WOLF LEPENIES
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Andrei Plesu in Romania seemed to have a voice in determining the
guidelines of new and democratic policies. In the East, moralists in the
East came to power. The experienced Western experts who busily went
about politics "business as usual" paled in comparison. It was expected
that the confrontation between moralists and experts would bring about a
spiritual uplifting of Europe.
Today, nothing remains of this hope. Not only in Germany but ev–
erywhere in Europe, the victorious West has failed in the moment of
victory to pause and look within. Socialism has collapsed; a takeover by
the market economy and the modern constitutional state is perhaps now
only a question of time; the world could become one united, global
bourgeois society. Today, however, we are beginning to realize how
costly this crippling optimism will be. The illusion that intellectuals can
participate in European politics has faded. Viclav Havel is again President,
but he is now only the largely disempowered leader of a divided land. In
Hungary, intellectuals fight among themselves in state and government
departments while authoritarian tendencies increase and anti-Semitism is
almost respectable. In Romania, nothing remained for Andrei Plesu after
a short stint as Minister of Culture in a pseudo-democratic government
but to return to a university position that no graduate assistant in
Germany would accept.
Bronislaw Geremek's career is characteristic: Solidarity has split and is
no longer a political power. His own party, which includes moderates,
can, under the best conditions, expect only four to six percent of the
votes in the next election. So now he is teaching, having accepted a one–
year position as "Chaire Internationale" at the College de France in Paris.
Naturally, he belongs to the Academie Universelle des Cultures. The
intellectuals are corning home.
It
is no accident that Paris is the privileged
place of arrival for this homecoming. In our century, the disappointment
over the fall of intellectuals is nowhere greater than in France, especially
in Paris. Among the French, however, surprise about this fall has been
stronger than the desire to explore its origins. These days, what is
particularly visible is the paradox of the "intellectual renaissance."
Take, for example, Bernard-Henri Levy. In a profoundly provincial
book, he lambasts the French intellectuals and their overestimation of
themselves . But he also travels to war-torn Bosnia and meets with
Izetbegovic . After his return to Paris, he is received by President
Mitterrand, who is convinced by his intellectual colleagues to take a
spectacular trip to Sarajevo, thereby changing the course of French Balkan
policies. Levy's journal,
LA Regie du ]eu,
supports the intellectuals' unbro–
ken claims to influence the rules of the political game.
For a long time it had seemed as though no writer could survive
