History and Theory 51 (May 2012), 221-245
© Wesleyan University 2012 ISSN: 0018-2656
REVIEW ARTICLE
Thinking after Hitler: The New Intellectual
History of the Federal Republic of Germany1
German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. By A. Dirk Moses. Cambridge, UK,
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. ix, 293.
Also discussed in this article:
Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Begründung der
Bundesrepublik. By Jens Hacke. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Pp.
323.
Leben als Konflikt: Zur Biographie Alexander Mitscherlichs. By Martin
Dehli. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007. Pp. 320.
Alexander Mitscherlich: Gesellschaftsdiagnosen und Psychoanalyse nach
Hitler. By Tobias Freimüller. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007. Pp. 480.
Streit um den Staat: Intellektuelle Debatten in der Bundesrepublik 1960–
1980. Edited by Dominik Geppert and Jens Hacke. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2008. Pp. 292.
Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. By Eva-Maria Ziege. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. Pp.
346.
Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert. By Jan Eike
Dunkhase. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Pp. 378.
Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten
Krieg. By Tim B. Müller. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010. Pp. 700.
Habermas: An Intellectual Biography. By Matthew G. Specter. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 204.
ABSTRACT
This review essay seeks to direct attention to intellectual history as a new and flourishing
subfield in the historiography of post-1945 Germany. The essay probes and critically interrogates some of the basic arguments of Dirk Moses’ prize-winning monograph German
Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. It does so by engaging with a series of German-language
monographs on key intellectuals of the postwar period (Alexander Mitscherlich, Jürgen
Habermas, Herbert Marcuse) or groups of intellectuals that have appeared during the last
few years. The essay also includes two books that focus on intellectual transfers from
and to the United States and hence transcend the purely national framework. The essay
1. I would like to thank Brian Fay and Julia Perkins for their helpful editorial suggestions as well
as Philipp Stelzel for his helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.
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highlights some broader themes such as West German intellectuals’ confrontation with
the Nazi past and with the memory of Germany’s failed experiment with democracy during the interwar Weimar Republic. It also discusses the significance of the West German
student movement in the 1960s for West German intellectual history. The essay concludes
with some broader reflections on writing intellectual history of the postwar period, and it
points to some avenues for further research. It underlines the significance of intellectual
debates—and hence of intellectual history—for charting and explaining the process of
postwar democratization and liberalization in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Keywords: West Germany, intellectuals, memory, democratization, liberalization, Nazi
past, emotions
For much of the post-1945 period, the intellectual history of the Federal Republic
did not constitute a prominent field of historical inquiry. Despite the fact that it
emerged as a democratic state in the wake of total defeat and utter moral collapse,
the Federal Republic lacked the kind of foundational debates that had accompanied other democratic transitions such as the French and American revolutions.
Moreover, West German academic and public debates seemed to represent only
a pale reflection of the vibrant intellectual life of the Weimar Republic, largely
because of the loss of many Jewish intellectual voices. What for a long time
appeared to be the single most remarkable achievement of postwar West Germany—its stunning economic recovery—did not seem to lend itself to intellectual history approaches. The plenitude of refrigerators and cars stood in marked
contrast to the paucity of interesting ideas. Ironically, critical West German intellectuals confirmed this view of the Federal Republic as a thriving economic yet
intellectually poor marketplace. As one of them put it, West Germans prefer “to
eat rather than to think.”2 Members of the famous literary group Gruppe 47, such
as Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, or Wolfgang Koeppen, tirelessly denounced the
early Federal Republic for its shallow consumerism, moral indifference, and petty
bourgeois provincialism. They saw merely a West German Biedermaier, which,
in contrast to Weimar culture, stifled the intellectual and cultural avant-garde.
Over the last two decades, however, this historiographical image of the Federal Republic has been dramatically revised. No longer understood primarily as
a period of conservative “restoration,” the first two postwar decades now appear
as an era of rapid and profound social, political, and cultural transformations
that historians have sought to capture with paradigms such as “modernization,”
“Americanization,” “Westernization,” or “liberalization.”3 As this historiography
has made clear, the true “miracle” of postwar history did not consist of the (by
now rather well understood) economic recovery, but rather of the political and
cultural transformation of an authoritarian, post-fascist society into a surprisingly
2. Hans-Werner Richter, cited in Dominik Geppert, “Von der Staatsskepsis zum parteipolitischen
Engagement: Hans Werner Richter, die Gruppe 47, und die deutsche Politik,” in Geppert and Hacke,
eds., Streit um den Staat, 53.
3. See Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau, ed. Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywotteck (Bonn: Dietz,
1993); Anselm Döring Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen: Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); Wandlungsprozesse
in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002); Volker Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry,
1945–1973 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
thinking after hitler
223
stable and increasingly pluralist, Western-style liberal democracy.4 To be sure,
cultural and gender historians have made abundantly clear that this emerging
liberal-democratic order was by no means incompatible with the persistence
of racialist ideas, and it was also linked to a patriarchal gender order as well as
an ardent homophobia that lost their normative force only gradually.5 Still, a
growing body of scholarship testified to a palpable sense of excitement about
post-1945 West German history, which was further compounded by a virtual
explosion of historiography on the memory of the Nazi past and the Second
World War.6 Postwar West German history now probably constitutes the beststudied period in the entire field of “memory” studies more generally. Contrary
to the previous assumption of a complete amnesia about the past, this historiography unearthed the ubiquitous if selective presence of the past in postwar West
Germany, which was constantly managed, manipulated, and mobilized yet never
completely “repressed.”
This review article discusses a parallel development in the field of West German intellectual history, namely, the discovery of a vibrant and important history
of ideas. All books under review revise the traditional picture of the Federal
Republic as an economic and political success story bereft of interesting intellectual debates. They bring to light vigorous, highly contested, deeply antagonistic,
and often very public intellectual debates that accompanied the history of the
Federal Republic from its inception. Moreover, they also underline the significance of these public debates for the process of postwar democratization and
liberalization. Precisely because the ideological parameters of the Bonn republic
were not firmly determined at the outset, these debates constituted an integral
part of the Federal Republic’s critical self-reflection and gradual self-recognition.
They were central to the definition of a viable democratic polity that needed to
be constructed on the ashes of the “Third Reich” and against the background of
Germany’s failed first experiment with democracy during the interwar period.
Most studies under review here focus on academics and therefore highlight
the university as the central institutional site of postwar intellectual discourse.
Moreover, they also analyze thinkers, who, in one way or another, became part
of the Federal Republic’s intellectual mainstream. This review article therefore
excludes intellectuals (such as Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, or Ernst Jünger)
who were so compromised by their implication in the Nazi past that they main4. On this process, see Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995, transl.
Brandon Hunziker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Diethelm Prowe, “The
Miracle of the Political-Culture Shift: Democratization between Americanization and Conservative
Reintegration,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna
Schissler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 451-458.
5. On these perspectives, see especially West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society,
and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997); The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Rita Chin et al., After the Nazi Racial State: Difference
and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
6. The literature is too vast to cite here. For a good overview, see the review articles by Robert G.
Moeller, “What Has Coming to Terms with the Past Meant in the Federal Republic of Germany?,”
Central European History 35, no. 2 (2002), 223-256; idem, “‘Germans as Victims?’ Thoughts on a
Post-Cold War History of the Second World War,” History and Memory 17, no. 1/2 (2005), 147-194.
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tained an inner distance from the Federal Republic, as well as those left-wing
intellectuals who decided to throw in their lot with the “other” Germany in the
East. That these arguments within the Federal Republic’s intellectual mainstream
nevertheless assumed an extremely heated, at times vitriolic, tone testifies to the
pressing, even existential, issues that were at stake in these debates. West German
intellectuals after 1945 negotiated nothing less than the possibility and the conditions of democracy in the aftermath of National Socialism and the Holocaust.
With two exceptions, all books under review here are German-language
monographs. Taken together, these (and numerous others7) also point to a stunning methodological revival of intellectual history as an important subdiscipline
in German-language historiography, and this article seeks to introduce some of
these works to an English-speaking audience.8 While European intellectual history always retained, at least until recently, a firm place in American academia,
this was generally not the case in Germany. To West German advocates of a historical social science, as well as of more recent cultural history approaches, ideas
appeared to be either irrelevant or hopelessly elitist. The best of the studies under
review seek to counter these challenges by offering a set of methodological suggestions for a reinvigorated intellectual history. They locate “ideas” and “intellectuals” in their larger institutional contexts, and they identify larger “thought
styles” or even anthropological structures that shaped individual thinkers.
