Nazism destroyed a generation of social-democratic constitutional thought

Evidence

It was as if Habermas was recoiling from involvement with what Kirchheimer had demonstrated most incisively in the final years before the Nazi takeover: an analysis of the constitution and constitutional reality that would show that the forms of a functioning democracy had up till then been possible only on the basis of the unchallenged supremacy of a single social class. But this recoil from taking as a direct theme the democratic system’s dependence on the patterns of the distribution of power within society went hand in hand with the absence of any stimulus in the history of ideas that might have encouraged him to take up such a topic. Not merely Kirchheimer’s trenchant studies from the late 1920s and early 1930s but also all the discussion by social-democratic and trade-union-oriented legal and constitutional experts, both among themselves and with their authoritarian counterparts, formed part of a tradition of social-democratic thought that had been either destroyed or protractedly interrupted by Nazism and remained suppressed until late into the 1960s. In the Federal Republic, this tradition was only maintained by Wolfgang Abendroth, an outsider among the university professors. Habermasand even more so others of his generationknew only more recent work by Kirchheimer, Neumann or Fraenkel. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Frankfurt School history in earlier chapters, and to the general theme of how totalitarianism ruptured intellectual traditions. Also touches on the question of which Weimar thinkers survived into the Federal Republic’s academic canon. — connects to: Nazism suppressed the social-democratic constitutional tradition until the late 1960s — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2372; Nazi decrees stripped Jewish academics of teaching rights step by step — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 634; Economic collapse destroyed social fabric and private life before Nazism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 253
• QUESTION: What exactly did Kirchheimer, Neumann, and Fraenkel argue about class supremacy and democracy in the Weimar period that Habermas’s generation apparently missed? Worth chasing.

Broader Connections

• Economic collapse destroyed social fabric and private life before Nazism’s rise #qualifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 253