Peter Tietze is a PhD-student at the Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen (Germany), Department of Contemporary History. In his PhD-project he is researching the development of the method and theory of “Historical semantics” in German-speaking historiography between the 1920s and 1970s.
His PhD-thesis focuses on the former professor for Modern History at the Hebrew University, Richard Koebner (1885-1958). Koebner was one of the most intriguing and innovative historians to have reflected on the method and theory of Historical Semantics and to have applied it to the study of modernity. Today, however, he is almost completely forgotten, except perhaps by the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck, who received some of Koebner’s programmatic works. It is therefore the aim of the research project to analyse Koebner’s theoretical and methodological innovations in the field of historiography, his vital part in the establishment of the discipline of history at the Hebrew University, as well as his role as a precursor of the German Begriffsgeschichte.