I
The existential significance of German intellectual debates about the Nazi past
is the starting point of Dirk Moses’ remarkable and justifiably acclaimed study.
Eschewing “conventional intellectual history,” Moses seeks to “relate the ideas
of intellectuals to their political emotions” (10). Deploying categories of social
psychology and of cultural anthropology, he seeks to uncover the “underlying
structure of political emotions” that, according to him, all but determined individual intellectuals’ relationship to the German past. Marked with the stigma of
the Nazi past and confronting a “polluted” national identity, German intellectuals
had two options at their disposal to confront their “chosen trauma”: they could
either reject their culture and seek to radically renovate it, or they could defend
the source of their trauma. These two reactions constituted, according to Moses,
the two antagonistic yet always dialectically intertwined formations among postwar German intellectuals: on the one hand, the non-German Germans, advocating a “redemptive republicanism” that saw the national body as “irredeemably
7. In addition to the books discussed here, see, for example, Dirk van Laak, Gespräche in der
Sicherheit des Schweigens: Carl Schmitt in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1993); Jan Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005); Carola Dietze, Nachgeholtes Leben: Helmut Plessner, 1892–1985 (Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 2006); and Daniel Morat, Von der Tat zur Gelassenheit: Konservatives Denken
bei Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger und Friedrich Georg Jünger 1920–1960 (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2007).
8. See the discussion forum “The Intellectual History of the Federal Republic,” in German History
27, no. 2 (2009), 244-258; see also Alexander Gallus, “‘Intellectual History’ mit Intellektuellen und
ohne sie: Facetten neuer geistesgeschichtlicher Forschung,” Historische Zeitschrift 288 (2009), 139150.
thinking after hitler
225
polluted” sought to create a new national identity; on the other hand, the German
German representing an “integrationist republicanism” that sought to defend the
German national tradition. It was the dialectic of “constructing and rejecting
stigma” that accounted for the dynamics of the intellectual discourse in West
Germany.
While the boldness of this argument is quite breathtaking, it is fleshed out
largely convincingly in the book’s chapters, which cast the Freiburg political scientist Wilhelm Hennis as the protagonist of the “integrationist republicans” and
the philosopher Jürgen Habermas as the classic representative of the “redemptive
republicans.” Both of these intellectual types emanated from a shared generational experience, that of the “Forty-Fivers,” a label that Moses had previously
coined in a much-cited article.9 Born between the early 1920s and the early
1930s, the “Forty-Fivers” experienced the defeat of National Socialism as a collapse of their personal and collective identities. They also rejected previous intellectual traditions, notably the conservative revolution of the 1920s and 1930s,
and thus distanced themselves from the more unreconstructed conservatives such
as Armin Mohler or Arnold Gehlen. Yet the “Forty-Fivers” ultimately arrived at
very different answers to their shared generational questions as to why fascism
had succeeded in Germany and how it could be prevented in the future. “German Germans” identified (rather more like contemporary historiography, one
might add) a broader European crisis rather than specifically German conditions
as responsible for fascism. They also came to identify closely with the liberalconservative polity of the newly founded West German state, and defended
a national historical consciousness as an important counterweight against the
potentially disintegrating forces of modernity. By contrast, non-German Germans like Habermas saw the West German state as principally not trustworthy,
and they identified a persistent authoritarian potential in the Federal Republic.
“Redemptive republicans” also blamed “integrative republicans” for preventing
a more radical new beginning after 1945, thus stimulating their constant fears of
an authoritarian turn of the Federal Republic following the models of Franco’s
Spain or De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.
Moses defends the functional necessity of the integrationist approach in the
1950s, which facilitated the transmogrification of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft
into the West German body politic. But unlike blatantly apologist versions of this
argument, he also highlights the costs of this process. It was the renewed discussion of the Nazi past from the late 1950s onward that not only revealed the blind
spot in the German Germans’ vision but also accounted for a profound sense of
political crisis in the 1960s. Moses persuasively rejects a teleological and Whiggish view of the 1960s that postulates—after the deficits of the 1950s—a linear
evolution toward an increasingly more comprehensive and critical memory of
the German past. Indeed, the two chapters on the West German 1960s and their
aftermath constitute perhaps the most original sections of the book. Rather than
a second founding of the Federal Republic marked by what Habermas called a
“fundamental liberalization,” the 1960s saw the “crystallization and disintegra9. A. Dirk Moses, “The Forty-Fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy,” German
Politics and Society 17, no. 1 (1999), 105-127.
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tion of the tenuous left-liberal alliance” (162).10 While integrationist and redemptive republicans initially shared concerns about a subterranean and hidden authoritarianism within West German society, they ultimately split over their responses
to the radicalization of the student movement in 1968 and beyond: the former
began to see the major political threat as emanating from the Left rather than from
the Right and so formed an alliance with conservatives, whereas the latter, while
also critical of the most radical and potentially violent wing of the student movement, defended the concerns of what they saw as its reformist majority. “1968”
thus exacerbated the ongoing culture war among West Germany’s intellectuals
with each side suffering from what Moses terms the “Weimar syndrome,” that
is, the frequent tendency to accuse the respective other side of seeking to destroy
West German democracy. Indeed, what Habermas at some point described as
a “semantic civil war” culminated in the late 1970s when neoconservatives
accused leftist intellectuals of having fostered terrorism, while Habermas and
others accused the right of exploiting the terrorism scare for authoritarian and
illiberal purposes. Clearly, Moses’ concept of “political emotions” is well suited
to explain the intensity and excessive rhetoric of these debates.
Significantly, the period from the 1980s witnessed a rhetorical de-escalation
as well as a realignment of intellectual alliances. Leftists abandoned their chronic
distrust of the West German state after recognizing that even the conservative
Kohl government did not call into question the founding principles of the Federal Republic. The left-liberal alliance came together again in the historians’
dispute over the singularity of the Holocaust, and it succeeded in establishing
the Holocaust memorial as a globally recognized stigma of German national
consciousness. While some of Moses’ later chapters lack the thematic coherence
of the first part of his book, they also entail analytic gems such as a very subtle
analysis of the critique of a national sacrificial culture by the West German writer
Martin Walser in a highly controversial speech in 1999. As various other memory
scandals indicate, the rival memory projects of the German Germans and the nonGerman Germans continued to compete into the twenty-first century, and they
informed different prescriptions for German citizenship and national identity.
Yet Moses concludes on a fairly upbeat note: he sees the ultimate formation of a
republican consensus emerging that allows young Germans to invest their trust in
the country’s political institutions as well as to display national flags in support
of their country’s soccer team without immediately thinking of the Holocaust.
Not primarily a contested and catastrophic past but rather the “axes of ethnicity
and immigration” now define, according to Moses, the parameters of German
national identity, just as in “any other country” (283).
Moses’ study is truly remarkable in its scope, especially for an author’s first
book based on a revised dissertation. He brilliantly succeeds in integrating more
than forty years of intellectual debate in postwar West Germany into a cohesive
and coherent argument. However, as is inevitable with a book of such wide
thematic breadth, some aspects of his analysis invite further scrutiny. Given the
central significance of a distinctly national trauma for Moses’ argument, he tells
