German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal
Culture and Politics after 1945

This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Sean A. Forner (Author)

9781107049574, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 October 2014

396 pages, 10 b/w illus. 1 map
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.4 cm, 0.76 kg

'Sean Forner has produced an impressive work of contemporary intellectual history. While the focus on a group of German intellectuals whom Forner calls 'engaged democrats' in the immediate post-war period may sound limited in scope, he actually deals with a considerable number of significant figures, and the study reaches beyond the period of four-power occupation of Germany from 1945 to 1949 to follow the trajectories of a range of key political thinkers into the 1960s.' Andrew G. Bonnell, European History Quarterly

This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.

Introduction: democratic renewal and Germany's 'zero hour'
1. Germans, occupiers, and the democratization project
2. Rethinking democracy: freedom, order, participation
3. Renewing culture: the 'unpolitical German' between past and future
4. Subjects of politics: publicness, parties, elites
5. A parliament of spirit? Mobilizing the cultural nation
6. Into East Germany: intelligentsia and the Apparat
7. Into West Germany: nonconformists and the Restoration
8. 1968, 1989, and the legacies of participation
Select bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], European history [HBJD]