The dominant figures in German aesthetics after World War II were certainly Hans-Georg Gadamer, perhaps the most important student of Heidegger, and Theodor W. Adorno, the leading theorist of the Frankfurt school of “critical theory” after the war. Although Adorno, as both a Jew and a leftist, was forced to flee Germany in the 1930s and spent the war years in the United States, while Gadamer, a non-Jew who tried to remain apolitical and therefore could not get an academic appointment, was nevertheless able to ride out the war within Germany, there is a deep commonality in their thinking in general and in aesthetics in particular: Both take a deeply historical approach to art, seeing all art as expressing its time and therefore offering the possibility of knowledge of it. But Gadamer tries to assimilate that approach – which can be seen as deriving from Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein freed from its pretense of introducing an analysis of Sein – with the aesthetics of play that Heidegger had rejected, while Adorno did not, so that task was instead left to his Frankfurt school colleague Herbert Marcuse (also originally a student of Heidegger), who came to America but unlike Adorno stayed there after the war, although he continued to work within the tradition of German aesthetics. So he will be considered here along with Gadamer and Adorno, rather than in the subsequent discussion of American aesthetics. Several other German aestheticians associated with either Gadamer or Adorno as well as several others significant in postwar Germany will also be touched upon, although Gadamer, Adorno, and Marcuse will be the main characters in this chapter.