Spirit and system: Mass media, journalism and the dialectics of modern German intellectual culture

The dissertation offers studies in time, place and voice of the agency of the German cultural bourgeoisie in the intuition, articulation, negotiation and dissemination of public knowledge of "German culture," its distinctive traits and qualities. At theoretical issue is how the social environment and social experience of intellectuals (defined broadly as "knowledge-specialists") mediates the formation of more widely-shared knowledges of social selfhood and alterity. In the German case, the dissertation demonstrates that putatively ethnotypical traits such as positive "German inwardness" or negative "German over-formalization" are in fact objectifications of the social phenomenology of the German-speaking cultural bourgeoisie of Central Europe that became sedimented into a generalized language of collective virtues, traits and morals over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries.; By means of a series of ethnohistorical and ethnographic studies centered on one intellectual profession, journalism, and on one intellectual cultural institution, mass media, the dissertation traces the artisanal relationship of intellectuals to the production, legitimation and reproduction of social knowledge of "German culture" through concrete lives, places and times. Specifically, the national mythology of a perpetual Faustian struggle between the sanctifying historical becoming of national culture ( Bildung) and the constraining static being of the totality of its products, System (System), is judged to be a translation of German intellectuals' own social experience of modernization into seemingly immutable ethnic-national and ontohistorical characteristics. By tracing and unraveling the dialectical intuitions of the alienation of intellectual spirit (Geist) from the System of modernity, the dissertation surfaces a hidden social history of the evolution of "German cultural character" in the changing relationship of German intellectuals to German society. In fact, as the dissertation argues, "German-ness" is a phenomenological work-in-progress of a specialized caste of national distinction, not the timeless cultural order it suggests itself to be.