History 427: Modern German Intellectual History (McCole)
MIDTERM REVIEW SUGGESTIONS
You may wish to use the following topics as a way of organizing your review
for the midterm exam. I would suggest that you might also use the outlines
for the
lectures as a guide.
1. Kant’s definition of Enlightenment in “Answer to the Question, ‘What
is Enlightenment?’”
2. The history of the Bildungsbürgertum (educated upper middle class)
and the idea of Bildung, or self-cultivation (Ringer and lecture)
3. 1848, 1871, and the German empire (Fulbrook and lectures)
4. Nietzsche: the argument of The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche as a cultural
critic
5. The German empire in its Wilhelmine phase, after 1890 (Fulbrook and lectures)
6. Ringer’s conception of German sociology as mandarin modernism
7. Similarities and differences between Simmel and Weber as sociologists and
as diagnosticians of their own society
8. The argument and approach of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism
9. The arguments and approach of Simmel’s essay on fashion
10. The various neo-romantic currents and rebellions of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century
11. Schorske’s “Politics in a New Key”: the main features of
the new radical right wing movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Schönerer,
Lueger)
12. The changing relations of Germans and Jews in the nineteenth century: the
processes of emancipation and assimilation
13. The argument of Buber’s “Spirit of the Orient and Judaism”;
Buber’s speech/essay as a comment on German-Jewish history