Abstract
This chapter begins with the things it cannot do: for here is not the task to analyze, thickly or thinly, the dynamics of popular revolution, the symbols and semiotics of consumerism, or the popular politics of mass demonstrations, but to understand precisely the absence of these things in the words of intellectuals. In Western societies it is unclear whether the word comes from somewhere above or from somewhere on the sidelines of everyday life. Whatever the case, the power wielded by a so-called intellectual either on Alexanderplatz or on the university podium ultimately rests uncomfortably on the morphous word. I am drawn to the relationship of the word from “above” and the deed from “below” not only because of the antithetical locus of my contribution, but because this divergence calls out from all intellectual corners of the unification era. Yet, while foundational for the definition of the German intellectual and accordingly ubiquitous in the unification discussion, throughout most considerations the need to overcome this divergence is regarded as self-evident. While commentators have dutifully situated the intellectual in the dialectic between reality and utopia, they have also impulsively accepted the self-evidence of a possible resolution to this dialectic for the everyday participation of intellectuals in politics. This assumption has, in turn, led to an important oversight regarding the elemental philosophical and historical constitution of “the intellectual.”
[Immanent critique] takes seriously the principle that it is not ideology in itself, which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality. Immanent criticism of intellectual and artistic phenomena seeks to grasp, through the analysis of their form and meaning, the contradiction between their objective idea and that pretension.
—Theodor W. Adorno1
[Language] can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war ... Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
—Toni Morrison2
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Notes
Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Samuel and Shierry Weber, trans., Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 32.
Christa Wolf, “Christa Wolfs Rede auf dem Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 4.11.1989,” in Benno Zanetti, ed., Der Weg zur deutschen Einheit (Munich: Goldmann, 1991), pp. 205–206. The original statement by Christoph Hein was made on October 24 in a talk entitled “Ein Berliner Traum im Oktober 1989, der bereits im August 1968 von deutschen Panzern auf dem Wenzelplatz überrollte wurde. Zur Podiumsdiskussion ‘DDR—wie ich sie träume.’ ” This and other contributions to the unification discussion are collected in Die fünfte Grundrechensart (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990). When not otherwise noted, translations are mine.
Stefan Heym, “Rede auf der Demonstration am 4. November, Berlin, Alexanderplatz,” in Einmischungen (Aalen: Bertelsmann, 1990), p. 271.
Heiner Müller, “Dem Terrorismus die Utopie entreißen. Alternative DDR,” in “Zur Lage der Nation.” Heiner Müller im Interview mit Fritz Raddatz (Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990), pp. 9–24. Appeared first in Transatlantik v.1, n.90 (1990). This sentiment was echoed by Christoph Hein in “Weder das Gebot noch die Genehmigung als Geschenk,” Berliner Zeitung, November 4–5, 1989, reprinted in Die fünfte Grundrechensart, pp. 189–193: “Kunst strickt ungern mit heißer Nadel. In der Vergangenheit hatten Kunst und Literatur von einem Bonus gelebt, der sich auf einem Mißverhältnis gründete. Statt der Zeitung kauften sich die Leute ein Buch. Jetzt sehe ich Anzeichen dafür, daß sich die Zeitungen mit Politik befassen und die Kunst dadurch entlastet wird. Damit wird Kunst wieder auf ihre eigentlichen Aufgaben zurückgeführt. Langfristig wird eine Entlastung von Literatur stattfinden. Ich finde gut, daß wir wieder Shakespeare spielen, statt aktuelle Bösartigkeiten zu verhandeln, deren Ventil- Strickmuster schnell zu durchschauen ist. Es ist für Literatur völlig unwichtig, Neuigkeiten zu reportieren.” (193)
Jürgen Habermas, Vergangenheit als Zukunft, Michael Haller, ed. (Zurich: Pendo-Verlag, 1990), p. 51f.
Helmut Dubiel, “Linke Traurigkeit,” Merkur v.49, n.6 (1990): p. 488.
Monika Maron, “Writers and the People,” New German Critique v.52 (1991): p. 40.
Andreas Huyssen accused especially the eastern intellectuals of “a fatal aloofness from reality and a desperate clinging to projections, and, when under fire, melancholic self-pity and unrepentant self-righteousness.” Andreas Huyssen, “After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals,” New German Critique v.52 (1991): pp. 109–143.
Karl-Heinz Bohrer, “Why We Are Not a Nation—And Why We Should Become One,” trans. Stephen Brockmann, New German Critique v.51 (1991): p. 73. Originally appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 13, 1990.
Ibid., p. 83. Based on this substantivist assertion, many on the right argued that denying Germans their national unity would only serve to foment irrationalist desires. See Ulrich Oevermann, “Zeit Staaten oder Einheit?” Merkur v.49, n.2 (1992): pp. 91–106. Significantly, this was also used opportunistically to legitimize the callous Realpolitik of Helmut Kohl.
See George G. Iggers, The German Conception of History; the National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968). For further discussion of this see Ruth Starkman’s article in this volume.
Ulrich Greiner, “Das Phantom der Nation. Warum wir keine Nation sind und warum wir keine werden müssen-ein vergeblicher Zwischenruf im Intellektuellen-Streit um die deutsche Einheit,” Die Zeit, March 16, 1990. See also Jürgen Habermas, “Zur Identität der Deutschen. Ein einig Volk von aufgebrachten Wirtschaftsbürgern?” in Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); an abridged version appeared as “Der DMNationalismus,” Die Zeit, March 30, 1990; the unabridged version appeared in English as “Yet Again: German Identity—A United Nation of Angry DMBurghers?” trans. Stephen Brockmann, New German Critique v.52 (1991): pp. 205–225.
See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Nationalliteratur,” in Franz Norbert Mennemeier and Conrad Wiedemann, eds., Deutsche Literatur in der Weltliteratur—Kulturnation statt politischer Nation? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), pp. 197–207.
Günter Grass, Kopfgeburten oder die Deutschen sterben aus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), pp. 8ff.
Siegfried Mews, “After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: German Writers and Unification,” South Atlantic Review v.58, n.2 (1993): pp. 1–19.
Ibid., p. 10. For Walser’s recent contribution to the “German Question” see Martin Walser, Über Deutschland reden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989).
Alexander von Pechmann, “Abschied des Linksintellektuellen,” Widerspruch v.22 (1992): p. 28.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Wozu noch Philosophie,” in Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 26. The beginning of Negative Dialektik echoes this sentiment: “Philosophy, which at first seemed obsolete, keeps itself alive because the moment of its realization was missed,” Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 15.
Heinrich Heine, “Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen” (1844), in Sämtliche Werke v.2, Ernst Elster, ed. (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1890), p. 444f.
See Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); for a more extensive explication of modernity applicable here,
see Habermas , The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
For a thorough and broad discussion of the academic intellectual response to these problems from the end of the Second Empire to the end of the Weimar Republic, see Fritz Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
Certainly Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s Das Dritte Reich (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1931), first published in 1923, is the most outstanding example. The greater discourse of the third in general, however, should not be underestimated.
See George Mosse, Germans and Jews. The Right, the Left, and the Search for a ‘Third Force’ in Pre-Nazi Germany (Detroit: Wayne Press, 1970), pp. 181–225, esp. pp. 3–33.
The extensive literature on intellectuals and the 1920s is an intellectual historical phenomenon itself, primarily in the 1960s, but also extending to the present. See, e.g., in order of their original publication: Helmut Plessner, Die verspätete Nation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), esp. pp. 17–40;
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961);
Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1962);
Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992);
George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origin of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Fritz Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins; George Mosse, Germans and Jews;
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Throughout this literature, the discussion of the right intelligentsia outstrips that of the left. The connection between the two in relationship to the common search for a third way is discussed partially by Mosse (1970), but needs more exploration.
See Josef Schumpeter, “The Sociology of the Intellectuals,” in The Intellectuals, George B. de Huszar, ed. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), p. 79;
Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie (Frankfurt am Main: G. Schulte-Bulmke, 1965), p. 135.
Thomas Mann, “Von deutscher Republik,” in Gesammelte Werke v. XI (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1960), cited here from Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, p. 312.
See Jürgen Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 30–117;
in addition to the neoconservative move he identifies in the late 1970s in the Federal Republic, he also refers to the neoconservative movement in the United States is rightly identified with Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
See Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), esp. pp. 1–20.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation,” in Gesammelte Werke. Reden und Aufsätze III (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980), pp. 24–41; originally published in 1920. The similarity of utopian vision between Grass and Hofmannsthal should not, of course, collapse their political differences.
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Wheeler, B.R. (2006). Intellectuals, the “Third Way,” and German Unification. In: Starkman, R.A. (eds) Transformations of the New Germany. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984661_2
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