Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-fwgfc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T09:43:06.257Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

PROVINCIALIZING AMERICA: NEW AND NOT SO NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORIES OF WEIMAR GERMANY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2014

RÜDIGER GRAF
RÜDIGER GRAF*
Affiliation:
Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam E-mail: graf@zzf-pdm.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Together the two volumes under review contain over forty essays on the intellectual history of Weimar Germany and its legacy today. The wide interdisciplinary field of authors, historians, philosophers, theologians, and literary, legal, and religious scholars, as well as social and political scientists, testifies to the continuing fascination of this era of thought in Anglo-American academia. With the exceptions of Mitchell G. Ash, Michael Krois, and Klaus Tanner, the authors teach at American, British or Canadian universities and represent major tendencies of the anglophone engagement with Weimar's intellectual history. Despite the fact that intellectual history of the Weimar Republic has been a flourishing field of research in Germany over the last decades, the volumes contain no contributions by German historians. This observation is by no means negligible in an age of transnational academic exchange, as may be exemplified by the recent Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, which contains contributions by German, American, and British experts in their fields.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , August 2016 , pp. 541 - 554
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 A recent review of the political, social, and cultural history of Weimar Germany that also contains important contributions to its intellectual history is Ziemann, B., “Weimar Was Weimar: Politics, Culture and the Emplotment of the German Republic,” German History, 28 (2010), 542–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Hofmeister, Björn, “Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte der Politik in der Weimarer Republik,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 50 (2010), 445–501Google Scholar; Rossol, Nadine: “Chancen der Weimarer Republik,” Neue Politische Literatur, 55 (2010), 393–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Smith, Helmut W., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 28–9Google Scholar.

4 Tellingly, several American historians of Weimar Germany who have been intensively discussed on the other side of the Atlantic, such as Peter Fritzsche or Kathleen Canning, have not contributed to the volumes.

5 Kaplan, Leonard V. and Koshar, Rudy, eds., The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law (Lanham, MD, 2012)Google Scholar, xi, xvii.

6 Gordon, Peter E. and McCormick, John P., eds., Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 394–406.

9 For recent examples see Weipert, Matthias, “Mehrung der Volkskraft”: Die Debatte über Bevölkerung, Modernisierung und Nation 1890–1933 (Paderborn, 2006)Google Scholar; Breuer, Stefan, Die Völkischen in Deutschland: Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Darmstadt, 2008)Google Scholar; Wiede, Wiebke, Rasse im Buch: Antisemitische und rassistische Publikationen in Verlagsprogrammen der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 John V. Maciuika, “The Politics of Art and Architecture at the Bauhaus, 1919–1933,” in Gordon and McCormick, The Weimar Moment, 291–315; Nerdinger, Wolfgang, “Architekturutopie und Realität des Bauens zwischen Weimarer Republik und Drittem Reich,” in Hardtwig, Wolfgang, ed., Utopie und politische Herrschaft im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit (Munich, 2003), 269–86Google Scholar.

11 Karin Gunnemann, “Writers and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 220–39, at 221.

12 Mergel, Thomas, “Überlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Politik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 28 (2002), 574–606Google Scholar; Ute Frevert and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Neue Politikgeschichte: Perspektiven einer historischen Politikforschung (Frankfurt, 2005); Wolfgang Hardtwig, ed., Politische Kulturgeschichte der Zwischenkriegszeit: 1918–1939, special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 21 (2004).

13 Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review, 92 (1987), 879–907CrossRefGoogle Scholar; La Capra, Dominick, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in LaCapra, Dominick and Kaplan, Steven, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 47–85Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., “Languages and Their Implications: The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought,” in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (London, 1989), 3–41Google Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koselleck, Reinhart, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main, 1995)Google Scholar.

14 Leonard V. Kaplan, “The Political: From Weimar to the Present,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 185–214, at 185, 198.

15 Ibid., 209.

16 Jeffrey Herf, “Displacement, Abstraction, and Historical Specificity,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 409–20.

