Together the two volumes under review contain over forty essays on the intellectual history of Weimar Germany and its legacy today. The wide interdisciplinary field of authors, historians, philosophers, theologians, and literary, legal, and religious scholars, as well as social and political scientists, testifies to the continuing fascination of this era of thought in Anglo-American academia. With the exceptions of Mitchell G. Ash, Michael Krois, and Klaus Tanner, the authors teach at American, British or Canadian universities and represent major tendencies of the anglophone engagement with Weimar's intellectual history. Despite the fact that intellectual history of the Weimar Republic has been a flourishing field of research in Germany over the last decades, the volumes contain no contributions by German historians.Footnote ¹ This observation is by no means negligible in an age of transnational academic exchange, as may be exemplified by the recent Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, which contains contributions by German, American, and British experts in their fields.Footnote ² Rather, Weimar Thought and, to a lesser extent, The Weimar Moment offer paradigm cases for a phenomenon that, in debates on postcolonialism, Dipesh Chakrabarty has aptly described as “asymmetric ignorance.”Footnote ³ Over recent decades, German historians, especially the younger generations, have intensively studied American scholarship in search of inspiration, and today no German PhD candidate could afford to neglect the relevant English-language literature in his or her field. By contrast, many—though by no means all—of the authors in Weimar Thought and in The Weimar Moment seem to find German scholarship dispensable when discussing the intellectual history of Weimar Germany.Footnote ⁴ These authors represent at least a significant current in American intellectual history today. They neither reflect upon this disregard of German historiography nor argue for its negligibility; German books and essays are simply absent from the footnotes. In the following, I will try to spell out the consequences and problems of this apparent semi-permeability of transatlantic academic discourse that has produced two very different debates on the intellectual history of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the United States.

To begin with, both volumes not only pursue the historiographical goal of understanding and explaining the emergence, constitution, and development of the Weimar intellectual landscape. They also follow more presentist interests. Rudy Koshar justifies the publication of the “Weimar Moment” with the assertion that Weimar's “evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against a politics of narrow self-interest . . . cannot but appeal to us today.”Footnote ⁵ In order to offer guidance in the present, however, Weimar intellectual developments should be historically contextualized and appreciated in their complexities and often ambiguities, Koshar rightly continues. Many essays in the volume, including his contribution, follow this demand, whereas others do not. While The Weimar Moment has a clear research focus on the history of theology, liberalism, and law, Weimar Thought follows a broader and more basic approach. Peter Gordon and John McCormick want to offer a “critical companion for specialized research that, while adding to current scholarship, would nonetheless remain accessible to the more general reader,” and thus a “compendium focused primarily on the major intellectual trends” of the German interwar era.Footnote ⁶ Their justification for the book, however, is similarly presentist, namely that “much of the literature we now regard as foundational for modern thought derives from a single historical moment,” namely the years from 1918 to 1933.Footnote ⁷ Regrettably, they never really specify who the “we” are or on what basis they decide which epoch is “the most crucible of intellectual innovation.”

