The day after the Queen died, a joke did the rounds on Twitter: “Germany also has a symbolic figurehead with no real power whose function is to ideologically bind the nation together. We call him ‘Jürgen Habermas’.”
The country has long had a solemn reverence for public intellectuals such as Habermas, a nonagenarian philosopher whose every utterance seems to carry the ex cathedra force of papal writ. There is nothing quite like them in Britain. Known as Vordenker (leading thinkers), they have diagnosed, prophesied and even spearheaded sweeping shifts in society, culture and politics.
For many decades they enjoyed great respect and licence for cantankerous or contrarian behaviour. The footage of the great literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki imperiously rejecting a 2008 German television prize live on stage — “I can only throw this object away from me . . . I don’t want to talk about all the nonsense you see on television these days” — is legendary. The late Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who died a fortnight ago, got away with consorting with the Baader-Meinhof gang, defending the Iraq war and lambasting the European Union.
This attitude has also rubbed off on Germany’s leaders. After he was kicked out of the chancellery in 1982 Helmut Schmidt spent his long retirement pontificating on late-night television shows and writing countless books about ethics and grand strategy. Angela Merkel celebrated her 50th birthday with a lecture from a neuroscience professor about the political significance of the snail’s nervous system. Olaf Scholz has continued the tradition of the philosopher-chancellors, reading voraciously and explicitly borrowing ideas from academics such as Michael Sandel, Branko Milanovic and Andreas Reckwitz.
Yet Enzensberger’s death feels like the end of an era. The old guard is giving way to a new breed of public intellectual who function more as newspaper pundits than the high priests of a loftier realm of ideas. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine there has been a weekly ritual where the German media shreds the latest shrill chat-show appearance by a famous writer or thinker.
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Harald Welzer, a sociology professor and prominent critic of German arms deliveries to Kyiv, was monstered for lecturing the Ukrainian ambassador about Germany’s supposedly unique understanding of the lessons from the Second World War. Richard David Precht, a bestselling pop philosopher, was castigated for “mansplaining” media ethics to senior political journalists. This week’s victim was Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s best-known feminist, who was accused of resorting to “conspiracy theories” in an angry exchange with a Ukraine correspondent.
There are several things going on here. The first is that Germany, like other western societies, is becoming steadily less deferential. Part of this is down to social media. Half a century ago Enzensberger foretold a future in which every citizen would become their own broadcaster rather than a mere passive recipient of information from on high, breaking down social barriers and claims to authority. We are now living in that future.
The war in Ukraine itself has been a significant catalyst for these changes. Habermas once said that public intellectuals had a duty to act as an “early warning system” when “current events are threatening to spin out of control”. As Germany has broken taboo after geopolitical taboo during the past nine months — rearming, dispatching weapons into an active warzone, abandoning long-cherished illusions about Russia — Habermas and many of his aspiring successors have cast themselves as bulwarks of old-fashioned prudence.
This has left them looking not so much like Vordenker as Hinterherdenker (behind thinkers), the intellectual rearguard action of a circumspect and pacifist world view that once prevailed in Germany and is still held by a large minority of voters.
These thinkers have often tried to reinforce Scholz’s instinctive caution. So far they have had only limited success. One argument that appears to have caught the chancellor’s imagination is an analogy with the outbreak of the First World War: both Scholz and Welzer have used it to argue that the localised conflict in Ukraine is in danger of boiling over into decades of uncontrollable violence across Europe, and escalation must be avoided at all costs.
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It’s conceivable that the Hinterherdenker may gain more traction over the coming months. Several recent polls have indicated that the German public is gradually coming round to their side in the face of recession and the chill of winter: on Monday one survey found 42 per cent wanted support for Ukraine to be scaled back, while only 39 per cent favoured keeping it up. Germany’s munitions stocks are so low that it is increasingly hard to identify spare arms for the Ukrainians. Last week Scholz cryptically suggested that there might ultimately be a way back to the old “peace order” in Europe if Russia agrees to behave like a normal country.
A wholesale change of heart seems unlikely, though. Scholz has staked his political destiny on the Zeitenwende, the dawn of a new age in German policy, and repeatedly promised to back Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. “The world afterwards,” as he told the Bundestag three days after the first Russian missiles fell on Kyiv, “is no longer the same as the world before.” Germany is moving on, and many of its public intellectuals are at risk of being left behind.
Oliver Moody is Berlin correspondent. Roger Boyes is away