Over the past twenty-five years, the diminishing force of the radical agendas from the 1968 generation has fostered a cautious intellectual environment. Many scholars have grown wary of broad, ambitious theories about history and society. Within this retreat from sweeping narratives, the German academic landscape has maintained distinctive tendencies. One such tendency is the evolution of microhistory, which seeks to restore the meticulous craftsmanship of traditional historiography while avoiding outdated positivist methods. Typical studies in this tradition rely on the detailed examination of diverse historical documents to uncover the hidden textures of everyday life. The conclusions often challenge the use of broad organizing categories such as capitalism, industrialization, and the state, dismissing them as relics of discredited philosophical systems. This approach, marked by its populist spirit, has earned its practitioners the affectionate nickname “barefoot historians.”
Among these historians, Lutz Niethammer has stood out for his originality and intellectual range. Known primarily as an oral historian, Niethammer shares certain methodological affinities with the British historian Raphael Samuel, though the national and cultural differences between them are significant. Unlike Samuel, Niethammer’s history from below has always existed in tension with an awareness and respect for the theoretical frameworks he ultimately seeks to critique. His best-known work, Posthistoire, published in English in 1994, is a rigorous study of the “End of History” thesis. At just 160 pages, it provides a concise yet profound analysis of this concept, exploring the intellectual exhaustion it represents.
Niethammer’s Exploration of Collective Identity
Niethammer’s more recent project is an ambitious genealogy of the term “collective identity.” Unlike his earlier focus on coherent theoretical constructs, he argues that this term lacks conceptual precision. His study traces the evolution of the idea from its obscure origins in the early twentieth century to its contemporary prominence as a defining concept of the modern age. According to Niethammer, the phrase “collective identity” consistently evades clear definition, fluctuating between notions of essence and construction, between factual observation and normative claim. Because of this vagueness, traditional historical methods fall short in capturing its significance. Instead, Niethammer proposes a more interpretive approach guided by intuition and psychological insight.
In his analysis, Niethammer reads the early uses of “identity” in the works of figures such as Carl Schmitt, Georg Lukács, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Halbwachs, and Aldous Huxley as symptomatic expressions of deeper personal and intellectual conflicts. He suggests that these thinkers employed the term in part to conceal or manage an inner disquiet related to their social and political positions. Through psychoanalytic reading, Niethammer argues that the early connotations of “identity” reveal an effort to grapple with the anxieties of modernity, fragmentation, and the dissolution of stable cultural forms.
A Revisionist Genealogy
Niethammer’s central objective is to challenge the accepted German narrative about the origins of contemporary identity discourse. According to the conventional story, the idea of identity entered post-war German thought through the re-importation of American ego psychology. Erik Erikson, one of its founders, promoted the ideal of a balanced personal identity, an image of psychological harmony well-suited to the stability of the Adenauer period. Over time, this concept was expanded from the individual to the collective level, merging with elements of German philosophical tradition. Niethammer disputes this progressive narrative. Instead, he locates the emergence of “collective identity” in the interwar period, interpreting it as a response to the crises and psychological tensions of that era.
His approach is not genealogical in the Nietzschean sense. Nietzsche argued that the origin of a concept and its later uses are often unrelated, separated by vast differences in purpose and application. Niethammer, however, takes the opposite stance. He defends the historian’s conviction that origins disclose the essence of later developments. For him, to understand a concept’s beginnings is to uncover the secret of its subsequent transformations. This conviction, though controversial, drives his analysis throughout the study.
The Method and Its Limits
Niethammer acknowledges that many of his interpretations rest on fragile textual evidence. In several of the works he discusses, the term “collective identity” appears only once or twice, often in marginal contexts. Yet he views these scattered references not as weaknesses but as evidence of the concept’s inherent indeterminacy. He argues that the ambiguity of the term is part of its meaning. Its essential characteristic is that its essence remains hidden. In his reading, every appearance of the term becomes a clue to the author’s deeper struggle to define the boundaries and nature of the collective during times of upheaval—civil war, religious decline, and the unresolved tensions of the Jewish Question.