Justifying engagement with Weimar Germany with the need for intellectual orientation today is at least partly attributable to the necessities of American academia and the publishing market. Since the end of the Cold War, public and research interest in the US has shifted significantly from Europe to other world regions, and the need to engage with German history is not as self-evident as it used to be. Moreover, there is no denying that historiography always follows current interests and that research questions derive from current social, political, and economic predicaments. Yet interpreting the Weimar intellectual landscape from the vantage point of today's political interests, asking what can be learned from Weimar thinkers in the present, results in a distorted picture of German intellectual history from 1918 to 1933. Both volumes tend to focus on the more agreeable thinkers, the political left, the liberals and the so-called republicans of reason (Vernunftrepublikaner) and neglect the political right, creating a pleasant and self-assuring picture of Weimar Germany. Apart from Anson Rabinbach's short and essayistic “Reflections on the Culture and Ideology of National Socialism,”Footnote ⁸ the Nazis are almost completely absent from the volumes. Similarly, apart from the inevitable essays on Carl Schmitt, whose continuing capacity to arouse fascination is even more fascinating than his work, the conservative revolution does not receive special attention. Neither do we find essays on German communism. Racism, eugenics, and obscurantism, all flourishing in Weimar Germany and important research topics of recent years, are hardly mentioned in the volumes.Footnote ⁹ When David Kettler and Colin Loader write about “Weimar Sociology” they only write about the usual suspects—Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, thinkers who are still quoted in today's sociology. Hardly mentioned are influential contemporaries like Hans Freyer, the first German professor of sociology; Leopold von Wiese, the director of the Research Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne; Franz Oppenheimer, Mannheim's predecessor in Frankfurt; or Werner Sombart, the last chairman of the Verein für Socialpolitik. In Weimar Thought's section on “Aesthetics, Literature, Film,” John V. Maciuika writes on the well-known Bauhaus, yet Bauhaus architecture was only a fraction of what was actually built in Weimar, and by no means representative.Footnote ¹⁰ Karin Gunnemann, to provide a final example, does not write about “Writers and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” as the title of her article maintains, but almost exclusively about the often-discussed conflict between the Mann brothers, finding Thomas “shockingly chauvinistic,” and the equally well-researched Kurt Tucholsky.Footnote ¹¹

The presentist approach assumed by many essays in the volumes has yet another consequence that distinguishes them from the mainstream of intellectual history as it has been conducted in Germany over the last few decades. Looking at their neighboring scientific communities, German intellectual historians either have followed the Cambridge school in contextualizing the work of allegedly great thinkers, treating their texts not as contributions to an eternal debate on fundamental questions but as utterances at a specific place and time that addressed precise problems and need to be examined as such, or they have assumed a neo-Foucauldian approach, analyzing discursive formations over a broad array of heterogeneous sources, ranging from newspapers and political pamphlets to popular books to scientific or philosophical treatises. While many of these histories have been classified under the label “new cultural history of politics,” they still situate Weimar intellectuals within broader discursive frameworks.Footnote ¹² In contrast, it is surprising to see—years after the seminal essays on method in intellectual history by John A. Toews, Dominick LaCapra, J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Reinhart Koselleck—how many contributions to the volumes engage in a rather old-school intellectual history.Footnote ¹³ Despite the editors’ emphasis on the “Weimar moment” and the specificity of the interwar years in Germany, some of the authors write as if their objects of study were writing today or addressing eternal questions, and the authors themselves were engaging them directly on these issues. No time seems to have elapsed since their writings, and no secondary literature seems to have been produced.

For Leonard Kaplan, for example, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss provide a bridge from the “Weimar moment” to the present, as they continued to provoke “the best commentators” and to influence “European world-class intellectuals.”Footnote ¹⁴ Without offering any guidance as to who qualifies as a world-class intellectual, Kaplan uses his authors to reflect on US foreign policy, the Supreme Court, and drug abuse.Footnote ¹⁵ In his essay on the “Frankfurt School's Critical Theory,” Jeffrey Herf attacks Horkheimer and Adorno for having produced an abstract theory of modernity in which historical specificity and, especially, the singular cruelty of National Socialism and the Holocaust disappeared.Footnote ¹⁶ Polemically, he states that the Dialectic of Enlightenment provided its readers with no clue that a devastating war and the Holocaust were taking place when it was written. Even worse, according to Herf, the reader might have plausibly assumed “that these anti-fascist refugee intellectuals did not see a qualitative difference between American or British modernity, on the one hand, and German, Italian, or Japanese variations, on the other.”Footnote ¹⁷ His historical indictment derives from the accusation that Horkheimer and Adorno underestimated the “causal importance . . . of Nazi anti-Semitism.”Footnote ¹⁸ This is a position that Herf has long been arguing for, but it is by no means universally shared in current research on National Socialism.Footnote ¹⁹ The attempt to engage past thinkers in a dialogue on contemporary problems encourages an ahistorical perspective in which their writings are not understood and explained as utterances at a specific time and place. Characteristically, at the end, Weimar Thought contains a chronology that lists “major events in modern German history alongside major publications that are mentioned in this volume.”Footnote ²⁰ Meant to “orient readers with a basic outline of the era,” it rather disorients and distorts a historical understanding of the intellectual history of Weimar Germany as it indistinguishably places films and books with a high circulation next to speeches or essays that were hardly received at the time, and only became influential much later. Here, as in many other instances, contextualization is merely a gesture that camouflages an astonishingly ahistorical approach to Weimar intellectual history.

