The Promise of Publicness

Intellectual Elites and Participatory Politics in Postwar Heidelberg

Bibliographic Data

ID12740445
AuthorsSean A Forner (Michigan State University, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume9
Issue3
Pages641-660
Publication date2012-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Intellectual History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1479-2443 • E-ISSN: 1479-2451
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1479244312000236
OpenAlexW2113539528
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited32

This essay explores how the experience of National Socialism provoked German intellectuals to rethink elitist conventions in politics. It focuses on three figures in the town of Heidelberg—Alexander Mitscherlich, Dolf Sternberger, and Alfred Weber—as well as on a journal ( Die Wandlung ) and a discussion forum (the Aktionsgruppe Heidelberg) that they established after 1945. Breaking with both mandarin and vanguardist traditions, they conceived a politics that neither transpired over the masses’ heads nor sought to organize them from above but rested on the people's participation from below. Moreover, a correspondence existed between their thinking on democracy and the grassroots, extra-institutional activities they pursued in an attempt to realize what they called “publicness” ( Öffentlichkeit ). Finally, the essay relates such immediate postwar ideas and practices to these intellectuals’ stances toward West Germany after 1949 as well as to the discussion on “publicness” that unfolded there, as exemplified in Jürgen Habermas's early work

Citizen journalism · Communism · Democracy · German · Grassroots · Political science · Politics · Social science · Socialism · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · German Social Sciences and History · History · Law

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