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THE PROMISE OF PUBLICNESS: INTELLECTUAL ELITES AND PARTICIPATORY POLITICS IN POSTWAR HEIDELBERG*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2012

SEAN A. FORNER
SEAN A. FORNER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Michigan State University E-mail: saforner@msu.edu
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Abstract

This essay explores how the experience of National Socialism provoked German intellectuals to rethink elitist conventions in politics. It focuses on three figures in the town of Heidelberg—Alexander Mitscherlich, Dolf Sternberger, and Alfred Weber—as well as on a journal (Die Wandlung) and a discussion forum (the Aktionsgruppe Heidelberg) that they established after 1945. Breaking with both mandarin and vanguardist traditions, they conceived a politics that neither transpired over the masses’ heads nor sought to organize them from above but rested on the people's participation from below. Moreover, a correspondence existed between their thinking on democracy and the grassroots, extra-institutional activities they pursued in an attempt to realize what they called “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit). Finally, the essay relates such immediate postwar ideas and practices to these intellectuals’ stances toward West Germany after 1949 as well as to the discussion on “publicness” that unfolded there, as exemplified in Jürgen Habermas's early work.

Information

Type
Forum: Intellectual History in and of the Federal Republic of Germany
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 641 - 660
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

The myth of postwar Germany's “zero hour”—the notion that the Second World War's end and National Socialism's collapse cleared the ground of history and enabled a fresh start—long served to elide inconvenient continuities across 1945. Still, “zero hour” also named the deep rupture, a political and ethical as well as physical state of collapse, in which many Germans felt themselves caught at the time. For most, material hardship and avoidance of the past directed their attention firmly to the present; for some, the possibility of political and spiritual renewal energized their imaginations of the future.Footnote 1 Nazism's demise and Germany's four-power occupation left questions of legitimate postwar authority deeply unsettled. At the same time, the social leveling seemingly wrought by the war's destruction made plausible the possibility of cross-class cooperation for the common good. These conditions inspired a welter of reform and reconstruction agendas advanced by broad political coalitions and typified at a grassroots level by “antifascist committees,” known simply as Antifas.Footnote 2 The intellectual corollary of such activism was an efflorescence of so-called “cultural–political” journals founded to discuss Germany's renewal.Footnote 3

It was in this climate that certain circles of intellectuals—whom I call Germany's “engaged democrats”—rethought the perceived problem of mass democracy, its conditions and its nature, in a participatory direction.Footnote 4 The solutions they proposed entailed recasting conventional views on the relationship between elites and the populace. Since the late nineteenth century, Germany's privileged social strata, like those elsewhere in Europe, had confronted mass politics as “elites against democracy.”Footnote 5 In fact, a basic elitism extended across the entire political spectrum. Pressured from below, liberals and conservatives conceded more meritocracy but still excluded “the masses.” On the left, Social Democrats’ state paternalism and Communists’ party vanguardism each expressed its own deferral of trust in the people.Footnote 6 On the populist right, the Nazi “people's community”—one bound by racist nationalism and governed by acclamation of the “leader”—represented another variant of the new, mass politics.Footnote 7 In contrast to these models, certain German intellectuals were prompted by the rupture of 1945 to conceive a politics that neither transpired over the heads of the masses nor sought to organize them from above but rested on active popular participation from below. Notably, this held true even for their fellow Germans, who had quite recently supported Nazism itself.

