"Kultur" und/oder "Gesellschaft?
"Culture" and/or "Society"? (On the "Cultural Studies Turn" in the Historical Sciences)

Summary/Abstract: Since the late 1980s, "culture" has become a key concept of a counter-move, no longer understood as a corrective, but as the beginning of a new "royal road" in the historical sciences as well. "Culture" has been almost a battle cry from the periphery of the established subject areas, closely connected with the debate about the "heretical" ideas of postmodern discourse or about the reception of poststructuralism and the linguistic turn. In this way, several years later, culture successfully contributed to institutionalization and legitimation strategy within the disciplines themselves - "Cultural science(s)" opened a clear way out of the legitimation crisis in the humanities. "Cultural science(s)“ now became visible as a "magic formula" of a trans-disciplinary renewal of the humanities, as a programme for the overcoming of disciplinary boundaries, but also of the ever stronger differentiation within the subject. In German historical science, the reception of the cultural science paradigm has focussed on the dichotomy between the leading concepts of "culture" and "society". In this paper, the transdisciplinary agreement-fields of the "culture science turn" are not pushed into the field of vision, but the disciplinary differentiations and centres of gravity are considered, on the basis of the view that the variety and heterogeneity of the culture science paradigm is also conditioned through different disciplinary reception forms: The author attempts a move of the transformation of the historical science(s) under the concept of culture, the controversies over the theoretical focusing and socio-political potential of the "cultural science turn", and the consequences of this transformation for the self-understanding of historical science—from a historical social science to a historical culture science—should contribute to the formulation of the definition of categories in the opaque semantic field of "culture".

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