West German Marxist Hegelians – Between the DKP and the Academy
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Framing: The paradoxical situation
The West German Marxist reception of Hegel after 1945 found itself in a peculiar position: unlike the GDR philosophers, these thinkers worked in a capitalist state that marginalized Marxism; unlike the French or Italian Communists, they had no mass party behind them. The DKP remained a splinter party; the KPD had been banned in 1956.
This created free spaces, but also isolation. West German Marxists were neither state philosophers (as in the GDR) nor organic intellectuals of a labor movement (as in France or Italy). They worked in niches: at universities that mostly tolerated them only reluctantly, in journals with modest circulation, in circles of the convinced.
Three figures stand out – not because they were the only ones, but because each developed his own particular approach to the Hegel-Marx tradition:
Wilhelm Raimund Beyer (1902-1990) – The Nuremberg Local Patriot
Beyer was a special case: jurist, civil servant, philosopher – and passionate researcher into Hegel’s Nuremberg and Bamberg years (1806-1816). His works “Hegel-Bilder” (1962/1964) and “Zwischen Phänomenologie und Logik” (1955) opened up a phase of Hegel’s development that had long been neglected.
The systematic significance: Beyer showed that Hegel in Nuremberg was not merely a school headmaster, but developed his logic under concrete institutional conditions. The “Philosophical Propaedeutic” for the pupils of the Egidiengymnasium was not mere simplification, but an independent formulation. Beyer combined philological precision with a materialist interest in the conditions under which philosophy arises.
His greatest achievement lay in institution-building: Beyer played a leading role in founding the International Hegel Society (1962) and organized the Nuremberg Hegel Days. He built bridges – between East and West, between philological and systematic Hegel research, between academic philosophy and the broader public.
The limits: Beyer’s work often remained confined to the historical. The systematic question – what follows from Hegel’s logic for today? – he posed less often than the genetic one – how did Hegel’s logic arise? This was both strength (philological solidity) and weakness (lack of contemporary relevance).
Hans Heinz Holz (1927-2011) – The Materialist History of Dialectics
Holz undertook the most ambitious attempt at a comprehensive Marxist account of dialectics since Engels. His monumental work “Dialektik: Problemgeschichte von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart” (5 volumes, 2011) traces the dialectical tradition from Heraclitus to the present – always asking how “objective dialectic” (in nature and history) relates to “subjective dialectic” (in thought).
The systematic position: Holz defended – against the spirit of his time – Engels’s thesis of a “dialectic of nature.” For him, dialectic was not merely a method of social analysis (as it was for Western Marxists from Lukács to Habermas) but a structure of reality itself. The laws of motion (the transformation of quantity into quality, the unity and struggle of opposites, the negation of the negation) hold in nature and in history alike.
This was a minority position. Most Western Marxists had abandoned the philosophy of nature – partly for epistemological reasons (how can one make a priori judgments about nature?), partly for political ones (GDR orthodoxy had discredited “Diamat,” dialectical materialism). Holz objected: whoever abandons objective dialectic ends up in subjectivism, which politically leads to reformism or terrorism.
The theory of reflection – Holz’s differentiated approach: At the center of Holz’s epistemology stands the category of “reflection” (Widerspiegelung). Holz was aware that the vulgar version – consciousness as a passive mirror of the external world – is untenable. He himself criticized the “mechanistic interpretation of the metaphor, in which the mirror remains purely passive.”
Instead, Holz drew on Leibniz and spoke of the “mirror vivant,” the “living mirror.” The relationship should not be understood as a relation between “two mutually isolated terms, the mirrored object and the mirroring mirror,” but rather “as a relation in which the mirrored and the mirroring are sublated as moments.”
More than that: for Holz, reflection had “primarily an ontological, and derived from that an epistemological, significance.” What was at stake for him was a universal system of reflection within material reality itself. Matter reflects itself within itself; human consciousness is only a particularly developed case of this general principle.
The problem of justification: Holz saw the fundamental problem of materialism more clearly than most of his comrades. He cited Ernst Bloch’s remarks on the “problem of materialism”: “Unlike a justificatory procedure immanent to consciousness in the Cartesian tradition, materialist philosophy faces a more difficult problem of justification… since it cannot ground reality solely in thought, dialectical-materialist philosophy must ground the relation of being and thought in a material relation that manifests itself in thought and philosophically only in thought.”
This is remarkably honestly put: the relation of being and thought is supposed to be grounded “materially,” but this grounding “manifests itself only in thought.” Holz tried to break through this circle by means of his ontological turn: if reflection is a structure of being itself, then thought as reflection is not a special case requiring explanation, but a moment of the general nexus of the world.
Why the solution does not hold up: However differentiated Holz’s position may be, it does not solve the fundamental problem but merely renames it more subtly.
First: when asked how matter reflects itself, the only possible answer is: that is simply its nature, its ontological structure. The capacity for self-reflection is ascribed to matter without really being explained. The correspondence theory is not grounded but declared a property of matter.
Second: where does this reflection take place? Holz admits that it “manifests itself only in thought.” But then the old question resurfaces: how do we test whether the reflection is “faithful”? We cannot step outside thought to compare the mirrored with the mirroring. The question of the location of comparison remains unanswered.
Third: the philosophy of practice – that the truth of our knowledge proves itself in practice – is the decisive clue, even in Holz. Practice is the place where resistance shows itself. In practice we hit limits, plans fail, theories prove themselves or fail to. The resistance of reality shows itself in practice.
The next step would be obvious: this resistance shows itself in consciousness as that which cannot be wished away, cannot be reinterpreted. Practice is not some mysterious place where mind and matter “meet” – it is the place where resistant moments of experience arise, which must be coherently integrated.
