Helmuth Plessner and The Delayed Nation

It is unusual for the title of any work of history to become a catchphrase, let alone to be regarded as a text that addresses the core of a nation’s modern history. Helmuth Plessner’s Die verspätete Nation (The Delayed Nation), published in 1959, did just that. Its snappy title is perhaps more frequently cited than any other work on German history. Indeed the title itself suffices to make the point that the Third Reich was in some sense the outcome of Germany’s supposedly retarded history: the last major European nation to emerge as a nation state, a complex mixture of extreme modernity and equally extreme backwardness.

Other works also played an important role in the development of this narrative: Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht (translated as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), caused controversy in Germany for its apparent endorsement of the war guilt clauses of the Treaty of Versailles (Fischer, 1961). But Fischer’s subtitle, Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (The War Aims of Imperial Germany 1914–18), like the title of its English translation, indicates its narrower focus. Plessner’s book covered a much wider range, from the late medieval Holy Roman Empire and the Reformation to 1933. The fact that it has never been translated indicates something of the challenges which it presents. These arise from the complex subject matter, Plessner’s extremely difficult style, and the curious history of the text itself.

For someone educated in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s the idea of Germany as a ‘delayed nation’ was immensely suggestive. School reading on German history, a relatively small part of European history courses, was largely confined to works by Geoffrey Barraclough, A. J. P. Taylor and E. J. Passant, or the American Koppel S. Pinson. At Cambridge between 1972 and 1975, I studied modern German history for the first time in a final-year special subject course on ‘The Nazi Seizure of Power’. It was in this context that Jonathan Steinberg first introduced us to the notion of the ‘delayed nation’, though we did not actually read Plessner’s text. We were even unaware of the subtitle: Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes (‘On the susceptibility of the bourgeois spirit to political seduction’). The catchphrase main title was enough to make the point about Germany’s apparently problematic engagement with modernity and its tragic denouement. It was only much later that the significance of this complex text became clear to me.

Plessner’s work was in fact first published under a different title by Max Niehans in Zurich in 1935: Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche (literally, ‘The fate of German spirit at the end of its bourgeois epoch’). It comprised lectures given at the University of Groningen in the winter of 1934–5. In them, Plessner, an academic philosopher of part-Jewish origin, who lost his position under the civil service law of April 1933 which dismissed all Jews in state employment, sought to explain the situation in Germany to a Dutch audience. The book was sold and reviewed in Germany for a short period but was then banned and largely ignored. The work only gained a significant audience some years after Plessner returned to Germany in 1952 as professor of sociology at Göttingen. As we shall see below, Plessner’s early development and the circumstances of his first writing are key to understanding the text and much of what many later critics have found problematic in it.

The timing of the work’s republication in 1959 and the new title were both highly significant. This was the period in the history of the Federal Republic in which a movement of writers and intellectuals against Konrad Adenauer’s conservative CDU/CSU government gained ground. After its electoral failure throughout the 1950s, the Social Democratic Party abandoned its socialist economic policies and embraced its own version of Ludwig Erhard’s social market model (Wolfrum, 2006: 144–86, 207–16; Conze, 2009: 45–250).

Younger historians began to deliberate the problems of what from about 1957 was referred to as a ‘restoration’ under Adenauer (Kiesel, 2003). Radical young writers such as Günter Grass emerged as proponents of a new and uncompromising literary realism. Grass’s Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, caused excitement and controversy in 1959 for its engagement with the Nazi past and the role of ordinary Germans in it (Glaser, 1997: 251–81). Others were beginning to discuss the need for more serious engagement with the past: the Germans, they argued, had not come to terms with the Nazi period and would not be able to live in a ‘normal’ democratic society until they did so (Conze, 2009: 250–8).

The word ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ and the phrase ‘Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit’ articulated the conviction of many of the liberal left that Germans finally had to confront, own up to and work through their past. As Theodor Adorno explained in a lecture in November 1959 entitled ‘Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit’, Germans had not come to terms with the death of Hitler or their defeat in 1945: until that happened, they could not hope to develop a new and truly free way of living (Adorno, 2003).

‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ and ‘Aufarbeitung’ both focused on the crimes of the Nazi period. Explaining how they came about led to the creation of a new master narrative of German history known as the Sonderweg. For Adorno, as for Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School generally, the answer was clear: fascism was the political manifestation of capitalism. Yet that begged the question of why the Holocaust had been perpetrated by Germans and why other varieties of fascism did not have the same horrendous outcomes. Explaining the specificity of the German experience required a deeper understanding of German history. The Sonderweg offered a perspective on the development of Germany which became part of the political programme of the liberal left from the late 1950s.