Some of the intellectuals in question are to be found in Heidelberg, a surprising site for such an endeavor. Nestled into a rolling riverside, this provincial town had long cultivated a preindustrial, romantic nimbus, and as the seat of Germany's oldest university it was a stronghold of the “educated bourgeoisie” (Bildungsbürgertum). Its professors and literati were renowned not for an embrace of “the masses” but for their vibrant, socially exclusive intellectual culture, exemplified in the early twentieth century by the Stefan George circle's secretive aesthetes as well as by the liberal, cosmopolitan Max and Marianne Weber salon. Indeed, the latter persisted across 1945 to become the seedbed of activities examined below.Footnote 8 My attention will focus on three similarly surprising figures. A postwar political scientist and public intellectual, Dolf Sternberger (1907–89) is remembered today as a liberal champion of “burgher-ness” (Bürgerlichkeit) and an old-guard adversary of 1960s student radicals.Footnote 9 Political economist turned cultural sociologist Alfred Weber (1868–1958) is best known by way of his biographer, who asserts a social-reformist liberalism as the lasting foundation of Weber's long career.Footnote 10 And neurologist turned psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–82), though familiar as a leftist gadfly during West Germany's middle decades, earlier consorted with “conservative revolutionaries” Ernst Jünger and Ernst Niekisch.Footnote 11 As scions of Germany's educated bourgeoisie, these intellectuals’ positions are generally taken to exemplify the persistence of aristocratic and antimodern sensibilities within that stratum, revised only gradually and partially after 1945.Footnote 12 From that perspective, they are unlikely protagonists of a counterelitist, participatory-democratic postwar turn, but my central claim is that each of them and their milieu underwent just such a transformation, one that was soon out of step with, yet not irrelevant to, developments in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

The argument proceeds in several steps. It begins by examining key texts by these three intellectuals that approach “the people” not as objects—of elites’ exclusion, organization, or tutelage—but rather as self-civilizing citizen-subjects. The next section relates the content of these intellectuals’ discussions to the forms of their activity, as manifest in a journal they founded and a discussion forum they convened. These became the vehicles of a project that pursued “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit) as a political good, not primarily in terms of educating or influencing public opinion but in terms of constituting a public in the first place, as an autonomous organ of political authority. This innovative stance had everything to do with immediate postwar conditions; as the Cold War divide deepened, they reverted to more conventional modes of intervention. However, as the concluding section illustrates, these immediate postwar dynamics were not without resonance in the West German 1950s, both for the political stances toward the FRG that they inspired and in their legacy for a burgeoning discourse around the question of “publicness.”

SELF-GOVERNMENT AS SELF-EDUCATION

In 1945, these actors were drawn together by a shared sense of having opposed Nazism. As a bookish student in 1920s Heidelberg, Sternberger studied literature, some social science with Weber, and much philosophy with Karl Jaspers.Footnote 13 During the 1930s, he joined the staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the great liberal daily that persisted, increasingly compromised, until the Nazis shuttered it in 1943. It was seen as a bastion of covert critique in the style Sternberger later dubbed “undercover writing.” After his dismissal as the spouse of a “non-Aryan,” he and his wife lived out the regime's last years in fear and seclusion.Footnote 14 Sternberger had made Mitscherlich's acquaintance in the early 1930s, but they fell out of contact after he refused to associate with the circle around Niekisch's journal Widerstand, citing ideological differences.Footnote 15 The journal's title had announced “resistance” first to Germany's Weimar Republic, then to Nazism, and, amid the ensuing persecutions, Mitscherlich spent a brief interlude in Switzerland and a few months in Gestapo custody. Thereafter, he joined Heidelberg's neurology clinic.Footnote 16 Weber, meanwhile, was already a prominent, politically engaged professor in the Weimar period. He co-founded the German Democratic Party, endorsed—like his brother, Max Weber—an elitist “leadership democracy,” and directed Heidelberg's Institute for Social and State Sciences, although his speculative “cultural sociology” remained a marginal enterprise there.Footnote 17 In March 1933, in the faculty's only act of overt defiance, Weber had a swastika flag removed from atop his institute; shortly thereafter, he withdrew from the university.Footnote 18 Marianne Weber's salon became his refuge, and he formed ties to active resisters through Emil Henk, a local Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader.Footnote 19 By the war's last years, Weber, Sternberger, and Mitscherlich were living in “inner emigration” and hoping fervently for Germany's defeat.