10. Quoted in Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 157.
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227
an almost exclusively German story. As a result, the inherent transnational nature
of at least some of these debates over the role of technology or the status of the
university are largely missing from his analysis. Moreover, while Moses’ concept
of “political emotions” is highly innovative, it does not draw on the growing,
interdisciplinary literature on emotions for further conceptualization, and thus it
remains rooted in a rather colloquial understanding of “emotions.” Finally, one
wonders to what extent the conflict between “redemptive” and “integrationist”
republicans replicated the traditional debate between left- and right-wing liberals
that goes back to the nineteenth century?11 In fact, Moses’ study does not entail
an extensive discussion as to how “republicanism” did or did not differ from the
more common notion of “liberalism.”12
II
In light of Moses’ ambitious attempt to identify the underlying structure of
postwar intellectual discourse, it makes sense to test his hypothesis against
the findings of recent studies that focus on key thinkers in his account. This
concerns, first and foremost, Moses’ ideal-typical non-German German, the
philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who is alternatively dubbed either the “Voltaire”
or the “Hegel” of the Federal Republic.13 Matthew Specter’s recently published
intellectual biography builds on some of Moses’ insights, yet it also casts a somewhat different light on Habermas’s intellectual trajectory. Like Moses, Specter
emphasizes the extent to which a specific generational experience shaped Habermas’s thinking. Yet contrary to Moses and “45ers,” Specter posits the notion of
Habermas as a “58er,” which, as he claims, not only corresponds to Habermas’s
own self-description but also derives from the “centrality of the legal theme” in
Habermas’s oeuvre.14 A series of decisions by the West German constitutional
court in 1958 regarding the extension of free speech and positive guarantees for
the public sphere confirmed, according to Specter, Habermas’s perception of the
potentially progressive elements of constitutional law. Specter traces this view
back to Habermas’s affiliation with the left-wing political scientist Wolfgang
Abendroth, who saw the possibility of a Socialist democracy as inherent in the
West German constitution. Habermas therefore identified constitutional law as a
source of democratic renewal and thus distanced himself from the Marxist view
of legality as simply concealing bourgeois rule. By developing a theory that
emphasized the connection between the rule of law and democracy, Habermas
contributed significantly to the democratization of the Federal Republic and also
succeeded in “re-enchanting” the Rechtstaat for the Left.
11. James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978).
12. This distinction is important in the historiography on the American Revolution; see Gordon
Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).
13. For “Voltaire,” see Neaman in Discussion Forum “The Intellectual History of the Federal
Republic,” 254; for “Hegel” as an attack by the writer Martin Walser, see Moses, German Intellectuals, 278.
14. Specter, Habermas, 25.
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Specter also traces Habermas’s ambivalent reaction to the student movement,
which shifted from sympathy for the 68ers’ new sensitivity to the question of
legitimacy of the political and social order to skepticism regarding the disposal
of legality. While Spector sees Habermas essentially as a “German thinker,” he,
unlike Moses, nevertheless points out the significance of Habermas’s increasing interest in American pragmatism in the context of his “linguistic turn” in
the 1960s. By defining an ideal of “rational” or “undistorted” communication,
Habermas sought to distance himself from the radicalism of Western Marxism
while still maintaining a radically reformist agenda. By the 1980s, Habermas
had developed a more procedural, “thin” version of democracy with the “selfrevolutionizing Rechtstaat” at its core. His notions of “constitutional patriotism,”
or of the significance of the Federal Republic’s “anchoring in the West” (Westbindung), thus did not signify political resignation but rather “a powerful rhetorical reformulation of the utopian longings of the German Left.”15 It was therefore
precisely Habermas’s ongoing “self-critique of the capitalist, mass democratic,
constitutional welfare state” that constituted a central element of the Federal
Republic’s democratic political culture.
Based on a considerably more narrow focus than Moses’, Specter makes a
convincing case for the centrality of legal thought in Habermas’s intellectual
trajectory. Yet it remains doubtful whether the legal theme really constitutes the
sole or even primary key to unlocking Habermas’s highly complex and multifaceted body of thought. Here, Moses’ notion of political emotions might offer a
greater explanatory potential. And while Specter’s book offers a comprehensive,
readable, and largely persuasive explication of Habermas’s writings, it also might
have benefited from a more extensive appropriation of German-language historiography, especially on postwar conservativsm. Specter, for example, tends to
lump together old-style conservatives such as Arnold Gehlen and Carl Schmitt
with neo- or liberal conservatives such as Herman Lübbe. But, as Jens Hacke’s
study of the liberal conservative founding of the Federal Republic demonstrates
(which, incidentally, is missing in Specter’s biography), this equation obscures
important differences between the two groups.
III
Hacke’s study, which appeared a year before Moses’ book, focuses not on
individual intellectuals but rather on a group of academics who, in one way or
another, were affiliated with the philosopher Joachim Ritter at the University
of Münster. The members of the “Ritter school” defined a new, liberal version
of conservatism that significantly contributed to the establishment of a “cultural and intellectual legitimacy” of the Federal Republic.16 Hacke’s focus is on
Moses’ “integrative republicans” or “German Germans,” even though he sees the
philosopher Herman Lübbe, not Wilhelm Hennis, as their most important representative. Contrary to an earlier thesis that credited the Frankfurt School with
the intellectual foundation of the Federal Republic, Hacke seeks to highlight the
15. Ibid., 201.
16. Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit, 296.
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229
contribution of center-right intellectuals to this process.17 While the reformulation and transformation of postwar conservatism has already received significant
attention in English-language historiography, Hacke provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the philosophical foundations and assumptions of
West German liberal conservatism.18 His study also demonstrates how liberal
conservatives’ attempt to construct a German identity in the face of National
Socialism and the Holocaust, as analyzed by Moses, constituted only one aspect
within a larger reorientation of conservative thinking in the postwar period. With
basic empathy and only occasional critical distance, Hacke lays out the basic
tenets of a “philosophy of Bürgerlichkeit”—a term that refers both to the “citizen” and to the “bourgeois”—which eventually helped to reconcile conservatism
with parliamentary democracy.
Hacke analyzes the formation of postwar liberal conservatism in two steps: he
first outlines the historical origins and contexts in which it took shape, and then
moves on to a more systematic analysis of liberal conservative political thought.
Its philosophical starting point was a liberal Hegel-interpretation that rejected the
left Hegelian emphasis on historical progress and that sought to insulate Hegel
against totalitarian appropriations by highlighting his refusal to identify either a
historical telos or a specific historical subject in charge of realizing it. Skeptical
toward the belief in the malleability of individual and collective identities qua
discursive practices, liberal conservatives stressed the normative function of
existing institutions. This position shaped their attitudes toward both the Nazi
past and the postwar West German state: while they rejected apologetic understandings of the Nazi past and defined postwar German identity ex negativo in
opposition to the “Third Reich,” they wholeheartedly embraced the West German
liberal constitutional order as it emerged after 1945. This is also why the challenge of “1968” triggered a defensive response of liberal conservatives against
what they perceived to be an increasing ascendancy of the Left, especially in
the realm of secondary and higher education. And while the liberal conservative
defense against the Frankfurt School and the student movement may occasionally
have produced “intellectual overreactions,” Hacke stresses its essentially liberal
nature that did not simply descend into a form of “counter-enlightenment” as
charged by Habermas and others.
In the second part, Hacke analyzes in detail what certainly constitutes the
main achievement of liberal conservative intellectuals: the liberal and democratic
transformation of conservative ideas and their incorporation into the mainstream
of the democratic constitutional state. Whereas conservative thinkers like Arnold
Gehlen saw institutions as an anthropological necessity, liberal conservatives
endowed institutions with moral and ethical values. Unlike more straightforward
conservatives, liberal conservatives remained skeptical toward an empathetic
identification with the nation, and they also abandoned the traditional conservative rejection of the welfare state. Against the leftist critique and distrust of
17. See Clemens Albrecht et al., Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1999).
18. See especially Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
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institutions, they argued that the “burden of proof” rests with those who want to
change existing institutions. This affirmative attitude toward the existing order
stood in constrast to what liberal conservatives denounced as the “retroactive
disobedience” toward National Socialism and a corresponding “hypercritical”
rejection of the Federal Republic among the New Left. The significance of institutions also manifested itself in the liberal conservatives’ revival of the theory of
political decision as developed by Carl Schmitt. Rather than employing “political
decision” as a legal foundation of autocratic or, in Schmitt’s case, fascist rule,
liberal conservatives defined “pragmatic decision” as a genuinely political counterweight to overtly technocratic discourse, even as they insisted that the parameters of pragmatic decisions should remain firmly limited by existing institutional
and normative frameworks. Liberal conservatives contrasted pragmatic decisions
taken by elected officials under conditions of time pressure with Habermas’s
ideal of a rational and “domination-free” discourse.
