The famous critical diagnosis of Friedrich Nietzsche that “God is dead”
and his concomitant insight into the devaluation of all values in the
name of enlightenment reason together with the experiences of the first
world war have especially led german intellectuals to question and
challenge the political heritage of the French Revolution and the
intellectual heritage of a self-destructive enlightenment reason, as
they perceived it. Against these two mutually reinforcing paradigms of
political and cultural modernity these intellectuals then tried to
reestablish a way of thinking that is premised on regaining firm ground
for social, cultural and political development in transsubjective and
transhistorical powers such as God, tradition or a mythological notion
of nature.
This line of thought has not only inspired a great number of German
intellectuals in the post-war era, including famous authors such as
Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann and Carl Schmitt, but also strongly
influenced for example the work of Ernst Forsthoff, Arnold Gehlen and
Helmut Schelsky. And from here its repercussions can be followed up to
the great contemporary intellectual debates in the Federal Republic.
In order to grasp this intellectual relationship the seminar will
highlight the intellectual prehistory of the conservative revolution in
the 19th century, then cast an exemplary light on its paradigmatic
formation in the Weimar Republic and last, but not least follow its
traits up to the more recent intellectual debates in the Federal Republic. |