Twenty-seven years after the English translation of Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1985), interest among Anglophone scholars in the work of the historical theorist and historian Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) remains high. Since Koselleck's death, a new collection of Koselleck's essays has appeared—Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte (2010)—as well as two new volumes of critical essays on his work: Begriffene Geschichte (Berlin 2011) and Zwischen Sprache und Geschichte (Wallstein, 2012). Thus the appearance of Olsen's comprehensive intellectual biography, the first in any language, is a well-timed retrospective view of his career as a whole.

Olsen's book has ambitious aims: to offer a synopsis and explication of the theoretical premises of Koselleck's work over five decades, to discern the continuities and discontinuities in this oeuvre, and to highlight the aspects of Koselleck's biography that seem most relevant to illuminating the preoccupations and goals of the work. The leitmotif of Olsen's work is pluralism: “Koselleck's program was structured around the aim of deconstructing all utopian and relativist notions of history in the singular with a view to a notion of history in the plural” (p. 303). What Olsen thinks is entailed by such a pluralistic view of history is only partially developed.

In an introductory chapter, Olsen situates Koselleck's biography in the generational context of the so-called '45ers, the German generation born between 1922 and 1933. Olsen assimilates Koselleck to the “liberal conservative” branch of this generation, one that included figures such as Hermann Lübbe and Ernst Wolfgang Bockenförde. Like the younger left-liberal historians of this generation such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Koselleck sought to eschew the statist tradition in German historical writing; but unlike them, Koselleck's skepticism was directed toward philosophies of history that appeared to create false confidence that history had a direction that could be both discovered and mastered. Olsen sketches the five German academics he claims made the greatest impression on Koselleck during his student years at Heidelberg: the historian Johannes Kuhn; the jurist Carl Schmitt; and the philosophers Karl Lowith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Martin Heidegger. Throughout the book, Olsen foregrounds the reception of Carl Schmitt and Heideggerian/Gadamerian hermeneutics.

In chapter two, Olsen traces Koselleck's debts to Schmitt, Heidegger, and Lowith through a close reading of Koselleck's celebrated 1954 dissertation, Kritik und Krise. Olsen convincingly shows the concurrent influence of Sein und Zeit on Koselleck's ontology of history. But his account of how and why Koselleck sought to rework Heidegger's description of human existence—namely, by emphasizing the conflict potentials between friend and enemy, master and slave, the sexes, the generations, and other categories, “to understand what makes histories possible,” in Koselleck's words—is confusing. The discussion of Schmitt's influence is clearer but reaches an unconvincing conclusion. Acknowledging the pervasive influence of Schmittian concepts and categories, Olsen nevertheless implausibly concludes that Koselleck's “theoretical and normative project is distinctly different to [sic] Schmitt's” (p. 83). Olsen's synopsis of Kritik und Krise goes as far as to suggest that its critique of utopian philosophy contains a compelling vision of the preconditions of “rational and responsible political action” (pp. 52, 56).

Chapter three, which focuses on the making of Koselleck's 1965 Habilitation, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution, is the strongest in the volume. In it, Olsen reconstructs the intellectual and political contexts behind Koselleck's influential study. He depicts Koselleck's ambivalent apprenticeship with Werner Conze (1957–65) and the Heidelberg Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte and the novelty of his focus on agents' perception of temporality as a causal factor in historical events. The temporal layers of the Prussian Vormärz is the most concrete illustration Olsen provides of what he means by a history made “plural.”

The agenda of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG), from conception in 1963 to the final volume's publication in 1992, is the major subject of the stimulating fourth chapter. Olsen contextualizes the GG vis-à-vis other forms of Begriffsgeschichte with which it competed, and argues that the GG aimed “to deconstruct hypostatized vocabularies that had led to the German catastrophe and to outline . . . a plurality of . . . more responsible semantic meanings and practices” (p. 177). He offers some helpful points of comparison with Saussure and Gadamer, tries to account for its institutional successes in Germany and abroad, and concludes that the systematic and collaborative nature of the project was fundamentally misaligned with Koselleck's temperament, becoming in the end a kind of “intellectual straight-jacket” for him.

In chapter five, Olsen portrays Koselleck's intellectual career at Heidelberg (1968–72) and Bielefeld (1973–88), focusing on how and why the theme of temporality emerged to prominence in his work. He argues compellingly that this was Koselleck's solution to a widely felt identity crisis in the discipline of history, as well as frustration with the hegemony of the Gesellschaftshistoriker at Bielefeld and their notions of a unidirectional Sonderweg in German history. Sketching Koselleck's identification with the Heidelberg group “Poetik und Hermeneutik” thickens our understanding of his self-proclaimed marginality at Bielefeld and the importance to him of Gadamerian hermeneutic concepts such as experience, expectation, and horizon. A final chapter traces a line that connects his work on dreams and war memorials from the 1970s onward to his interventions in the German Holocaust memorial debates in the 1990s. Olsen uses Koselleck's autobiographical reflections on his experiences as a POW to decode and explicate his critical reservations about the notion of collective memory.

Olsen does not make use of the Koselleck Nachlass in Marbach, but has an encyclopedic grasp of all of Koselleck's published writings. Commendably, Olsen has also mastered the vast secondary literature on Koselleck and includes hundreds of intriguing references for his readers to explore. While Olsen's ambition to grasp Koselleck's life, times, and work as a meaningful totality is admirable, the result is a somewhat dense and unwieldy text too weighty for the novice. The book also succeeds better in tracing Koselleck's itinerary among and between the academic disciplines in the Federal Republic—and affords fascinating resources for the specialist interested in the intellectual fields discussed—than as an introduction on how to conceive (or practice) history as a pluralistic enterprise beyond utopianism and relativism.