Accordingly, they experienced the Allied victory emphatically as a liberation. Suddenly, Heidelberg was a hotbed of activity, as American occupiers sought out non- and anti-Nazi Germans found on their “white list.”Footnote 20 The committee convened to spearhead the university's reconstruction included Henk, Jaspers, Weber, Mitscherlich, and others from Marianne Weber's circle.Footnote 21 After consulting Jaspers and Weber, occupation officials appointed Henk, Mitscherlich, and Sternberger to postwar Germany's first, short-lived civilian administration, located in a small, southwestern province.Footnote 22 After its dissolution, Sternberger proposed that he found a journal, and preparations began for Die Wandlung (The Transformation), the first such US-licensed publication. As coeditors, Sternberger enlisted Jaspers, Weber, and the Romance literature professor (and Communist resistance member) Werner Krauss. Lambert Schneider, an old friend, became their publisher.Footnote 23 Germans were initially forbidden to organize politically, and early informal discussions involving Mitscherlich, Weber, and dozens of others were shut down.Footnote 24 But American authorities began licensing political parties in late summer, and Weber joined his friend Henk in the SPD. This party-political affiliation, a departure from Weber's liberal roots, was atypical among his associates; Mitscherlich sympathized with but did not join the SPD, while Sternberger remained independent.Footnote 25

In 1946, prospects for Germans’ own involvement in their political reconstruction appeared on the horizon in the American zone. The year opened with municipal elections, and planning was soon under way for state constitutions, assemblies to draft them, and referenda to ratify them.Footnote 26 Not by accident, 1946 also saw the publication of two exemplary texts on Germany's future democracy, examined below. For German anti-Nazis, coming to trust the people was not easy, since traditional doubts about the masses’ political maturity were only exacerbated by the popular support Nazism had enjoyed. The Heidelberg group helped develop a distinctive response to this conundrum: Germans required a democratic “reeducation,” it was true, but this could succeed only as a self-education. Manifold popular participation figured as both means and goal in this process; only by practicing self-government could the people effectively learn it. In that spirit, they proposed a variety of institutional arrangements to deepen democratic principles in politics as well as expand them to economy and society.

On encountering each other in the war's immediate wake, Mitscherlich and Weber were struck by the compatibility of their views, and they soon coauthored a pamphlet entitled Free Socialism. Part historical sociology, part policy program, it appeared just in time for the SPD's May 1946 convention, where it was widely distributed.Footnote 27 The authors laid different accents in their contributions, but the point of departure was a shared one: civilization now confronted “the question: totalitarian bureaucracy or socially saturated freedom,” to which they offered “the answer: free socialism.” This socialism was a form of humanism. It was not at base an economic project but a “spiritual task,” designed to produce “the human being who will be the equal of this situation and this danger.”Footnote 28 Mitscherlich grounded the problem in the uncontrolled dynamism of modern technology. In the guise of capitalist industrialization, as Marx had recognized, technology dissolved the old corporate order into a class society; out of the ensuing conflicts had emerged a mass society, monopolistic economy, and monolithic state. Productive forces had revealed their destructive potentials, in which the mechanisms engulfing workers and managers were of one piece with the ravages of mechanized war. This amounted to a “victory of technology over humanity,” as the latter came to serve the former's ends, not vice versa: “The machineries of state and economy push humans around in total disregard of their personal freedom.”Footnote 29 Weber framed the core issue as one of bureaucracy, to similar effect.Footnote 30 Its stultifying structures had expanded across state and economy to colonize all corners of social life. This sealed the fate of deep dispositions toward freedom that, in Weber's vitalist philosophy of history, had lain dormant in the Germans since they subjugated themselves first to princes and then to modern states and firms. Bureaucracy posed a grave threat to “free spontaneity and self-formation,” reproducing the same pattern everywhere: the rule of “leader-cliques” over the “great masses,” precluding any “upswell of living forces” from below. Modern life made elites as well as masses mere cogs in a machine, a “totalitarian bureaucracy” that culminated in National Socialism.Footnote 31 This diagnosis trafficked in well-worn tropes of German cultural critique that decried “massification” and “technology,” exalting the “cultivation” of “personality.” Yet assimilating it to a nostalgic, elitist antimodernism would miss the mark.Footnote 32 The proximities are relevant, but closer examination suggests important distinctions.

