Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany

462 Pages·2001·31.772 MB·English

by  Michael Geyer

POWER
INTELLECTUBLS
CONTEMPORPRY GERMPNY
IN
Edited by Michael Geyer
THE POWER OF INTELLECTUALS
IN CONTEMPORARY GERMANY
THE POWER OF
IN TE LLEC TUA LS
IN CONTEMPORARY
GERMANY
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
ix
MICHREL GEYER
Introduction; The Power of Intellectuals in
Contemporary Germany
i
PART
1
Intellectuals and the Palitics of Culture in the
German Democratic Republic
DIETRICH HOHMRNN
An Attempt at an Exemplary Report on H. 27
FRANK TROMMLER
German Intellectuals; Public Roles and the
Rise of the Therapeutic 35
DOROTHEA DORNHOF
The Inconsequence of Doubt; Intellectuals
and the Discourse on Socialist Unity 59
SIMONE BRRCK, MARTINA LRNGERMANN,
AND SIEGFRIED LOKATIS
The German Democratic Republic as a “Reading Nation”;
Utopia, Planning, Reality, and Ideology 88
KATIE TRUMPENER
lui guerre estfinie: New Waves, Historical
GDR
Contingency, and the “Rabbit Films”
1 1
DAVID BATHRICK
Language and Power 38
i
2
PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON
Syntax of Surveillance: Lanj^uages of
Silence and Solidarity 160
LOREN KRUGER
Wir treten aus unseren Rolleii heraus:
Theater Intellectuals and Public Spheres 183
ALEXANDER KLUGE
It is a Mistake to Think That the Dead
Are Dead: Obituary tor Heiner Muller 2
1
P A RT 2
Intellectuals in Transit: Taward a Unified Germany
DIETRICH HOHMANN
The Consequences ot Unification According to H. 221
PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON
GDR
Soundtracks: Music from “Revolution”
to “Reunification” 227
ANDREAS GRAF
Media Publics in the CjDR: Unification and
the Transformation of the Media, ic;8y-iyc;i 249
KONRAD JARAUSCH
The Double Disappointment: Revolution,
Unification, and CaTman Intellectuals 276
MITCHELL ASH
G.
Incoming Normal, MiKlern, and Cerman
(Again?) 295
ANDREAS HUYSSEN
Nation, Race, and Immigration: Cierman
Identities After Unification
3 4
1
JOHN BORNEMAN
hdiication After the (.'old War:
Remembrance, Repetition, and Right-
Wing Violence
335
1
MICHREL GEYER
The Long Good'bye: German Culture Wars
in the Nineties 355
ALEXANDER KLUGE
The Moment ot Tragic Recognition with
a Happy Ending 381
List of Contributors 395
Bibliography 40
Index 445
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to acknowledge that this volume had its origins in a confer-
ence sponsored by the Goethe-lnstitut Chicago, the Department ot Ger-
man Literatures and Languages, and the Interdisciplinary Program for the
Study of Europe at the University of Chicago. The conference explored
the relations between the State Security Service (the Stasi) and writers,
artists, cultural workers, academics, and ministers (what we called, in short,
“intellectuals” or the intellectual classes) in the late German Democratic
Republic (GDR). The responsibility of intellectuals in the face of state
power and the fallibility of moral and aesthetic authority were its main
concerns. was co-organized by Robert von Hallherg, Michael Geyer, and
It
Hans-Georg Knopp (of the Goethe Institut). Subsequently Neal Enssle,
Gale Erie, Michael Latham, Devin Pendas, and Annette Timm provided
translations and research assistance that accompanied the emergence e^f
this volume. They deserve high praise and heartfelt thanks.
0
MICHAEL GEYER
Introduction: The Power of Intellectuals
Contemporary Germany
in
This hook ot essays focuses on the intellectual class of the defunct Gen
man Democratic Republic (GDR). Taking the troubled transition to a
unified Germany as a starting point, the essays explore the public debates
surrounding the role of intellectuals in the process of unification and re-
fleet on the challenges of this momentous event. The responsibility of
intellectuals in the face of state power and the fallibility of their moral
and aesthetic authority are the contributors’ major themes. The contro-
versies that surrounded relations between the State Security Service of
GDR
the (the Stasi) and writers, artists, cultural workers, and academics
shaped the public culture of the newly unified country to a remarkable