It is now common to read that the Sonderweg is passé and it is certainly true that few current German historians espouse anything like the version of this master narrative that was current in its heyday (Wehler, 1979: 709–53; Kocka, 1992; Evans, 1997: 12–22, 212–20; Kocka, 1999: 43–50; Smith, 2008; Waechter, 2013; Grüttner, 2014: 39; Everett, 2015; Metzler, 2018: 123–52). This lasted from the early 1960s to the mid to late 1970s, the social democratic era of the FRG, which further underlines the political function of both the Sonderweg itself and the broader programme of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ of which it was part.

Clara Maier has argued that the history of the Sonderweg thesis ‘begins with Helmuth Plessner’ and that the original 1935 edition of his book represented ‘the earliest and at the same time the most complete theory of the German question’ (Maier, 2016: 27). It was certainly an important part of the pre-history of the Sonderweg narrative. Yet the idea of a Sonderweg under that name only really emerged after 1945. It represented the negative inversion of the Prussian–German historical master-narrative that had dominated the writing of German history since Treitschke: the idea of the ‘besonderer deutscher Weg’, the special German way or German mission in the world (Faulenbach, 1980; Everett, 2015).

Some scholars, such as Otto Hintze and Ernst Troeltsch, already began to criticize key elements of this narrative after the First World War, to some extent taking up themes that Max Weber had elaborated since the early 1890s (Kocka, 1988: 4; Iggers, 1983: 176-95, 232-6; Faulenbach, 1980: 168-71, 178-80; Everett, 2015). Criticism of, or at least growing doubts about, Lutheranism and of Prussia, the foundations of modern Germany in Treitschke’s narrative, gained currency. Socialist and communist authors such as Franz Mehring (1846–1919) or Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), both academic outsiders and not represented in history faculties, had of course rejected the ‘establishment’ narrative right from the start and their writings enjoyed considerable popularity (Kössler, 2005).

The 1930s and early 1940s then saw a proliferation of works which sought to diagnose the German ‘problem’ (titles by the writers listed in this paragraph may be found in the references). Studies by German émigrés such as Plessner and many others were joined by contributions by non-Germans such as the French scholar Edmond Vermeil (1878–1964), the Hungarian Aurel Kolnai (1900–73), the maverick American William Montgomery McGovern (1897–1964), or British authors such as Peter F. Wiener (1870–1949) and A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90). After 1945 the number of such books grew apace in the context of debates about the collective responsibility of the Germans for National Socialist crimes. Equally important in generating new attitudes were the various post-war allied re-education programmes (Smith, 1996; Fischer, 2007). The cumulative effect of all these various types of historical revision was to bring about the inversion of the old master narrative: the old idea of a positive special German way became the new negative Sonderweg (Langewiesche, 2008).

Plessner’s text was undoubtedly a significant contribution to this growing body of literature. But, unlike all the others, it must be considered in two contexts: that of its first conception in the early 1930s and that of its republication in 1959. While the body of the text remained the same, its meaning, and the thrust of its argument, appeared rather different in the second.

The publication of 1935 represents the culmination of ideas that had been developing in Plessner’s mind since the First World War. (For the biographical details, see Dietze (2006). Other useful studies are Schüßler (2000) and Dejung (2003).) Born in 1892, the son of a doctor in Wiesbaden, Plessner embarked on medical studies at Freiburg in 1910. The following year he transferred to Heidelberg, where he studied under the philosopher and biologist Hans Driesch and with the neo-Kantians Wilhelm Windelband and Emil Lask. He also encountered Max Weber, as well as Ernst Troeltsch, Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács. A growing interest in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl prompted Plessner to a further move to Göttingen in 1915 and a decision in favour of philosophy as the focus of his doctoral studies. If he started out as a budding phenomenologist, he ended as a confirmed neo-Kantian, with a job at Cologne, and an uneasy relationship with his new senior colleague Max Scheler, to whose thinking his own in many ways ran parallel. Both are now recognized as founders of the new philosophical anthropology which their work established by the late 1920s (Schnädelbach, 1984: 219–26).

