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Postmodernism and Weimar Culture

Published/Copyright: February 27, 2008
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From the journal Volume 38 Issue 1

Abstract

An examination of the connections between the Messianism in the cultural politics of the intellectuals in the Weimar Republic and contemporary post-modern cultural critique. Both distinctly neo-Romantic positions emphasize illuminating and redemptive energies in the fragmentary and ironic displacements that sustain an ever elusive Meaning. This concern emerges from the growing awareness of intellectuals that their postwar cultural position is increasingly marginalized through the sciences and technocracy. During the Weimar period, the shock of this experience was fresher and more distinct. Claiming to speak authoritatively about an increasingly complex social, political and cultural reality that largely eluded them, Weimar intellectuals turned under the influence of Georg Lukács' ‘History and Class Consciousness’ to highly idiosyncratic variations on Hegelian Marxism – a problematic solution that Siegfried Kracauer analysed critically in his correspondence with Bloch.

Published Online: 2008-02-27
Published in Print: 2003-05-27

© Walter de Gruyter

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