Should one think that nothing new and exciting can be said about postwar German memory politics and national identity, reading Dirk Moses's German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past will convince one otherwise. In this bold work, Moses surveys five decades of German grappling with its past, present, and future to produce a new conceptual framework for understanding postwar German political and cultural development. Chiefly, Moses draws a distinction between institutional politics and “political emotion” to account for the contradictory realities that have made postwar Germany such a puzzle: on the one hand, the creation over time of a durable, transpartisan consensus about the value of democratic institutions and processes; and on the other hand, and in the domain of political emotion, the near-ceaseless, intensely partisan conflicts over questions of German guilt, responsibility, and national identity. With this bifurcated model, Moses can acknowledge the long-term success of postwar Germany as a political project while giving voice to the strife that has made its evolution so dynamic.

The book's success rests on three main innovations. First, it focuses neither on the Federal Republic's founding generation (Konrad Adenauer et al.) nor on the 68ers, often credited with inducing a “second founding,” but on a generation Moses calls the “45ers.” Born largely in the 1920s, members of this group had vivid memories of the war and the German defeat, if not also direct involvement in the military and the Nazi party, but were not the primary perpetrator generation. Moses credits this generation, which famously includes Jürgen Habermas and Günter Grass but also many other thinkers, with doing much of the difficult work of establishing the terms of discussion about the past and integrating that discussion within commitments to constitutional republicanism.

Second, Moses adopts a refreshingly expansive view of intellectual life to include not only prominent “public intellectuals” but also academics of lesser renown, thinking politicians, and journalists. He thus presents a diversity and richness to debates lost with the commonplace focus on just a few figures, such as Habermas. Finally, Moses introduces analytic categories extremely valuable for parsing not only intellectual positions but entire modes of subjectivity and outlook built in response to the German past.

In among the most valuable, Moses differentiates between “redemptive” and “integrationist” republicans. The former, dwelling mostly on the left, saw the Nazis' defeat as an opportunity to create an emphatically just society that would improve on the perceived limitations of the problematically liberal and capitalist “west.” The latter, grouped in the center and to the right, warned of the danger of big ideas and strong ideologies and sought the more modest construction of a working democracy thoroughly aligned with liberal anticommunism. In their often bitter rivalry, each group indulged the “Weimar syndrome,” accusing the other of repeating the sins of the interwar years in such a way as to tempt a fascist reconstruction. Yet, over time, they functioned to check and balance the other, neutralizing the extremes. For Moses, both constituencies were necessary and valuable for building democracy (though his greater sympathy is with the redemptionists).

Equally fascinating is Moses's presentation of different options for seeing the past and interpellating one's Germanness in relation to it. Some Germans sought after the war to disavow their Germanness as much as possible, sometimes by fleeing the country outright. Others, deemed by Moses the “German Germans,” retained a strong sense of Germanness but sought to make that affiliation bearable by, for example, relativizing the Holocaust or pointing to allegedly benign aspects of the pre-Nazi past. The most interesting, and ultimately influential, group is the “non-German Germans.” These Germans, whether in thought or deed, have at once placed the “stigma” of Nazism and the Holocaust at the enduring center of German identity; zealously condemned residual prejudice and authoritarianism, as well as efforts at denial; and, most recently, redefined Germany in powerfully multicultural, transnational, and even post-national ways. Though this taxonomy may not capture every possibility for subjectivity, it illuminates the main currents of identity and can be productively applied to the debates currently animating German politics and culture.

For all its virtues, Moses's work is not without flaws. At times it felt too erudite, too thorough. There is a value in defining key terms, but Moses's lengthy excurses on the meaning of such things as “generation,” “experience,” and “structure” grew distracting. His cataloguing of positions in given debates was so extensive that I sometimes forgot what was being debated. Dealing with 1968 and 1977, the periods I know best, he sought to avoid rehearsing well-known events. But this gave much of his discussion of public discourse a level of abstraction and remove from the very concrete episodes that often inspired it. The ideas he so skillfully dissects therefore lack the immediacy and embeddedness of their moment. Finally, there is almost no inclusion of women's voices or treatment of gender whatsoever in the entire narrative. This doubtless reflects, in part, the domination of intellectual life by men (in Germany, as elsewhere). But women surely had some purchase on the weighty issues of memory, democracy, and national identity. Ideally, Moses would have found a gendered domain of discourse and affect in which he could have recovered women's agency in a collective, national process.

These limitations, however, do little to diminish the overall achievement of this ambitious project, which crackles with insight.