Abstract

This text-based biography of the famous German political scientist Kurt Sontheimer (1928-2005), written by his lifelong friend Bedrich Loewenstein in critical empathy, investigates the most important issues and controversies of Sontheimer's lifetime. In this spectrum, much of the political intellectual history of the Federal Republic is reviving - polemics around the German Sonderweg, Thomas MAnn's political essays, the student revolt of the sixties, the German political culture, the political phiosophy of Hannah Arendt etc. Kurt Sontheimer was considered the political conscience of the second German republic and a guardian of democratic values. In many aspects his thinking is worth considering.