The Crucible of German Democracy. Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War

Abstract

In this magisterial volume Robert E. Norton addresses a simple question: how and why did Germany become a parliamentary democracy in 1918? The scale of the undertaking is daunting, especially as so many accounts of the period have been coloured by the tragic course of what came later. The period has to be read against the complex constitution and political dynamics of the Prussian state and the German empire, whose underlying tensions surfaced in the First World War as Germany suffered setbacks which made constitutional change impossible to resist. Norton rises to the challenge. Seeking to read the period on its own terms, he emphasizes the contingencies of German history: German democracy was not doomed to fail. Norton approaches his task through the writings of Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), the polymathic Heidelberg systematic theologian who migrated to the Philosophical Faculty at Berlin in 1915 and who rivalled Adolf von Harnack as a public intellectual. In lectures, cultural commentary, journalism and academic writings, Troeltsch was one of the most prolific and intelligent interpreters of his own society. The gradual publication of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe has made his work easily accessible, and Norton has used virtually everything that Troeltsch wrote to develop a historical narrative shaped by a liberal, critical thinker engaging with his own society. Much of the book constitutes detailed exposition of texts that have never been translated into English, which is a major achievement in itself and will serve to introduce Troeltsch to a new generation of historians and theologians, few of whom will have access to the original language.