Helmuth Plessner’s The Delayed Nation was a key text in the Sonderweg narrative that dominated the writing of German history from the later 1950s to the mid-1980s: the idea that the disaster of the Third Reich and the Holocaust could be explained in terms of Germany’s problematic path to modernity since the Middle Ages. The book had originally been published under a rather prolix title in Zurich in 1935 when Plessner was an émigré in the Netherlands. It made little impact then, and only attracted attention from 1959 under a short title which seemed to capture the essence of the emerging left-liberal view of the disastrous course of German history. The more accessible title in reality masked an extremely complex book which did not sit easily with the social history preoccupations of the avant-garde of post-war German historians. Plessner’s history was a narrative of intellectual degeneration that placed philosophy at the heart of the German problem. Plessner’s book can only be fully understand in relation to his own philosophical and political concerns in the 1920s. Its impact in the 1960s and after derives almost entirely from its suggestive and eye-catching title.

中文翻译：

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Helmuth Plessner 和延迟的国家

Helmuth Plessner 的 The Delayed Nation 是 Sonderweg 叙事中的关键文本，它主导了 1950 年代后期到 1980 年代中期的德国历史写作：第三帝国的灾难和大屠杀可以用德国的问题来解释中世纪以来的现代化之路。这本书最初于 1935 年在苏黎世以相当冗长的标题出版，当时 Plessner 是荷兰的移民。它当时影响不大，只是从 1959 年以一个简短的标题引起了人们的注意，这个标题似乎抓住了新兴的左翼自由主义对德国历史灾难性进程的看法的本质。现实中更容易理解的标题掩盖了一本极其复杂的书，它与战后德国历史学家的先锋派关注的社会历史问题并不一致。普莱斯纳的历史是一段关于知识退化的叙述，将哲学置于德国问题的核心。普莱斯纳的书只有结合他自己在 1920 年代的哲学和政治问题才能被完全理解。它在 1960 年代及之后的影响几乎完全来自其暗示性和引人注目的标题。