The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany by Michael Geyer (review)

Abstract

MLR, 99.1, 2004 263 the carnival and giving a critical review of Bakhtin's theories, before moving on to the features of carnivalesque literature such as the use of the grotesque and intertex? tuality. Thereafter, the second part, which occupies a good two-thirds of the book, is concerned with texts, specifically, in addition to Hilbig, works by Ingo Schulze, Stephan Krawczyk, Katja Lange-Muller, and Stefan Schutz. These authors are not treated in the same way. Only fivepages are devoted to Krawczyk's Bald, whereas the discussion of Die Weiber takes up thirty.While only one work by each of these two authors is discussed, this is not the case elsewhere, with four works being considered in the cases of Lange-Muller and Schutz. Inevitably, this means that the analysis varies between close reading, at least in relation to Die Weiber, and the selection of a very limited number of aspects of some of the other works discussed. Symmank's approach is undoubtedly scholarly, as the extensive bibliography and the copious footnotes indicate. One wonders, however, if all 520 of the latter are needed, not least because they complicate the reading of what can only be described as, at times, a very dense text. The strength of the volume lies in the detailed analysis of a work such as Die Weiber; sometimes, however, as with the five pages devoted to Schutz's Schnitters Mall, one feels one has read little more than a brief review. Elsewhere, there is occasionally the danger of the commentary on a text lapsing into a checklist of carnivalesque features, though it is fairto point out that Symmank does make clear that his approach to the works considered is not exhaustive. To sum up, this is undoubtedly a work for the specialist with an interest in this element of literary theory or the specific authors discussed. As such it certainly has merit, although this reader found the style at times extremely opaque. Mougins Stuart Parkes The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany. Ed. by Michael Geyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. 459 pp. ?16; $25. ISBN 0226 -28987-7 (pbk). This book contains a substantial introduction and eighteen essays, including two each by the German intellectuals Dietrich Hohmann and Alexander Kluge. Notwithstanding its title, however, the real focus of the volume, which came out of a conference held at the University of Chicago (the date is not given), is not so much the position of intellectuals in contemporary Germany (by which most potential buyers of a book published in 2000 would most probably understand post-unification Germany) as an investigation into the supposed 'failure' of intellectuals in both the GDR and the FRG just before 1989, occasionally even earlier, and, in only a few ofthe contributions, in the newly united Germany immediately after 1990. The argument implicit in the majority of essays is that while intellectuals in both East and West certainly marginal ized themselves, and made a number of obvious strategic mistakes, their generally pessimistic prognoses with regard to social, economic, and political development in post-unification Germany have proven to be substantially accurate. The repetitive rehearsal across many of the essays of very familiar arguments regarding higher levels of unemployment in the east, the rise of Neo-Nazism, and the dismantling of the German economic model is perhaps the major weakness of the book. The concentration on the (evident) downsides of unification, especially for east Germans, can occasionally irritate: the gains of unification are rarely mentioned, and, when they are, they are almost always immediately relativized. A number of essays, for the same reason, can also feel dated; indeed, large parts of the volume are clearly haunted by the upsurge in racist attacks in the early 1990s, and by fear of the resurgent intellectual right. The wars in the former Yugoslavia also loom large; 264 Reviews here, European readers might feel frustrated by the occasional slip into polemic, as in Andreas Huyssen's assertion in his essay 'Nation, Race and Immigration' that 'the difference between Serb nationalism bent on outward conquest and genocide, and a western European popularism that calls for internal ethnic cleansing on the basis of a new differentialistracism...