This thesis offers a comparative analysis of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Reinhart Koselleck with regard to their life trajectories, historical context, and key theoretical concepts. Its starting point is the question of how, after the political and moral catastrophes of the twentieth century, history, understanding, and time can still be thought without falling into teleological or positivist simplifications. The thesis first outlines the historical context of Germany from the collapse of the Empire and the Weimar Republic through Nazism, the Second World War, and postwar division to reunification, and then examines Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics alongside Koselleck’s conceptual history. Particular attention is devoted to Gadamer’s understanding of tradition, language, and historically effected consciousness, as well as to Koselleck’s analysis of historical time, conceptual semantics, the space of experience, and the horizon of expectation. In its comparative section, the thesis shows that, despite their different disciplinary starting points, Gadamer and Koselleck are linked by a shared problem of historicity, yet they approach it in different ways: Gadamer primarily from the perspective of understanding, language, and tradition, and Koselleck from the perspective of historical time, political conflict, and conceptual transformations. The central finding of the thesis is that, for both authors, the concept is not merely an instrument of thought but one of the fundamental media of historicity itself. Gadamer places greater emphasis on its hermeneutic function, whereas Koselleck stresses its analytical and historically critical dimension. In this way, the thesis contributes to an understanding of the relation between language, history, and concept, and argues that Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) may be understood as complementary approaches to the modern study of history.
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