Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Stigma and Structure in German Memory
- 2 The Languages of Republicanism and West German Political Generations
- 3 The Forty-fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy
- 4 The German German: The Integrative Republicanism of Wilhelm Hennis
- 5 The Non-German German: The Redemptive Republicanism of Jürgen Habermas
- 6 Theory and Practice: Science, Technology, and the Republican University
- 7 The Crisis of the Republic, 1960–1967
- 8 1968 and Its Aftermath
- 9 The Structure of Discourse in the 1980s and 1990s
- 10 History, Multiculturalism, and the Non-German German
- 11 German Germans and the Old Nation
- 12 Political Theology and the Dissolution of the Underlying Structure
- Index
2 - The Languages of Republicanism and West German Political Generations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Stigma and Structure in German Memory
- 2 The Languages of Republicanism and West German Political Generations
- 3 The Forty-fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy
- 4 The German German: The Integrative Republicanism of Wilhelm Hennis
- 5 The Non-German German: The Redemptive Republicanism of Jürgen Habermas
- 6 Theory and Practice: Science, Technology, and the Republican University
- 7 The Crisis of the Republic, 1960–1967
- 8 1968 and Its Aftermath
- 9 The Structure of Discourse in the 1980s and 1990s
- 10 History, Multiculturalism, and the Non-German German
- 11 German Germans and the Old Nation
- 12 Political Theology and the Dissolution of the Underlying Structure
- Index
Summary
Studying a structure demands what Jean Piaget called “a special effort of reflective abstraction.” We need, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explained, to look “beyond the empirical facts to the relations between them,” which “reveals and confirms that these relations are simpler and more intelligible than the things they interconnect.” By studying intellectuals whose political emotions dramatize the structure of German subjectivities, we can reveal these relations in the case of postwar German memory and identity. Intellectuals and writers are no different from other Germans in having to wrestle with political emotions. In fact, because their identity projects are so elaborately articulated in public language, they embody the affects and unconscious fantasies about their large-group identity as Germans in oblique but sometimes disarmingly candid ways. Because of the high level of reflection in their thinking for and against the nation, intellectuals are more likely to develop internally consistent and coherent positions, and, consequently, we can “read off” the logic and structure of their political emotions from their writings. Dissecting their writings is thereby at once an exercise in biographical study and detection of those deeper, often quasi-religious currents that subtend public discourse. Nonetheless, while agreeing with Nietzsche that “every great philosophy” is “the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir,” this book does not contend that the link between individual intellectual life and social psychology affords access to the political emotions of every German.
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- German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past , pp. 38 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007