This dissertation concerns the problem of renewal on the German Left. How did crises of renewal and moments of generational conflict shape the theory and organization of German socialism during the tumultuous four decades between 1930 and 1970? When and how did socialism cease to be a viable political alternative to democratic capitalism? I treat the history of one small organization, New Beginning, as paradigmatic for the experience of the socialist renewers generation—the generation that renewed socialism through antifascist struggle and remade the German Left after the war.

Born between 1905 and 1915, the renewers were too young to have served in the First World War or actively participated in the November Revolution. They matured amid the political and economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic and later pioneered the formation of “socialist splinter groups.” Between the fronts of social democracy and communism, these small organizations like New Beginning, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), the International Socialist Fighting League (ISK), and the Communist Party-Opposition (KPO) sought to unify and renew the German socialist movement through a curious combination of elite vanguardism and grassroots initiative. They believed that the fight against fascism provided socialists a unique opportunity to finish the democratic revolution that had begun as early as 1848, leapt forward in 1918-19, but stalled during the conservative Weimar Republic. New Beginning distinguished itself from the other splinter groups in the way it explicitly articulated the problem of socialist renewal and linked the fate of socialism to the fate of its own generation.

After twelve years of anti-Nazi resistance and war, former members of New Beginning such as Fritz Erler, Waldemar von Knoeringen, Richard Löwenthal, Wolfgang Abendroth, Ossip K. Flechtheim, and Robert Havemann either arose from the rubble or returned from exile to acquire leading posts in German academia and politics. They set about applying the theories and methods they had learned during the 1930s to the new problems of reconstruction, divided Germany, and the developing Cold War. The majority of the renewers generation helped modernize the Social Democratic Party and develop a new kind of socialism that renounced Marxism and embraced a liberal, middle-class ethos. An important minority of renewers, however, stayed true to the promise of radical socialism. These dissident left socialists paved the way toward a New Left, and in the 1960s the original revolutionary élan of the renewers passed on to a new generation of militant young intellectuals: the Sixty-eighters.

Political ideologies as well as mass social movements grow old. Their proponents and participants physically age, and their ideas start to rust. Revival and rejuvenation, then, periodically capture the attention and shape the objectives of multi-generational social movements. The former members of New Beginning were keenly aware of how the problem of renewal could cause dysfunction in the established parties of the Left. But they also recognized an opportunity to mobilize the German youth against capitalism and conservative reaction. Instead of restarting socialism, however, the New Left and the Sixty-eighters unwittingly extinguished the original promise of German socialism and the renewers generation. Subsequent movements for social change in Germany and elsewhere in Europe would occur largely outside the socialist tradition.

This dissertation argues that ideas and experiences of friendship were central to the thinking of German radical conservatives in the twentieth century, from the pre-WWI years to the emergence, beginning in the 1970s, of the New Right.

I approach this issue by examining the role of friendship in the circle around the writer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998). Like many in his generation, Jünger's youthful alienation from a "cold" bourgeois society was felt via a contrast to the intimacy of personal friendship. A WWI soldier, Jünger penned memoirs of the trenches that revealed similar desires for mutual understanding, glorifying wartime comradeship as a bond deeper than words and a return to the "tacit accord" that supposedly marked traditional communities. After 1933, Jünger turned from a right-wing opponent of democracy into a voice of "spiritual resistance" to the Nazi regime. For Jünger and other non-Nazi Germans, friendship was a crucial space of candid communication and nonconformity to the norms of the Third Reich. Jünger's writings from these years also issued coded signals to sympathetic readers to keep alive conservative values for a post-Nazi future. After WWII, Jünger became one of Germany's most controversial figures, a critic of modernity who was at the center of a friendship network that joined the veterans and heirs of Weimar's radical right into a counterculture opposed to what they believed was the decadence of German life. In Jünger's later works, he portrayed friendship as the last true site of community, an idea that shaped the elitist attitudes of new members of the German right.

