Posted in the spring of 1961 Young historian Reinhardt Kosslick, mentor to Carl Schmidt The year 1947 was chosen from the writings of the Benedictine abbot Robert Kornman. Kornmann lived from 1757 to 1817 and in 1803, he lost his monastery – Proving near Regensburg – during the massive confiscation of German church property in the “Reichsdeputationshauptschluss”. Since then, he has lived as an educated writer who has practiced contemporary diagnosis with sharp tongues. It was necessary to understand the turmoil of that era, which directly affected Kornemann. As a philosophically trained Catholic, Kornemann had an eccentric position as an observer, which led him to an unusual analysis of the revolutionary age that was unique to him.
The gift of the book from 1961 elicited no response from the addressee, although the apocryphal Catholic historical thinker was a fitting gift for Carl Schmidt. Even more surprising is Korneman’s continued presence in Kosslick’s theoretical treatises until the end of his life. Building on the unsuccessful shipment of books, Jan Eike Dunkhase has now evaluated all of Kornmann’s published and unpublished antiquities in Koselleck–including excerpts and reading traces of the estate–and presented them with a small selection of Benedictine’s writings. This turned into a wonderful ideological historical thriller leading into the Bielefeld Pool where Koslik stored a few thousand volumes from his massive library.
Historian and co-editor of the standard work “Historical Basic Concepts” Reinhart Kosslick
(Photo: imagostock and people)
What made Kornmann so interesting to Koselleck? On the one hand, Kornman was a masterful expert in diagnosing acceleration that went down in history with the Revolutionary Era. On the other hand, Kornman denied that this acceleration also means that the processes, which have become so fast, are fundamentally new. There is nothing new under the sun, only ten times faster than before, is Koerman’s reflection in its shortest form: “Our contemporary history is a brief repetition of the general history of the world.”
Korneman revealed this idea in several parallels, which met in a system of “recurring structures”, to use the word Koslik. Korneman noted that the “leaders of the Great Enlightenment” – that is, politicians who acted in the name of progress – “did in their field of activity the same thing they had been accused of in the past”. Korneman called the Crusades, the Inquisition, constraint, and colonialism. “But let us change the names and we shall find all these apparitions again under the scorching sun of enlightenment.” Especially disgusting is the “false personality of humanity” in whose name terrorism is practiced.
Jean Ike Donkeys: The Korneman Truth. A story from the era of the saddle. Matisse and Seitz, Berlin 2022. 111 pages, €12.
When you read Kornmann, you quickly begin to take notes, he is sharp-tongued: “The victories over loyalties and the abuse of old women were worth as little blow as Domitian’s triumphant marches on slain flies.” Accelerating, but without “progress,” Korneman occupied the exact strategic position in which Koslick settled his theory of historical times: it combined a perception of pressure for change affecting all areas of life with simultaneous skepticism against an optimistic or apocalyptic philosophy of history. . History is racing, but it still has no destination.
This skepticism was intended to protect against the authoritarian self-empowerment with which revolutionary actors walk over corpses in the name of “history”. And it is possible that the topic of history as a teacher of life (“Historia magistra vitae”), to which Koslik’s most famous treatise was dedicated, and which was resolved “On the Moving Horizon of Modern History”, he does not have today. It had to be supplemented by the theory of historical ages, and then it could work against the violent assumptions of the philosophy of history.
Kosslick had found a soul mate in a skeptical, tongue-in-cheek Catholic who resisted all reformist temptations—there can be no going back to Korneman’s healthy premodern era either. And even for today’s readers, the abbot of the caustic monastery repeatedly contains appropriate and disturbing words: “God did not say: destroy the earth, but fill it.”
“The more police (regulations) bind a language, the less it is known.”
“The spirit of invention, in the time of refinement, invented new killing machines and improved the old ones.”
“Maybe you can silence the present, but not future generations.”
Such a writer should not be abandoned.
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