Their proposals stressed not the containment or uplift of masses by elites but rather the masses’ agency in effecting their own maturation. Politically, Mitscherlich and Weber endorsed parliamentarism as the only feasible framework for “mass democracy,” but anchored it in “local and regional self-management” or the “intensification of local political life.”Footnote 33 This held for citizens of the polity as well as students in its schools, where they suggested forms of “pupil self-management” that would ensure “each . . . be given the opportunity to lead.”Footnote 34 Economically, they sought to “break . . . the influence of capital,” but to avoid simply exchanging capitalist for state socialist bureaucracies.Footnote 35 Their plan rested on two pillars. First, a sweeping socialization would reorganize private property into various forms of collective ownership—from public-law corporations in heavy industry and banking to cooperatives in manufacturing and agriculture—under regulated competition. Nationalization would be limited to transit and communications. Second, decision making within firms would be restructured to ensure maximal codetermination by employees alongside their employers, through works councils in the shop and production boards at the firm level. They justified such organs as vehicles for the collaborative control of economic processes, not as means for organized interest-negotiation or for keeping social peace in lean times.Footnote 36 This marked the specificity of their program relative to other schemes of the moment that endorsed corporatism and socialization as pragmatic “crisis response.”Footnote 37

In its affinity for the local and small-scale, this may appear a neoromantic vision. Indeed, it was derided as “petty-bourgeois socialism” by contemporaries further to the left.Footnote 38 But it was an explicitly forward- not backward-looking program. Mitscherlich conceded that “there is no going back from the industrial-technical-rationalized life-form,” and Weber acknowledged the need for “large-scale organization” in the modern era. Into the apparatus, however, he proposed to inject self-governing organs as “living counterforces” to the fullest possible extent. Such institutions were not themselves the “goals” but rather the “means” of their program; the participation they entailed cultivated the kind of human being Weber and Mitscherlich affirmed—“the free personality.”Footnote 39 The goal was to enable people's “self-liberation” from external control as well as internal egoism and to counter their habituation to an “authoritarian” order through their own “independent democratic activity,” construed as a process of collective “education.”Footnote 40 The German people were to be not only its objects but also its subjects, effecting a reeducation by which the masses would transform themselves into self-developing personalities on the neohumanist ideal.Footnote 41

If these Heidelbergers’ endorsement of parliamentarism was unremarkable, it was also qualified. Mass party politics had turned bureaucratic and sclerotic, they asserted, echoing interwar critics on the right and the left.Footnote 42 The remedy they proposed engaged postwar debates on electoral systems, where they campaigned for direct, majority voting over indirect, proportional representation. Tellingly, they called this a choice between “person elections” and “list elections.”Footnote 43 Sternberger elaborated their position in an essay entitled “On the Vote, Voting, and Electoral Methods.” Playing on the dual meaning of Wahl as both “choice” and “vote,” he asserted that choosing and revising choices as “I form and transform myself” is a quintessentially human freedom, one violated when the terms of our existence “are simply allotted” to us from outside. In politics, identified as the quintessentially human activity, the election process should engage voters and candidates as “persons,” not “objectified . . . ballots” and “seats” brought into proportion by political parties. Majority elections made citizens active “subject[s],” freely deliberating and delegating deputies to assemblies at higher levels, while parties remained “living and flexible” means to that end. Proportional representation made parties the “actual subject[s],” campaigning as preformed entities with preselected candidate lists. The outcome was a “scale reproduction of quantities of votes” that froze political life into a composite of party affiliations, favoring “status habit” and perceived “class interest” over reflective judgment.Footnote 44

For Sternberger, proportionality misrecognized the nature of popular sovereignty. Drawing on Rousseau, he aligned proportional voting's concern that “no voice be lost” with the “will of all,” which simply aggregated the “private interest” of each. In contrast, majority voting allowed a “general will” that intended “the common good” to emerge. By “the formation [Bildung] of the majority,” the constitution of the opposition, and their ongoing interaction, the majority principle could “bring forth the whole in an unending process”; as participants’ capacities “form themselves,” the population “forms the political people.” Proportional representation “blows apart” the population into ideology- and interest-based parties, and its very “anonymity” eventually provoked a “shriek for . . . the strong man,” as Weimar's political disaster had shown.Footnote 45 In its reversal of subjects and objects, means and ends, proportionality ossified a qualitative, dynamic process among persons into a quantitative, static procedure among parties. Worse, it perpetuated the people's immaturity. By most accounts, proportional representation was linked historically to democratization. It had enabled parties representing working people to displace parties of elite notables, and it was enshrined in constitutions across continental Europe, including Weimar Germany.Footnote 46 Sternberger disagreed: proportionality and mass parties in fact impeded democracy by curtailing citizens’ direct participation. Majority voting maximized that participation and served as “an educational institution [Bildungsinstitut]” in the process.Footnote 47 To those who asserted that Germans were not yet ready for politics unmediated by parties, he responded, “how are they ever to become independent if you don't give them the chance?” All arguments for “benevolent guardianship” overlooked the fact that “one cannot learn to swim on dry land.”Footnote 48

