REINHART KOSELLECK, THE GENERATION 45 AND THE SCHMITT CASE

Throughout his life Reinhart Koselleck insisted on belonging to a generation marked by war and defeat, both of which were part of a concentration and post-concentration era for which primary experience is the essential condition for any critical work of the historian and memorialist. The article describes the stages of this intellectual journey, which should have led to the writing of a Historik, a theory of history, which he never wrote. Above all what was the role of the debate about the secular state and the historicity of law, as it developed in the 1950s in the circles around Ernst Forsthoff and Carl Schmitt? What form will it take under the pressure of the evolution of civil society over the next two decades to finally take shape in a reflection on the notion of "work of memory", of which the investigation of the iconography of war memorials has been the last step in the historian's journey.