17 Ibid., 414.

18 Ibid., 413.

19 Ibid., 413. See also Herf, Jeffrey, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a broader perspective on the motivating forces behind the National Socialist project see Raphael, Lutz, “Pluralities of National Socialist Ideology: New Perspectives on the Production and Diffusion of National Socialist Weltanschauung,” in Steber, Martina and Gotto, Bernhard, eds., Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Life (Oxford, 2014), 73–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 407–415.

21 Samuel Moyn and Azzan Yadin-Israel, “The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge: Martin Heidegger's Theological Critique of Immanuel Kant,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 123–44, at 123.

22 See as a recent example Morat, Daniel, Von der Tat zur Gelassenheit: Konservatives Denken bei Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger und Friedrich Georg Jünger, 1920–1960 (Göttingen, 2007)Google Scholar.

23 Moyn and Yadin-Israel, “The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge,” 138.

24 Peter E. Gordon, “German Idealism and German Liberalism in the 1920s: Remarks on Ernst Cassirer and the Historicity of Interpretation,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 337–44, at 344.

25 Ibid., 337.

26 More examples could be given: Gordon also thinks that Hermann Müller's cabinet of 1928 was “primarily socialist,” while only three out of eleven ministers were Social Democrats. Moreover, Christophe Chalamet erroneously locates the September elections in which the National Socialists won 18.3% of the vote in the year 1931, and Leonard Kaplan talks of the killing of Benno “Ohnesorge” in 1967. In Weimar Thought, Charles Bambach names Detlev Felken “Detlev Falken,” Anson Rabinbach talks of “Ekkhard Bahr,” probably meaning Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, and there are many other misspellings.

27 Graf, Friedrich W., Der heilige Zeitgeist: Studien zur Ideengeschichte der protestantischen Theologie in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 2010)Google Scholar.

28 Charles Bambach, “Weimar Philosophy and the Crisis of Historical Thinking,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 133–49; Wolfgang Bialas and Gérard Raulet, Die Historismusdebatte in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); Oexle, Otto G., Krise des Historismus, Krise der Wirklichkeit: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur 1880–1932 (Göttingen, 2007)Google Scholar; Hardtwig, Wolfgang, “Die Krise des Geschichtsbewußtseins in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik und der Aufstieg des Nationalsozialismus,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs, 2001 (2002), 47–75Google Scholar.

29 Kaplan, “Notes toward a Theory of Political and Legal Resistance,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 465–514. For the books cited, details are Moses, A. Dirk, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar; Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987); Hockenos, Paul, Joschka Fischer (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar.

30 Martin Jay, “The Weimar Left: Theory and Politics,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 377–93, at 391; Abraham, David, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (Princeton, NJ, 1981)Google Scholar.

31 Jay, “The Weimar Left,” 390.

32 Gary Dorrien, “Barthian Dialectics: ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ on the Barthian Revolt and Its Legacy,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 217–40, at 217; Peter E. Gordon, “Weimar Theology: From Historicism to Crisis,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 150–78, at 150.

33 John P. McCormick, “Legal Theory and the Weimar Crisis of Law and Social Change,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 55–72, at 57.

34 Dana Villa, “The Legacy of Max Weber in Weimar Political and Social Theory,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 73–97, at 75.

35 Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Weimar Criticism,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 203–19, at 203, 216.

36 Frederick Beiser, “Weimar Philosophy and the Fate of Neo-Kantianism,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 115–32, at 117; Bambach, “Weimar Philosophy,” 136.

37 Gordon, “Weimar Theology,” 158; John Michael Krois, “Kulturphilosophie in Weimar Modernism,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 101–14, at 104.

38 Beiser, “Weimar Philosophy,” 124.

39 Suzanne Marchand, “Eastern Wisdom in an Era of Western Despair: Orientalism in 1920s Central Europe,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 341–60, at 346. The Table of Contents has “Susanne.”

