The German Idea of Democracy

Abstract

The German Idea of Democracy Gangolf Hübinger (bio) Robert E. Norton, The Crucible of German Democracy. Ernst Troeltsch and the First World War (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2021), XV + 649pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-159828-9. €129.00. The theologian, philosopher, and politician Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) belonged, like Max Weber, to the classical thinkers of the modern age. Weber and Troeltsch were friends and rivals. For a time they lived in Heidelberg in the same house on Ziegelhäuser Landstraße. Their main works, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, are regularly compared.1 Politically, both were committed to liberal reforms to the German Empire, to a Verständigungsfrieden with the Entente powers, and to the introduction of parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic. To this end, both scholars acted as prominent campaigners for the German Democratic Party (DDP).2 Far more research has been done on Max Weber's political profile than on Ernst Troeltsch's. It is therefore extremely welcome that Robert E. Norton has now penned a very detailed and thoroughly researched study on Ernst Troeltsch's understanding of democracy and his political activities during the First World War. Norton, a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Notre Dame, has written a widely [End Page 125] acclaimed biography of Stefan George.3 In his latest study of World War I, he evaluates an impressive array of contemporary writings, speeches, and manifestos in order to situate and highlight Troeltsch in the fierce controversies among German scholars and intellectuals over wartime goals and reforms of the political system. In many respects, he was able to draw on the Kritische Ernst Troeltsch Gesamtausgabe.4 Norton has not written a biography of the entire life span of the liberal theologian and philosopher of history as such. His intellectual biography is contextual and is guided by two theses. Modern German democracy emerged in the internal battles of ideas during the First World War, before the American President Woodrow Wilson exerted external pressure with his wartime goal 'to make the world safe for democracy'. And democracy in Germany was certainly not a result of the defeat in the war. Rather, there had been a 'process of social transformation' early after the beginning of the war, pushed by scholars such as Hugo Preuß, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze. Ernst Troeltsch occupied 'a preeminent place among them, in these wartimes debates'. Troeltsch, as an opinion leader of German 'self liberation' (11), requires an historical re-evaluation. Troeltsch's permanent struggle for 'the necessity of a democratic future for Germany' has been unjustly forgotten in German historical culture. With his monograph, Norton does not want to celebrate his protagonist as a 'hero', although he certainly was one in the sense of Dieter Thomä's book Why Democracies Need Heroes.5 Norton's Crucible of German Democracy comes at the right time. For some time now, there has been a fierce dispute in Germany about the opportunities and threats to democracy in the past and present. Is democracy, as the Western type of political rule, in a deep existential crisis today, and how, by comparison, did contemporaries in the World War and the Weimar Republic view and judge the crises of Germany's revolutionary reordering? Norton wants to set his own accent here and has chosen Ernst Troeltsch as a key figure for this purpose. In the obituaries in 1923, Troeltsch was compared to Albert Einstein, and Norton adopts the image of the 'Einstein of culture' for his introduction, bringing Troeltsch into new focus as the leading figure in German intellectual history. Norton is full of admiration for [End Page 126] Troeltsch's style of thinking: 'his almost alchemical talent for integrating vast and disparate amounts of information within a generous framework of dazzling subtlety and sophistication' (24f.). Troeltsch earned this reputation with his two major works, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches and the unfinished work Historicism and its Problems, but also through his more than 1,300 items of literary criticisms and reviews in the entire field of cultural studies.6 Troeltsch was able to transfer his authority as...