Weimar Thought

A Contested Legacy

Peter E. Gordon, John P. McCormick, Peter Gordon, John McCormick

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400846788
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918–33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period.The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates.Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.

Part I

Law, Politics, Society

1 Weimar Sociology

David Kettler and Colin Loader

Although it would take an ironist with the genius of Georg Simmel to do justice to the complex of competing teachings and practices that comprised Weimar sociology, it was nonetheless a bounded field, and even a distinctive discipline in formation. Simmel himself could not have written such an account of the discipline, since he had died before the end of the Great War. But he is nevertheless a significant presence in the story that follows here. Like his contemporary Max Weber, who also did not survive beyond the initial months of the Weimar Republic, Simmel helped to set an agenda for the generation that followed. In the embattled condition of sociology in the universities, moreover, their reputations among a wider public also provided an internal password and external legitimation for a largely self-selected and widely distrusted circle of young outsider aspirants to university careers. Together Simmel and Weber bequeathed to Weimar sociologists a legacy to be both explored and contested as they sought to realize Nietzsche’s well-known injunction to become what they were.

We speak of irony, because most contemporaries questioned whether sociology was more than a label and because the books by sociologists that were admired were more likely to be taken as exercises in high journalism than scholarly works, let alone sociological “classics.” Although institutionalization of the discipline had in fact begun, its struggle for widespread acceptance was difficult, partly because of its identification with republican constitutional institutions. This overlapping of theoretical, institutional and political competition is an important part of our story. For these reasons, after examining the legacy of Simmel and Weber, we turn to Karl Mannheim, the thinker who wrote perhaps the most discussed of such books, but who also most significantly engaged the work of the earlier masters and thereby played a noteworthy role in the emerging institutionalization of Weimar sociology and its relationship to political citizenship.

To understand Mannheim’s significance for Weimar sociology, one must locate the field within both its academic and political contexts. The strong identification of the German university establishment with the imperial state before the war has been well documented.¹ There was little challenge within academia to the belief that the state provided a spiritual unity for the nation, and thus was hierarchically above the fragmented, interest-oriented sphere of civil society. The first generation of authors whose work became canonical for German sociology challenged the elevated standing of the state without great success, and they could not displace the image of society—and sociology—as a dangerously disruptive realm. This perception was heightened by the very important circumstance that Simmel, Weber, and the others seriously engaged the new, sophisticated, university-trained generation of intellectual Marxists, some of whom even received their patronage. Their academic opponents maintained that sociology fostered narrowly limited standpoints—such as mechanistic positivism or radical socialism—divorced from the higher unity of traditional disciplines.² Sociology was accordingly never recognized as a university discipline before the war, and the imperial “sociologists” who found university positions held appointments in disciplines such as political economy or philosophy. Even then, their “sociological” writings, although they were in fact neither positivistic nor socialistic, received only marginal scientific recognition within the universities.

The demise of the imperial political establishment in the trauma of the war and the subsequent declaration of the republic were disorienting for many citizens of the new republic, including its most prominent academic voices. In the chaos of the first post-war years, they looked back on the empire as a more stable time, when the disruptive forces now on the loose had been subjected to the harness of “tradition” and authority. While the changes brought by the Weimar Republic were exhilarating to some, they aroused only feelings of disorientation and even anger among the predominant mandarins.³ Their disillusionment was reflected in the prevalence of the term “crisis” during these years. Many in the imperial generation within the university joined in Friedrich Meinecke’s 1923 pseudo-classical lament: “everything is relative, everything is flux—give me a place where I can stand.”⁴ Writing at the very end of the Weimar epoch—in a brief journalistic essay for two liberal newspapers published after the disastrous election of November 1932—Karl Mannheim, in contrast, deprecated those who portrayed the widely-discussed “spiritual crisis” as “nothing but an evil that must somehow be eliminated” or as something that can be understood by “grandiose surveys based on intellectual history.” What are called “spiritual crises,” he observed, may be “worthily worked through” and they can, in any case, be understood only by close examination of the concrete displacements of individuals and groups, the obsolescing of their orientations, and of their “readjustment efforts.” They are by no means merely “spiritual.” To give weight to these reflections, Mannheim reports on an exercise in survey research that he evidently conducted earlier in that year. The individuals who report experiencing such a crisis also indicate on their questionnaires that they experienced a major change in circumstances—and there is evidence that some at least treated the crisis as a dramatic opening to a new realism and autonomy.⁵

Mannheim’s protest can serve here as a helpful reminder that Weimar society, like the republic itself, was hardly doomed from the start. Many of the academic intellectuals in the social sciences worked to build and retain a civil and productive process, even across the lines that would soon prove cruelly impassable: the labor lawyer, Franz Neumann, eagerly accepted the hospitality of Carl Schmitt’s seminar in 1932 to present his argument for exempting the collective bargaining guarantees of the Weimar Constitution from Schmitt’s cherished presidential emergency powers;⁶ and Karl Mannheim allied with Hans Freyer in 1932 to defend “contemporary studies” as a legitimate part of the sociological curriculum (even if he openly disdained Freyer’s proto-fascist idealization of arbitrary will). Such collaborations were integral to the work of building the plural social constitutions that proved so vital to the fabric of Weimar. Mannheim remains the best known of the scholars dedicated to the constitution of sociology in that setting, and he is often recognized as a representative figure, whose career offers a special insight into the course and prospects of sociological development.⁷

