In 1947 Elias published an excerpt from his 1939 book Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation in Germany – for the first time in an official sense,because the book had not been distributed in Hitler ’s Germany.The part selected was the Blick auf das Leben eines Ritters (‘Scenes from the Life of a Knight’, pp.376 –94 in the 1997 Suhrkamp edition, and pp.172 –82 in the revised English translation of The Civilising Process published by Blackwells). It was published with a short preface in the monthly magazine Neue Auslese which was distributed from 1945 to 1950 for purposes of  ‘re-education’ by the Allied Information Service (Alliierten Informationsdienst) in the Russian, British and American zones of Germany and Austria. The magazine’s full title was Neue Auslese aus dem Schrifttum der Gegenwart (from June 1947 amended to Neue Auslese aus dem Schrifttum aller Länder) and it contained short texts on various aspects of knowledge and culture, including Mensch und Gesellschaft (man and society), Internationale Fragen (international politics), Deutschland und die Welt (Germany and the world), Wirtschaft (economics), Bodenkultur (agrarian culture), Wiederaufbau (reconstruction), Erzählungen (novels), Kurzgeschichten (short stories), and Szenen (plays or theater) – just to name a few of thirteen subsections. The authors were of international rank, from Karl Mannheim, Adolph Löwe, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harold Laski, Loren Eiseley, Liam O ’Flaherty, Helmut James Graf von Moltke, Friedrich Meinecke to Alberto Moravia, Paul Valéry, Stefan Zweig and – not least – Norbert Elias.

The volume in which Elias wrote also included letters by Thomas Jefferson, ‘The natural and the political individual’ (Edward Muir), ‘Meeting with Stalin’ (Harold Laski), ‘Rotdorn’ (Elizabeth Bowen), ‘The old farm’ (Homer Croy), ‘Problems of women in England’ (Weltwoche), ‘Tricks of Propaganda (Clyde Miller), ‘At the crossover’ (Friedelind Wagner). At the end of the magazine were short notes about some of the authors, but nothing about Elias. There is no indication of who were the editors, nor of their connections to Elias. Who invited him to contribute to this re-education programme? The text is presented with reproductions of the pictures that he describes in the text. The introduction that he wrote for the text is new. It shows more clearly than ever before the purposes which guided the sociologist’s interest: civilised human relations.

Reinhard Blomert, Berlin

source: Figurations (Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation) no. 16, p. 5