The Weimar Moment

The Weimar Moments evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and communityor, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, racecannot but appeal to us today. This appealits historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thoughtis the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegels remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.