12 - The Organic Intellectual: The Public and Political Impact of Greta Kuckhoff, 1945–1949

Summary

WHEN GRETA KUCKHOFF WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON by the Red Army in 1945, she immediately volunteered for work with the Allies. Imprisoned by the Nazis as a member of the antifascist resistance group called Die Rote Kapelle (The Red Orchestra), she believed that it was the duty of those anti-Nazis who had survived to help rebuild Germany. In this chapter I explore Kuckhoff’s work and writings as a case study for raising questions about cultural impact in Germany between 1945 and 1949. In particular, I look at her weekly radio programs and educational speeches as elements of the cultural landscape at that time. In doing so, this investigation insists on a broader definition of culture than some other contributions to this volume. This chapter argues that an understanding of culture as a “whole way of life,” far from leading to meaninglessness, contributes more successfully to a theorization of cultural impact. Both the author and her texts are sites of meaning, and therefore have potential impact. Working with both sites simultaneously allows for the possibility of an insistence on experiential contextualization and textual narratives of memory. This chapter therefore investigates two elements of impact: first, Greta Kuckhoff’s individual impact on postwar culture, and second, the factors that facilitated the impact of her cultural production at that time.

In the first part of this essay, I argue that Kuckhoff’s role during the immediate postwar period was that of an organic intellectual. Beginning with Gramsci’s definition of the organic intellectual and expanding it by drawing on contemporary cultural studies approaches, I investigate the ways in which Kuckhoff became a spokeswoman for certain class and gender interests. Her personal history in the antifascist resistance and her ability to draw on these memories in her speeches and texts endowed her with political capital; her individual impact can therefore be measured in terms of her increasing authority to speak. A focus on the material processes that allowed her voice to be heard, and their significance in terms of historical context, enables me to argue for the impact of her positionality. I show how Kuckhoff gained symbolic capital by virtue of her positioning as an organic intellectual within the public sphere.