Sternberger's position touted a British electoral model and affirmed French republicanism, but it was justified in terms that resonated with German idealism—with Kantian notions of autonomy, a Hegelian concern for self-constituting historical collectivities, and the Humboldtian ideal of Bildung.Footnote 49 Steeped in high-cultural tradition, this argument for radical democracy looked to deliberative bodies as both vehicles and schools of popular sovereignty. The common ground it shared with Mitscherlich's and Weber's proposals was the people's unmediated, spontaneous participation in institutions of self-government as the path to democratic self-education.

FORMING A PUBLIC

These intellectuals reexamined democracy's conceptual underpinnings, but they also cast about for ways actively to promote their vision's realization. How did the contents of these intellectuals’ ideas relate to the forms of their activities? Such a question rests on the methodological premise that the formulation of ideas and other types of social action are not practices of different analytic orders but warrant consideration together.Footnote 50 For postwar Germany, a coincidence of esoteric sociability and aristocratic convictions has been demonstrated among intellectuals of the right, who embraced their temporary exclusion from public life as a virtue.Footnote 51 In the present case, a style of political thinking was similarly reflected in other modes of activity. Below, I trace these actors’ attempts to translate participation into social practice and some of the hurdles that effort encountered.

Published commentary was their main avenue of engagement, but it was not the only one. Their postwar activism was rooted in a local, face-to-face intellectual sociability found across Germany amid the collapse.Footnote 52 However, these Heidelbergers made building outward from such enclaves their explicit project. In late 1946, Mitscherlich, Sternberger, and Weber founded the Heidelberg Action Group for Democracy and Free Socialism (Aktionsgruppe Heidelberg zur Demokratie und zum freien Sozialismus) with Schneider and several other academics from Marianne Weber's salon: Marie Baum, Hans von Eckardt, and Karl Geiler.Footnote 53 This group emerged from the campaign against proportional representation, and just as the latter has been seen as a plea for old-style liberal politics, so the group has been dismissed as a “notables’ association” seeking to influence the public from on high.Footnote 54 Such assertions correspond to the group's social basis, but they ignore its attempts to wrestle with elitist legacies and find modes of engagement more consistent with the popular politics they professed.

Closer scrutiny reveals that the Aktionsgruppe embodied an attempt to initiate a broad-based extra-parliamentary movement. Sternberger called its core a “loose grouping” of Heidelbergers who refused “to leave public affairs to appointed party leaders and officials,” rejecting the authoritarian identification of “political action” with either “commanding or obeying.”Footnote 55 To that end, they established a forum for public deliberation of the pressing questions of the day. They planned to build it on a broad social base into a “private people's parliament,” one that would dialogue with “all citizens” and thus transcend the “false . . . dissonance between the masses and the intelligentsia.”Footnote 56 In practice, however, their initiative remained confined to the latter. They lamented this fact, regretting that only union officials could attend, “since workers themselves were unfortunately generally unavailable” for such meetings.Footnote 57 But they soon reconciled themselves to this situation and pursued their avowed goal: to “contribut[e] to the formation of a genuine public opinion in Germany”—that is, to the constitution of a “political public sphere.”Footnote 58 At times, these pronouncements had a conventional feel, in which the public was an external entity to be informed or influenced by their deliberations.Footnote 59 More often, the public figured as a body still in formation, of which the Aktionsgruppe's dialogues represented an exemplary instance.Footnote 60 In the latter usage, these terms evoked at once a realm independent of formal politics yet eminently political, as well as an entity constituted by private citizens coming together to deliberate matters of public concern.

