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and liberal intellectuals in the Federal Republic. Enzensberger
described their task as "the sanitary chore of the intellectuals after the
end of fascism, the whole ideological waste disposal, a very wearisome
and protracted job." The intellectual was to be watchful of continuities
with the pre-1945 past, and reorient Germany towards the political and
cultural traditions of the West. This did not exclude the possibility of
German intellectuals sometimes criticizing the West themselves
de haute
en bas,
which, however, stood in marked contrast to the fact that polit–
ical leaders-in both East and West-were overeager to please their
respective superpowers with their ideological zeal. Moreover, in con–
trast to the academic doyens and their cultural pessimism which had
still dominated the early and mid-1950S, younger scholars tried to con–
sciously define themselves in opposition to the tradition of the "German
mandarins" and to the illiberal interwar intellectuals in particular. But
the role of the critical intellectual was also defined in contrast to the
"party intellectual" co-opted by the state in the GDR, a point Gunter
Grass insisted on at a number of meetings between East and West Ger–
man writers. Finally, what one might call a "liberal reconstitution" of
the intellectuals was also opposed to the supposed "restoration" under
Adenauer-and, in particular, his increasingly autocratic behavior in the
late 19 50S and early 1960s, when he attempted to become president and
establish a government-directed television station. In that sense, the role
of the intellectual was based on a triple negative-against the mandarins
of the past, the party intellectuals to the East, and the technocratic spe–
cialists which the "economic miracle" seemed to require.
Left-liberal intellectuals, often themselves of petty bourgeois origins,
were horrified by the crass materialism of the 1950S and revolted by the
petty bourgeois nature of West Germany-and their criticism was in
fact not entirely free from the cultural pessimism and anti-modernism
pervasive among figures on the Right. Habermas, for instance, analyzed
the "illusions on the marriage market" in terms of the commodification
of emotional life during the "economic miracle," while Enzensberger
and Martin Walser wrote satirical novels and hostile poems about the
philistinism of the late 19 50S.
Opposing Adenauer's anti-communism, the intellectuals often opted
for a vaguely defined anti-anti-communism. But while they were some–
times quicker in denouncing the supposed oppression of French intel–
lectuals under de Gaulle than mobilizing support for their imprisoned
East German counterparts, they had few illusions about the true nature
of the GDR-in fact, some saw the GDR as worse in certain respects
than the Third Reich. For them, East Germany was hardly the "better,"