Hacke’s is a dense, academic book that makes few concessions to readability
and is ultimately designed for a specialist audience. Still, he succeeds brilliantly
in distilling the essence of a distinct liberal conservative political philosophy out
of often highly abstract texts. Given their skepticism toward ideological utopias,
liberal conservatives never formulated an explicit political theory. Their political
views therefore need to be cobbled together either from abstract philosophical
treatises or from more occasional political commentaries. What emerges is a
broadly coherent worldview that, as Hacke argues, was of central significance
for the political evolution of the Federal Republic. It constituted a “sobering” and
“pragmatic” program that adjusted conservative ideas to liberal constitutionalism. As such, Hacke’s findings correspond closely with Moses’ emphasis on the
centrality of “integrative republicans” in the history of the Federal Republic.19
Like Moses, he highlights the considerable achievements of liberal conservatism
in providing philosophical and political legitimacy for the Federal Republic. At
the same time, since much of liberal conservative philosophy was formulated as
a defensive response to Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory, Hacke’s study inadvertently underlines the significance of the Frankfurt School and of Habermas in
particular for the intellectual history of the Federal Republic.
IV
Both Hacke and Specter basically confirm some of Moses’ central findings while
also placing somewhat different emphases as they analyze the centrality of legal
thought in Habermas’s work (Specter) or the philosophical foundation of liberal
conservatism (Hacke). Two biographies of another prominent intellectual in postwar West Germany, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, demonstrate, by
contrast, that individual intellectual trajectories tended to be somewhat messier
and often did not line up neatly with Moses’ categories—best seen as Weberian
ideal types—of “redemptive” and “integrationist” republicans. As the author of
books such as Society without Fathers or The Inability to Mourn, Mitscherlich
19. Both books appeared within a year from each other and do not cite each other.
thinking after hitler
231
appears to belong firmly in Moses’ “redemptive republican” camp. Yet both Martin Dehli and Tobias Freimüller challenge this dominant monumentalist image
of Mitscherlich as one of the iconic intellectual founding fathers of the Federal
Republic. They do so, in part, by unearthing Mitscherlich’s lesser-known, pre1945 ideological affinity to major figures of the right-wing conservative revolution such as Ernst Jünger and the national-Bolshevist Ernst Niekisch. This is especially true for Dehli’s biography, almost half of which is devoted to Mitscherlich’s
biography before 1945. While the discovery of the young Mitscherlich’s
right-wing, antidemocratic sentiments is surprising, Dehli also makes clear that
Mitscherlich’s objection to the Weimar Republic was more an “aesthetic” one and
did not lead him to commit any major political errors when it came to Nazism.
In fact, the Gestapo eventually arrested Mitscherlich, who then joined forces with
oppositional circles in Heidelberg during the last years of the Nazi period. Still, as
Dehli concludes, Mitscherlich was “less unambiguous in his political views, less
persecuted in his life, less courageous in his actions than he asserted” after 1945.20
Adopting a history-of-science perspective, Dehli emphasizes the significant
continuities in Mitscherlich’s thinking after 1945. In particular, he highlights the
important role of the medical anthropologist Viktor von Weizsäcker whose vision
of a psychosomatic medicine as an alternative to traditional medicine ultimately
exhibited a problematic affinity with Nazi eugenics and social Darwinism. In his
pre-1945 writings, Mitscherlich was very receptive to these ideas, though he later
excised the most problematic passages in the post-1945 editions of his works.
Along similar lines, his highly controversial report on the Nuremberg trials of
German doctors, Medicine without Humanity, indicted organic medicine for its
implication in National Socialism even as it systematically obscured the equally
problematic past of psychosomatic medicine. Mitscherlich gradually adopted the
basic tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis largely through intensified contacts with
emigrant psychoanalysts in the United States, but here too he obfuscated existing
continuities with the Nazi period by claiming to have established psychoanalysis
completely anew. Finally, Dehli also detects persistent traces of Mitscherlich’s
earlier allegiance to cultural pessimism and antimodern sentimentalism in his
most well-known social psychological work. Fatherlessness, for example, constituted for Mitscherlich primarily a pathological symptom of a mechanized,
anonymous modern civilization rather than a concrete sociological phenomenon
of postwar society.
This is a revisionist biography that challenges Mitscherlich’s (self-) stylization
as the “moral conscience” and “intellectual founding father” of postwar West
German democracy. Yet Dehli’s recovery of Mitscherlich’s pre-1945 biography
also highlights similar processes of transformation and adaptation that Hacke
identified among liberal conservatives. It demonstrates how “originally antimodern and antidemocratic traditions were recast after 1945 and hence made a
positive contribution to West German identity.”21 The postwar period witnessed
multiple learning processes that, as Mitscherlich’s case demonstrates, often cut
across the conventional categories of “right-” and “left-wing” intellectuals. His
20. Dehli, Leben als Konflikt, 81.
21. Ibid., 275.
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biography offers a case study of how one prominent intellectual resolved the
experience of disorientation, collapse, and uncertainty that Moses has identified
as characteristic for the “FortyFivers” generation more generally.
While Dehli’s biography emphasizes the persistence of Mitscherlich’s earliest
intellectual commitments into the postwar period, Freimüller’s biography seeks
to explain Mitscherlich’s rise to being one of the most prominent public intellectuals in West Germany. In so doing, his study opens up new methodological paths
for the writing of an intellectual biography. Without sacrificing the “coherence of
the subject,” Freimüller remains sensitive to the discontinuities and ruptures in
Mitscherlich’s life, and he unites the analysis of the evolution and transformation
of Mitscherlich’s ideas with their changing reception by the West German public.
In fact, as Freimüller makes clear, Mitscherlich’s most important public impact
did not derive from his professional expertise in psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine, but rather from his application of a critical social psychology to
the problems of modern society. Mitscherlich was widely recognized as the most
important representative of psychoanalysis in West Germany, and his public
status resulted, in large part, from the curiosity and interest with which postwar
society greeted what appeared to be a new and original intellectual tradition. By
contrast, Mitscherlich remained a lifelong outsider within the academic milieu—
he received a regular chair only in 1967.
Freimüller’s study concentrates especially on the 1960s when Mitscherlich’s
public reputation was at its peak. This popularity resulted, as the author argues
convincingly, from the fact that Mitscherlich’s writings echoed already existing
sentiments within West German society. His therapeutic efforts to strengthen
the autonomy of the “ego” through psychotherapy in the face of ongoing “massification” was highly compatible with the increasing “individualization” of
West German society at that time. Also, Mitscherlich’s writing both reflected
and drew on an emerging desire for a more critical confrontation with the Nazi
past. While Mitscherlich had actually endorsed the earlier, relative silence about
the Nazi past in an article demanding “amnesty instead of re-education” in 1955,
he now emerged as perhaps the leading critic of the West German failure to
“come to terms with the past.” Freimüller’s excellent analysis of the reception
of Mitscherlich’s most famous work, The Inability to Mourn, shows that West
Germans initially understood well the book’s main thesis, namely that they had
failed to mourn the loss of Hitler as their love object (not, as it was frequently
misunderstood later on, the victims of Nazism). Mitscherlich’s book was innovative in highlighting both the popular investment in the Nazi regime as well as
postwar Germans’ repression of this past. Yet it also contained hidden exculpatory tendencies by portraying ordinary Germans’ support of Hitler, as well as
their unwillingness to face up to it, as the result of psychological and biological
necessities virtually beyond the individual’s control. The book also promised
closure if Germans were willing to subject themselves to the therapeutic impetus
as suggested by Mitscherlich.
Mitscherlich’s position as a public critic of West German society and as academic outsider predestined him to being one of the most committed and longlasting allies of the student movement. Yet his attitude also largely followed the
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233
trajectory of other left-liberal intellectuals as discussed by Moses: he supported
the “1968ers” longer than most of his peers did, but he ultimately also rejected
the student movement’s activist turn as well as the wholesale politicization of the
university. Herbert Marcuse and, despite his increasing schizophrenia, Wilhelm
Reich, increasingly replaced Mitscherlich as the New Left’s favored representatives of a critical psychoanalysis. By the early 1970s, moreover, psychoanalysis
had lost some of its originality and newness, and Mitscherlich’s public prominence began to decline as well; his ambition to employ psychoanalysis for urban
planning ended with a disaster in a public housing project in the suburbs of
Heidelberg.
Freimüller is somewhat less critical than Dehli regarding Mitscherlich’s pre1945 activities. And rather than dwelling on Mitscherlich’s academic shortcomings, he highlights his crucial role as a public intellectual, especially during the
1950s and 1960s. Mitscherlich’s contributions outside of the academic sphere—
in newspaper articles, radio interviews, and television broadcasts—significantly
contributed to the emergence of a critical public sphere in postwar West Germany. His important public position thus highlights the crucial part West German
intellectuals have played in the self-definition and ongoing self-reflection of the
Federal Republic, which Moses too sees as central for the eventual forging of a
republican consensus. Dehli and Freimüller together thus thoroughly succeed in
historicizing and demythologizing one of the most prominent intellectuals of the
postwar period.
