Abstract

To discuss under this tide the early writings of authors, who a few years later would be numbered among the members of the exiled Institute for Social Research, is a kind of provocation. The political culture of the Weimar Republic was initially re-appraised in West Germany primarily in light of totalitarian theoretical principles. Later this picture changed to the extent that research abandoned the right-left equation. Should this progress, in view of a new wave of nostalgia, be undone? Can anything other than a scandal result if one considers the fact that prominent representatives of the leftist intelligentsia — the jurist Fritz Neumann, the political scientist Otto Kirchheimer, and the philosopher Herbert Marcuse — had been students of even more well-known representatives of the academic right?