Through the twin stories of a highly ambitious figure and the legendary publication he headed, Siemens charts the course of the intellectual Left's rise and decline in power during the decades that shaped the political divides of the twentieth century. Crucially, his account challenges the widely held belief that post-1989 German unification has represented a victory over the traumas of the past. Instead, Siemens shows the complexity of different strains of socialist thought and activity and demonstrates the contested place of Nazi Germany's exiles at the center of Cold War Germany's cultural history.