Princeton University Press - Weimar Thought

Weimar Thought

A Contested Legacy

Edited by Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2013 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

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Cover art: Raoul Hausmann (18861971), The Spirit of Our Age (Mechanical Head) , 1919.

Wooden head with various objects attached to it. 32.5 x 21 x 20 cm. AM 1974-6.

Photo Credit: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. ARS, NY.

2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

All Rights Reserved

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-13511-3

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Weimar thought : a contested legacy / Edited by Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-13510-6 (alk. paper) 1. GermanyIntellectual life20th century. 2. GermanyHistory19181933. 3. Social sciencesGermanyHistory20th century. 4. HumanitiesGermanyHistory20th century. 5. Political cultureGermanyHistory20th century. I. Gordon, Peter Eli, editor of compilation II. McCormick, John P., 1966editor of compilation

DD239.W365 2013

943.085dc23

2012038154

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Pro and Ideal Sans

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick

David Kettler and Colin Loader

Mitchell G. Ash

John P. McCormick

Dana Villa

John Michael Krois

Frederick Beiser

Charles Bambach

Peter E. Gordon

Cathryn Carson

Michael Jennings

Karin Gunnemann

Martin A. Ruehl

Sabine Hake

John V. Maciuika

Michael P. Steinberg

Suzanne Marchand

Tracie Matysik

Martin Jay

Anson Rabinbach

This volume brings together a broad range of papers on diverse themes pertaining to the intellectual and cultural history of the Weimar Republic. It includes a great variety of contributions by scholars affiliated with manifold disciplines, including, but not limited to, history, political theory, philosophy, sociology, the history of science, film theory, art history, and literary criticism. Our aim has been to provide a critical companion for specialized research that, while adding to current scholarship, would nonetheless remain accessible to the more general reader. Few if any single-volume works have succeeded at offering a unified portrait of the rich developments of Weimar thought, and we believe the time is right to offer a guidebook to the German interwar era, a compendium focused primarily on the major intellectual trends of the time.

What was Weimar thought? To a remarkable degree, much of the literature we now regard as foundational for modern thought derives from a single historical moment: the astonishing cultural and intellectual ferment of interwar Germany circa 191933. The era of the Weimar Republic was arguably the foremost crucible of intellectual innovation in political theory and sociology, cultural criticism and film theory, psychology and legal theory, physics and biology, and modernism in all of its diverse forms. Its brief lifespan saw the emergence of intellectuals, scholars, and critics who rank amongst the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. A representative list would no doubt include philosophical radicals such as Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler; theorists of political crisis such as Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jnger, Hannah Arendt, Hans Kelsen, and Oswald Spengler; innovators in theology such as Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, and Ernst Bloch; and exponents of aesthetic rebellion in literature, film, drama, music, and the fine arts, including Alfred Dblin and Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Krenek, Hannah Hch and Kurt Schwitters. No doubt the list could well be expanded to far greater length.

Intellectual labors of the era were noteworthy, too, for the way in which they exemplifed a boldness of inquiry that would, in current jargon, be characterized as interdisciplinary. Scholars, critics, and artists frequently cut across the customary boundaries separating philosophy, history, and artistic criticism, political theory and theology, not to mention science and metaphysics. In this respect it might be argued that the leading figures in Weimar thought not only anticipated, but actually helped to found and inspire the ongoing interdisciplinarity of our own day. This is especially obvious when one considers the contemporary actuality of these theorists, whose ideas, even today, continue to enrich academic and cultural discourse within and beyond the university. An intellectual-historical survey of Weimar thought in all its many facets is thus in no small measure a pre-history of our own intellectual present.

On some of these topics much has been written already. Yet the increased specialization of research has all-too-frequently been achieved at the expense of contextual and historical understanding. Scholars have often failed to recognize just how much the leading intellectuals of that time worked within a shared intellectual horizon. Especially in the past twenty years, we have witnessed a terrific burst of dehistoricized theory, a mode of inquiry that plundered the past for its insights but often neglected its historical character and effaced the salient (though by no means insurmountable) differences between past and present.

But the largely ahistorical character of modern theory is now fading, thanks in part to recent innovations in historical and philosophical method, and, perhaps most especially, to the renaissance of intellectual history, a discipline which only twenty years ago seemed in decline. The great efflorescence of intellectual history in the last two decades has helped to break down many of the previously-enforced boundary lines between the humanities and the social sciences. Under the auspices of a new generation of philosophers, political theorists, historians, and literary-cultural critics, scholars have begun to appreciate the fruitful tension between hermeneutic contextualism and transcendental claims to truth. The time is therefore ripe to bring these insights to bear on the theoretical heritage of the Weimar era. A major advantage of this interdisciplinary volume of essays is that it demonstrates both the unity and diversity of this inheritance, and it identifies anew those characteristics that helped to make Weimar a veritable birthplace of European intellectual modernity.

In his synthetic history of the Weimar Republic published over twenty years ago, the German historian Detlev Peukert observed that our present image of Weimar is marked by an irresolvable paradox: it combines the hopeful picture of avant-garde cultural achievement with the bleak picture of political breakdown and social misery. For Peukert this paradox was not only resistant to resolution, it was in point of fact emblematic of classical modernity as such: The tensions of the age were taken to represent the conflicts and crises of the modern era itself. But the governing theme of a classical phase in modern history merely names without wholly explaining the paradox Peukert sought to diagnose. The historians impulse to unify divergent features of a political-cultural epoch is unlikely to prove genuinely satisfying since it derives from the nave and ultimately un historical expectation that every age must somehow subscribe to a common theme. The paradoxical character of the Weimar Republic no longer strikes us as paradoxical once we abandon the retroactive search for a governing logic and open ourselves to the diversity and disunity of narratives within any given historical epoch.