Street Life and Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime by Lesley Chamberlain (review)

Street Life and Morals: German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime details a survey history of philosophical thought in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At various times in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, she stresses that philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Hannah Arendt struggled to answer a trio of questions raised by the forces of modernity: how to manage liberal, capitalist social relations; technological change and innovation; and the fate of reason itself. The sections of the book lay out in detail the various interventions and suppositions made by major philosophers of Germany’s early twentieth century to answer these questions. Organized in a basically chronological order, the book conforms to the titular lifetime of Adolf Hitler and begins roughly in 1889 and continues to 1945. An introductory chapter opens the book and then the narrative proceeds to a second chapter detailing the social, economic, and urban transformations of Germany as perceived by philosophers like Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer. The next chapter discusses “Kantianism” in Germany and twentieth-century attempts to adapt what Chamberlain emphasizes was an eighteenth-century philosophy to urban industrial life. Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl figure prominently in this chapter. The most substantial chapter, the fourth, discusses the thought of key figures including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Arendt of the Frankfurt School along with Martin Heidegger. Chamberlain details their engagement with the crisis of modernity and philosophy posed by the Weimar and Nazi period. The concluding chapter attempts to show that the philosophy that came out of this period, particularly from the Frankfurt School and its affiliates, was a “positive outcome,” a remnant of a lost German tradition. The book ends with two appendices, one on Kant’s relevance to National Socialism and one on the experiences of philosophers during the Third Reich.

The strengths of Chamberlain’s book lie in its intense and erudite interest in the thought and lives of the philosophers detailed in the book. For a reader unfamiliar with the corpus, this book provides a useful overview of the era’s major ideas and their interconnections. Chamberlain’s overview of Simmel and Arendt, in chapters two and four, respectively, are of noteworthy quality. These virtues mean that Street Life and Morals would be especially suitable for an educated, non-academic reader who desires to understand the history of philosophical ideas in Germany during the Interwar period. Similarly, a scholar seeking a general overview for reference would benefit from the text.

Disappointingly, the book examines the crisis of philosophical confidence and sensibility during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without satisfactorily showing the connections to the wider social and political crisis that lay at the root of the Nazis’ ascendance. Reading the book’s chapters is to immerse oneself in a traditional history of ideas; a discussion of philosophers, their lives and ideas, and their relationships. Only infrequently does Chamberlain connect the wider historical context of Weimar Germany and the Third Reich to these histories. It reduces the lifetime and impact of Adolf Hitler on Germany to little more than a framing device. It would have been highly productive to have the shifts and changes in the ideas of Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, or others connected to the rapidly and radically shifting social, political, and cultural history playing out in Germany at the time. Nor does Chamberlain bring in the extensive scholarship on the intellectual lives of German academics and cultural figures during the Weimar era. These weaknesses limit the book’s utility for historians and cultural scholars of the period who are not expressly interested in one, some, or all of the philosophers that Chamberlain examines.

The approach and tone of the book are uneven when read from an academic perspective. Frequently, Chamberlain inserts herself into the narrative with critiques of the quality of a philosopher’s prose or similar asides. In fact, this approach reinforces the general...