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analyze, and judge, due to West Germany's lack of centralized structures,
of personnel and experience for the task, and to its daunting and un–
precedented nature. The only exception was the Academy of Sciences.
Otherwise, the reform was entrusted to those who were to be reformed,
with the result that the transformations in East German academe were
more tedious than in any other area of society. When official measures
were finally taken by the ministries of education of the
Lander,
they
could not but be confrontational, sternly bureaucratic, and often brutal.
The misery of East German intellectuals became visible after some
outsiders published letters in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel,
and other periodicals. The complaints usually went along the same lines
as a much-discussed letter written by five professors of mathematics at
Leipzig University in May of 1990. Less prominent was a letter written by
a physicist and myself to Hans-Joachim Meyer, at the time the Minister
of Education of the GDR, in June 1990. We asked that Leipzig Univer–
sity rid itself of the name of Karl Marx, who had never even visited this
institution; that all official and unofficial state security informers should
be revealed and fired; and that professorships with ideological underpin–
nings be terminated and then restaffed.
The only newspaper which decided to publish my letter removed a
paragraph about state security people. But the publication of the letter
made my situation in the department unbearable, and I finally decided to
leave for good. I was accused at a faculty meeting of "aspiring to the
role of an inquisitor," of "betrayal of my profession," and - with a para–
doxical reversal of roles - of "informing on my colleagues to the me–
dia." This was typical. A less temporal problem regarding post-Commu–
nist, East German intellectuals is their intellectual competence. Arnulf
Baring, in
Germany, What Now?,
doubted the scholarly competence of
most East German intellectuals, whom he found "to a large extent unus–
able." Baring called the former GDR a "headless country." Indeed, the
lack of a professionally, morally, and politically independent intelligentsia
made the system work politically and decay economically. Paradoxically,
this was one of the conditions which led to the eventual collapse of the
system: During the economic and political crises of the 1980s, when in–
tellectual flexibility was needed, intellectuals could not meet the demands
to save the system that had borne them. Even considering the impressive
mimicry acted out by the Communist-ruled academe which mocked real
intellectual life, most achievements were reached not because of but de–
spite the Party- governed system.
Immediately after 1989, established scholars showed little hesitancy to
use their old connections with Western colleagues which they alone had