V
A similar story of rupture, discontinuity, and postwar transformation is also at
the center of Jan Erik Dunkhase’s intellectual biography of the historian Werner
Conze. By pioneering a social-science-oriented social history in West Germany,
Conze ranks as one of the most influential historians of the postwar period. Yet
as a practitioner of a then innovative “people’s history” with extensive ideological affinities to National Socialist racism and imperialism during the 1930s and
1940s, he was also the most compromised politically among all the intellectuals discussed in this essay. Conze’s collaboration did not just consist of mere
aesthetic affiliation with conservative ideas, as in Mitscherlich’s case, but rather
of an explicit scholarly endorsement of Nazi population policies based on the
concept of “living space.” One of his articles, for example, speculated about the
“de-judification” of rural territories to solve the problem of surplus population.
While the affinities of “people’s history” (Volksgeschichte) to Nazi ideology and
its impact on the social history of the postwar period have been extensively analyzed during the last decade, this study offers an intellectual biography of a key
figure who—together with the Cologne historian Theodor Schieder—personified
these continuities.22 Slightly older than Mitscherlich, Conze developed an early
22. German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing 1919–1945, ed. Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Ingo Haar, Historiker im Nationalsozialismus: Deutsche
Geschichtswissenschaft und der Volkstumkampf im Osten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2000).
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ideological commitment to National Socialism in spite of his affiliation with the
historian Hans Rothfels, who was eventually removed from his position at the
University of Königsberg due to his Jewish ancestry. Some of Conze’s views also
extended beyond 1945. His habilitation lecture of 1943 was published in 1949
and contained blatantly anti-Semitic passages. An autobiographical memoir of
infantry division 291 published in 1953 fit perfectly into the then predominant
apologetic view of a “clean Wehrmacht.”
Much of Dunkhase’s analysis focuses on the complex mixture of subterranean
ideological continuities, on the one hand, and political methodological adjustments in Conze’s public and academic life after 1945, on the other. Thanks to
his old Königsberg network, Conze received a temporary academic position
in Münster where he also came under the influence of the Ritter School. Yet
unlike the liberal conservatives analyzed by Hacke, Conze ultimately proffered
a more progressive social history of the industrial world, including a history of
the German working class, which at least initially rendered him positively disposed toward the emerging student movement. Conze also served as advisor of
several important left-liberal historians such as Hans Mommsen, Dieter Groh,
and Christian Streit, author of a pathbreaking study of the German Wehrmacht’s
abominable treatment of Soviet POWs during World War II. Having received a
chair in Heidelberg in 1957, Conze was elected chancellor of the university in
1969 as a center-left candidate, even though he was already facing accusations
because of his compromised past, both from within the student movement and
from East Germany.
In spite of his methodological innovativeness, which also included a positive
response to the Annales School from France, Conze retained some strict conservative positions, especially an ardent nationalism (which also distinguished
him from the liberal-conservative adherents of the Ritter School as analyzed by
Hacke). He vehemently agitated against the Eastern policy of Chancellor Willy
Brandt in the 1970s, which implied a de facto recognition of East Germany. And
despite promoting critical research on the Nazi past by his students, Conze’s own
brief forays into the history of the Third Reich remained completely apologetic,
largely portraying ordinary Germans as Hitler’s victims without ever addressing
Jewish victimhood. By the mid-1970s, Conze had also lost his earlier vanguard
position within the historical profession. He increasingly employed his growing
influence—he served as president of the West German Historical Association in
1972—as a platform for articulating a conservative critique of younger social
historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka.
Dunkhase’s biography lays out the various aspects of Conze’s public and academic life in a straightforward and accessible manner. Based on a pioneering use
of Conze’s personal papers, the work succeeds in painting a multifaceted picture
of a West German academic who combined the often contradictory impulses of
historiographical innovation and thematic pluralism, on the one hand, with political conservatism, on the other. At the same time, Conze’s various activities are
too often analyzed separately and in isolation. The author too rarely follows his
own suggestion of treating Conze’s historiographical work after 1945 as “work
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235
on his own biography.”23 Rather than searching in vain for an explicit admission
of guilt in Conze’s oeuvre, it would have been interesting to know if and how
his “conceptual history” of terms such as “peasantry” and “race,” or his preoccupation with social collectives such as the working class, served as an indirect
confrontation with his own compromised past. Conceptually, the book thus
does not quite achieve the analytical level of some of the other works reviewed
here: whereas Moses makes postwar intellectuals’ subjectivity central to understanding their ideas, and Freimüller and Dehli document both continuities in
Mitscherlich’s thinking as well as his own reinvention through his intellectual
work, Dunkhase’s study reproduces the compartmentalization that determined
the life of his subject. Future works might do more to integrate the analysis of
postwar historiography with broader currents of the emerging intellectual history
of the Federal Republic of Germany.24 Still, despite these shortcomings, the book
offers an important and much needed contribution to a critical history of the West
German historical profession.
VI
In all of the studies analyzed above, the 1960s assume a central place. This
period saw an intensification of the conflict between redemptive and integrationist republicans; the emergence of a re-imported psychoanalysis, and the rise of
Mitscherlich as its most important spokesperson; the evolution of Habermas’s
theory of communication; and the political formation of postwar liberal conservatism. While this period may not have constituted the “second founding” of the
Federal Republic, it clearly constituted a transformative period in the intellectual
history of the postwar period. It is therefore only fitting that an edited volume
zooms in on this period and investigates intellectual debates about the state during the 1960s.
Edited by Dominik Geppert and Jens Hacke, the volume diverges methodologically from the publications discussed above by adopting a thematic focus.
Perhaps the most important finding of the volume is the dialectics of the Federal
Republic’s gradual self-recognition through fundamental intellectual critique,
especially by left-wing intellectuals. What Specter had already concluded in the
case of Habermas can be extended to West German left-wing intellectuals more
generally: the often vehement critique of the West German state sensitized critics
to the inherent democratic potential of the constitutional state and thus yielded
the paradoxical result of “belonging in and through opposition.”25 Yet the volume
also eschews a teleological perspective that merely aims at explaining the gradual
stabilization of the Federal Republic. It also adopts a retroactive perspective that
traces the current crisis of the state and of liberal democracy to the intellectual
23. Dunkhase, Werner Conze, 187.
24. See also the earlier study by Thomas Etzemüller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte:
Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2001).
25. Niklas Luhmann, cited in Klaus Naumann, “Nachrüstung und Selbstanerkennung“ in Geppert
and Hacke, eds., Streit um den Staat, 269.
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debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Seen in this way, the history of the Federal
Republic does not just reflect a paradigmatic case of successful liberalization
and democratization, but it points forward to contemporary debates about the
possibilities of the political in the age of globalization, ecological threats, and
deterritorialization.
Several larger themes emerge from the contributions of the volume. One of
them is the broad-based fear of an authoritarian state in the 1960s. It is quite
striking to see how a state that had barely shed its provisional nature managed to
inspire so much fear of its authoritarian, even dictatorial, potential. While Moses
identified this fear as a shared sentiment of both “integrative” and the “redemptive” republicans, several contributions to this volume flesh out the specific nature
of these fears and also arrive at widely divergent evaluations of these perceptions. Geppert shows that the critique of Hans Werner Richter, the founder of the
important literary Group 47, aimed more specifically at the authoritarian elements
of Adenauer’s chancellor democracy, not at the state per se. In fact, intellectuals’
engagement on behalf of the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) initiated
a process of political education that culminated in a “revolutionary acceptance”
of the state among German writers. West German intellectuals never adopted the
kind of wholly dismissive attitude toward the state as that of their predecessors
during the Weimar Republic. The same, however, cannot be said of some activists in the campaign against the “emergency laws” of 1968, which stipulated the
possibility of abrogating constitutional rights in the case of an internal or external
emergency. As Wolfgang Kraushaar argues, activists such as Johannes Agnoli or
the SDS leader Hans-Jürgen Krahl employed this controversy in an attack on the
constitutional state tout court, which, in their view, functioned simply as a disguise
for a new form of fascism. This view derived from a “personalist reduction” that
mistook the presence of former Nazis in the Federal Republic as proof of its fascist
nature, and it completely underestimated the impact of the protests (and of the
SPD’s parliamentary work) on the final version of the law, which was considerably “softer” than the original draft. While a critique (and explanation) of some
intellectuals’ exaggerated fears appears important and adequate, Joachim Scholtyseck’s analysis of West German intellectuals’ response to the building of the
Wall descends into a barely concealed polemic. According to his view, the bulk
of West German left-wing intellectuals, including well-known liberal journalists
such as Sebastian Haffner, Theo Sommer, and Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, abandoned
the “anti-totalitarian” consensus and became “fellow travelers of despotism.” The
series of labels employed to characterize the attitudes of West German intellectuals—“creeping loss of reality,” “weak and helpless,” “opportunistic,” “simplifications and distortions”26—signifies that this article aims at denunciation rather than
explanation. The only sane voices left in this account are well-known conservatives such as Arnulf Baring or the historian Klaus Hildebrand, a colleague of the
author at the University of Bonn. In light of the studies discussed in this review
essay (as well as many others), the author’s conclusion that a “comprehensive and
