Weimar Thought is an idiosyncratic collection. The book covers a wide range of topics on the intellectual history of the Weimar Republic, from poetry to biology, sociology to art history, politics to film theory. Yet, this is no comprehensive survey or handbook of Weimar thought. The essays focus on discrete problems of interpretation and contextualization, and the coverage is selective. While a few contributors discuss neglected thinkers, most focus on the giants of German science and letters, including some who are more in vogue today than they were in interwar Europe. Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, and Carl Schmitt appear frequently; cranky ideologues like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, eugenicists like Alfred Ploetz, and forgotten doyens of Weimar scholarship like the historian Friedrich Meinecke generally do not. The emphasis is on thinkers who demonstrate Weimar's importance as a “birthplace of European intellectual modernity” (2).

According to the editors, the collection aims to explore Weimar thought within its political, social, and cultural contexts. In their introduction, Gordon and McCormick criticize the “terrific burst of dehistoricized ‘theory’” that has “plundered the past for its insights,” while obscuring the “differences between past and present” (2). The seventeen insightful and well-polished essays echo this point, though less polemically, by showing how perceptions of “crisis” after World War I decisively shaped intellectual projects, dialogues, and debates. As Cathryn Carson argues, Weimar thinkers were united by “the sense of living in a particular moment” (179). The challenges and opportunities of that moment provide a common thread among the various essays and a dramatic hook for readers who may not ordinarily wade into such a diverse sea of topics.

Carson's essay on the natural sciences is the most striking example of the interpretive payoffs of contextualizing Weimar scholarship. World War I and its aftermath, she argues, caused a crisis in the triumphant narrative of progress that, for decades, had buoyed research in mathematics, biology, and physics. The tottering of old paradigms created the opportunity for new advances. Carson cites Werner Heisenberg's assertion that “it is not by chance” that quantum mechanics emerged after a catastrophic war had demonstrated that “there were no firm foundations for our existence” (190). The Weimar moment, Carson argues, demanded “methodological reflection” (192) that had profound and often highly productive consequences for scientific work.

The four essays on social science and social theory similarly suggest how a crisis in ideologies and institutions triggered bursts of scholarly creativity. John McCormick argues that the growth of administrative social welfare measures after 1918 challenged liberal principles of constitutionalism and legal formalism. Liberal theorists grappled brilliantly with the question of how to grant legitimacy to the social state and tether it to the rule of law, but it was Carl Schmitt, according to McCormick, who, with “perverse” but effective logic, resolved this problem most completely by arguing for a single “law-giver” ruling by popular acclaim (69). David Kettler and Colin Loader demonstrate how the postwar crisis drew Weimar scholars to the work of Max Weber and Georg Simmel and led to the institutionalization of sociology. Dana Villa's piece on the legacy of Max Weber, and Mitchell Ash's on developments in psychology, describe the fragmentation of Weimar scholarship in ideological clashes and methodological disputes based on wildly different appropriations of prewar theory.

The four essays on Weimar philosophy all revolve, in some measure, around the relationship of philosophy to history and to the German ideal of culture. John Michael Krois provides an especially lucid summary of Ernst Cassirer's theory of symbolism and the power of myth. Frederick Beiser, Charles Bambach, and Peter Gordon map out aspects of the “crisis of historicism.” Beiser argues that, for neo-Kantians, “faith in progress and the creative powers of man came to grief in the Great War” (126). Surveying a diverse set of writings on religion, Gordon sees the emergence of a “crisis theology” centered on a revolt against liberal-historicist assumptions. Bambach situates Heidegger's radical rejection of historical narratives of progress and decline in relation to the work of Oswald Spengler, Ernst Troeltsch, and the neo-Kantians.

The essays on the arts and literature hold the fewest surprises, likely because contextualization has long been a dominant theme in this scholarship. John Maciuika tells a largely familiar story about the origins and development of the Bauhaus. Karin Gunnemann revisits the political education of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, and Alfred Döblin, while Michael Jennings describes the origins of a “new cultural criticism” in the short “figures of thought” (Denkbilder) produced by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Sabine Hake and Michael Steinberg trace the emergence of new “ways of seeing” (328) in, respectively, Weimar film criticism and art history. Martin Ruehl argues against the tendency to see poet Stefan George and his circle as a proto-fascist cult, reminding us of the multivalent implications of George's work.

Some of the most innovative essays are the hardest to categorize. Susanne Marchand's essay on orientalism describes the engagement of Weimar intellectuals with “eastern wisdom” as an antidote to “western despair” (342). Tracie Matysik's contribution—the only essay that delves into gender—analyzes how leading Weimar feminists reformulated their concepts of women's “feminine subjectivity” (362) in the wake of legal emancipation. Martin Jay deconstructs the failure of the Weimar left to get over its fantasy of a “universal class with a single revolutionary consciousness” (390) and to develop strategies for broader appeal.

The book's concluding chapter, by Anson Rabinbach, explores aesthetic, political, scholarly, and popular culture in the Nazi era. His analysis implicitly justifies both the diversity of this collection and the authors' overall refusal to identify a specific zeitgeist or offer neat conclusions about the failures of Weimar culture. National Socialism, Rabinbach argues, was a “cultural synthesis fusing diverse and incompatible elements” (397). This collection, by providing rich and suggestive analyses of Weimar thought in all its messy glory and disturbing power, opens up further possibilities for analyzing this historical moment in relationship to subsequent catastrophes and to our own time.