ABSTRACT
In November 1918, the trauma of the war ended as the authoritarian Empire gave way to the democratic Weimar Republic, whose brief lifespan coincided with Karl Mannheim's German career. The Republic has been described as the paradigmatic site of the "crisis of classical modernity", characterized primarily by the increased fragmentation of both the political and cultural spheres. Mannheim's decision to use the problem of social mobility as a central theme in his sociology class as well as the theme of cultural democratization in his later writings reflected a widespread anxiety. More moderate than von Below, but distrustful of Weimar parliamentarism, they also rejected sociology as a synthetic discipline. Ernst Robert Curtius was less inclined to blame developments within the specialized disciplines as a whole. He focused on the new, as yet insufficiently focused discipline of sociology, identifying it with outside forces that encroached upon the university.
