PROVINCIALIZING AMERICA: NEW AND NOT SO NEW INTELLECTUAL HISTORIES OF WEIMAR GERMANY

Abstract

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. This observation is by no means negligible in an age of transnational academic exchange, as may be exemplified by the recentOxford Handbook of Modern German History, which contains contributions by German, American, and British experts in their fields.