The Twilight of the Public Intellectual: Germany

2004

Six weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel published an article with the caption: 'Are the towers still standing?' (Schnibben 2001, p. 223). The towers which journalist Cordt Schnibben had in mind were not those of the World Trade Centre but another set of pillars of stability and certainty that had been toppled a decade earlier. He was referring to Germany's writers and intellectuals. It had not taken long for the events of September 11 to be turned into an occasion for expressing disappointment with the nation's intellectuals. Schnibben's point is simple enough: the terrorist attacks, as worrying as they were, had alerted Germans to a perennial blight on the post-war intellectual landscape: the failure of the country's writers and social commentators, intellectuals and philosophers. What was particularly disturbing was that the country's intellectual classes appeared to have no answers as to why the attacks had occurred. Germany's intellectuals had not only failed to foresee the disaster that struck on September 11, they had been unable to offer an explanation for the attacks or to provide an analysis of the causes. To reinforce the point that this was a collective failure, Schnibben singles out public figures by name: 'We have read Günter Grass in the FAZ, Peter Schneider in the Woche, Botho Strauß in the Spiegel, Diedrich Diederichsen in der taz, Alexander Kluge in the SZ (Süddeutsche) and were amazed that they were as clueless as we were' (p. 223). As the 'advisors of the powerful' and advocates for all manner of things, for 'Ostpolitik and Vietnam, for the emergency laws and Chile, abortion and Biafra, nuclear energy, Nicaragua and rearmament, always to hand whenever the world's conscience was called for' (p. 223), Germany's intellectuals had failed the nation once again. The Spiegel article invokes a trope of failure and betrayal that has been a habitual feature of German intellectual life in both the Federal Republic of Germany and its now defunct socialist other half, the German Democratic Republic. In West Germany attacks on the integrity and politics of intellectuals were made with predictably regularity under the conservative governments of Adenauer and Erhard in the 1960s,

At the end of a long project, one becomes acutely aware of their own limitations. While cause for my own sense of uneasiness in bringing this work to a close, this moment also provides the happy occasion of acknowledging that I could not have reached this point alone. This realization-that I needn't go it alone-is at least as important as any of the intellectual insights or practical know-how that I have accumulated through the course of researching and writing this dissertation. In any case, it was only after I sought the help of friends and colleagues that this project really progressed to its final stages. Much of the primary research for this project was conducted in Germany during two six-moth stays in 2004-2005 and in 2007. The first was made possible by a nonservice fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a travel grant from the Department of History. The more recent stay was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, which also provided me the opportunity to conduct research and writing at an excellent host institution, the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Institut für Germanistik and to my Gastgeber, Prof. Dr. Helmut Schneider for providing me an exceptional environment in which to work and also the opportunity to present my project before colleagues in the German Graduate Seminar. The Landes-und Universitätsbibliothek and its archive iv provided extremely valuable primary source materials for this project, particularly the Nachlass of Erich Rothacker. The fellows and archivists in Bonn were highly professional, efficient, and at the same time very patient and friendly. Both in Winter 2005 and again in Spring 2007, I was able to conduct research at the Deutsches Literatur-Archiv in Marbach am Nekar. The materials there have proven invaluable for this project and will no doubt continue to direct my future work on postwar German culture and intellectual life. The staff and research fellows at the DLA in Marbach were extremely encouraging and helpful. I would like to thank in particular Dr. Carsten Dutt and Dr. Marcel Lepper for their expert assistance with the archives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg and for their general support of my work. Finally, the director of the DLA, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Raulff was a great source of information and of encouragement both at the archive and during a visit here at the University of Pennsylvania. Here at the University of Pennsylvania my work on this dissertation, indeed, my entire career as a graduate student, has been directed by a remarkable group of scholars. I must first thank Frank Trommler in the German Department for his unfailing support of my work over the many years it has taken me to complete it. Professor Trommler's expertise and his work on postwar German culture has influenced my own thinking beyond reckoning. Thomas Childers has also proven to be a constant source of personal support and intellectual inspiration. My greatest debt is owed to Warren Breckman, my Doktorvater. He has shepherded me through my graduate career from the beginning. I have benefitted from his keen understanding of European intellectual history and his v constant pragmatic advice about how best to craft this project and recognize its limits. I simply would not have finished were it not for his encouragement and belief in my ability. Finally, I also wish to thank Liliane Weissberg for intellectual and professional advice and for aiding me in establishing contacts with German scholars. All of these people have been not only instructors and mentors, but also great friends.

