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Re-coding West Germany's political culture: Kurt Sontheimer and "1968"
By Riccardo Bavaj
The student revolt of the late 1960s had far-reaching repercussions in large parts of West German academia. For many scholars it proved to be a crucial challenge which they could not avoid. Of course, a small minority of leftist scholars even supported some of the students’ more radical demands. Yet many professors were less understanding. Indeed, conservative scholars were simply infuriated by what they considered a left-wing extremist attempt to destroy the university as an institution and to overthrow the socio-political order. One group, however, showed a profoundly ambiguous attitude towards the students’ political commitment: the group of liberal scholars. They were often torn between sympathizing with the students’ desire for more democracy on the one hand and a deep scepticism towards anti-liberal traits of a newly emerging “political romanticism” on the other. “Bloody liberals,” after all, were amongst the prime targets of radical students. Liberal scholars had been proactive in the reform of universities since the beginning of the 1960s. They also showed a generally critical stance towards the state and the political culture of the Federal Republic which they considered in need of a thorough democratization. Hence, they were commonly known as “liberal critics.” Initially, they welcomed that students were becoming engaged in politics, both inside and outside the university. Soon, however, they became increasingly concerned about the stability of West Germany’s still fledgling political order and placed more and more emphasis on preserving rather than changing the status quo. However, this way of responding to “1968” was not unanimous. In fact, the group of “liberal critics” split up in the wake of the student revolt. They were part and parcel of a radical polarization of West Germany’s political culture, provoked by a decisive leftward shift of the “political set of concepts” and accompanied by a significant restructuring and politicization of the media and the public sphere. The outcome was the formation of two hostile camps: the left-liberals (or “social-liberals”) on the one side, and the liberal-conservatives, disparagingly labelled “neo-conservatives” by their intellectual adversaries, on the other side. Riccardo Bavaj's article, recently published in "German Politics & Society" (27, 2009, 39-59), seeks to illuminate the transformation of “liberal-critical” scholars into liberal-conservative ones by examining one of the most prominent examples: Kurt Sontheimer (1928-2005). One of the few “liberal-critical” students of Arnold Bergstraesser’s “Freiburg School,” he belonged to the influential “second generation” of West German political scientists who were staunchly committed to the “science of democracy” (Demokratiewissenschaft). Praised by liberal and left-wing scholars for his magisterial work on anti-democratic thought in the Weimar Republic (1962), he was already part of the academic “establishment” by the time the student revolt broke out. Sontheimer had been working at the Free University Berlin (FU) since 1962, as a professor of political science at the well-known Otto-Suhr-Institute. He makes for a prime example of a “liberal-critical” scholar shifting and being shifted to the centre-right for various reasons: his close encounter with the student movement at one of the epicentres of the revolt; his professional self-conception as a political scientist determined to influence West Germany’s political culture; and his never-ending, almost obsessive reflection on the events of “1968.”
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