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A Prophet without Honour: Karl Jaspers in Germany, 1945—48

Of all the intellectuals in Germany clamouring for positions of leadership after the second world war and there were many Karl Jaspers was perhaps the most favourably situated. A celebrated professor of philosophy in Heidelberg before the war, Jaspers had been an opponent and victim of the nazis during the twelve-year Third Reich. Unlike other well-known German intellectuals, including his philosophical comrade-in-arms Martin Heidegger, he had refused to compromise with the nazi regime. Indeed, according to his former student Golo Mann, Jaspers 'had not spoken or, so long as he was still allowed, published a single word that might have been interpreted as support for tyranny'.1 Moreover, Jaspers, in contradistinction to exiles such as Thomas Mann, could not be accused of abandoning his country in its hour of need: thus he was one of the few German intellectuals who could hope to use his moral authority to speak to and for Germany. Given this opportunity, Jaspers was prepared to help Germany take the first faltering steps toward cultural and political renewal. For a brief period between 1945 and 1948 he became the most recognized and the most important intellectual in the western zones of occupation. Assessing Jaspers' influence in postwar Germany has, however, proved difficult, in large part because of the controversy surrounding his discussion of the guilt question and his emigration to Basel in 1948. Especially after his emigration, many of Jaspers' contemporaries in Germany saw him as irrelevant to developments in the Federal Republic of Germany, even though subsequent discussion would suggest that the categories he pioneered remained appropriate and fruitful. By the 1960s and 1970s he had become the object of condescension, scorn and neglect in Germany. Although his reputation as an intellectual has recently begun to recover, some critics have continued to find his influence deleterious to subsequent German cultural and political history. But too often such assessments have lost sight of context, of what could reasonably be expected in the circumstances. This article recreates the openness and drama of the immediate postwar situation first and then evaluates Jaspers' effectiveness at meeting the shortand longer-term challenges in postwar Germany.