Samuel Moyn and Azzan Yadin-Israel, for example, assert that Martin Heidegger was “very uncertainly situated in the intellectual history of his era.”Footnote ²¹ This is a bold claim, considering the vast German literature on his life and works which is not referred to in the essay.Footnote ²² Yet the authors concentrate their analysis on Heidegger's “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics” in order to “contextualize his thought as part of a broad post-World War I rejection of optimistic Christian anthropologies.” In this way, however, Heidegger's work loses its historical specificity and, finally, becomes a mere new move within the “millenial contest between rival Christian anthropologies.”Footnote ²³ Peter Gordon also claims to contextualize the protagonists of his essays, Ernst Cassirer and several Protestant theologians. But this contextualization is rarely more than an ornament: it does not do any explanatory work. In the end, he applies normative categories when he laments that Cassirer's attempts to justify Weimar democracy by going back to a German intellectual tradition “led him to concede the nationalistic conception of intellectual history as a battleground between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ ideas.”Footnote ²⁴ Sometimes, in the allegedly contextualizing passages, Gordon's search for beautiful prose carries him away, as when he writes that the Weimar constitution was “vetted by the Weimar National Assembly at Goethe's famed birthplace.”Footnote ²⁵ If that were true, the Goethehaus in Frankfurt would have to close down. We all make mistakes, but how could a mistake like this survive the review process?Footnote ²⁶ Part of the answer may lie in the stunning refusal to engage with the relevant German secondary literature and in transatlantic academic exchange. Peter Gordon writes on “Weimar Theology: From Historicism to Crisis” as if he were the first to have discovered the importance of the theology of crisis, neglecting the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and others.Footnote ²⁷ And he is not alone in this approach. Charles Bambach analyzes on the “crisis of historical thinking” without mentioning Wolfgang Bialas, Otto Gerhard Oexle, or Wolfgang Hardtwig.Footnote ²⁸ Yet of what use is a compendium that does not provide its readers with references to the most important literature in the field? Maybe the publishers assume that most of their potential readers do not understand foreign languages anyway, but would it not still be helpful to alert them to the fact that there is research going on in other countries as well? In Weimar Moment, Leonard Kaplan tries to write about the psychosocial history of generations in Germany, almost exclusively on the basis of three books: Klaus Theweleit's study on the Freikorps, Dirk A. Moses's German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, and Paul Hockenos's biography of Joschka Fischer.Footnote ²⁹ What results can then realistically be expected? Martin Jay's essay on the Weimar left takes the task of contextualization more seriously, but it appears to be slightly dated. It may be an honorable move to refer readers to David Abraham's heavily criticized book on The Collapse of the Weimar Republic for an account of workers’ lives in Weimar Germany, but the book was published over thirty years ago and scholarship has moved on in the meantime.Footnote ³⁰ Yet Jay makes the important point that the assumption that a unified left might have prevented the rise of National Socialism should not be the main criterion against which to measure its actions, as “the telos of a unified working class . . . was already in jeopardy.”Footnote ³¹