26. Joachim Scholtyseck, “Mauerbau und Deutsche Frage,” in ibid., 71, 77, 83.
thinking after hitler
237
sober accounting of the history of ideas in the Federal Republic remains a desideratum of historical research” is simply inaccurate.27
More productive than the rehashing of contemporary intellectual debates is
an analysis of the unintended consequences of what undoubtedly constituted
an excessive and unjustified critique of the allegedly authoritarian nature of the
Federal Republic. As Jörg Requate and Klaus Naumann show in their essays on
intellectual responses to West Germany’s encounter with terrorism in the 1970s
and on the debate on NATO’s double-track solution, it was precisely a vehement
and often fundamental critique of the state that increased appreciation for the rule
of law or the democratic majority principle. It is in these essays that the theme
of self-recognition through critique becomes most apparent. Moreover, as Holger
Nehring discusses in a suggestive article on the campaign against nuclear death
in the late 1950s, the perspective of a nuclear apocalypse also functioned as a
deterrent to the formation of a redemptive alternative to the Federal Republic.
The debate over nuclear weapons remained focused on individual conscience and
did not fuel, as in the Weimar Republic, doubts about the legitimacy of the state
or visions of a new Reich.
Contrary to the long-held depiction of the 1970s as a “red decade,” several
essays also highlight the significance of this period as the incubation phase of
a new (neo-)conservatism. Whereas the essays by Riccardo Bavai and Daniela
Münkel emphasize the by now rather familiar significance of “1968” for the formation of a postwar conservatism, the contributions by Jens Hacke and Rüdiger
Graf bring into focus some lesser-known aspects of conservatism. Hacke analyzes
a shared sense of crisis in the 1970s that manifested itself in the left-wing notion
of a “legitimation deficit” and the right-wing concept of the “ungovernability” of
the state. Whereas left-wing intellectuals saw the crisis emanating from within
society, conservative intellectuals worried about inflationary demands on the
state. Rüdiger Graf, by contrast, discusses the complex responses of conservative
intellectuals to the emergence of environmentalism as reflected in the publication on the “limits of growth” by the Club of Rome from 1972. Environmental
consciousness did not simply promote conservative tendencies but rather split
conservatives into proponents of an unbridled belief in the potential of technology and “eco-conservatives” who identified the protection of natural resources as
an essentially conservative theme. What’s so innovative in both of these contributions is that they point forward to the intellectual debates of the 1980s: left-wing
intellectuals like Habermas gradually began to embrace West German institutions
and to develop the notion of “constitutional patriotism,” whereas more conservative intellectuals sought to overcome what they saw as the emotional deficit of the
West German state by mobilizing historical consciousness on behalf of defining
a distinct West German identity.
Finally, Helmut König’s impressive essay on Hannah Arendt’s perception of
the Federal Republic opens up the topic not just chronologically but also spatially. Due to the emigration of many German intellectuals before 1945—postwar
German intellectual history did not remain limited to the Federal Republic (or,
27. Ibid., 86.
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for that matter, to German-speaking lands). As König demonstrates, Hannah
Arendt’s judgment of the Federal Republic was “damning,” as was her view of
left-wing intellectuals like Hans Magnus Enzensberger. And while in retrospect
some of her perceptions of West Germany seem harsh, even distorted, her voice
nevertheless adds an otherwise missing dimension to inter-German debates, not
the least her plea to forgo too abstract constructs in facing up to the Nazi past and
to listen instead to individual life stories.
VII
The significance of this transnational and, especially, transatlantic dimension of
West German intellectual history is explored much more fully in the last two titles
discussed here—Eva Ziege’s history of the Frankfurt School in exile, and Tim B.
Müller’s study of the American life of Herbert Marcuse. These books transcend
the purely national focus of Moses’ book as well as of most of the other studies
discussed above. Both books also offer important methodological innovations for
the writing of intellectual history: rather than celebrating the autonomy of intellectuals, they highlight the important, even decisive, significance of spatial and
institutional contexts for the formation of ideas. Ziege, for example, stresses the
decisive importance of American exile for the members of the Frankfurt Institute
of Social Research. In particular, the persistent need to secure external funding
for its research programs ultimately led to theoretical innovation. The author
stresses especially the little known and still unpublished empirical study on
“Antisemitism among American Labor” that the Institute produced in 1944–45
in cooperation with and with financial support from the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee. The labor study led the theory-oriented
German emigrés to adopt the methods of empirical social research, which then
decisively influenced their later methodology. In fact, the author highlights the
significance of the labor study as the “missing link” between the more philosophically oriented Dialectic of Enlightenment and the later, empirically based,
study, The Authoritarian Personality. It points to the empirical, American, and
distinctly Jewish origins of the Frankfurt School’s postwar writings. In addition,
Ziege also emphasizes the centrality of anti-Semitism for an understanding of
modern society in the thinking of Adorno and Horkheimer, thus revising Martin
Jay’s earlier thesis that had highlighted Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Marxism
over their Jewish identity.28
Occasionally theory-heavy and somewhat over-reliant on the categories of
Pierre Bourdieu, Ziege’s study brings into focus the external and especially
Jewish influences on the Frankfurt School in American exile. But unfortunately,
it discusses the transfer of the insights gained in American exile to postwar
Germany only in a very cursory fashion. The relevance of her study to the
intellectual history of postwar Germany is therefore limited. Some of her findings, however, are truly original and deserve further study and elaboration. For
example, she attributes the Frankfurt School’s postwar preoccupation with the
28. Martin Jay,”Frankfurter Schule und Judentum: Die Antisemitismusanalyse der Kritischen
Theorie,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 5 (1979), 439-454.
thinking after hitler
239
idea of confronting the Nazi past to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s experiences
with American-Jewish groups in American exile. She also alludes to the importance of national contexts not just for the production but also for the reception of
specific works: whereas The Authoritarian Personality became an instant classic
in the US, it was never fully translated into German. It would be interesting to
know more about the selectivity of these transatlantic transfers—why did certain
experiences in exile continue to shape the practice and program of the Frankfurt
School after the re-emigration to West Germany, whereas others appear to have
been forgotten?
