Structuring German postwar ideologies: review of A. Dirk Moses, German intellectuals and the Nazi past

Abstract

It is not only because much of the ideological landscape of postwar West Germany remains to borrow one historian's metaphor uncharted intellectual territory that German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past comes as such a key contribution to the historiography of twentieth-century thought. To be sure, while certain canonized figures, such as Jurgen Habermas, Gunter Grass, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, and even the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have received adequate attention in Anglophone scholarship, we have precious few studies in English on many of the thinkers examined here by Moses. These are the lesser-known postwar historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and educationalists (p. 10) who served on government advisory committees, became ministers of culture and education, or in other ways decisively shaped the political discourse of the Federal Republic. For that reason alone Moses was guaranteed to cover new ground. But it is ultimately the innovative way in which he has mapped his subject matter that makes this work stand out, not only as an indispensable guide to early debates about Nazism and West German democracy, but more generally as a distinctively original model for writing about intellectuals and their ideas. This book is not a conventional intellectual history, we are told in the introduction (p. 10). Part of what makes that statement true is the attention Moses pays to fields that is all too often terra incognita for intellectual historians namely, structural anthropology and the voluminous but neglected literature on German social psychology. His case for integrating research on family life, transgenerational transmission, and the like into a history of intellectuals rests on the deceptively profound insight that political ideas and ideologies, arguably nowhere more so than in postwar Germany, often possess existential significance for their articulators. Drawing on Erving Goffman's theories of social drama, Moses presents the political