In 1949, upon his return to Germany from exile in United States, literary critic Richard Alewyn was alarmed to find a carefree Goethe cult, allerorten schon wieder anschickt, Goethe zu feiern, als ob dies fur einen Deutschen die naturlichste Sache von der Welt ware, als ob gar nichts geschehen ware, oder als ob irgend etwas damit ungeschehen gemacht werden konne1 Dismayed and annoyed, Alewyn warned his compatriots: Zwischen uns and Weimar liegt Buchenwald, [...] Was aber nicht geht ist, sich Goethes zu riihmen and Hitler zu leugnen. How did Auschwitz come about? Are Buchenwald and Weimar really so near to each other? Why was German variation of fascism, National Socialism, so particularly brutal? These and similar questions have been raised and answered in myriad ways time and again. Yet, as diverse as debate has been over exceptionalism of Germany's road to modernity, intensity of dispute itself indicates a common point of reference. The Sonderweg thesis is not a matter of mere details of academic research; rather, it lies at a point of intersection between historical development of a nation and its simultaneous self interpretation. Critics of Sonderweg thesis warned famously of dangers of a teleological and polarizing orientation, beyond reality, to National Socialism. England and France, said these critics, must not provide standards for development. The concept of bourgeois revolution is a myth: other countries have had their own traditions of authoritarianism and their deficits regarding democracy In addition, orienting German history to bad times was supposed to hinder development of a normal sense of national identity. Supporters of Sonderweg thesis, on other hand, called attention to failures of German revolutions, to delayed formation of nation-state, and to certain specifically German strengths in bureaucratic, authoritarian institutions, together with notable parliamentary weaknesses. Generally, supporters of Sonderweg thesis would take historical course of Western Europe to be and exemplary, and, as reader is no doubt aware, would often cite evidence beyond institutional developments, reaching to intellectual history and history of states of mind. Such arguments present a path of specifically German authoritarian mentalities, from Luther to Hitler via Nietzsche, a path laid with the destruction of reason, political incapacitation, abstract intellectuality, and pre-modern ways of thinking. Admittedly, intense dispute over Sonderweg has long since abated. The expression itself has become somewhat unfashionable. More cautious language of a specific path to modernity, or Eigenweg, or of consciousness of a Sonderweg, eases evidence's burden, as then no philosophy of history will dictate that exemplary development be exhibited, more or less, by Western European states. But while debates have subsided, this does not mean at all that issue has been settled as to whether any specifically German conditions, beside immediate political and historical events, played a part, in long run, in making possible success and acceptance of Nazi regime. I would like to argue that such longer-term potentialities included an element which has not received much scholarly attention so far, and which may only be understood as part of a new kind of transdisciplinary exploration. My topic includes first, reactions of German learned and academic elites, Bildungsburgertum, to a triumphant cultural modernism, as detected in linguistic traces, and second, closely related to this, a certain susceptibility to National Socialism, which did indeed present itself as rescuer of German culture. With these remarks I hope to make it easier to understand why Weimar and Buchenwald are not very far apart. For this precise locality symbolizes a specifically German sequence, attainment of a normative peak followed by a plunge into depths, a succession that developed among dynamic interplay of semantic elements in arts discourse among Bildungsburger, artistic productivity, and political destructiveness. …