Andreas Agocs. Antifascist Humanism and the Politics of Cultural Renewal in Germany

In Antifascist Humanism and the Politics of Cultural Renewal in Germany, Andreas Agocs has written an empirically focused, analytically wide-ranging study of the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund), a self-consciously antifascist organization that surfaced amid the ruins of Nazism in 1945. In its politically pluralist composition and its invocation of culture as a resource for regeneration, it was little different from many other contemporary initiatives. It was distinctive, however, in the support it enjoyed from powerful Soviet occupiers and their German Communist allies. This filiation has fueled debates around the organization ever since. Yet unlike most other scholars of the topic, Agocs is interested only secondarily in the Cold War and German division. Instead, his analysis situates the Kulturbund within longer-term histories of calls for “cultural renewal” and programs for mass political mobilization in German-speaking Europe. For all its seeming novelty, Agocs argues, the organization reflected important continuities, albeit ones shaped by the peculiar postwar conjuncture. Just as the end of Nazism allowed a broad-based antifascism to flourish among intellectual elites, so the beginning of the Cold War polarized its adherents. The Kulturbund had prehistories and afterlives, but its own run was short indeed

Communism · Democracy · Economic history · German · Humanism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies