Franz Neumann

Franz Neumann's classic account of the governmental workings of Nazi Germany, first published in 1942, is reprinted in a new paperback edition with an introduction by the distinguished historian Peter Hayes. Neumann was one of the only early Frankfurt School thinkers to examine seriously the problem of political institutions. After the rise of the Nazis to power, his emphasis shifted to an analysis of economic power, and then after the war to political psychology. But his contributions in Behemoth were groundbreaking: that the Nazi organization of society involved the collapse of traditional ideas of the state, of ideology, of law, and even of any underlying rationality. The book must be studied, not simply read, Raul Hilberg wrote. The most experienced researchers will tell us that the scarcest commodity in academic life is an original idea. If someone has two or three, he is rich. Franz Neumann was a rich man. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944

Behemoth

Bernhard Claußen

Walter Gagel

Herausforderungen' und, Antworten' - diese Begriffe sind als di daktische Schliisselkategorien zum Merkmal des didaktischen Den kens von Wolfgang Hilligen geworden. So sehr sie heute Allgemein platz geworden sind, - er seIber hat sie schon 1955 verwendet, um die Moglichkeiten politischen Handelns in einer problematisch geworde nen Welt aufzuzeigen. Eine Schrift, durch welche Freunde und Kolle gen Wolfgang Hilligen zu seinem 75. Geburtstag im Mai 1991 ehren wollen, muJ3 diese Worte im Titel aufweisen, wenn sie seinem Werk ge recht werden solI., Herausforderungen' sind die krisenhaften Gefahrdungen der jewei ligen Gegenwart; mit dem Begrift', Antworten' wird die Uberzeugung ausgedriickt, daB Menschen die Kraft und die Fiihigkeit besitzen, die sen Gefahrdungen zu begegnen und LOsungen zu finden, die ihnen ein Uberleben und ein sinnvolles Leben ermoglichen. Es ist dies eine ge schichtsphilosophische Grundiiberzeugung, die sich bei Wolfgang Hilli gen gegen Endzeit-und Untergangspessimismus richtet und ein MaO an Zuversicht ausstrahlt, das Jugendliche wie Erwachsene ermutigen kann. Die, Antworten' sind im Sinne von Wolfgang Hilligen nicht als bloB technokratische zu verstehen. Vielmehr miissen sie nach seiner Uberzeugung von einem Bezug auf normative Grundentscheidungen geleitet sein. Hilligen hat seine normative Uberzeugungen in seinen, Optionen' formuliert; sie stellen den Wertekern seiner Didaktik dar. Es sind die Optionen - ffir die unbedingte Geltung personaler Menschenrechte, - llir die Uberwindung struktureller sozialer Ungleichheiten, - fUr die Notwendigkeit, Spielraum und Institutionen fUr Alterna- ven zu schaffen und zu verbessern.

Politische Bildung in den neunziger Jahren

Heraus Forderungen Antworten

Essays in Political and Legal Theory

The Democratic and the Authoritarian State

Herbert Marcuse

Otto Kirchheimer

During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time. These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war. Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany

Würde und Leben sind antastbar oder Wer schützt den Menschen?

First published in 1987. The legal and political writings of the German Social Democrats Kirchheimer and Neumann, from the period prior to the National Socialist seizure of power, are little known to English readers. This volume presents a selection of important essays from this period, which focus on the prospects for the constitutional realization of a social democratic order in the first German Republic - the Weimar Republic, created out of the collapse of the monarchy in 1918, and destroyed by the National Socialists in 1933. Both Kirchheimer and Neumann were active as lawyers in the later 1920s and early 1930s, the latter especially having a close connection with trade union legislation and labour law. From their viewpoint as Social Democrats and lawyers they present incisive analyses of the problems confronted by the attempt to realize the ideal of a social Rechtsstaat in a political environment increasingly dominated by forces on left and right which saw constitutional order only as a means to seize power, and not as a legitimate form of order in itself. In these circumstances, political issues translated into constitutional issues, and thus could be analysed in terms of the aims and objectives of a given constitutional order. A substantial introduction by the volume’s editor, Keith Tribe, presents the political and theoretical background to these essays, which range over questions of industrial democracy, political representation, parliamentary rule and the role of judicial review. These issues are once more on the political agenda of Western industrial democracies, and the analyses of Kirchheimer and Neumann have lost none of their force and relevance, despite the catastrophic ‘failure’ of Weimar democracy in 1933.

Franz Neumann

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