Alongside his philosophical work, but also linked with it, the First World War and its aftermath led Plessner to engage with the political developments of the 1920s. Despite some debate about whether Plessner was a liberal or a conservative before 1933, it seems quite clear that he was a liberal nationalist – like Max Weber – during and after the First World War. In 1924 he wrote disparagingly that the admission by the German Chancellor in 1914 that the invasion of Belgium was a violation of international law and a sin against Germany showed that he was merely indulging in the ‘luxury of the harmony of conscience of a rentier’ (Stirk, 2006: 76–7). He himself had offered military service but was hindered by a stiff arm; his father volunteered as a front-line doctor in his place (Dietze, 2006: 36–7). Civilian service as an assistant at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg was an unsatisfactory substitute. Being obliged to guide visitors round the Reformation exhibition mounted to commemorate the quatercentenary in 1917, however, gave him knowledge and experience that fed into his thinking about German history.

The war and its aftermath clearly preoccupied Plessner deeply, and in 1924 he wrote his first historical-political work, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (‘The limits of community: a critique of social radicalism’). At the political level this was a critique of the political visions of the Marxist revolutionaries, the youth movement and the new right-wing groups, such as the National Socialists. Plessner emphasized the significance of the public sphere as a ‘Hygienesystem der Seele’, a ‘hygiene system for the soul’, which would cleanse and harmonize the conflicting inclinations and ambitions of individuals (Plessner, 1981a: 133; see also Bialas, 2010: 139–46). The precondition for its operation, of course, was the commitment of all citizens to active political engagement. Plessner identified the main obstacle to success of such a Kantian vision in the present as the progress of modernity during the nineteenth century. Industrialization and the development of the modern state had deprived humans, particularly Germans, of their sense of political agency.

If Kant and Weber were obvious inspirations, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft also reflected Plessner’s association with Troeltsch and his work at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. For Plessner now also began to write about the long-term impact of the Lutheran Reformation on German society. Echoing Ranke’s view that the Reformation had divided the German nation, he combined this with Troeltsch’s critical assessment of the political implications of Lutheranism. On the one hand, he argued, the Reformation had crippled the Holy Roman Empire and turned Germany into a ‘European province’ (Plessner, 1981a: 21). On the other hand, Lutheranism imbued Germans with a deeply conservative and apolitical mentality. Its teaching of the purely personal relationship of the individual with God deprived Germans of any possibility of redeeming agency in a world that was inherently sinful. While Calvinists might aspire to redemption by virtue of their own efforts, Lutherans were doomed to become the obedient subjects of authoritarian rulers (Plessner, 1981a: 20).

The arguments set out rather sketchily in this early work were extended in a second political tract of 1931: Macht und menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht (‘Power and human nature: an attempt to formulate an anthropology of the historical world view’). This was Plessner’s response to the growing strength of völkisch thinking in Germany in the later 1920s and the increasing prevalence of political views that promoted a biological understanding of human nature (and in consequence political theories according to which political action was determined by solipsistic decisionism and by the biologically determined nature of a Volk or nation).

More stridently and more urgently than in 1924, Plessner reiterated the case for a Kantian view of human nature and for a community defined by the public sphere (Dietze, 2006: 76–83; Bialas, 2010: 146–56). At the same time, he refined his view of what community meant in order to underline his differences with the advocates of decisionism and of ideas of community defined by blood. His targets were figures such as Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger and those associated with the so-called Conservative Revolution. He argued that belonging to or loyalty to community was not in the first instance a natural or a biological attribute. Communities, he now argued (using the term Volkhaftigkeit to denote the sense of belonging to a people or a Volk), were historically evolved entities shaped by a common history and experiences (Plessner, 1981b: 228–34).

Once more Plessner emphasized the Bismarck era as a crucial turning point in the modern history of German political culture. For the ‘central question of political anthropology’ which is ‘to what extent politics is an integral part of human existence’ is not considered very important in Germany at all, unlike in ‘those countries which have a political culture’ in which ‘it is never entirely forgotten in the offices of the administration and the newspapers’ (Plessner 1981b: 139). Once again, the political apathy of the Germans, or rather their historically evolved apolitical nature, was seen to pose a profound threat to their future.

The developments that Plessner engaged with philosophically soon shattered his existence. Dismissed as a part-Jew following the promulgation of the civil service law in April 1933, he fled into exile. He first went to Istanbul, enticed by the news that the university there was seeking to appoint 30 German professors following Atatürk’s higher education reform. By the time he arrived, however, the reform process had run into difficulty. In December 1933 he accepted an offer of support from Groningen, where he started afresh in January 1934. He visited Germany frequently and maintained contacts with family, friends and former colleagues. He found it difficult to come to terms with his status as an exile. Conversations with fellow exiles and new friends in the Netherlands, together with lectures on contemporary German philosophy in 1934–5, were all worked into the book Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche, which Plessner described in a letter of 1936 as ‘an attempt to come to terms with my fate’ (Dietze, 2006: 137). This was the text reissued in 1959 under the title Die verspätete Nation (The Delayed Nation) (Plessner, 1982).

