Demokratisierung nach Auschwitz: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Sozialwissenschaften in der Nachkriegszeit by Fabian Link (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Demokratisierung nach Auschwitz: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Sozialwissenschaften in der Nachkriegszeit by Fabian Link George Hong Jiang Demokratisierung nach Auschwitz: Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Sozialwissenschaften in der Nachkriegszeit. By Fabian Link. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2022. Pp. 640. Paper €66.00. ISBN 9783835351981. How the public and intellectuals reacted to the Nazi past has been a common theme of both popular culture and academic research. The rise and fall of Nazi Germany are not just a calamitous event in terms of physical destruction but also a negative sea change for intellectual circles. Many untamed brains were banished or chose to emigrate when the Nazis started to construct a totalitarian leviathan, while other scholars stayed and engaged in the government's activities in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Martin Heidegger and Helmut Schelsky. The Frankfurt School, where many members and its heads, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, were Jews, had to live in exile, firstly in Geneva and Paris and then in New York. The various ways different figures dealt with their Nazi past and reengaged in German academia after 1945 shaped Germany's social sciences and democratization process. Focusing on two prominent groups, i.e., the Horkheimer circle and the Schelsky circle, Link's monograph offers a comprehensive and detailed record of their academic and social activities for the three decades between 1931 and 1961. The book has a very clear and coherent structure. The central theme is how the two groups, "those who came back" (Rückkehrer) and "those who stayed [in Germany]" (Dabeigewesene), conducted social research and thus contributed to Western Germany's democratization after 1945. Part A, as the introduction, presents the historical background of the status quo of social sciences after 1945 in Western Germany. Part B, which occupies over two-thirds of the length of the book, illustrates how the Horkheimer circle and Schelsky circle differed from each other in three fields: social empirical research, sociological analysis, and educational policies. In the first field, while the Horkheimer circle utilized interviews and group experiments to investigate social-psychological sources of totalitarian tendency, the Schelsky circle conducted sociological analyses of families, sexuality, and youngsters after 1945. In the second field, the two groups carried out their respective sociological analyses of [End Page 507] the industrializing society. In the third field, by dint of their administrative positions at universities and their interpersonal relationship with the authorities, the two groups facilitated educational reforms and nurtured new generations of students. Highlighting the debates between relevant figures, such as the positivism dispute (Positivismusstreit), Part C illustrates the epilogue of the divergence. While the Horkheimer circle apparently experienced more physical changes regarding its remigration from Europe to the United States and back to Germany again than the Schelsky circle, the former had more consistency in theoretical progress than the latter. Schelsky, as a representative of Dabeigewesene, expressed positive attitudes toward the Nazi regime (Chapter 6.1.3.) but turned to criticism after 1945. Like many pro-Nazi scholars at the time, Schelsky praised the Nazi regime as the realization of the Germanic race and a flag of modern society (192). On the other hand, heavily criticizing the totalitarian tendency of the modern capitalist society before the 1930s and actively investigating the sources of the spiritual Nazi seeds after 1945, the Horkheimer circle insisted on its intellectual pursuit. Paying more attention to the analysis of an adjusted society of the middle class (nivellierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft, Chapter 9.2.) since the early 1950s, Schelsky rarely saw the totalitarian tendency hiding in socializing industrialization and mechanization. Nonetheless, as the two most influential groups of social scientists in Western Germany, who passionately published essays and monographs and gave speeches through radio programs, their research and suggestions to the authorities hugely shaped the public and academia. Because massive numbers of German people immediately after the war still spoke highly of Hitler and his statecraft (313), democratization in Western Germany was obviously a burdensome process. That process is vividly illustrated by the divergence and convergence between the Horkheimer circle and the Schelsky circle, both of whom cooperated with American and British officials to revive Germany's social sciences and shape the spiritual liberalization of the German...