SEHI7004 Between Politics and Culture: German Ideas 1890 - 1970

Summative Assessment

Coursework Essay 4000 words (75%)

Coursework Essay 1500-2000 words (25%)

Formative Assessment

Student presentations, feedback in class.

Module Outline

The course will examine some of the major intellectual debates in Germany in the twentieth century. The course will make students familiar with important philosophers of the respective period and how they made sense of the society they lived in. It will introduce a variety of texts by German intellectuals including Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas. In doing so it will offer an introduction to the field of intellectual history, and a means of understanding how basic concepts and ideas have been shaped by the course of recent German history. The seminar will focus on different reactions to and interpretations of ‘modernity’ in its varied meanings and understandings, and follow the development of these from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century.

Indicative Texts

• Peter Gay, Weimar Culture. The Outsider as Insider. New York 1968.
• Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge 1984.
• Mathew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918. Houndsmills et. al. 2003.
• Dirk A. Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past. Cambridge 2007.
• Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford 2002.
• Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley/Los Angeles 1997.

Please note: This outline is accurate at the time of publication. Minor amendments may be made prior to the start of the academic year.