A side effect of the presentist perspective on Weimar Germany and the methodological conservatism of many texts, especially in Weimar Thought, is their tendency to speak in superlatives. Karl Barth's writings were “the major event of twentieth-century theology” (Gary Dorrien) and Weimar was the place of “some of the most earthshaking revolutions in the study of religion” (Peter Gordon).Footnote ³² According to John McCormick, “one of the Republic's greatest misfortunes . . . was the fact that its most brilliant diagnostician was Carl Schmitt, its fiercest and most perspicacious enemy.”Footnote ³³ Dana Villa holds that Carl Schmitt and Georg Lukács were among the “most gifted thinkers of the generation after Weber”;Footnote ³⁴ Michael Jennings thinks that Walter Benjamin (according to Peter Gordon the “most famous German-Jewish philosopher”) and Siegfried Kracauer formulated “the most compelling theory of modernity ever to arise from cultural criticism” and that Theodor W. Adorno was one of the “twentieth century's most powerful thinkers.”Footnote ³⁵ If one does not write intellectual history in order to discover something about the beliefs of people in the past, but conceives it as a debate with authors from the past over timeless issues, past thinkers need to be magnified in order to justify one's own research endeavors. Instead of sharing one or the other of these normative judgments, however, it would be a more fruitful task for intellectual historians to explore how and why they emerged. The claims concerning the historical dimension of the authors under scrutiny may be true but none of them is substantiated with evidence or anything that resembles an argument. Neither is Frederick Beiser's thesis that Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) was “one of the most influential books of the Weimar era” or Charles Bambach's assertion that its impact on the “Weimar cultural scene was seismological.”Footnote ³⁶

Spengler and his book actually constitute a good example of the difference between an intellectual history that focuses on just a few texts by allegedly great thinkers and an approach that takes the task of contextualization more seriously. Without any doubt, “decline of the West” was one of the catchphrases of the Weimar period. Yet what do we make of its omnipresence? For Peter Gordon, Spengler was an “anti-liberal exponent of historical pessimism” and Michael Krois thinks that Spengler developed a “fatalistic conception [of history] which gave a dispensation from responsibility.”Footnote ³⁷ Charles Bambach maintains that, after the belief in progress had been destroyed in the First World War, Spengler's Untergang captured the spirit of the time. Similarly, Frederick Beiser defies the editors’ warning that Weimar Germany cannot be subsumed under a homogeneous zeitgeist, and suggests that “pessimism . . . was the dominant Zeitgeist of Weimar. It permeated all aspects of its life, culture, politics, and philosophy.”Footnote ³⁸ Oswald Spengler's success is one of Beiser's main arguments for the all-pervasiveness of the belief that life was in decline, everything was getting worse and nothing could be done. Yet Suzanne Marchand informs the readers of her interesting essay that Hermann Graf Keyserling and his Darmstadt School of Wisdom (Schule der Weisheit) “renounced Schopenhauerian pessimism.”Footnote ³⁹ Together with other orientalists, the best-selling author saw Eastern wisdom as a way out of the decline. Whereas Marchand treats this rejection of declinism as an exceptional stance, a look at the contemporary reviews of Spengler's Untergang, an easy and elementary exercise that none of the authors bothered to conduct, shows that this attitude was far more common than the above quotes suggest. In 1922 Manfred Schröter summarized that the critique of Spengler's Untergang had been overwhelmingly negative. According to this Spengler admirer, it was due to the superficial misunderstanding of Spengler's book as a fatalistic prophecy of doom.Footnote ⁴⁰ As all reviewers shared this misunderstanding, only Protestant theologians wholeheartedly embraced Spengler's book because they expected a period of religious renewal in the wake of the decline. Other than that, even the reviewers most sympathetic to Spengler on the political right criticized the book for its alleged pessimism and concurring fatalism. Conservative revolutionaries like Hans Freyer and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck praised Spengler's intellectual accomplishment but also emphasized the chances of “young peoples” to re-emerge or the necessity to hope and to be politically active.Footnote ⁴¹ Everybody talked about the Untergang des Abendlandes not because they fatalistically embraced decline or doom, but because they criticized such an attitude and offered ways to avoid it. Even Spengler himself felt unease with the pessimistic interpretation of his book, which had originally been conceived as a justification for the expected German victory in the war. In an article entitled “Pessimismus?” Spengler tried to specify that the title of his book was directed against the “easy optimism of the Darwinistic age,” but this did not make him a pessimist or fatalist as he saw many urgent tasks that had to be dealt with.Footnote ⁴² Instead of Untergang he might also have said “completion” (Vollendung), Spengler maintained, and only those who needed “pious lies” or the “veil of ideas and utopias” interpreted his heroic realism as pessimism.Footnote ⁴³