I use published texts and letters alongside new archival material to make two broad contributions. First, by investigating friendship among twentieth-century German radical conservatives, I bring to light the important work that friendship has done for those facing quintessentially modern problems like alienation and social fragmentation. I argue that the work of friendship for figures like Ernst Jünger has primarily been the provision of needs for affirmation, communication, and mutual understanding. Recognizing these needs helps us see that anxieties about being understood, longings for fellowship, and concerns for the quality of interpersonal relationships have often underlain radical conservatism's explicit ideas about, say, the virtues of "organic" community or the perils of democratic leveling. I show how these needs and anxieties were closely bound up with the radical conservative critique of modernity, including its elitism, ultra-nationalism, and disdain for mass society and mass culture. It is through friendship, I argue, that German radical conservatives have understood the shortcomings of modern life and envisioned ways to overcome or cope with modernity.

My second contribution is methodological. The study of friendship, I argue, can uncover emotional needs and intimate states of mind that are otherwise difficult for the historian to bring to light. Examining friendship among twentieth-century radical conservatives provides fundamental insights into motives, helping us understand why certain emotional demands were felt at certain moments in German history, and how these emotions in turn drove the decision for particular ideological positions. Asking these questions of the German radical right offers a fresh angle on a group usually dealt with through a reductive focus on cultural pathologies and formal ideology. Taking Ernst Jünger and his many friends and interlocutors as a case study, I provide a rich biographical historicization of German radical conservative thinking as it developed over multiple stages throughout the twentieth century. Stressing recurring needs for communication and mutual understanding, I locate new motives for radical conservative ideas.

At the end of the twentieth century, the gradual triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism over “really existing socialism” brought to many West Germans not relief but melancholy. Facing what they interpreted as the dissipation of radical social and political alternatives, academics and public intellectuals pronounced the death of ideology, of history, and of utopian ambitions. This dissertation asks how West Germans nevertheless found ways to challenge this resignation by giving voice to new, radical hopes for Germany’s future.

For their broad popularity and sustained impact, this study traces the grassroots efforts of three groups. First, it follows the Berlin History Workshop, a collection of amateur and professional historians, as they attempted to liberate the process of researching and writing history from the rigid confines German universities. This group sought, instead, to bring the historian’s craft into Berlin’s local neighborhoods in order to enable ordinary Germans to narrate their own histories. Second, this dissertation analyzes the Green Party, which practiced localized plebiscitary policy making in an effort to endow German citizens with greater political agency. The Greens brought this political practice to numerous cultural projects in an effort to democratize German society by democratizing the cultural encounters of its citizens. Third, this project investigates a loosely-connected group of artists who echoed the investments of the historians and politicians by creating art installations with ordinary objects in ordinary spaces that prompted passersby to reevaluate their relationships to the topography of their daily lives.

This dissertation argues that, through these groups, everyday Germans adopted a set of cultural practices in the 1980s and ‘90s that not only critiqued established institutions but also crafted new institutions in their place. Their critical practices followed three conventions. First, they championed radical grassroots democracy by giving citizens opportunities to create socially-significant cultural products like museums and monuments. Second, they decentralized the creative process, locating it in the spaces of everyday life in order to make it widely accessible. Finally, they borrowed from the environmental movement the concept of sustainability, which demanded that any alternative to existing society be both enduring and adaptable. These practices put culture to work in realizing a more democratic, more socially-integrated Germany. In doing so, they permitted their practitioners to reclaim utopian hope from the dustbin of historical ideas.

These three case studies span Germany’s academic, political, and aesthetic terrain. As such, together they offer evidence that efforts to battle twentieth-century apathy signaled a broad shift in German cultural sensibilities, not an isolated phenomenon. The first three chapters of the dissertation treat each of these groups individually as they began to advocate for new, more democratic geographies of cultural engagement, or “alternative public spheres,” in the early 1980s. Their focus on Germany’s cultural environment made them particularly receptive to the idea of sustainability popularized after the convening of the World Commission on Environment and Development in the middle of the decade. The next three chapters trace their pursuit of sustainability in culture. A sustainable culture, they came to realize, had to regard its projects as part of an ongoing process rather than as static goals: theirs was a renewable, future-oriented cultural movement in the present, or a “sustainable utopia.” Faced with radical changes to the international political landscape and the rapid expansion of their constituencies to include sixteen million East Germans alongside more pedestrian concerns like funding difficulties and interpersonal conflicts, these groups weathered the last decade of the twentieth century with varying success. The study concludes by underscoring the irony that the most durable component of their cultural programs in the wake of German political reunification was their push for cultural decentralization.