The lectures and the resulting text were at one level deeply personal, testimony to the profound disorientating impact on Plessner of the early stages of the war of ‘Germans against Germans’, to use the arresting title of Moshe Zimmerman’s study of the fate of the German Jews (Zimmermann, 2008). At the same time, however, Plessner’s continuous engagement with German politics since the First World War made this, like his earlier works, a decidedly German book. Others, notably in the circles of the Frankfurt School, were already thinking about fascism as a European phenomenon, as a general problem of European modernity. Plessner’s thoughts, however, did not draw on Marx but rather on Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, the German neo-Kantians, Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. Consequently, he saw Nazism as the outcome of a uniquely German development since the later Middle Ages. It was not, he suggested, furthermore, a consequence of capitalism but of the deformation of the German educated classes.

The book comprised three sequential but overlapping and intertwined narratives. The first was the development of the German state from the Holy Roman Empire to the new empire created in 1871 and its successor the Weimar Republic. The second was an analysis of the impact of Lutheranism on German society and culture. The third was an account of the development of German philosophy since the eighteenth century. The three narratives combined to explain the susceptibility of the German educated classes to Nazism and the tragic state of affairs in Germany from 1933.

Plessner’s starting point was the situation of Germany after the First World War. The war, he argued, had transformed the framework in which European states existed (Plessner, 1982: 34). It marked the end of Europe’s political, economic and technical domination and the emergence of a new relationship with countries that were previously dependent on it. It accelerated a divisive process of politicization both within and between states as the belief in the value of human solidarity diminished under the impact of internal impoverishment and external isolationism and the desire to create new national authorities to replace the old. At the same time intellectuals lost faith in the specific achievements of the ideals of personal freedom and free competition and the civilizing effects of progress in accordance with the ability of humans to use science to control natural forces. This new scepticism in turn reflected the collapse of religious faith in modern society and Europe’s loss of any understanding of the historical origins of its own ideals. If this was a European problem, it was at its most acute in Germany which, exhausted by the Herculean effort made in the war, was in defeat the centre of scepticism about European values (Plessner, 1982: 40).

Yet it was no accident, Plessner suggested, that Germany became the centre of a war against the ‘political Humanism of the western world’ (Plessner, 1982: 40). The current crisis had its origins in a German struggle against political humanism that began in the seventeenth century as the nation states of Western Europe emerged while the Holy Roman Empire entered its terminal decline. The German protest at the peace settlement of 1919 was thus more than just a reaction to defeat in the war. It was a protest at that ‘historical destiny’ which denied Germany true national unity in the modern era (1982: 41).

That leads to the heart of Plessner’s first narrative strand. The modern German state had no ‘idea’ or true mission, nor was it a state that truly incorporated the German nation. The empire Bismarck created was an artificial construct which had little to do with the historic German national polity, the Holy Roman Empire, and which excluded large numbers of Germans. The Weimar Republic was no better in this respect. This was one of the outcomes of the Reformation. The old Holy Roman Empire was the premier polity of Christendom and represented the unity of Christendom. The Reformation destroyed that unity and the empire declined as a result. It lost its higher meaning or sense of mission and degenerated into a meaningless and anarchic system. While Western nation states emerged and developed a strong sense of unity and purpose, Germany was dominated by authoritarian princes and their purely regional and sectarian ambitions.

For German society, the absence of a meaningful state or state with a mission meant that the notion of the Volk became central from the eighteenth century onwards. If the concept of Volk had been the concern of writers and poets in the eighteenth century, by the 1920s it had become a contested notion at the heart of the ideological conflict that preoccupied German society after the First World War. The idea of the Volk and its future was fought over by politicians and philosophers in battles which inflamed the German educated classes. Plessner believed that the centrality of the notion of Volk underlined the primacy of ideas over material conditions and the need to understand how the development of ideas in Germany culminated in the crisis of the late 1920s.

