Abstract

Although inextricably bound with a discredited unilinear theory of progress, the Sonderweg reading of German history still thrives as the teleological context for what remains of Left ideology in Germany. Today one of its main functions is to relegitimate an increasingly obsolete Left-Right political paradigm to help occlude new unsettling political realities and New Class domination. A fundamental assumption of this approach is a “natural” trajectory of national development, which leads to the demonization of all German history, culture and politics as culminating, because of the late unification of the German nation, in the compensatory xenophobic nationalism of the Nazis.