Modern Intellectual History, 2012

What can one say about the state of the art in the Federal Republic? A number of aspects are discernible, not only in the practices and various traditions of intellectual history there, but also in its politics: the stark dichotomy between Marxists and anti-Marxists; the ever-present metahistorical question of which (sub)discipline, field, or method would set the political agenda; and the position of Jewish émigrés. These issues raise still more basic ones: how to understand the Nazi experience, which remained living memory for most West Germans; how to confront the gradually congealing image of the Holocaust in private and public life; and the related matters of German intellectual traditions and the new order's foundations. Had the Nazi experience discredited those traditions and had the personal and institutional continuities from the Nazi to Federal Republican polities delegitimated the latter? These were questions with which intellectuals wrestled while they wrangled about ...

2018

This paper argues that German literary studies was, from its inception, an entirely nationalist and nation-building endeavor, perhaps the quintessential nationalist project. Among the discipline's foundational premises are its belief in and commitment to a diversity of culturally individuated national communities (rather than one uniform humanity), a non-hierarchical plurality of vernaculars (rather than classical languages), and historically inflected and culturally expressive aesthetic forms (rather than transhistorically and transregionally valid templates of excellence). Three disciplinary activities of early Germanistik—Germanic historical linguistics, vernacular canon formation, and national literary history—are introduced as key instruments of nationalization. In conclusion, the paper claims that contemporary German Studies in the US, thankfully a reflective and critical enterprise, nonetheless remains institutionally completely dependent on the paradigm of the linguistically and culturally defined nation.

Department of Modern Languages, 1997

In Serbian writer Milorad Pavic's novel Landscape Painted With Tea, one character, referring to the situation of the younger generation in Germany after 1945, suggests that because of the older generation's complete bankruptcy, the younger generation is in a position to dominate and control German culture for many decades to come. In Germany, according to Pavic's character, who is advising a member of the younger generation on where it is best to live, "they'll be looking for younger people, who bear no responsibility for the defeat; the generation of fathers has lost the game there; there it's your generation's move." 1 Controversial German historian Ernst Nolte has likewise suggested that the memory of Germany's "Third Reich" is being used for moral and political purposes by a younger generation "in the age-old battle with 'their fathers.'" 2 The American literary scholar Harold Bloom has sought to describe literary progress itself as a kind of primal Freudian scene in which a younger generation is constantly seeking, metaphorically, to "kill" its fathers and to escape from what Bloom called the "anxiety of influence." 3 Of course Bloom knew very well that such an escape was impossible. On the surface, Pavic's scenario for postwar German culture would seem to have plausibility. If literary generations really do behave like Freud's primal horde, in which brothers band together to kill the father, then the

2005

Dominic Boyer has sought a distinctive path to a much sought-after destination. He wants to solve the mystery of German political pathology. Using the resources of the sociology of knowledge (from Gramsci and Mannheim to Bourdieu) as well as ethnographic strategies allied to newer anthropological "trope theory," he proposes a thick description of German intellectual life, beginning in the eighteenth century, to explicate if not to explain the inner tensions that manifest themselves variously not only in totalitarian but also, he argues, in critical modes of social knowledge and the attendant cultural practices.

PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2005

The paper starts by relating the notion of the "critical intellectual" to the notion of "agent of social change" on the one hand, and to other potential types of agents of change on the other: women in revolt, artists, exiles and queer agencies. Proceeding to a brief characterisation of the socio-cultural and political context "Germany", we shall explore some meanings of attributes such as post-modern and consumer for contemporary German society and culture, arguing that these are cultural and economic terms, which denote current forms of expression for what continues to be a capitalist economy and a bourgeois democracy. One recurrent question will be what the contours might be of the figure of the "critical intellectual" under present day conditions. This is followed by a brief sketch of the meanings of "kritische(r) Intellektuelle(r)" in a historical ("geistesgeschichtlicher") perspective, mainly from the enlightenment on...

European History Quarterly, 2008

Rosy Singh, Essays in Contemporary German Literature, Goyal Publishers, 2017

This book is an attempt to trace some of the new developments that are visible in the contemporary German literary landscape. The fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 and the re-unification are generally taken as markers for contemporary German language literature. The turning point is the desire and the courage of some writers to explore themes other than the war and the holocaust. A cultural normalisation is happening but this development is still in its natal stages.