The close relationships formed between teachers and students in the materially impoverished and politically compromised postwar universities in western Germany are the central focus of this dissertation. I analyze how a divided generation of politically overburdened intellectual youth negotiated the new possibilities opened up by the collapse of cultural restrictions imposed by the twelve-year dictatorship and the new expectations, stemming from the changing ideas and realities of the university and philosophy in an expanding middle-class, consumerist society. In spite of the limitations of their institutional and cultural environment, the younger philosophers and intellectuals I investigate develop highly productive models for the practice of philosophy and the ‘human sciences’ (Geisteswissenschaften), which have relevance beyond their own specific historical situation, national boundaries, and interests.