Meaning and Science in Weimar: Crisis and the Cultural Foundations of Reason.

This essay surveys a number of intellectual currents in and about the Weimar Republic (1919-33), and attempts to provide a limited background for understanding the codeterminacy of scientific, cultural, and socio-political crisis. It will attempt to map out the contours of a constellation of cultural elements around the concept of crisis in order to penetrate the semiotic function of both the concept and the period in which it is so passionately meaningful.