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.

揚－維爾納•米勒（Jan-Werner Müller） 德國籍。英國牛津大學哲學博士。現任美國普林斯頓大學（Princeton University）政治係副教授。

另著有《危險的心靈：戰後歐洲思潮中的卡爾•施米特》（A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-war European Thought, 2003），編有《戰後歐洲的記憶和權力:過去的現在性研究》（Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past，2002）和《1945年以來的德國意識形態：聯邦德國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)。

譯者簡介

馬俊 復旦大學哲學碩士，現為《第一財經日報》評論部編輯。

謝青 1972年生。南京解放軍國際關係學院英語學士、法學碩士。發錶有《當代西方國際關係理論中的安全理念》、《論東西方政治學發展過程中的異與同》等。