The Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

For the humanities and social sciences, the Weimar Republic was a period of dynamic change. Academics from these fields were deeply engaged in public debates and intellectual controversies about the nature of modernity and the future of the German nation after its defeat in the First World War. The national-conservative majority of the faculty kept their distance from the new democracy, criticizing new forms of cultural and political pluralism as being symptomatic of a crisis of national culture. However, the search for intellectual orientation fuelled new approaches in the humanities: ‘objective idealism’, holistic approaches, and new research methods opened up innovative perspectives in history, theology, philosophy, and literary criticism. Yet these new approaches had ambivalent political outcomes: on the one hand, they led to an engagement with the mixture of nationalist völkisch ideas that became state ideology between 1933 and 1945. On the other, during the Weimar era methodological realignment was embraced by many critical approaches in the humanities and social sciences, whose proponents went into exile in 1933.