For young intellectuals like Mannheim, born twenty to thirty years later than Meinecke’s generation, despairing cries of “crisis” seemed like surrender. The younger generation looked instead to the legacy of the two thinkers whose heroic detachment promised an orientation to both the actuality and the promise of the alleged “crisis of culture”—and whose early deaths made it easier to accord their work an iconic status. Although both Simmel and Weber gained a posthumous prestige for the rich detail of their principal “sociological” writings, their chief legacy to the post-war sociological generation concerned their final, more didactic statements, first delivered as public lectures at historically acute moments. In November 1917, Weber spoke to students in Munich on “Science as a Calling,” and in January 1919, during the first tumultuous months of the republic, he spoke in the same venue on “Politics as a Calling.” Between Weber’s two speeches, Georg Simmel, speaking in the last months of the war, lectured on “The Conflict in Modern Culture,” rather soberly completing a cycle of public offerings on this topic, several of the earlier of which were marred by uncharacteristic bursts of wartime enthusiasm. By the middle of 1920, both Weber and Simmel were dead.

Simmel was born in 1858 into an assimilated Jewish commercial family in Berlin, the metropolis in which he spent most of his life and which provided the inspiration for much of his work. The learning and wit of his lectures at the University of Berlin attracted large audiences, composed mostly of enthusiastic students and the larger cultivated public. Mannheim and his mentor Georg Lukács, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin were among the many young intellectuals who attended these lectures. Despite Simmel’s popularity, his eclectic modernism, his association with left-wing circles, the petty jealousies of less innovative thinkers, and—above all—the anti-Semitism prevalent in the German academy, denied him a professorial chair in Berlin. Only by accepting a move to a provincial university in 1914 could he receive the academic rank he had long been denied.

While Simmel’s family background was in the “disruptive” socio-economic sphere, Weber, who was six years Simmel’s junior, grew up within the “unified” political establishment. He was exposed not only to his father’s liberal political associates, but also to the many prominent academics visiting the Weber household. Hailed as a rising star in both history and political economy, as well as a promising political figure, he was called to a chair in political economy at the University of Heidelberg in 1896. There he presided over one of the most dynamic intellectual circles in Germany, which was frequented by many of those who attended Simmel’s lectures. However, within two years his academic career was disrupted by a severe mental breakdown. Although he emerged from his illness in 1904, produced an amazing series of seminal works, and challenged the elders of political economy in institutions such as the Association for Social Policy, he was not able to return to the academy until the last years of his life, remote from his core constituency in Heidelberg. Like Simmel, although for different reasons, he remained at the margins of the imperial university.

The common starting point of what became their testamentary lectures was a decisive break with the expectation that it might somehow be possible to realize the harmonistic, unpolitical liberalism derived from Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose central slogan of “Bildung” embodied the notion that a conjunction of individual self-cultivation, collective cultural achievement, and a public order both prosperous and ethical belonged to the natural course of social development. Although both Simmel and Weber had served on the editorial board of Logos, the pre-war journal that in many ways embodied Fichte’s faith in cultural and ethical progress, neither of them could see a way to resurrect that model, which in their eyes seemed to have been decisively undermined by anti-bourgeois theorists such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and even Marx. While they did not reject the elements of the earlier cultural-liberal complex, they discerned paradoxes in their interrelations. Weimar sociology took its brief from their newly ironic orientation. Weber and Simmel were of course quite dissimilar: Weber remained interested in historical development, while Simmel’s method was largely ahistorical; Weber appealed to causality whereas Simmel made impressionistic use of analogy; Weber examined larger social structures based on individual orientation and conduct, whereas Simmel studied smaller social and cultural forms as interactions.⁸ But their lectures, delivered at a moment of fundamental transition, articulated a constellation of themes that challenged the fledgling discipline of sociology. Mannheim would later claim Max Weber as his principal model while defending his Ideologie und Utopie against a prominent cultural conservative on the eve of his brief career as professor.⁹ And he would draw on Simmel (whose courses he had attended for a semester during his student years and whose diagnosis of cultural crisis he had made the starting point for an ambitious philosophical lecture he had delivered in Budapest in 1918)¹⁰ when in 1930 he laid out the rationale of his first sociology course in Frankfurt.¹¹ In both cases Mannheim demonstrated the importance of the thematic legacies of these two masters to the emerging sociological field. Ironically, he would also claim that his own generation was distinguished by a certain hopefulness, in contrast to the “disillusioned realism” he found in Max Weber, whose clear-sightedness nevertheless remained his ideal.¹²

Georg Simmel: Sociology and Cultural Fragmentation

Simmel’s 1918 lecture was his final statement on the “tragedy” of culture, a conception he expressed in a distinctive essayistic language combining elements of Kantian philosophy with the Lebensphilosophie of the pre-war decades.¹³ The lecture, a social and cultural diagnosis with great resonance, presented cumulative human achievements as a mounting threat to the human capacity for achieving. Defining culture as an actualization of humanity’s vital and spiritual forces, Simmel acknowledges the catalogue of Kantian antinomies as limitations on rational self-command but concentrates on a single fundamental polarity—the relation between life and form. “Life,” resistant to precise definition or delimitation, is flux, formless vitality, creativity, will, the dynamic force of the individual.¹⁴ It can, however, “become [cultural] reality only in the guise of its opposite...