Structuring German postwar ideologies

Jaspers, and even the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich have received adequate attention in Anglophone scholarship, we have precious few studies in English on many of the thinkers examined here by Moses.These are the lesser-known postwar "historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and educationalists" (p.10) who served on government advisory committees, became ministers of culture and education, or in other ways decisively shaped the political discourse of the Federal Republic.For that reason alone Moses was guaranteed to cover new ground.But it is ultimately the innovative way in which he has mapped his subject matter that makes this work stand out, not only as an indispensable guide to early debates about Nazism and West German democracy, but more generally as a distinctively original model for writing about intellectuals and their ideas."This book is not a conventional intellectual history," we are told in the introduction (p.10).Part of what makes that statement true is the attention Moses pays to fields that is all too often terra incognita for intellectual historians-namely, structural anthropology and the voluminous but neglected literature on German social psychology.His case for integrating research on family life, transgenerational transmission, and the like into a history of intellectuals rests on the deceptively profound insight that political ideas and ideologies, arguably nowhere more so than in postwar Germany, often possess "existential" significance for their articulators

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