Studying a structure demands what Jean Piaget called “a special effort of reflective abstraction.” We need, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explained, to look “beyond the empirical facts to the relations between them,” which “reveals and confirms that these relations are simpler and more intelligible than the things they interconnect.” By studying intellectuals whose political emotions dramatize the structure of German subjectivities, we can reveal these relations in the case of postwar German memory and identity. Intellectuals and writers are no different from other Germans in having to wrestle with political emotions. In fact, because their identity projects are so elaborately articulated in public language, they embody the affects and unconscious fantasies about their large-group identity as Germans in oblique but sometimes disarmingly candid ways. Because of the high level of reflection in their thinking for and against the nation, intellectuals are more likely to develop internally consistent and coherent positions, and, consequently, we can “read off” the logic and structure of their political emotions from their writings. Dissecting their writings is thereby at once an exercise in biographical study and detection of those deeper, often quasi-religious currents that subtend public discourse. Nonetheless, while agreeing with Nietzsche that “every great philosophy” is “the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir,” this book does not contend that the link between individual intellectual life and social psychology affords access to the political emotions of every German.