HUMAN RIGHTS AND HISTORY Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig
Past & present,
08/2016, Letnik:
232, Številka:
232
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Historians are the embalmers of people's political and moral convictions. As soon as historiography begins to take an interest in an issue, they can be certain that it no longer possesses a ...self-evident presence in their society. Some questions and problems only become objects of history after society has become historically conscious of them. The history of workers boomed in the 1970s, for example, when industrial labor was in the process of disappearing, just as memory and its sites became a mode of inquiry for historians in the 1980s precisely at the moment when lived memory of `the age of extremes' (Eric Hobsbawm) was disappearing together with its last generation. Here, Hoffmann develops three interconnected arguments that seek to determine the place of human rights in the crises and conflicts of the recent past.
Sediments of Time Koselleck, Reinhart; Franzel, Sean; Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig
2018, 2018-05-08
eBook
Sediments of Time features the most important essays by renowned German historian Reinhart Koselleck not previously available in English, several of them essential to his theory of history. The ...volume sheds new light on Koselleck's crucial concerns, including his theory of sediments of time; his theory of historical repetition, duration, and acceleration; his encounters with philosophical hermeneutics and political and legal thought; his concern with the limits of historical meaning; and his views on historical commemoration, including that of the Second World War and the Holocaust. A critical introduction addresses some of the challenges and potentials of Koselleck's reception in the Anglophone world.
Has there always been an inalienable 'right to have rights' as part of the human condition, as Hannah Arendt famously argued? The contributions to this volume examine how human rights came to define ...the bounds of universal morality in the course of the political crises and conflicts of the twentieth century. Although human rights are often viewed as a self-evident outcome of this history, the essays collected here make clear that human rights are a relatively recent invention that emerged in contingent and contradictory ways. Focusing on specific instances of their assertion or violation during the past century, this volume analyzes the place of human rights in various arenas of global politics, providing an alternative framework for understanding the political and legal dilemmas that these conflicts presented. In doing so, this volume captures the state of the art in a field that historians have only recently begun to explore.
The ethics of seeing Evans, Jennifer; Betts, Paul; Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig
2018., 2018, Letnik:
21
eBook
Throughout Germany's tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur ...photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography's multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.
Koselleck in America Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig
New German critique,
11/2017, Letnik:
44, Številka:
3
Journal Article
The recent upsurge of interest in Reinhart Koselleck's work across disciplines makes it even more conspicuous that his historical epistemology was rarely evoked—for example, in the excruciating ...debates about the linguistic turn in the 1980s and 1990s. Although there were repeated transatlantic encounters with Koselleck's work and briefly even with him as a teacher (in Chicago and New York around 1990), other German theoretical impulses were much more influential not only for Anglophone historians. Up until very recently, Koselleck was perceived
as a conservative historian and anti-utopian ideologue à la François Furet
, more narrowly, as a
, that is, historian of concepts à la John Pocock and Quentin Skinner,
as a metahistorian à la Hayden White. Of course, Koselleck repeatedly insisted that all these interests belong together. Yet only the essays published in three volumes in the years immediately before and after his death in 2006 make apparent how these different interests are laced together in his theory of possible histories, his
When the Second World War ended, Europe was in ruins. Yet, politically and socially, the years between 1943 and 1947 were a time of dramatic reconfigurations, which proved to be foundational for the ...making of today's Europe. This volume hones in on the crucial period from the beginning of the end of Nazi rule in Europe to the advent of the Cold War. Through a series of interrelated case studies that span the entire continent, it demonstrates how the everyday experiences of Europeans during these five years shaped the transition of their societies from war to peace. The authors explore these reconfigurations on different scales and levels -the local and regional, the ethnic and national, and the international - with the purpose of enhancing our understanding of how wars end.
The electron-nuclei (hyperfine) interaction is central to spin qubits in solid state systems. It can be a severe decoherence source but also allows dynamic access to the nuclear spin states. We study ...a double quantum dot exposed to an on-chip single-domain nanomagnet and show that its inhomogeneous magnetic field crucially modifies the complex nuclear spin dynamics such that the Overhauser field tends to compensate external magnetic fields. This turns out to be beneficial for polarizing the nuclear spin ensemble. We reach a nuclear spin polarization of ≃50%, unrivaled in lateral dots, and explain our manipulation technique using a comprehensive rate equation model.
This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well-known for his ...work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti-totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.
Gazing at Ruins Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig
Journal of modern European history,
01/2011, Letnik:
9, Številka:
3
Journal Article
This essay explores documentary photography and, by way of comparison, diary-writing as the most common social practices for registering experiences of German defeat in 1945. Berlin witnessed one of ...the last gruesome battles of the war in Europe and the only one – with the exceptions of Stalingrad and Warsaw – where a major city became a battle-field. Soviet and German troops suffered more than 240.000 casualties in the space of only three weeks. More German civilians died during these last weeks of the war than during the entire bombing campaign against the city. The shattered capital of the Nazi empire was a war trophy for the Allies and subsequently became the social laboratory for the post-war international order. By moving beyond an exploration of visual propaganda, the main claim is that visual experiences in the wake of war constituted distinctive ways of making sense of defeat, destruction, and desolation. Finally, the paper will investigate how different modes of the photographic gaze at ruins shaped the «politics of pity» in the early cold-war years.
Throughout Germany's tumultuous 20th century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers ...chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. 'The Ethics of Seeing' brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasising the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography's multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.
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