Living with Liberal Democracy
This chapter looks at the rise in prominence of the Institute for Social Research, a small academic center whose work became a lodestar for left-wing politics among secular West Germans in the 1960s. That an institution which had previously been forced into exile because of its Marxist politics had returned in the form of a quasi-state agency in an age of extreme anticommunism was remarkable in itself. Still more impressive, perhaps, is the fact that the Institute for Social Research has come to represent West Germany's shift from the Christian conservatism of the Adenauer era into the multicultural era of present-day Germany. The chapter then examines the institute's role as a left-wing entity whose members were deeply disappointed with how the constitutional, economic, educational, and cultural reconstruction had played out in West Germany, and yet accepted the new liberal democracy's legitimacy, actively endorsing it against the alternative of the communist German Democratic Republic.