The lessons that we learn from the brilliance of the scholarship from Weimar Germany and its continued relevance to the contemporary scene define the spirit of the essays in this volume. Academic analysis is the beginning of institutional response to avoid reoccurrence of past political nihilism and catastrophe. This volume presents a predicate for such effective defense.
The Weimar Moment's evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and "community"-or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, "race"-cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal-its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought-is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel's remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.
