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than acting as "seismographers" during novel situations-an ideal by
which friend and foe have nevertheless tended to measure them.
Who are we talking about then, and what made these intellectuals
special? Intellectuals like ]urgen Habermas, Gunter Grass, Hans Mag–
nus Enzensberger, and Ralf Dahrendorf are all part of a generation born
at the end of the I920S and in the early I930S-01d enough to have been
part of the Hitler Youth or even the regular Wehrmacht, but too young
to have been directly implicated in Nazi crimes. This generation has
rightly been labeled "skeptical" on account of its early disillusionment
with grand ideological promises-and it was intellectuals of this gener–
ation who dominated public debates throughout the history of the old
West Germany and even the first decade of the unified country.
These intellectuals first defined their peculiar role at the end of the
I950S and in the early I960s, and it is no accident that Habermas once
called himself a member of the "generation of I95 8." It was at this time
that the building blocks for the peculiar role of the left-liberal intellec–
tual in West Germany were put into place. Most importantly, in the late
I950S, the attitude toward dealing with the past slowly began to
change. The public was stirred by a succession of scandals, in particular
a number of anti-Semitic attacks such as the desecration of the Cologne
synagogue on Christmas Day I959, and the now-apparent failings of
the judiciary which were revealed in a number of trials. It was in I9 59
that Theodor W. Adorno, very much in a capacity which one can only
describe as that of a democratic adult educator, delivered an influential
radio talk, "What Does Working Through the Past Mean?"
In
the same
year, the philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner republished his
book
The Belated Nation,
which he had written in his Dutch exile in the
mid-I930S. The former argued for a democratic "vaccination" through
enlightenment and knowledge about the past, and pointed to the par–
ticular dangers of fascist continuities within democracy, rather than of
antidemocratic neo-Nazis. Plessner, in turn, contrasted the healthy
democratic developments of the states of Western Europe with the
pathological course of German history. Germany had been a "belated
nation" since it had "missed" the seventeenth century crucial for the
development of a strong bourgeoisie and a modern, liberal democracy.
Its desperate efforts to catch up and compensate for deficiencies in state
building and national consciousness had contributed to the fact that it
had been led down a "special path"-a so-called
Sonderweg,
the end
point of which was the Third Reich.
The advocacy both of an active engagement with the past and of the
Westernization of Germany became central to the role of the left-wing
