586
PARTISAN REVIEW
university , and political and economic culture everywhere, vary in line
with traditions and institutional linkages, nevertheless makes for amalgams
that frequently defy distinctions. And because professors are entitled to
make connections of thought as well as of substance, meanings get mixed
up, and differences are ever harder
to
discern. Yet, comparisons of spe–
cific, concrete problems emanating from each society are needed as
heuristic devices, or as road maps, to explain matters to the uninitiated.
Inevitably, on both sides of the Atlantic, conceptions of East versus West,
Kohl-Reagan versus Brandt-Honegger, though pushed into the collective
unconscious by the original euphoria of the "victory" of democracy over
Communism, have a way of hanging on both in the so-called left and
the right.
Because nearly all German universities are state institutions (the state
- at the
Liil1.der
levels - not only finances them but is involved in such
matters as professorial appointments, et cetera), they are entrusted with a
more immediate responsibility for the evolution of both intellectual and
political culture than are their American counterparts. This direct link to
government, though infused on every level with mediating input, with
bureaucratic and financial manipulation, and with specific, personal histo–
ries, nevertheless holds faculty members and administrators more immedi–
ately accountable to the society at large. Unlike American departmental
politics which can revolve around whether or not sociology can be con–
ceptualized as quantitative or qualitative, literature as postmodern or
traditional, psychology as clinical or cognitive, et cetera, all German
professors are expected, and expect themselves, to address the most press–
ing political and social realities, and thus are not allowed too many di–
versions into narrowly defined academic problems.
At present, Germans both within the university and the culture are
overwhelmed primarily by the dilemmas arising from massive migration
into their country by non-Germans. These are ramifications of the
Wende
(reunification), and their repercussions permeate every pore of civil and
political culture, including university culture, and require also the most
urgent curricular reforms. The multitude of proposed measures are ex–
pected to heal all social ills as well. But facile parallels derived from
habits of simple "cold war" thinking cannot immediately be eradicated,
if only because the transformation of the former East Germans, "Ossies,"
into West Germans, "Wessies," as well as of Poles, Turks, and a variety
of Slavs, who are warring among themselves, often is bound to exacer–
bate these habits. These issues now pervade every aspect of German life.
Because the German
Wende
appeared to come about so painlessly
and unexpectedly, the tortured metamorphosis continues to be so ex–
cruciatingly painful, and the problems so overwhelming. (I use
Wende
