Abstract

This article addresses the German reception of Ludwig Feuerbach’s works from 1965 to 2015 exploring the historic and political developments before and after the Fall of the Iron Curtain. Whereas the interpretation of Feuerbach’s philosophy during the Cold War was dominated by ideological struggles between idealism and materialism, the new Feuerbach-research emphasizes the independence of Feuerbach’s philosophy of religion and anthropology as an ethical concept for post-secular societies. So this short history of the German Feuerbach reception during the last fifty years also mirrors the ideological distance of West and East Germany before 1990 and the scientific approach of both sides after the end of the Cold War. Internationalizing the discourse on Feuerbach has helped to emancipate his philosophy from Engel’s dictum that Feuerbach’s anthropology neither reached the level of Hegel’s epistemology nor Marx’ sociology and was nothing else than old school metaphysics beyond any historic and societal intermediation.