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Paul Betts, European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957
The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War, German History, Volume 36, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 131–134, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghx082Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of new titles on what is now called ‘global intellectual history’, setting their sights on tracing how key ideas, concepts and doctrines travelled across national borders and took root in various international settings. Since the late nineteenth century, imperialism and decolonization have spurred (and framed) much of the intellectual traffic across continents, and for this reason much of what we know often centres on the West and its former overseas possessions. Germany has not figured all that prominently in these new histories, though this is changing quickly. Dina Gusejnova’s European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957 and Udi Greenberg’s The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War are two recent efforts to integrate German thinkers on empire and democracy, respectively, back into the broader international discussion. Whilst Gusejnova is more interested in German-speaking aristocratic intellectuals in the interwar years, Greenberg focuses on Weimar republican thinkers who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.