Plessner’s second narrative strand takes up this theme with a consideration of the nature of Lutheranism and its impact on German society. In relation to the present, Plessner noted the widespread absence of belief and the long-term decline of Christianity. This was in a sense the ironic outcome of the Lutheran Reformation. The Reformation was born of the same spirit of rebellion that had characterized the early church. Yet while Calvinism and other Protestant sects retained this quality, Lutheranism did not. The Lutheran churches became subservient to the state and the authority of the princes, and Lutheranism thereby lost its spirit of freedom; individual Lutherans were subjected by their faith to lives of unquestioning industriousness. This was good for economic development in the long term but hampered the evolution of the kind of public spirit and political engagement that one found in the Western countries where Calvinism had been dominant. The absence of free churches and of sectarianism in the Holy Roman Empire contrasted sharply with the experience of the Netherlands or England, where free thinking fed into a reinforced commitment to political liberty. The Germans did not experience a seventeenth-century revolution.

In the hopelessly divided Holy Roman Empire any discussion of religion became impossible; intellectual life atrophied. This had three consequences. Firstly, German Catholicism was stifled and no subsequent attempt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to revive it succeeded in breathing fresh life into it (1982: 85–90). By contrast, in France, the ‘theocratic clericality’ (1982: 86) of the Catholic Church and the survival of Divine Right kingship provoked growing criticism, which culminated in 1789 and the separation of church and state. ‘Enlightenment in its classic form’, Plessner claimed, ‘is secularized Catholicism’, though he noted that a parallel development unfolded in England and he also wrote of the ‘Anglo-French Enlightenment’ and referred to Italian influences as well (1982: 85, 87).

Secondly, the emancipatory impulses of the Enlightenment were allegedly blunted in Germany by the authoritarian princely states and by Lutheranism. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the gradual secularization of Protestantism, but the new secularized forms were still shaped by the legacy of the Reformation. Even German philhellenism was only a pseudo-pagan culture and remained Protestant in its core (1982: 89). More generally, for the educated classes, Plessner suggested, the worship of culture increasingly served as an ersatz for both church-going Lutheran religiosity and active political participation, or a true sense of national identification. Since neither state nor church had a meaningful purpose or mission, the Germans in the new Reich of 1871 devoted themselves to culture, knowledge and economic activity more energetically than any other European people (1982: 105).

Finally, Plessner argued that the gradual secularization of German Protestantism not only turned many to the worship of culture but also generated another phenomenon in the later eighteenth century: modern German philosophy, whose development provides Plessner’s third narrative strand. In his view, the crisis of Lutheranism led on the one hand to the worship of culture and learning (Wissenschaft) and on the other hand to the search for a new sense of meaning through philosophy. Kant and his contemporaries and successors liberated philosophy from the shackles of the old Christian world-historical framework. Here Plessner followed Dilthey and others in denying the value of the Aufklärung and in emphasizing instead the emergence of the German spirit in the ‘German movement’ of the three generations from the 1760s personified by the figures of Herder, Goethe and Hegel (Gretz, 2007: 23–38).

Kant set a new philosophical course by challenging all accepted truths by means of critique. Successive Idealists attempted different versions of this critique, culminating in Hegel’s philosophical world history which told the story of the self-liberation of Geist through history. Yet critique and the critique of critique merely led to further questioning. Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche each sought to expose the inadequacy of philosophy to date and to propose different solutions: revolution, a new Christianity, or a new way of living ‘beyond good and evil’ (1982: 185–97). The effect of all their efforts was to deprive philosophy of any claim to authority. Philosophy ultimately became Lebensphilosophie, no longer able or willing to explain the world but content to find meaning in life alone.

This downward spiral of philosophy was paralleled by an accelerated process of change in the world of learning. Theology was supplanted by history; history was supplanted by sociology. Finally, biology was left as the only science which seemed to hold the key to human existence. Darwinism became the dominant mode of thinking in the later nineteenth century. Freud provided the sequel. Darwin had inspired bourgeois visions of progress and ambitions of greatness. Freud reflected the ‘disappointed consciousness of those who had arrived or those who sensed that they would never arrive in the era of radical unbelief’ (1982: 160).

The notion of life as struggle, of the biological imperative, remained central to the ideological conflict of the 1920s and early 1930s: Volk, race, blood and soil were all that now mattered. Modern Germany was living in the age of ‘authoritarian biology’ (1982: 162–84). Philosophy had become redundant as a result of its own efforts since the late eighteenth century: critique led ultimately to self-negation. The new belief in blood as the ‘true root and destiny of mankind within the confines of a racially maintained Volk’, Plessner concluded, represented the last response to the history of the fall of Graeco-Christian tradition from the German political and intellectual perspective’ (1982: 210–11). The German Volk had not yet been able to find its unity in a nation state; they lived purely from the quasi-religious racial ideology which had taken the place of philosophy. Philosophy has finally lost all contact with and meaning for life.

