Participation, Democracy, and German "Spirit" under Allied Occupation

This paper will address the participatory conception of democracy that emerged in the cultural-political journalism and activism of various German intellectuals after 1945, taking liberal Dolf Sternberger, Left-Catholic Walter Dirks, and Marxist Ernst Bloch as exemplary instances.  The question of democratic renewal after National Socialism was raised under four-power occupation and during the incipient Cold War, a context in which these actors sought to forge an independent path for Germany, distinct from both West and East.  They proposed to overcome the antinomy of "freedom" and "order" represented by these two poles through a third term, participation, and they elaborated this perspective via an explicitly equivocal relationship to their national cultural heritage.  On the one hand, they saw in classical German literature and philosophy a well-spring of ideas about subjectivity that emphasized the reciprocal development of self and world through spontaneous, creative activity.  By extension, democratic freedom could lie only in the collective self-imposition of norms rather than in "liberty from constraint" or "insight into necessity."  On the other hand, they read this patrimony as a symptom of their people's disastrously apolitical past.  Its otherworldly culturalism had paved the way to catastrophe, encouraging Germans to realize their freedom only in the realm of "spirit" while subjugating themselves to external authority in the actual world.  According to these intellectuals, to recover the participatory potential of the German cultural tradition from its apolitical inwardness and bring it to bear at the level of politics constituted a crucial resource for democratic renewal.  Such thinking undergirded a variety of proposals for grassroots and decentralized forms of political and economic self-governance, expressing both the potentials and the limits of the postwar German political imagination.