Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht once described the great conceptual histories as pyramids of the spirit from a completed phase of the humanities.

Well, these pyramids keep building.

This is particularly thanks to the Center for Literature Research (ZfL) in Berlin, which has already presented two milestones with the dictionary of biology and the lexicon of basic aesthetic concepts and now wants to examine the twentieth century, which is considered fragmented and furrowed, to see whether there are any longer any continuities exhibits than is commonly assumed.

It does this in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary History Research in Potsdam and the Institute for the German Language.

The end product should be the lexicon of the basic terms of the twentieth century,

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The articles will first appear digitally and later in print.

Ernst Müller, who forms the editorial team together with Barbara Picht and Falko Schmieder, is optimistic that it will take five years to go to press.

The geographic radius is limited to Germany.

Post-colonialists may wield the Germanocentrism club, but it is pointless to ask about the semantic career of self-actualization in Mauritania or Pakistan.

No calendar of daily politics

The choice of keywords is still preliminary, and given the size of the project, it goes without saying that they are debatable.

“Zeitenwende”, a term that was influential in the Weimar Republic and which, unlike today, still had eschatological overtones, is not represented, for example.

That's understandable.

A dictionary is not a calendar of daily politics.

It is more difficult to understand that 'spirit', a term that was extremely influential well beyond the middle of the century, has so far been missing.

Many of the terms selected, such as communication, information or diversity, have a scientific character, in line with the editors' thesis that the general tendency to make society more scientific is also expressed in the key vocabulary.

This is true of both the social sciences and the natural sciences, both of which are becoming increasingly influential in describing society and man in this century.

The big climber is the economy.

The corresponding lemmas such as market, competition or growth were not yet represented in the two standard works from the 1960s.

This refers to the historical dictionary of philosophy created under the aegis of Joachim Ritter and the lexicon of basic historical concepts published by Reinhart Koselleck.

The new lexicon builds on the basic historical terms, but takes a more pragmatic approach.

The aim is not to pursue an isolated history of words or ideas, but to examine the language actually used.

Nor does it draw a clear line between political-social and (cultural)-philosophical vocabulary.

“Pop culture” and “self-realization” also made it into the selection.