German intellectual history abroad is also the focus of Tim B. Müller’s fascinating account of German emigrés in American exile during and after the Second World War. Written in an accessible, at times even gripping, style, Müller
unearths what he describes as the “secret history of intellectuals” during the Cold
War. Like Ziege, Müller highlights the significance of “institutional contexts” as
well as “material and epistemological conditions” for the formation of ideas.29
In his case, it is the shared service of German emigré intellectuals such as Franz
Neumann and Herbert Marcuse with American liberals such as H. Stuart Hughes
and Carl Schorske in American governmental institutions—first the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) during the war, then the Office of Intelligence Research
(OIR) within the State Department during the Cold War—that decisively shaped
their thinking. It was this “epistemic community,” he argues, that gave rise to
highly innovative and original analyses of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. The fact that this knowledge served intelligence and security purposes
did not diminish its intellectual validity. Rather, it was precisely the need to
“know the enemy” and to develop effective means of psychological warfare that
produced highly complex and subtle analyses of the fascist and Communist dictatorships as well as the general situation in postwar Europe. Müller also shows
how this “epistemic community” continued into the 1950s under the auspices of
philanthropy. Marcuse, for example, advanced to become an internationally recognized authority on Marxism as a member of the Russian Institute at Columbia
University, which was largely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Based on extensive research in American governmental and nongovernmental records, the book offers a series of new and original insights that revise our
understanding of the intellectual history of the Cold War. The first one concerns
the essential significance of intelligence work for these intellectuals’ approaches
to explaining some of the central questions of twentieth-century history. As
a result of their service in the OSS, for example, Marcuse and Neumann not
only developed an awareness of the annihilation of the Jews in Europe but also
a greater appreciation of the efficacy of Nazi ideology, which led Neumann
to distance himself partially from his own classic work Behemoth. As Müller
demonstrates in a later chapter, it was the encounter with Nazi Germany that
led intellectuals like Hughes and Schorske to develop a new kind of intellectual
history with “political-therapeutic” intentions. Nazism appeared to them not as
the product of a specific German particularity but as a result of the inherent
29. Müller, Krieger und Gelehrte, 8.
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irrationality in modernity. Due to their own proximity to the world of policymaking, however, they did not believe in the inevitability of Horkheimer’s and
Adorno’s “dialectic of enlightenment” but rather maintained the viability of a
reformist, left-liberal option. The Marshall Plan, to which Hughes, as Müller
shows, contributed significantly, was precisely the outgrowth of this vision of
a democratic, socialist order based on a progressive welfare state that the group
identified as the most promising antidote to Soviet Communism. It is also not
by accident that most proponents of the group began to subscribe to Freudian
psychoanalysis, which seemed to promise a mechanism to master and contain
irrationalism through rational means. Finally, this program of a new intellectual
history, which ultimately acquired a very established place in the American academy, was designed (and promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation) as a decisive
counterweight to the then dominant behaviorism in the social sciences as well as
to a self-congratulatory consensus-history advocated by Cold War liberals such
as Daniel Bell or Arthur Schlesinger.
Second, the book analyzes Herbert Marcuse’s work in the 1950s as an indication of how surprisingly subtle and nuanced research on Marxism could be
at the high point of anti-Communist hysteria during the first half of the 1950s.
Marcuse served as the chairman of “Committee on World Communism” in the
State Department that was charged with investigating the “strengths and vulnerabilities” of Communism, and he continued this work under the auspices of the
Rockefeller-funded Russian Research Institute at Columbia. While the Rockefeller Foundation had to make some tactical concessions to prevailing anti-Communism, its widespread personal network, as well as an ongoing need for realistic
assessments of the Cold War enemy, enabled it to withstand the worst onslaught
of McCarthyism. Marcuse’s and others’ analyses of Soviet Communism challenged the view of a unified Communist bloc and opposed the then regnant totalitarianism paradigm. Instead, he identified potentials for liberalization within the
Soviet Union, describing it as a modernizing, late industrial society that shared
some essential features with Western industrial societies. These analyses aimed
at understanding the Cold War enemy “from within,” and they all pointed to the
need for detente and for a relaxation of tensions between East and West.
Third, the book casts a very different light on the intellectual biography of
Marcuse. In several of the books discussed above (Moses, Specter, Freimüller,
Geppert/Hacke), Marcuse makes cameo appearances as the intellectual icon of
the transatlantic New Left. Müller’s book adds an important prehistory to the prevailing view of Marcuse and thus helps us to understand better the genesis of his
later radicalism. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s, Marcuse’s thinking was
located squarely in the left-liberal mainstream of the New Deal. Informed by the
perspective of “liberal governmentality” during the Cold War, Marcuse advocated
an essentially social-democratic alternative to Soviet Communism. Marcuse’s
affinity to mainstream liberalism was largely the product of the institutional
context in which he moved, and it resulted from the proximity to and friendship
with American liberals such as H. Stuart Hughes. Marcuse’s later radicalization,
which, as Müller writes, “surprised everyone,” was a direct result of his separation from these personal and institutional contexts and his rise as a “campus
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intellectual” during the 1960s. Yet even then, the traces of his earlier life in the
intelligence community were still visible: his One-Dimensional Man, for example,
constituted the Western counterpart to Soviet Marxism, extending the analysis of a
bureaucratic, totalitarian uniformity from the Soviet Union to the West. Marcuse’s
radicalism resulted largely from his exposure to the student movement, which
influenced him just as much or even more than he influenced the students. He
eventually disagreed with his former colleagues in the OSS concerning the issue
of the politicization of the university. Whereas Hughes insisted on the value of
academic freedom, Marcuse now criticized “repressive tolerance” and advocated
a limitation of free speech on campus. Yet his radicalism also oscillated. He never
abandoned, for example, a belief in reason or in the possibility of political action;
he denounced the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s; and, at the very end of his life,
supported the plans of his friend and former West German student leader, Rudi
Dutschke, to found a reformist Green Party.
At times Müller’s extensive analysis of the various institutional contexts in
which intellectuals operated threatens to overwhelm his focus on the central protagonists. This is also one of the reasons why the book is so long—most American
publishers would have balked at the suggestion to publish a revised dissertation
of more than 700 pages! But the book’s length also assures its empirical depth,
and the author always succeeds in returning to his central cast of characters,
whom he follows from the 1940s through the 1960s and almost into the present.
Moreover, as in the case of Ziege’s study, only parts of Müller’s book pertain
to the intellectual history of West Germany. In fact, it is one of the author’s contentions that the German emigré Marcuse eventually became an American intellectual whose thinking was shaped primarily by American contacts and contexts.
Still, the study also alludes to several moments of transatlantic connections that
make it pertinent for the intellectual history of West Germany, and that point to
possible future avenues for research. The role of the Rockefeller Foundation,
and of philanthropic organizations more generally, for example, deserves to be
explored further (note that Mitscherlich’s establishment of psychoanalysis in
West Germany strongly benefited from the support of the Rockefeller Foundation
as well). The development of area studies and of “enemy research” during the
Cold War in West Germany also warrants further exploration, especially in comparison and contrast to a more vehemently anti-Communist strand of “research on
the East” in the Federal Republic.30 Marcuse’s insights regarding the bureaucratic
nature of Soviet Communism were adopted, for example, by the West German
political scientist Siegfried Landshut, who incidentally also functioned as the
doctoral advisor of Wilhelm Hennis, Moses’ prototypical “integrationist republican.” Another West German political scientist, Peter Christian Ludz, further
developed Marcuse’s idea of the convergence of advanced industrial societies,
also with significant support of the Rockefeller Foundation. A further analysis of
these transatlantic networks and encounters might significantly enrich the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and help to bring into focus more precisely
its distinctly German features.
30. See Corinna Unger, Ostforschung in Westdeutschland: Die Erforschung des europäischen
Ostens und die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007).
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Finally, Müller’s book also offers an explanation for the emergence of a specific kind of intellectual history, one that gained significant prominence within the
American academy yet never caught on in West Germany despite the extensive
study visits of West German historians to the US. Whereas US-based historians
developed an intellectual and cultural history of the long-term origins of Nazism,
their West German counterparts located these alleged peculiarities in the realm of
social and political structures. Müller’s book suggests that the particular institutional and political origins of European intellectual history in the US might have
contributed, besides a series of other factors, to this transatlantic methodological
divergence.31 It also raises a larger question for a transatlantic history of ideas in
the postwar period, namely, why did certain transfers fail to occur?
Ziege’s and Müller’s books thus provide important correctives to an intellectual history of the postwar period that remains too strongly nation-centered.
To be sure, this focus on German specificities undoubtedly resulted from the
overwhelming significance of the Nazi past for the intellectual self-reflection of
the Federal Republic. But it is important to realize that this particular past also
exceeded its national boundaries and assumed a broader, even worldwide, significance. The postwar German confrontation with the Nazi past and the ongoing
democratization of the Federal Republic thus constituted a process that radiated
outward, and it constantly received important external impulses from outside
of Germany. This is also why intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt or Günter
Anders, who remained on the margins of postwar discourse in a both spatial and
thematic sense, deserve special attention. They were able to provide an outsider’s
perspective that transcended more parochial West German concerns. The same
observation applies to critical liberals such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Sebastian
Haffner, who spent a good deal of their intellectual lives outside of Germany
and also managed to move across the often rigidly polarized intellectual camps
in postwar Germany.