Many authors in the volumes share a similar misunderstanding concerning the notion of crisis, presuming that today's largely negative understanding of the term was also dominant in the Weimar Republic. They assume that in the ubiquitous talk of crisis contemporaries referred to a state of dissolution and disarray, or even a precursor of doom in which pessimistic and fatalistic attitudes prevailed.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Charles Bambach, such a “crisis-mentality” pervaded “all areas of learning and culture in the Weimar era,” and “Destruktion, Abbau—demolition, dismantling, and destruction—all became watchwords of social and intellectual change.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Frederick Beiser even claims that “nihilism, in the broad sense of believing in nothing and having no allegiances, haunted cultural life in Weimar Germany.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet as Tracie Matysik observes in her chapter on “Weimar Feminity,” whereas Helene Stöcker, Marianne Weber, and Lou Andreas-Salomé were all busy constructing crises in the Weimar period, none of these crises was terminal. Rather, they were all designed in order to be overcome by political activity.Footnote ⁴⁷ In her informative and substantial overview of Weimar science, Cathryn Carson analyzes the foundational crisis (Grundlagenkrise) in the natural sciences and mathematics. Carson correctly points out that in these scientific debates, “crisis” was no purely negative term; rather the “moment of crisis reopened the time horizon.”Footnote ⁴⁸ As I have argued elsewhere, this was overwhelmingly true for the use of the term in Weimar Germany: in contemporary usage, “crisis” usually signified a moment of an existential decision between two mutually exclusive alternatives that were both possible. In general, intellectuals invoked “crises” not because they expected doom but because they had a positive vision of the future which they wanted to realize and needed a crisis in order to motivate people to become active and achieve that goal.Footnote ⁴⁹ Reading the broader intellectual debates of the 1920s, it is not so much pessimism or nihilism which is striking but rather the certitude with which plans for a new and better future were put forward.

Despite the general objections to the volumes and many of their chapters, outlined above, they also contain valuable contributions to the understanding of the complexity and ambiguities of Weimar intellectual life that avoid a presentist, traditionalist, and parochial approach. The chapters by Cathryn Carson and Susanne Marchand, already mentioned, offer helpful overviews of the natural sciences and German orientalism. In Marchand's essay the much-maligned orientalists appear in a friendlier light, as she positions them within the intellectual landscape of Weimar Germany as true seekers for an alternative to the West.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, Mitchell G. Ash offers a nuanced account of Weimar psychology as a discipline that was “torn between science and philosophy, divided between science and humanistic approaches, and divided again between commitments to basic science for its own sake and to bringing science into the social sphere.”Footnote ⁵¹ Yet despite the heterogeneity of the discipline, Ash determines two common trends: the emphasis on the “immediately given” and the “mobilization of the physiognomic gaze as an instrument of psychological expertise.”Footnote ⁵² Peter Caldwell presents a thoughtful treatment of the importance of Article IV of the Weimar Constitution, which integrated international law as a binding element of the Constitution. Analyzing the juridical debates, Caldwell shows that the article's symbolic function was much larger than its concrete importance. Rather than being an admonition of war guilt, the article had been designed as a protest against the Versailles Treaty, maintaining that the Reich had always followed the principles of international law. While Article IV served no concrete purpose, Caldwell shows that it became an important focal point for debates on national sovereignty.Footnote ⁵³ In his treatment of the circle around the poet Stefan George, Martin A. Ruehl nuances the vast literature in this field, arguing that George cannot be reduced to a conservative critic of modernity or even a trailblazer of National Socialism. Fleshing out the complexity of the circle's attitudes towards politics, however, he argues that it would be equally misleading to overlook its “anti-democratic, illiberal, and racist” elements.Footnote ⁵⁴ Following Stefan Breuer, Ruehl sees “aesthetic fundamentalism” as the distinctive element of a group that entertained the vision of an alternative modernity.Footnote ⁵⁵ In contrast to the above-mentioned essays which simply purport the seminal importance and influence of their objects of study, Udi Greenberg actually establishes the importance of Carl Joachim Friedrich's theory of democracy and dictatorship or totalitarianism. Greenberg shows how Friedrich's theory took shape in Weimar Germany and how it became influential after the Second World War, when Friedrich became a legal adviser to US occupation forces.Footnote ⁵⁶

