I. The Confrontation of Terror and Play: An Intellectual-Historical Constellation in Early West Germany In September 1968, a conference took place in the castle of the town of Rheda (Westphalia), remote from German intellectual centers. Boasting illustrious names from the German history of ideas, such as Jean Bollack, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Blumenberg, and Manfred Fuhrmann, this gathering of twenty-eight highly renowned scholars appears, in retrospect, to be one of the more memorable events in the intellectual history of the Federal Republic of Germany. It had a lasting impact on German research in the fields…