Plessner’s argument, as it was published in 1935, left no real hope for the future. The point at which Germany had arrived was, after all, its ‘Schicksal’ or fate, as the work’s 1935 title indicated. The observation that all things are subject to change and with the implied hope that political Humanism might yet prevail offered no consolation. Nor did the book have much impact. The reception was limited by the restriction imposed on its sale in Germany by the National Socialist government in 1936 and was in any case mixed (Dietze, 2006: 149–58). As noted already, the Frankfurt School criticized its fundamental lack of understanding of the social and economic process, its focus on elements of the superstructure rather than on what they regarded as fundamental. Other reviewers, by contrast, praised Plessner’s liberal Christian standpoint. In the English-speaking world there was also a limited reception. Hans Kohn, an émigré from Prague after five years of Russian captivity in 1916–22, was extremely enthusiastic. He hailed the work as ‘by far the best book written on the background and fundamental attitude of present-day Germany’. He noted, however, that it was written in the ‘language of a German philosopher’ and that reading it might be difficult for ‘those not trained’ in that language, a particularly difficult form of German (Kohn, 1936). Plessner himself later recalled that the work was soon forgotten (Plessner, 1985: 334).

The 1959 edition was identical to the first, apart from a new title, a new introduction and some explanatory notes, notably on the function of antisemitism in the new biological thinking of the 1920s and 1930s. Plessner feared that the work would appear too late to make any difference. In West Germany, widespread anti-communism seemed to justify Hitler and National Socialism retrospectively. In East Germany the official Marxist ideology ensured that Plessner’s ideas would have no impact. He expressed scepticism about European integration and the embrace of a post-national world as a realistic way forward. He observed in 1975 that the book might have made a difference in 1946 but that years of prosperity made Germans indifferent to their past (1985: 334). In so far as they were interested in their recent history, they preferred books about what happened rather than books about why it happened.

Some found his approach anachronistic, believing that the tradition of Geistesgeschichte itself belonged to the problematic German past. Habermas noted that Plessner’s language, with its use of terms such as Volk, volkhaft, artgemäß, faustisch or tropisch, was archaic, full of words that had disappeared from the German vocabulary since 1945 (Habermas, 1987: 133).

Plessner was unapologetic. In his new introduction he was dismissive of those who had subsequently sought to explain the German problem. And he staunchly defended his methodology as the only real way to understand the long historical evolution of the mentality of the German middle and educated classes, whose responses to the crises of the early twentieth century facilitated Hitler’s Reich. He also offered an excellent summary of his argument (Plessner, 1982: 14–20).

Yet as Habermas also pointed out, Plessner’s view of the way forward was ambivalent. Plessner argued that ‘revolutions conjure up their own dialectic’ (1982: 32): Germany in the late 1950s might be poised to turn decisively against the ideas that had sustained the Third Reich. Naturally he hoped that Humanism would once more prevail. But, in view of the anticommunism and Europeanism prevalent in the FRG in the 1950s, he seemed hesitant. He hoped that the Germans would use their time of powerlessness constructively. In the spirit of early ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ he concluded that while we could not know which path the Germans would take, they would not be able to take any path at all until they had ‘come clean with themselves and understood themselves’. This was a ‘rule of human decency that one should never forget, even in a time of helplessness and hopelessness’ (1982: 33).

Plessner’s account of German history now seems dated. Historians of modern Germany have moved on from the Sonderweg, though it still resonates through their narratives nonetheless (Smith, 2008; Waechter, 2013). Few historians of early modern Germany would accept Plessner’s account of the Holy Roman Empire after the late fifteenth century, his judgements on Luther and Lutheranism, or his views on the insignificance of the Aufklärung (Whaley, 2015; 2018). Intellectual historians would probably hesitate to accept in every detail Plessner’s dialectical narrative of the development of German philosophy and ideology. The history of philosophy might be the one area where significant elements of Plessner’s narrative can still be found (Hösle, 2017: 139–240), yet few would accept that philosophy as such was responsible for what happened in Germany after 1933. Plessner’s belief that it was German philosophers who sealed the fate of German modernity is simply untenable.

Yet to approach Plessner’s work from the point of view of scholarship today is to ignore its historicity. It is an historical document of the 1930s; it became a tract for the 1960s. It was one of those books that contributed to the formation of the political culture of the FRG. That it did so owed much to its suggestive new title: Die verspätete Nation.