40 Schröter, Manfred, Der Streit um Spengler: Kritik seiner Kritiker (Munich, 1922)Google Scholar.

41 van den Bruck, Arthur Moeller, “Der Untergang des Abendlandes,” Die Deutsche Rundschau, 184 (1920), 41–70Google Scholar; Freyer, Hans, “Der Untergang des Abendlandes,” Die Tat, 11 (1919), 304–8Google Scholar.

42 Spengler, Oswald, “Pessimismus?”, Preußische Jahrbücher, 184 (1921), 73–84Google Scholar; repr. as Pessimismus?, Schriftenreihe der Preußischen Jahrbücher, 4 (Berlin, 1921).

43 Spengler, Oswald, Jahre der Entscheidung. Erster Teil: Deutschland und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung (Munich, 1933)Google Scholar, 9 ff. See Heinz D. Kittsteiner, “Oswald Spengler zwischen ‘Untergang des Abendlandes’ und ‘Preußischem Sozialismus’,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig, ed., Geschichte für Leser (Stuttgart, 2005), 309–30; and, with additional references, Graf, Rüdiger, Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich, 2008). 104–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 4.

45 Bambach, “Weimar Theology,” 134. For a different perspective see Fritzsche, Peter, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the November Revolution,” in Jones, Larry Eugene and Retallack, James, eds., Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Oxford, 1993), 299–328Google Scholar.

46 Beiser, “Weimar Philosophy,” 120.

47 Tracy Matysik, “Weimar Feminity: Within and beyond the Law,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 361–76, at 373. On the “crisis” of Weimar Germany see also Fritzsche, Peter, “Landscape of Danger, Landscape of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany,” in Kniesche, Thomas W. and Brockmann, Stephen, eds., Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia, 1994)Google Scholar, 29–46; Föllmer, Moritz and Graf, Rüdiger, eds., Die “Krise” der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt am Main, 2005)Google Scholar; Hardtwig, Wolfgang, ed., Ordnungen in der Krise: Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900–1933 (Munich, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Cathryn Carson, “Method, Moment, and Crisis in Weimar Science,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 179–99, at 183.

49 Graf, Rüdiger, “Either–Or: The Narrative of ‘Crisis’ in Weimar Germany and in Historiography,” Central European History, 43 (2010), 592–615CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 354 ff.

51 Mitchell G. Ash, “Weimar Psychology: Holistic Visions and Trained Intuitions,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 35–54, at 38.

52 Ibid., 49.

53 Peter Caldwell, “Sovereignty, Constitutionalism, and the Myth of the State: Article Four of the Weimar Constitution,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 345–70, at 347, 363.

54 Martin A. Ruehl, “Aesthetic Fundamentalism in Weimar Poetry: Stefan George and His Circle, 1918–1933,” in Gordon and McCormick, Weimar Thought, 240–72, at 244 ff.

55 Ibid.

56 Udi Greenberg, “The Limits of Dictatorship and the Origins of Democracy: The Political Theory of Carl J. Friedrich from Weimar to the Cold War,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 443–64, at 444.

57 Rudy Koshar, “Demythologizing the Secular: Karl Barth and the Politics of the Weimar Republic,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 313–34, at 321, 313.

58 Ibid., 315.

59 Ibid., 327.

60 Christophe Chalamet, “Karl Barth and the Weimar Republic,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 241–68, at 256.

61 Dorrien, “Barthian Dialectics,” 217–22.

62 Ibid., 236.

63 Klaus Tanner, “Protestant Revolt against Modernity,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 3–16, at 10.

64 Michael Hollerich, “Catholic Anti-liberalism in Weimar: Political Theology and Its Critics,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 17–46, at 38.

65 Ulrich Rosenhagen, “‘Together a Step towards the Messianic Goal’: Jewish–Protestant Encounter in the Weimar Republic,” in Kaplan and Koshar, The Weimar Moment, 47–72, at 59.

66 Heimpel, Hermann, “Review of Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates,” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 208 (1954), 197–221Google Scholar, at 210.