But the materialists never dared take this step – neither the orthodox Diamat theorists nor Holz with all his sophistication. For fear of falling into idealism, they remained with the picture of two separate spheres that must somehow come together. Holz’s complicated phrasing – “universal system of reflection,” “ontological structure of reflection,” “overarching universal” – shows him wrestling with a problem he did not allow himself to think through radically enough.
Our solution (in the truth text and in the Hegel commentary): What was missing was the insight that the distinction between “matter” and “consciousness” is itself a distinction that consciousness draws – and draws precisely by reference to resistance. This is not an idealist denial of matter. It is the insight that we have no access to “matter in itself” except through the resistant moments of our experience.
Resistance – that which does not bend to our whims – shows itself within consciousness. The distinction between manipulable moments (representations, wishes, interpretations) and resistant moments (sense impressions, pain, logical necessity) is what we call “inside” and “outside.” This distinction is real, but it takes place within experience, not as a mysterious comparison between two separate spheres.
From here, the opposition between coherence theory and correspondence theory, over which Diamat labored, also dissolves: correspondence is coherence with the resistant moments of experience. There are not two different criteria of truth, but one: the integration of all moments of experience, in which the resistant ones play a special role.
Holz came close to this insight when he spoke of both moments being “sublated.” But his insistence on the primacy of matter prevented the final step: seeing that this very primacy is itself a position within consciousness, one that must prove itself against resistance – not a standpoint outside from which the relation of thought and being could be surveyed.
The closeness to the DKP: Holz was one of the few philosophers of standing who remained close to the DKP, and did not revise this position even after 1989. This marginalized him academically but also gave him independence from the fashions of university life. Whether the price was too high, each must judge for oneself.
The lasting achievement: Holz’s history of dialectics is the most comprehensive account from a materialist perspective. Even those who reject his basic theses will find here a wealth of material and interpretation not accessible elsewhere. The combination of scholarship in the history of philosophy with systematic ambition is rare.
Above all, though, Holz formulated the problem of justification facing materialism as clearly as almost anyone. That his solution does not hold up does not diminish the merit of having seen the problem in its full sharpness. Anyone reflecting on the relation of thought and being can learn from Holz – especially precisely where one cannot follow him.
Klaus Holzkamp (1927-1995) – Critical Psychology
Holzkamp took a different path: not the history of philosophy, but reform of science. His “Critical Psychology” was an attempt to replace bourgeois psychology (behaviorism, cognitivism) with a Marxist-grounded science of the subject.
The basic thesis: the human being is not the object of stimuli and reactions but a subject who can consciously shape the conditions of his own life – but under conditions he has not himself chosen. Psychology must grasp this dialectic of subjectivity and social conditioning, instead of degrading the subject to a mere reaction mechanism.
The Hegel connection: Holzkamp received Hegel primarily through Marx and Leontiev (the Soviet theorist of activity). But the structure is Hegelian: the subject is not given, but develops through activity; it is not isolated, but socially mediated; it is not passive, but active – yet its activity is enabled and limited by objective conditions.
“Grundlegung der Psychologie” (1983) was the main systematic attempt: a reconstruction of the basic categories of the psyche from the standpoint of social mediation. Capacity for action (Handlungsfähigkeit), not behavior, is the fundamental concept. Human beings act in order to expand the conditions of their lives – or they adapt, where expansion seems impossible.
The connection to Vygotsky: Holzkamp drew on the Soviet cultural-historical school treated in Chapter 14a. Vygotsky had shown how consciousness arises through tools and language, socially mediated. Holzkamp radicalized this: the “zone of proximal development” becomes a theory of the capacity for action, which can be expanded or restricted depending on social conditions.
The institutional impact: unlike Holz, Holzkamp built a school. The Free University of Berlin became the center of Critical Psychology; the journal “Forum Kritische Psychologie” is still published today. His students (Ute Holzkamp-Osterkamp, Morus Markard, and others) developed the approach further – into learning theory, emotion theory, professional ethics.
The limits: Critical Psychology remained marginal. The academic mainstream ignored it; the Marxist movement that might have sustained it disintegrated after 1989. Holzkamp’s work is theoretically demanding but has remained practically without much consequence – a tragedy he himself may have sensed before his early death.
The systematic common ground
What connects these three very different thinkers?
First: all held fast to the connection between Hegel and Marx when it went out of fashion. For the Western academy, Marx after 1968 was either finished or shrunk to a mere critic of society; “Diamat” was considered overcome. Beyer, Holz, and Holzkamp insisted: the dialectical method is not mere rhetoric, but a means of cognition.
Second: all worked outside the mainstream – but without withdrawing into sectarian circles. Beyer built international institutions, Holz wrote for an educated public, Holzkamp reformed a science. They wanted to have an effect, not merely to be right.
Third: all faced the problem that their political home (the Communist movement) disintegrated before they could complete their work. Beyer died in 1990, Holzkamp in 1995, Holz in 2011 – all lived to see the collapse of what they had hoped for. What remains is the work, not the movement.
What remains?
West German Marxist reception of Hegel has left behind no school that still flourishes today. But it posed questions that remain unresolved:
- Is there an “objective dialectic” – structures in nature and history that thought traces rather than constructs? (Holz)
- How does philosophy arise under concrete historical conditions without being reducible to them? (Beyer)
- How can a psychology take the subject seriously without ignoring social mediation? (Holzkamp)
These questions will recur in Volume III – in the question of emergence and self-organization, in the question of the relation of mind and nature, in the question of an anthropology that is neither naturalist nor idealist.