A long-standing thesis has it that modern Germany's educated bourgeoisie identified with cultural ideals to the detriment of its political formation. Fixated on the realm of ideas, the 'unpolitical German' deferred to real-world authority, paving the road to National Socialism. While emigre scholars gave an influential version of this diagnosis, parallel concerns shaped debates within occupied Germany. On its unsettled political-cultural field, educated elites grappled with how to assess the national cultural heritage in the wake of Nazism, war and Holocaust. Most sought refuge in a compensatory cultural identity, while a vocal minority demanded a purifying break with all tradition. This article focuses on an overlooked third grouping and their equivocal position, which reworked an elitist cultural patrimony into one cornerstone of a counter-elitist political vision. On the one hand, they agreed a focus on things spiritual had fed political quiescence; on the other, they saw embedded in German Kultur a specific and rich way of thinking about freedom. After 1945, they sought neither to jettison nor to revive this cultural tradition but to extract the liberating potential at its heart and bring the latter to bear on politics, as a resource for democratic renewal. Various loosely linked clusters of intellectuals pursued this project through cultural-political journals and in a new type of association, the Kulturbund. This article explores the conditions of their novel rearticulation of received frameworks of cultural and political meaning in the years after 1945 and reflects on its resonance in West and East Germany after 1949. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.