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Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003) 343



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Michael Guyer, ed., The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 459 pp.

Germans (especially German intellectuals) take their intellectuals quite seriously; perhaps more seriously than anyone else. So what did "the chattering classes," above all in the East, make of the creation of yet another "new Germany" after 1989? What did they make of the "absorption" of the GDR, the stagnation and Europeanization of the German economy? (Many in the East can be excused for believing they fought to join the party—that other party—just when the band left and the bar closed.) How did they deal with the globalization of commerce and the Social Democrats' shift to the political center? Intellectuals complain a lot, and mostly they held true to form in these cases: they complained, especially about what they perceived as their own growing irrelevance, particularly as they realized how much of the 1989 "revolution" was motivated by a nationalist version of collective identity and by a yearning for a consumer society (not exactly the intellectuals' rallying cry). Guyer's collection offers several thoughtful essays on the great peculiarities, ironies, and complicities of pre-1989 GDR intellectuals, and it covers a very wide range of phenomena manifesting the postunification "free fall," disorientation, confusion, memorialization, nostalgia, Vergangenheitsbewältigung—all as embodied in literature, theater, film, and other media (plus education). It's quite a valuable survey.

 



—Robert B. Pippin

Robert B. Pippin, Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, has received the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award for Scholarship in the Humanities. His books include Kant's Theory of Form, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations, and Henry James and Modern Moral Life .

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