German Writers as Intellectuals: Strategies and Aporias of Engagement in East and West from 1945 until Today

Abstract

It would be customary, but intellectually limited to apply the key question of this symposium what remains of German literature in the second half of the twentieth century only to Belletristik in the proper sense, or only to use it to reconstruct or complete the literary canon. We also need to be concerned about what writers did when they were not writing between 1945 and 2000. Intellectuals meddle in the interests of society and historical events. Or, to put it in terms of the expressionist and activist Ludwig Rubiner's essay title, which refers admiringly to Heinrich Mann: The Poet becomes Politically Active.2 To be sure, such intellectuals have always been around, from Walther von der Vogelweide to Georg Forster and from Ulrich von Hutten to Georg Biichner. Jacobinism and Vormarz in particular were epochs in which writers programmatically