Wilhelm Hennis is one of the Federal Republic's most prominent political thinkers, best known in the English-speaking world for his books and articles on Max Weber. He has been a pugnacious commentator on political events and theory since the 1950s and is regarded as one of the “grand old men” of the country as a whole. An integrative republican from the outset of the new state, he was also a “German German” who developed an account of the nation's past that rescued its traditions from moral pollution.

Born into a Protestant horticultural family in Hildesheim in 1923, Wilhelm Hennis did not have a typical German childhood. He spent five years in Venezuela (1933–38), where his father, disaffected with the new political situation in Germany, accepted the offer of the Venezuelan president to establish a silkworm industry. Instead of mixing with his Volksgenossen (German comrades) in the Jungvolk (the Hitler Youth for ten- to fourteen-year-olds), he attended primary school with the locals and emigrant Jewish children from Germany. Still, as there were no secondary schools there and because his family set enough store on a proper German education, they returned to Germany in 1938. Hennis senior may not have liked the regime but not enough to prevent him and his family from living in Nazi Germany

The younger Hennis likewise had an ambivalent relationship to Nazi Germany.