What is the role of the humanities in democratic society? How can they help train informed and critical citizens, even as they are eclipsed by the quantitative sciences? In this thoughtful book, Robert Powers explores how German thinkers grappled with those questions a century ago. He reconstructs the efforts of humanists to craft new scholarship and curriculum in response to their country's devastating defeat in World War I and the chronic instability that plagued the Weimar Republic. Somewhat unusually, the book tells its story through the biographies of two public intellectuals: Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack (1854–1930) and classicist Werner Jaeger (1888–1961). While they belonged to different generations and disciplines, both wrote passionately and extensively about humanities’ place in the public sphere. And both were involved in debates and reforms to higher education.
The book's first part focuses on Harnack, who today is known mostly to specialists of religious thought but in the early twentieth century was one of Germany's most famous scholars. Like many in his Protestant and educated milieu, Harnack understood Christianity as a project of individual self-enlightenment. In several publications, such as the hugely popular What is Christianity? (1900), he claimed that Christianity's core was the search for universal ethics. The purpose of religious scholarship was to “liberate” it from “external” influences, such as Greek or Medieval thought, which obscured the Gospel behind dogmatic and institutional traditions. What is more, Christianity was for Harnack synonymous with progress. Humanity's quest toward liberation reflected God's promise of redemption. As a supporter of the Weimar Republic, Harnack argued that this understanding of Christianity made it especially useful for democratic life. Theology, he insisted, provided young Germans with the spiritual tools to engage with others as equals, a conviction that helped his successful campaign to preserve theology in German universities.
At the center of the book's second part is Jaeger, who enjoyed international fame as a philologist and educator. Unlike Harnack, Jaeger believed that Germany's cultural life should be based on the classics. Greek philosophy and literature could provide the youth with the capacity for self-examination, which a stable and pluralist society required. Jaeger was especially adamant that engaging with ancient texts would help young men and women transcend the confines of national culture. Against state authorities’ increasing focus on German histories and texts in school curricula, the classics would encourage reflections on universal themes and the cultivation of humanist sensibilities. Jaeger was especially fascinated with British universities, which took the classical world as integral to elite education. It was an interest that continued to inform his career after he fled the Nazis to Chicago in 1936.
While telling these two biographies together at time feels strange—the two men worked on different topics and only minimally engaged with each other's writings—Power's study highlights important parallels between them. Both labored to build a cultural canon premised on self-examination. Both viewed the history of ideas as a tool against radicalism: the models they hoped to offer young readers were not heroic figures, but theologians and poets who questioned stale dogmas. The book's two sections also display deep research and close and careful readings of Harnack and Jaeger's publications. To be sure, readers without background in Weimar's intellectual debates about theology and education may sometimes struggle to follow some of Power's narrative. For example, the pages that describe Harnack's response to Karl Barth's “neo-orthodox” theology in the 1920s assume considerable familiarity with the latter. But dedicated readers will find Power's work illuminating. By shedding light on largely forgotten figures, it expands our understanding of Weimar thought.
Perhaps more contentious is Power's efforts to link his protagonists to our times. In Power's telling, Harnack and Jaeger should be more than historical curiosity. They can provide a useful model for humanists today: figures who insisted on art and culture's centrality to society. This does not mean that Powers ignores Harnack and Jaeger's shortcomings. He acknowledges that their conception of education was highly elitist, focused solely on the roughly 3% of Germans who attended universities (and in Jaeger's case, on the even smaller number of those who learned Greek). He highlights their dismissive comments on Asian and African cultures. And the book discusses in detail their ambivalent understanding of Judaism, including dismissive comments on the Old Testament (indeed, Powers labors not to replicate their limited interest in Judaism by with a brief section on the German-Jewish writer Leo Baeck). Still, Powers celebrates Harnack and Jaeger's belief in history's capacity to foster healthy self-doubt, introspection, and humility. They drew on the past not for self-affirmation but as a source of moderation and reason.
Yet even if one shares Power's generous assessment of the two men's work, it is still hard to envision them as an inspiration for our time. The cultural and intellectual sources on which they drew, and the convictions that they took for granted, are so foreign to be almost unrecognizable. Harnack's equation of Protestantism with the middle class's ethos of self-improvement has largely faded. Jaeger's belief in Greek culture's capacity to forge enlightened elites is equally moribund. Indeed, even Power's reconstruction of their thinking highlights the distance between their time and ours. Even educated readers would be challenged to follow countless theological and classical references that Harnack and Jaeger took for granted. If the two are of interest today, it's for their unfamiliarity and difference. Not as much as guiding lights but as relics of a distant intellectual era.
