First, it spoke of a subject that is the source of some chagrin, the fact that I would have gotten more out intellectually in learning German than French. The article affirmed for myself that my instincts were correct - German had more intellectual capital in the course of the early 20th century. Foucault, Sartre were just leaves in the wind when you consider the people who came before them:
For the basic achievements of the Weimar Republic and the reasons non-Germans take an interest in it are not political but intellectual and cultural. The word today suggests the Bauhaus, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Walter Benjamin, the great photographer August Sander and a number of remarkable movies. Weitz picks out six names: Thomas Mann, Brecht, Kurt Weill, Heidegger and the less familiar theorist Siegfried Kracauer and the artist Hannah Höch. One could as easily add, say, Carl Schmitt on the (rare) intellectual right, Ernst Bloch on the far left and the great Max Weber in the middle.
And on culture, what does Paris has to offer really aside from this populist belief in a foreign and romantic location where the business at the end of the day is to consume our imaginative trysts:
The prestige of Paris, ‘capital of the 19th century’, obscured the fact that it no longer had major innovations to offer between the wars except for Surrealism, itself largely derived from the multinational Dada of the Zurich Central European refugees.
Having visited Paris personally, I can speak with some measure of agreement that a visit to the city would not change anything drastically say, your notion of destiny, or gaining a new sense of purpose.
I digress to compare German to French, Berlin to Paris not because they are apples to apples or oranges to oranges, but because it is personally resonating. The article itself captures a moment in time when intellectual and cultural capital are at their zenith in a place that has vanished.
