AMERICA AND THE EMERGING EUROPE
657
I have to note that if you compare the musical public of Bielefeld and
Vienna, it's of course evident that more experts are to be found in
Bielefeld. I like your metaphor of playing the tune and paying the bill. I
think that German interests were better served when Germans did not
aspire to playa solo part but rather to be an important component of
an orchestra.
David Gress: Thank you. And I now call upon the conference direc–
tor, Edith Kurzweil, to give the concluding comments.
Edith Kurzweil: Thank you David. I promise to be brief We've had a
very rich and thought-provoking conference. We've had wonderful,
well-informed participants and interesting debates among them. So I've
been thinking this morning, about what I could possibly add. I'll begin
simply by paraphrasing Freud. The voice of the intellect, he said, is low.
But it keeps reaching out and eventually it emerges. I think it's emerged
in the informed contributions we've heard and on a wide range of issues,
here, which we covered from many perspectives. Among them, we talked
about the need to mourn the atrocities committed by Germans during
World War II; about mourning the death of our hopes for a socialist
society; and about mourning for socialism with a human face.
We talked of the contradictory conceptions by perpetrators and by
their victims; the connections between collective consciousness and indi–
vidual consciousness; the way people have dealt with
Vergangenheitsbe–
wiiltigung,
and much more. We heard about the legacy of the Nazi and
Communist dictatorships; we asked whether these legacies can possibly be
wiped out in the not-so-distant future; and about whether to approach
this more in terms of a mass psychology perspective or an individual one.
We speculated about economic, social, and political possibilities in the
future; about the effect of migrations, and the consquences of these on
the distribution of populations, and on the intellect; and about the
prospect of eventually lessening the power of nationalist feelings. We
have noted the emergence of a specific Austrian identity and the fact that
the Austrian identity will not be swallowed by Germany, along of course
with the importance of Bielefeld in the culture at large.
We heard that there are so-called opinionated feelings. Well, we've
revealed a number of these here as well. I must add that contrary to
what some people expressed during breaks, I don't see this as a fault at
all. In fact, this is part of what a conference like this should do, because
we are trying to bring together different kinds of people - people from
within the university and people from outside it - and it's important for
