Abstract

To an outside observer, the most striking feature of Marxism in West Germany is a lingering feeling of trauma—the trauma of a violent break with a tradition which, for better or worse, has become part of a tormented national cultural identity, mirroring real social conflicts. Indeed, Germany “gave rise” to historical Marxism, not simply as the cultural birthplace of Marx and other “classics,” but also by providing the prototype of a Marxism which has become a cultural and organizational model for the labor movement. Today's Germany, however, has violently rejected this historical legacy. If the Nazis liquidated Marxism as a scientific theory and as a Weltanschauung (and thus the discussion of the removal of Marxism from German culture also involves the meaning of the collective experience of Nazism for Germany, well beyond that of military defeat alone).