MODERNITY, WAR and the ABSURD of HISTORY

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to which we will reconstruct the research and reflections that Reinhart Koselleck developed in this regard from aesthetic memory, conceptual history, to history and its temporalities. For this historian, politically motivated wars constituted the fundamental axis for the foundation of the historical consciousness of modernity. The systematic and massive death of the civilian population in World War II marked a limit to the foundation of this historical sense of wars, exposing the absurd background of history. To understand this limit of history, it is essential to recover the iconic expressions in the various monuments that have been created in memory of those killed by wars and the holocaust. This experience of the absurd has its parallel in the way history is understood.