Moderator: This is an ongoing debate, started by Anthony Barnett and Martin Wolf, about whether an intelligentsia is needed if Gordon Brown, or anyone else, is to reform Britain. You can read the whole of the debate here.
Tilman Spengler (Berlin, Kursbuch): It was indeed the case that there was an intelligentsia that emerged from 1967 onwards in Germany as Anthony Barnett describes. An important moment was when Willy Brandt defended the role of writers in response to a diatribe against them by Ludwig Erhardt, who had had resigned as Chancellor in 1966. Usually traditional, trade-union-based social democracy is anti-intellectual. Brandt’s response as the leader of the Social Democrats was to reach out to their influence. The young Gunter Grass became one of his advisers. The Greens when they started around that time were not considered an intellectual party. If anything they were part of the de-intellectualised, ‘practical’ politics and Joska Fischer was initially considered not so much as brainy but as someone who got things done. In a more familiar way, Helmut Schmidt, the SDP leader who was Chancellor from 1974 to 1982 was also of this school. He was impressed by rather vacuous ‘strategic thinking’ but not by ideas. He was particularly irritated by what he considered "visions". "If you want visions", he once cried out, "consult your optician".
When he became the SDP’s leader and the Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, though by local standards no intellectual, returned the SDP to the Willy Brandt inheritance. There were a series of meetings with writers like the one Anthony recalls Reinhard Hesse describing before Afghanistan. The one I remember most clearly was when a mall top-notch delegation had returned from Washington in early 2002. Schroeder invited about 16 of us, mostly philosophers and writers to talk about the situation. Ingo Schultze, a popular short-story writer from East Germany, was the youngest and Grass the oldest. Schroeder was very low in the polls and it was not at all clear what effect support for an invasion of Iraq would have in terms of popular opinion. Schroeder encouraged a completely free discussion. Everyone was against Germany backing or participating in an invasion based on what we heard from Washington. He listened - the discussions were very open, though very confidential. Then Schroeder suggested that if one of us wrote something he would not contradict it. There were specific points including his not preventing US over-flights if they decided to go ahead, or his willingness to respond if there were in fact poisonous gas attacks, but beyond that “no”. Wolf Lepenies, of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Berlin wrote an article for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and the German government’s opposition to the war began to be set out. Obviously there were party discussions as well, but the writers and philosophers were independent opinion formers influencing in a practical – and I would say fully vindicated way – the direction taken by the SDP. Perhaps it is a pity that there was not such a connection between writers and the government in Britain at the time.
