Deutsche Schriftsteller als Intellektuelle

Wer bewahrt die Welt vor dieser Weltgefahr Nr. 1: den Intellektuellen, die ihre Theorien entwerfen, das Bestehende verlästern, die Massen mit Utopien bezaubern und den Machthabern die moralischen Hemmungen wegeskamotieren – ohne die Kosten und Kehrseiten zu bedenken, ohne die Kosten am eigenen Leib tragen zu wollen?¹

Helmut Gollw

Summary

The author investigates the dramatic changes in the public function and importance of writers, especially GDR writers, since the Wende and the reunification of 1989/90, comparing them with the perceived role and shift in public function of intellectuals in the Federal Republic. Here it is necessary to speak of a decline in the engagement of German writers as the so-called ›Conscience of the Nation‹ and societal spokespersons over the course of entire twentieth century. This decline reveals a questionable continuity in today’s intellectuals’ overestimated self-importance and susceptibility for totalitarian ideologies. Such a continuity was expressed in the identification of East German writers with the GDR’s founding myths of anti-fascism and socialism, which were maintained as utopias up until the demise of the GDR and even afterwards. — As a rule, author-intellectuals of the FDR never bound themselves so ›totally‹ to one ideology, but, in spite of all their dominant nonconformity, features of arrogance and a presumptuous monopolizing of the interpretation of societal-political questions can be identified in them too. The delineation of this history of error and disappointment in their Eastern and Western variants gives rise to the question as to what extent writers today can or even should still have a particular role as intellectual spokespersons in public discourse in a world that is globally networked and shaped by permanent media presence, high technology, and the knowledge of specialists.