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German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity
ing self-referential ‘camp thinking’, Müller perhaps wrongs German
intellectuals. This sort of behaviour can be observed everywhere, and
processes like these must be analysed separately. More justified is his
point that the German intellectuals deeply distrust the German people.
This is not, however, a specifically German feature. We need
only think of �rench philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as
Voltaire, and their disparaging opinion of the ‘common people’.
Nevertheless, in Germany the Right and the Left perhaps approach
each other closely here. Mutatis mutandis, both hold the latent, or, on
the Right, sometimes explicit, opinion that the ‘nation’ needs strong
guidance. The Right advocates that this should be achieved by the
state and institutions, the Left by morality linked with pedagogy.
Both tend towards pessimism in their deep scepticism about the
strength of social self-regulation, and both, finally, stand firmly in the
sometimes lamentable German tradition of constructing national
identity from above, quasi in closed session, without including the
‘common people’—and sometimes even in opposition to them.
Within the right-wing camp a negative anthropology is a basic theoretical
assumption, but nor is the left-wing spectrum immune to such
views. Intellectuals of the ‘sceptical generation’, such as Jürgen
Habermas, subscribed to the values enshrined in the constitution.
This faith in the constitution, which according to Müller was also
conditioned by the experience of National Socialism, was anchored
in a deep distrust of the people. One can only wonder what ‘constitutional
patriotism’ should be. A ‘patriotism’ that by definition is critical
of a majority of the population? A ‘patriotism’ that wants to be a
teaching tool for the nation? One thing should, however, not be forgotten.
Surveys of personal attitudes to National Socialism and Adolf
Hitler as a statesman justify a certain scepticism about the democratic
sense of the average German well into the 1960s.
Reading Müller’s book, one gains the impression that German
writers and intellectuals possess a lineage going far beyond the period
under investigation in this book. In this lineage, which began during
the Enlightenment and Romanticism, they saw themselves as a
new caste of priests, uncoupled from the real world and largely alien
to the population, creating visions of nationality in which the superficial
phenomena of the vulgar world had no place. Their constructions
of national identity were exclusive, morally highly rigorous,
and of a barely comprehensible aesthetic artificiality. Many of these
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