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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: [email protected]
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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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