The intellectuals have bemoaned the normative deficit of the unification process. That seems to me important because it concerns the irresponsible handling of our political culture and hence long-term damages, damages which the political parties and the civil service have dangerously neglected through, respectively, their electoral tactics and the administrative installation of an economic system. The Basic Law can function no better than it is allowed to by the consciousness of State citizenship on the part of a population accustomed to institutions of freedom. Political culture arises out of delicate networks of mentalities and convictions which cannot generated by or simply steered through administrative measures. And this communication is founded on a cultural infrastructure which today is being allowed to decay in the new Federal states.
Ruptured biographies are in every case a catastrophe.
Industrial capacities are, however, repaired through other means. Broken cultural milieus cannot be reconstructed in a similar fashion. When they are ruined, they are ruined forever. All of my being reacted back then against Adenauer, against the politics of normalization conducted by an old man with a narrow vocabulary. Our radical opposition to that spirit of the Adenauer time seems to me also justifiable today.