How did German intellectuals react to unification and how have they conceived the country's national identity and its new international position? This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider history of the development of German political thought since World War II -- while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers. Jan-Werner Muller explains why many intellectuals reacted so defensively to unification and why unification plunged the Left in particular into a major crisis that is yet to be overcome. He analyzes the responses of Gunter Grass, Jurgen Habermas, and others of the so-called skeptical generation, who broke with the tradition of the illiberal interwar intellectuals and reinvented themselves as a "democratic elite" who sought to transform political culture after the war -- and tried to do so again after 1989. He discusses the German idea of "constitutional patriotism" as well as the antinationalism of the "generation of 1968", and provides the first full-scale analysis of Germany's "New Right". Written clearly and elegantly, the book assesses the acrimonious debates about the future of the nation-state and public memory in Germany and offers more general reflections on the role intellectuals can play in post-totalitarian societies.

扬－维尔纳•米勒（Jan-Werner Müller） 德国籍。英国牛津大学哲学博士。现任美国普林斯顿大学（Princeton University）政治系副教授。

另著有《危险的心灵：战后欧洲思潮中的卡尔•施米特》（A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought, 2003），编有《战后欧洲的记忆和权力:过去的现在性研究》（Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past，2002）和《1945年以来的德国意识形态：联邦德国文化和政治思想研究》（German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic, 2003)。

译者简介

马俊 复旦大学哲学硕士，现为《第一财经日报》评论部编辑。

谢青 1972年生。南京解放军国际关系学院英语学士、法学硕士。发表有《当代西方国际关系理论中的安全理念》、《论东西方政治学发展过程中的异与同》等。