German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past
A. Dirk Moses
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0521145716
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book examines West German intellectual debates about the Nazi past by explaining why they were so relentlessly polarized. Germans argued about the viability of their very nationality: was it stigmatized, stained, or polluted by crimes of the Third Reich? Or was it really like any other nation? The book examines how German intellectuals either defended national traditions or condemned them and instead advocated alternative traditions. Although the book proceeds chronologically, it differs from other works, which are event-based narratives, by highlighting this underlying structure of identity and dispute.
Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity
Nazi Germany: History in an Hour
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity
The Third Reich Sourcebook (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
Conservatives like Heimpel who insisted on university autonomy as well as progressives like Habermas who sought to realize the ideal in radically different circumstances. Schelsky insisted that it was inapplicable because Humboldt and Fichte had proposed a radical distance between the university and bourgeois society. It was not just a matter of academic freedom but also academic isolation. Because this situation was unrealizable today, universities should resign themselves to being solely.
Business tycoon who profited greatly under the Nazis by employing slave laborers, to whom his family has never paid compensation, moved his modern art exhibition to Berlin after protesters successfully hounded it from Switzerland. Herr Flick could not comprehend the motives of those who objected to the separation of his love for modern art and the moral issues surrounding his father’s ¨ business dealings before 1945. Neither could Chancellor Schroder, who opened the exhibition by calling for the.
The political world as a whole, an alienation that culminated in the German fascism that they all experienced in some form. From them, as from Burckhardt and Weber, Hennis learned to see the crisis of the twentieth century as a problem of European modernity rather than a German “special path” away from modernity. The challenge for Germans, then, was to become emancipated citizens who exercised freedom rather than be cowed subjects of an alienated state. “Working through the Nazi Past” was.
Thought too much attention to the totalitarian experience would issue in an irrational “limitless excitement” (Aufregung) that could tip into “petit bourgeois resignation.”110 Excessive reflection on the Nazi past, he thought, reproduced the customary German lopsided relationship to politics and should therefore be avoided. What Hennis had in mind were judgments that relativized the difference between the Federal Republic and eastern bloc countries because the former was viewed as essentially as.
A sensitive, intellectual personality who kept an apolitical distance to the world of great ideologies.12 Confessionally, Habermas’s hometown of Gummersbach is dominated by pietism, and its culture of inwardness, spiritual rebirth, and “new reformation” no doubt suffused the Habermas household: his grandfather had been a Protestant minister and head of the local seminary.13 Habermas joined the Hitler Youth despite his disability, serving as a field nurse toward the war’s end, but avoiding the.