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PARTISAN REVIEW
A culture of suspicion, then, and a catalogue of categorical, negative
imperative to avoid the mistakes of Weimar guided the intellectuals'
interventions. The advantage of this culture of suspicion was its essen–
tially egalitarian and democratic nature-after all, nobody was to be
"above suspicion," and democratic citizens
should
be citizens suspicious
of their governments and
should
demand their accountability. The
downside was that it could lead-and often did lead-to a primary con–
cern, even an obsession, with unmasking politicians and other intellec–
tuals, and with ascertaining their true personal motivations. Suspicion
is, of course, typical of almost any posttotalitarian and postauthoritar–
ian society, as well as exile and expatriate cultures. Suspicion could also
prove indispensable for proving one's democratic credentials-to the
extent that every generation, it seemed, had to prove its ex post facto
resistance against National Socialism through its discovery of continu–
ities with the past. Every generation, it also seemed, had to question the
previous generation's attempts at "coming to terms with the past" as
somehow deficient. Already in the late 1950s, observers like Manes
Sperber were struck with how liberally serious young intellectuals
labeled anybody whom they politically disliked as "fascist"-and how
much this label seemed to serve their self-image more than any dis–
cernible political agenda.
Subsequently, throughout the history of the Federal Republic,
instances of major political and intellectual conflict were couched in the
language of the past and German continuities. The rebellious student
generation of 1968 accused their country of fascism, and were them–
selves subject to the suspicion of "left-wing fascism" by liberals and
conservatives; the terrorists of the 1970S radicalized the reproach of fas–
cism, and were themselves portrayed as "Hitler's children"; and in
1990, the Left saw a reincarnation of the aggressive nation-state of the
past, just as much as the Right saw the Left continuing a fateful roman–
tic German "special path" by refusing to be a "normal country." Ironi–
cally, rather than unification discrediting the intellectuals of the
skeptical generation, as was so often claimed ten years ago, it arguably
gave them another lease on public life. True, Gunter Grass with his
bizarre historical determinism that a German nation-state would auto–
matically lead to "another Auschwitz," ]urgen Habermas with his
undifferentiated accusation of "DM-Nationalism" directed against a
larger Germany, and the Left's general unwillingness to face up to some
of its past misjudgments all did damage to the image of the intellectual
as "seismographer" or as being in a position to provide moral guidance
during times of enormous historical flux. But, more importantly, with
