German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past

This book examines the relentlessly polarized West German intellectual debates about the Nazi past.

A. Dirk Moses (Author)

9780521864954, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 September 2007

304 pages
24 x 16.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.572 kg

'In this compelling and accessible intellectual history of West Germany, the author explores how the past comes to bear on the present.' The Historian

This book analyzes how West German intellectuals debated the Nazi past and democratic future of their country. Rather than proceeding event by event, it highlights the underlying issues at stake: the question of a stigmatized nation and the polarized reactions to it that structured German discussion and memory of the Nazi past. Paying close attention to the generation of German intellectuals born during the Weimar Republic - the forty-fivers - this book traces the drama of sixty years of bitter public struggle about the meaning of the past: did the Holocaust forever stain German identity so that Germans could never again enjoy their national emotions like other nationalities? Or were Germans unfairly singled out for the crimes of their ancestors? By explaining how the perceived pollution of family and national life affected German intellectuals, the book shows that public debates cannot be isolated from the political emotions of the intelligentsia.

1. Stigma and structure in German memory
2. The languages of republicanism and West German political generations
3. The Forty-Fivers: a generation between fascism and democracy
4. The German German - the integrative republicanism of Wilhelm Hennis
5. The non-German German - the redemptive republicanism of Jurgen Habermas
6. Theory and practice: science, technology, and the republican university
7. The crisis of the republic: 1960–7
8. 1967 and its aftermath
9. The structure of discourse in the 1980s and 1990s
10. History, multiculturalism, and the non-German German
11. German Germans and the old nation
12. Political theology and the dissolution of the underlying structure.

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