The “Unpolitical German” Reconsidered: Culture and Politics from the Late Weimar to the Early Postwar Period

A long-standing thesis has it that Germany's educated bourgeoisie identified with ideals of culture (Kultur), self-cultivation (Bildung), and spirit (Geist) to the detriment of its political formation. Fixated on the realm of ideas and disposed to inwardness, it deferred to real-world authority, stunting the rise of liberalism and paving the road to National Socialism. This paper interrogates this diagnosis of the “unpolitical German” by tracking the shifting political valences of Kultur from the last years of the Weimar Republic to the first years after National Socialism. Intellectuals' obsession with a “crisis of Kultur” amid the Weimar regime's implosion was indeed symptomatic of an apolitical culturalism. The experience of collapse and the subsequent Nazi “catastrophe,” however, brought forth a different position after 1945. For German intellectuals, that moment raised the question of how to relate to the national cultural heritage with urgency. This paper focuses on three clusters of prominent intellectuals – around periodicals and organizations in Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Berlin – who articulated an equivocal relationship toward the German fascination with “culture” and “cultivation.” On one hand, such notions implied a specific and rich way of thinking about freedom and subjectivity; on the other, the very focus on things spiritual had indeed fed a political quiescence. After 1945, they sought neither to jettison nor to revive this cultural tradition but to extract the liberating potential at its heart and bring the latter to bear on the sphere of politics, forging an autochthonous German path to postwar democracy of neither a liberal, “Western” nor communist, “Eastern” stripe. The practical and ideological space for such a position was crushed by the polarization of “culture” in the Cold War, but it was not without influence on critical intellectual currents and oppositional intellectual politics in the early years of both West and East Germany.