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situations. Substituting analogy for argument as a justification of for–
eign policies-as, most recently in the Kosovo War, when a left-wing
government evoked the maxim "Never again Auschwitz," replacing the
previous slogan "Never again War"-was also designed to lend these
policies a self-evident moral legitimacy which they might or might not
have had, had there been a proper debate about their meaning for the
present. Apart from its obvious polemical value as the ultimate rhetori–
cal weapon, drawing parallels with the past would frequently-though
not always-serve to set the speakers up as ex post facto resisters, just
as a strong self-incrimination might in fact often have been exculpatory.
"Qui s'accuse, s'excuse,"
as Enzensberger put it in
I964.
In the same vein, many intellectuals also feel that the old gestures of
suspicion-so effective both in consolidating the old Federal Republic
and in casting out one's political opponents-will no longer do.
If
the
twin tasks of intellectuals in democratic societies are "subversion" of
reigning opinions and furthering "civility" in public debate, as sociolo–
gist Jeffery Goldfarb has put it, then the culture of suspicion promoted
the former, but often detracted from the latter.
It
encouraged a kind of
collective exorcism and ostracism, as well as a tendency for witch-hunts
on "internal enemies," which was an expression of the Cold War as
much as of the uncertainty of the Germans about their own democ–
racy-although suspecting even anti-Nazis did make sense at a time
when some of them turned out actually to have been Nazis.
Paradoxically, the culture of suspicion, of criticism and questioning,
created trust for the country, both domestically and abroad-a fact that
became obvious not least last year when Gunter Grass, Germany's pre–
mier suspicious citizen, appeared in his first-ever tails at the Nobel Prize
ceremony in Stockholm. But at the same time, the culture of suspicion
made it difficult for many intellectuals to genuinely accept conflict
within liberal-democratic rules. For this idea, Germans have the unique
concept of
Streitkultur-a
culture of civilized dispute-but the very fact
that it is necessary to invoke such a highly normative concept seems evi–
dence for the absence of the thing itself. Such an acceptance of conflict
might also further a "sense of reality" which outside observers from
Hannah Arendt onwards found missing in Germany and which might
help to redeem the still-unfulfilled promise of a more "Anglo-Saxon"
style of debate.
While many older intellectuals of course continue to make prominent
public interventions, there is ample evidence that younger writers
remain suspicious of a
litterature engagee
and the role of the intellectual
in politics. For instance, when young writer Ingo Schulze, often
