INTELLECTUALS AS CULTURAL AGENDA‐SETTERS IN THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC?

Abstract

This article argues that intellectuals in Germany post‐1945 have had, and continue to have, an important influence both on the political culture in general and on cultural policy in particular. Our thesis has been structured in three parts. The first traces the introduction of the term “intellectuals” into German, sketches out how they have variously been defined and sets out the reasons why they have been polemically abused as well as critically lauded. Parts two and three are dedicated to case studies on Jürgen Habermas and Hilmar Hoffmann respectively. Between them they are seen to embrace the two aspects (cultural politics and cultural policy) of the term Kulturpolitik: Habermas by discursive interventions in a changing terrain of values, mentalities and institutional frameworks determining the lifeworld of an ever changing modernity and Hoffmann by theoretical reflection about the parameters and tasks of cultural policy as a field of professional administration and decision‐making. To what extent, in connection with what issues and areas of public life and at what stages in the development of the Federal Republic they can be deemed to be agenda‐setters is critically assessed throughout.

KEYWORDS:

• Kulturpolitik (cultural policy/cultural politics)
• cultural struggle
• discourse
• public sphere
• “culture for everyone”
• Kulturstaat (cultural state)
• multiculturalism

Notes

1. This essay has been authored in close collaboration, with Wilfried van der Will being mainly responsible for the section on Jürgen Habermas and Rob Burns being mainly responsible for the section on Hilmar Hoffmann.

2. See Saunders (2004).

3. See Posner (2002) and Jennings (2002).

4. See Lohmann (1981) and Lepenies (1992).

5. See Parteitagsprotokolle SPD 1903: Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands, abgehalten zu Dresden vom 13.–20. September 1903, Berlin, p. 225 (cited in Bering 1978, p. 73).

6. See Kautsky (1899, p. 133, cited in Bering 1978, p. 178).

7. See Liebknecht (1958, pp. 166–167, cited in Bering 1978, p. 245).

8. See van der Will and Burns (1982, 1985).

9. These were written by Gramsci between 1929 and 1935 and first published in Italy in six volumes between 1948 and 1951. The section on intellectuals appeared in 1949 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 5–23).

10. See Weber (1923, 1927).

11. This was a reference by the then Federal Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to the SPD’s law expert, Adolf Arndt (Burns & van der Will 1988, p. 18).

12. See Parkes (1999, pp. 270–271); also Burns and van der Will (1988, pp. 19–52).

13. Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (1970, p. 164).

14. See the section on “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno & Horkheimer 1973, pp. 120–167).

15. See for example the controversial essay by Botho Strauss, “Anschwellender Bockgesang” (Strauss 1994, pp. 19–40).

16. See, respectively, The Chambers Dictionary (1997) and Meyers großes Taschenlexikon (Mannheim 2001).

17. See Kulturpolitisches Wörterbuch (1970, pp. 302–303) and Langenbucher, Rytlewski and Weyergraf (1983, pp. 280–282).

18. This list, put forward jointly by Prospect magazine (October and November 2005) and the American journal Foreign Policy, received much attention in the British media, principally from The Guardian and the BBC “Today Programme”.

19. See Lohmann (1981), Lepenies (1992), Posner (2002) and Jennings (2002).

20. This telling phrase (die Wächterschaft der öffentlichen Kritik) occurs in Habermas’s review of Martin Heidegger’s lectures of 1935, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Habermas 1953).

21. “Die Einheit der Vernunft in der Vielfalt ihrer Stimmen”, originally the title of a lecture at the Fourteenth German Congress for Philosophy in 1987, now in Jürgen Habermas (1992).

22. For example: defining the framework for the media of public opinion and the status of culture as an indispensable asset for a lived European identity; determining the changing levels of legitimation needed for the exercise of power in the modern democratic state; finding adequate institutional presentation of the nation’s attitude to its past; arriving at the right administrative and constitutional expression of European states bound by the Rome and Mastricht treaties, et al.

23. “Interview des Monats: Hilmar Hoffmann” (conducted by Bernd Hesse, 11 May 2001), LAKS Hessen (Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Kulturinitiativen und soziokulturellen Zentren in Hessen e.V.), 2002 (http://www.laks.de/public/aktiv/interv‐hoffmann.htm, accessed 9 February 2004).

24. Quoted in Genscher (2000, p. 17).

25. For a discussion of the workers’ cultural movement in the Weimar Republic and of Radbruch’s contribution to the development of the SPD’s cultural politics, see van der Will and Burns (1982).

26. This was, of course, a conscious echo of a slogan coined by the architect of West Germany’s post‐war “economic miracle”, Ludwig Erhard, namely “affluence for everyone” (Wohlstand für alle), which was used very effectively in a election poster in 1957 and as the title of a book by Erhard.

27. This debt to Williams’s work is implicitly acknowledged in the very title of the third part of Hoffmann’s trilogy, Kultur als Lebensform (Culture as a Way of Life), and is made explicit in the text itself (1990a, pp. 98–99).

28. This argumentation is set out in detail in the section “Verfassung und Kulturpolitik”, in Kultur für alle (Hoffmann 1979, pp. 21–34).

29. The term Bildungsbürger acquired negative connotations in that it indicated a social type lacking in political awareness that was produced in great numbers by the nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century German grammar school system. Similarly, the term Wohlstandsbürger evokes the – for Hoffmann – negative image of a person who equates their quality of life solely with their material standard of living. For the positive attributes evinced by the ideal‐typical Kulturbürger, see Hoffmann (1990a, pp. 114–115).

30. Quoted in von Weizsäcker (2000 [1996], p. 478).

31. “Interview des Monats: Hilmar Hoffmann”, LAKS Hessen (see note 23).

32. See their contributions in Wapnewski and Mucher (2000, pp. 224–225; 186–192; 285–288; 193–195; 214–223; 256–257 respectively).

33. See Burns (1995, pp. 258–261). Inspired by the idealism of Willy Brandt, Hoffmann joined the SPD in 1966 and has remained a member since then (see Hoffmann 2003, pp. 48–50). Between 1983 and 1990 he was Federal Chairman of the party committee Cultural Forum of Social Democracy (Kulturforum der Sozialdemokratie).

34. Quoted in Unseld (2000, p. 135). Compare also the following statement: “The politician amongst cultural workers cannot be bound by party policy in the narrower sense. He should be acting on behalf of all sections of the population and therefore he cannot accept the imperative mandate of a party. If need be, he must also go against his own parliamentary group should he consider this necessary” (Hoffmann 1979, p. 19).

35. Cf. “The motto ‘culture for everyone’ is nowhere near over and done with”, “Interview des Monats: Hilmar Hoffmann”, LAKS Hessen (see note 23).

36. Kulturzerstörung is a key concept in Hoffmann’s theoretical armoury. In 1983 he edited a book with this title with invited contributions from, amongst others, Ivan Illich, Eric Hobsbaum, Erich Fried, Melvin J. Lasky and the then Chancellor of Austria, Fred Sinowatz. Hoffmann’s introductory essay to this volume was republished in 1990 as a section entitled “Kulturpolitik und Kulturzerstörung” in Kultur als Lebensform (Hoffmann 1990a, pp. 119–135).