Nazi rule and restoration alienated postwar Germans from utopian-social criticism

Evidence

At around the same time as Adorno was offering his interpretation of Mörike’s almost free-verse poem Auf einer Wanderung', Emil Staiger published an interpretation of Mörike's Auf eine Lampe’, a kind of poetic still life in iambic trimeter. Staiger was the most impressive of the literary critics who after 1945 published studies that became standard works of what was called work-immanent' interpretation. Under the Nazis, this approach had offered critics like Max Kommerell a way of avoiding ideological demands, and after 1945 it became a way of avoiding genuinely fresh thinking that enjoyed wide popularity. Wolfgang Kayser wrote the standard textbook for this approach with his introduction to the study of literature, The Linguistic Work of Art, published in 1948. In his Basic Concepts of Poetics, first published in 1946, Staiger drafted a fundamental poetics’ following Heideggera phenomenology of the purely ideal essences of lyric, epic and drama. These he regarded on the one hand as literary-critical terms for general human possibilities and, on the other, as fields for the manifold possibilities of poetic composition. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2224 (#expands, via linked claim)

The time span of half a century that was required, for example, for the political resocialization of the population of the (old) Federal Republic of Germany after the end of the Nazi dictatorship – despite the preceding 150 years of constitutional development – is an indicator of the obstacles that generally have to be overcome by any acclimatization to a liberal political culture. For the moral core of such a culture consists in the willingness of citizens to reciprocally recognize others as fellow citizens and democratic co-legislators endowed with equal rights. This begins with regarding political adversaries in a spirit open to compromise as opponents and no longer as enemies – and it continues, beyond the limits of different ethnic, linguistic and religious forms of life, with the reciprocal inclusion of strangers, who wish to remain strangers to one another, in a shared political culture. … This political culture must have differentiated itself from the respective majority culture to such an extent that every citizen in a pluralistic society can recognize himself or herself as a member. The social bond of a society, however heterogeneous it may be, will remain intact only if political integration as a general rule ensures a form of civic solidarity that, far from demanding unconditional altruism, calls for a limited reciprocal willingness to assist. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 24 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The overall quantitative result, which made no claim to be generally representative of the West German population, and which was also restricted to those participants who spoke, was (for all topics excluding East Germany): 16 per cent positive, 40 per cent ambivalent and 44 per cent negative. On the topic of the East, rejection, classified as positive, was the overwhelming result. Despite an odd attempt to keep this evaluation of attitudes non-committal, and to leave undecided the question whether the attitudes being evaluated in this way were to be seen as attitudes to democracy or attitudes to the discussion topics, the interpretation which kept gaining acceptance, even in the text itself, was that the attitudes being examined were attitudes to democratic values. For supporters of a democratic system, it was therefore a result which gave little grounds for confidence. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1888 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar West Germans showed mostly negative or ambivalent attitudes toward democratic values — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1888; Post-Nazi Germany needed fifty years of resocialization to acquire liberal political culture — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 24; Work-immanent criticism served as political retreat under Nazism and after 1945 — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2224 (+10 more)

Related

• Work-immanent criticism served as political retreat under Nazism and after 1945 (similarity 0.87)
• The Nazi era and Cold War severed younger Germans from utopian social criticism. (similarity 0.83)
• Postwar West Germans showed mostly negative or ambivalent attitudes toward democratic values (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Work-immanent criticism served as political retreat under Nazism and after 1945 #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2224
• Post-Nazi Germany needed fifty years of resocialization to acquire liberal political culture #corroborates (0.78) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 24
• Postwar West Germans showed mostly negative or ambivalent attitudes toward democratic values #complicates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1888