. The acting editor is Anja Keith.

Our approach ties in heuristically with historians of modernity and cultural historians, who assume a historical threshold “around 1900,” often considered to be the beginning of high modernity or the aesthetic modernism. While the project represents a critical continuation to Reinhart Koselleck’s Basic Concepts in History (Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe), it does not, however, presuppose a “second Sattelzeit” for the 20th century. For us, the 20th century presents itself as multifariously fractured and contradictory. Its semantics are characterized by conceptual innovations, terminological revolutions, and by diverse temporalities debated in terms of acceleration, simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, or poly- and heterochrony, but also by astounding continuities and cyclical progressions. The strong ties between the philosophy of history and structural history which provided the epistemic framework for Koselleck (latently threatening to generate a concept-realist ontology) are dissolved in favor of an interest in exchange processes between scientific, literary-aesthetic, political, and everyday language. We are thus interested in the entire diversity of forms of meaning and the procedures of its generation and circulation. Assuming that basic concepts of the 20th century are fundamentally shaped by the sciences, the project follows the differentiation of academic disciplines that replaced philosophy as a universal discourse in the last third of the 19th century and the emergence of plural publics based on new media targeting social masses. Academic disciplines, relevant to the development of political semantics most prominently include sociology, cultural studies, religious studies, anthropology, as well as areas of life sciences (genetics, experimental psychology, psychoanalysis), and, finally, applied work science. Among the new types of concepts that are being analyzed, we are particularly interested in process categories with the suffix -isierung which first appeared in the 20th century, and in “medium range” concepts that do not span the entire century, but exhibit shorter conjunctural appearances instead.

With the expansion of the subject area in relation to Koselleck comes an innovation of the methodology. The increasing availability of large digital corpora allows for an analysis of semantics of political-social discourse that goes beyond specific domains and theoretical contexts. New tools and methods have been specifically developed for concept-historical issues and make it possible not only to quantitatively analyze very large bodies of texts but also to evaluate these texts qualitatively with regard to their semantics. For the first time, the three partners ZfL, IDS, and ZZF will jointly make use of the tools COSMAS, DiaCollo, and SCoT that were developed in their respective disciplines to explore new ways and methods in an interdisciplinary digital history of concepts. With these tools, the project will systematically analyze comprehensive bodies of texts—consisting of a wide variety of genres and sources including newspapers, professional journals, non-fiction books, novels, parliament protocols, and online news. Each tool has specific strengths: COSMAS determines the most common word constructions and phrases including typical contexts, DiaCollo can visualize their distribution diachronically, and SCoT enables the detection, visualization, and analysis of different meanings of concept words and the evolution of their semantics. Equipped with various complementary functions, these tools allow for a connection of close and distant reading of unprecedented dimensions.

In addition to the possibilities that the Digital Humanities offer for the analysis of technically and medially mediated mass-democratic societies, new promising methods and approaches in the analysis of 20th-century semantics have come to the fore. These include:

• the connection to the history of science and of knowledge,
• the reflection on semantic transfers between languages of different functional systems as well as everyday language,
• newly calibrated methods of analysis through language pragmatics,
• the opening towards adjacent methods such as discourse analysis or metaphorology,
• the turn to cultural semantics, including meaning beyond linguistic fixation.

Overall, we expect the project to tap into the history of concept’s interest in the mediality of language and the individual dynamics of language processes. The lexicon should therefore develop a specific understanding of the 20th century and possibly come to different conclusions than a strongly synthetic (socio-)historiography or one that is guided by political turning points.

In the context of the whole project, each of the three cooperating institutes will focus on a specific type of basic concept, corresponding to their respective expertise.

Fig. above: Naomi Booth, Source: Pixabay