ABSTRACT
Intellectuals are those strange creatures who, in contrast to hommes de lettres, Schriftsteller, and academics, understand that their business of cultural criticism always includes the political sphere. The intellectuals' reactions against the increasingly clear development of a mass technocracy and democracy became increasingly negative, that is, antibourgeois and antimajority. In this chapter, the author focuses on his analysis of the development of intellectual discourse in the Federal Republic on one representative, Jurgen Habermas. He explains Habermas' statements on cultural events and changes made on certain occasions that were specifically conducive to such cultural, critical stocktaking. In 1967 Habermas gave a lecture at the Goethe House in New York to inform the US public about the protest movement in the Federal Republic. West Germany became a welfare state, and materially the intellectuals benefited, too. Habermas is representative of German postwar intellectuals precisely in profound ambivalence.