This interpretive method, while creative, risks overextension. Niethammer himself admits that his conclusions sometimes rest on tenuous grounds. Nonetheless, he insists that such difficulties are unavoidable when studying the psychological and ideological undercurrents of intellectual history. His work aims to expose how the term “identity” functions as a screen for more profound contradictions rather than a clear analytical tool.
The Case of Carl Schmitt
Niethammer begins his exploration with Carl Schmitt, a choice that may appear arbitrary but is intended to illustrate the darker implications of identity discourse. Schmitt, born during the late Wilhelmine era in a Catholic provincial environment, emerged as a leading figure in Weimar political thought. Niethammer portrays him as a counter-revolutionary thinker and anti-Semitic nationalist who sought to undermine the democratic order of the Weimar Republic before aligning with the Nazi regime in 1933. Schmitt’s 1922 assertion that democracy entails an “identity” between rulers and ruled is interpreted as an expression of nationalist metaphysics that legitimized exclusionary politics.
However, Niethammer’s interpretation of Schmitt has been contested. He suggests that Schmitt viewed the Jewish diaspora as disrupting the imagined unity of the national community. This reading is intriguing but unconvincing, as Schmitt’s early writings before 1932 contain no explicit anti-Semitism, and his later Nazi-era works that do are devoid of the language of identity. Critics argue that Niethammer misrepresents Schmitt by forcing the term “identity” into contexts where it had no central role. They also note that Schmitt explicitly rejected ethnic definitions of nationhood in his Weimar-era works, a fact Niethammer largely overlooks.
Beyond Schmitt: Identity and Democracy
Despite these issues, Niethammer’s broader argument retains its power. He suggests that Schmitt’s definition of democracy as identity between rulers and ruled exposes the coercive potential of mass politics. In this framework, the distinction between direct democracy and authoritarian plebiscite becomes blurred. Both reject the pluralism and mediation characteristic of parliamentary liberalism. The idea of collective identity, when tied to such notions of unanimity, risks becoming an instrument of domination rather than liberation.
It was only in the decades following World War II, during the rise of affluent capitalist societies, that the concept of “collective identity” gained widespread traction. The political revival of the 1960s in West Germany saw a curious diffusion of Schmittian language across ideological lines. The term began to appear in the rhetoric of both the left and the right, in conservative nationalism as well as socialist activism. Yet the meaning remained elusive. According to Niethammer, this semantic flexibility allowed the term to operate as a tool of political mystification. Detached from its origins, it provided a convenient idiom for diverse agendas, from progressive movements to reactionary campaigns.
The Ideological Afterlife of Identity
Niethammer contends that the adoption of identity discourse by the post-war left marked a turning point. What had once been a language of resistance became, in his view, a vehicle for conformity—by embracing the rhetoric of “collective identity,” left-wing thinkers inadvertently obscured the real challenges facing modern democracy. The concept, instead of fostering solidarity, began to mask social divisions and to neutralize political critique. It became a symbol of the depoliticization of public life, a sign that the energies of collective transformation had been redirected toward managing belonging.
In this sense, Niethammer’s study of collective identity also serves as a critique of the intellectual culture that sustains it. He sees in the term’s popularity not a sign of progress but a symptom of exhaustion. The idea of identity promises unity in a fragmented world, yet it often serves to conceal rather than resolve underlying conflicts. For Niethammer, the inflation of this discourse signals the decline of democratic imagination and the triumph of a homogenizing language over the diversity of lived experience.
Lutz Niethammer’s work offers an unconventional and thought-provoking history of one of the most pervasive ideas of the modern age. His method, combining historical inquiry with psychoanalytic interpretation, reveals the hidden anxieties and contradictions that have shaped the language of identity. Though his readings sometimes stretch the evidence, they compel reflection on how intellectual traditions evolve and how terms once born in crisis can become the unquestioned currency of public discourse. In The Age of Identity, the Question is not merely where the concept originated, but what its persistence reveals about the state of modern thought and the fragility of collective meaning in an era of uncertainty.