This dissertation reconstructs the intellectual and political reception of Critical Theory, as first developed in Germany by the "Frankfurt School" at the Institute of Social Research and subsequently reformulated by Jürgen Habermas, in the Netherlands from the mid to late twentieth century. Although some studies have acknowledged the role played by Critical Theory in reshaping particular academic disciplines in the Netherlands, while others have mentioned the popularity of figures such as Herbert Marcuse during the upheavals of the 1960s, this study shows how Critical Theory was appropriated more widely to challenge the technocratic directions taken by the project of vernieuwing (renewal or modernization) after World War II. During the sweeping transformations of Dutch society in the postwar period, the demands for greater democratization--of the universities, of the political parties under the system of "pillarization," and of society more broadly--were frequently made using the intellectual resources of Critical Theory. In turn, the development of a progressive, "posttraditional" society in the Netherlands, which appeared to reach its apex in the 1970s, suggested to a number of intellectuals that Habermas's more sanguine "theory of communicative action" best conceptualized the democratic achievements of modern society and the continuing prospects for the "rationalization of the lifeworld," through which injustices and social pathologies could be exposed to the scrutiny of critical reason. Critical Theory, then, had an "actuality" that went well beyond academia and had continuing "relevance"--another meaning of the Dutch actualiteit or German Aktualität--for understanding the past and future rationalization of society.

There was, moreover, another sense in which Dutch thinkers interpreted the actuality of Critical Theory. In the transnational process of reception, ideas and theories are inevitably shaped by the contexts in which they are taken up. This study begins with the Dutch social democrat Andries Sternheim, who worked at the Institute's office in Geneva in the 1930s, and shows how tensions arose over the more speculative philosophical premises of Kritische Theorie, as formulated in director Max Horkheimer's key 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory." These tensions prefigured the later emphases and inflections given to Critical Theory by its intellectual supporters (and detractors) in the Netherlands and reflected, I argue, a "discourse of actuality" with which Habermas's thought had greater resonance. Although some Dutch intellectuals gravitated towards the earlier arguments of Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, which identified the roots of modern pathologies of social domination in the widespread expansion of "enlightened thought" into forms of "instrumental reason," these claims were seen by many as overly pessimistic and speculative, particularly in comparison to Habermas's thought. Habermas argued that Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the "dialectic of enlightenment" had obscured a different form of rationality, made possible only by the rationalization of the lifeworld, namely "communicative rationality," which had its basis not in the arguably metaphysical, "emphatic" concept of reason to which Horkheimer and Adorno appealed, but rather in the immanent practices of everyday, intersubjective communication. Although Habermas insisted that the telos of mutual understanding, toward which non-strategic communicative practices were oriented, remained a counterfactual ideal, many of his adherents went beyond Habermas in ascribing an empirical actuality to the idea of communicative rationality. Furthermore, even as Habermas's theory was challenged in the course of the "modernism/postmodernism" debates of the 1980s, Dutch scholars frequently interpreted "poststructuralist" thought in ways that broadened the concept of rationality, rather than pitting one side against the other, as the leading German and French antagonists often did.

By putting the ideas of Critical Theory into historical and comparative relief, this reception history goes beyond strictly philosophical studies of the relative validity of the Frankfurt School and Habermas's competing forms of thought. The Dutch example offers a particularly revealing view into the "actuality" of what Habermas called "the unfinished project of modernity," as well as its potential limitations. In concluding, however, I follow other scholars of early Critical Theory in arguing that Adorno's thought in particular may have its own pressing actuality, even as its philosophical premises are considered outdated in the wake of the "linguistic turn." Against the historical developments of the last decades of the twentieth century--not least in the Netherlands--we might yet have something to learn from Adorno's thought, even in its most apocalyptic and utopian exaggerations.