JAN-WERNER MULLER
567
the addition of East Germany, the questions of democratization and
Westernization which intellectuals like Habermas and Grass had made
their special task to answer, were back on the agenda-and with them,
the old role of the intellectual as democratic citizen, even if most of the
intellectuals were now reaching the age of senior democratic citizens. It
is entirely conceivable that without unification the intellectuals of the
skeptical generation would have retired quietly. Instead, with the sud–
den prospect of unification in 1990, many intellectuals reentered the
public sphere, where they often reenacted roles-and rearticulated posi–
tions-which they had already formulated as early as the 1960s. They
feared that with the addition of seventeen million undemocratic East
Germans calling for
ein Yolk,
and the "return of the nation-state," Ger–
many might yet again suffer from a "democratic deficit" and see
renewed nationalism. Given that Adenauer's grandson so clearly
appealed to what one might call a "pan-German economic miracle iden–
tity" and centered the unification process on the executive, thereby rein–
forcing the perception of a new "Chancellor democracy," intellectuals
saw ominous parallels with the 1950S and feared the establishment of
continuities with pre- 1945 Germany. While none of their proposals in
1990 were taken up, and while they were often subjected to harsh
attacks by the Right, ultimately they did end up playing the role of
"national preceptors" for another decade-and, among other things,
battled against the rise of a nationali t "New German Right" which
seemed increasingly likely in the mid-1990s.
Ten years after unification, however, there is a widespread sense that,
while it was a crucial and valuable part of the task of the left-liberal
intellectuals after 1945
to
detect and denounce continuities, the old
model of intellectual intervention has itself become anachronistic–
ironically, due
to
its very success in helping
to
make Germany a demo–
cratic Western country. Even left-wing and liberal intellectuals feel that
the past can serve less as a direct yardstick for the present than it did for
the "generation of 1958"-which is not to say that younger intellectu–
als want
to
draw the infamous "thick line" under the past. Whether the
Germans were able
to
deal openly with their past had once been the
clear standard applied by left-liberal intellectuals (but also by the Amer–
ican occupiers) as
to
whether Germany had yet become another, demo–
cratic country. Now remembrance has become a much more
differentiated and decentralized process, especially among the young.
Also, in retrospect it seems that invoking the past frequently furnished
later generations with a moral certainty which otherwise could hardly
be had in pluralist societies faced with complex and morally ambiguous
