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antifascist Germany-if anything, the existence of the GDR did as much
damage to the West German Left as the Third Reich had done to the
Right. Rather than the GDR, it was a vaguely defined antifascist, demo–
cratic-cum-socialist Germany which became the implicit standard of cri–
tique. Not least, this stance was an ex post facto resistance to National
Socialism-which also explained the curious hostility of some postwar
intellectuals to the emigrants. After all, an imaginary democratic social–
ist German
Resistance
would have worked from within the country,
rather than constituting another intellectual and moral possibility out–
side Germany, as the emigrants supposedly did.
Intellectuals, while often complaining of being "homeless" or even
seeing Germany as a "country of enemies," as Enzensberger put it in the
early 1960s, in fact were never quite as alienated from the politics of the
Federal Republic as the rhetoric suggested. While they attempted to fos–
ter what one might call a "culture of suspicion" vis-a-vis the new state
and its representatives, by and large they did subscribe to the values of
the West German Constitution, and supported its democratic institu–
tions-even if it was sometimes a logic of the lesser evil that led them to
this stance. As Enzensberger admitted in retrospect, they were "latter–
day liberals, good Social Democrats, moralists and socialists without
clearly defined aims, anti-fascists without a programme for the future ."
However, reformers necessarily could not be as ideologically neat as rev–
olutionaries. And for all their programmatic vagueness, the intellectuals
were able to do what was indispensable for intellectuals in order to have
any effect at all, namely to define one general interest, in this case
"democratization," to which particular criticisms could then be related.
Conceiving of themselves as a "democratic elite" or even a "democ–
ratic fire brigade," they sought to substitute for a broader critical pub–
lic which was yet to develop. They also aimed at fostering what they
quite openly called the "re-education of the masses," as well as a sober,
so-called "Anglo-Saxon model" of debate, which avoided the supposed
German tendency of turning political argument into a matter of mutual
moral destruction-a tendency which had proven fatal for the Left dur–
ing Weimar.
From the very beginning, however, there was also a paradox inherent
in the role of the "democratic intellectual," i.e., of the elitist opinion–
leader and defender of cultural distinctions in a politically egalitarian
society. In theory, this paradox could only be solved over time through
the thorough democratization of society-or through ending the role of
the intellectual as "national preceptor."
