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the Party had more than symbolic repercussions.
Other ordeals and tests of loyalty became visible only with an intel–
lectual's advancement. Signatures promising to maintain secrecy and to
transmit relevant information to the State security were rewarded with
privileges such as the right to attend international conferences, which in
turn led to new requests to share information about those trips, and so
on. Only intellectuals who had climbed the ladder could gain increasing
insights into the functioning of the system. But the price they paid was
an ever-closer and increasingly compromised involvement with the system
itself.
In
other words, it was not the often proclaimed socialist persua–
sions or the faith in the Communist utopia that prevented the vast ma–
jority of Communist intellectuals from participating in the dismantling
and reformation of the academic apparatus, but the degree of their own
shameful involvement.
Younger intellectuals did not know or understand the hidden aca–
demic structures well enough to attack them successfully. The establish–
ment, on the other hand, succeeded in uniting most of them in its fear
ofWestern intruders. One action exemplifying this new unity was the so–
called clearance of everybody's files of unnecessary materials, in early
1990, as a seemingly democratic measure to erase records of Party mem–
bership, administrative functions, and so on. This was strategically clever:
instead of analyzing the personal involvement and assigning the necessary
consequences at the end of the
Wende,
there was a unified post-Com–
munist intelligentsia with a completely hidden past, and, likewise, a
group that completely denied personal responsibility for anything that
happened before 1989.
There also were niches for intellectuals within the churches and, to a
much smaller degree, in the media. These were socially marginalized, but
the intensity of their explorations and the exchange of ideas among them
was much stronger than within the official intelligentsia. They feared the
1989 changes as much as the unofficial segment of the intelligentsia wel–
comed them, albeit in a somewhat artless fashion, taking them as the
fulfilment of their cherished dreams. At the same time, the unofficial in–
telligentsia's insights and professional experience were insufficient, so that
they were unable to provide the anti-Communist movement with the
conceptual vigor it needed.
When the two systems merged between 1990 and 1993, misunder–
standings inevitably ensued. Scholars from the underprivileged strata ex–
pected the miraculous arrival of judges from the West who would sepa–
rate the worthy from the unworthy. The former Communist establish–
ment, of course, was afraid. But there was a reluctance to investigate,
