Creating Liberal Germany From Empire to Exile: The Fischer Circle

Abstract

The thesis focusses on the history and political thought of the Fischer circle, a group of journalists, theorists, and writers associated with the Berlin publishing house S. Fischer and its monthly review journal, Die Neue Rundschau. In their opposition to the German Empire’s government; as the intellectual architects of the Weimar Republic; as publishers of exiled German writers in Sweden and the US; or as the Allies’ partners in building up a new Germany after 1945 these intellectuals were among the leading representatives of Germany’s liberal democratic left – ideologically rooted in so-called ‘classical liberal thought’ on the one hand, Kantian transcendental rationalism and German Idealist and Romanticist philosophies on the other. The thesis reconstructs how the Fischer circle adapted and reinstated these ideological roots in the context of the political upheavals that Germany experienced in the first half of the twentieth century, for instance by constructing a model of cohesive, organic democratic representation towards the end of the First World War or by reinstating the Romanticist utopia of European unity in the context of the governmental crisis of 1923/24. One crucial result of this analysis has been how continuously the philosophical trajectories of ‘German’ freedom – reinvigorated by nineteenth-century Lebensphilosophie – served as central imaginative and normative resources for the political. The case of the Fischer circle indeed exemplifies that the political thought of the liberal democratic left continued to depend deeply on such ‘spiritual’ resources. Studying these intellectuals thus helps elucidating not only the long-term history of the idea of liberal democracy in Germany, but likewise the diversity of the political left. In bringing together archival sources and published theoretical or essayistic texts, the thesis seeks to sensitise for the intimate interdependence of life, politics, and thought. At the same time, it brings to the fore the materiality of ideas and of modern political thought, meaning their financial and organisational dependence on patrons and distributors such as, in the case of the Fischer circle, Samuel Fischer, Kurt Wolff, Gottfried and Brigitte Bermann-Fischer, or Peter Suhrkamp.