Meinecke’s Sonderweg

Sonderweg is the idea that Germany had its own peculiar development, institutionally because national unity came late and culturally because Idealism flourished in Germany like nowhere else in Europe. The idea that all events in the late nineteenth-century and the subsequent one can be ascribed to Germany’s peculiar history has been given up, but Sonderweg as a notion does well to explain Meinecke’s intellectual development. My essay discusses three of Meinecke’s major works. In Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat Meinecke describes how the fusion between the state and national culture never came off. In the Idee der Staatsräson he noted how the notion of the reason of state had left its ethical moorings and in the Entstehung des Historismus he concluded that German idealism could not save Nazi Germany. Nonetheless he remained loyal to the philosophy of German Idealism to the end, as becomes clear from Die deutsche Katastrophe, his assessment of Germany’s situation after world war two. Idealism was peculiar to Germany and the fact that he remained loyal to it –notwithstanding his criticism of German politics- may justify the title of my essay.