The sons destined to murder their father: crisis in interwar Germany

The Enlightenment is often equated with Kant’s Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment (1784) and the charge that humanity must ‘dare to know’ and ‘have the courage’ to understand in order to be liberated from ‘self-imposed immaturity’. The new authority of critical reason as the basis of knowledge and the hope that this could lead to freedom and equality amongst people separated this period from earlier ways of thinking. Kant can be seen as emblematic of this hope for the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment. Yet, while the Enlightenment led to increased political and social emancipation in France, England, and the United States – the German Aufklärung did not follow the same trajectory; its population remaining ‘naively unpolitical’, advocating instead for an educational revolution, spread through dedicated private individuals and benevolent rulers (Epstein 1966: 33, 35). This was expressed in the uniquely German idea of education as Bildung in which the Enlightenment ideal of progressive self-liberation was framed first and foremost as the internal development of the individual, rather than as requiring social expression and change: self-cultivation rather than political emancipation.