High politics gave the group its impetus, but their intent was to establish an alternative to just such official channels. When occupation authorities solicited input from parties and unions, the Aktionsgruppe objected that “independent personalities” too must be heard, especially given German politicians’ manifest inability to forge consensus on “questions absolutely decisive for our existence.”Footnote 61 Over the course of 1947, they convened three two-day meetings that each drew some 100 to 150 attendees, most but not all from the American zone.Footnote 62 These included journalists, academics, and other professionals, with a smattering of politicians, officials, and military government representatives. The discussions incorporated social dimensions into what had originally been a narrowly political agenda.Footnote 63 Together, the resolutions they debated, passed, and publicized articulated a comprehensive program for peace and democratic renewal. In the face of a widening East–West rift, they insisted on a unified, neutral Germany at the heart of a federated Europe. Domestically, they endorsed federalist decentralization, direct elections, and socialization, as well as a thorough but self-imposed denazification. German war crimes and the Holocaust were addressed explicitly, though the precise nature of Germans’ “guilt” or “responsibility” proved controversial.Footnote 64 The events received extensive and favorable coverage in newspapers across the western zones and Berlin and as far away as New York City.Footnote 65

In keeping with its extra-institutional thrust, the group did without firm organization or formal membership. This they hoped would set a vital and readily replicable example, one that would work as “leavening,” by “stimulation,” or even “infection.”Footnote 66 Similar groups, they imagined, might spring forth on their own initiative across Germany, each working independently but sharing a commitment to become “genuine organ[s] of public opinion.” As likely nuclei of such activities, they mentioned other clusters of acquaintances and allies, including intellectuals around the journals Frankfurter Hefte, Freiburg's Die Gegenwart, and Berlin's Aufbau.Footnote 67 Such self-constituting civic fora were indispensable to renewal. As Sternberger put it, “if this space of free but responsible discussion is not held open, the state is of no use, even if it is called democratic. This is no luxury, but life-breath, a life necessity: public spirit, Bürgerlichkeit—in the political sense of the word.”Footnote 68 Theirs was a vision of civil society, but in a decidedly grassroots vein.Footnote 69 Its image of widespread local self-organization bore just as strong an affinity for radical-democratic as for liberal-notable traditions. Not for nothing did Sternberger liken their interest in a democracy beyond parties to “the original Soviet council conception,” before it devolved into “single-party dictatorship.”Footnote 70 Their concern was less to influence public opinion from above than to build a postwar German public from below, as an arena of self-constituting authority in the absence of a democratically legitimate government.

Such was their position in the 1946–7 conjuncture, soon transformed by Cold War confrontation. As interallied cooperation broke down, steps were taken toward a separate West German state, and officials in the Soviet zone launched a propaganda offensive for national “unity.” In this context, a neutralist initiative undertaken with prominent East Berliners generated such fallout that these Heidelbergers backed away from the limelight they had previously sought. Simultaneously, they withdrew from their comprehensive, all-German agenda to address particular aspects of the West's emergent institutions. After 1947, the Aktionsgruppe convened no large, public meetings, nor did they pursue plans to let similar groups bloom all across Germany. Instead, they held closed small-group discussions and lobbied over personal contacts to politicians.Footnote 71 If the heady openness of the immediate postwar period enabled grassroots innovations, the pressures of Cold War polarization and division encouraged a reversion to more traditional modes of intervention.

One constant in these intellectuals’ activities was their engaged journalism itself. Even along this more conventional avenue, they sought to recast the received relationship between elites and the people. They fought a conviction enshrined in long-standing German practice and in allied licensing regulations: the “idée fixe,” as Sternberger called it, “that the press exists to educate people.” Journalists had to “assume from day one that they deal with mature readers,” or those readers “will never become mature.”Footnote 72 Eugen Kogon of the Frankfurter Hefte, one of his allies, put the point more bluntly: “The journalist is no schoolmaster, and the reader is no idiot.” Rather, they should aim at “a conversation among equals.”Footnote 73 Such statements construed the audience as active interlocutors, not passive receivers. Accordingly, these intellectuals proposed a positive “freedom of information” as well as a negative “freedom of the press.” The former obliged all government agencies to furnish the press with information on demand, recognizing not only the press's right to inform the public but also the public's right to inform itself from all possible sources. A press free in both senses was vitally necessary “so that the people can participate, can contribute . . . so that—simply put—sovereignty can derive from the people.”Footnote 74 Commensurately, they viewed journalists in a dialogical, not didactic, relationship with public opinion, in news reportage as well as cultural–political commentary. While they still identified a privileged role for “publicists”—“we argue, we reason, we enlighten”—they insisted that “writer” and “reader” were “participants” in the same critical process.Footnote 75 Published replies to readers’ letters were the most common vehicles of such a dialogue, but the editors also engaged their readership as a whole via surveys on their journals’ overall content as well as on specific political issues.Footnote 76

