Even before reading Weimar thought. A contested legacy, one might readily be predisposed to take it for a monumental collection of essays. This is not only judging by its sheer size, nor from the fact that the editors, Peter E. Gordon and John P. McCormick, are among leading American historians of Weimar political thought, nor even that its contributors include some of the most respected specialists in their field. It is also the remarkable thematic range of the volume – inquiring into Weimar law, politics, and society in its first part, academic thought in the second, literature and film in the third thematic block, and general cultural and social themes in the last one – coupled with its interdisciplinary mode of inquiry – that creates the expectation of a monumental contribution to this notoriously complex field of study, ‘Weimar thought’. Unlike the case with all too many edited volumes, this one does not let the reader down; it goes substantially beyond merely meeting the initial expectation. In what follows, I will briefly list some main reasons why the volume contains an extraordinary collection of essays.
Weimar studies are an odd field of research. Due to the fact that its intellectual legacy is both astoundingly rich and equally troubling, it has been subject to ongoing and intense scholarly attention ever since the Second World War. It is almost as if no single stone had been left unturned, nor any subject, however minor, unexplored, however familiar, countless times re-examined. Weimar never seems to fall out of fashion either, having gained new vigour with recent decades’ explosion of interest in some iconic thinkers – interestingly enough, at all ends of the political spectrum – for example, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss. There is a small library written on each of these individual authors, and interest does not seem to be fading. So, there is a sense of already-burdensome familiarity, if not repetition, accompanying studies of the Weimar period. On the other hand, once one becomes more engrossed in this field, one senses that this familiarity might be deceptive; all too often, studies of the past century bear the mark of their own times – in which there is also a fragile balance to be struck. This, in turn, leaves the questions that seem most urgent to us today unasked. In short, it seems that for some time now, each decade has had its own Weimar to encounter and explore, its own Weimar to be both inspired by, and to refute.
This collection of essays is anything but a mere addition to decades-long scholarship on the doomed Republic. On the contrary, it is a reflection of some of the most recent perspectival changes in the field, including an increasing emphasis on the openness of its political fate and the imperative of seeking to understand it as such. In other words, the formerly dominant narrative that tended to read inter-war history from 1945 backwards, and sought to establish inevitable chains of events and ideas leading from Weimar to 1933, has recently been increasingly challenged by historians and intellectual historians alike. Weimar thought. A contested legacy is a contribution to this effort, refusing to subscribe to a simplistic liberal teleology in which Weimar signifies mankind’s temporary fall into irrationality and chaos, only to re-emerge politically wiser, kinder, and repentant. Instead, the individual chapters of the book, as well as its general orientation, seek to separate themselves from grand narratives and do full justice to the undetermined in the unfolding of historical events and experience. Or, more concretely, as this is a book of intellectual history, some of its chapters insightfully reconstruct the open character of the translation of Weimar historical experiences into scholarly, cultural or political discourses, thus capturing insightfully some of the key reasons why these legacies continue to influence and resonate strongly in contemporary debates.
This extraordinary achievement is, in no small part, due to the editors’ rejection of a monolithic narrative of Weimar intellectual history. In fact, they seek to demonstrate ‘both the unity and diversity’ of Weimar thought – and this is another reason for which the volume offers such fascinating and useful reading for anyone interested in the time period. It would be difficult to deny that all the fields discussed in this volume were affected by tremendous political, social, and cultural crisis, or that any scholarly or creative work could isolate itself from this context. On the other hand, the individual chapters highlight the diversity, and mostly the stark antagonisms between specific responses to the crisis, resisting any containment within a single narrative. To give just one example – the responses of legal thinkers Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen could hardly have been more distant from each other, yet both have produced an extraordinary range of echoes and debates throughout recent decades, up to our present day (and one of the notable strengths of the volume is that is goes far beyond the Schmitts, Kelsens, Heideggers, and Benjamins of the period). Further narrative categories that connect individual parts and chapters to each other are innovation and tradition, and continuity and tradition; in other words, the authors invite us to study Weimar thought in the light of the constant interplay, struggle, and change of balance between these counterparts, rather than confining Weimar thought into the narrative framework of, for instance, the pathos of novelty, or, to the contrary, reactionism.
In addition to the volume’s advancement of a wider conceptual, historical, and methodological framework for contemporary Weimar studies, many of the individual inquiries are significant contributions to a more nuanced understanding of particular disciplines or debates, especially for Anglo-Saxon readers. For instance, in his chapter, ‘Weimar theology: From historicism to crisis’, Peter Gordon rightly and innovatively highlights the central importance of dialectical theology for an entire array of other humanist and social disciplines and its long-lasting legacy in surprising new contexts. Martin Ruehl, in ‘Aesthetic fundamentalism in Weimar poetry: Stefan George and his circle, 1918–1933’ recovers an often-omitted, yet extremely influential part played in the Weimar creative and scholarly scene by this intellectual circle. Needless to say, the bibliography of the volume serves as an excellent starting point and aid for students and scholars of the period, at any level of expertise.
The bibliography seems to be unharmed by what the present reader thought was the only noteworthy weakness with this volume, or at the very least, a question to be asked: that the collaborators include only a few scholars who have spent most of their careers in German academia – two out of twenty – in contrast to giving voice to many of the most notable American experts. Engaging more of those scholars, who have lived the debates over the Weimar legacies in a more personal and immediate way, might have added a further level of ‘contestation’ – a theme at the heart of this volume, in more than one sense.