Why try? Hmm. Prior to WWI and up to the beginning of Weimar Thomas Mann started off in a very similar embrace of Nietzsche and the high literary, political, and philosophical controversies that also attended Strauss, Arendt, Heidegger and Cassirer. In Mann's case (See, Notes of a Non-Political Man) he was vehemently pro-German during WWI but he changed his views of political life in the processes of writing and living the events that created the Weimar Republic. He essentially moved from where Strauss started and ended, toward where Arendt and Cassirer ended, but with a fold of Adorno in there somewhere.
Mann also left on the collapse of Weimar and came here along with the others except Heidegger obviously, and Adorno who delayed or was delayed, I've forgotten which.
What do I think was going on here? I think that WWI brought the rise of industrial proletariat, and petit bourgeoisie (across Europe and the US) into mass political power and it threatened to completely overwhelm the older existing haute bourgeoise cultural dominance of just about everything except the extreme upper reaches of the political-military caste of aristocratic classes and the richest of the industrial capitalists. It was the arrival of these masses (ironically through mass military conscription along with their economic domination as workers) into a position of concrete power--- that arrival drove the altering courses of thought and work in all this elite literary and academic group.
That group looked into a Kathy Kolowitz print and saw their own class doom. Strauss, like Heidegger, and to a certain extent Adorno took various paths of resistance to the flood of the human condition. Cassirer and Arendt, pretty much embraced this fundament of change via Rousseau and Kant, and thought mass education and the welfare state would ultimately resolve the crisis of these class conflicts of power.
Most of this group were involved in some form or another in an identity crisis that turned on various degrees over being Jewish---a crisis of course made more pressing and concrete by the explosive combination of nationalism en-folded with anti-Semiticism. Mann also had a reaction to this combined conflict of identity, roots, and nation since he spent the entire Thirties writing his Joseph novels---novels I haven't read---well because they are extremely long. Another must-do in sorting out this puzzle.
Dot, dot, dot. So here we are in the US with a post-WWII rise of mass culture and dislocated, disconnected, rootless, heterogenious masses of people who have no idea what or who they are or how they belong to each other and the world. The hope is then, that by reading within that particular and highly articulate immigrant group, I will find some insight into----I don't know what, the US, or history, or how people react...You know, like life in general.
Chuck Grimes