From the start, they hoped to spark a socially broad dialogue through their journals, traditionally organs of the educated middle class.Footnote 77 There too, this aspiration remained largely unfulfilled. Survey returns confirmed that most readers were educated professionals, but a handful of craftsmen, workers, and farmers did also respond.Footnote 78 In this context, even comments by the aristocratically inclined Jaspers in Die Wandlung's first issue—“We may speak publicly with one another. Let's see what we have to say!”—take on a more inclusive cast.Footnote 79 It was in this view of the media as a venue for the co-constitution of a public by authors and audience together that their conception of “publicness” was most clearly articulated and most practically viable.

“PUBLICNESS” AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE EARLY FRG

After the foundation of separate German states in 1949, earlier renewal visions fed differing comportments within and toward the new Federal Republic. Sternberger became what he is known as today: a critically supportive analyst of its civic culture and parliamentary democracy. One factor in this trajectory is that the side of his interest in majority voting that was concerned with effective parliamentary outcomes came to overshadow the side that was animated by participatory process and averse to mediating institutions.Footnote 80 His analysis of the 1953 federal elections is revealing. Some observers registered dismay at the near-absolute majority delivered for the Christian Democrats and for Konrad Adenauer's authoritarian “chancellor democracy,” with its emphasis on security and order. Sternberger, in contrast, hailed the results as a “German electoral miracle” because they laid the groundwork for a stable interplay of government and opposition despite the FRG's proportional voting.Footnote 81 Sternberger's narrowing focus on the mechanics of representative institutions—elections, parties, coalitions, and the like—was entirely compatible with the postwar system's basic terms.

Others saw the promise of 1945 violated by subsequent developments. In their view, Germans had squandered the opportunity for a radically new order, succumbing to tried-and-true values, familiar political and social patterns, and long-entrenched interests. The influential indictment of this “restoration” came from Kogon's colleague Walter Dirks, but the disillusionments he captured were widely shared.Footnote 82 During the 1950s, Weber and Mitscherlich, Kogon and Dirks, and a host of other immediate postwar publicists helped shape the FRG's most vital oppositional currents. Of immediate concern were its rapid willingness to rearm and its manifest unwillingness to exclude ex-Nazis from power. Within the social market economy's confines, they also continued to advocate for labor codetermination. Finally, they played prominent roles in the early peace movement, galvanized by efforts to integrate the FRG into the Western bloc and then to arm its forces with nuclear weapons.Footnote 83 The ensuing “Paulskirche Movement” and “Campaign against Atomic Death” marked the inception of an extra-parliamentary counterpublic.Footnote 84 The terms in which these intellectuals castigated the early FRG—“remilitarization,” “renazification,” and “restoration”—resonated widely in postwar protest.

And what legacies had their immediate postwar rethinking of “publicness”? In their journalistic practice, they had begun to view themselves less as educators and more as participants in a broader dialogue. Thereby, they anticipated views that younger reformers would propagate in later decades. Overall, the 1950s were still dominated by elitist perspectives and consensus-oriented journalism, but they clearly bore the seeds of a more contentious and egalitarian media public.Footnote 85 Accordingly, this period saw shifting self-conceptions among journalists and publicists regarding their societal roles and an increasing valorization of open discussion as integral to democratic public culture.Footnote 86 Moreover, it witnessed a quickening of intellectual debate around the notion of “publicness” itself, in which anxieties regarding the irrational manipulability of “the masses” were widely aired, but affirmations of “the public” as a rational interlocutor and legitimate political subject could also be heard.Footnote 87

