Since the introduction is easily available online on the publisher’s website, a review that provides a kind of “summary” of such “summaries” runs the risk of redundancy. The introduction does a brilliant job of summarizing the nineteen essays assembled here. Many of the essays, in a sense, provide summaries of major intellectual trends in the Weimar period. Any given reader-including this reviewer-is inevitably reduced to the status of a novice in areas beyond his or her own particular expertise. The present volume explicitly seeks to address expert and general reader alike. McCormick deftly acknowledge and discuss the theoretical quandaries to which their project is subject. Using a lens of “continuity and crisis” (1), editors Peter E. The sheer variety of voices and the bewildering simultaneity of competing, often inherently contradictory, world views cannot easily be accommodated under a unified conceptual heading. This observation is by no means negligible in an age of transnational academic exchange, as may be exemplified by the recent Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, which contains contributions by German, American, and British experts in their fields.The dazzling diversity and complexity of intellectual activity that emerged in German speaking central Europe in the wake of the cataclysm of the First World War eludes the grasp of a single individual and raises the question of whether it is possible to talk of “Weimar Thought” as a unified concept, even if the term is useful as a necessary shorthand.

Despite the fact that intellectual history of the Weimar Republic has been a flourishing field of research in Germany over the last decades, the volumes contain no contributions by German historians. Ash, Michael Krois, and Klaus Tanner, the authors teach at American, British or Canadian universities and represent major tendencies of the anglophone engagement with Weimar's intellectual history. The wide interdisciplinary field of authors, historians, philosophers, theologians, and literary, legal, and religious scholars, as well as social and political scientists, testifies to the continuing fascination of this era of thought in Anglo-American academia. Together the two volumes under review contain over forty essays on the intellectual history of Weimar Germany and its legacy today.

Weimar Thought by Peter E. Gordon