degree. The essays in this volume read these controversies as markers of a
struggle over the makeup of culture in the new Germany and the “spirit of
our age.’’*
The relations between East German intellectuals and the Stasi have
a history that is now being explored in ever finer detail." After an initial
media frenzy, revealing all manner of Stasi ties, this emergent history estab-
lishes meticulously and, one hopes, truthfully the degree of their collusion
and collaboration with the East German regime and its ruling Socialist
Unity Party, the SED. Above and beyond the record, however, the en-
twinement of intellectuals and the repressive regime is of signal importance
in the ongoing debates on German culture. At stake is the relation of
culture to power, which, for all intents and purposes, is the key concern
—
of modern intellectual life and surely of German intellectual life in the
twentieth century.
The complex genealogy ofthis issue need not concern us.’ What matters
is the hope invested in a separation of the spheres c^f power and spirit. The
presumption of and insistence on the autonomy of culture was justihed
1
MICHAEL GEYER
2
as a check against state power on one hand and as a counterweight to
commerce and industry on the otherd In the German system of checks
and balances, culture ascertained moral justice. The control of intellectuals
over the sphere of culture guaranteed not just the reign of good taste hut
social betterment and Bildung.^ Even if it had not been for this elevated
role ot intellectuals, their collusion with a repressive regime and their
subsequent abandonment by the reading public would still have mattered.
However, because of the special role of intellectuals as both guardians
against the state and as tutors of the nation, the actual betrayal of their role
(misbegotten as this role may appear in hindsight) destroyed not only the
credibility of individual informers and of the whole class of collaborating
intellectuals but also the legitimacy of an idea.
This collection explores the power of the idea of the tutelary intellectual
and the social and cultural configuration from which it sprang.^ For the
GDR
intellectuals and especially the writers were highly regarded, irre-
spective of their individual merits, because they came to articulate this
idea of culture as a realm of justice most compellingly. The contributions
in tbis volume explicate two kinds of entanglement. One has to do with
—
GDR
what has become past, the and its culture a past that has a weighty
presence. The other has to do with the evolution of a post-”revolutionary,”
post-unification German nation and the place of culture and, more so, the
public and political role of intellectuals in the new state and its emergent
media and information society. The two lines of inquiry are intimately
linked in that the past is revisited as the present is made to change. The
controversies about the Stasi ties of East German intellectuals were but
the starting shot for a procession of spectacular debates on the nature of
culture and the power of intellectuals in the newly unified country.^ These
debates rangeel over an extraordinarily wide terrain and they amounted,
at times, to a free-ft)r-all. In a genteel spirit, one might treat them as mis-
cellaneous discontents about Cjermany and mcxlernity or even as a kind of
—
Weltschrnerz or ail of the above wrapped up into one, as Peter Handke’s
writings of the mid-nineties suggest.” Or one might treat them as a cpiest
for truth amid a world of lies, with a national media public as a sort of truth
commission that eclipsed the state-sponsored effort at national accounting
in the form of the Enquete Ckimmissiori.'^ suggest that we think of these
1
deb:ites ;ind their entwinement of p;ist, present, ;md the future as rites of
p;iss;ige Irom one world to :inother.
The ess:iys collected iti this volume were written and rewritten at various
st;iges during the iqqos. They make ;ipp;irent the emotional nature and the
itiseciirities of the tr;insitiori to new Germ:iny. Writing them was ;m exer-
;i
cise in the product ion of thought in the process of moving ;ind settling into