Doubtless the most prominent artifact of these debates is Jürgen Habermas's habilitation thesis, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, published 1962.Footnote 88 Revisiting it in light of the immediate postwar debates sketched above historicizes a tension in Habermas's account of “publicness.” Most interpretations and applications frame this work in liberal-democratic terms, which is no accident, since Habermas grounded his normative political model in a history of “bourgeois society.”Footnote 89 With new sites of sociability, associational life, and the explosion of print media in eighteenth-century Europe, an institutional space emerged for the constitution of public opinion against the state. In Habermas's schema, the political public sphere was of the private arena but stood opposed to the realm of “public authority.” Although it mediated between state and society, upholding the distinction between them was crucial to its operation; the mutual interpenetration of these spheres in the welfare state undermined the public sphere's critical function from the late nineteenth century onward. Even as he exposed its ideological underpinnings and recounted its historical decline, Habermas discerned a transhistorically valid emancipatory moment in the coming together of private people in the “public use of reason.” He called the latter a novel principle of coercion-free control, a “claim to power” that “renounced” any “claim to domination.”Footnote 90 It is rarely noted that this idealized principle was not logically bound to the historical account of liberalism's emergence as a check on established state (and church) authority.Footnote 91 The promise accorded publicness as a self-sufficient mode of power expressed a second, less liberal- than participatory-democratic side to Habermas's thinking.Footnote 92

In this aspect, Habermas's formulations effectively systematized pretheoretical notions current in immediate postwar discussions in Heidelberg and elsewhere. Out of step though they were with the Adenauer era's political climate, such ideas circulated in milieus and media to which Habermas had access, before and after 1949.Footnote 93 Their common emphasis lay on the idea of the public itself as self-constituting sovereign, rather than on the critical, controlling function of public opinion vis-à-vis the sovereign state. This sense of publicness infused Habermas's 1958 essay on “political participation,” which saw participation's potential for the people's democratic self-education being undercut by the mediation of mass parties under elite control.Footnote 94 And it is this strand that developed over the 1960s into Habermas's initial formulation of consensus rule founded on coercion-free, intersubjective communication unfreighted by the instrumental agendas of money and power.Footnote 95 The affinities with immediate postwar affirmations of grassroots, dialogical, extra-institutional political forms are conspicuous.

These concerns were those of a minority current in early West German political thought and practice. The young Federal Republic was consolidated under conservative—if not necessarily “restorative”—auspices, a theme that made room for such diverse intellectual variations as the “technocratic conservatism” of sociologists Helmut Schelsky, Arnold Gehlen, and Hans Freyer; the “integrative republicanism” of political theorist Wilhelm Hennis; and the emphatically liberal elitism of sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf. For all the distinctions and tensions among them, these thinkers shared an emphasis on the integrative authority of superordinate institutions and rule by meritocratic elites, a top-down mode of social and political organization consonant with the “high modernist” tenor of the postwar period.Footnote 96 The alternative, bottom-up vision of the polity burst vividly onto the scene during the large-scale social and political ferment of the 1960s. The latter was carried most prominently by students but shaped also by a broader range of actors, including older academics and public intellectuals. Whatever else it was, the “spirit of ‘68” was shot through with a participatory-democratic ideal.Footnote 97

What the present findings suggest is that participatory democracy had a longer, more surprising genealogy than is captured in accounts of “68ers'” practical recovery of “Frankfurt school” theory.Footnote 98 In the German case, at least, its spirit bore traces of an earlier popular politics, one enacted not only on the ground but also in the rarified air of educated elites’ discussions. The years after 1945 saw the inception of a discourse on participatory publicness, of which the intellectuals treated above articulated liberal and left-liberal variants. This discourse was elaborated by Habermas and others from the late 1950s on, and it suffused the perspectives of the New Left. It is no accident that later activists’ “antiauthoritarian” credo and their lionization of “self-management” reworked key tropes in discussions among Mitscherlich, Sternberger, Weber, and their ilk. To be sure, the latter were products of an older educated bourgeoisie, and a politics of direct action appeared no more on their horizon of possible experience than did experiments in communal living. Much was different in the conceptual content and practical forms of dissent among 1960s youth, who felt themselves a potentially revolutionary constituency at the affluent society's margins. But it is striking that an initial and lasting spark of pro-public counterelitism came from a faction of the postwar elites themselves.

Footnotes

*

I thank this journal's editors and anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as well as the SSRC (now GSA) Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University of Berlin for research support.

References

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