Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture - Hardcover

Dominic Boyer is assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University.

Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer s Spirit and System exposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced Germans conceptions of modernity and national culture.

Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of Germanness from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of Germanness that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner spirit and an external system of social life is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals self-knowledge as he tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity across two centuries.