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ways becoming as interesting as you were two generations ago,
twenty years ago. They are now going through an extraordinarily
complicated relationship with the East, with Marxism again, and it's
one that goes
dans la profondeur,
and they are doing it on their own,
without any reference to the French experience.
Dominique Schnapper:
Yes, exactly. We had a meeting with university
professors from Germany, and we had the impression that they were
coming from another world, and that we were twenty-five years
younger, which is rather nice . We had the impression they were in
the sixties .
Harold Kaplan:
Far be it for me to suggest anything like historical
determinism here, but the attitude that was prevalent when you
were a little girl in the fifties, was, it seems to me, directly propor–
tionate to the sheer mass, the actual weight of the communist in–
fluence in the country. The existence of a whole communist
culture - communist municipalities, sports clubs, insurance systems
for health, etcetera - consciously or not, weighed very heavily on
French intellectuals. The notion of separating oneself from all that
on the one hand or, on the other hand, finding through one's in–
tellectual work some sort of way of linking up with it, was central to
them. In the same way, it seems to me that the Germans are now
very heavily influenced by the situation on the ground, if you will,
the closeness, the intimacy of the East; they have begun opening up
relations with the seventeen million Germans who are on the other
side. They have the notion that they are all Central Europeans who
are going to have to make some sort of accommodation. Somehow,
in a manner that I could not explain, that affects their intellectual
work. This would bring us back to the notion that there is first the
will and then the intellect . There is a kind of existential need . And
there was
'l
need in France too , at least when I lived there, for
French intbl1ectuals to separate themselves from all this, and it was
doubly difficult because of the sheer weight of the communists.
])omi~i'que
Schnapper:
I think you're quite right, and one can give the
Italian example. As you know , in Italy the Communist Party still
has thirty-two or thirty-three percent of the votes. Most intellectuals
now are Marxists and go through the Communist Party, which is
absolutely finished in France. I think that the weight of Eastern Ger–
many is important to the evolution of the German intellectuals.
What is fascinating is the enormous gap between Germany and
France, and the nonintellectual relationship between the two.