These are all well-researched and convincingly argued essays on the intellectual history of Weimar Germany, yet they do not have so much in common that they need to be bound together in one or two volumes. Of greater coherence is the collection of articles on religion and theology, particularly on Karl Barth, that is contained in The Weimar Moment and almost constitutes a book within the book. As editor Rudy Koshar rightly points out, it is deplorable that “most general treatments of ‘Weimar culture’ ignore the religious dimension” even though Weimar Germany was a period and place both of secularization and the privatization of religion and of the strong persistence of religious thinking.Footnote ⁵⁷ Focusing on Karl Barth, Koshar argues convincingly that the goal of Barth's dialectical theology was to demythologize liberal secularity. Like other exponents of political theology, he wanted to overcome the “Great Separation” between religious and secular questions, yet he did not become an advocate of tyranny.Footnote ⁵⁸ Rather, Barth's radical position concerning the absolute otherness of God opened the space for non-absolutist politics and a liberal secularity.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a similar vein, Christophe Chalamet argues that it was precisely Barth's theological illiberalism that offered him the resources to develop “a radical critique of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of social and political life.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, the theologian Gary Dorrien describes Karl Barth's intellectual development from liberalism to dialectical and crisis theology in relation to his criticism of the war and involvement in religious socialism.Footnote ⁶¹ From a historiographical point of view, however, one may question the theologian's heroization of Barth and his assessment that Barth's “writings were spiritually powerful chiefly because he insisted with high-octane persistence that Christianity must live by the life-renewing Spirit of Christ, not by weak substitutes such as philosophy, apologetics, ideology, churchianity, or smells and bells.”Footnote ⁶²

In a surprising coincidence, in all bigger congregations, after the First World War, there were movements for a religious renewal that often brought its protagonists into a questionable relationship with the new state. Mainstream Protestants were, as Klaus Tanner describes, opposed to the new republic because their formerly exceptional status had been diminished. The loss of influence appears to have been more important for the Lutherans than Luther's teaching that Christians had to accept earthly authority.Footnote ⁶³ Whereas the Catholics benefited from the new state, there was also a significant Catholic antiliberalism which Michael Hollerich analyzes, while exonerating Alois Dempf from the severer accusations of anti-parliamentarism.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ulrich Rosenhagen analyzes the “Jewish–Protestant encounter” in the Weimar Republic, arguing that the dialogue failed because the Protestants would not accept another faith as an equally justifiable religion. This obstinacy, however, did not turn them into anti-Semites; rather, they rejected anti-Semitism.Footnote ⁶⁵ Together with the chapters on Barth, these chapters are fruitful contributions to the intellectual and religious history of Weimar Germany.

Despite these interesting chapters, however, the basic conclusion to draw from the volumes is that major trends in German and American intellectual history seem to have developed in different directions. While German historians look at Anglo-American historiography in search of inspiration, with respect to a large branch of American intellectual history this is an asymmetric relationship. To be fair, historians like Rudy Koshar, Mitchell G. Ash, Cathryn Carson, Martin A. Ruehl, Peter Caldwell, or Udi Greenberg, and many others who are not present in these volumes, have an excellent mastery of the German scholarship in their fields. Moreover, many of them see connections and develop innovative perspectives because their view is less influenced by the standard accounts of German historiography. Yet there is also a significant current within American intellectual historiography on Germany that exhibits an astonishing indifference to German scholarship. Moreover, many of those engaged in intellectual history seem to fall back behind the methodological demands for contextualization that the mainstream of German intellectual historians now take for granted. “Knowledge of the relevant literature prevents new discoveries and is the most basic element of the rational behavior that is usually somewhat grandiosely called historical method,” Hermann Heimpel said sixty years ago.Footnote ⁶⁶ In many of the essays under review, this maxim seems to have been ignored. Yet in spite of the above objections, The Weimar Moment, with its focus on religion and theology, is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of Weimar Germany. By contrast, from a historiographical point of view and considering the state of intellectual historiography on Weimar Germany on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not clear why Princeton University Press published Weimar Thought.