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country.
With emigrants passing away - losing Hans Jonas and Leo Lowenthal
has made this again evident - the creative tension and internationality of
German intellectuals has lessened . Nor is the unification of the two
German states any compensation. On the contrary, this unification makes
it all the more clear that Germany has simply become a bigger province in
Europe. In former East Germany, the intellectual modern age ended in
1933. What is more, the moral advantage held by East German emigrants
has vanished since opening the Russian archives. Traditionally drawn to
introspection, German intellectuals are also busy uniting the German
state, for the most part without confrontation.
These efforts come at the right time for German politics. For while
European borders are disappearing, it is important to convince German
politicians to bring art and science, culture and intellectual life, into the
foreground. At a time when money is short, when it is clear in any case
that money cannot do everything, politicians should realize how much
can be accomplished in the arts and sciences with relatively little money.
Unlike Franyois Mitterrand with the College de France, Helmut Kohl
probably will not try to develop a traditional German research institute
during his remaining time in office. Green with envy, German intellec–
tuals can only look to Paris and to the United States, where President
Clinton's "new democrat" is a professor at Yale, Georgetown, or
Harvard.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the dream inspired by
Enlightenment intellectuals to interpret and change the world already
seems to have faded. Napoleon, a man of action and sworn enemy of the
"ideologues," had changed the map of Europe. At the same time, indus–
trial production and distribution began to develop its own laws. Engineers
were needed to maintain machines and bureaucrats to manage the masses.
There was no longer any place for an unproductive intellectual elite
which believed that principles could govern society. The result was res–
ignation and revolt on the part of intellectuals. They consoled themselves
with the idea that their realm was not of this world. They felt they be–
longed to a church of the inner order, to a "clerisy" (Coleridge) or
congregation of worldly clerics who celebrated the sacramental nature of
the mind in shared loneliness. Intellectuals resigned themselves from the
world, but this resignation only increased their own overestimation of
themselves because it consecrated their theological position. Julien
Benda's influential work,
The Great Betrayal
(1927), provided twentieth–
century thinkers with a definitive slogan and carried this defiant act of
myopia to the extreme. At the same time, attacks against Germany and
the German spirit played a central role in Benda's treatise. The na-
