The changes in the social democrats' intellectual milieu

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the German Social-Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) began to rebuild. Coming after 12 years in which the SPD had been banned from organising on German soil, this reconstruction process also brought a renewal of the party’s relationship with intellectual and programmatic work. New institutions were created, and the leaders and intellectuals who now took charge of the party programme were no longer the same ones who had made the SPD of the 1920s the Mecca of Marxism. This chapter is devoted to describing the transformations that took place in this post-war period.