VIII
Another more general problem that the new intellectual history of the Federal
Republic raises is the vexing issue of the wider dissemination and reception of
ideas. Some of the highly abstract texts discussed by the authors above achieved
comparatively wide circulation—most notably Mitscherlich’s works, but also
texts such as Claus Offe’s Structural Problems of the Capitalist State, which sold
50,000 copies in the 1970s.32 What determined these patterns of wider cultural
reception? Why did certain texts exert a larger cultural impact beyond the narrow
confines of high intellectual debates? How, in other words, can some of the key
texts of the postwar period be contextualized and hence historicized? Among the
books reviewed here, Freimüller offers the most promising approach regarding
31. For an insightful analysis of other factors contributing to this divergence, see Philipp Stelzel,
“Working toward a Common Goal? American Views on German Historiography and German-American Scholarly Relations during the 1960s,” Central European History 41, no. 4 (2008), 639-671,
especially 656-662.
32. Cited in Jens Hacke, “Der Staat in Gefahr,” in Geppert and Hacke, eds., Streit um den Staat, 193.
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these questions. His study is not merely an intellectual biography but a history
of broader patterns and shifts in the West German public sphere that eventually
enabled the rise of Mitscherlich as one of its most important protagonists. It
would be interesting to identify more such links between high intellectual debates
and more “middlebrow” discourses in magazines, feuilletons, or radio broadcasts,
especially because some of the protagonists of the books discussed here also
became very active participants in an expanding West German public sphere.
Along similar lines, the contexts for the production of ideas also deserve further attention. By highlighting how specific institutional settings—intelligence
communities, philanthropic organizations—not just influenced but actually
shaped intellectual approaches, Müller’s study is exemplary here. It might be
similarly beneficial to connect the production of ideas in the Federal Republic
with recent studies of the evolution of the contexts in which they were formed.
In this regard, the intellectual history of the postwar period would have to be
more strongly integrated with studies of the West German public sphere,33 of the
evolving culture of discussion,34 and of publishing houses.35 Moreover, since all
intellectuals discussed here were academics, the subtle dialectics of reinvention
and transformation within various disciplines in West German academia after
1945 forms an integral context as well.36 The boundaries between intellectual
history and the history of science and other academic disciplines in the postwar
period are therefore very fluid. While the new intellectual history of the postwar
period has thus added an important dimension to our understanding of the Federal Republic, its methodological potential and possible extensions to a broader
cultural history of the production and reception of ideas in West Germany does
not yet seem to be entirely exhausted.
Finally, one is struck by at least three glaring absences in the intellectual
discourse of the postwar period and hence also of its historiography. The first
concerns the status of religion.37 It is widely known that the Christian churches
assumed a very important moral and political position in the postwar period
that by no means remained limited to purely religious questions. And while
most intellectuals discussed in this review essay would describe themselves as
secularists, it would still be useful to research potential subterranean religious
influences in their thinking. To be sure, Hacke analyzes the significance of religion as a counterweight to modern mass culture and as a foundation for the antitotalitarian emphasis on human rights in the thinking of liberal conservatives,
while Ziege and Müller highlight the significance of Jewish identity for Marcuse
and other members of the Frankfurt School.38 But the intellectual history of the
33. Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen
Medienöffentlichkeit, 1945–1973 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006).
34. Nina Verheyen, Diskussionslust: Eine Kulturgeschichte des “besseren Arguments” in Westdeutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010).
35. Olaf Blaschke, Verleger machen Geschichte: Buchhandel und Historiker seit 1945 im deutschbritischen Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010).
36. Bernd Weisbrod, Akademische Vergangenheitspolitik: Beiträge zur Wissenschaftskultur der
Nachkriegszeit (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002).
37. For a similar point, see Hodenberg in Discussion Forum, “The Intellectual History of the
Federal Republic,” 256.
38. Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit, 245-256. On the latter, see also Samuel Moyn, “The
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postwar period has not yet completely absorbed the historiographical critique
of the notion of a linear secularization after 1945 and its concurrent emphasis
on the persistence of distinct religious milieus of religious beliefs, at least in the
early Federal Republic.39 At the same time, as Benjamin Ziemann has shown, the
Catholic church explicitly sought to draw on the insights of modern social science
and psychology.40 The interactions and mutual influences between both Christian
churches and postwar intellectuals thus has to be studied in both directions.
Second, while intellectual history might be, by definition, elitist, the complete
absence of both women and gender—either as protagonists or as subjects of
analysis—in postwar intellectual discourse is nevertheless quite striking. The
relentlessly patriarchal order of the 1940s and 1950s might partly explain this
situation, as does the particularly difficult structural conditions that women
encountered (and, one might add, continue to encounter) in the German academy.
The problem is therefore both historical and historiographical. For one, future
research might have to explain why the process of postwar Westernization in the
Federal Republic did not yield female intellectuals of the power and importance
of Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, or Susan Sontag. At the same time, postwar intellectual discourse itself has to be subjected to a gendered analysis that
would pay particular attention to specific forms of gendered exclusion in West
Germany—perhaps along the lines of the feminist critique of Habermas’s concept
of the public sphere.
Third, a similar omission exists with respect to ethnicity. Although West
Germany had become, for all intents and purposes, a multicultural society by the
1970s, this aspect of postwar West German society is almost completely absent
from the dominant intellectual discourses of the postwar period. This blank spot
seems especially striking in view of the increasing centrality of the Holocaust
for postwar intellectual debates—West German intellectuals, it appears, were
not quite successful in connecting the increasingly multicultural nature of their
present with their deliberations on racism and ethnic cleansing in the past. Yet,
as the work of Rita Chin and others has shown, West Germany actually saw the
emergence of a distinct migrant literature and discourse in German, largely formulated by Turkish intellectuals.41 Although this discourse was closely related
to mainstream intellectual debates and offered, among other insights, distinct
perspectives on the German past and the Holocaust, it evolved largely separately
and in isolation from the central debates over West German identity and democracy. Placing women and minorities into the intellectual history of the Federal
Republic thus constitutes perhaps the most important desideratum of the new
intellectual history of the Federal Republic, and it might also offer new potential
for the methodological innovation of this strand of the historiography.
First Historian of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011), 56-79.
39. Mark Ruff, The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar Germany, 1945–1965 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
40. Benjamin Ziemann, Katholische Kirche und Sozialwissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2007).
41. Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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245
Still, the books under review here contribute significantly to a new and more
nuanced understanding of the Federal Republic’s postwar history. We now know
that postwar West German history was more than the history of its economic
success. It was also the process of the gradual emergence of a democratic way
of thinking to which the intellectuals discussed in this essay contributed a great
deal. Not only the content of these intellectual debates mattered but also the fact
that they occurred at all. These intellectual controversies fostered a vigorous culture of debate and a high level of reflection over the meanings of democracy in
the aftermath of war, fascism, and genocide. As such, the intellectual history of
the Federal Republic demonstrates how a postwar and post-fascist society managed to generate the internal impulses for a process of inner liberalization and
democratization that proved to be, despite nagging and long-lasting doubts to the
contrary, irreversible.
This crucial contribution of intellectuals to postwar democratization notwithstanding, however, the intellectual history of the Federal Republic should not be
reduced to a functional component of its postwar stabilization. This was not just
a Whiggish history of gradual (self-) democratization, but also a history of tortured self-reflections, bitter semantic civil wars, and, frequently, intense fears and
anxieties. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to dismiss postwar intellectuals’
often bleak assessment of the political reality of the Federal Republic as exaggerated and misplaced. Yet these heightened concerns and excessive sensibilities
were peculiar to intellectuals in postwar West Germany and therefore deserve to
be analyzed and explained rather than ridiculed. The obsessions, misdiagnoses,
and false paths taken by postwar intellectuals are therefore just as interesting as
their contributions to postwar stabilization and democratization. The widespread
skepticism of West German intellectuals regarding the democratic potential of
the Federal Republic thus reflected the daunting challenges of constructing a
democratic political culture after Auschwitz. It was the experience and memory
of National Socialism and of the Holocaust that raised the stakes of postwar
intellectual debates and gave them their truly existential significance. In seeking
to define democracy in postwar Germany, intellectuals never quite escaped the
long shadow of a uniquely catastrophic past. But the new intellectual history of
the Federal Republic also testifies to the possibility and vibrancy of thinking after
Hitler.
Frank Biess
University of California – San Diego