The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany

Abstract

Geyer, Michael, ed. of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 459 pp. $60.00 hardcover; $25.00 paperback. post-Wall readings of GDR political and intellectual culture collected in this volume of conference papers differ greatly in scope and interest and reviewer will have to be selectively focused. If editor's heavily annotated introduction was meant to establish a degree of coherence-a notoriously difficult task in case of such collections-it does not succeed: see especially rather opaque section The Native as Stranger (3 ff) summing up difficulties of GDR intellectuals with cultural rupture of unification. We are informed in Acknowledgements that aim of conference had been to explore relations between Stasi and GDR intellectuals, that is, the responsibility of intellectuals in face of state power and of moral and aesthetic authority were its main concerns (ix). authority to define such responsibility and denounce fallibility in aftermath of collapse of state power, then, seems to be a given: GDR intellectuals were powerful under a government that used them to its and their advantage, including their complicity with its repressive policies of silence and secrecy. Now, after its collapse, they are impotent because their complicity with a criminal regime has revealed irrresponsibility of their former power. But by whose standards is this irresponsibility to be judged? Would not its meanings have to differ for accusers and accused? And we not therefore have to start with acknowledging and exploring those differences as soberly and fairly as possible? This has rarely happened in aftermath of collapse and essays collected here too reflect a Western and an Eastern set of views on and from post-Wall situation. It seems an enduring separation, both obvious and obscure, inevitable but also inevitably changing that has created particular difficulties for development of a realistic and coherent analysis-apparently more so for Western than Eastern perspective and I will therefore focus on former. In many cases trying to be fair, Western perspective is still based on a perceived authority to interrogate and criticize to point of sentencing; Eastern perspective is based on perceived need for self-defense and coping with powerful of expectations of self-critique. Adept at turning to her advantage power of others' expectations, Christa Wolf put it perfectly: defending herself against anticipated accusations that she had waited nine months before making public discovery of her former, forgotten informer-self Margarete in her Stasi victim file, she cited witch hunt atmosphere in spring of 1992, which would block rather than promote a debate about reality of GDR as well as self critical working through of our experiences in this country. David Bathrick quotes her in his essay Language and Power (143) to conclude a section What happened, where he also deals with more serious cases of Stasi informers Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski. Despite his attempts at differentiation, his account of events remains in important ways inconclusive precisely because he is not sufficiently clear about powerful dilemmas of GDR intellectuals at core of that complex realty of GDR. Bathrick himself gives an example of complicated games Stasi played with them: Schedlinski had tricked a known dissident into sending him copies of several texts considered highly dangerous by regime which he then promptly sent on to Stasi. They could easily have arrested man on this occasion but refrained from doing so, possibly from fear of exposing a part of their complicated surveillance system. In Bathrick's view, convincing Schedlinski and Anderson that as informers they were actually using Stasi for their own purposes was one of means this organization employed to keep upper hand. …