Open Access

Kirk Wetters

• In present-day Germany, research on postwar academia, up through the 1960s and beyond, requires no special justification. But from the North American side, the point of this scholarly activity - including the many new editions and a flood of archive-based publications - is much less obvious. For the most well-established figures of the period, the primary international canonizations were already part of the first waves of the reception, the theoretical tectonics established themselves accordingly, and the theories were established as theories - which are in many quarters presumed to be just as reliable today as they were decades ago. One might say that the international and North American reception of European theory has manifested an overall tendency toward sedimentation, while the dynamic of scholarly research about theory, including the archival unearthing of new sources, tends to complicate and undermine the established corpus of "primary texts."