“Vielen Dank für den offenen Austausch”: Juli Zeh as public intellectual

“Vielleicht könnte man sagen,” Juli Zeh writes in her 2020 Fragen zu Corpus Delicti, “dass Erzählen die Kunst ist, menschliche Gemeinschaft herzustellen, und die Politik die Kunst, diese Gemeinschaft zu gestalten“ (141). These two art forms, narration and political action, collapse into one when Zeh oscillates between being an author and being a public intellectual—one of the most prominent of her generation. In her 2015 study Aufklärer der Gegenwart, Sabrina Wagner states that Zeh “am ehesten dem Bild des engagierten Schriftstellers [entspricht], wie man ihn insbesondere nach Sartres Konzept aus dem 20. Jahrhundert kennt und wie er als Typus noch heute eine Projektionsfläche definiert” (64). The fact that Zeh's literary texts are at least received as explicitly political, and that her public interventions in the form of opinion pieces published in major German newspapers like Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung have been part and parcel of Zeh's work, confirms this assessment. The start of Zeh's career now lies more than 20 years in the past, so taking stock of her work as a public intellectual is perhaps fruitful, not least because this facet of Zeh's work has come under criticism recently, as the essays in this forum elaborate. The purpose of my contribution is twofold: I begin by sketching Zeh's role as a socially engaged author in general terms before turning to a recent interview with Der Spiegel that clearly illustrates the kinds of pronouncements that have recently come under fire. Ultimately, I argue that Zeh has not fundamentally changed her positions and positionality; what very much has changed, though, is public discourse itself.

According to Edward Said, a public intellectual is “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” (11). This definition, which still holds traction today even though the public itself has changed substantially since Said first wrote these words in the early 1990s, is strikingly similar to Zeh's definition of the intersection between an artist and the public sphere. “Der Künstler,“ Zeh stated in an interview with Deutschlandradio in 2013, “ist dem normalen Bürger am allernächsten, er ist quasi der normale Bürger plus der Möglichkeit, öffentlich zu sprechen” (“Ich habe”). What her statement ignores is the privileged position that the possibility not just of speaking out but of being heard entails. While everyone with access to the Internet can contribute to public debates by stating and sharing their opinions, a bestselling author with a large, well-established audience is arguably further removed from a “normal citizen” than Zeh cares to admit. In other words, if a regular person publishes a blog post on perceived state overreach as a response to a global pandemic, they may or may not make a ripple in public discourse. If Juli Zeh does the same, it will trigger an incomparably more wide-reaching response due to her privileged position in the discursive field.

In this sense, she fulfills the responsibilities of a public intellectual that Bauman lists; she can do so, as already mentioned, due to her role in the discursive field. Furthermore, corporeality—in the sense of a physical, performative act—is also crucial for Zeh: “Being an intellectual means performing a peculiar role in the life of society as a whole. It is this performance that makes one an intellectual” (Bauman 225). In other words, it is not enough to speak up; public intellectuals need to show up as well, like Zeh did with a number of fellow writers in front of the German Chancellery in 2013 to hand over roughly 70,000 signatures they had collected to protest against surveillance practices of the National Security Agency in Germany.

Zeh explicitly positions herself against generalizations she considers to be inaccurate and therefore harmful for a functional democracy. In his contribution to this forum, Thomas Benjamin Fuhr analyzes how this sentiment has populist implications in Zeh's novel Über Menschen, and it also lies at the heart of the evocatively titled Zwischen Welten. This does not mean, however, that Zeh sympathizes with AfD voters, and neither does it mean that she supports a dichotomy between an elite ruling class and what we traditionally refer to as common people.

Rather, I argue that what Zeh is calling for is an open debate or, put differently, open communication, on a level playing field, between all participants. Zeh's statement from 2022 echoes her previously published ruminations on public discourse from almost a decade earlier in her poetics lecture Treideln. Toward the end of Treideln, she characterizes public discourse as a multivocal conversation society is having with itself: “Wir werden die herumliegenden Fäden des öffentlichen Diskurses wieder aufnehmen, auf dass das große Selbstgespräch der Gesellschaft ein möglichst vielstimmiges sei“ (160). What this statement reinforces is Zeh's belief in the necessity and value of a pluralistic public sphere in a democratic society, the latter of which she aims to defend at all costs. She is well aware that, just like society itself, democracy is changing (see also Wagner 123−24); what remains is Zeh's own “Blick aus der Mitte,” as Wagner calls it. This means that Zeh observes German society not from the fringes but from the center or, in Wagner's words, as “eine von vielen” (64). This was an accurate description when Wagner wrote it in 2015; more recently, however, Zeh's positions arguably have become less mainstream or centrist, as Fuhr's analysis convincingly shows for her fictional work.

Additionally, there seems to be a tension between Zeh's oft-repeated diagnosis of our time as a highly individualistic one and an all-encompassing traditional model of the public sphere that arguably needs adjustment to the realities of the present moment. What we are facing today is much closer to what Harold Mah classifies as “multiple, conflicting arenas of discourse” (20). In these arenas, a call for open communication is certainly a noble endeavor, just as a multivocal public discourse is a benefit for any society. However, a call like this one assumes that all participants agree on the same terms of engagement, and it is more than questionable whether these prerequisites are adequately met in the status quo of public discourse in today's liberal democracies. In a discursive climate where the lines are firmly drawn between supporters and detractors of any given issue, it seems rather idealistic, in fact. Put differently, if one fraction of the public refuses to talk to the press or their political opponents, discards scientific proof as fabricated, assumes that democratic elections are manipulated if they do not bring the expected results, and displays a wide-reaching rejection of democratic principles, open communication on a level playing field is a goal that is hard to achieve. Juli Zeh takes a stance toward public discourse that can perhaps be classified as moderate; however, the current temperature of public discourse is anything but.

At the end of their at times rather lively conversation, Der Spiegel's Feldenkirchen sees Zeh off with the words “vielen Dank für den offenen Austausch.” It seems to me that this is a fitting phrase to conclude my own ruminations as well. I consider this forum to be part of an open exchange, even though I am well aware that it predominantly addresses a specialized audience. Nevertheless, Zeh's relevance for Germany's literary landscape today makes it necessary to critically engage as scholarly readers with both her literary and non-literary texts. Somewhat ironically, even if we criticize her, this critical engagement is very much in the spirit of Juli Zeh.