The silence of the clerks: German intellectuals, irritated by the bourgeois tone of the revolution in their midst, are maintaining an angry silence

National Review, April 16, 1990 by Joachim Fest

German intellectuals, irritated at the bourgeois tone of the revolution in their midst, are maintaining an angry silence. But it doesn't matter the people aren't listening anyway.

THERE ARE times when silence is more articulate than any number of words. One of the most striking things about 1989 was the silence with which the intelligentsia of the Federal Republic and the GDR met the year's revolutionary events. This became a silence compounded by despondency when the results of the first free election in East Germany were declared. There is a somewhat ironic angle to this. The words that poured out ad nauseam on the bicentennial of the French Revolution only made the silent response to the current revolution all the more audible. Critical awareness had suddenly become speechless.

This astonishing reticence deserves some consideration. It can be interpreted as a mark of embarrassment in face of the failure of an idea, namely socialism, which, more than any other, could rely on the sympathy of those who love dreaming up plans for social happiness. Furthermore, as long as the people stayed put, and the Wall stayed up, this silence could be justified as concern for a status quo which secured peace (even though this ultimately amounted to a justification of the existing repression). But the grounds for that explanation have now been destroyed, and it is fair to ask whether there are deeper reasons for this dumbnesk.

Leaving aside the tragic events in Rumania, what strikes one about the revolutions of 1989 is not just their largely peaceful development, which has undermined the classic concept of revolution involving insurrection, violence, and civil war. In addition, they took on a confusing and poignant nature precisely because they lacked that element of social revolutionary fervor which has dominated almost every historical revolution of modern times. (The various attempts to interpret the current revolution as one of true socialism against its deformation merely turn the truth upon its head.) Revolution without Theorists

E ARE dealing in Germany

for the first time with a revolution

that has not been preceded by its theorists. That may help to explain something of the uneasiness which the intellectuals' silence expresses. It also reveals a deep break with the past. Ever since the Enlightenment, when the undermining of traditional power structures began and power had to justify itself to reason, all revolutions have been preceded by intellectual theorists, who devised, justified, yearned for, and in some cases even helped realize a radical change in the course of history. Even the National Socialist seizure of power had its own ancestry of remarkable names.

But current developments diverge from this tradition. The gulf between those who usually lay down the revolutionary law and the actual protagonists in the streets is reflected in two events: the loyal address proffered to Erich Honecker by the Students Committee of the Free University of West Berlin on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the GDR; and the failure of the proclamation "for our country" with which Christa Wolf and others tried to assert the autonomy of the GDR. This would have vanished without even an echo if Egon Krenz's support had not given it some unwelcome resonance:

The intellectuals, whether from East or West Germany, unlike those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, did not prepare the ground for the revolutionary nights of last November. There never was in Germany a movement like Charter 77, not even one directed from the safe terrain of the Federal Republic. One looks in vain for such outright champions of fundamental human rights as Vaclav Havel or Mircea Dinescu among German intellectuals. Most of them reserved their enthusiasm for imaginary paradises, untouched by the misery of the people next door.

Nowhere is this better revealed than in the attitude of the Greens. It is legitimate to have some reservations about the idea of a unitary German state; it is possible to see the so-called German question as demanding a greater peace order, for which an increasingly unified Europe provides the framework. On that assumption, it would certainly be necessary to insist that the unification of Europe and Germany proceed hand in hand.

But the indifference with which most speakers of the Green Party, even in the turbulence of those November days, denied their neighbors those rights that they are only too ready to press for in foreign lands, was something altogether different. It is probably wrong to think that this stance revealed a lack of national feeling. What emerged more forcefully was a lack of basic human compassion.

Continuing the German tradition of cultural pessimism and staring at holes in the ozone layer, the Greens adhere so rigidly to visions of apocalypse that better times anywhere in the world are a concept too subtle and imaginative for them. One is sometimes tempted to think that many who are molded by this most German of all German traditions are paralyzed by the discovery that history has, for once, not hatched a catastrophe.